Fragment with peacocks and inscription (1000–1100s): Art, History and Details

Fragment with peacocks and inscription (1000–1100s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

One of the stories in "The Thousand and One Nights" is of a slave girl named Zumurud who lived in Khurasan and embroidered curtains with designs of animals and birds in colored silk and gold threads. Sumptuous embroideries were not only commissioned by rulers, caliphs, and court officials but also widely exported. Today, less than a dozen fragments of these rich embroideries survive. All are worked on "mulham," a fabric having silk warps and cotton wefts that was a specialty of Iran and Iraq. With the exception of the Cleveland Museum of Art's fragment CMA 1952.257, which was found in Baghdad, all of the known examples were preserved until the 1900s in Egyptian graves and refuse heaps.

Object facts

• Title: Fragment with peacocks and inscription
• Date: 1000–1100s
• Culture: Iraq, probably Baghdad, Seljuq period
• Type: Embroidery
• Technique: Silk warp and cotton weft (mulham): plain weave; silk, gilt, and silver thread: embroidery, couched and split stitches
• Dimensions: Overall: 31.5 x 40.5 cm (12 3/8 x 15 15/16 in.)
• Collection: T - Islamic
• Department: Textiles
• Accession number: 1938.300

A detail from the museum

The design is arranged in three broad bands; the top and bottom have two opposing lines of Kufic inscription and the center has roundels.

Collection credit

Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Lamm, Carl J. Cotton in Mediaeval Textiles of the Near East. Paris: P. Geuthner, 1937.
• Wiet, Gaston. "Tissus Brodes Mesopotamiens." Ars Islamica 4 (1937): 54-63.
• Underhill, Gertrude. "An Eleventh-Century Mesopotamian Embroidery." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 26, no. 1 (January 1939): 4–5.

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.