Early Islamic Pottery (Arthur Lane)

Early Islamic Pottery: Mesopotamia, Egypt and Persia is a book by Arthur Lane of the Victoria and Albert Museum, published by Faber and Faber in London in 1947 in the Faber Monographs on Pottery and Porcelain edited by W. B. Honey. ^{3 1 4} The editor's foreword says the Burlington House exhibition of 1931 had revealed Persian pottery to the public, that Lane shows it to belong to a larger Islamic world in which potters moved freely from court to court, and that the survey ends with the thirteenth century. ²

Eleven chapters: the Islamic scene; the Umayyads and the sources of Islamic ornament; first contacts with China and the Abbasid school of Mesopotamia; painted wares of Samarkand and Persia; Egyptian lustre-painted and carved pottery of the Fatimid period; common pottery; the Saljuq Turks and the new epoch in Persia; Saljuq carved, moulded and silhouette-painted pottery; Persian and Mesopotamian lustre wares; minai and lajvardina wares; and underglaze painting; followed by a hundred plates. ^{5 6}

• He attributes the sudden rise of Islamic pottery in the ninth century to the court's discovery that pottery could be an art worth patronising when Chinese wares reached Baghdad, citing Bayhaqi's report that Ali ibn Isa, governor of Khurasan, sent Harun al-Rashid twenty pieces of "Chinese imperial porcelain" and two thousand other pieces. He rejects the view that it was owed to the prohibition of gold and silver vessels, citing al-Maqrizi's inventory of gold and silver vessels in al-Mustansir's palace in 1062. ⁷
• He holds that the Baghdad potters devised the opaque white tin glaze to imitate white Chinese ware and then painted on it, and that lustre was first used on glass in Egypt and then on pottery in Iraq in the Samarra period. ^{8 9}
• On circumstantial evidence he suggests that the best Baghdad potters moved to Fatimid Cairo, and that after the fall of the Fatimids in 1171 Egyptian potters moved on to Rayy and Raqqa. ^{10 11 12}
• He describes the hard white bodies of glass frit, silica and clay in Saljuq Persia and the sequence of wares made on them: white and coloured carved wares, lakabi, silhouette wares, lustre, minai and underglaze painting. ^{13 14 15 16}