Nihon Room, Pembroke College, 5.30 pm

Jenő Radisics and his two unforeseen contributions to Islamic art studies

As archeological excavations uncover increasingly revealing finds, the study of  cosmetics is coming into its own, no longer as a sideline of costume or aesthetics, but as an independent field, the implications of which extend into the study of rituals, fashions, botany, mineralogy, chemical synthesis, long-distance trade and cultural exchanges, in other words all the essentials of the development of early civilizations. The excavations on the Iranian plateau and in the Bactrian-Margian Archaeological Complex have pushed back the frontiers of the first use of cosmetics to the fourth millennium BCE, even earlier than recorded for ancient Egypt