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Lot Essay
This is the earliest known textile prayer panel or mihrab that has been published to date. The form is known carved in stone, in tiles, and in drawings, but no textile to date has survived. That it is a prayer panel or mihrab is in no doubt not just because of the form, but also due to the band of stylised script along the prayer arch with the repeated, if slightly illiterate, word "Allah". It is a hugely important addition to the corpus of Mongol textiles, demonstrating clearly that these textiles were woven for Muslim patrons and probably by Muslim weavers.
The spandrels in their general spacing and aesthetic are reminiscent of Chinese embroidered designs, for instance the corner scrolling vines on a Yuan silk embroidery in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (James C.Y.Watt and Anne C. Wardwell, When Silk was Gold, Central Asian and Chinese Textiles, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1997, no.60, pp.196-199). There are clear similarities, although with differences which are discussed in detail in the note to the following lot. The technical features that link this panel to those in the following three lots, discussed under the following lot, clearly enable the other panels to be placed in the same Islamic context that is demonstrated by the present prayer niche.
It is interesting to compare this textile with much later Ottoman embroideries. There is an Ottoman embroidered prayer niche in the Topkapi Palace that has columns dividing the space into three and with two embroidered footprints in the central niche (Hülya Tezcan and Sumiyo Okumura, Textile Furnishings from the Topkapi Palace Museum, Istanbul, 2007, no,.45, pp.142-145 and front cover). This is a feature that is found also on Ottoman tile panels (for example one associated with the Darwish Pasha Mosque in Damascus sold in these Rooms 4 April 2006, lot 100 and now in the Aga Khan Collection (Schätze des Aga Khan Museum, Meisterwerke der islamischen Kunst, exhibition catalogue, Berlin, 2010, no.36, pp.70-71), and on Ottoman pile prayer rugs such as an Ushak multiple prayer rug (saf) formerly in the Selimye Mosque in Edirne and now in the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Art, Istanbul (Nazan Ölçer et al., Turkish Carpets from the 13th-18th Centuries, Istanbul, 1996, pp.174-177). The whirling motifs in the side panels bear a passing resemblance to those on a 17th century Ottoman silk embroidered wrapper (Tezcan and Okumura op.cit., no.51, pp.160-161). The first of these two motifs clearly shows the continuity of the design within the Turkic tradition over a considerable period of time.
A Carbon 14 analysis, performed by the Rafter Laboratory in New Zealand, sample 32465/2 on 7 July 2010 gives the following results, consistent with the proposed dating for this lot:
68 confidence level: 1282 AD to 1298 AD (62.8 plus 1374 AD to 1377 AD (6.5
95 confidence level: 1279 AD to 1303 AD (71.0 plus 1367 AD to 1384 AD (24.3
The spandrels in their general spacing and aesthetic are reminiscent of Chinese embroidered designs, for instance the corner scrolling vines on a Yuan silk embroidery in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (James C.Y.Watt and Anne C. Wardwell, When Silk was Gold, Central Asian and Chinese Textiles, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1997, no.60, pp.196-199). There are clear similarities, although with differences which are discussed in detail in the note to the following lot. The technical features that link this panel to those in the following three lots, discussed under the following lot, clearly enable the other panels to be placed in the same Islamic context that is demonstrated by the present prayer niche.
It is interesting to compare this textile with much later Ottoman embroideries. There is an Ottoman embroidered prayer niche in the Topkapi Palace that has columns dividing the space into three and with two embroidered footprints in the central niche (Hülya Tezcan and Sumiyo Okumura, Textile Furnishings from the Topkapi Palace Museum, Istanbul, 2007, no,.45, pp.142-145 and front cover). This is a feature that is found also on Ottoman tile panels (for example one associated with the Darwish Pasha Mosque in Damascus sold in these Rooms 4 April 2006, lot 100 and now in the Aga Khan Collection (Schätze des Aga Khan Museum, Meisterwerke der islamischen Kunst, exhibition catalogue, Berlin, 2010, no.36, pp.70-71), and on Ottoman pile prayer rugs such as an Ushak multiple prayer rug (saf) formerly in the Selimye Mosque in Edirne and now in the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Art, Istanbul (Nazan Ölçer et al., Turkish Carpets from the 13th-18th Centuries, Istanbul, 1996, pp.174-177). The whirling motifs in the side panels bear a passing resemblance to those on a 17th century Ottoman silk embroidered wrapper (Tezcan and Okumura op.cit., no.51, pp.160-161). The first of these two motifs clearly shows the continuity of the design within the Turkic tradition over a considerable period of time.
A Carbon 14 analysis, performed by the Rafter Laboratory in New Zealand, sample 32465/2 on 7 July 2010 gives the following results, consistent with the proposed dating for this lot:
68 confidence level: 1282 AD to 1298 AD (62.8 plus 1374 AD to 1377 AD (6.5
95 confidence level: 1279 AD to 1303 AD (71.0 plus 1367 AD to 1384 AD (24.3