Dish with cross-shaped and arabesque decoration

This heavily restored hemispherical bowl of average size has curved, slightly rounded sides and stands on a small ring base. The lip turns outward slightly and is accented by a shallow groove.

Its two faces are coated in a dark green glaze. On the inner surface, traced in metallic brown, is a cruciform decoration filled in with leafy scrollwork. The branches of the cross end in two-strand braids delimited on either side by parallel lines.

The bowl’s shape is a common one in Medieval Ifriqiyan ceramic ware and the copper oxide-based green is typical of Raqqada ceramics.

The braid at the ends of the cross-shaped motif is the only example of this motif for the period.

The foliated scroll that covers the bottom is somewhat reminiscent of the scrollwork on the wooden half dome surmounting the niche of the mihrāb in the Great Mosque of Kairouan. The three- or four-lobed grape leaf motif is in fact very common in the Ifriqiyan decorative repertoire. It appears on tenth- and eleventh-century funeral steles in Kairouan[1], in the decoration of the cupolas of the mosques of Kairouan, Sousse and Tunis, and on the façade of the Mosque of the Three Doors (Kairouan, 866)[2]. Certain lustre tiles decorating the mihrāb of the Great Mosque of Kairouan display a surprising analogy in terms of both the colours (ochre yellow and brown) and the lightness of the highly stylised vegetal motifs.

The metallic lustre technique was clearly practiced in Ifriqiyan ceramic workshops. Analyses carried out on lustre samples found in an oven during the excavation of Sabra al-Mansuriyya attest undeniably to the presence of locally produced lustre decoration on cobalt blue ground at the end of the tenth and the beginning of the eleventh centuries.

However, this technique, which came into being in the ninth century in Mesopotamia and spread to Egypt in the mid-tenth century, was relatively recent at the time and required painstaking work. It is hardly conceivable that Ifriqiyians had managed to master such a complex technique so quickly. There is, therefore, every indication that this dish was imported from Mesopotamia or made on site by ceramic artists from the East. In addition, the decoration of this dish breaks completely with the relatively unrefined, less abstract repertoire of contemporaneous Ifriqiyan ceramics. It is more clearly related to the lustre tiles of the mihrāb of the Great Mosque of Kairouan, whose Mesopotamian origin has been established by chemical analyses. Other Mesopotamian ceramic items preserved in the Islamic Art Museum in Berlin[3] and the Museo Nazionale d’Arte Orientale in Rome, along with pieces discovered in the excavations at Fustat and preserved in the Islamic Museum of Cairo, also present a certain similarity with this bowl. 

Soon thereafter, doubtless by the end of the tenth century, Ifriqiyan ceramists would master this technique. Everything suggests that they were the ones who introduced it to Qala'at Bani Hammad in the eleventh century. The technique seems to have reached Andalusia in the twelfth century and to have spread from there to Italy, especially through Valencia and Sicily.

[2] In the lower portion that constitutes the intrados of the arches.

[3] See Le califat de Bagdad, la civilisation abbâsside, p. 252, n° 125.