The Role of Textiles in Mamluk Ceremonial

The Mamluks, a Muslim dynasty of manumitted military slaves, ruled Egypt from 1250 to 1517. While Mamluk ceremonial has been of some interest to medieval historians, its material aspects have only been touched on by historians of Islamic art. Textiles were particularly effective symbols of social position in status-conscious Cairo, where official ceremonial buttressed the political claims of the military elite..She sought to examine the ROM’s 109 textile fragments attributed to the Mamluk dynasty through a socio-cultural lens, rather than a strictly art historical lens, by accompanying her object study of the textiles’ styles and inscriptions with interpretation of relevant extant written sources.