Bookings open

Bookings are now open for the BISI Annual Mallowan Lecture: "A New Look at Samarra: Small Finds from the Herzfeld Excavation in the Victoria and Albert Museum", by Dr Mariam Rosser-Owen (V&A) and Dr Rosalind Wade Haddon (Independent Scholar), at the British Academy on 27 February. You can find further details of the lecture here, and if you would like to book, click here. Tickets are free, but pre-registration is required.

Save the date!

Dear Samarra fans - a belated but very Happy New Year to you all! We can now announce that we will be giving the annual Mallowan lecture, following the BISI AGM on Thursday 27th February at 6pm. The details of the lecture are copied below and also available on the BISI website. Booking will be open to BISI members first and foremost, but may then open out more generally if there is space, so please keep an eye on the website for updates. We will also post a report here afterwards, and the content of the lecture will eventually be written up for publication in the BISI journal, Iraq.

Wall painting fragment from Samarra, V&A: A.30-1922

A New Look at Samarra: Small Finds from the Herzfeld Excavation in the Victoria and Albert Museum

BISI Annual Mallowan Lecture
By Dr Mariam Rosser-Owen (V&A) and Dr Rosalind Wade Haddon (Independent Scholar)

Date: Thursday, February 27, 2014 - 18:00 to 20:00.
Location: The British Academy, 10 Carlton House Terrace, London, SW1Y 5AH.
In 2013, BISI granted the Victoria and Albert Museum the annual pilot project award to research, catalogue, photograph and conserve the museum’s collection of 285 objects excavated at Samarra by Ernst Herzfeld in 1911-1913. This material encompasses architectural ornament in plaster, stone and wood, as well as objects in steatite, glass and ceramic. It forms a representative typeset of the finds from this landmark excavation, which are now widely dispersed across international museum collections; this project forms the first phase in an attempt to research and virtually reunite the Samarra finds. This lecture will outline the work undertaken over the past year, the discoveries that have been made, and how the Samarra material is now accessible through the museum’s website. It will also sketch out the ambitions that remain for this collection, and the project’s next phases. 

The lecture will be immediately preceded by BISI's Annual General Meeting at 5.45pm. All audience members are also warmly welcomed to join us for a reception after the lecture.

Tickets: free, but pre-registration is required. Bookings to open shortly.

Cairo conference December 2013

Main hall to Cairo University

 

The First International Conference of Islamic Archaeology in the East, 8-11 December 2013, Faculty of Archaeology, Cairo University, Cairo 

 

The current situation in Egypt made this event a little less 'international' than intended, which was a great shame for the organisers, Professor Ahmed Rageb Ali, Conference Coordinator, Professor Mohamed Hamza Ismail al-Haddad, President of the Conference, and Dr Rehab Ibrahim Ahmed el-Siedy, Lecturer in Islamic Archaeology - all from the Faculty of Archaeology. These security concerns were totally unfounded and the few of us who did attend enjoyed three days of papers and discussion followed by two days of sightseeing. I must confess that I passed on a visit to the pyramids (having lived in Cairo the past know only too well how cold it can be out there in December) in favour of a visit to the Museum of Islamic Art to meet the Director, Mr Mostafa Khaled and the Curator of Textiles, Mr Mohamed Abdelsalam, in search of the Herzfeld Samarra typeset that should have been received sometime after the 1922 division meeting at the British Museum - more on that below.

Dr Abdelrahman Salem and Professor Bernard O'Kane chairing a session

The conference languages were Arabic and English, which called for extreme concentration on the part of the few non-Arab attendees! Although the title specified Islamic archaeology to the east of Cairo, some topics covered the Maghreb, Andalusia and the Eastern Mediterranean (click here for the full programme). There were some interesting papers on Uzbek sites, and several on Syrian ones, including a distressing assessment of the recent damage in Aleppo by Dr Walid Ahkrass of the Syrian Antiquities Department. Undoubtedly the highlight for me was Dr Stéphane Pradines' assessment of Abbasid fortifications in Egypt and his tracing the continued practice of construction in red burnt brick walls with rounded towers at intervals through Raqqa, northern Arabia, Sinai, the Delta sites, the island of Rawdah, Cairo and finally Qala'at al-Kabsh, the Tulunid barracks immediately south of Ahmad ibn Tulun's mosque in Cairo. The latter two sites will be his next project to survey and plan, if at all possible. Ms Yui Kanda, currently an MPhil student at Wolfson College, Oxford, presented a thought-provoking study of the 15th-century Cairene potters' workshops, based on comparing the quality of signed bowl fragments and tiles, demonstrating that there were many versions of a signature such as Ghaybi's.

