Programme

Inscriptions sur le site du Musée du Quai Branly : https://my.weezevent.com/odeurs-et-parfums-pratiques-quotidiennes-et-usages-rituels

Paewhan Seol (Université nationale Chonnam) présentera une conférence sur le thème :

“The Aromatics Network in the Mongol Empire―Aromatics, Palaces, Shrines, and Gods of the Sacred Mountains and Rivers”

Résumé : 

This study analyzes the vast network of aromatics and incense exchange, including its operation, within the Mongol Yuan empire. Through this network, aromatics and incense could act as media connecting the Mongol court with the “gods of the sacred mountains and rivers” (yuezhen haidu 嶽鎭海瀆), Daoist, Buddhist, and Islamic temples and churches within the empire or beyond, and maritime world at its frontier

Aromatic culture was natural to the Mongol grasslands. Processed aromatics and incense, however, remained somewhat unfamiliar to Mongols until after the turn of the 13th century. This changed during the reign of Chinggis Qan (r. 1206–1227), when a Chinese Taoist in Samarqand introduced some Mongols to burning incense. By the reign of Qubilai (r. 1260–1294), the culture of burning incense was established in the Mongol imperial court, beginning with the sacrifice to the gods of the sacred mountains and rivers as late as 1261.

While people burned incense in offerings to the great Qan in their ordo, or felt tents, on the grassland, envoys of the Qan burned incense in offerings to the gods of the sacred mountains and rivers in the incense halls of his dual capitals of Dadu (大都, M. Khanbaliq, modern-day Beijing) and Shangdu (上都, or Xanadu in modern-day Zhenglanqi, China). By so doing, the Qan connected his empire’s territory through sacrificial rites performed by proxy. Thus, royal envoys and Daoists sacrificing to the gods of the sacred mountains and rivers joined Confucian scholars in Confucian shrines and Tibetan Buddhist monks during their “Buddhistic city tour of the Imperial City” (you huangcheng 游皇城) as performers of a great political and religious incense ritual.

Through this incense-burning culture, the Mongols inherited the traditional Chinese ideology of “correlative resonance between Heaven and people” (tianren ganying 天人感應), expressing it with the magical, territorial, and festive qualities of Mongol culture. A representative example of this phenomenon is the you huangcheng, a Buddhistic ceremony that combined Tibetan Buddhism with a Mongol-style festival and city tour. Called gdugs dkar in Tibetan and bai sangai (白傘蓋, “white canopy”) in Chinese, the event took place every year on February 15th, and centered around a tour of the inside and outside of the imperial city after welcoming a white canopy installed beside the imperial throne in the main hall of the great Qan or Da Mingdian (大明殿). This constituted a Buddhistic and civic version of a “jāma and ǰisün feast,” a royal banquet featuring dress in one-color robes bestowed by the great Qan.

Burning incense was a cultural activity with a strong religious aspect, but it had political and economic functions as well. Economically speaking, it offered material rewards for religious temples and their people. Daoists, Buddhist monks, Confucians, and (Nestorian) Christians were highly incentivized by the political and economic benefits they gained from burning incense bestowed by the Mongol royal families. This, as a consequence, reshaped the politics, economies, and cultures of China, Iran, and Goryeo (modern Korea). Aromatics and incense from Southeast Asia all the way to Tamla 耽羅 on Korea’s Jeju Island (Danluo in Chinese) connected the material world of sea ports, palaces, and the spiritual world of sacred mountains and rivers, temples, and the Heavenly Concubine (Tianfei 天妃), namely, sea-goddess Mazu 馬祖. Thanks to incense, the Mongol Qan, from the time of Qubilai, dominated the worlds of both mountains and streams and also spirits within his realm through a network that integrated ordos and incense halls (xiangdian 香殿) with the main imperial halls of Shangdu and Dadu.

Veuillez noter qu’exceptionnellement, la séance aura lieu au 54 boulevard Raspail, au sous-sol, salle 15.

Il sera également possible d’assister au séminaire en ligne en vous connectant à : https://meet.goto.com/gsrl

Archaeology of Smells with Sterenn Le Maguer

Cet entretien revient sur mes recherches dédiées à l’étude du commerce et de l’usage des encens dans le monde médiéval musulman, et plus généralement sur la méthodologie archéologique.

320 p., 106 colour ill., 16 b/w tables, 178 x 254 mm, 2021
ISBN: 978-2-503-59981-6
Languages: English

The book offers innovative perspectives, exciting historical insights and often astonishing archaeological data on long distance trade and the mobility of goods during Early Medieval times in the Indian Ocean area, the Mediterranean, East Africa, the Near East and northern Europe.

