The Guardians of Samarkand: Dramatis Personae and Useful Notes
Here you go: some useful notes for The Guardians of Samarkand.
To those of you who are just tuning in, this alternative history AU has had the Barmakids openly ruling the Caliphate after Jaffar seized the throne from Ahmad (supposedly Harun al-Rashid's grandson) in the film. Currently, it's Jaffar's sister, Dunya, who is regent over the Caliphate in Baghdad (overseeing her young son, growing up to be Caliph). Jaffar and Yassamin have retired to live incognito in Samarkand; they live there comfortably from the profits of Jaffar's clockwork creations and have 8-year-old twins, Salsabil and Anwar. Samarkand in turn is ruled by Jaffar's younger brother, Mohammad; his head wife is Yassamin's sister, Latifa. Jaffar's older brother, Fadl, a former warlord, has relinquished the governorship of Balkh and has retired to Samarkand as well. One of the main reasons he has done so is his desperate love for Zainab, the richest woman in the city.
Further notes and bits and bobs below the cast list underneath the cut.
***
A cast of characters, in order of appearance:
***
Jaffar ibn Yahya al-Barmaki (Abu Anwar): engineer and wizard and mystic and all-round sex panther. Also a hopeless manwhore, but this helped him mellow the fuck out from his crazy in the movie and he's now a happily retired... well, the medieval equivalent of an old hippie professor who's into polyamory and mysticism and the occasional "interesting" potions and shit.
Yassamin al-Basri (Umm Salsabil): Ze Pwinzezz of the original movie. Not only a pwinzezz or an ex-queen, she is also a mighty lover, mother, and occasional engineer (and witch). She is the more normal, sensible of the two. Yassamin is in many ways an everywoman, but well-educated and smart and compassionate. She gets neurotic from time to time, but thankfully she has a sex panther for a husband who can spank her angst out of her most skillfully and lovingly when needed.
Her pwinzezz senses are extremely well-honed in their ability to detect bullshit.
Salsabil and Anwar: Jaffar and Yassamin's children. Twins. Eight and a half years old. Very precocious little nippers, very sensitive and intelligent. Salsabil is a nerd and scientist (think medieval Persian Lisa Simpson, except looking more like baby Fairuza Balk, with five long braids and a very intricately embroidered cap). Anwar is a dancer and poet, having inherited his father's beauty, amazing motor skillz and mystical-magical tendencies. I couldn't give Salsabil five braids in the Sims, but these should give you an idea:
Attaf the Baker's Son: a baker in his own right, breadseller in the main Samarkand bazaar, occasional baker for the royal court when they need shittons of bread for big festivals. Based on this photograph of a Samarkand bread seller with a breadbasket on his head taken by Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii in 1911 (click for bigger).
Because this is awesome and it's exactly the kind of historical/cultural thing I want to show in my medieval Persian fics. You can see more photos of this set in this post over on my Tumblr, and it has a link to some more. There's an illustration of the scene in the fic, with Attaf and the kids here.
Fu Feng (Feng the Younger): Chinese textile merchant in the main bazaar. Jumpy guy, in his late teens or early twenties, running the stall in lieu of his father, Feng The Elder.
Zainab: richest woman in the entire province, young widow who was a former slave girl, of Viking descent. Played by grown-up (mid-twenties) Bonita Granville with extra BBWage. Reference photos here, and see here for all my Zainab doodles (NSFW), giving you a better idea of how she appears in the fic. Sexy, full of wild WLW sexual energy, but also a grade A bitch half the time (none of the ex-slave-girls who'd clawed their way to the top of their societies were right in the head because it was such a dog-eat-dog world, so you had to be a bitch and a tyrant to survive). Occasional lover to Yassamin, Jaffar, and Fadl, the last of whom is hopelessly in love with her. Was smarter at the start but I'm afraid she ended up becoming the resident comedy bawd to the point where she's at times a medieval Miss Piggy. Sorry. But it's FUNNY.
Also, did I mention she's fucking *hot?* My gay would like to order a dozen.
