© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/24519197-bja10011
philological encounters 5 (2020) 409–449
brill.com/phen
The World-Revealing Goblet: Reading Farhād
Mīrzā’s Geographical Treatise Jām-i Jam
as a Lithograph
Zeinab Azarbadegan
PhD Candidate, Department of History, Columbia University,
New York, NY, USA
zaa2117@columbia.edu
Abstract
This article examines a copy of Farhād Mīrzā’s Jām-i Jam (the World-Revealing Goblet)
published in 1856 in Tehran and kept at Columbia University Library offsite storage. It
demonstrates the dual importance of this book in geographic knowledge production
and as part of the library of Saʿīd Nafīsī, one of the most prominent Iranian scholars
of Persian literature. Methodologically, the paper offers various ways to study a single
lithograph to decipher larger historical processes in histories of education, translation,
and print. First, it analyzes the paratext to expose scholarly and political networks
in order to examine the genealogy of geographic knowledge production in mid-
nineteenth century Qajar Iran. Second, it studies the content and translation practices
employed by Farhād Mīrzā to offer novel strategies for analyzing dissemination and
reception of new ways of production and categorization of geographic knowledge as
well as methods utilized in composition of pedagogical geography books. Finally, it
discusses how cataloging practices affect current scholarship and lead to rendering
certain texts “hidden.” It therefore illustrates how the study of Farhād Mīrzā’s Jām-i
Jam, a book aspiring to reveal the world, can expose much about scholarly practices
not only in the past but also the present.
Keywords
Persian lithography – Geography – Qajar – Translation – Education – Textbook
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