An armchair traveller from early modern England, reading about travels to Islamic countries, if they were attentive, would learn that printing with movable type was not yet common there. The reader who opened a copy of Purchas his pilgrimage (1626) or Giovanni Botero’s Relations of the most famous kingdomes and common-wealths (1611) would have been told that the Turks ‘will suffer no Printing’;[1] ‘have no Printing’;[2] ‘vse no printing’.[3] And if they turned to travel books about Persia, the reader would notice a similar series of comments on the absence of printing and the printed book in that country. If they came across the account of William Parry, one of the retinue of men and officers who accompanied Anthony Sherley on his journey to Persia in 1598, our reader would get the impression that a lack of printing in Persia was part of a larger state of ignorance. In A new and large discourse of the travels of Sir Anthony Sherley, knight, by sea, and over land, to the Persian empire (1601), Parry writes:

They [the Persians] haue not many Bookes, much lesse great Libraries amongst their best Clarkes. They are no learned nation, but ignorant in all kinde of liberall or learned Sciences, and almost of all other Arts and Faculties, except it be in certaine things pertaining to horses furniture, and some kindes of carpettings and silke workes, wherein they excell.[4]

A later seventeenth-century reader, picking up an English-language book about travels to Persia, would find it hard to avoid comments on the lack of printing in that country. Adam Olearius, the German mathematician and scholar who travelled to Persia in 1637, and whose account of his travels was translated into English in 1669, states that the Persians ‘have not as yet […] the use of Printing, as we have in Europe.’[5] Jean Chardin, a French traveller who visited Persia in the 1660s and 1670s, is more fulsome. He writes that:

[The Persians] have desired a hundred times to have Printing-Houses; they acknowledge the Usefulness and Necessity of them; they see the Advantages and the Profit of them; yet no body undertakes to set up one. The Brother of the Great Master, who was a very Learned Man, and the King’s Favourite, would have engaged me, in the Year 1676, to send for Workmen to teach them that Ingenious Art: He showed His Majesty the Arabick and Persian Printed Books I had given him; whereupon a Contract was made; but when they have laid down the Money, all was broke off.[6]

In Asia. being an accurate description of Persia (1673), the Scottish geographer John Ogilby, who included an atlas and description of Persia in his book, remarks that the Persians are ‘utterly ignorant in the Art of Printing’.[7] John Fryer, who perhaps had more detailed knowledge of Persia, having undertaken a long tour of Persia and India between 1672 and 1682 in the interests of the East India Company,[8] notes in A new account of East-India and Persia (1698) that in Persia ‘[b]ooks are all written with the Pen […], not committed to the Press’.[9]

These later seventeenth-century travellers by and large do not follow Parry’s association between a lack of printed books and a lack of learning and knowledge. In fact, they discuss education, learning and the importance of books in Persian culture in some detail. Crucially, they also demonstrate a greater awareness of the presence of a rich manuscript book culture in Persia. The French gem merchant Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, who undertook six voyages to Persia and India between 1630 and 1668, states in his own record of travels through Persia that ‘Their nobler Arts are Writing, for Printers they know none. All their Books are writt’n, which is the reason they so much esteem that Art.’[10] Not only does Tavernier not repeat the assertion that a lack of printing or printed books is associated with a lack of knowledge, but he directly states that it results in a more developed and respected art of writing by hand.

What sense, then, would the later seventeenth-century English reader get of book culture in Persia? It might not have been immediately obvious, but when European travel-writers mention seeing Persian books, or encountering people reading books, it is usually handwritten texts that they are describing. The manuscript text was everywhere in Persia, and it was highly prized and respected. As Susan Mokhberi notes, French travellers such as Jean Chardin praised Persians ‘as beacons of learning and civility’; Chardin records that ‘many peasants themselves go to read good books’.[11] In Asia, Ogilby writes that ‘Their chief Book is […] Culustan [Gulistān], that is, Rose-Valley, made by the famous Poet Schich Saadi, […] every Persian hath this Book in his House’; he notes that ‘[books of philosophy are rare and kept] as a great Treasure’.[12]

At other times, the reader would get a fleeting but powerful image of the importance of manuscript culture in Persia. Olearius describes encountering a library where:

