A geospatial critique of Ibn Sīnā's imagined past in Isfahan
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Date
2024-04-05
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In the Dardasht district of Isfahan (Iran) stands a dodecagonal, domed building known as “Madras-i Ibn Sīnā” (Academy of Avicenna). Today, the building is firmly believed to be the space where Ibn Sīnā (980-1037 CE), the renowned physician-philosopher and polymath, taught his students during his residence in Isfahan (1024-1037 CE)—a claim originally made by the early 20th-century local historians of the city. The folk and anecdotal nature of almost all the information about this historical monument made me question its relationship to Ibn Sīnā’s life and career, and to the city in his time. My poster shows how I used digital mapping to assess this claim through geospatial data visualization of two historical datasets that I extracted from a wide range of primary and secondary literature on urban history of Isfahan, and on Ibn Sīnā’s biobibliography. Geolocating the textual evidence along with georeferencing historical maps of Isfahan allowed me to analyze the spatial relationship of the Madras to Ibn Sīnā’s whereabouts and activities in a reconstructed geospatial model of the city in his time. My spatial analysis shows that the location and speculated function of the building is not consistent with the geolocated historical data.
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Digital humanities, Mapping, IDAH
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Presentation