Turks: A Journey of a Thousand Years, 600–1600 is an ambitious and highly informative exhibition. With 376 items on display from 53 lending institutions—such is the wealth of material that it is hard to believe it took barely fifteen months to assemble—the show constitutes an important part of a program of all things Turkish in London. The aim is to unravel the cultural origins of the Ottomans (or the Turks, as Ottomans were commonly known in the West), but soon it becomes clear that this is no easy task. Thus Turks skillfully unfolds before our eyes as the widest possible panorama of a complex civilization. Curated by Filiz Çagman, Adrian Locke, Nazan Ölçer, Norman Rosenthal, and David J. Roxburgh—and organized in a similar manner to another recent milestone exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, Aztecs (2003)—Turks includes many works that have never previously been displayed outside Turkey, in particular outside the Topkapi Palace Museum, the primary lender. The exhibition is seminal in that it sets the arts of the Ottoman Empire within the broader context of early Turkic tribal cultures. There have been many ways of recounting the history of the Ottoman Empire, seen as a political and military...