Pre-arranged panel at the 10th European Conference of Iranian Studies, Leiden
University, Netherland (21-25 August 2023)
Tuesday August 22, 14:30-18:00
Rereading Hans E. Wulff’s Archive of
the Traditional Crafts, Technology, Science,
Material Culture, and Art of Iran
as A Source for Iranian Studies
Convenors
Mahroo Moosavi, University of Oxford, UK
Roxana Zenhari, Georg August University, Göttingen, Germany
Pedram Khosronejad, Western Sydney University, Australia
Speakers
Pedram Khosronejad, Western Sydney University, Australia
Hadi Safaeipour, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran
Ana Marija Grbanovic, University of Bamberg, Germany
Abigail E. Owen, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA
Roxana Zenhari, Georg August University, Göttingen, Germany
Moosavi, University of Oxford, UK
1
Uncovering Hans E. Wulff Collection: A Life Contribution to the Study of Iran and
Iranian Studies
Professor Pedram Khosronejad, Western Sydney University, Australia
In 1936, twenty-nine-year-old Johannes Eberhard Wulff (1907-1967) was given an
official position to go to Iran at the request of Reza Shah (1878-1944), the king (r. 19251941), to plan and set up the first ever schools of technical engineering, as foreign aid
from the German government to the Iranian government. The first technical college was
established by Wulff in Shiraz in 1937, and it was during the official opening of this
school that he received a royal order from Reza Shah to collect the necessary data for the
preparation of an encyclopaedia regarding the “Traditional Crafts, Technology, Science,
Material Culture and Art of Persia.” In parallel with administering and teaching at the
Technical Colleges in Shiraz, later in Isfahan and finally in Tabriz, Wulff spent time from
1936 to 1941 travelling all around the country observing, interviewing, and
photographing master craftsmen of many different guilds to record their techniques of
production and tool making, to teach at his new schools and to use them as primary
resources in his royal project. Since July 2019, I have been working closely with the
children of Hans E. Wulff in Sydney. They have recently donated his entire collection and
archival material to our project. This collection contains more than 5,000 unpublished
photographs, negatives, slides, and drawings; more than ten handwritten diaries; more
than 5,000 field notes; and the entire official letters and communications.
This paper will present the life and research conducted by Hans E. Wulff in Iran 19361941 and 1964-65 and the significance of his archive and collection for the study of the
traditional craft, art, technology, and science of Iran.
2
Vaulting without Centring in the Work of Iranian Master Masons: Interpretation
of a Construction Habit through the Lens of Hans E. Wulff
Dr Hadi Safaeipour, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran
In Iranian architectural history, building habits were passed on mainly in the workshop
and through apprenticeship practices, orally or by observational learning. Therefore,
available written sources, as well as surviving inscriptions and the few documented
scrolls usually contain no more than a few words regarding building crafts. In this
historical context, referring to master masons, as the genuine reservoirs of construction
knowledge and skills, is one of the essential methods for recognizing Iran’s traditional
architecture. Johannes Eberhard Wulff’s (1907-1967) ethnographical study of
technology, carried out from 1936 to 1941, is among the very pioneering works through
which the study of traditional crafts was revolutionized in Iran at a time when many
building habits had survived the vast modernization trends and were still alive. In his
The Traditional Crafts of Persia: Their Development, Technology, and Influence on
Eastern and Western Civilizations (MIT press, 1966), under the chapter building crafts
and ceramic crafts, after identification of spatial types and constituent elements of
Iranian historical architecture, Wulff introduces the construction methods applied by
contemporary artisans and classifies these methods based on a geographicalconstructive perspective. In addition to the description of distinct building crafts, Wulff
indirectly illustrates how various local techniques introduce similar constructive
features which despite their differences, shape an integrated construction culture in
Iranian architecture. With this perspective, the current study investigates one of the
outstanding vaulting craftsmanship habits in Iran which has significantly attracted the
attention of Wulff: vaulting without centring; a habit that based on the available
physical evidence practiced extensively throughout centuries even millennia in the
architecture of the Iranian plateau. Accordingly, this paper addresses the requirement,
circumstances, and results of vaulting without centring in the work of contemporary
Iranian master masons through investigating three main topics: these vaults techniques
and tools; their constructive, formal, and structural features; their influence on the
configuration of a distinct construction culture. To this aim, the required information
will be gathered by refereeing to three resources: a) archival study of Wulff’s treasury
which has remained largely neglected and unstudied to date;
b) precise and complete survey of vaulted brick structures made by contemporary
master masons and reverse engineering of their execution techniques; c) revisiting the
results of the author’s four-year-long field experience of direct observation and looselystructured interviews with contemporary master masons at work in Isfahan, Tehran,
Yazd, Kashan, and Qom.
