Chapter X: Pottery

The only pottery now made in Egypt is the porous unglazed ware, made principally at Ballasa, Kiné, and Semenhūd, which is used for water- bottles and utensils for the kitchen, and the roughly glazed variety of Asyūt, which is chiefly made for coffee-cups and ornaments, pipes, ash- trays, &c. Both are of red earth (or, the latter, sometimes black, as fig. 99), and are turned on the ordinary wheel. The ornament, when there is any, is coarse, but the forms are generally simple and graceful. Some of the shapes of the common porous drinking-bottles are singularly pure, and might serve as models to the most finished potter of Europe.[82]

No fine pottery is now made in Egypt with the floral decoration and pure siliceous glaze, such as we see in the well-known Damascus and Rhodian pottery. It is even a disputed point whether any of the tiles which adorn the mosques and houses of Cairo were made there, and some critics would have all fine earthenware to have been imported from Damascus and Persia. The mere fact that no fine pottery is now made in Cairo is no argument against its having been made there formerly. Anyone who will wander among the rubbish mounds of Old Cairo (Fustāt), after a high wind has disturbed the sand, will be rewarded by picking up fragments of glazed earthenware of a great variety of styles. These are the potsherds of former centuries, for no ware like these can be discovered in the present day. That these fragments represent wares actually made at Fustāt, is proved by the fact that the “cockspurs” or clay tripods, upon which they were placed during the firing, are found with them; and that they were made before the almost total destruction of Fustāt by fire in 1168 is at least probable, from their abundance and the absence of any similar ware made in Cairo at later periods. Many of these fragments have a gold or copper lustre; others are decorated with streaks of red and white; and a large proportion show coarse black designs on a turquoise or blue-green ground, resembling the ancient black and blue ware of Syria. It is only natural to conclude that the Saracens (or their subjects), who cultivated the potter’s art with remarkable success in Persia and Syria, should have carried the same proficiency to so important a city of their empire as Cairo.

Fortunately there are a few references to Egyptian pottery scattered among the works of the historians and travellers of the East, though much fewer than could be desired. The most important is the statement of Nāsir-i-Khusrau, who visited Egypt in the middle of the eleventh century of our Era. “At Misr” (i.e. Fustāt), he writes, “they make earthenware of all kinds, so fine and diaphanous that one can see one’s hand through it. They make bowls, cups, plates, and other vessels; decorate them with colours resembling [the iridescent stuff called] Būkalamūn, so that the shades change according to the position in which the vessel is held.”[83] This can only refer to an iridescent ware like the fragments found among the rubbish mounds of Fustāt, which have the metallic lustre described by Nāsir-i-Khusrau, and are painted with arabesque designs, inscriptions (unhappily not indicative of date), and sometimes with figures of animals. The fragments, however, are not translucent, as was the ware described by the Persian traveller; but this may be explained by the likelihood of the more fragile ware having been reduced almost to powder, and thus escaping observation. The fact remains that fine pottery was manufactured at or near Cairo in the eleventh century; and this point once established, there is no reason to seek for a different source for many of the tiles that are found in the decoration of the mosques and houses.

Tiles were the Saracenic substitute for mosaic. The last was used in mosques and palaces, though not to cover the upper portions of the walls; but for private houses, and sometimes for mosques, a cheaper substitute was found in siliceous glazed tiles. We find them commonly in the dados of the reception-rooms in the better class of houses. How early they were introduced is not known, but the coating of the remarkable minarets of the mosque of En-Nāsir Mohammad in the citadel of Cairo is of glazed blue tiles, and this carries them back to the first quarter of the fourteenth century. It is worth noting that the Egyptians call wall-tiles _Kāshāny_, “pertaining to Kāshān,” a Persian city, and the name points to the possible derivation of Syrian and Cairene faience from the early lustred earthenware of Persia. The fragments picked up at Fustāt, however, bear little resemblance to the early Persian ware, nor have the devices of the later Damascus and Cairo tiles much in common with the golden arabesques of the true Persian. There is nothing to prove that the Persian pottery was the parent of the Cairene: it is equally possible that the Fustāt fragments represent the origin of the Persian wares. But wherever the art originated, it is reasonable to assume that the Tartar invaders of Egypt in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries brought with them the idea of coating the walls of a tomb or house with tiles, such as they had seen on their route through Persia. The usual dates of the Persian star-shaped tiles are of the thirteenth century. This would give sufficient time for the art to be carried to Cairo by the Mamlūks, and used for the decoration of En-Nāsir’s mosque in 1318. It is true that the Cairo tiles are not star-shaped, nor do they resemble their Persian contemporaries in colour or general treatment; they are not lustred, nor have they inscriptions or dates. Moreover, the potter’s art was practised successfully in Egypt in the days of the Pharaohs. Still, the notion of _using tiles as wall coverings_ may have come from the Persian tombs, though the material and process had long been familiar. It was in the adaptation and revival of old arts that the Saracens excelled.

