Abbasid tin-glazed ware

Arthur Lane notes that Arab authors named three kinds of Chinese ware, the "apricot-coloured", the "cream-coloured" and the "mottled", which finds suggest were the green Yüeh celadons, the creamy-white porcelain and the green-and-brown splashed stoneware, all of the T'ang period. ³ Imitations of the white porcelain were found at Samarra alongside the Chinese originals. ¹

The surface of Chinese porcelain could not be reproduced with a clear lead glaze over white slip, so the potters of Iraq used a device known earlier to the Egyptians: they mixed tin oxide into a modified lead glaze, making it opaque and white, which on a well-purified yellow or pinkish clay looked deceptively like porcelain. ¹ They then painted on the white surface with cobalt blue, copper green, manganese purple and sometimes antimony yellow, paint and glaze being fixed in one firing. ¹ Lane likens the soft absorption of cobalt into the glaze of the Tehran bowl to "ink on snow". ¹

Local varieties were made in Egypt and Syria without blue and with a coarser glaze, and many pieces found at Rayy, Istakhr and elsewhere are, for Lane, Iraqi imports betrayed by their materials. ^{1 2} The same factories, probably in or near Baghdad, made both the colour-painted and the lustre-painted wares, and their shapes were often copied from Chinese models. ^{2 4}