Fragment with Inscription (early 900s): Art, History and Details

Fragment with Inscription (early 900s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

This fragment preserves a large-scale octagon enclosing a pair of peacocks which stand on recumbent griffins and flank a palmette tree. The inner edges of the octagon contain an inscription blessing its owner. The outer edges of the octagon are ornamented with abstract leaves. In the interspaces between octagons are floral roundels, each containing four birds; from the top, bottom, and sides of each roundel spring palmette trees, of which the top and bottom are flanked by birds. According to recent analysis of the museum’s Buyid textile materials, some have been identified as modern reproductions.

Object facts

• Title: Fragment with Inscription
• Date: early 900s
• Culture: Iran, style of the Abbasid period (750–1258) or Buyid period (945–1055)
• Type: Textile
• Technique: Silk: lampas weave
• Dimensions: Overall: 78.7 x 90.2 cm (31 x 35 1/2 in.)
• Collection: T - Islamic
• Department: Textiles
• Accession number: 1982.24

Collection credit

Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Lee, Sherman E. “Year in Review for 1982.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art, vol. 70, no. 1, 1983, pp. 3–55.
• Blair, Sheila S., et al. “Reevaluating the Date of the ‘Buyid’ Silks by Epigraphic and Radiocarbon Analysis.” Ars Orientalis, vol. 22, 1992, pp. 1–41.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.