An Overview of Islamic Pottery

Abd el-Naser Yasin

 

During Seven Seasons of the course excavation, a large number of Islamic pottery objects has been discovered and classified as follows:

  • Unglazed Earthenware

The excavation provided us with various fragments of unglazed vessels, mostly water jugs and koullal.

  1. Glazed Earthenware

The most common forms of pottery found during the excavations are those made of glazed earthenware. The objects which belong to this kind of pottery are decorated by using the incised, carved and painted techniques in the slip under a polychrome transparent glaze. Most of the decorations are stylized plant motifs, and inscriptions with the Mamluk Thuluth calligraphy.

  1. Monochrome-glazed pottery

Among the pottery objects found during excavations are a number of undecorated bowl fragments with green or yellowish-brown glazes. Some fragments have both glaze colors: green glaze from inside and yellowish-brown glaze from outside.

  1. Underglazed-painted pottery

Among the pottery finds of the excavation, two fragments characterized with more fragile and whiter clay. One of these two fragments is an upper part of a bowl body; the other is a part of the same bowl. The interior and exterior of the two fragments are decorated with simple light-blue and greenish-black motifs. This decoration style, a typical style of a Mamluk underglazed bowl belongs to the 8th Hijri century/ the 14th century A.D.

  1. Imitation of Tang pottery

The Tang dynasty of China had produced a unique type of pottery. It is characterized by the simple dots or strips decorations. The Tang pottery had been imported by Muslim countries, including Egypt. The imitation of the Tang pottery had spread throughout Egypt since the Tulunid till the end of the Mamluk rules. Some of the excavations' pottery finds are imitation of the Tang Chinese pottery.

    6- Chinese Porcelain:

  Porcelain is famous Chinese pottery, made of white coherent and solid material. The decoration painted in blue against white background, underglazed. This type of pottery was exported to the near East since the 3rd century of Hijra/ 9th century A.D. It is well known that Egypt had imported large quantities of Chinese porcelain made during the reign of Chinese royal family of "Minge". Mumluk pottery makers were interested in imitating porcelain, but they did not succeed enough.

   The mission in Asyut project has discovered fragments of porcelain. When assembled together, they made a bowl body and only part of its base. The interior of one fragment is decorated in blue against white background, but plain in its exterior. The bowl body is decorated as open flower.

To sum up, we can safely assume that most of the pottery discovered in the western mountain of Asyut belong to the Mamluk Period. But this does not mean that we did not find pottery belonging to other periods, such as the Ottoman Period, from which time many fragments of pips were found.

For full text, see:

Abd El-Naser Yasin, "An Overview of Islamic Pottery", in: Seven Seasons at Asyut: First Results of the Egyptian-German Cooperation in Archaeological Fieldwork, The Asyut Project 2, Edited by Jochem Kahl, Ursula Verhoeven and Mahmoud El-Khadragy, Harrassowitz Verlag, Wiesbaden, 2012, pp. 119-127.