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Margaret S. Graves, "Invisible Hands: Fabrication, Forgery, and the Art of Islamic Ceramics" (Princeton UP, 2026)
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- [00:01]
Dr. Margaret Graves
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [00:06]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Margaret Graves about her book titled Invisible Hands, Fabrication, Forgery, and the Art of Islamic Ceramics, published by Princeton University Press in 2026. Now, this is a really interesting book because it's tracing sort of two things that are incredibly intertwined, right? On the one hand, we're talking about, like, really gorgeous traditional craft skills and the kind of work that it takes to make Islamic ceramics. Obviously, yes, this is a story about those skills being present centuries ago, but also they're actually much more around than we might think. And that's part of the story here. The other part of the story is around what's going on with collecting these sorts of objects as art, and who decides what that means in terms of art and authentic and value questions that are relevant throughout kind of all things art and museum studies and, of course, how these things go together. So I don't want to give too much away at this point, but clearly we have a whole bunch of things to talk about. So, Margaret, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast to tell us about your work.
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Dr. Margaret Graves
Thank you very much for having me.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book?
- [01:24]
Dr. Margaret Graves
Of course. Yeah. So my name's Margaret Graves. My professional title is I'm the Adrian Minassian Associate professor of Islamic Art and Architecture at Brown University. And from that title you can probably glean I'm a specialist in Islamic art. That's my primary area of focus in terms of why I decided to write this book. This book has quite a long. It's got quite a long gestation. It was about 10 years work all in for the book. But it actually goes back to an earlier set of questions that really I began asking when I was just a young PhD student and starting work as I was training to be a scholar of medieval Islamic art, which involved going to a lot of museum collections. And I started to wonder why nobody was really talking about the actual condition of the subjects of study, because I kept seeing pieces where I thought, well, that's obviously partially modern or that's obviously not really real. So how do we base our historical arguments about the past on things that have actually been heavily modified or sometimes made from scratch in the present? And I did start to wonder, too, why on earth were we so squeamish about the market and about profit Motives, talking about profit motives and how they figure in art history. A lot of this also, I think the subject of this book, as you, you beautifully described it, is about the intertwining of the market and about how we value things. And it's a lot of it is about how what we might call fakes and forgeries, what I've called fabrications in the book, how they actually get made in the context of Islamic ceramics. And a lot of this does go back to. I have a long training in studio, which is relatively unusual in art history. I have about six years of full time studio training. So I think I have an abiding fascination with how things are made. And so when I started to look at these objects, after initially saying why are we not talking about how modern some of them are, I also became totally fascinated by the skill that had gone into reinventing these things for the modern era. So that was the sort of long background to this. I will also say quite openly that this is very much a post tenure book. I'm not from the US originally, but I am now teaching at a US university and I have tenure, which gives me a kind of freedom to ask questions that are potentially quite awkward. And of course the question of authenticity. Authenticity is one that can get quite awkward, especially when we're talking about an active collecting market where saying something is authentic or inauthentic has massive effects on its financial value. This is a long winded way of answering this, but the other part of all of this is that I arrived in the Midwest. I arrived at Indiana University in 2012 and having come from the UK where there aren't really any hidden collections, I was totally blown away to discover the scale of the American collections in the Midwest. But you're barely even known even to US scholars on the East Coast. So the book also ended up being really based in some of those collections which have never before been published, or a lot of them have not really been studied very much as well. So it's a lot of strands that came together and built over a long time into this book. It's a bit of a labour of love.
- [04:49]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
See listeners, this is why I was so intrigued to read this book and Margaret, to get to speak to you about it, because there are so many things that come together here and you and I have both kind of laid out some of the questions the book book investigates. Are there any others we want to put on the table at this point?
