Intricate decorative tilework found in medieval architecture across the Islamic world appears to exhibit advanced decagonal quasicrystal geometry--a concept discovered by Western mathematicians and physicists only in the 1970s and 1980s. If so, medieval Islamic application of this geometry would predate Western mastery by at least half a millennium.
The finding, by Peter J. Lu at Harvard University and Paul J. Steinhardt at Princeton University, will be published this week in the journal Science, reported Science Daily on Feb. 24.
“We can’t say for sure what it means,“ says Lu, a graduate student in physics at Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. “It could be proof of a major role of mathematics in medieval Islamic art or it could have been just a way for artisans to construct their art more easily. It would be incredible if it were all coincidence, though. At the very least, it shows us a culture that we often don’t credit enough was far more advanced than we ever thought before.“
Breathtakingly elaborate geometric tiling is a distinctive feature of medieval Islamic architecture throughout the Middle East and Central Asia. Art historians have long assumed that simpler elements of the patterns were created with elementary tools such as straightedges and compasses. But there has been no explanation for how artists and architects could have created the unmistakably complex tile patterns adorning many medieval Islamic edifices.
“Straightedges and compasses work fine for the recurring symmetries of the simplest patterns we see,“ Lu says, “but it probably required far more powerful tools to fully explain the elaborate tilings with decagonal symmetry.“
While it’s possible to create these patterns individually with basic tools, they are incredibly difficult to replicate on a larger scale without generating extensive geometric distortions. The most complex medieval Islamic tilings have little such distortion, leading Lu to believe more is at play.
“Individually placing and drafting hundreds of decagons with a straightedge would have been exceedingly cumbersome,“ Lu says. “It’s much more likely these artisans used particular tiles that we’ve found by decomposing the artwork.“
These tiles, dubbed “girih tiles“ by Lu and Steinhardt, consist of sets of five contiguous polygons (a decagon, pentagon, diamond, bowtie, and hexagon), each with a unique decorative line pattern. For medieval Islamic artisans, they may have represented a toolkit for generating huge numbers of distinctive tile patterns without the lengthy, painstaking, and often flawed process of creating each line segment individually.
These girih tiles may have been used to generate a wide range of complex tiling patterns on major buildings from medieval Islam, including mosques in Isfahan, Iran, and Bursa, Turkey; madrasas in Baghdad; and shrines in Herat, Afghanistan, and Agra, India.

Iran’s first Association for Cultural, Literary and Artistic Luminaries has been established by the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance in cooperation with the Islamic Azad University.
Announcing this, Mohammad Hassan Asgharnia, as advisor to culture minister told IRNA on Feb. 26 that the association will seek to identify and honor luminaries for their efforts in the fields of culture, literature and art.
Famed Iranian artist, Mahmoud Farshchian, is the first honorary member of this association which plans to hold a ceremony to commemorate Mirza Kouchak Khan Jangali, leader of a revolutionary campaign in Gilan forests in northern Iran.
“The ceremony will be held in cooperation with the Cultural Department of the Islamic Azad University and Martyrs’ and Sacrificers’ Affairs Foundation in Rasht,“ he said.
Asgharnia further said that an artistic council was set up to encourage students to learn calligraphy.
“Familiarizing students with calligraphy, the holy Qur’an, sayings of the infallible household of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) and poetry is another aim of the Calligraphers’ Artistic Council,“ he concluded.

National Scriptwriting Day will be observed each year on February 25. The decision to this effect was taken in a ceremony to commemorate the veteran Iranian scriptwriter Hossein Torabi here at Cinema House later on Sunday.
According to Mehr, the ceremony was attended by Deputy Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance for cinematic affairs Mohammad Reza Jafari-Jelveh and a number of artists including Minoo Farshchi, Pouran Derakhshandeh, Shadmehr Rastin, Ali Reza Raeisian, Khosrow Sinaei, Farshid Houran, Farid Mostafavi, Morteza Razzaq-Karimi, Khosrow Dehqan, Nezameddin Kiaei, Mohsen Damadi and Siyamak Taqipour as member of the Scriptwriters’ Center.
Speaking at the ceremony, noted actress Fatemeh Motamed-Arya, who was conducted the program said, recalled that she was from a generation which began its activities in the field of cinema with Hossein Torabi.
Head of Scriptwriters Center Farhad Tohidi also said that the center had planned to hold the first commemoration ceremony for Hossein Torabi but each time it was cancelled due to a number of reasons.
“This time, we decided to organize a ceremony to mark his 70th birth anniversary,“ he noted.
Commenting on the personality of the artist, he noted that the healthy spirit, thriftiness, pungent satire and clear accent are among the characteristics of Torabi. Generosity is rooted in his being and patriotism stems from his deep knowledge about the richness of his motherland.

