Pillow cover with Arabic inscription (800s): Art, History and Details

Pillow cover with Arabic inscription (800s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

This rare complete Egyptian pillow cover is a masterpiece of contrasting colors. Crimson and blue-green wool alternate in the ground and bird-inhabited roundels, supported by mustard-colored wool and undyed linen woven in tapestry weave. When folded down the center, based on examples from Egyptian burials, four birds form a unit on each side and are appropriately ascending in flight. Above, an Arabic text written in angular Kufic script reads, "In the name of God. Blessing from God to its owner. Of what was made in the tiraz." The word tiraz means factory or an Arabic-inscribed textile. This was probably made in al-Bahnasa, the city renowned for colorful wool textiles with figures, as they claimed, from a "gnat to the elephant."

Object facts

• Title: Pillow cover with Arabic inscription
• Date: 800s
• Culture: Egypt, al-Bahnasa
• Type: Textile
• Technique: Wool and linen: tapestry weave
• Dimensions: Overall: 80 x 83.2 cm (31 1/2 x 32 3/4 in.); Mounted: 93.3 x 95.9 cm (36 3/4 x 37 3/4 in.)
• Collection: T - Islamic
• Department: Textiles
• Accession number: 1959.48

Collection credit

Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Shepherd, Dorothy G. "An Early Tiraz from Egypt." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 47, no. 1 (1960): 7-14.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1966. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1966.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1969. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1969.

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.