- Title
- Bottle
- Date Made
- second half of 7th-8th century
- Medium
- High-tin bronze, hammered
- Dimensions
- Height: 9 15/16 in. (25.24 cm)
- Accession Number
- M.2002.1.568
- Collecting Area
- Art of the Middle East: Islamic
- Curatorial Notes
This handsome bronze vessel, with a slightly rounded body and tall waisted neck, possibly functioned as a bottle. Its high tin content may have initially given it a silvery color that blackened over time. Similarly shaped high-tin bronze bottles were made in Iran under the Sasanian dynasty (224−651), when gold and especially silver plate seems to have been the tableware of choice for elite feasting, based on surviving objects as well as textual accounts mainly from the early Islamic period (see M.76.97.378). The bottle was perhaps made as a less costly substitute for a silver vessel. Its shape, function, and technique would have carried over into the Islamic era, which, while it heralded the ascendancy of a new faith and leadership, would not necessarily have altered the traditional manufacture of fine tableware in Iran.
2024
