Zellij (Maghrebi tile mosaic)

Zellij is the ceramic mosaic used to pave and wainscot floors and walls in Morocco. Rexford Newcomb quotes Jean Gallotti's picture of the lanes of Fez, where a house going up is betrayed by a gravel of chips of coloured glazed terracotta, the debris of zellij, and where the courtyard rings with the steel hammers of the tile-setters trimming their pieces. ¹

Newcomb divides Moroccan decorative tilework into ceramic mosaic and painted tiles. Some mosaic is made of small squares, hexagons and other regular shapes, its pattern carried by colour; some is true mosaic, the pieces cut and laid like marble or glass tesserae. The Arabic and Kufic inscriptions on the borders of panels are made from whole glazed tiles, usually black: the inscription is laid out and the surface round the letters cut through the glaze to the terracotta with chisels or sharp hammers, leaving black letters on a terracotta ground, a process demanding great skill. ^{2 3}

Newcomb notes that Leo Africanus, writing early in the sixteenth century, mentions a brilliant ceramic industry in the century before, and that Alfred Bel cites the author of the Rawd al-Qirtas (c. 1325) on the fourteenth-century care for building with enamelled tiles, marble and carving, as the revetments of fourteenth-century madrasas, mosques and houses bear out. ^{1 2} Painted tiles, by Gallotti's account, never had in Morocco the success they had elsewhere, and mosaic remained in favour. ^{3 4}