Late 16TH CENTURY

Herat Afghanistan

Height 18-Cm X Body circumference 53-Cm

An extraordinary shaped heavyset-copper Jug with dragon-head and wide-open jaws with robust handle tail downward, the pollen stack is covered with engraved arabesques twirled with a flowered band against a cross-hatched posterior.

Additional, elaborate engraving with the “Quranic” inscriptions bands around the cylindrical neck.

The Jug cylindrical neck is engraved with elegant and impressive intertwined arabesques heeding as throughout repetition.

On the centre, the body comprised lozenges engraved with extraordinary intertwined and inverted arabesques with the distinct Quranic inscriptions solely in sealed triangulated formed.

In the medieval Muslim world, the dragon was the most frequently represented fabulous beast. This applied across styles and media and in both sacred and secular contexts. Yet it’s prominence is marked by seemingly contradictory representations. Like Plato’s “Pharmakon” the dragon was imbued with antithetical meanings: as it stood for both the darkness of the eclipse and the light of God, the satanic and the divine, the transcendent and the earthly. The “Yin” and the “Yang” of Islam were embodied in the dragon, whose fire was the hell of destruction and also the blessed light of the divine. The dragon thus represented one of those exceptional and mysterious symbols that explained the more baffling phenomena such as creation, chaos and order, furthermore signifying amalgamations of dichotomous forces whose balance made life and the understanding of life possible.