Shaped Inlay Pieces
Not on view
These small shaped inlay pieces made of clear glass were once embedded in plaster with mother-of-pearl to create reflective designs. They were found at Samarra in the rubble of its Main Caliphal Palace (Dar al-Khilafa) along with fragments of glass tiles. While there is no direct precedent known yet for this type of decoration in early-Islamic Iraq, small colored glass inlay pieces were excavated at the sixth-century Byzantine Church of St. Polyeuktos in Istanbul, where they had been inlaid into a marble column shaft.
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