Panel

This carved wooden panel came to the museum through an unusual source, the British art and antiquity dealer Sydney Burney (1878–1951), known mostly for his trade in African and modern art and for having served as the President of the British Antique Dealers’ Association. His only ventures into the market for Islamic art are limited to an assemblage of carved wood which he sold to the Met, the British Museum, and the Louvre. It is yet unknown how the London-based dealer obtained these artifacts, of which the large part are said to have been found in Tikrit in Iraq.

From this group, the fragments 33.41.8, 33.41.9, 33.41.10, 33.41.11, 33.41.12 display the same patterns and style of this panel; they may have originally belonged to one object. Their decoration, displaying a continuous scroll of trilobed leaves, is evocative of Late Antique and early Islamic visual languages.