The Nishapur Excavations

Nishapur was founded by the Sasanian king Shapur and became the capital of the province of Abarshahr. Its name may stem from the Old Persian for “fair, good city of Shapur” (*nēv-šāpūr), but in Islamic times writers in Arabic rendered it as Nishabur or Nayshabur, from which comes the modern Farsi pronunciation.

In the Sasanian period, Nishapur consisted of a citadel and an adjoining walled city, all surrounded by numerous villages, while one of the empire’s important Zoroastrian fire temples was located on the nearby hills. Streams coming from the same hills were directed through channels that passed underneath the city (called qanats), allowing Nishapur’s citizens to draw water from wells. 

Between the ninth and thirteenth centuries, at Nishapur’s peak, its population is believed to have been between one hundred and two hundred thousand people, and the city was approximately six and a half square miles in size. In addition to local Iranians, this included Turks and Arabs who arrived after the city’s incorporation into the Abbasid empire. The majority of Nishapur’s residents were Muslim, but Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians were also among the city’s population, which consisted of landowners, merchants, craftsmen, farmers, government officials, religious clerics, and scholars, including female ones. Recent scholarship has shed new light on the presence and role of the women of Nishapur. The population was largely Persian-speaking, but Arabic was used by the Arab population, by scholars, and for official administrative documents. Inscriptions, both monumental ones on buildings and those on everyday objects also used Arabic. 

Bowl with a Figure and Birds, Purchase, From Iran, Nishapur, 10th century. Earthenware; polychrome decoration under transparent glaze (buff ware). Height 3 5/8 in. (9.2 cm), Diameter 7 7/8 in. (20 cm). Rogers Fund, 1938 (38.40.290)

Nishapur’s position on the Western edge of Khurasan, the region encompassing today’s eastern Iran, western Afghanistan, and southern Turkmenistan, made it a crucial point in the land routes connecting East Asia to the Mediterranean, popularly known as the “silk road”. Such networks were active as early as 2000 BCE,  facilitating the movements of people, ideas, technologies, and a variety of goods, including silk. Other textiles, but also ceramics, glass and metal wares, raw glass, seeds, spices, fruit, and cereals, but also jade, lapis lazuli and other precious stones moved along these trajectories. As one of the largest cities along these routes, Nishapur flourished economically, benefitting from taxes on goods sold and from the commerce brought by traveling caravans. 

Map of the Silk Road trade route

Nishapur’s population of workers and artists also produced prized commodities, including unprocessed or carved turquoise, renowned cotton and silk fabrics, and a variety of ceramics. One of its produces was a rare type of edible clay believed to have curative properties. While all these goods were traded trans-regionally, the city’s commercial relevance is mostly reflected in the coins that were found during the Met’s excavation. These range between the eighth to the fifteenth century and include coins from Armenia, Syria, Iraq, elsewhere in Iran, and Central Asia (today’s Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan), in addition to those produced by the Nishapur mint. 

A silk and cotton textile made in a Nishapur tiraz workshop, dated 879-80 CE (31.106.27, Gift of George D. Pratt, 1931)

These cylinders of earth may be sellable units of Nishapur’s famous edible earth, 1939

The agreement between The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Iranian government was to divide the excavation finds into two equal groups between The Met and the National Museum of Iran in Tehran. In the case of the stucco panels from the site of Sabz Pushan, some of the original pieces were reproduced with gypsum casts, so that each museum would have a full set. Both museums have displayed the Nishapur material since the 1930s. 

A 1937 special exhibition of the Nishapur material at The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Nishapur stuccoes in the 1949 Galleries of Near Eastern Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Museum’s excavation team consisted of Met staff Joseph Upton, Walter Hauser, and Charles Wilkinson. They built a house at the site and worked for an average of four to six months per season between 1935 and 1940. The outbreak of World War II halted the project until 1947, when Wilkinson and Hauser went back for a final season to clean up the excavation house and sort through the remaining objects. Nearly fifty years later, Iranian archaeologists (1995-2002) and a joint French-Iranian expedition (2005-2007) have resumed work at Nishapur, expanding our knowledge of the site. 

Joseph Upton, Charles Wilkinson, and Walter Hauser, 1930s (year unknown)

The Nishapur excavation house, 1947

Living room of the excavation house; note the casts of the stucco panels from the Sabz Pushan site behind the sofas, 1947

The Met’s archaeologists sunk test trenches in the mound on which the citadel of Nishapur stands, known locally as Tepe Alp Arslan. These excavations revealed that this area, higher than the rest of the site, had been built up artificially. Recent excavations have suggested that this area was already inhabited in the Sasanian period. 