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Dr. Margaret Graves
Yeah, I mean, in a way. So maybe the simplest way to describe the book is to say that each chapter poses a different question. And there's five chapters, and I think things that we will probably talk about in this conversation. The first chapter really started out of asking how did a market develop that was quite so receptive to this kind of fabrication? And it gets into the history of the market for Middle east antiquities, about which there is a lot to say. The second chapter, which was very difficult to write, but I think it's a very, very important one, was about what I asked myself, what would the history of Islamic ceramics look like if we told it not from the sort of classic perspective of the normal model for catalogs of Islamic ceramics, is a kind of narrative of developments in ceramic technology, and it begins in the 8th 9th centuries, and it goes up to the early modern period. I wanted to ask, what would this look like if we told this instead as a history of extraction of these objects from sites in the Middle east, starting around about 1860 and running into the 20th century, which is really the kind of historical arc of the book. The third chapter, and I know you were keen to talk about this too, is the question of just how these were done. And a lot of the third chapter is really laying out in detail how this kind of work was done. The fourth chapter got into. I, of course, ended up very curious about what we could know about the people in the supply line who actually did the work, and how they kind of manage the movement and the trading and the presentation of these objects. And then the fifth chapter really came out of a question about wondering about how widespread might fabrication be? And it ends up using a case study of previously unpublished pieces that gave very surprising results and do have implications for the wider question of the collected ceramics from the Islamic world in a lot of much more famous institutions than some of the ones I was looking at. I think those are all questions that you're probably going to cover, but those are the ones that were really driving the book.
- [07:12]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
I mean, I'm definitely hoping we can cover at least some of them, obviously in less detail than the book. But you know what, let's take a stab at it, see how the discussion goes, starting then with this question of the market. Right. Because obviously there's no point in fabricating something if there's no market. Right. That's the incentives question you mentioned earlier. So why was there a market for items from the Middle east that might be forged, might be fabricated? What are the factors that led to that market even existing?
- [07:42]
Dr. Margaret Graves
Yeah, it's a really. It's a really interesting one. And this is in a Place. In many ways, what we're seeing in the rise of this market is kind of the intersection of late colonialism, basically, is part of this and colonial activities that are going on in Middle Eastern countries, especially in the Ottoman Empire and Iran at the end of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th. But sort of the prehistory of this is there was really through the 18th and 19th centuries, what we really see in the West. So in the Christian west in particular, was a growing desire to see physical evidence of biblical narratives, things that would prove the veracity of the Bible. That's a kind of earlier strand. And I do talk about it in the introduction to the book that gave rise to some amazing kind of whole clothes, cases of forgery, sometimes, you know, entire sort of categories of history being invented. The Islamic ceramics collecting comes in a little bit later. And it is really where we see that really kicking into gear after about 1850 is really with the expansion of the kind of the collecting machine, new materials start to become new categories of desire. The market for antiquities boomed in the second half of the 19th century, and this is the period that obviously sees the rise of museums as well as private collectors. So that is a big part of the driver here, too, is this absolutely frenetic scramble for antiquities in the Middle east. No longer just limited to the biblical material, but also just looking for things that have this kind of lure of the exotic or that speak to certain versions of history, or that can be sort of convincingly turned into categories of desire for connoisseurship. So what we really see is it's been very aptly termed the scramble for the past. The era of this kind of rush to extract antiquities from the Ottoman Empire was where that particular phrase has been applied. It's also happening in Iran simultaneously, and of course, it's also taking place in Central Asia under the Russian Empire as well at the same time. So these things all kind of come together to create this sort of a perfect storm at the same moment that we're seeing a massive expansion of things like the international banking models that are kind of expanding into the Middle east at this point. Huge infrastructure projects being undertaken that involve a lot of earth churning, which is also turning up some of these materials as well. So, yeah, it could be described as a perfect storm, I would say.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
All right, so that's really helpful to understand why there even is a market. And, of course, it's always so interesting when it's a combination of factors. Right. The perfect store rather than just one thing. If we're thinking, though, about those things coming together. Why is it then that pre modern Islamic ceramics were part of it? Like, the factors you've described could kind of apply to lots of different sorts of things. So why does that particular demand develop within this context?
