Funder: Barakat Trust, British Academy, Oxford University
Partner organizations (inside or outside Oxford): not specified
Project Description:
In 1975 the Department of Eastern Art of the Ashmolean Museum was fortunate enough to receive a bequest consisting of the unique negative collection of Professor K.A.C. Creswell, the eminent pioneer of medieval Islamic architectural history. Among the photographs are many of those used to illustrate the two publications which remain the basic research tools for scholars of medieval Islamic architecture: Creswell's Early Muslim Architecture, and Muslim Architecture of Egypt. The collection also includes large number of photographs intended for a third volume of Muslim Architecture of Egypt, which was to deal with the monuments of the Burji Mamluk period. Since this project remained unfinished at the time of Creswell's death, the bulk of these are unpublished. Over the past decade the Ashmolean Museum has undertaken the printing, identification and digitisation of the Creswell Archive with the aim of making this exceptional collection available to a wider audience. The subjects of the photographs range in place and date from al-Andalus to Iraq, from the late seventh century to the eighteenth. The greater part of the archive consists of images of the architecture of Egypt and the Levant between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries. Most were taken in the second quarter of this century.
Other projects the participants have been involved in:
