Bowl Fragments

This bowl bears painted decoration, protected on the entire inner and outer surfaces by an opaque glaze. This glaze is largely damaged and so the decoration that we are left with is only partially extant.

The decoration consists of a line running around the wall of the bowl in a manganese-brown colour with repeating patterns, against a turquoise-green background. Resembling Arabic script, it is in fact a stylised form that does not deliver any translatable text. This so-called ‘pseudo-epigraphic’ motif (imitation writing) may have come from workshops in, perhaps, Samarkand and Nishapur.