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Dr. Margaret Graves
Yeah, that is a really good question. And in a way, when you study the sort of movements of the market, it does look almost a little bit arbitrary at first, which I guess it probably was. If you think about the collecting industry as this kind of rapacious machine that is moving through many areas, and of course not just in the Islamic world. This is also. We're talking about the same sort of period that in, say, in Latin America, we're seeing a huge kind of harvest of pre Columbian, various different pre Columbian materials that happens around the same time and also gives rise to markets in fakes and forgeries? I think with the Islamic ceramics, in a way, I mean, the ceramics of China had long been prized by Western collections. And one of the things that's happening is simply as kind of resources dry up in one area, often the market will start looking wider for other things to fill that place. So collectors who might have felt, well, I can't get in on the ground the money, you know, the prices that Chinese ceramics go for Ming, Ming Dynasty material, et cetera, is just too high. They start casting around, being interested in other traditions. The market responds to that. So this is when we start to see a sort of movement towards the stuff from the Middle east. And it's actually kind of the later stuff that comes in first, Iznik materials from Ottoman Turkey, later sort of early modern Safavid Iranian stuff. We're talking kind of 16th, 17th century material. And it's only after those have been sort of seized upon by the market that there starts to be a move towards the medieval material. And that really gets going in the last decades of the 19th century. And it really peaks in the run up to World War I, although it does go on after that. I do think, as I sort of alluded to in my previous answer, I think one of the things that is also happening is because of the colonial expansion that's taking place in the Middle east during this period, the European and Russian powers, there is a huge rush or a huge movement towards extractivist models that are being applied to think about minerals, copper ore and petroleum, of course, towards the end of the 19th century as well. I've actually been looking into the ways that mining for antiquities worked at places like Ray and Raqqa, and they're surprisingly similar sometimes to how kind of local Smaller scale local industries of mining for minerals worked as well. So I think that also is a really important part of it. That idea of there is money in the ground we can extract will bring a certain small economic advantage to local people. It tends to benefit the international traders far more. The prices always go up as things get further and further away from the original site of production. With Islamic ceramics, it's also quite striking that there's sort of slightly different developments of interest in the different imperial centers. Coming from the uk, I really knew the British sort of trajectory of this, which is that there's a strong interest in industrial design that gets going in the UK, especially after the 1851 Great Exhibition. You have lustre, you have Ottoman Iznik ware. Those things get really seized upon by the British, you know, by the British sort of industrialists who are looking for exemplars. It's a little bit different in Russian collecting in Central Asia is moved partly by this kind of imperial expansion. It also, Russia has very strong commercial connections with 19th century Iran, so material is moving that way. The French have this kind of a lead on connoisseurship in Islamic ceramics. There is a very strong collector's market for fine ceramics in France. And later you get kind of ethnographic interest bundled in too. Germany follows a bit later. There's less of an interest there. And the Americans really joined towards the end of the 19th century with the rise of, particularly with the rise of American public museums. Islamic ceramics really get pitched to the American buyers as a kind of new category of sophistication ceramics. Very, very good for public display as well because they are very stable and durable. They don't need to be rotated off because of light. Light sensitivity issues. So there's a lot of different things that make Islamic ceramics a kind of perfect fit into the market in this period too, and that they are sort of utilized or instru, I think you could say in different ways by some of the different kind of imperial models of collecting that are really developing as well.
- [15:21]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's a really interesting sort of variation to see amongst the different places you mentioned though, the run up to World War I being a really sort of peak period. Why?
