Looking for Urban Agency in a City of Memorials
Tomb Towers of Late-Thirteenth-Century Ahlat
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 22135356 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Oya Pancaroğlu (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2021 |
| Volume | medieval worlds |
| Issue | 14. 2021 |
| Pages | 117-154 |
| Publication date | 2021-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Medieval Worlds (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2412-3196 • E-ISSN: 2412-3196 |
| Publisher | Osterreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Verlag (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1553/medievalworlds_no14_2021s117 |
| OpenAlex | W3215298610 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 17 |
In the medieval period, the city of Ahlat was an important urban center in the Lake Van region. The medieval city suffered serious depredations in the form of military assaults and earthquakes between the 13th and the 16th centuries that caused the urban center to be rebuilt at least twice at some distance from the medieval location. While only meager traces of the medieval urban fabric remain, Ahlat preserves a remarkable medieval funerary landscape of cemeteries and tomb towers that attest to the dynamic workings of local urban agency. This essay focuses on a discrete set of tomb towers of the late thirteenth century built by Muslim amirs of the Ilkhanate in order to explore the relationship between these new urban actors and the physically elusive urban stage of medieval Ahlat, in tandem with contemporary political circumstances. These tomb towers â built in the outskirts of the medieval city in the aftermath of much destruction witnessed in the course of the thirteenth century â represent some of the earliest indications of Islamization among Ilkhanid amirs but have hitherto been studied from a purely formalistic angle. In order to situate these monuments in their historical context, the essay is grounded in an extended summary of the medieval (7th-13th centuries) political and military history and the attendant demographic changes that significantly impacted the urban structure of Ahlat. The construction of tomb towers is investigated in the light of the compromised nature of the thirteenth-century urban settlement and the contemporary emergence of nodes of Sufi inhabitation in the peripheries of Ahlat as can be deduced from Ottoman-period tax registers. Amounting to a spatial externalization of urban agency, the tomb towers and Sufi lodges represent distinct but complementary claims to reconstitute social and political influence in the face of a ruptured urban center
Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · Economic history · Middle Ages · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · Urban history · Archaeology and Historical Studies · Eurasian Exchange Networks · History · Islamic Studies and History · Law
Encyclopaedia Iranica
Islamization in the Mongol Empire
Anatolia under the Mongols
Religion Under the Mongols
Die altarmenischen Ortsnamen
Rulers and City Life in Mongol Central Asia (1220-1370)
Chinese Motifs in Thirteenth-Century Armenian Art
Ruling from the Outside
Tamta's World
Culture and Conquest in Mongol Eurasia
Devotion, Hospitality and Architecture in Medieval Anatolia
Mongols and Mamluks
Georgia and the Anatolian Turks in the 12th and 13th centuries
Women in Mongol Iran
The Monumental Inscriptions from Early Islamic Iran and Transoxiana
Ilkhanid Buddhism
Mongols and the Islamic World, from Conquest to Conversion
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0.33 |
| Citation span | 2023 - 2023 (1) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |