# The Bobrinski Bucket > Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahid (caster) and Mas'ud ibn Ahmad (inlayer) - Muharram 559 AH / December 1163 CE > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/artworks/muhammad-ibn-abd-al-wahid-and-masud-ibn-ahmad/bobrinski-bucket-hermitage/ > Published by Servola Systems GmbH. Last verified: 2026-08-08 ## Tombstone - **Artist:** Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahid (caster) and Mas'ud ibn Ahmad (inlayer) - **Date:** Muharram 559 AH / December 1163 CE - **Medium:** Cast bronze (brass alloy), inlaid with silver and copper - **Dimensions:** Height 18.5 cm (7.3 in); no further dimensions were published in the sources consulted - **Object type:** Islamic metalwork - **Period:** Khurasan under Seljuq rule, mid-twelfth century (Herat workshop tradition) - **Current location:** State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, Russia - **Attribution:** accepted ## Summary A small bronze bucket, cast and inlaid with silver and copper in Herat, in the Khurasan region of present-day Afghanistan, and dated by its own inscription to Muharram 559 AH, December 1163 CE. Three separate inscriptions across its handle, rim and body name the two craftsmen who made it, the man who commissioned it, and the Herat merchant it was made for - a rare and complete run of documentation that makes it one of the earliest firmly dated and signed pieces of Islamic inlaid metalwork, and the fixed point against which an entire undated corpus of twelfth- and thirteenth-century Khurasan bronzes has been classified and dated ever since Richard Ettinghausen's foundational 1943 study.What the bucket was actually for remains disputed: a bath vessel, a food container, a pilgrimage souvenir, a gift, or, in the interpretation now most widely accepted, a showpiece commissioned to demonstrate a workshop's new repertoire of courtly and astrological imagery. It is named for Count Aleksei Aleksandrovich Bobrinsky, who owned a group of Kufic-inscribed metal objects acquired in Bukhara around 1885; how the bucket itself travelled the roughly 800 kilometres from Herat to Bukhara over the intervening seven centuries is not recorded. It entered the State Hermitage Museum in 1925, transferred from the Soviet successor to the Imperial Archaeological Commission that Bobrinsky had once chaired, while Bobrinsky himself was living in emigration in France.No free-licence modern photograph of the object was located for this record. The single image available is a black-and-white plate from the catalogue of the landmark 1910 Munich exhibition of Islamic art masterpieces, taken while the bucket was still in the Bobrinsky family's own hands. ## Provenance Every link carries a grade. `documented` means a cited source supports it, `disputed` means the identification is argued but not established, `unknown` means we have no owner for that span and have not bridged it. - **1163** Rukn ad-Din Rashid ad-Din Azizi ibn Abu'l-Husayn az-Zanjani `[documented]` (commission and completion) Made in Herat for the merchant Rukn ad-Din az-Zanjani, on the order of Abd al-Rahman ibn Abdallah al-Rashidi, by the caster Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahid and the inlayer Mas'ud ibn Ahmad. Dated by its own inscription to Muharram 559 AH, December 1163 CE. - **1163-c. 1885** Unknown `[unknown]` (gap) No owner, findspot or location is documented for roughly seven centuries between the bucket's completion in Herat and its appearance in the Bukhara antiquities trade in the 1880s. - **c. 1885-1917** Count Aleksei Aleksandrovich Bobrinsky `[documented]` (purchase) Secondary sources place a group of Kufic-inscribed antique metal objects in Bobrinsky's hands as a result of purchases in Bukhara, with the acquisition recorded to 1885. Bobrinsky was chairman of the Imperial Archaeological Commission and had asked the Turkestan governor-general to route regional antiquities to St Petersburg. The specific transaction - dealer, direct find or intermediary - is not documented in the sources consulted. - **1917-1925** Uncertain (transitional) `[unknown]` (gap, likely nationalization) Bobrinsky left Russia after the October Revolution and settled in France, where he was active in monarchist emigre politics until his death in Grasse in 1927; he could not have personally delivered the bucket to a Soviet institution in 1925. The move from his private collection into Soviet state hands during this period is consistent with the well-documented nationalization of aristocratic property after 1917, but no source consulted for this record documents the specific act or date of confiscation. - **1925-present** State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg `[documented]` (transfer) Entered the Hermitage in 1925 by transfer from the State Academy for the History of Material Culture, the Soviet-era successor to the Imperial Archaeological Commission. Ex collection of A. A. Bobrinsky. Inventory number IR-2268. ## Open questions - What were the exact circumstances of Bobrinsky's acquisition of the bucket in Bukhara around 1885 - a dealer purchase, a direct find, or a local intermediary? Not documented in the sources consulted. - How did the bucket travel the roughly 800 kilometres from Herat to Bukhara between 1163 and the 1880s? No intermediate owner, findspot or route is recorded. - What specific mechanism moved the bucket from