Lina: Zainab's favourite from among her lesbian harem. Brainier than Zainab herself, she's her right-hand woman. Also in her mid-twenties, of Chinese descent, tiny and perky and tomboyish. Also a massive perv, like all of Zainab's girls; she basically runs a home for wayward WLW ex-slave girls who are all hornier than average and gayer than average, and thus were rejected by their previous male owners. I haven't got a headcast for Lina yet, but here's my tag for Lina doodles (NSFW) featuring a cartoon version. Stop press: I did find my headcast (to an eerie level of perfection) in the Chinese actress Wang Zhener.
Fadl ibn Yahya al-Barmaki: Jaffar's big brother, a former warlord who's an expert warrior and strategist and good at being a leader, not so good with people. Basil Rathbone as his swashbuckling swordy villains, just as a 1001 Nights version of the same. Also the resident racist, sexist, everything-ist macho douchebag, but has mellowed out over the years just as Jaffar has done. Zainab, whom he is desperately in love with, has beaten a lot of his douche out of him, and Jaffar and Yassamin have also kneaded out his locked-up, stiff-upper-lip stuck-up-ness and bummed the stick out of his arse on several occasions. So now he is at the point where he's at least useful instead of a sulky twunt. I'm just going to drop my favourite manip of him here, because I can:
Original Tumblr post for the manip here, should you want to reblog it or something.
Mohammad ibn Yahya al-Barmaki: Jaffar and Fadl's little brother, some 15 years younger than them. The current reigning sultan of Samarkand. (Yes, I am vell avaaare that the term 'sultan' wasn't used until a couple of centuries later, but the movie used it when Yassamin said she was going to run off to Samarkand, so I'm rolling with it.) No fixed headcast at the time of writing, but a young Roger Delgado has at times appeared in my brain.
That might work (it's from the all-round terrible racismfest, The Stranglers of Bombay).
Latifa al-Basri: Mohammad's head wife, Yassamin's sister, the one of whom Ze Pwinzezz says "she will protect me." See underneath in the notes as to why this is fucking *hilarious* for medieval Persian history nerds. Latifa is a very very skilled magician and outright saint. Headcast is Linda Darnell. Click to embiggen:
Also, she'd have way more heavy jewelry than that. She'd have big-ass, heavy nose rings (in both nostrils) and earrings and torques. And she'd have her hands painted with henna and her makeup would be much darker and heavier. That sari-like veil might work, though, as would the amounts of pearls.
Atesh ibn Abi ("son of his father"): Late teens, guy of mixed Arabic and Chinese ancestry, most fervent preacher at the Brotherhood. He's got serious childhood traumas from the Muslim conquerors and has been a slave for most of his life. Yet, he's turned to religion to get back some self-confidence and soon gets many listeners due to his oratorial skills.
The Shaykh: The elderly leader of the Brotherhood, a Rumi-like mystical, saintly figure who's somewhere around a hundred years old. A soul filled with loving kindness who turns away none, not even those everyone else hates and despises.
Suleyman and Aloui: two Abyssinian (now Ethiopia) traders, from princely families. Suleyman is in his thirties, a big, heavily built, muscular, handsome man with a shaven head; he is the calmer, more calculating, brainier of the two (but isn't averse to some hot, anonymous gay sex). Aloui is tall, slim, beautiful, with long black braids and blue eyes (think Milli Vanilli and you've got it) and he's in his early twenties; he's Suleyman's friend and lover. They're both rich enough to get by without having to resort to trade, so what are they doing at the bath-house? Beyond that hot, anonymous gay sex...
Feng the Elder: The father of Fu Feng. A travelling trader who insinuates himself onto passing caravans to see who he can exploit, a peddler of terrible snake-oil remedies and stolen goods. The medieval Sogdian equivalent of a spiv. Would sell his own children for money and probably has (it wasn't uncommon around this era, after all).