- [15:31]
Dr. Margaret Graves
Yeah, it's really fascinating actually. It really feels like the Wild west when you read about what was happening during that period and the scale and speed of the excavations that were happening for the material below ground and the liquidation of material in above ground collections. This is also a time when an enormous number of family collections get liquidated and entered into the market. There are a number of reasons for this. The antiquities laws operating in the Middle east were. The Ottoman antiquities law was not covering quite a lot of things. There is a much more stringent law put in Place in 1906 which attempts to stem this basically haemorrhage of cultural heritage that's going on from the Ottoman Empire. But it's still, you know, there are still places where it's baggy and it's possible for people to get things out past customs authorities up until really, up until World War I, although they tighten the net a lot. Iran didn't really manage to get very effective laws in place either prior to World War I. Like I mentioned before, there is this massive expansion during this time as well of European powers rushing into resource extraction and financ financial operations that are going on in the region. There's also the money, the money that flies around during this period is staggering. The prices that some things went for are incredible. They're not matched again for decades and decades afterwards. And a lot of this is down to sort of a market model that is actually really still with us today, which is a few incredibly wealthy, really ultra wealthy buyers blowing up prices, basically creating kind of bubbles. So you have people simultaneously moving in, getting excited about material from the Islamic world. J.P. morgan, who dies in 1913, he wasn't actually particularly interested in Islamic ceramics, but he was hugely interested in Christian material from that was in what is now the Islamic world. He, I mean single handedly kind of drives prices up. You also have people like Freer who formed who for a while was massively into buying Islamic ceramics, bought a huge collection of them and Gulbenkian, Kalus Gulbenkian, who was a very, he was one of the richest men in the world due to his shares in Middle Eastern Petroleum. And he was a very savvy, careful collector for his own personal collection as well. So when you have people with that kind of money, that late 19th century era of the, you know, the robber barons and these ultra wealthy individuals, what you get is a sort of huge, huge blow up in market prices. After World War I, the market in Middle Eastern antiquities never really recovers in Europe the prices are just never matched again. And the market, the sort of center of gravity for buying really moves to the US after that. So it's this period where sort of low controls, in spite of the serious efforts by some of the indigenous powers to try to control. But some of those controls take a long time to get into place. That's matched with countries, regions like Iran are Basically fighting off simultaneous advances from the Russian Empire and from the British and to some extent from the French as well. They're trying to fight these things off simultaneously while dealing with their own economic crises. So you have these very sort of porous borders that are created by internal instabilities and the sort of rapacious aspects of the colonial program at the same time that you have individuals who are more wealthy than we've ever seen before who get really interested in buying in some of these areas, too. So, again, I mean, I keep using the words perfect storm, but it is a kind of. It does create this kind of extraordinary milestone of money and markets and availability that it doesn't go away after World War I, but it's not the same after World War I.
- [19:44]
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- [20:12]
Dr. Margaret Graves
Experian.
- [20:14]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that is really key to understand kind of what's happening at this peak period on the demand side, because that then helps us understand why there was such a supply side. Right. So many people wanted this for so much money that honestly, it's pretty obvious, like, yeah, why not try and take advantage of this? But it's, of course, one thing to say that, and it's a very different thing to actually have the skills to pull it off. So how were these objects actually made?
- [20:40]
Dr. Margaret Graves
Yeah, and this is really the core of the book. And one of the things, you know, one of the things I was trying incredibly hard in this book to do was reposition the conversation about this. Because a lot there's very specialized studies that have looked at this kind of fabrication in Islamic ceramics. But outside of that, a lot of the collecting literature has basically tended to treat this as a kind of malfeasance, you know, that this is fraudulent, it's bad. There's a kind of moralistic tone in a lot of the writing about it. And because of the incredible skill that's at work here and as you point out, the fact that this is a completely logical place for skills to be directed at this time, because of the way that this market is working. I really wanted to reposition the conversation and turn this into one about this is a huge skill set that we haven't previously recognized. So in terms of how things were, the nitty gritty of how things were actually made, this is the third chapter of the book, is really a detailed kind of walkthrough of many different objects and looking at the different techniques that were applied to these processes of remaking. The range is enormous. I mean, this was a challenging chapter to write because I just had far too much data and I had to keep scaling back to just very limited number of examples because otherwise it would be unreadable. But in that range, I tried to kind of group these to make them coherent for the reader. There's