3
In sum, reconsideration, re-presentation, and revisiting Wulff’s archive will result in
simultaneous revelations about two distant yet linked cultural heritages: The first is the
knowledge of Iranian vaulting traditions; the second is the collection of documents by
Wulff, a pioneering scholar, whose research is under-appreciated and who, himself, has
been largely relegated to anonymity. It is an irony of history that such a missing link of
Iranian architecture, remains tucked away in Australia. It is my hope that this work will
be the first step in not only filling a glaring lacuna in the history of Iranian traditional
craftsmanship knowledge but also potentially revitalizing Iranian western academic
dialogues.
Johannes Eberhard Wulff and Research of Carved Stuccos in Iran
Ana Marija Grbanovic, University of Bamberg, Germany
Scarcity of literature concerning Islamic stucco artistic techniques, Ilkhanid stucco
revetments included, leaves an extensive gap in knowledge and understanding of how
Ilkhanid stuccos were produced and how their production process impacted the overall
visual appearance of stuccos. One of very few points of references in Western languages
remains Hans E. Wulff’s (1907-1967) publication on arts and crafts from 1966. In his
section regarding gypsum and stucco Wulff provides a few pieces of general information
regarding the stucco making, which were based on his observations of contemporary
stucco craftsmen. The monograph by Aslani from 2014 focuses on the history of Islamic
stucco artistic techniques in the Isfahan region, but it is lacking a systematic approach
and a chronological framework. Some recent Iranian publications also provide new
information about stucco artistic techniques, but they are also often based on
contemporary knowledge of stucco production, rather than historic research of stucco
material (e.g., Kamalizade and Kamalizade 2016). More substantial research has been
published concerning Islamic stucco techniques and production technology in Spain by
Ramón Rubio Domene (2010). But this information needs to be comprehended in an
indicative manner, because stucco production technology variates between geographic
and chronological contexts. In a similar manner, research of stucco technology of the
Sassanid period by Moslem Mishmastnehi (2016), provides for comparative material.
Rather than indicative of stucco production technology of the Ilkhanid period, these
publications need to be treated as comparative material.
Lack of discussion of stucco production technology and stucco artistic techniques
resulted in superficial comprehension of stuccos in Western art historical literature.
Islamic art historians most commonly approached discussion of Ilkhanid (and other)
stucco revetments based on the criterion of stylistic comparison. By doing so, the
scholars discussed stuccos based on their visual elements, studies of inscriptions and
especially by focusing on their ornamental iconography (e.g., Pope and Ackermann 1977
[1938-1939], Vol. 3). The multitude of different approaches to stucco production, design
transfer and stucco carving were almost entirely ignored and are accordingly given
attention in this paper. The fact that the knowledge of stucco body production and
carving determined the final appearance of stuccos, was not discussed. In
4
order to fill these gaps, this paper provides a preliminary taxonomy of stucco artistic
techniques, which is based on filed observations and documentation of Ilkhanid preIlkhanid stuccos. As mentioned, substantial archaeometric research would have to be
performed on stuccos from at least the Early Islamic period until the Late Ilkhanid times
in order to comprehend the basics of their production technology and the differences in
their production technology which occurred through the passing of time.
Embodied knowledge and the role of technique: Wulff’s Contribution to the
History of Groundwater Management
Dr Abigail E. Owen, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA
In my 2011 doctoral dissertation, Hidden Waters: Groundwater Histories of Iran and the
Mediterranean, I examined Hans Wulff's classic work, The Traditional Crafts of Persia. In
my dissertation, I compared Wulff's 20th-century documentation of Iranian technical
knowledge for groundwater management with the 11th-century manuscript by
Mohammed al-Karajī, Treatise on the Extraction of Hidden Waters. Both Wulff's and alKarajī’s work belong to a genre of written documentation that makes sense of, and
translates, the sophisticated technical practice of craft knowledge into written form.
This paper will further consider Wulff's work within the context of 21st-century areas of
study in the history of science, which emphasize the importance of technique; embodied
knowledge, and modes of exchange of knowledge by practitioners, especially across
borders, while relying on methods of exchange that do not include the written word. In
this sense, Wulff’s 1966 encyclopaedia, The Traditional Crafts of Persia, is an important
document and forerunner of 21st-century directions in the history of science. Wulff’s
archive will be examined in this light; I will also revisit al-Karajī’s11th-century work as
an example of the challenge and serendipity of turning nonwritten knowledge into
written form, exactly as Wulff did.
