This tile has an unusual orange-colored over glaze luster decoration. It reached the museum in an unusual way. It first came into the hands of the museum’s former director Friedrich Sarre who acquired it in Algeria, far from Uzbekistan, in 1904. In 1922/23 it passed to the museum together with other pieces from his collection. Originally the tile was part of a building, and the man who had it built is named in a cursive Arabic inscription on the tile: the Temurid sultan Abu-l-Muzaffar Abu Sa’id Bahadur Khan. It is quite possible that the tile came from a building on the territory of Uzbekistan since Sultan Abu Sa’id, named in the inscription, was Temur’s great-grandson and ruled the Temurid state from 1451 to 1469.
These and other examples of architectural decoration, now placed on permanent exhibition, have delighted hundreds of thousands of museum visitors, conveying to them an impression of the beauty of the buildings of medieval Uzbekistan and the mastery of the architects and artisans who worked to create them. It has been possible to see all these pieces in Berlin’s Pergamon Museum since 1932.
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.