three main avenues that we can see. The first is what I've called bricolage. The second is what I've called skin swaps. And the third is really true forgery. And I'll talk in turn about each of those and what they mean. By far the most common technique by which these objects are actually being made for the market is what I call bricolage. And this is the suturing together of pieces from usually from multiple objects, often from multiple old objects. But they're not all the same object. Sometimes there's a mix of old fragments and then new made pieces being put into the same object together. And this goes. I mean, what we have is sometimes quite simple stuff where, you know, stuff is just getting glued back together as we would expect it to be. But gaps, when there's missing material are being filled with bits of some other old material that is basically cut to fit and then glued in and repainted to try and make it into a continuous surface. But that's pretty minor and some of that's quite easy to spot. But it gets incredibly complex actually, very, very quickly. And seen pieces where we're talking literally hundreds of fragments from, I mean, doubtless dozens of objects. So there are whole industries that are being dedicated to basically pulling medieval sherds out of the ground, sorting them by type, and then fitting them together in these new configurations. It's particularly common with the material that's coming from Iran, from the 12th and 13th century. Material from Iran. And the level of complexity at work in it is such that there are sometimes pieces I've seen where the whole object is a sandwich. You know, you have the back and front, so the inside and outside of the bowl will turn out to be two separate layers where all of the fragments in it have had one side Filed off, and then they've been pasted together like a sandwich. The whole of the design on the inside is basically a new fabrication. It's something that's been made afresh out of bits and pieces, fitting them together to produce something that looks convincingly like a medieval object. This, of course, is one of the things that. What also makes this kind of important for scholars of this area is especially students. I've had a lot of students who've wanted to work on this kind of material and have launched themselves into kind of iconographic studies of the imagery on some of these bowls, especially the Minai ware from Iran, where I've had to say, okay, it's great, but stop, stop, stop. Because actually, most of that imagery is modern. A lot of that is a new fabrication. So you can talk about that in another way, but you can't use it as the basis for understanding things in the medieval period or saying that this represents something that particularly mattered to medieval audiences because it's not actually medieval. So that's one thing. You have these incredible levels of complexity going on with bricolage working through three dimensions. I mean, it's a really amazing testament to the skill of some of these artists. When you get up close with these objects and some of the ones that I've looked at in the book, all of this has to be overpainted to try and make it look like we're talking about, like the objects have continuous surfaces when they're actually, you know, sort of composite pieces or pastiches. And that leads to the second big category that I talk about is all the different ways that you can put a new surface on a ceramic. And I called these skin swaps. And this goes all the way from just over painting. I mean, the technology is nothing more complicated than a paintbrush and paint, but the skill levels vary enormously. And some of these are really, really lovely in the work that they do. You know, speaking as someone with sort of many years of training in drawing and painting, I had a real respect for some of the artists who did some of this work. Others are much more crackhanded. But there are some extraordinary levels of skill again in the painting. Lots and lots of new gilding. There's a lot of bling being stuck on things to kind of razzle dazzle buyers. This creates entire categories of object where I'm yet to see one that I think is actually genuine. So there are some whole categories of collected ceramics that I think might be entirely based on modern work. When you get into more sort of like heavy duty things. This also involves going all the way into sometimes cutting new designs into plain bowls or firing new lustre designs onto plain bowls. So luster is an overglaze technique and it's very, very, very difficult technique. It's a very hard one to control, but firing new designs onto old plain bowls. And also there are instances, and I show some of them in the book where we have pieces that have had new designs cut into them and then they've been completely re glazed and refired. So that's a really, I mean that is a really, really heavy duty kind of fabrication. But it's also one that was actually pretty widespread amongst certain groups of objects. I've seen quite a number of these pie that are supposedly from northern Iran that do this as well. And there the artist gets free rein to really create a whole new world. So when you take a plain bowl and you cut a new design into it that you think is going to appeal to a market looking for the exotic and the medieval, you can really start to see how some of these modern artists, they're kind of world making. They're inventing their own idea of what a kind of medieval fantasy would look like. And they're getting really into snakes and you know, sort of evil kings with snakes coming from their shoulders and dogs and sort of men with three faces, you know, really, really extraordinary kind of wild stuff. So there's a lot of scope for the imagination, which is something I also wanted to really pull forward in the book. Then the third category is what we would call true forgery. And then this is an object that has been made from scratch. So the intention was always