Dome of the Rock mosque lamp dated 956 AH

R. L. Hobson calls this lamp "a document of capital importance" in the British Museum's Turkish pottery: a mosque lamp from the "Mosque of Omar" in Jerusalem, that is the Dome of the Rock, with an inscription saying it was made in 956 AH and that its painter was "the poor, the humble Mustafa". ³ Hobson made it the frontispiece of his guide. ⁴

It is of impure white sandy ware dressed with white slip and painted in blue and turquoise green with black outlines under a clear glaze. ¹ The inscriptions in the main bands are passages from the Qur'an; those on the foot read: "in the year 956, in the month of Jumada al-ula; the painter is the poor, the humble Mustafa". ¹ Hobson equates the date with June 1549, the time when Suleiman the Magnificent restored and redecorated the Dome of the Rock. ²

Hobson says the finest Turkish pottery of his Group II belongs to about the date of this lamp, and argues from this that the source of that ware should be sought not in the potteries of Damascus, depleted by the Ottoman conquest, but in a centre where the Ottomans had concentrated talent. ⁵