Abdullah (Abu Mohammad): One of the youngest, but most pious members of the Brotherhood, a twentysomething father of two. Unsure of his loyalties, unsure of even his religion, as he is a fresh convert to Islam.
Ubayd Allah: One of the older members of the Brotherhood (around sixty), an old general of Fadl's age, who's fought in the same battles as Fadl and who has now retired to live a more spiritual life. A father figure to Abdullah. Authoritative, can sway the Brotherhood with his wisdom.
Sonbol: The guy in charge of running Jaffar's household; the medieval equivalent of a butler (except in this case, he's a freedman, not a slave like most of them would've been). Tall, thin, elderly Ethiopian eunuch in his sixties, very gentle, very shy but brave and wise. Teacher to the children. I'll just use my Sims version to illustrate him, as I haven't yet got a fixed headcast for the guy.
Zahra: Yassamin's chamberlain-ess/maid of honour/whatever the highest position of a royal companion to the queen was at the time (there were several terms and types). Also her best friend. She's the same age as Yassamin, also of Ethiopian descent, very highly educated and a freedwoman (Yassamin and Jaffar manumitted all their slaves when they moved to Samarkand, so the few who followed them were friends with them already). Zahra's probably the most sensible person in the entire household, one of those women who are amazing at organising everything and keeping us idiots' shit together. She's based on a couple of people of that sort IRL who are absolute angels to have around at cons: Anne W and Smurf. Cuddly and helpful and a shoulder to lean on, and a scholar in her own right, she is also of a mystical bent and has considerable magical skills. Also a teacher to the children. Married to Sonbol. She gets way more to do in the doodles and is an all-round genius at noms and crafts and various handy things. She's very much a voice of reason and won't take any shit. But she's also the cuddliest, warmest, loveliest person you can imagine. Zahra is the friend we'd all love to have. Here's Sims version of Zahra.
Ishtiaq: A tame cheetah who Jaffar and Yassamin took in as a cub after his mother and siblings had been killed by hunters. He is a bit of a goofball, and an eternal cub in many ways. But once he's let loose in the fields to go after gazelles, he becomes the killing machine Nature had meant for him to be. Until he comes back to his humans and then the derpy derpiness returns. He thinks of Jaffar as his mother, which amuses everyone to no end.
Sarosh: A magical sex robot built by Jaffar out of living silver as a present for Yassamin, looking like Jaffar himself (because she asked to have another Jaffar). Sarosh has multiple arms/hands and various body parts that can be altered by magic.
***
Other Notes (will be updated as the story chapters are posted, so as not to spoil things too much):
-I've decided Mohammad's royal palace was Afrasiyab, the now-ruined ancient palace on the outskirts of modern Samarkand. Some good articles on it here and here.
-This story involves the aftermath of Muslims having obtained the secrets of papermaking from the Chinese prisoners of war after the Battle of Talas in 750 CE. It was the Barmakids who established the first paper mills in Samarkand and Baghdad soon after. There was a lot of disgruntlement among the native Persians and the Chinese living there (nearly all of whom were slaves or freedmen) about the Arabs--they didn't want to be ruled by the Arabs, and felt that the (native Persian) Barmakids had sold them out to the Arabs. But it's way more complicated than that, and as this is an alternate history AU, the Barmakids are now in charge of the Caliphate and the Persian empire.
-"My sister is married to the Sultan of Samarkand! She will protect me!" Why is this line of Yassamin's hilarious for the history nerd? Because if--as the movie implies--the Barmakids had survived Harun al-Rashid, one of Jaffar's brothers might still have been the governor of Samarkand, because they were that historically. Fadl was the governor of Khorasan in 792, for example, and Musa was in charge at the time Harun killed the Barmakids. Both were well-loved in Khorasan. So she might just be running from the frying pan into the fire, poor thing. At least she looked hot in drag, right?
