Here’s an odd podcast, because really, when you look at the object, it’s a whole lot of nothing. ‘Fragments’ is right; they have a few bits of tile, not mosaic, just some porcelain-like substance that was on the wall of the swanky Caliph’s palace at Samara toward the end of the Abyssinian dynasty of the Islamic Caliphs, just before the year 900. You can see a couple of people’s faces, a horse, and something that looks like Islamic decorative style (see the gold coin of the Caliph from a century earlier, when the capitol was Damascus. It went to Baghdad, then to Samara, and eventually split up into lots of fragments); but there’s not much to go on here, and of course MacGregor just loves it. This kind of situation, where you don’t have much evidence and so really have to look hard and think hard to figure out what the story was, this is where intellectuals and academics of every stripe truly turn on.
For the rest of us, the important thing about this world is this is the setting of the Arabian Nights; the golden age of the Islamic Caliphate became the romanticized fantasy of the East, the Orient, Ali Baba and Sinbad, the Thief of Baghdad and Aladdin, Magic Flute and Turandot, and Hollywood schlock from The Garden of Allah to The Prince of Persia. One of my all-time favorite Arabian Nights fantasies was the first collaboration (I think) between Neil Gaiman, one of my favorite living writers, and P. Craig Russell, my favorite illustrator. In a Sandman story, Gaiman exaggerated the difference between the fantasy Baghdad, which Russell then illustrated up the wazoo, and the grim reality of modern Baghdad, which Russell gave us in a few, brief, spare, elegant panels.
And yes, the history got really obscured; McGregor pointed out that after the Caliph moved from city to city, building gorgeous palace after gorgeous palace in Islam’s golden age, Samara went away but nothing much happened in Baghdad until Gengis Khan destroyed the city, razed it to the ground, four or so centuries later. (And since then, no one has conquered Baghdad...or Afghanistan, for that matter.) What would happen if we tried to inform our love and delight in the fantasy Arabian Nights world with a few more facts about the real Abyssinian dynasty?
The harem, for instance. It’s interesting and worth knowing that the women of the harem were comparable to geishas, as one of MacGregor’s experts points out here; trained to be well-rounded companions, musicians and dancers and sparkling conversationalists, so that when you came back to hang out at the harem, pleasure and diversion were the way of things. MacGregor is pretty up front about there being beautiful boys in a harem, as well as women, and there’s certainly plenty of male-male action in the Arabian nights, although in the ones I’ve seen (I certainly haven’t read the whole thing) it’s usually an evil wizard lusting after some pretty young thing. MacGregor theorizes that the wall fragments here were to be found in the harem, and originally depicted the kinds of people who’d be working there, the extra wives and eunuchs and so forth; he delights in the irony that images of those people (ie, not the ones in power) have not only survived, but emerged from the sacred hidden perfumed inner sanctum to be enjoyed here by all the world.
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