Document Type : Original Article
Authors
1 Faculty member, of the textile design department, Art Faculty, Semnan University, Semnan, Iran
2 MA, Iranian Architectural Studies, Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran
Abstract
Abstract: It is certain to happen that a historical writing contains numbers of facts about the quality of living status of the writer’s era. Some of them may be mentioned clearly in the text and the others may get concealed beyond the stories narrationed. In this regard, Tarikh-i Bayhaqi, one of the most brilliant history books in Farsi, is entitled to be crammed full of those plain and hidden information aforesaid. Thanks to the unique narration approach employed by the author meticulously, in which alongside reporting the main events in an absolutely faithfully way, he described the contexts of themvibrantly and thoroughly in details, including even seemingly insignificant and unimportant incidents. Therefore, his composition is not only a conventional history book, merely confined to the chronicle of rulers and their territories, but a rich resource of precious factual datas belong to the Forth-Fifth/ Tenth-Eleventh centuries. For instance, a wide range of scarce datas about local customs, architecture, clothes and the other humans’ artifact of the epoch, spread amongst the contexts. For this reason, the book Tarikh-i Bayhaqi can be considered a reliable primary source for researches on Irainian historical culture and art issues.
But one of the crucial factors that every researcher who aims to explore on this source _and also on the other historical texts_ should ponder, is passing several hundred years from the author’s time until ours. In this long duration, due to several causes such as abolishing the examples and proofs, some of the prose’s words have got changed in the meaning or become completely abandoned and forgotten. Neglecting this vital aspect may lead to misunderstandig or even ignoring some notable facts. So extracting the accurate truths and less misguided datas out of these texts, necessarily needs the original and precise meanings of the words at the exact contexts’ period of time.
This essay focuses on the target above for the field of textile and clothing, attempts to scrutinize the literal meanings and examples of the word “Jama” as one of the key main words of the mentioned discipline, throughout the book Tarikh-i Bayhaqi. For this purpose, the method interpreting text by text is employed. At first, the associated evidences covered with anecdotes get pulled out of the text and then relying on their own contexts, and wherever needed juxtaposition with the other historical and literary texts of the same language or epoch, endeavor to comprehend its real sense. In the end, the result of the exploring and comparing clarifies that the word “Jama” despite its mono-meaning in our current days, which refers only to clothes and clothing, amongst the Persian-speakers of the circa Forth-Fifth/ Tenth-Eleventh centuries has had much wider realm of meanings and embodiments and testified to all textile, carpet and clothing
Keywords
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