EARLYMEDIEVAL ISLAMIC POTTERY: THE ELEVENTH CENTURY RECONSIDERED

Abstract

In the spring of 1977, George Bass (then the president and now the archaeological director of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology at Texas A & M University) began in Serge Limani, a small natural harbor on the southern Turkish coast just opposite Rhodes, the excavation of a shipwreck lying under one hundred and ten feet of water. The results achieved during the three seasons of retrieval at this beautiful site are revolutionizing our view of early medieval Islamic art owing to the fact that the wreck is not only a time capsule of a single voyage, it is a datable one. Coins of the Byzantine emperor Basil II and gold coins and glass coin weights of the Fatimid caliphs al-Hakim and al-Zahir were among the objects brought up by the team of divers and the latest among these, three of the weights, permit us to pinpoint the ship's sinking to ca. 1025. Thus, the wreck is serving as an invaluable tool for the archaeologist and art historian alike.' The most important cargo on this merchant ship was its glass. However, it was also carrying arms, metalwork, jewelry, wooden objects, two pairs of small rotary millstones, a small amount of arsenic ore, one or more perishable cargoes which have disappeared, and various types of pottery. The largest single ceramic group consisted of one hundred and ten amphoras which are of the Byzantine type in common use between the ninth and eleventh centuries. Besides these and other