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This talk introduces how the Arabic and Islamic manuscript tradition inherited and adapted images of the late antique cosmos, focusing on a series of cosmographical maps from the 12th century Andalusian Sufi thinker, Ibn al-ʾArabi (d. 1240) and considering the reception of these images in the visual history of the Islamic world.

This lecture is part of the ISAW Library events series and will take place in person at ISAW (15 East 84th Street). Registration is required; click through for the registration link. This lecture explores a new source of evidence for the status and conceptualization of women in Ptolemaic Egypt through a pilot study of classifiers in the hieroglyphic system. From the Old Kingdom onwards, Egyptian hieroglyphic writing employed a highly organized system of category markers—classifiers or determinatives. These “mute” hieroglyphs, typically placed at the end of words, provide a unique window onto the emic organization of knowledge and the categories through which the ancient Egyptians conceptualized their world.