An example of one of Ghaybi's fragmentary bowl bases in the collection of the Cairo University Museum

Dr Manu Sobti, School of Architecture & Urban Planning at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, gave an interesting account of Eric Schmidt's achievement in aerial archaeology in 1930s Iran, outlining the importance of his work and how useful it is today for studying the hinterland of the Iranian sites.

I presented our Samarra Finds Project at the V&A, spreading the word that it will shortly be accessible to researchers and anyone interested, via the Museum's website. 

Bab al-Nasr from outside the walls

The conference days were highly concentrated, and to fit in a site-visit to Dr Pradines' current excavations inside the Fatimid and Ayyubid walls of Cairo near the north-eastern gate of the Bab al-Nasr entailed an early meeting and a race back to the university. Happily Dr Rehab el-Siedy, who has been working at the site too, was equally keen that we should go, and kindly facilitated this. It was a chance for me to meet their ceramologist, Dr Julie Monchamp, who wrote her extremely useful PhD dissertation on the pottery excavated from the north-eastern areas of the Fatimid, Ayyubid and Mamluk levels associated with the city walls. For obvious reasons photography was not permitted, so all I can include is a view of Bab al-Nasr - but if you follow Dr Pradines on Academia.edu you can access all his reports, which come out regularly.

From left: Ahmed Ali (Museum Curator), Mohammed Darwish (Museum Director), Maha Mohammed (Curator), Yui Kanda, yours truly, and Tarek Gallal (Head of PR for the Faculty of Archaeology)

Another visit made during the conference was to the University Museum. This covers both Pharaonic, Graeco-Roman and Islamic periods, and I was amazed to find four excellent examples of South Arabian votive stelae with Sabaean inscriptions. Not, I should add, found in Egypt, but donated by the Yemeni government to a former head of faculty and Chairman of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, Professor Abd al-Halim Nureddin, a colleague from the early 1980s when we were both working in Sana'a. The Islamic section is largely made up of Fustat finds from Dr Suad Maher's excavations and loans from the Museum of Islamic Art. The highlight for me was an almost complete cobalt blue flask, very similar to the fragmentary examples from Samarra we posted on this blog in August. This was apparently found in Fustat, so like the burnt brick fortifications, similar Abbasid containers, in addition to the well-known lustrewares, travelled or influenced local glass production too.

Cobalt blue glass phial similar to the 170 found by Herzfeld in the Dar al-Khilafah, Samarra

As mentioned above, I visited the Museum of Islamic Art in search of the typeset supposed to have been sent to Cairo after Herzfeld's division was made in 1922. Sadly there is no trace of such a gift and I would welcome any suggestions for where to find records or documentation about why it never reached its destination. I will start with the India Office and Colonial Office records, as both were involved in the finds being shipped from Basra to London. The museum does, however, hold 25 carved stucco panels, ten of which are on display with the remainder in storage. These were sent directly from Baghdad by the Iraqi government and must be from the Iraqi excavations between 1936 and 1939. It is now impossible to photograph anything on display without the express permission of the Minister of Antiquities, so unfortunately I am not able to include any images of these panels here.

View of the Muhammad Ali mosque and the green dome of Sultan Nasir Muhammad's mosque on the citadel

The following day we visited the Citadel and were taken to areas that I had never been able to visit before, including Qasr Ablaq, the area excavated in the 1990s where some late 13th century mosaics were found (these were described by Iman Abdulfattah and Mamdouh Mohamed Sakr at the 2009 ‘Arts of the Mamluks’ conference at SOAS, since published in the volume The Arts of the Mamluks in Egypt and Syria - Evolution and Impact, ed. Doris Behrens-Abouseif, Bonn University, 2012). We also explored the south-eastern fortifications, as well as the mosque of Sultan Nasir Muhammad and Muhammad Ali's Ottoman landmark, before descending to Sultan Hasan's masterpiece on the square below.

