UC Irvine

The “corpus” of medieval textiles from Central Asia, Iran, and India — spanning roughly the 9th to the early 13th centuries — constitutes one of the most technically complex and historiographically fragmented bodies of objects in the study of Islamic art. The period is characterized by successive political rearticulations by the Samanid, Ghaznavid, Qarakhanid, Seljuk, and Shansabani governments, which administered the interregional spaces that had long been shaped by Iranian, Indic, and steppe cultural frameworks. The period is also characterized by the growing prevalence of Islam, which emerges as the increasingly dominant, albeit internally diverse, religious tradition. Here, textiles can rarely be attributed to specific workshops or provenances; yet, their fibers, dyes, and woven structures nonetheless carry recoverable historical meaning — one that this study argues can be accessed through examining the processes of their making.By analyzing according to the framework of converging assemblages, I argue that textiles from this medieval interregional space are transformed through their constituent parts, participating at each level of production in various socio-political dialogues and contexts. This ontological reframing of the textile medium certainly responds to the longstanding marginalization of textiles within art history, where their technical complexity and elusive provenance have kept them at the periphery of scholarly attention despite the common recognition of the medium’s deep entrenchment in the material and ceremonial life of the medieval world. Following this framework, the dissertation examines textiles through five successive scales of inquiry, each building on the last. In Chapter 2, I begin with the “raw” materials — fibers such as wool, silk, and cotton —examining their production via spindle whorls, tracing their local and interregional dimensions, and references made to these fibers in geographic literature. I also conduct close fiber analysis to suggest how certain regional (local) qualities of fibers likely rendered them desirable in global markets. This study then turns to dyes and colorants of textiles, examining a group of Central Asian kesi silk slit-tapestries to argue that natural dyes occupied a morally ambiguous position in the increasingly Islamic milieu. I examine polychrome here as it was possibly received by the elite Central Asian and Iranian audiences trained in adab and through the interpretive lens of būqalamūn. In Chapter 3, then, I refer to būqalamūn and connect the term with broader contemporaneous considerations of color, light, and wonder, which reframed and ameliorated the unstable chromatic surfaces as occasions for cultivated perception. The subsequent examination of textile production in Chapter 4 proposes a prosopographic understanding of the textile artist as a collective body, distributing the “body” across domestic, workshop, and itinerant spaces. I refer to the “textile making” community as having embodied, intergenerational knowledge that is further shaped by interregional networks and material culture beyond the fixed urban workshops that authors have traditionally privileged. In Chapter 5, I consider how this “textile making” context shaped woven structures and examine how the final “woven structures” were likely perceived by referring to medieval Islamic optical theory. Here, I position plain-woven mulḥam, double- and triple-weave, samite, and proto-lampas textiles as surfaces designed to activate different modes of haptic and contemplative looking. Finally, this dissertation traces various ornamental motifs, specifically focusing on the "star and cross" motif, found on textiles and other media to examine how textiles participated in historically grounded intermedial assemblages. Specifically, I suggest how the star and cross motif constituted and sustained elite and cosmopolitan princely spaces across a broad social spectrum. Medieval textiles from Central Asia, Iran, and India have been studied piecemeal within the separate disciplinary specializations of Islamic, pre-Islamic, and South Asian art history. The field of art history has yet to produce a study that addresses their material processes of making and the medium as primary historical evidence, rather than mere evidence of other media’s interregional movement. This dissertation intervenes at this point, taking a material and technical approach to the medium and deriving evidence from fiber analysis, dye identification, weave structure, and literary sources to argue that the meanings of textiles are generated not only in their use and display, but at every stage of their convergence.