Objects in its collection dating from the 19th and 20th centuries were limited to a few subject areas such as book art, calligraphy, carpets, and other textiles.
Following the museum’s acquisition in 1925 of a total of sixteen ceramic vessels and over one hundred shards from Samarkand, all of which came from a Russian collection, the museum received a number of crates in the late 1930s from the Berlin Ethnological Museum containing thousands of ceramic fragments. They had been acquired by Willi Rickmer Rickmers (1873 – 1965) on expeditions to Turkestan in 1907 (the main ethnographic part of this collection is still in the Ethnological Museum: see the essay by Ingrid Pfluger-Schindlbeck). A large proportion of them came from the ruins of Afrasiab, the site of ancient Samarkand.
The museum received further ceramic fragments from Adolf Bastian (1826 – 1905), director of the Ethnological Museum from 1876 to 1905. Among all these vessels and fragments there were also shards from the Temurid period, but most of them belonged to an earlier, equally illustrious era in Uzbekistan’s history, the time of the Samanid rulers and their successor dynasties. The first review and attempt to sort this enormous collection was conducted before the start of the Second World War by Kurt Erdmann who also published a few of the pieces. More work on ordering the collection and occasional publications followed after the war.
The collection was augmented as archaeological objects still held in the Ethnological Museum were transferred starting in the late 1970s: vessels, fragments of vessels, and architectural ceramics. Starting in 2014 a collaborative project with the University of Bamberg and the Linden-Museum in Stuttgart conducted a scholarly reappraisal of this enormous collection.
You can learn more about the topic in the book-album "Collections of the Federal Republic of Germany" (volume XI) in the series "Cultural Legacy of Uzbekistan in the World Collections".
The main sponsor of the project is the oilfield services company Eriell-Group.
