# The Blacas Ewer > Shuja ibn Man'a al-Mawsili - Rajab 629 AH / April-May 1232 CE > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/artworks/shuja-ibn-mana-al-mawsili/blacas-ewer-british-museum/ > Published by Servola Systems GmbH. Last verified: 2026-08-13 ## Tombstone - **Artist:** Shuja ibn Man'a al-Mawsili - **Date:** Rajab 629 AH / April-May 1232 CE - **Medium:** Sheet brass, hammered to a faceted body, engraved and inlaid with silver and copper - **Dimensions:** 30.4 x 22 x 21.5 cm (height x width x depth) - **Object type:** Islamic metalwork - **Period:** Zengid/early Ayyubid Jazira, thirteenth century - **Current location:** British Museum, London - **Attribution:** accepted ## Summary A brass ewer hammered to a faceted body and inlaid with silver and copper, made in Mosul and signed and dated by its maker, Shuja ibn Man'a al-Mawsili, to Rajab 629 AH (April-May 1232 CE). Nothing else is known of him beyond this one inscription. The ewer's medallions carry the standard courtly repertoire of the period, hunting, feasting, music and a scene from the Persian Shahnama, cut across a fretwork ground, and it is missing its original spout and foot.It entered the British Museum in 1866-67 as part of the wholesale purchase of the Blacas family's collection of antiquities, a deal negotiated in France by Charles Newton and funded by a Parliamentary vote of just under 46,000 pounds. Its documented history before that reaches back only to a Blacas-owned publication of 1828; the roughly six centuries before that are unrecorded.Because it combined a firm date, a named maker and an explicit Mosul origin, all on the object itself, it became one of the fixed points D.S. Rice used from 1949 onward to build the chronology now associated with the term 'Mosul school'. That category is no longer treated as settled: Julian Raby's 2012 reassessment tested the corpus attribution by attribution rather than accepting the school as a single unit, and a second Mosul-inscribed object, a pen box of 1255-56, ended this ewer's uniqueness as the sole example in 1997. What the ewer actually says, and where exactly it says it, remains only partly recovered in the sources available to this record; the maker's name and the date are certain, the full inscription text is not. ## 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. - **Rajab 629 AH / 1232 CE** Made by Shuja ibn Man'a al-Mawsili, Mosul `[documented]` (manufacture) Date and maker are given in the object's own signed inscription. Any original patron or first owner is not named on the object and is not documented. - **1232-by 1828** Unknown `[unknown]` (gap) No owner, location or transaction is documented for approximately six centuries between the ewer's manufacture and its appearance in a Blacas-owned publication. - **by 1828-1866** The Blacas d'Aulps family collection, most probably assembled or held at this date by Pierre-Louis de Blacas d'Aulps, 1st Duc de Blacas d'Aulps (1770/71-1839) `[documented]` (collection) The ewer's presence in the Blacas cabinet by 1828 rests on Wikipedia's account of the ewer (citing Raby 2012), which this record read; this record independently confirmed the existence, title, publisher and date of Reinaud's 1828 catalogue of the Blacas cabinet but did not read that catalogue's text directly to confirm the ewer's specific entry. Attribution to the 1st Duc rather than his son (2nd Duc, 1815-1866, aged 13 in 1828) follows from the son's age and the catalogue's title-page attribution to 'M. le duc de Blacas', but is not itself independently documented and secondary sources are inconsistent on the two men's names; see open_questions. - **1866-1866-67** Heirs of Louis, 2nd Duc de Blacas d'Aulps (d. Venice, 1866) `[documented]` (inheritance and sale) The 2nd Duc died in Venice in 1866; his heirs sold the family's antiquities, coins, gems and vases as a single collection. Secondary literature gives the price to the family as 1,200,000 French francs; this record did not independently reconcile that figure against the sterling figures in the Parliamentary record. - **1866-67-present** British Museum, London `[documented]` (purchase) Purchased by the British Museum following an examination of the collection in France by Charles Newton. An initial government offer of 45,000 pounds was refused; the sale concluded at 48,000 pounds, reduced by 2,221 pounds for reserved duplicates, for a final recorded expenditure of 45,721 pounds, debated in the House of Commons on 18 February 1867. Registered under the Museum's Blacas-collection accession numbers; this object is 1866,1229.61. ## Open questions - What is the complete Arabic text of the inscription, and what published English translation exists? Only the maker's name and the date are consistently reported across the sources this record could access; no full transcription or translation was located. - Which Duke of Blacas actually assembled or held the ewer before 1828? Reasoning from the 1828 date of Reinaud's catalogue points