This bell-shaped hookah base is made of white marble with traces of gilded decoration on the rim of the slightly flaring mouth, the neck’s midpoint projecting molding used to facilitate carrying, the vessel’s shoulder and body, and the splayed foot of the vessel. The ornamentation on the shoulder and splayed foot is a scrolling vine with complex components consisting of a repeating pattern of parallel tendrils that form open-ended horizontal cartouches with foliate terminals. Interspersed between the cartouches are starburst designs with a central orb and six smaller orbs concentrically radiating outward on spokes. Beneath the shoulder is a necklace of hemispherical arches with floral pendants and a single orb floating in the arch’s interior apex. The same ornamental band is inverted and repeated above the scrolling vine band on the splayed foot. The vessel body has a diaper pattern of larger, more articulated starbursts or perhaps stylized six-petaled blossoms.
Hookahs are a type of water-pipe used to cool and sometimes flavor tobacco smoke by drawing it from a combustion bowl through a water-filled reservoir in the base, typically made from a coconut shell, metal, jade, or glass. The smoker then inhaled the smoke through a long reed or flexible tube fitted with an interchangeable mouthpiece. Until the invention of flat-bottomed water-pipes in the early 18th century, support rings were needed to prevent the earlier spherical vessels from toppling over.
