The Islamic Art Archives is composed of six collections, including those of Mehmet Ağa-Oğlu, Arthur Upham Pope, Donald Newton Wilber, Oleg Grabar, Marianna Shreve Simpson, and the Afghanistan Archaeological Remains Photograph. The Mehmet Ağa-Oğlu collection documents the Islamic and pre-Islamic art and architecture of the Middle East, Persia, the Caucasus, Western Asia, North Africa, and Southern Spain. Arthur Upham Pope focused primarily on Persian architecture and monuments, but his collection also includes photographs of Persian ceramics, textiles, and illustrated manuscripts. Wilber, Pope's colleague, also primarily studied Iranian monuments but he focused on those built during the Achaemenid and Sasanian empires. Oleg Grabar's work focused on the architecture of the seventh and eighth centuries of the Umayyad dynasty, the architecture of Jerusalem under Islamic rule, Arabic and Persian illustrated manuscripts and ornaments, and contemporary Islamic architecture. On the other hand, the Afghanistan Archaeological Remains Photograph collection depicts Afghanistan sculptures, statues, figural reliefs, pottery, and other archaeological remains, the majority of which are from the Kabul Museum in Afghanistan. Finally, Dr. Simpson's collection documents her work and her notes from her study of Islamic manuscripts around the world. The collection also includes photographic prints of the pages of the illustrated manuscripts Maqamat and Shah Nama.
The Islamic Art Archive is composed of six different smaller collections and is the oldest photographic archive of Islamic art in the United States. The bulk of the materials are from 1933-1979. Some additional materials date from the mid 1920's and last part of the twentieth and first part of the twenty-first centuries. The collection consists primarily of lantern slides, negatives, and photographs of manuscript paintings, monuments, and decorative arts such as pottery, metal works, and textiles from ancient Iran and Afghanistan. Dr. Mehmet Ağa-Oğlu, Dr. Oleg Grabar, Dr. Richard Edwards, Dr. Walter Spink, and Dr. Marianna Shreve Simpson all taught at the University of Michigan as part of the Department of the History of Art and now their collections reside at the Visual Resources Collections, as part of the Islamic Art Archive. The Islamic Art Archive also contains a collection of prints assembled from various repositories and collections around the world.
Photographs of the pages of the illustrated manuscripts of the Maqamat and Shah Nama make up an important portion of the collection. The Maqamat is considered to be one of the greatest Arabic illuminated manuscripts of all time. It is a compendium of tales written by Abu Muhammad al Qasim ibn Ali al-Hariri (1054-1122) and illustrated by Yahya ibn Mahmud al-Wasiti. The Maqamat contains fifty short stories, each one identified by the name if a city in the Muslim world of the time. The stories tell of actual adventures and verbal pronouncements in verse or in prose of a roguish and peripatetic hero, Abu Zayd from Saruj a town in northern Syria, as told by al-Harith.
The Shah Nama is an epic poetic work authored by Persian poet Abu'l Qasim Hasan, professionally known as Firdawsi (935-1020 or 1025) around 1000CE. The Shah Nama tells the stories of ancient heroes and kings of pre-Islamic Iran; it is rich with exploits of love and betrayal, courage, and valor. This epic work remains one of the most popular in Iran, and the first known illustrated copies date to the Ilkhanid period. The work is written in almost purely Persian and is composed of 62 stories, 990 chapters, and contains 60,000 rhyming couplets.
