Tomb tile — Tile, Iran, 1710

Tomb tile in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (museum number 546-1878), made in Iran, dated 1710. The museum's brief description reads: Ceramic memorial stele, buff-coloured earthenware with inscriptions and decoration incised through slip under a clear amber-coloured glaze, Iran, dated 1710.. Museum description: Memorial stele with decoration on one side, probably intended to stand against a wall. The shape is an upright rectangle with rounded corners at the top, where a triangular upper section rises to a point. The body is earthenware, with a coat of slip under an amber glaze. The inscriptions and decoration were applied through the slip with a stylus. The main body of the stele is laid out as five horizontal pairs of cartouches, as though to receive five couplets of verse. Instead two couplets from a poem in Persian have been inserted into the first four pairs, with each line split between two cartouches. The name and death date of the deceased is recorded in Arabic at the very end of the fourth line and in the final two cartouches, with the date inserted below and then above the name of the deceased. Above the lines of text is a band of ornament (a diaper pattern), while the pairs of cartouches are divided by a central vertical band that is decorated with a continuous repeat pattern of… The museum records it as earthenware, measuring Height 32 cm; Width 24 cm; Depth 2.7 cm. These details come from the museum's own record; how far this object represents a wider collectible type has not yet been independently verified.