The group inside the south-east fortifications on the citadel

The Madrasa of Sultan Hasan (left) and the Rifai mosque (right), at the base of the citadel

In the evening I gave an extended version of my BISI conference paper on Gertrude Bell's influence on Islamic archaeology to the Netherlands Flemish Institute, as part of their regular Thursday evening lecture series. This provided a great opportunity to discuss the topic with a former teacher from the American University in Cairo, Professor Bernard O'Kane, and other friends involved in the Islamic archaeological world.

I was extremely glad that I was able to attend this first in a new conference series (by the way, next year's will encompass the eastern Mediterranean world). It was a great opportunity to make contact with Egyptian colleagues and to hear about their current research. 

The Samarra finds project is now signing off for the Christmas break, but we wish you all the best for the festive season, and look forward to continuing our project in the New Year!

Rosalind Wade Haddon

Matching objects with archives

Please do not interpret the Blog's silence as lack of activity in the Samarra Project - nothing could be further from the truth! We have entered a 'research' period, trying to identify where individual pieces of the V&A's 285 artefacts were found on the site, what they can tell us about 9th-century Abbasid decoration, and where possible identify any additional information in Herzfeld's copious documentation. Concurrent with this, objects are being catalogued on the Museum's database and photographed by the Museum's photographer, and gradually every item is being uploaded to the website, so that our goal of full access to one and all is starting to be achieved. The glass objects are already photographed and uploaded, so please go to http://collections.vam.ac.uk/ and type in 'Samarra glass' and you will see them. Ignore everything else for now, as although there are some images and information there already, these records will be updated as the project proceeds. Each plaster fragment will be photographed front and back, as the mechanics of how it was affixed to the wall/ceiling/floor are just as important to the overall picture as the actual decoration, and in the long run will probably assist in identifying which location in the palace complex it came from, and which group of paintings/stucco/wood decoration it belonged to.

The collection is a typeset of the excavators' finds but it is not comprehensive - for instance, it lacks metal pieces. However, it is easy to establish from Herzfeld's records (now housed in the Freer Sackler Gallery's archive) what metalwork was found in Samarra, which compensates for this lack. You can see from the bronze- and copper-headed nails, illustrated below, that they are not large pieces, but are decorative utilitarian objects used to secure the fixtures and fittings suitable for a caliphal palace. Each piece has been given a findspot number: for example, I-N 697 (second row, second from right) is recorded as being found in Square 26v in the Dar al-Khalifah, and described as being a "massive copper head of an iron nail, door hardware? Traces of gilding, pattern: twisted rosette" (translation taken from the Lubkins' incredibly useful document - see our entry on their visit here). The grid reference to 'Square 26v' refers us to the findspot on Herzfeld's gridded map, on the FSG Samarra resources site. 

Click here to see this image on the FSG website

FSA_A.6_04.22.071

Once familiar with these online resources, it is easy to navigate through the many illustrations and documents, and in recording the objects this facility has been useful for providing additional information. Around half the objects are still marked with their Herzfeld red inventory number (prefixed by I-N in the various publications). Herzfeld was a highly accomplished watercolourist (as we have seen in a previous post) and in addition to his sketches he reconstructed some of the wall painting fragments into complete murals. However, he did use a little artistic licence, so it is essential to double check every detail.

V&A A.29-1922 - measures h.14cm x w.16cm.
 You can see this fragment at the 
centre of Herzfeld's pl. LII in DIE MALEREIEN.
The fragment immediately to the right of this one is
now on display in the British Museum.

.

V&A A.54-1922, which you can see depicted in the bottom right hand corner of DIE MALEREIEN, pl. L


The resources on the Freer Sackler website help to problem-solve too. For example, among the ceramics there is a series of similar lid fragments, all now in different collections, some of which might fit together. Nothing published in Sarre's Die Keramik von Samarra resembles these, but in Herzfeld's own photographs, there is a group image - two with the same design and two of the same shape but seemingly with a different design. A fragment of one of these is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and can be seen on their website. (Interestingly, this lid fragment in the V&A is one of very few lustre pieces in the V&A Samarra typeset.)

