Buff ware (Nishapur)

Buff ware is a glazed earthenware with a buff body, its decoration painted in black, yellow and green and then covered with a lead glaze; numerically it is one of the largest groups found at Nishapur. ¹ According to Wilkinson, nothing like it had come to light elsewhere until it was discovered at Nishapur in 1935. ¹

Three pieces later turned up among the Afrasiyab sherds in the Islamisches Museum, Berlin, probably imported from Nishapur; sherds were found at Gurgan, mostly imported from Nishapur, at Qumis between Semnan and Shahrud, and at Merv in a tenth-century level, where some appears to have been made locally. ¹

Wilkinson holds that the ware originated in Khurasan and owed nothing at first to Iraq, to the western Islamic lands or to Chinese centres; a late fifth- or sixth-century vase from Merv with seated figures suggests to him that the animate buff ware of Khurasan was, if not a continuation, at least a rebirth of an existing tradition. ¹ It uses birds, animals and human beings as contemporary lustre ware of Iraq and Egypt did, but its style is its own; the non-representational forms of the later buff ware follow a fashion, from Syria and Egypt to Transoxiana, for a vermicular background behind the main design. ¹ The book divides it into animate and inanimate types. ¹