Pembroke College Cambridge

Interview with a Fellow: Seismology to Mongols

How do you go from earthquake history to the Mongols?

This is the subject of part two of our interview with Fellow and Professor of Persian History, Charles Melville. As a newly appointed lecturer at Cambridge he looked for new questions to ask, and landed on the Mongols.

Not the rise of the Mongol Empire – there were enough books about Genghis Khan already. But what was behind a powerful Mongol empire coming to an end? Unchallenged in terms of force, but governing Iran – a country the size of the whole of Western Europe – without an agreed-upon heir; internal pressures soon materialised.

This is where a connection appears between Mongol history and illustrated manuscripts. Free of an empire, Iranians turned to the Shahnama – the Book of Kings – for a cultural and mythological tradition to draw from. This, Professor Melville explains, is the beginning of Iran as we know it as a distinct country with its own cultural traditions, and the production of illustrated manuscripts was a part of it.

From seismology, to Mongols, to historiography – how history is written. History is, like most things, selective. Even two professional historians would write different accounts of a time period they had both experienced, so constructing Persian history accurately is a challenge. For Professor Melville, how history is written and transmitted is more interesting than what the events were. What the history is, how the history is written, how the history is visualised, and how it’s transmitted – all these questions are connected.

Part 1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZUu_H8X_bs

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