V&A C.632-1922

Click here to see the image on the Freer Sackler website

Matching the objects with the archival material is slow but rewarding work, and hopefully the reader will understand why this blog has been a little dormant. Next month our findings to date will be presented at the First International Conference on Islamic Archaeology in the East, to be held at the University of Cairo from 8th-12th December. News from Cairo to follow soon thereafter!

Rosalind Wade Haddon

A Study in Close Looking: Reflections on Herzfeld's Architectural Drawings at the Met

Hello Herzfeld Scholars,

My name is Charmaine Branch and I am a rising senior studying art history at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. I’ve spent the past few months working as an intern here at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. On the first day Matt Saba, a Research Fellow and my supervisor, introduced me to the works of Ernst Herzfeld housed in the Islamic Art Department. Although I had no previous knowledge of Herzfeld’s expeditions in Samarra and other cities across Iran, Turkey, and Syria, I welcomed the challenge of exploring a whole new area of art history.  Matt acted as my guide as I familiarized myself with architectural drawings, watercolors of wall decorations, photographs, and their subject matter.

As part of my internship, I also gave tours in the Met galleries to the general public. The experience encouraged me not only to focus on the historical importance of an object, but to also appreciate the extensive information available through visual analysis. Herzfeld began his drawings with the act of close looking. For me, the task of digitizing a sketch was brought to life by his skill and meticulous documentation of detail. I often invited other interns in our department to join me in admiring a floor plan or study of a column before I moved on to the next.

Shaykh 'Abd al-Samad Shrine at Natanz (Iran): Analysis of Muqarnas Vault. (MMA, eeh1575)

I spent a long while studying Herzfeld’s analysis of the muqarnas vault over the tomb chamber in the shrine of Shaykh ‘Abd al-Samad at Natanz (shown above). In order to understand the complex construction of the vault’s underlying scheme, Herzfeld employed a series of grids still visible in the upper right hand corner. As your eye moves clockwise around the octagon, the dotted squares, triangles and circles give way to fully-inked lines showing the shapes of some of cells, including flower-like compilations of triangles.  The drawing continues to transform as Herzfeld highlights different geometric elements. In the lower left-hand corner, Herzfeld added parallel lines along some of the preexisting lines, emphasizing texture and depth. As a final step, he applied a thicker black strip between those lines and a new series of shapes were revealed. Herzfeld represented a complicated structure, and his drawing allows you to read his process as your eye travels around the octagon.

Working with the Herzfeld papers during the course of the summer, I came to understand what a significant role this project plays within the international study of Herzfeld’s lifework. I find the possibility of reconstructing parts of a madrasa or mosque based on Herzfeld’s drawings incredibly compelling. The global exchange of information is intrinsic to the study of art not only for scholars but also for everyone who is interested in the visual history of our world. All of Herzfeld’s works are in dialog with one another, although they span his career and are now dispersed geographically as part of several collections.  I am very lucky to have joined the conversation. 

Charmaine Branch (Vassar College)

Update from the Met

Dear Samarra-Finds Readers,

I write to you with a Herzfeld-related update from New York. As summer comes to a close, we are excited to report that the Department of Islamic Art is moving closer toward making our Herzfeld Papers more accessible to researchers. Having been rehoused and reorganized several years ago, the Islamic Department’s share of the Herzfeld Papers is on its way to being fully cataloged. By the end of the process, each item will have a unique ID number, content description, publication information and, eventually, references to related archival materials.

We have recently finished cataloging the drawings, watercolors and prints in our collection. This group of material includes the preparatory sketches and watercolors for illustrative plates in Der Wandschmuck der Bauten von Samarra und seine Ornamentik, and Die Malereien von Samarra, the volumes where the wall ornament and wall paintings from Samarra were published. Aside from being works of art themselves, these items may be of interest to Samarra scholars as evidence of Herzfeld’s research techniques. Certain questions came to my mind as I looked through the sketches: Did Herzfeld draw from life or from photos, for example? And how much of what we see in the final publication is to be considered an interpretation?

