Dish with battle scene

This bowl comes from Sabra al-Mansūriyya, a city founded by the Fatimids in 947 in the immediate vicinity of Kairouan. A palatial city that was also a centre of trade, Sabra was laid waste by Hilalian invasions in the mid-eleventh century. Long used as a quarry for residents of Kairouan, it sank into oblivion until excavations began in the last century.

Like their Aghlabid predecessors of eastern origin, the Fatimid sovereigns made Kairouan the Maghreb’s meeting place and relay station for artistic innovations emanating from Mesopotamia, a phenomenon illustrated by this bowl.

The bowl is a fairly large streamlined object standing on a small ring base. The rim is straight and its lip juts out. The piece is completely coated in a pale yellow glaze, with decoration traced in brown and highlights of honey yellow and green glaze. Greens and browns, already in use in Mesopotamia in the ninth century, were a great success in the western Mediterranean, starting in the ninth century in Tunisia, the tenth century in Spain[1] and Sicily, the eleventh century in Morocco and Algeria, and the twelfth century in southern Italy.

The phenomenon was both aesthetic and cultural, and it crossed religious boundaries, as testified in the productions of Paterna[2] (Spain) and Marseille[3]. Soon the Kairouan workshops added yellow to their palette, as on this bowl. This shade and the way the paint is applied in streaks reveal the influence of Eastern ceramics from the same period[4].

The inner rim of the dish is decorated with two staggered rows of squares delimited by double lines. Traced inside the squares are finely-drawn repeat motifs whose meaning escapes us. On the bottom unfolds a turbulent war scene in which warriors astride galloping horses brandish bucklers[5] in their left hands. The riders are shown in profile, their large wide-open eyes emphasised in black – details that are found on many productions contemporaneous with the piece in Spain and North Africa. They are dressed in close-fitting striped outfits. This taste for striped fabrics is encountered elsewhere in the Mediterranean and in other epochs: on the frontispiece of a thirteenth-century Syrian manuscript[6] Dioscoride faces two disciples, one of whom sports a magnificent blue- and red-striped tunic.

The horses are drawn with a hasty, highly stylised stroke. Their harnesses and certain parts of their bodies are emphasised by hatching that varies in thickness and slant, a convention found on Ifriqiyan ceramics from the Aghlabid era (800–909) which developed under the Zirids (972–1148). On other ceramic objects found in Sabra al-Mansuriyya horses are frequently depicted with rather naturalistic-looking horsemen astride them.

Under the Fatimids a stylised, imaginative figurative art flourished in the Maghreb and later in Egypt. That art is masterfully illustrated by this dish. The theme of the epic on horseback also developed east of the Islamic world, in particular through the illustration of the Shāh-nāmeh[7], and it could be interesting to compare the bowl from the museum of Kairouan to a large thirteenth-century dish that shows the Iranian version of this iconography[8].

This bowl has a certain kinship with the Eastern aesthetic sense, but in all likelihood also plunges its roots into a remote African past. Compared with Eastern – and even Andalusian – drawings, the representations of the Ifriqiyan horses seem less realistic and more stylised, albeit imbued with a real sense of movement, which endows them with a truly particular personality[9].

[2] Dish with castle decoration, Spain, Paterna, fourteenth century, clay paste, painted decoration, Barcelona, Museo de Cerámica, 20.090. (Spain corpus)

[3] Facing tile, France, Marseille, workshop of Sainte Barbe, mid-thirteenth century, Marseille, Musée d’Histoire, MHM 93.5.36

[4] Dish with mottled decoration, Iran, ninth–tenth century, clay paste, decoration engraved into the engobe coating and painted over glaze, Copenhagen, David Sammlings, 2/1965

[5] Shield used in the Middle Ages.

[6] Dioscoride, De Materia Medica, Syria, 1229, Istanbul, Library of Topkapi Sarayi Müzesi, Ahmet III, 2127. (corpus Byzantium, base n°766)

[7] Book of Kings, written in Persian by the poet Ferdowsī at the end of the tenth century. This epic poem retraces the gesture of the mythical and historic kings of Iran from the creation of the world up until the Islamic conquest.

[8] Dish with battle scene, Iran, Kashan, early thirteenth century, siliceous paste and haft rang decoration over opacified glaze, Washington, Smithsonian Institution, Freer Gallery of Art, F 1943.3.

[9] Like the bowls with riders found on the site of Sabra and conserved in Tunis, Musée du Bardo, inv. D115 and D33.

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