From the eighth century on, the citadel was a residential area, 1936

Some of the homes had extensive decoration. In Gallery 452, there are carved stucco panels from three rooms in one of the excavated houses.

A residential neighborhood was uncovered in the area known as Tepe Sabz Pushan (“Green Mound”), excavated between 1935 and 1937. Houses in this area were built of sun-dried bricks covered with white plaster, and consisted of three to four rooms, usually arranged around a central courtyard. Some had extensive wall decoration of carved stucco and small niches flanked by engaged columns, which were interpreted as mihrabs. Access to the houses was from small alleys that ran between them.

A Sabz Pushan house with an underground storage room, 1936

 
One of the most intriguing finds at Tepe Madrasa was a room with wall paintings covering the lower half of the walls. These seem to mimic stone dadoes, but also bear motifs that echo the animal and vegetal worlds. (Painted Dado Panel on view in Gallery 453)

This complicated area in the heart of the city, southwest of the citadel, was excavated between 1937 and 1940, and was later leveled through commercial diggings and the construction of a railroad. The excavators brought to light a residential complex which they interpreted as a monumental palace or a government center, for the importance of its architecture and rich decoration. The area also revealed a mosque that was in use from the second half of the eighth century until the twelfth century. 

Rooms on the west side of the Tepe Madrasa site, 1939

Excavated in 1938, Qanat Tepe is named for its proximity to an underground water channel, or qanat. Many types of buildings were found here, including domestic rooms, a bathhouse with wall paintings, a small mosque, and a watchtower. The site also resulted being a production area for ceramics, unglazed sphero-conical vessels and glazed stonepaste vessels. Qanat Tepe appears to have been occupied from the early ninth century until the late eleventh or early twelfth century.

The bathhouse of Qanat Tepe, with individual cells for bathing attached to a central well, 1938

In 1936 and 1937, the excavators uncovered small residences spanning the ninth to thirteenth century, including a phase of reconstruction during which the buildings’ orientation was changed. The residences were similar in form to those found at Sabz Pushan and Qanat Tepe, with underground storage chambers and wells connected to the neighborhood canal.

Cooking pots in a Village Tepe kitchen, 1936

At the behest of local officials who were improving the areas near the nearby tomb of Omar Khayyam and Muhammad Mahruq, the team excavated this site in 1936. The area was occupied for a long period and well into the thirteenth century, after the arrival of the Mongols.

Workers at the Falaki site, 1936

After a test dig in 1935, the excavators decided not to continue working at the North Horn, but in 1936 they returned to the South Horn and found remains from a pottery workshop specializing in molded ware. The finds indicated that the site was occupied well into the thirteenth century.

A street in the South Horn neighborhood, 1936

The American excavators uncovered three separate kiln sites where the ceramics of Nishapur were made, although in later decades more were identified by Iranian archaeologists. The finds from the production areas were significant, providing proof that certain types of vessels, including slip-wares as well as later alkaline-glazed pieces and molded vessels, were in fact made in the city. Kilns were constructed with a domed top covering a wide ledge that projected over a central, circular firing chamber. Ceramics would have been placed on clay batons and stuck through holes along the sides of the kiln to be fired.

Base of a kiln, with holes for the batons that held the ceramics as they were fired, 1939

A series of mounds at this location led some scholars to believe that it may have been the site of a bazaar, or marketplace, hence the name of the site. While the excavators found no definitive evidence of this, the finds point to an occupation well in the twelfth and possibly thirteenth century.

Excavations in 1936 and 1937 revealed a row of rooms from a monumental complex of buildings fronting an alley. Like the buildings at Tepe Madrasa, they had thick walls, elaborate carved stucco and stone reliefs, and an outstanding painting of a mounted huntsman as well as a standing figure now in the National Museum of Iran in Tehran. It appears that this area was abandoned after an earthquake, perhaps in 1145.

Mounted huntsman mural in the Vineyard Tepe, 1937. Later detached and assigned to The National Museum of Iran in Tehran.

Rich decoration covered the exteriors and interiors of some of Nishapur’s buildings. Prominent homes and palaces featured painted murals, carved stucco reliefs, or both. Large public buildings of the eleventh and twelfth centuries were clad in baked bricks set in decorative patterns and carved terracotta panels, while slightly later ones had glazed tiles, often in turquoise. Two of the bathhouses that the excavators found preserved the remains of earlier layers of wall paintings, apparently refreshed each time humidity obscured the images. These examples include a range of geometric and vegetal patterns, calligraphy, figures, and animals. 

