Internet Archaeology. 9. Mason & Gonnella. 1

1.0 Introduction

From the late 11th through to the 16th centuries AD, Syria was one of the foremost regions of ceramic production in Islamic lands. Here were made some of the technically most advanced ceramics in the world, with bodies of a siliceous paste known as stonepaste, and a complex variety of glazes and decorations. Syria included centres making the prestigious lustre-ware types, the technique having been handed on from Iraq and Egypt and which was passed on to Iran from Syria. Lustre-wares were made using an already-fired vessel which was painted with the lustre pigment, an amalgam of copper, silver, iron oxides and an earthy mounting medium, and then fired again at a low temperature to allow the metals to fuse to the vessel surface. In Syria was also developed the new technology of painting with pigments under the glaze, a technology which would eventually be passed on to China and Europe (Mason 1997).

Unlike earlier Iraq and Egypt, or contemporary Iran, Syria did not have a single great centre of ceramic production which dominated all the rest, and which was the only production centre for lustre-wares. Damascus, Raqqa, and a number of other sites are known to have been important production centres, while unassigned petrographically-defined fabrics, or petrofabrics, indicate yet further unidentified sites of production (Mason 1997). Although a great deal of work has already been completed on Syrian stonepaste wares this has mostly been undertaken on samples from sites outside of Syria, such as Fustat in Egypt, or on material obtained through dealers and not reliably attributed. Ongoing research on the production of ceramics in Syria during this time is aimed at sampling pottery from Syria itself. Amongst the first of these Syrian sites to be studied is Aleppo. The pottery from this site does not include the full range of ceramic types or known Syrian petrofabrics, and so for the sake of completeness in this overview paper, research on pottery from other sites is also included.