Bowl

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

These sherds were once part of a shallow bowl with a concave base. They are made of reddish-brown clay which has been burnish, and wheel marks indicate the bowl was made on a potter’s wheel. They were excavated at Tepe Nush-i Jan, an Iron Age hilltop site about 60 km sound of Hamadan in western Iran. Nush-i Jan is generally associated with the Medes, an Iranian people known from Assyrian, Achaemenid and Biblical sources. However, the site was evidently reoccupied in the Parthian period, probably between the 1st century B.C. and the 1st century A.D., to period to which this bowl dates. It is a distinctive type of Parthian pottery, known from other sites in Mesopotamia and iran, to which archaeologists have given the charming name of ‘cinnamon ware.’

Ancient Near Eastern Art

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Met's Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art cares for approximately 7,000 works ranging in date from the eighth millennium B.C. through the centuries just beyond the emergence of Islam in the seventh century A.D. Objects in the collection were created by people in the area that today comprises Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Syria, the Eastern Mediterranean coast, Yemen, and Central Asia. From the art of some of the world's first cities to that of great empires, the department's holdings illustrate the beauty and craftsmanship as well as the profound interconnections, cultural and religious diversity, and lasting legacies that characterize the ancient art of this vast region.

Metropolitan Museum of Art