Żygulski, Zdzisław: Ottoman art in the service of the empire (New York, NY [u.a.], 1992)

CHAPTER 4

Tents

SOME REMARKS ON THE ORIGIN AND
IMPORTANCE OF TENTS
Considering the rote that tents have played in human culture, in the
past and still today, surprisingly little has been written on this subject.
While the permanent, immovable architecture all around the world
has had thousands of printed studies devoted to it in all languages,
the movable architecture of tents, used since ancient times, has hardly
any theoretical literature. A preliminary study of Persian tents in
history was published by Arthur Upton Pope half a century ago, but
the actual basis for this research was very limited, since no fully
preserved examples existed.' A little earlier, G. Mentendon had
attempted to classify Oriental tents in principal types according to
structure, but his conclusions seem rather too simple." Ethnogra-
phers have studied Arab tents," while Polish scholars, basing their
work on original materials, produced some studies of Oriental tents
after World War II.^
As for the Turkish tents in old European literature, the descrip-
tions by Luigi Ferdinando Count de Marsigli, an eyewitness (from

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