to make something that would pass as something that it's not on the market. It's not improvisational the way that both bricolage and skin swaps are. It doesn't depend on there being some old material. This is a completely new mate endeavor that's actually much rarer. And I think it's over. I mean, it's certainly much rarer amongst the pieces that I examined and I think it's rarer overall. But it is certainly something that was done. And with that go some amazing technologies of artificial aging. But we have glimpsed through a few sources that talk about these. One that actually gives a very, very detailed technical account by a chemistry professor in the very early 19th, sorry, early 20th century in Iran who describes all of this. Hours and hours of complex processes that go into artificial aging of new made ceramics where you have to dip them in fat and in a lead monoxide slip and refire them and put them under pressure. And it's incredibly complex. I mean, hundreds of hours of experimentation must have gone into making, getting these techniques to work. So this, you know, this is the big sort of pitch that I'm making in the book is not only can we understand these objects better and in a fuller way that will help, you know, will help scholarship on them if we examine these kind of techniques, but we can also recognize and actually honor that huge skill set that has basically that has mostly passed under the radar because it's been treated as a kind of morally wrong, problematic endeavor or something that's a bit shameful or something that lowers the value of antiquities. And therefore there is a kind of market interest in not talking about it as well. The pieces that I've found lingering, particularly on some of the most skilled or the most puzzling examples, really demonstrate that this is where a lot of craft skills went at a moment when the traditional craft industries in the Middle east had been really hard hit, a lot of them by the advent of industrialization and the colonial markets that flooded Middle Eastern markets with Western manufactured goods. So, you know, there's a long been a narrative about the decline of craft skills in the Middle east being this, you know, this kind of sad 19th century story. This stuff all gets, you know, gets sort of ruined and craft skills die off and there's no more practitioners. I think there's actually a lot of craftsmen who moved into this direction and their work has been kind of sitting there in plain sight all this time, but we haven't acknowledged it properly yet.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's a really interesting aspect of this. And just so that we're very clear, right, where are these objects being made? They're not being made in New York by someone looking at a museum. Right. They're being made where they originally kind of would have come from or what are we talking about?
- [30:54]
Dr. Margaret Graves
Yeah, actually this is one of the tricky aspects of the book. And it was puzzling, not puzzling. It was difficult to get information about who the craftsmen were. I got a little bit more about where they were, but always, of course, because of the nature of the subject, because this is basically a self effacing craft skill. It's always kind of circumstantial. It's definitely clear that there was a industry in this kind of work in Aleppo, particularly when the Rocco ceramics were really coming to the fore as collected objects in. It's also very, very clear there was a whole kind of world of this being done in Iran. And I Think some of the most skilled and complex pieces that I've seen are things that have come out of Iran, sometimes with Iranian export labels on them, which means that we know for sure that that work was done before they left the country. I think Tehran is undoubtedly the major site. It was the major center. There may also be. I didn't uncover any hard evidence for other sites in Iran, but I suspect there were and probably some others in Syria. It's also possible that work of this kind was being done in Istanbul, although, again, I never uncovered any hard evidence for that. Paris is the other place. It was definitely happening in Paris as well. And the only single named craftsman doing this kind of work that I found mentioned anywhere in the archives that I looked at was somebody working in Paris called David Zade, who was mentioned in a letter sent in the 1930s about getting a piece put back together, getting a piece reworked. So there is an industry, and it's very hard to sort of put the line on where the industry of restoration, which was a sort of recognized industry, where we would say that shades off away from just restoring pieces and into creating these kind of new fabrications. I think there's actually no way to draw a fine line between those. I also think, you know, one of my hopes, you always hope with a book that it will be useful to other people. And one of my hopes for the future is that I think there's likely to be a world of information in family archives and local archives in probably Iran, in Syria, maybe Turkey and elsewhere that I couldn't get access to, but that other people will actually find and be able to use in the future to add to this constellation of places where this work was being made. I think we can definitely look at it, though, as an international endeavour. A lot of which was happening in the Middle east before things were being exported, but some of it was also taking place in Paris.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, that's helpful to sort of situate where these things are. And I take your point about Paris, but I am going to put that aside for a moment because that's sort of less interesting logistically to me than the ones in Raqqa or Tehran. How do they get from somewhere like that to New York to Indiana? I mean, we're talking ceramics. So, yes, once they're on a shelf, they're pretty stable, but they're fragile to get there. So how does that work?
