A History of the World in 100 Objects - Dr Neil MacGregor [132]
Although we regard the Arabian Nights as exotic fiction, they tell us a lot about real life in the court of the Abbasid caliphs, the supreme rulers of the vast Islamic empire which in the eighth to tenth centuries stretched from central Asia to Spain. The historian Dr Robert Irwin has written a companion to the Arabian Nights and has traced its various historical connections:
Some of these stories do reflect the realities of Baghdad in the eighth and ninth centuries. The Abbasid caliphs employed a group of people known as Nudama – professional cup companions, whose job was to sit with the caliph as he ate and drank, and entertain him with edifying information, jokes, discussions of food and stories. So some of the stories in the Arabian Nights are part of the repertoire of these cup companions.
It was a closed society. Few people ventured within its walls, and it’s been said that when a pious Muslim was summoned to see the caliph, he took with him his shroud – ordinary people rather feared what went on within the walls of the caliph’s palaces. I say ‘palaces’ advisedly, since the Abbasid caliphs seem to have had rather a disposable attitude towards them; once they had used one up they went and built another, and then abandoned it. So you get a succession of palaces, one after another in Baghdad, and then they moved to Samarra, where they did the same thing.
Most of the Abbasid palaces, both in Baghdad and in Samarra, are now in ruins. But some elements survive. At the British Museum we have a few fragments of painted plaster from the harem quarters of an Abbasid caliph, which take us back into the heart of the Islamic empire of the ninth century and show us the real counterparts of the girls from the Arabian Nights. For me, these fragments have more magic than any movie. They’re haunting glances across the centuries and could themselves inspire 1,001 stories.
The little portraits are probably all of women, although some may show boys. They are fragments of larger wall-paintings, and they link us directly to medieval Iraq. In Baghdad itself hardly anything architectural survives from this great age of glory around AD 800, because the city was later destroyed by the Mongols. But luckily we can still get quite a good idea of what the Abbasid court looked like, because for almost sixty years its capital was moved seventy miles north to the brand new city of Samarra, and a lot of ancient Samarra survives.
At first sight these pictures are not very much to look at – they are really just scraps of paintings, and the largest is no bigger than a CD disc. They are drawn fairly simply, with black outlines on a yellow ochre background, with just a few sketchy lines to capture the features, but there are flecks of gold in the painting which give us a hint of their earlier opulence. Like random pieces from a jigsaw puzzle, they make it difficult to guess what the bigger picture that they once came from might have been. Indeed, they’re not all portraits – some of the fragments show animals, some show bits of clothing and bodies. But the faces that are caught here have a definite sense of personality – there’s a clear air of melancholy in the eyes, as they look out at us from their enclosed, distant world.
These small pieces of plaster were excavated by archaeologists from the ruins of the Dar al-Khilafa palace, the main residence of the caliph in Samarra and the ceremonial heart of the new purpose-built capital city. Pleasure was built into the very name of the city, which was interpreted at the court as a shortened form of ‘Surra Man Ra’a’ – ‘He who sees it is delighted’. But beneath the frolicking there were ominous undercurrents. The decision in 836 to move the court from Baghdad to Samarra was taken in order to defuse dangerous