Roundels with Hunters (800s): Art, History and Details

Roundels with Hunters (800s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

This textile consists of two fragments mounted together. They are woven with floral roundels that enclose horsemen hunting lions. The theme of riders hunting with lances, the floral frames of the roundels, and the costumes of the hunters were all inspired by silks from the Byzantine world. The stiff, abstracted style, however, is characteristic of Sogdian silks, woven in Sogdiana in Central Asia and often traded to distant markets. These fragments were preserved in a grave in Egypt where they were found sewn as ornaments onto a tunic.

Object facts

• Title: Roundels with Hunters
• Date: 800s
• Culture: Eastern Iran or Central Asia
• Type: Textile
• Technique: Silk: samite weave
• Dimensions: Overall: 26.5 x 25.5 cm (10 7/16 x 10 1/16 in.); Mounted: 46.4 x 74.3 cm (18 1/4 x 29 1/4 in.)
• Collection: Textiles
• Department: Textiles
• Accession number: 1959.124

A detail from the museum

The two roundels have different diameters, even though the number of warps per repeat is the same.

Collection credit

Gift of The Textile Art Alliance

Further reading listed by the museum

• Shepherd, Dorothy G. “Medieval Persian Silks in Fact and Fancy: A Refutation of the Riggisberg Report.” Bulletin Du Cieta, Centre International D'étude Des Textiles Anciens 1974, no. 39-40
• Shepherd, Dorothy G. "Zandanījī Revisited" In Müller-Christensen, Sigrid, Mechthild Flury-Lemberg, and Karen Stolleis. Documenta textilia: Festschrift für Sigrid Müller-Christensen. München: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1981.
• Wardwell, Anne E. Material Matters: Fifty Years of Gifts from the Textile Arts Club, 1934-1984. Cleveland: The Museum, 1984.

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.