- Latifa brings up the ghilman. The ghilman (singular: ghulam, later mamelukes), were Turkic slave-soldiers and pages in the service of medieval Persian rulers, forming their elite guards. The ghilman were youths who were chosen as much for their beauty as for their expert skills on the battlefield; they were forbidden to marry until retirement and lived isolated from women, so they developed a very homoromantic subculture among themselves. Many were brought up from childhood to serve their masters and developed a fierce loyalty to these men who acted as their father figures, and often the ghilman became the rulers' lovers. The problem with this was that if they lost their masters, that loyalty, born of love, was difficult to transfer to the new masters--this got them embroiled in many court intrigues, often involving love as much as they did power struggles. They were the greatest desire-objects in medieval Persian culture, becoming celebrated figures who inspired far more poetry than women did: these were the exact pages the queen mother dressed Caliph Amin's slave girls as in hopes of begetting an heir, because he preferred them to women so much. But this homoerotic culture--even if it was a *huge* deal at the time--is a fact that often gets erased by homophobic modern writers, so it's worth mentioning here as any mentions of it will immediately get edited out from Wikipedia and such.
Here's a post about the ghilman with some pictures.
-The operating board Jaffar uses for his automatons and other devices looks something like this geomantic device from medieval Persia. Similar tabulator devices were used centuries earlier to calculate horoscopes and the positions of the heavenly bodies for magical purposes, such as the engraving of talismans.
-On the value of money: Depending on the source/period, there were about 15-20 silver dirhams to 1 dinar around the late 700s/early 800s where the story is set.
According to some estimates, one gold dinar is about 46 USD in 2018. According to that and presuming that one dinar was 15 dirhams, one dirham is 3 dollars. A medium quality and cheap shirt cost 8 and 4 dirhams, respectively. So a good shirt would be 24 bucks and a bad shirt would be 12 bucks.
Yet, another source (Hugh Kennedy's “When Baghdad Ruled the Muslim World”) says: “An ordinary labourer might get one twelfth of a dirham a day, the foreman twice that. This does not sound very much until we read that a sheep cost a dirham, a lamb a quarter of a dirham. A dirham would buy 30 kilos of dates or 8 litres of oil.”
-Remind me to add notes about the queen-fabric right here if I haven't done so after posting the last chapter!
To those of you who are just tuning in, this alternative history AU has had the Barmakids openly ruling the Caliphate after Jaffar seized the throne from Ahmad (supposedly Harun al-Rashid's grandson) in the film. Currently, it's Jaffar's sister, Dunya, who is regent over the Caliphate in Baghdad (overseeing her young son, growing up to be Caliph). Jaffar and Yassamin have retired to live incognito in Samarkand; they live there comfortably from the profits of Jaffar's clockwork creations and have 8-year-old twins, Salsabil and Anwar. Samarkand in turn is ruled by Jaffar's younger brother, Mohammad; his head wife is Yassamin's sister, Latifa. Jaffar's older brother, Fadl, a former warlord, has relinquished the governorship of Balkh and has retired to Samarkand as well. One of the main reasons he has done so is his desperate love for Zainab, the richest woman in the city.
Further notes and bits and bobs below the cast list underneath the cut.
***
A cast of characters, in order of appearance:
***
Jaffar ibn Yahya al-Barmaki (Abu Anwar): engineer and wizard and mystic and all-round sex panther. Also a hopeless manwhore, but this helped him mellow the fuck out from his crazy in the movie and he's now a happily retired... well, the medieval equivalent of an old hippie professor who's into polyamory and mysticism and the occasional "interesting" potions and shit.
Yassamin al-Basri (Umm Salsabil): Ze Pwinzezz of the original movie. Not only a pwinzezz or an ex-queen, she is also a mighty lover, mother, and occasional engineer (and witch). She is the more normal, sensible of the two. Yassamin is in many ways an everywoman, but well-educated and smart and compassionate. She gets neurotic from time to time, but thankfully she has a sex panther for a husband who can spank her angst out of her most skillfully and lovingly when needed.
Her pwinzezz senses are extremely well-honed in their ability to detect bullshit.
