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Lot Essay
The inscription reads:
al-'izz wa al-iqbal wa al-dawla wa al-sa'ada wa al-tamma (?) wa al-baqa wa a (Glory and prosperity and wealth and happiness and entirity and long life and).
D.S. Rice discussed animated scripts at some length in chapter IV of his monograph on the Wade Cup, tracking their development from the first appearance on the Bobrinski bucket in Herat in 1163 AD (D.S. Rice, The Wade Cup in the Cleveland Museum of Art, Paris, 1955). The script on the present saucer falls into his "animated" category, the most fully developed of all three. There are various features of the present inscription that are very similar indeed to those of the Wade cup. The sin formed by three overlapping birds' heads, and the final ha formed of a dog biting its stem are both matched very closely indeed here. The features are sufficiently similar to suggest that both have the same origin. For the cup Rice suggests a date of the first third of the 13th century, a period that the present cataloguing in the museum has reduced to the first quarter of the 13th century.
One highly unusual feature of the present saucer is the use of gold in the inlay. This is very rare indeed in inlaid brasses, partly presumably because it was difficult to make it stand out against the base metal yellow colour. Little inlay remains in the present vessel today, although the outlines are very sharp. In a few places can clearly be seen the marks where a later hand has used a sharp chisel to dig out some of the original panels of metal, a feature that would be considerably more explicable if it had been gold.
al-'izz wa al-iqbal wa al-dawla wa al-sa'ada wa al-tamma (?) wa al-baqa wa a (Glory and prosperity and wealth and happiness and entirity and long life and).
D.S. Rice discussed animated scripts at some length in chapter IV of his monograph on the Wade Cup, tracking their development from the first appearance on the Bobrinski bucket in Herat in 1163 AD (D.S. Rice, The Wade Cup in the Cleveland Museum of Art, Paris, 1955). The script on the present saucer falls into his "animated" category, the most fully developed of all three. There are various features of the present inscription that are very similar indeed to those of the Wade cup. The sin formed by three overlapping birds' heads, and the final ha formed of a dog biting its stem are both matched very closely indeed here. The features are sufficiently similar to suggest that both have the same origin. For the cup Rice suggests a date of the first third of the 13th century, a period that the present cataloguing in the museum has reduced to the first quarter of the 13th century.
One highly unusual feature of the present saucer is the use of gold in the inlay. This is very rare indeed in inlaid brasses, partly presumably because it was difficult to make it stand out against the base metal yellow colour. Little inlay remains in the present vessel today, although the outlines are very sharp. In a few places can clearly be seen the marks where a later hand has used a sharp chisel to dig out some of the original panels of metal, a feature that would be considerably more explicable if it had been gold.