This book offers new and innovative perspectives on long-distance trade between Europe, the Mediterranean area, the Middle East, Africa, India and China during the Early Medieval period. The archaeological data and historical insights presented in this volume are without exception of great interest, often exciting, and more than once astonishing. The goods which travelled between the continents in the timespan under discussion (ca. 6th to 12th centuries) include pottery in all shapes and forms, textiles, coins, metal, lava millstones, glass, marble columns, rock-crystal beads, and also plants used for incense. 

The scope of the contributions includes the wide-ranging economic contacts of a Viking community, the changing patterns of long-distance trade in the Byzantine Empire, the spread of Chinese pottery to Africa, the Near East and Europe, the information on maritime routes provided by shipwrecks in the Java Sea, the reconstruction of an incense trade network, and the production and distribution of textiles as well as stone objects in the Middle East and beyond.

The varied approaches in this volume underline that the movement of objects in Early Medieval times over vast distances not only reflect mechanisms of exchange, but also imply social networks and the transfer of ideas. Thus, Riches Beyond the Horizon sheds compelling light on a world which was much more complex and much more interconnected than has often been assumed.Hagit Nol was awarded with a PhD by Universität Hamburg and holds a postdoctoral fellowship at the Université libre de Bruxelles. She combines archaeology with a critical reading of textual sources. Table of Contents

Joanita Vroom, Preface

Hagit Nol, Long distance trade in the Early Medieval period: A general introduction

Natalie Kontny, Arabo-Islamic geographies:Indian Ocean trade in Ibn KhurradKit (fl. 884 CE)

Sterenn Le Maguer-Gillon, Elusive remains: Identifying incense trade routes in western Asia from biodegradable commodities (ca. 7th-13th centuries)

Dashu Qin & Justin Ching Ho, Chinese ceramics exported to Africa during the 9th-10th centuries

Guangcan Xin, Maritime trade in Southeast Asia from the 9^th-10th centuries: A study of the Belitung and Cirebon Shipwrecks

Joanita Vroom, From Xian to Birka and back: Constantinople as a nodal point in long-distance contacts during the early Middle Ages (ca. 6th-12th centuries)

Hagit Nol, Rolling stones: Distribution patterns of marble, basalt and beach rock from Early Medieval Israel (ca. 7th-11th centuries)

Orit Shamir & Alisa Baginski, Early medieval textiles from excavations in Israel (9th-13th centuries) trade and Transfer

Ralf Wiechmann, Advancing into unknown lands: The numismatic material of Gros Stromkendorf near Wismar during the Early Viking age (ca. 8th-9th centuries)

Source: https://www.brepols.net/pages/ShowProduct.aspx?prod_id=IS-9782503599816-1

Sean Coughlin (Czech Academy of Sciences) 

Alchemies of Scent: Reconstructing the Practices of Ancient Greco-Egyptian Perfumery.

Abstract: I will be introducing the central research questions of a new 5-year study funded by the Czech Science Foundation and hosted at the Institute of Philosophy at the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague, with a lab at our partnering institute, the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry. Over the next five years, the project’s team of historians, Egyptologists, philologists and organic chemists will experimentally replicate the recipes of five Greco-Egyptian perfumes. Through these experiments, we will explore how the quest to extract, concentrate, compound and preserve the essences of plants influenced natural philosophy, medicine, art and culture in Ancient Egypt and Ancient Greece from the fourth through first centuries BCE. The talk will focus on the nature of our evidence for ancient Greco-Egyptian perfumery, how experimental methods can add to our understanding of it, and how our methods differ from those of previous studies of perfumes from other areas of the world. 

Zoom details:https://ed-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/5034102095?pwd=UjIvTkVjVmpvQ2hVSis3aXNOK0tTQT09
Meeting ID: 503 410 2095
Passcode: 2PPUqNnn

November lecture to be given by Dr Sterenn Le Maguer-Gillon, archaeologist and lecturer at the Institut Catholique de Paris on the topic The Art of Olfaction: Incense Burners in Medieval Islamic Society (7th-15th Centuries) on Wednesday, 17 November at 18.00 London Time. This will be a webinar, so please sign up with me by 15 November at my SOAS address: rw51@soas.ac.uk.

This lecture aims to explore the role of incense burners in the Medieval Islamic world (7^th-15^th cent.). We define as “incense-burner” any container having served for burning with aromatic products in a secular context. The use of perfuming guests with incense is attested in wealthy contexts as well as in the lower classes, demonstrating how important this ritual is. Different types of incense burners were produced, either in ceramic, soft stone or brass, and used to perform hospitality rites. This lecture will look at the place of these objects in the Medieval Islamic society through the textual sources as well as the archaeological documentation available. 

November 2021 poster-2