Salsabil and Anwar: Jaffar and Yassamin's children. Twins. Eight and a half years old. Very precocious little nippers, very sensitive and intelligent. Salsabil is a nerd and scientist (think medieval Persian Lisa Simpson, except looking more like baby Fairuza Balk, with five long braids and a very intricately embroidered cap). Anwar is a dancer and poet, having inherited his father's beauty, amazing motor skillz and mystical-magical tendencies. I couldn't give Salsabil five braids in the Sims, but these should give you an idea:
Attaf the Baker's Son: a baker in his own right, breadseller in the main Samarkand bazaar, occasional baker for the royal court when they need shittons of bread for big festivals. Based on this photograph of a Samarkand bread seller with a breadbasket on his head taken by Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii in 1911 (click for bigger).
Because this is awesome and it's exactly the kind of historical/cultural thing I want to show in my medieval Persian fics. You can see more photos of this set in this post over on my Tumblr, and it has a link to some more. There's an illustration of the scene in the fic, with Attaf and the kids here.
Fu Feng (Feng the Younger): Chinese textile merchant in the main bazaar. Jumpy guy, in his late teens or early twenties, running the stall in lieu of his father, Feng The Elder.
Zainab: richest woman in the entire province, young widow who was a former slave girl, of Viking descent. Played by grown-up (mid-twenties) Bonita Granville with extra BBWage. Reference photos here, and see here for all my Zainab doodles (NSFW), giving you a better idea of how she appears in the fic. Sexy, full of wild WLW sexual energy, but also a grade A bitch half the time (none of the ex-slave-girls who'd clawed their way to the top of their societies were right in the head because it was such a dog-eat-dog world, so you had to be a bitch and a tyrant to survive). Occasional lover to Yassamin, Jaffar, and Fadl, the last of whom is hopelessly in love with her. Was smarter at the start but I'm afraid she ended up becoming the resident comedy bawd to the point where she's at times a medieval Miss Piggy. Sorry. But it's FUNNY.
Also, did I mention she's fucking *hot?* My gay would like to order a dozen.
Lina: Zainab's favourite from among her lesbian harem. Brainier than Zainab herself, she's her right-hand woman. Also in her mid-twenties, of Chinese descent, tiny and perky and tomboyish. Also a massive perv, like all of Zainab's girls; she basically runs a home for wayward WLW ex-slave girls who are all hornier than average and gayer than average, and thus were rejected by their previous male owners. I haven't got a headcast for Lina yet, but here's my tag for Lina doodles (NSFW) featuring a cartoon version. Stop press: I did find my headcast (to an eerie level of perfection) in the Chinese actress Wang Zhener.
Fadl ibn Yahya al-Barmaki: Jaffar's big brother, a former warlord who's an expert warrior and strategist and good at being a leader, not so good with people. Basil Rathbone as his swashbuckling swordy villains, just as a 1001 Nights version of the same. Also the resident racist, sexist, everything-ist macho douchebag, but has mellowed out over the years just as Jaffar has done. Zainab, whom he is desperately in love with, has beaten a lot of his douche out of him, and Jaffar and Yassamin have also kneaded out his locked-up, stiff-upper-lip stuck-up-ness and bummed the stick out of his arse on several occasions. So now he is at the point where he's at least useful instead of a sulky twunt. I'm just going to drop my favourite manip of him here, because I can:
Original Tumblr post for the manip here, should you want to reblog it or something.
Mohammad ibn Yahya al-Barmaki: Jaffar and Fadl's little brother, some 15 years younger than them. The current reigning sultan of Samarkand. (Yes, I am vell avaaare that the term 'sultan' wasn't used until a couple of centuries later, but the movie used it when Yassamin said she was going to run off to Samarkand, so I'm rolling with it.) No fixed headcast at the time of writing, but a young Roger Delgado has at times appeared in my brain.
That might work (it's from the all-round terrible racismfest, The Stranglers of Bombay).