Which of the numerous varieties of tiles, still to be seen _in situ_ on the walls of Cairo buildings, are of native manufacture is a problem which does not appear likely to be solved until we have discovered tiles inscribed with names or dates, or obtained some fresh historical evidence. Some of the designs are so obviously akin to those known to have been made at Damascus, that it seems difficult to resist the conclusion that they were imported from that city. There is, however, another explanation of the similarity which is equally probable. It was, we know, the custom of the Mamlūk and other princes to send to various distant cities for artists and workmen, when they contemplated the erection of a great mosque or palace. We read of painters brought to Cairo from Basra and Wāsit, in Mesopotamia; of artisans furnished by the Greek Emperor to the Khalifs at Damascus; of a Cairo mason, sent in 1287 by Kalaūn, to chisel that Sultan’s name on a mosque then being built by Baraka Khan in the Crimea; of an architect of Tebrīz, who built the two minarets of the mosque of Kūsūn, at Cairo, on the model of the minaret set up in Tebrīz by Khwāja ‘Aly Shāh, the Vizīr of the Mongol King of Persia Abū-Sa‘īd. This principle of collecting workmen from the chief centres of their arts may have operated in producing the mixed character of the tile-work of Cairo. Potters may have been brought from Damascus, Brūsa, Kutahia, and the other centres of tile-work, to ornament the mosques and houses of Cairo, and this would account for the purely Damascus patterns which we frequently see. Sometimes, no doubt, the tiles were actually imported. Ibn-Sa‘īd tells us that quantities of _azulejos_ (a word formed from the Persian _lazūrd_, lapis lazuli) were exported from Andalusia, and the mosque of Sheykū at Cairo was decorated with these Moorish tiles, some of which are now in the South Kensington Museum (St. Maurice Collection). In a similar way, the Lady Chapel of St. Mary Redcliffe, at Bristol, is paved with _azulejos_, which formed the cargo of a ship captured off the coast.

What has now been said will show that it is not easy to decide which tiles may be ascribed to the native potteries of Cairo. Some general principles, based on observation of prevailing types, may however be laid down. It is supposed, with some show of reason, that the thinner tiles are Cairene; as distinguished from the thick ware of Damascus. The Cairo colouring appears to be chiefly blue, in two shades, dark and turquoise, and the designs are floral, but simpler than those of Damascus. Puce and sage-green (typical tints of Damascus) are not among the colours of the Cairene tile potter. We do not find such large panels of tile-work at Cairo as in Syria, nor are the individual tiles larger than about ten inches square. In point of firing, the Cairo tiles are less flat and more often crackled than those of Damascus, and the tints often run into one another.

Some fine examples of Cairo tiles, or what are supposed to be such, are illustrated in Prisse d’Avenne’s _L’Art Arabe_. Plates 119 and 120 show the magnificent tiled wall of the mosque of Āksunkur, built in A.H. 747-8 (1347). El-Makrīzy tells us that this mosque was built of stone, with a vaulted roof, and was paved with marble. Āksunkur himself took a share in the labour. In 815 the Amīr Tughān added a fountain in the middle of the court, the water of which was supplied by a wheel turned by an ox; the fountain was covered by a roof resting on marble columns, which the Amīr took from the mosque of El-Khandak, which he had pulled down. But the historian provokingly says nothing about the tiles, and we are forced to believe that, as he could hardly have omitted to mention so salient and almost unique a feature if it had existed in his time, the tiles must have been inserted when Ibrāhīm Āghā restored the mosque in 1652. No more splendid example of the use of tiles in large surfaces can be seen in Cairo. It is impossible to give any idea of this magnificent wall, covered with tiles from top to bottom, and displaying the typical Cairene pattern of blue flowers and leaves in the utmost perfection. The _sebīls_ or street fountains, are also sometimes lined with beautiful tiles; for example, that of ‘Abd-er-Rahmān Kikhya, erected in the eighteenth century. Other tiles of Cairo style may be seen in the South Kensington Museum. I succeeded myself in bringing back, in 1883, several batches of tiles of identical pattern, with a view to showing their effect when combined in large surfaces; and there can be little doubt that these long series were made at the city where they were found, and probably by native potters. Cairo tiles, like those of Damascus, are bevelled at the edges, to allow the thick plaster bed in which they are set to penetrate between them at the back and thus give a hold, and also to save trouble in exactly squaring the edges.

We have not attempted to assign dates to any given tiles, except those of the mosque of En-Nāsir, for the sufficient reason that any such attempt must be entirely hypothetical. It is not easy to say which tiles are really of Cairo make; but it is even more difficult to assign any fixed date to them. The Ibrāhīm Āghā tiles are, indeed, probably of the date of the restoration in the seventeenth century; but the same patterns seem to have been copied for so long a period that these, even if the date were absolutely certain, would form no safe guide as to the date of other tiles of the same pattern.

Of other pottery than tiles, except the fragments found among the rubbish mounds, there is very little that can be safely attributed to Cairo. An opaque white ware of a creamy glaze, of which there are specimens in the South Kensington Museum, is said to be Cairene; and I am disposed to ascribe certain coarse blue and white dishes, with floral patterns, of which two are in the St. Maurice Collection, to Cairo potters, chiefly because they came from Cairo, and are unlike any other known ware of the East.