Seljuk housewives dusting minai bibelots?

This year’s Yarshater lectures were about Images and Decor in the Persianate World. I especially liked Prof Yves Porter’s review of minai. As the professor noted, both minai and lustre pots are not fluid (or food or indeed anything-much)-proof. So the ceramics are not that functional. They just look pretty. Prof Porter created a delightful mental picture of Seljuk housewives dusting a shelf full of bibelots.

From the Fitzwilliam Museum: showing Azadeh trampled as well as on the camel

More academically, he talked about images of Bahram Gur and Azazadeh. And about how common these were on minai bowls. Bahram Gur was based on the Sasanian King Bahram V and is well known from Nizami’s Khamsa – and the tale of the seven princesses (Haft Paykar).

From the Met: showing the deer shot through the ear and the foot with one arrow

Prof Porter, though, focused on images of Bahram Gur with Azazadeh, the slave girl who was the ‘hearts delight and desire’ of the prince. These images, unusually, sometimes show two elements of the narrative at once: the beauty sitting on the back of the prince’s camel; and her being trampled underfoot after she suggested  Bahram’s hunting success was due to demonic powers. This accusation questioned the prince’s farr – the royal charisma indispensible for a legitimate Persian ruler, and demonstrated by a successful hunt.

Prof Porter was discussing these bowls (there are tiles too, for example in the V&A) as examples of narrative of ceramics. And the images are certainly immediately recognisable. But I wondered whether the ‘housewives’ – and their husbands – were looking at Bahram Gur (being kingly), or Azadeh (being put in her place)? The union of a slave girl and a prince, according to the social outlook of the Shahnameh, was after all just as absurd as Azadeh’s name, which means ‘free’ or ‘noble’.

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