The Early Islamic Pottery from the Monastery at al-Qusur

Abstract

The pottery discovered at al-Qusur (Failaka Island, Kuwait) is of first importance to clarify thedating of the Christian settlements of the Arab-Persian Gulf. Firstly attributed to the Sasanianperiod by their excavators on the base of pottery and stucco studies, theses sites were thenattributed to the Early Islamic period by other scholars according to the artefacts published.Complete catalogues of the materiel unearthed on these sites are still lacking. This article offers afirst overview of the pottery discovered at al-Qu??r by the French Mission in Kuwait in 1988–1989and in 2007–2009 in two buildings identified as two churches (A1 and A2), two courtyard houses(B1 and B8), and seven isolated buildings (B2–B7 and B9). The corpus was incomplete due to theloss of sherds from 1988 and 1989 campaigns during the Gulf war and to the treatment of partof the pottery discovered from 2007 to 2009. If quantification was meaningless and petrographyimpossible, this corpus reflects the cultural proximity of the site with Mesopotamia and Persiaand diagnostic sherds such as pitchers with gouged lines or pointed circles with incised lines andgouged motifs, stamped sherds, carinated turquoise-glazed cups, attest that the main occupationof the site is related to an Early Islamic period. This dating is consistent with other Christian sitesin the region, contradicting both Arabic and Syriac sources that propounded the disappearanceof Christianity as soon as the beginnings of Islam.