EBN BĀBAWAYH (1)

 

EBN BĀBAWAYH (Bābūya), family of Persian builders, luster potters, and tile makers, descended from the Shiʿite scholar Ebn Bābūya al-Ṣadūq (d. 382/991) and active in the 6th to 8th/12th to 14th centuries in central Persia. Several members are known.

1. Emām Jamāl-al-Dīn Bābūya Rāfeʿī, a builder (meʿmār), who in 572/1176-77 rebuilt the city walls of Qāzvīn and faced them with baked brick (Nozhat al-qolūb, ed. Le Strange, p. 58).

2. ʿAlī b. Aḥmad, a well-known luster potter who signed three important pieces: a medium meḥrāb dated 705/1305, taken from the Emāmzāda Yaḥyā at Varāmīn (St. Petersburg, Hermitage); a small meḥrāb tile (London, Victoria and Albert Museum, 1527-1876), pair to the “Salting” meḥrāb; and a medium meḥrāb dated 713/1313-14 or 723/1323 (Watson, p. 179).

3. Ḥasan b. ʿAlī b. Aḥmad, son of the above, active in the early 8th/14th century. In Šawwāl 709/March 1310 he made a set of three luster tiles decorated with an epigraphic arch supporting a hanging lamp (New York, Metropolitan Museum, 09.87). The tiles were probably designed for the cenotaph in the tomb of Shaikh ʿAbd-al-Ṣamad at Naṭanz, for Ḥasan’s name is inscribed in interlaced Kufic on the capitals below the superb stucco inscription dated 707/1307-8 around the tomb. He may well have made the molded and carved units for the moqarnas dome in the tomb. He signed a stucco meḥrāb dated 736/1335-36 in the shrine of Emāmzāda Abu’l-Fażl wa Yaḥyā at Maḥallāt-e Bālā, a village twenty-five km from Delījān in central Persia (Wilber, p. 137, pls. 66-67). Its shallow and stiff carving and misspellings suggest that he was an old man by this point.

 

Bibliography:

Sheila S. Blair, “A Medieval Persian Builder,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 45, 1986, pp. 389-95.

O. Watson, Persian Lustre Ware, London, 1985.

D. Wilber, The Architecture of Islamic Iran. The Ilkhanid Period, Princeton, 1955.

(Sheila S. Blair)

Originally Published: December 15, 1997

Last Updated: December 6, 2011

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