View a selection of architectural decoration finds >

Dado Panel, Excavated at Sabz Pushan in Iran, Nishapur, 10th century. Stucco; carved. Height 37 1/2 in. (95.3 cm), Width 92 5/8 in. (235 cm), Depth 3 1/2 in. (8.9 cm), Frame Depth 2 1/2 in. (6.4 cm). Rogers Fund, 1937 (37.40.40)

Texts or words were written in a variety of calligraphic forms on many kinds of objects excavated at Nishapur. Inscriptions were used to decorate ceramics with boldly rendered blessings and proverbs, to indicate ownership of objects, and to inscribe verses from the Qur’an or the names of royals on architectural elements. The letter forms were manipulated in different ways: some are elongated horizontally and vertically, some end in vegetal flourishes, and some became rhythmically repeated geometric units. Some of the inscriptions are in Arabic, others in Persian; both use the same alphabet. 

View a selection of inscriptions finds >

Bowls with Repeating Inscription, “Blessing,” Purchase, Found Iran, Nishapur, late 9th–early 10th century. Earthenware; black slip with white slip decoration under transparent glaze. Height 2 1/2 in. (6.4 cm), Diameter 8 1/8 in. (20.6 cm). Rogers Fund, 1937 (37.40.22)

So-called buff ware ceramics are characterized by graphic imagery outlined in a dark brownish-black color and highlighted with yellow and green glazes. Some of the buff ware vessels excavated at Nishapur were covered with a slip the same color as the buff body before being painted; the designs on others were painted directly onto the surface of the vessel. This group of ceramics includes geometric and abstract floral motifs, strong figural compositions, and overall patterns of four-legged horned beasts (possibly ibexes) and birds. The type was believed to have been produced only in Nishapur, although it has since been retrieved in a much wider geography. Recent archaeological research by the Met in southern Turkmenistan suggests that it was produced in a wider region. 

View a selection of buff ware finds >

Buff Ware Fragment with Animal Decoration, Excavated at Sabz Pushan in Iran, Nishapur, 9th century. Earthenware; polychrome decoration under transparent glaze (buff ware). Height 4 in. (10.2 cm), Width 6 1/4 in. (15.9 cm). Rogers Fund, 1938 (38.40.119) 

The excavators found many household items, such as keys, tweezers, mirrors, toys, and ceramic dinnerware and mixing bowls. These mundane objects provide a window into the daily life of a tenth to thirteenth century citizen of Nishapur.

A number of objects found in the excavations were so unusual that scholars still debate their original functions. Some have only been found in Nishapur and therefore lack enough context for us to understand them. Other types, although found at sites across Iran and the Middle East, still spark debate among scholars. These include a talismanic hand, a cupping glass, spit-rests, and spheroconical vessels that may have been used for perfumed and medicinal fluids or even for bubbly drinks.

View a selection of objects of daily life finds >

Cosmetics Mortar, Excavated in Iran, Nishapur, 10th–12th century. Bronze; cast. Height 1 1/16 in. (2.7 cm), Width 3 5/16 in. (8.4 cm), Depth 5 5/16 in. (13.5 cm). Rogers Fund, 1939 (39.40.100) 

Written sources indicate that Nishapur was an important trade city, and the finding of certain objects confirms this. Chinese ceramics were popular in Nishapur, and excavators believed that they also passed through the city on the way to western Iran, Iraq, and Egypt. Imported ceramics from the west, such as Iraqi luster wares of the ninth and tenth century must have been expensive enough for the Nishapuri potters to imitate them for the local market, but they used different glazes and techniques that make the local productions readily distinguishable from the imports. 

View a selection of imports and Nishapur craftsmen finds >

Fragmentary Plate with Engraved Designs, Attributed to Syria or Iraq. Excavated at Tepe Madrasa in Iran, Nishapur, 9th century. Glass, blue; blown, applied trail, scratch-engraved. Height 9/16 in. (1.4 cm), Width 10 5/8 in. (27 cm), Diameter 8 in. (20.3 cm). Rogers Fund, 1940 (40.170.131) 

In addition to the uncovering of mosques and mihrabs, the Met’s excavators found a variety of artifacts related to the everyday devotional practices of Islam, such as prayer beads, amulets with Qur’anic phrases, and jugs with magic words thought to have healing powers. Nishapur’s diverse population included other religious communities such as Jews and Christians. Their devotional practices are testified by seals with symbols and Hebrew letters, and ceramic objects decorated with crosses.

View a selection of religions finds >

Inkwell with Crosses, Purchase, From Iran, Nishapur, 10th century. Earthenware; polychrome decoration under transparent glaze (buff ware). Height 2 3/16 in. (5.6 cm), Width 2 3/4 in. (7 cm), Depth 2 3/4 in. (7 cm). Rogers Fund, 1938 (38.40.296)