The books were lay’d in Drawers, shuffled one upon another, without any order, but otherwise well enough kept. They were all Manuscripts, some, upon Parchment, others upon Paper, most in Arabick, and some in the Persian and Turkish Languages, but all excellently painted, richly bound, and cover’d with Plates of Gold and Silver, carv’d, and branch’d. The books of History were enrich’d with several representations in colours.[13]

Fryer speculates that Persian books, being in manuscript, are more accurate than they would be if printed, which are ‘less free from Errors’, suggesting one way in which handwritten texts might be valued over printed ones.[14] These sources also note the prestige accorded to the scribe, Ogilby recording in a marginal note that ‘Writing [is] the most advantageous Employment’,[15] and the importance of handwriting as an art form, Fryer, for example, explaining that the Persians are ‘mightily taken with a fair Hand and good Writing’.[16] In this way, our reader would gain some understanding of the richness of manuscript culture in Persian society.

The alert reader might also pick up on the importance of orality and oral culture in Persian life. Ogilby, in noting the ubiquity of books in Persia, also records the Persian tradition of learning poetry by heart: ‘every Persian hath this Book in his House; nay, some there are which carry it in their memory, and are therefore accounted very learned; this they repeat at all Feasts and other Merry-meetings.’[17] Olearius, who calls the Persians ‘addicted to Poetry’, explains that ‘the Great Lords think they cannot give their Friends a better entertainment, than by Diverting them, while they are at Dinner, with the recital of some Poem’.[18] In a fascinating image of literary production, he describes Persian poets, who

are known from others by their Habit, which is the same with that of the Philosophers; to wit, a long white Coat, but open before, with great broad Sleeves, and they have at their Girdle a kind of a Hawking-bag, in which are their Books, Paper, and an Ink-horn, that they may give Copies of their verses to such as desire them.[19]

Via these glimpses into the richness of early modern Persian culture, an English reader might have been able to gain a more detailed picture of Persian textual production, one that reflected the strength of manuscript and oral traditions in that country, and which gave the lie to a perception of Persia as having, whether through ignorance of learning or of technology, ‘not many Bookes’.

Chloë Houston is Associate Professor and joint Head of the Department of English Literature at the University of Reading. She works on the portrayal of cultural encounter and religious difference in early modern travel writing and drama, and her most recent book, Persia in Early Modern English Drama, 1530-1699: The Imagined Empire, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2023.

[1] Samuel Purchas, Purchas his pilgrimage (1626), p. 320.

[2] Giovanni Botero, Relations of the most famous kingdomes and common-wealths (1611), p. 525.

[3] Michel Baudier, The history of the imperiall estate of the grand seigneurs their habitations, liues, titles ... gouernment and tyranny (1593), p. 15.

[4] William Parry, A New and Large Discourse of the Travels of Anthony Sherley (1601), p. 24.

[5] Adam Olearius, The voyages and travells of the ambassadors sent by Frederick, Duke of Holstein, to the Great Duke of Muscovy and the King of Persia, trans. by John Davies (1669), p. 272.

[6] Jean Chardin, Sir John Chardin’s travels in Persia: with an introduction by Brigadier-General Sir Percy Sykes (London: The Argonaut Press, 1927), p. 249, quoted in Izadpanah 2023, p. 81.

[7] John Ogilby, Asia. being an accurate description of Persia (1673), p. 64.

[8] G. Goodwin and P. Carter, ‘Fryer, John (d. 1733), traveller and writer,’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004, September 23) Retrieved 23 July 2024, from https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-10219.

[9] John Fryer, A new account of East-India and Persia (1698), p. 361.

[10] Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, Collections of travels through Turky into Persia (1684), p. 229.

[11] Susan Mokhberi, The Persian Mirror: French Reflections of the Safavid Empire in Early Modern France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), p. 19, p. 18.

[12] Ogilby 1673, p. 60.

[13] Olearius 1669, p. 179.

[14] Fryer 1698, p. 361.

[15] Ogilby 1673, p. 64.

[16] Fryer 1698, p. 369.

[17] Ogilby 1673, p. 60.

[18] Olearius 1669, p. 251.

[19] Olearius 1669, p. 251.

Title Image: From John Ogilby's Asia. being an accurate description of Persia, and the several provinces thereof (1673)