Luster Bowl Fragment
Guiding Questions:
Looking at the following images, do you see yourself trying to figure out what the other parts of the fragments are to understand where it came from? Or do you agree with the repair that was made by the museum? This requires creating an image of the object and inferring what the repair may be. This is important to do especially when trying to figure out the history and context behind some of these Middle Ages objects.
About the Luster Bowl Fragment
This is a Egyptian luster bowl sherd with a gold silver peacock from the Middle East during the Fatimid period of the 11th century. However, since this is fragment, we must infer much about the rest of the object.
To conduct this inference, let us first consider the materials used. Luster pottery started in Basra, Iraq, which became an influential center for luster pottery around the world (Grube 1965). By AD 1000, luster potters left Basra and set up workshops in Egypt under the Fatimid dynasty. The potters during this time period developed new forms and decorations as opposed to the simple and uniform patterns found in luster bowls during 10th century in Basra (refer to the patterns on this bowl). However, we can find similar motifs with birds and hunting scenes on bowls during the Fatimid period. Furthermore, Fatimid pottery is made from coarser clay, making it a higher quality than those of the Basra potters (Caiger-Smith A. 1985).
Given this historical context about Fatimid bowls as well as an image of the object itself, we can deduce that it is a taller bowl than the out-rimmed bowls found during the 10th century Iraq, demonstrating its new form from the 10th century. Furthermore, just by understanding that the luster bowls during this time period encompassed motifs of birds, we can infer that there are probably other animals that appear on the other sides of the bowl, given this original image of a peacock. The background pattern consists of flowers and patterns of gold as we can see on the image. However, it is much harder to infer the use of these bowls. Do you find yourself trying to understand the historical contexts of this bowl or to understand the physical aspects of this bowl by imagining what the whole bowl may look like? What else can you infer from this bowl? What could be inside or inscribed to the bottom of the bowl? We see that even these partial fragments allow us to create educated guesses about the meanings of the whole object, and thus we find ourselves trying to create meaning from even partial fragments from the bowl by forming an image of the whole in our minds.