The Jeweled Gun of Sultan Mahmud I | Ashley Dimmig

E593 | The jewel-encrusted musket of Mahmud I is one of the most popular pieces at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. In this episode, curator Ashley Dimmig joins us to discuss her experience curating Islamic art and the manifold mysteries of the ornate 18th-century gun once owned by an Ottoman Sultan. These mysteries include practical questions about its design and the contents of its secret compartments as well as more conceptual puzzles about past provenance and effective presentation of Ottoman artifacts to international audience in an American city. In addition to discussing the fascinating history of the gun, Dr. Dimmig reflects on the exciting challenge of curating connections that allow every museum visitor to find an entry point into an exhibit. More at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2026/05/dimmig.html Ashley Dimmig has served as the Crossman Gallery Director at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater since 2022, where, in addition to overseeing all operations of the Crossman Gallery and its permanent art collection, she teaches art history in the Department of Art and Design. After completing her PhD in the History of Art at the University of Michigan (2019), she worked as the Wieler-Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow in Islamic Art at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. Abbey Stockstill is Associate Professor and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Chair of Architectural History at UVA. Her book, Marrakesh & the Mountains: Landscape, Urban Planning, and Identity in the Medieval Maghreb, traces the development of Marrakesh in the twelfth century as a new kind of metropolis in the Islamic west, bridging multivalent identities through a sensitive manipulation of the surrounding environment. Musa Kazım Azimli is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Corcoran Department of History at the University of Virginia, specializing in slavery, social history, and digital humanities in the early modern and modern Middle East, with a focus on the Ottoman Empire and the Mediterranean. His dissertation, supported by the Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship, reconstructs the history, spatial organization, and social legacies of Istanbul’s Imperial Slave Market through interdisciplinary methods drawn from spatial, socio-legal, cultural, architectural, and digital history. CREDITS Episode No. 593 Release Date: 28 August 2026 Recording Location: University of Virginia Sound production by Chris Gratien Music: kara güneş - İstanbul Bibliography and images courtesy of Ashley Dimmig at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2026/05/dimmig.html