This bowl comes from the city of Kashan (in present-day Iran) and was made at the beginning of the thirteenth century. It is extremely thin-walled—an effect technically difficult to achieve with ceramics. The former gilding of the decoration also contributes to the bowl’s overall impression of being made from a material other than ceramic.

The bowl has a deep, bulbous shape and is delicately crafted. The outside has a simple decoration of stylized palm leaves (palmettes) and droplets (blobs). On the inside, there is an exceptionally fine, raised decoration (relief) with remnants of gilding and a red border. It shows stylized leaf and flower shapes that fan out from a six-pointed star from the base of the bowl to the rim to form two different flower arrangements. On closer inspection, some of the stylized blossoms turn out to be figurative representations: twelve blossoms arranged in a circle are alternately followed by a frontally depicted squatting sphinx figure and a pair of birds with long curved tails.

Apart from the place and date of origin, no details are known about the bowl’s provenance. Comparable ornamentation can be found in the decoration of metalwork by the Seljuks, a dynasty of princes of the eleventh and twelfth centuries in what is now Iran, Iraq, Syria, Anatolia, and parts of the Arabian Peninsula. This suggests that such works served as a model for the bowl.