Latifa al-Basri: Mohammad's head wife, Yassamin's sister, the one of whom Ze Pwinzezz says "she will protect me." See underneath in the notes as to why this is fucking *hilarious* for medieval Persian history nerds. Latifa is a very very skilled magician and outright saint. Headcast is Linda Darnell. Click to embiggen:
Also, she'd have way more heavy jewelry than that. She'd have big-ass, heavy nose rings (in both nostrils) and earrings and torques. And she'd have her hands painted with henna and her makeup would be much darker and heavier. That sari-like veil might work, though, as would the amounts of pearls.
Atesh ibn Abi ("son of his father"): Late teens, guy of mixed Arabic and Chinese ancestry, most fervent preacher at the Brotherhood. He's got serious childhood traumas from the Muslim conquerors and has been a slave for most of his life. Yet, he's turned to religion to get back some self-confidence and soon gets many listeners due to his oratorial skills.
The Shaykh: The elderly leader of the Brotherhood, a Rumi-like mystical, saintly figure who's somewhere around a hundred years old. A soul filled with loving kindness who turns away none, not even those everyone else hates and despises.
Suleyman and Aloui: two Abyssinian (now Ethiopia) traders, from princely families. Suleyman is in his thirties, a big, heavily built, muscular, handsome man with a shaven head; he is the calmer, more calculating, brainier of the two (but isn't averse to some hot, anonymous gay sex). Aloui is tall, slim, beautiful, with long black braids and blue eyes (think Milli Vanilli and you've got it) and he's in his early twenties; he's Suleyman's friend and lover. They're both rich enough to get by without having to resort to trade, so what are they doing at the bath-house? Beyond that hot, anonymous gay sex...
Feng the Elder: The father of Fu Feng. A travelling trader who insinuates himself onto passing caravans to see who he can exploit, a peddler of terrible snake-oil remedies and stolen goods. The medieval Sogdian equivalent of a spiv. Would sell his own children for money and probably has (it wasn't uncommon around this era, after all).
Abdullah (Abu Mohammad): One of the youngest, but most pious members of the Brotherhood, a twentysomething father of two. Unsure of his loyalties, unsure of even his religion, as he is a fresh convert to Islam.
Ubayd Allah: One of the older members of the Brotherhood (around sixty), an old general of Fadl's age, who's fought in the same battles as Fadl and who has now retired to live a more spiritual life. A father figure to Abdullah. Authoritative, can sway the Brotherhood with his wisdom.
Sonbol: The guy in charge of running Jaffar's household; the medieval equivalent of a butler (except in this case, he's a freedman, not a slave like most of them would've been). Tall, thin, elderly Ethiopian eunuch in his sixties, very gentle, very shy but brave and wise. Teacher to the children. I'll just use my Sims version to illustrate him, as I haven't yet got a fixed headcast for the guy.
Zahra: Yassamin's chamberlain-ess/maid of honour/whatever the highest position of a royal companion to the queen was at the time (there were several terms and types). Also her best friend. She's the same age as Yassamin, also of Ethiopian descent, very highly educated and a freedwoman (Yassamin and Jaffar manumitted all their slaves when they moved to Samarkand, so the few who followed them were friends with them already). Zahra's probably the most sensible person in the entire household, one of those women who are amazing at organising everything and keeping us idiots' shit together. She's based on a couple of people of that sort IRL who are absolute angels to have around at cons: Anne W and Smurf. Cuddly and helpful and a shoulder to lean on, and a scholar in her own right, she is also of a mystical bent and has considerable magical skills. Also a teacher to the children. Married to Sonbol. She gets way more to do in the doodles and is an all-round genius at noms and crafts and various handy things. She's very much a voice of reason and won't take any shit. But she's also the cuddliest, warmest, loveliest person you can imagine. Zahra is the friend we'd all love to have. Here's Sims version of Zahra.
Ishtiaq: A tame cheetah who Jaffar and Yassamin took in as a cub after his mother and siblings had been killed by hunters. He is a bit of a goofball, and an eternal cub in many ways. But once he's let loose in the fields to go after gazelles, he becomes the killing machine Nature had meant for him to be. Until he comes back to his humans and then the derpy derpiness returns. He thinks of Jaffar as his mother, which amuses everyone to no end.
