EBRĀHĪM B. ʿOṮMĀN B. ʿANKAWAYH ḤADDĀD, Persian metalworker named in the inscription in Kufic script on the copper door knockers removed from a city gate in medieval Ganja (Soviet Kirovabad, Republic of Azerbaijan) and taken to the convent of Gelatʿi in Imeretiya, just east of Kutaisi in Georgia. According to the inscription, the gate was erected in 455/1063 during the reign of the Shaddadid Šāvūr b. Fażl under the supervision of a local judge named Abu’l-Faraj Moḥammad b. ʿAbd-Allāh. The position of ironsmith (ḥaddād) was apparently so important in early Islamic times that Ebrāhīm b. ʿOṯmān and Moḥammad b. Abū Esḥāq Eṣfahānī, the smith named on the Ḥaẓīra gate erected in Yazd in 432/1040-41, are two of the first craftsmen recorded in Persian epigraphs.
Bibliography:
Répertoire chronologique d’épigraphie arabe, Publications de l’Institut français d’archéologie orientale du Caire, Cairo, 1931, no. 2649.
S. S. Blair, The Monumental Inscriptions from Early Islamic Iran and Transoxiana, Leiden, 1991, no. 49, pp. 132-33, fig. 83.
(Sheila S. Blair)
Originally Published: December 15, 1997
Last Updated: December 6, 2011
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Vol. VIII, Fasc. 1, p. 66