A Guide to the Islamic Pottery of the Near East (Hobson)

A Guide to the Islamic Pottery of the Near East was issued by the British Museum in 1932 by order of the Trustees, written by R. L. Hobson, Keeper of the Department of Ceramics and Ethnography, with 40 plates and 73 illustrations. ^{1 4}

Hobson says the Near Eastern collection was begun by Sir Wollaston Franks, that the Henderson Bequest of 1878 added much later Persian and Turkish material, that in Turkish wares the collection reaches an exceptionally high standard, and that its chief document is the lamp from the Mosque of Omar (the Dome of the Rock) in Jerusalem dated 956 AH. ⁵ He says the material cannot yet be grouped by factories, so he arranges it tentatively in three periods, and that most early pottery has been recovered in fragments from ruined cities, so that fragments from authenticated finds matter especially. ⁵

Period I (622–1200): Samarra, Brahminabad, Egypt, Rhages (Rayy), Raqqa, Samarkand, sgraffiato ware, unglazed pottery; Period II (1200–1400): Rhages, Veramin, Sultanabad, Egypt; Period III (from 1400): late Persian pottery, "Gombroon" ware, Kubachi, Turkish pottery, Kutahya, tiles, and marks. ²

Hobson argues that the name "Rhodian" arose from pieces found at Lindos on Rhodes and that "Damascus ware" went unchallenged until F. Martin questioned it in 1909; he concludes that all three groups of Turkish ware were probably made at Iznik and that it is safest to call them all "Turkish". ^{6 7 3}