to the 1st Duc, Pierre-Louis de Blacas d'Aulps (1770/71-1839), but secondary sources give overlapping names for father and son and this record could not resolve the ambiguity from a specialist genealogy or a direct reading of Reinaud. - Where was the ewer, and in whose hands, between its manufacture in 1232 and its appearance in a Blacas-owned publication in 1828? No owner is documented for roughly six centuries. - Was the ewer in fact made for or connected to Badr al-Din Lu'lu'? No inscription on the object names a patron; the attribution is a scholarly inference from date, quality and comparison to other Mosul metalwork that does carry his name, and should not be read as settled. - When and how did the ewer lose its original spout and foot? Not documented in any source consulted. - Does niello appear anywhere on this object, and if so what is its current condition? The sources consulted describe silver and copper inlay only; niello is documented elsewhere in Mosul-period metalwork but not confirmed here either way. - What does the British Museum's own current catalogue and conservation file say about the piece? This record could not access britishmuseum.org or research.britishmuseum.org directly and relied on the Museum's Islamic Gallery microsite and partner projects instead; a fuller check against the Museum's own record is needed. - What did Rice's 1950 and 1957 articles actually argue, in his own words? This record could confirm their existence, titles and place of publication but could not read their full text, and relied on how later scholarship describes them. ## Sources - [1] British Museum, Islamic Gallery collection microsite, 'The Blacas ewer', object RRM9747. - [2] Museum With No Frontiers, Discover Islamic Art virtual museum, 'Ewer' [the Blacas Ewer], entry attributed to Emily Shovelton (2014), object ISL;uk;Mus01;12;en. - [3] Google Arts and Culture, 'The Blacas Ewer', British Museum partner content. - [4] Wikipedia, 'Blacas ewer', consolidating and citing Deniz Beyazit, 'The Blacas ewer', in Court and Cosmos: The Great Age of the Seljuqs (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2016), p. 75; Julian Raby, 'The Principle of Parsimony and the Problem of the Mosul School of Metalwork', in Metalwork and Material Culture in the Islamic World, ed. Porter and Rosser-Owen (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012), pp. 11-85; and Jonathan Bloom and Sheila Blair, Islamic Arts (London: Phaidon, 1997), p. 275. Tertiary source; this record read Wikipedia directly but did not read the Beyazit, Raby or Bloom/Blair texts it cites in full. Flagged for replacement with those primary catalogue and scholarly sources. - [5] Wikipedia, 'Badr al-Din Lu'lu'', for his rise to power, the date of his formal rule, and the Ibn Sa'id quotation on Mosul's inlaid-brass export trade. Tertiary source, flagged for replacement with a scholarly biography of Badr al-Din Lu'lu' and a scholarly edition of Ibn Sa'id. - [6] Wikipedia, 'Blacas', for the family's names, titles and life dates across the 1st and 2nd Ducs. Tertiary source, and itself internally inconsistent on the full names of father and son; flagged for replacement with a specialist genealogical or biographical source. - [7] Wikipedia, 'Louis, Duke of Blacas', for the 2nd Duc's death in Venice in 1866 and the sale of the collection to the British Museum in 1867 for 1,200,000 francs. Tertiary source, flagged for replacement with a primary or scholarly account. - [8] UK Parliament, Historic Hansard, House of Commons, 'Supply considered in Committee', 18 February 1867 - the Parliamentary debate and Vote for the purchase of the Blacas collection. - [9] Bibliotheque nationale de France, Catalogue general, bibliographic record for Joseph-Toussaint Reinaud, Description des monumens musulmans du cabinet de M. le duc de Blacas (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1828), 2 vols. Consulted for the catalogue's existence, exact title, publisher and date only; its text and plates were not read for this record. - [10] Bulle Tuil-Leonetti, review of Julian Raby, 'The Principle of Parsimony and the Problem of the Mosul School of Metalwork', in Abstracta Iranica. - [11] Wikipedia, 'Bobrinski Bucket', for the comparandum object's maker, date, and place of manufacture (Herat, 1163 CE). Tertiary source, flagged for replacement with the State Hermitage Museum's own catalogue. - [12] Bibliographic record for D.S. Rice, 'The Brasses of Badr al-Din Lu'lu'', Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, vol. 13 (1950), pp. 627-634. Existence, title, journal and pagination confirmed via library and publisher indexes; full text not read for this record. - [13] Bibliographic record for D.S. Rice, 'Inlaid Brasses from the Workshop of Ahmad al-Dhaki al-Mawsili', Ars Orientalis, vol. 2 (1957), pp. 283-326. Existence, title, journal and pagination confirmed via library indexes; full text not read for this record. --- 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.