Bowl with geometric decoration,
4th-3rd century BCE.

National Museum of History,

Ashgabat, Turkmenistan.

 

Ladle, 3rd-4th century.

Ethnographic Institute of the

Academy of Sciences, Moscow.

 

 

The Middle Ages

 

In the beginning of the Middle Ages the heritage of antiquity was still alive, even though new decorative forms and solutions were developing. The ewers or mourgoba (literally “waterbird”) are quite original with their stylised bird shape, placed on a small hollow pedestal like a flattened cone. On one of the ewers, dating from the 12th century and discovered in Kuva (Ferghana Valley), the neck ends in the shape of a wild boar.

 

The unglazed ceramics of the 9th through 12th centuries are represented by high jugs, flat flasks, small bowls and cups decorated with animals, birds, and even men from time to time, in spite of the banning of graphic representations of living creatures by Islam. This decoration was engraved.

 

Engraved crockery was made in many towns of Mavera-un-Nahr, Khwarezm and Ferghana. The ornamentation of recipients from Merv in the 12th century is particularly rich: gray bowls with a delicate inside surface, small jugs with large necks of which the outside decoration seems to be woven. Their bellies were made of two halves cast on moulds and glued together afterwards. The designs of the decoration are extremely varied: plant shoots with fantastic tangles that form a background with bunting scenes, medallions with supernatural creatures: a winged sphinx with a woman’s face, birds with men’s heads, mermaids, and harpies. Their artistic interpretation is true to the folk nature of these representations.

 

The decorative style of these objects is based on the repetition of the rhythmical character of ornamental patterns. Epigraphic decorations appeared as well at the beginning of the Islamic period.