Bobrinsky's collection into the State Academy for the History of Material Culture between 1917 and its 1925 transfer to the Hermitage - formal nationalization of his personal property, or a transfer within an institutional collection already tied to the Commission he had chaired? - Who was Abd al-Rahman ibn Abdallah al-Rashidi, the man who ordered the bucket, and what was his relationship to the merchant Rukn ad-Din az-Zanjani for whom it was made? Not established beyond the names given in the inscription. - Does the inlayer Mas'ud ibn Ahmad carry the title 'hajji' (pilgrim) or 'hajib' (chamberlain) in the primary inscription reading? Secondary sources consulted for this record disagree, and the discrepancy could not be resolved without the original publication. - What was Herat's precise political status in December 1163 - still under Seljuq suzerainty, as the date would suggest, or already shifting toward Ghurid influence? Some non-scholarly sources label the object 'Ghurid,' but the Ghurids did not take Herat itself until 1175, twelve years later; this record treats that label as unconfirmed. - Has any modern conservation report, condition assessment or scientific and technical imaging study of the bucket been published? None was located in the sources consulted. - Has the bucket been lent for exhibition at any point since entering the Hermitage in 1925, beyond its documented appearance in the 1910 Munich exhibition while still in Bobrinsky's own collection? No exhibition history after 1925 was located. ## Sources - [1] Wikipedia, 'Bobrinski Bucket.' Tertiary source consolidating Blair (1998, 2014), Ward (1993), Ettinghausen (1943), Kana'an (2009), Hartner (1973), Flood and Necipoglu (2017), and Bloom and Blair (2009). Flagged for replacement with direct citation of those primary sources. - [2] Ettinghausen, Richard. 'The Bobrinski Kettle: Patron and Style of an Islamic Bronze.' Gazette des Beaux-Arts 24 (1943): 193-208. Full text hosted on Gallica but not directly accessible during this research; cited here as consolidated via Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Iranica. Flagged for direct verification. - [3] Kana'an, Ruba. 'The de Jure Artist of the Bobrinski Bucket: Production and Patronage of Metalwork in pre-Mongol Khurasan and Transoxiana.' Islamic Law and Society 16, no. 2 (2009): 175-201. Full text paywalled on JSTOR; cited here via Wikipedia's citation and secondary summaries. Flagged for direct verification. - [4] Blair, Sheila. Text and Image in Medieval Persian Art. Edinburgh University Press, 2014, pp. 78-83. - [5] Blair, Sheila. Islamic Inscriptions. New York University Press, 1998, pp. 110-121. - [6] Ward, Rachel. Islamic Metalwork. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1993, pp. 72-79. - [7] Hartner, Willy. 'The Vaso Vescovali in the British Museum: A Study on Islamic Astrological Iconography.' Kunst des Orients 9, no. 1/2 (1973): 112-130. - [8] Bloom, Jonathan M., and Sheila S. Blair. 'Metalwork.' The Grove Encyclopedia of Islamic Art and Architecture. Oxford University Press, 2009. - [9] Flood, Finbarr Barry, and Gulru Necipoglu, eds. A Companion to Islamic Art and Architecture. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2017, pp. 464-465. - [10] Encyclopaedia Iranica, 'Metalwork.' Covers the Bobrinski Bucket's role, alongside the Tiflis-area faceted ewer of 577/1181-82, as the two dated anchor pieces for attributing undated Khurasan metalwork to Herat, and cites Qazvini's testimony to Herat's contemporary reputation for inlaid brass. - [11] Wikidata, Q4935932, 'Bobrinski Bucket.' Records the inventory number IR-2268 and the 1925 transfer to the Hermitage from the State Academy for the History of Material Culture, ex collection A. A. Bobrinsky. - [12] Wikimedia Commons, File:Bobrinsky Bronzekessel.jpg, extmetadata record confirming public domain status and the 1910 Munich publication source. - [13] Martin, F. R., ed. Die Ausstellung von Meisterwerken muhammedanischer Kunst in Munchen 1910, vol. 3, fig. 143. Original publication of the photograph used as this record's lead image. - [14] Kornbluth Photography, 'Bobrinsky Bucket,' scholarly Islamic metalwork photo archive. Confirms inventory number IR-2268, dimensions, and iconographic register descriptions; also the source of the disputed 'Hajib' title for the inlayer, flagged as unresolved against the primary reading. - [15] Sotheby's, 'A Khurasan silver-inlaid ewer, Herat, 12th century,' lot essay. Source for the Tiflis Ewer comparandum: maker Mahmud ibn Muhammad, dated Sha'ban 577 AH/1181-82, Simon Janashia Museum of Georgia, Tbilisi. - [16] Wikipedia, 'Aleksei Bobrinsky (historian).' Confirms full name Aleksei Aleksandrovich Bobrinsky (1852-1927), his chairmanship of the Imperial Archaeological Commission, and his emigration to France after 1917. - [17] Document hosted on Neliti, apparent title fragment 'A History of Scientific Archeological Research' concerning Turkestan/Uzbekistan; full author and journal could not be independently confirmed. Cited only for the specific claim that Bobrinsky purchased Kufic-inscribed antique metal objects in Bukhara, with the acquisition recorded to 1885. Flagged for replacement with a verified primary citation. --- Images on this record are public domain or CC0 and are hosted by us. No image on this site is generated or simulated. If you quote this record, quote the provenance grades with it.