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Sixth-century Sasanian moulded stucco panel showing a repeating pomegranate-in-palmette design, excavated near Ctesiphon, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Editorial

Tehran · Iran

The Fruit We Are Sure We Recognize

How the pomegranate became one of the most confidently named motifs in Islamic ornament — and one of the least confidently identified — across a thousand years of tile, silk and stucco, with meanings we mostly attached later.

A slab of sixth-century plaster in the Met shows a fruit you recognise at a glance: a pomegranate, and surely it means paradise. Hold that certainty up to the light and it dissolves. Across a thousand years of tile, silk and stucco, the pomegranate is the shape we name most confidently and identify least — blurring into the artichoke and the palmette, its meanings attached by later viewers, its very name partly a nineteenth-century invention

A massive granite column shaft under a stone arch, seen from below, with the dome springing above it.
Editorial

Istanbul · Turkey

Seventy Thousand Solomons: The Empire That Performed a Legend

A demon catalogue in the conqueror's library, a sixteenth-century text where kingship is an office held seventy thousand times, and the columns a sultan dragged across three provinces to prove he held it.

Mehmed II kept a Greek catalogue of demons in his library at Topkapı. Seventy years later a sultan named for a prophet was rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem and hauling Roman columns out of Egypt and the Lebanon into a mosque above the Golden Horn. In between, Ottoman writers turned Solomon from a warning into a job — and the empire applied for it in stone.