Kusuma Trust News Today

Situated within some of the oldest spaces on the Victoria and Albert Museum’s estate in Kensington, four new gallery spaces and a fifth reworked gallery

a href= http://vam.ac.uk target= _blank V&A Photography Centre /a has opened the largest suite of galleries in the UK dedicated to a permanent pho

The fifth poem of Nizami’s Khamsah (Quintet), Iskandarnamah, is a two-part account of the life of Alexander the Great or Iskandar as he is called in Persian. Nizami’s portrayal of Alexander as a philosopher-king would have appealed to Akbar, who promoted himself as a just and tolerant ruler.

Even in Firdawsi’s ‘Shahnamah’, he is described by Ardshir, founder of the Sasanian dynasty, as ‘the evil-minded tyrant’.

In his epic the Shahnamah (Book of Kings), the poet Firdawsi (940–1019 or 1025) vividly describes how Alexander (Iskandar/Sikandar) came upon the Persian emperor Darius (Dara) as he fled north after the battle of Gaugamela in 331 BC. Cradling the mortally wounded Dara on his knees, Iskandar promised “Your word...

Have you ever wondered how to defeat an army or a herd of wild elephants? Alexander the Great knew how, to judge by accounts (both historical and legendary) of his campaigns in the East. Elephants feature most prominently in Alexanders famous battle with King Porus of Inda in 326BC, as...

Where exactly was the Garden of Eden? Does it still exist? These are questions medieval scholars tried to answer by attempting to map Eden as a physical place on earth. In the Book of Genesis, the Garden of Eden (also known as the ‘earthly paradise’) is a place in which...

Today the a href= http://www.vam.ac.uk target= _blank V&A /a announced that the second and final phase of the V&A’s Photography Centre will o

The story and character of the Persianate Alexander the Great, known as Iskandar or Sikandar, underwent a great deal of transformation in poetic and prose texts over a millennium. What is most striking in the various works written for different audiences is the increasingly imaginative itinerary of the hero’s travels,...

Alexander the Great: The Making of a Myth (21 October 2022 – 19 February 2023), supported by the Kusuma Trust and Ubisoft, is the first exhibitio