# Ewer > Unknown metalworker(s), Khurasan or Herat workshop tradition - ca. 1180-1210 > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/artworks/unknown-khurasan-herat-metalworkers-ewer-44-15/met-ewer-khurasan-herat-44-15/ > Published by Servola Systems GmbH. Last verified: 2026-09-06 ## Tombstone - **Artist:** Unknown metalworker(s), Khurasan or Herat workshop tradition - **Date:** ca. 1180-1210 - **Medium:** Brass; raised and repousse-worked, inlaid with silver and a black compound - **Dimensions:** Height 15 3/4 in. (40 cm); diameter 7 1/2 in. (19.1 cm) - **Object type:** Islamic metalwork - **Period:** Islamic, Khurasan/Herat, late 12th-early 13th century - **Current location:** Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, on view at The Met Fifth Avenue, Gallery 453 - **Attribution:** accepted ## Summary A brass ewer raised from a single sheet, fluted into thirteen panels and inlaid with silver and a black compound, made around 1180-1210 somewhere in Khurasan or at Herat itself, then under Ghurid rather than Seljuq rule. Each flute carries a zodiac sign paired with its ruling planet, and the shoulder bears a pair of crowned, addorsed harpies rare even within its own small comparanda group of similarly shaped long-necked ewers.It carries no maker's signature, no patron's dedication and no date, only benedictions to an unnamed 'owner' and, on one 2012 reading of the base that an earlier 1978 reading does not corroborate, a possible owner's name: Fulad b. Mirak. It surfaces in the historical record already in the collection of the financier J. Pierpont Morgan, who died in 1913; unlike most of Morgan's Islamic and decorative holdings, which were either given to the Metropolitan in 1917 or sold off by his son for cash, this ewer sat in the estate for another twenty-seven years before the Museum purchased it outright in 1944. ## 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. - **ca. 1180-1210-by 1913** Unknown `[unknown]` (manufacture and unrecorded circulation) No owner, dealer or location is documented between manufacture in Khurasan or at Herat and the ewer's appearance in J. Pierpont Morgan's New York collection by the time of his death in 1913. Whether it left the region during the Mongol invasions of the 1220s, was exported earlier as part of ordinary trade, or left far later via the nineteenth or early twentieth-century art market is not established by any source consulted. - **by 1913-1913** J. Pierpont Morgan, New York `[documented]` (ownership documented at death) The Metropolitan's own provenance line records the ewer in Morgan's ownership until his death. Morgan died in Rome on 31 March 1913. No source consulted names the dealer, sale or date by which Morgan acquired this specific piece, though he was by then the Metropolitan's most important trustee and donor, having given or bequeathed several thousand objects to the Museum in his lifetime. - **1913-1944** Estate of J. Pierpont Morgan `[documented]` (held in the estate) The Met's provenance line records the ewer as remaining in Morgan's estate from 1913 until its sale to the Museum in 1944, a gap of thirty-one years. This does not match the two paths taken by most of Morgan's collection after his death: about forty percent of it was donated to the Metropolitan by his son J. P. Morgan Jr. in 1917, and much of the remainder was sold by Jack Morgan for liquidity. Why this ewer took neither path, and where it was physically kept for three decades, is not explained in the sources consulted. - **1944-present** Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York `[documented]` (purchase) Purchased by the Metropolitan Museum of Art with the Rogers Fund in 1944, accession number 44.15. First published by the Museum the following year. Currently on permanent view in Gallery 453. The purchase price has not been published in the sources consulted. ## Open questions - Was this ewer made in Khurasan generally or at Herat specifically? No inscription, findspot or workshop mark settles the question; the attribution rests entirely on comparison with a small number of related, mostly undated vessels. - Is Abdullah Ghouchani's 2012 reading of an owner's name, Fulad b. Mirak, on the underside of the base correct? Yasser al-Tabba's earlier 1978 reading of the same inscriptions does not report this name, and the Museum's own record presents both readings without resolving them. - Was the substitution of Saturn for Mercury as the ruling planet of Virgo a mistake by the metalworker, or, as Sheila Canby suggested in 2016, a deliberate reference to the horoscope of the ewer's unidentified original owner? - Given the object's proposed date range of ca. 1180-1210 spans the last decades of Ghurid control of Herat and the years immediately before the Khwarazmian takeover of the region (completed by about 1215), can the ewer be placed more precisely within that political transition, or tied to one regime rather than the other? - How and from whom did J. Pierpont Morgan acquire this ewer, and when? No source consulted names a dealer, a sale, or even an approximate decade of acquisition. - Why did this ewer remain in the Morgan estate for twenty-seven years after his son's 1917 donation of a large portion of the collection to the Metropolitan, when it was neither included in that gift nor sold off with the pieces Jack Morgan liquidated for cash, before finally being purchased by the Museum in 1944? - What is the actual chemical composition of the black compound used as the inlay ground? The Museum's own materials description avoids the word niello and gives no analysis; whether it matches niello proper or is a different mastic-type filler used elsewhere in this school of metalwork is not established in the sources consulted. ## Sources - [1] Metropolitan Museum of Art, 'Ewer', object 450513, accession 44.15 - Overview, Catalogue Entry, Signatures/Inscriptions/Markings, Provenance, Exhibition History and References tabs. - [2] Metropolitan Museum of Art Collection API (Open Access), object record for objectID 450513. - [3] Sheila R. Canby, in Sheila R. Canby, Deniz Beyazit, and Martina Rugiadi, Court and Cosmos: The Great Age of the Seljuqs (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2016), no. 118, pp. 200-201, figs. 79-81. Catalogue entry text reproduced on the object's own Met page (source 1). - [4] Maurice S. Dimand, 'Saljuk Bronzes from Khurasan', The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, n.s., vol. 4 (November 1945), pp. 87-92. Cited in the object's References tab (source 1); full text not independently retrieved. - [5] Stefano Carboni, Following the Stars: Images of the Zodiac in Islamic Art, exh. cat. (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1997), no. 9, pp. 24-25. Cited and partly quoted (footnote on the Virgo/Saturn substitution) in the object's Catalogue Entry (source 1); full text not independently retrieved. - [6] Metropolitan Museum of Art, 'Astronomy and Astrology in the Medieval Islamic World', Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. This ewer (object 450513) is used as the illustrative example for the essay's discussion of talismanic zodiac imagery. - [7] AramcoWorld, 'When Metalsmiths Found Their Groove' (2023), on Khurasan/Herat silver-inlay technique, the Bobrinski Bucket, and the post-1220 diaspora of metalworkers to Mosul, Syria and Anatolia. - [8] Metropolitan Museum of Art, 'The Museum, ca. 1913: Celebrating J. Pierpont Morgan's Legacy', Perspectives, April 10, 2014. - [9] Wikipedia, 'J. P. Morgan', for the general account of the 1917 Metropolitan donation (about 40 percent of the collection) and the sale of other portions by J. P. Morgan Jr. Tertiary source, flagged for replacement with a scholarly biography or the Metropolitan's own institutional history of the Morgan bequests. --- 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.