Sarosh: A magical sex robot built by Jaffar out of living silver as a present for Yassamin, looking like Jaffar himself (because she asked to have another Jaffar). Sarosh has multiple arms/hands and various body parts that can be altered by magic.
***
Other Notes (will be updated as the story chapters are posted, so as not to spoil things too much):
-I've decided Mohammad's royal palace was Afrasiyab, the now-ruined ancient palace on the outskirts of modern Samarkand. Some good articles on it here and here.
-This story involves the aftermath of Muslims having obtained the secrets of papermaking from the Chinese prisoners of war after the Battle of Talas in 750 CE. It was the Barmakids who established the first paper mills in Samarkand and Baghdad soon after. There was a lot of disgruntlement among the native Persians and the Chinese living there (nearly all of whom were slaves or freedmen) about the Arabs--they didn't want to be ruled by the Arabs, and felt that the (native Persian) Barmakids had sold them out to the Arabs. But it's way more complicated than that, and as this is an alternate history AU, the Barmakids are now in charge of the Caliphate and the Persian empire.
-"My sister is married to the Sultan of Samarkand! She will protect me!" Why is this line of Yassamin's hilarious for the history nerd? Because if--as the movie implies--the Barmakids had survived Harun al-Rashid, one of Jaffar's brothers might still have been the governor of Samarkand, because they were that historically. Fadl was the governor of Khorasan in 792, for example, and Musa was in charge at the time Harun killed the Barmakids. Both were well-loved in Khorasan. So she might just be running from the frying pan into the fire, poor thing. At least she looked hot in drag, right?
- Latifa brings up the ghilman. The ghilman (singular: ghulam, later mamelukes), were Turkic slave-soldiers and pages in the service of medieval Persian rulers, forming their elite guards. The ghilman were youths who were chosen as much for their beauty as for their expert skills on the battlefield; they were forbidden to marry until retirement and lived isolated from women, so they developed a very homoromantic subculture among themselves. Many were brought up from childhood to serve their masters and developed a fierce loyalty to these men who acted as their father figures, and often the ghilman became the rulers' lovers. The problem with this was that if they lost their masters, that loyalty, born of love, was difficult to transfer to the new masters--this got them embroiled in many court intrigues, often involving love as much as they did power struggles. They were the greatest desire-objects in medieval Persian culture, becoming celebrated figures who inspired far more poetry than women did: these were the exact pages the queen mother dressed Caliph Amin's slave girls as in hopes of begetting an heir, because he preferred them to women so much. But this homoerotic culture--even if it was a *huge* deal at the time--is a fact that often gets erased by homophobic modern writers, so it's worth mentioning here as any mentions of it will immediately get edited out from Wikipedia and such.
Here's a post about the ghilman with some pictures.
-The operating board Jaffar uses for his automatons and other devices looks something like this geomantic device from medieval Persia. Similar tabulator devices were used centuries earlier to calculate horoscopes and the positions of the heavenly bodies for magical purposes, such as the engraving of talismans.
-On the value of money: Depending on the source/period, there were about 15-20 silver dirhams to 1 dinar around the late 700s/early 800s where the story is set.
According to some estimates, one gold dinar is about 46 USD in 2018. According to that and presuming that one dinar was 15 dirhams, one dirham is 3 dollars. A medium quality and cheap shirt cost 8 and 4 dirhams, respectively. So a good shirt would be 24 bucks and a bad shirt would be 12 bucks.
Yet, another source (Hugh Kennedy's “When Baghdad Ruled the Muslim World”) says: “An ordinary labourer might get one twelfth of a dirham a day, the foreman twice that. This does not sound very much until we read that a sheep cost a dirham, a lamb a quarter of a dirham. A dirham would buy 30 kilos of dates or 8 litres of oil.”
-Remind me to add notes about the queen-fabric right here if I haven't done so after posting the last chapter!