Bowl with Blue Bird and Rim Inscription

This bowl and a nearly identical one in shape (2002.50.79) have on their rims the same repeated words in stylized Kufic script— perhaps interpretable as the Arabic al-dawla (wealth). Similarly shaped and decorated bowls are attributed to late twelfth-or thirteenth-century Iran; although both of these bowls are reassembled from many fragments and show degradation of the glaze, the results of thermoluminescence analysis on one of them (2002.50.81) suggest that they are both of relatively recent manufacture.