Colour-splashed ware

Colour-splashed ware is one of the largest groups of glazed earthenware at Nishapur: pieces were covered inside and out with a white engobe and decorated with dabs, spots or streaks of yellow, green and purplish brown before a clear lead glaze, sometimes greenish, was applied. ¹ Wilkinson divides it into two groups: one in which the splashes are the whole decoration, and a larger, later one in which the colours supplement incised (graffiato) designs. ¹

The ware was not invented in the Near East but first made in China in the Tang period (618–906), on a white kaolin body. ¹ Kaolin being unavailable to Islamic potters, they imitated the Chinese body by coating their clay, which fired buff to red, with a white slip that reflected the colour under the clear glaze. ¹ Wilkinson cites the eleventh-century historian Bayhaqi on Chinese wares given to Harun al-Rashid: twenty pieces of "chini faghfuri" such as had never been seen at a caliph's court, besides two thousand others. ^{1 2}

It was made in vast numbers at Nishapur in the ninth and tenth centuries, and in other centres in Iran, Transoxiana, Afghanistan, Iraq, eastern Arabia, Syria and Egypt; kiln wasters have been found as far east as Afrasiyab and as far west as Fustat. ¹ Its ninth-century date is certain from fragments found at Samarra, seat of the caliphate between 836 and 892. ²