Friezes of Animals in Vine Scrolls, reconstructed from fragments found in Samarra's Main Caliphal Palace (Dar al-Khilafa)

Another subset of the drawings was chosen for a focused digitization project over the summer. This group consists of approximately 175 drawings depicting architectural plans, elevations and details from buildings in Syria, Turkey, Iraq and Iran. A large number of these represent primary research for Herzfeld’s “Damascus: Studies in Architecture”series, a group of articles published at the end of his life that contain some of his most distilled ideas about the evolution of Islamic architecture. The series is an important supplement to the  Freer and Sackler Archives holdings, which have already been digitized in an exemplary fashion.

Nur al-Din Hospital (Bimaristan Nuri) in Damascus: sections of muqarnas dome over entrance hall

Thanks to our fabulous summer intern, Charmaine Branch, we were able to scan all but the largest of these drawings and we hope to upload them to the web. Once online, this series will serve as a “pilot” for a larger project to fully digitize the papers housed in our department, and to connect our portion of the archive to portions held in other institutions.

Matt Saba (Metropolitan Museum / University of Chicago)

Samarra at the British Museum

Today Rosalind and I visited Venetia Porter at the British Museum, and spent the morning looking at their Samarra material from Herzfeld's excavations. Part of our BISI-funded pilot project is to develop and seek funding for the next, more international phase of Samarrafinds, and a crucial part of the next stage will be to catalogue the BM's material. Today's visit was an initial assessment of the scope of that collection.

Venetia Porter and Rosalind Wade Haddon in front of the Samarra display in the British Museum's John Addis Gallery

The small gallery display doesn't begin to tell you how big this collection is compared to the V&A's rather modest selection! The V&A is an art and design museum and was always concerned to acquire objects that would inspire art students, so only took a few representative examples of the types of artistic production found at Samarra; but the British Museum is a 'universal museum', which has engaged in its own archaeological excavations, and has much more material in bulk. The same goes for Samarra. They have much much more of everything, and this morning's visit made us realise quite what a big job the next phase is going to be!

Rosalind and Venetia rummaging among fragments of wood and glass in the British Museum store

Rosalind was excited to see the glass, which has been giving her such headaches recently, and especially to realise that the lion's share of the 170 blue glass 'torpedo flasks' mentioned by Lamm are likely to be among the BM's finds. We were excited to find some of the examples he mentioned of bottle stoppers - made of cotton wool, wrapped around with papryus and cotton string! These would be candidates for future analysis, since the cotton may well have absorbed some essence of the original contents of these bottles.

The tops of two blue glass bottles, stoppered with cotton wool, papyrus and cotton ties

I am rather jealous of the several fragments in the BM's collection of incised blue glass dishes - why didn't the South Kensington curators in 1922 want a few of these?? They come from very elegant dishes, perhaps made in Nishapur in Iran, of which several amazingly complete examples have been recovered from the Famensi temple near Xi'an in China - from a reliquary chamber sealed in the 870s, thus also providing a clear terminus ante quem for the production of this type of glass, if the finds from Samarra weren't enough to establish a 9th-century date.

Three fragments of incised blue glass dishes - these are on display but there are more fragments in store

 
I was also amazed to see actual shells amongs the finds! Of course we are familiar with the pieces of mother-of-pearl used for a variety of inlay designs, but the BM collection holds several complete shells! Does anyone know what kind of shells these are? There is no sign of them having been used for make-up trays or paint palettes, unless analysis reveals invisible traces which have been lost to the naked eye - but perhaps they were waiting to be turned into inlay? Could the original context of the find have been a 9th-century inlay workshop??

Shells found at Samarra

These were just a few of the many exciting things we saw in the British Museum today, which hint at the many treasures we hope to uncover as the project moves into its next phase. But the size of the collection and the task ahead feels a little overwhelming! Next is to start making a list of priorities and possible candidates for scientific analysis. Oh, and to start thinking about where we might look for further funding. Any ideas, please be sure to let us know!

Mariam Rosser-Owen