Idealism of Hans Wulff about the Traditional Crafts and the Impact of his
“Weltanschauung” on the Theory of Sustainable Development
Dr Roxana Zenhari, Georg August University, Göttingen, Germany
In 1966 the German engineer Hans E. Wulff (1907-1967) published his long-term
research findings in the book “The Traditional Crafts of Persia: Their Development,
Technology, and Influence on Eastern and Western Civilizations”. A year later, the Iranian
publishing house, Franklin, submitted it to Siroos Ebrahimzade for translation. However,
it remained unpublished for years. When in 1976, Bank-e Melli, Iran’s national bank,
commissioned a book about
5
Iranian traditional handicrafts, Wulff’s book was not able to meet the expectations of
new cultural and economic policies. Instead the book “A Survey of Persian handicraft: a
pictorial introduction to the contemporary folk arts and art crafts of modern Iran” edited
by Jay and Sumi Gluck fitted to the new description of traditional crafts defined by the
Ministries of Science and Culture. The prolific use of coloured images as well as its
emphasis on the aesthetic aspects of crafts and objects juxtaposed to Wulff’s
methodology and his definition of crafts which he embodied through photos, diagrams,
and phonetic terminology.
After the 1979 Islamic revolution, Ebrahimzade’s translation of Wulff’s book was
published by Enteshārāt-e Āmūzesh-e Enghelāb-e Eslāmī (Publisher of the Islamic
Revolution in Education) in good quality, on glossy papers; though with the complete
removal of author’s preface.
The purpose of this paper is to examine Wulff’s methodology in the transmission of
knowledge he collected in Persian crafts. It argues about the interaction between the
knowledge he produced and the cultural and economic policies of the country during
three eras: in the first and the second Pahlavi epoch, and the Islamic republic period. In
the next section, I will discuss the multidimensional nature of Wulff’s work and its
implications for new investigations on the relationship between traditional
crafts/technology and sustainable development.
Intermediary Authorial Agency in the Archival Material: Hans E. Wulff’s Archive of
the Traditional Crafts of Persia
Dr Mahroo Moosavi, University of Oxford, UK
The Traditional Crafts of Persia: Their Development, Technology, and Influence on Eastern
and Western Civilizations is the title of a book published in 1966, written by the German
engineer Hans E. Wulff (1907-1967) who was in Iran from 1937 to 1941 (and in two
shorter periods in 1964 and 1965) with the order of Reza Shah Pahlavi (r. 1925-1941)
to plan and set up the first ever schools of technical engineering in Iran and to collect
information for an encyclopaedia of the “Traditional Crafts, Technology, Science,
Material Culture and Art of Persia”.
Rather than limiting the scope of the study to the book, this paper focuses on the
recently retrieved in Australia behind-the-scenes mass of archival notes, diaries,
sketches, and photographs of Wulff, and emphasises on the necessity of examination of
Wulff’s archive and book in parallel to each other to answer questions in terms of the
validity of historical information and to explain the possible methodological fallacies of
the book. To this end, along the Wulff’s archive, the paper will also look at John
Carswell’s (1931-) archive (the section that led to the publication of his book New Julfa:
The Armenian Churches and Other Buildings published in 1968), currently housed at the
Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.
6
While there are fundamental methodological and strategic-pedagogical differences
between Wulff’s and Carswell’s work, the parallel study of their archives sets the stage
for the emergence of a bigger picture in which we may see the ‘processes’ of authorial
thinking about art, architecture, and crafts of Iran as a concept of study. These processes
of authorial thinking are not necessarily visible in the final book product but mainly
constructed gradually and progressively through acts and stages such as collecting
information, taking photographs, making sketches, correspondence with others, adding
notes, writing diaries, and in the end the selection and curatorial modes, manners, and
procedure for the creation of the book. Concentrating mainly on the latter stage in this
paper, the close study of Wulff’s - and Carswell’s - archive reveals considerable and, in
some cases fundamental thematic and methodological incongruities of the raw material
and the book and raises questions regarding the intermediary psychology and polity
involved in the authorship, editorial, and compilation mechanism. The paper draws the
scholarly attention to two main points: Firstly, the importance of behind-the-scenes
archival notes, diaries, sketches, and photographs; and secondly the complexities of the
authorial agency - of Wulff - in the book production process. Through this new lens, the
close analysis and examination of the understudied archival material not only allude to
more historical and art-historical documents and information, but also and more
importantly sheds light on the agency of the author’s ‘self’ and layers of engaging facets
and factors with the notion of personhood.
7