Mamluks, a traveling exhibition of 130 objects organized by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service and curated by the late Esin Atil, which opened on 15 May 1981 at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, and ran through 19 July 1981.The 2025 exhibition therefore successfully bridged a forty-four-year hiatus in major Western exhibitions devoted to Mamluk art, and resulted in an authoritative, peer-informed, and thematically organized catalog, under review here.Rather than following a chronological framework, the catalog is organized thematically, like the exhibition, with essays exploring the diverse facets of Mamluk art and society alongside the exhibited objects, which are beautifully photographed and elegantly presented, and closely engaging with them to allow the material culture of the Mamluk world to emerge with clarity and depth.Exhibited pieces are assigned a catalog number (CAT.), whereas items included for comparative purposes are identified by a figure number (FIG.).
Noha Abou-Khatwa (Tue,) studied this question.