Abbés Zouache
Historian Abbes Zouache is a specialist in the history of the medieval Middle East, as well as in Arabic codicology.
A permanent Research Fellow at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), he is the current Director of the French Center for Archaeology and Social Sciences, a regional research centre based in Kuwait conducting research in the Arabian Peninsula as a whole. Furūsiyya: Birth and spread of an aristocratic culture in the medieval Middle East
Furūsiyya is often associated with equestrian arts. However, it was linked with everything related to warfare, from hunting to mounted martial games and recipes for Greek fire, as it is shown by the great number of preserved furūsiyya treatise. The treaties show that the furūsiyya was a culture, born in the early Middle Age with the establishment of the Abbasid caliphate, and inspired by Arab, Greek, Sassanid and Central Asiatic traditions. This lecture will present these manuscripts and a culture that spread all over the medieval Middle East, that was gradually disseminated in various forms, especially in the Arabian Peninsula.