Marble plates by Gazgan masters: for household or as a gift?

In the collection of the State Museum of the East in Moscow, there are two flat marble bowls (lagans). They are made of Gazgan marble of gray and dark gray color.

The Gazgan field of marble has long been known. It is located in the spurs of the Nurata Mountains, about 30 kilometers north of the city of Navoi, close to the medieval village of Nur-ata/Nurata (Nurota). According to the research of Academic Y. G. Gulyamov, marble was mined here as early as in the preIslamic era. The mine was developed with greater intensity during the reign of Amir Temur (1370 – 1405), and especially during the reign of his grandson, Mirzo Ulugbek (1411 – 1449). 

As for decorative marble tableware production, this tradition is relatively young for Nurata (not more than 200 years) and developed most dynamically in the late 19th – early 20th centuries. In Uzbekistan, this kind of marble dishware, made by masters of Gazgan, is stored in several museums. As a rule, such lagans were presented as a gift to diplomats, high-ranking representatives of the elite in the time of the last rulers of the Bukhara Dynasty of Mangits – “Abd al-Ahad (1885 – 1910) and his son Sayyid A’lim Khan (1910 – 1920). The sources and archives contain numerous references to such gifts. 

Lagans in the museum’s exposition are decorated with epigraphy. On their outer rim there are notches which form the modest pattern of these items. On the outside rim there are inscriptions executed in different scripts: kufic and nasta’liq. The inscriptions are arranged in individual segments (eight segments). Four larger segments bear a maxim in Arabic, which is often repeated on the monuments of Bukhara and Fergana valley ما شا اله“ ” (literally: “What Allah willed”1). It is written in angular Kufic script, diacritical marks are absent. A short text is repeated twice, moreover, in a technique well-known in the tradition of the medieval epigraphy – tava’man (i.e. mirroring the text in a given area). 

The second marble lagan in light gray is decorated in a similar style. The inscription here is more modest in content. As in the case described above, the inner ring is divided into eight segments. The following text is engraved in four of them, using the same tava’man style (with a mirror image of the main text): “What Allah wills”. It is written in angular Kufic script without diacritics. Between these segments, another short grapheme is engraved in the same tava’man style. Actually, it is one word written in decorative naskh script, which reads as “ فتاح ” (The one giving the benefit). It is one of the epithets of Allah known as “al-Asma ‘al- Husna” (Wonderful names).