Ali Akbar Dehkhoda

February 26 marks forty-eighth death anniversary of Ali Akbar Dehkhoda, well-known Iranian writer, journalist, satirist and linguist from the Constitutional Era of the early twentieth century.
Dehkhoda is among few contemporary figures who managed to expose his capabilities in the field of writing and intellectuality which were equally popular among the common man and the learned, the Persian daily Hambastegi reported.
Omran Salahi, a contemporary poet and satirist, believed that ’Charand o Parand’, or Gibberish, a book by Dehkhoda, should be written without the slightest change.
He has described Dehkhoda as one of the architects of modern Iranian literature and founder of modern prose.
Although Qaem Maqam Farahani earlier promoted simple writing, he was able to totally shrug off verbiage.
However, Dehkhoda completely abandoned difficult diction and turned to common style of writing, which was later enlightening for writers such as Mohammad Ali Jamalzadeh and Sadeq Hedayat.
A French researcher recently said that the source of Persian short stories is Dehkhoda’s ’Charand o Parand’.
Dehkhoda, who commands a special status in Iranian history, was born in Tehran to parents from Qazvin. His father died when he was only 10 years old. Dehkhoda quickly excelled in Persian literature, Arabic and French and graduated from college in political science.
In 1903, he went to the Vienna, Rome and Bucharest as an Iranian embassy employee, but returned to Iran two years later and became involved in Iran’s Constitutional Movement which sought to strip the monarch of absolute power and give more authority to the parliament.
In the final days of his life, he wrote to the then parliament speaker and donated the royalty of his dictionary, the largest ever lexical compilation in the Persian language, to the Iranian people.

Director of the Cultural Heritage, Handicrafts and Tourism Office in Mamasani, Fars province, has said on Monday that artifacts discovered in the region date back to 550 BC.
Habib Fahliyani told IRNA that archeologists from Iran and Australia came across five pillars of a monument similar to those in Persepolis (Takht-e Jamshid) in Sarvan Village last week.
The items were discovered during excavations in an area covering 1,200 square meters undertaken jointly by Iranian and Australian teams in 2002.
The first phase of the project is complete while the second phase will begin once the Interior Ministry issues the permit for the excavations, he noted.
Fahliyani further said that head of Iran’s Cultural Heritage, Handicrafts and Tourism Organization’s Research Center had announced that Sarvan Plain is 500 times more important than Sivand dam and Bolaghi Gorge and the area deserves investment.
Given the extent of activities conducted in the area, he said that it can turn to an effective region in the country’s tourism industry.
Mamasani is 180 kilometers away from Shiraz.

An archeological site in Gilan

Gilan Cultural Heritage, Handicrafts and Tourism Department will undertake joint archeological activities with one of the accredited universities of South Korea. Announcing this, head of the department, Mohammad Hossein Mehdipour told ISNA on Monday that two archeologists from South Korea arrived in Gilan to discuss joint archeological projects in the province.
They are interested in conducting research on Iron Age and Stone Age civilizations as well as on the ancient Silk Road with their Iranian counterparts, he said.
The undertakings, to be conducted under Research Center for Studies on Gilan, are favorable for promoting archeological research activities in the province, Mehdipour concluded.

Second round of ’British Theater Management’ educational workshop began here on Feb. 25 in cooperation with the British Embassy and the international department of Namayesh Publications.
According to ISNA, the five-day workshop will continue until March 2 at Iran Artists House. The first round of such a workshop was held from January 23 to 28.
The workshop aims at reviewing ways of materializing issues presented in the first round. The agenda includes a review of the status of theater in a modern society and ways of supporting the audience as well as meeting the expectations of investors and sponsors.
Artistic organizations, marketing, education and social problems are other issues which will come up for discussion in the second round of the workshop to be conducted by British drama professors.