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Dr. Margaret Graves
Yeah, and this is where the sort of the big web of the international antiquities market starts to become. You know, it's almost overwhelming, actually, trying to look at this on the scale of it, but you're absolutely right. So ceramics are fragile and certainly one thing the archives show, and we have a of lot. Lot of angry letters that are sent about pieces that arrive broken that weren't packed properly, or stuff that was packed in excelsior, which is wood fibre, which was very commonly used for packing in the early 20th century, but generates humidity and would sometimes cause the animal glue joins to come unstuck while pieces were in transit. So things did get broken, although actually maybe not quite as much as you would expect. But the movement of these objects is. They're basically. They're moving through a kind of rapidly expanding chain and it's a really big network. It is a network that's. I mean, it's based on trade associations. It's also based. And I talk in the book about the expansion of international banking as well, the financing of the movement of objects and the financing of getting pieces from local dealers and then getting them onto the kind of. Of international train and out of the country. That stuff also involves banks. A lot these things are moved. And one of the things I was trying to track in the book is who is doing the moving. It's difficult. It's very difficult to find at the supply end to find very much information. What you can get occasionally is sort of half mentions of people or of the sort of movement of antiquities. Diggers never get named, although they're talked about sometimes, and they're usually local laborers. The craftsmen doing this work are likely to be local laborers. They are often associated with minority groups. And this is one of the things that was very interesting, the history of the Middle Eastern antiquities trade, the modern Middle Eastern antiquities trade. It's very well known that this was dominated in particular by Armenians, but also by other, what are called minority trading groups, which would include both Melkite and Maronite Christians, Christians, also Jews of both Iranian and Levantine background as well. Now, the reasons that those particular groups were sort of so well positioned to move within the international antiquities market goes back to the trading histories of those particular groups, a lot of which have to do partly with polyglotism, with family traditions and sort of group traditions of having multiple languages, languages spoken. And this comes out in particular, it's very sort of clear case, in the case of a lot of the Iranian families. Sorry, not the Iranian, the Armenian families. This comes out from the fact that those who were well positioned for international trade already because they had longstanding early modern trade networks. And in the case of the Armenians, you could point to the silk trade networks that had spread long, long, long before the rise of the international antiquities market had spread across the Middle east, actually across Asia, into Russia, into Europe as well. So when you have these kind of widespread kinship groups who are accustomed to credit systems based on trust and have people speaking, you know, have people in the family who can speak multiple languages, they are perfectly positioned for navigating this particular market. Because if you look at some of those, particularly some of the Armenian traders, you know, within one family you have people who speak Arabic, Persian, Ottoman Turkish, as well as Armenian and French and maybe English too. So they are perfectly situated to act as interfaces between everybody. Basically, in that web from the Ottoman context, it's often local Arab men who are acting as diggers. You need someone who can speak to them, you need someone who can speak to the Ottoman authorities, or in Iran, you need someone who can speak to the Persian authorities. You need to be able to speak maybe Armenian with your own kinsmen and within some of your extended kinship trade network, you need to be able to speak French, which is the language of the antiquities market. And later, as the Americans come to be really important, you also need someone who can speak English. So that story of how these particular groups came to really be so well positioned to move in this industry, it goes back to that. It also goes back to the history of, of those trade groups in the late Ottoman Empire. Also there were certain kind of tax advantages that were given to them as well that kind of positioned them well for moving in trade too. So all of this is sort of there. And then you get specific individuals who are really, really successful in acting in this kind of interface. Two of the traders that I write about most in the book, one is Fahim Kujakshi, who was from Aleppin, family of Armenians, probably Melk Catholic, based on what I've read in the archives. His family established themselves in Aleppo, then set up a sale room in Paris. And then Fahim and his uncle went over and set up one in New York. Another major and really important trader who really set actually taste in Islamic antiquities in the American context in a pretty big way is Tikran Khalikin, who I also write about a lot in the book. Book, who was a really interesting figure, a long lived character. His family were originally from Kayseri in Turkey. He also had his brother and he set up a sale room in Istanbul. Then he at one point had a sale room in Cairo. He sets up one in Paris and he sets up one in New York. And he becomes a kind of go to figure for a lot of the American collections too. So these men were able to do that. I mean, they traveled unbelievable amounts. They were constantly. Fahim Kajakchi and Tikran Kolikian seem to have been constantly on steamships back and forth across the Atlantic because they were going back to the Middle east and getting stuff and working with their connections there, getting it moved through the system. And we're talking, you know, in the early days about a lot of steamship passage before petrol drawn vehicles. You have a lot of stuff having to be moved by horse in certain contexts and then getting onto trains when it can, and stuff going on steamship across the Atlantic as well. So there's an enormous amount of movement that happens now. The Midwestern part of the story comes in kind of later and it is something that really runs through the book. You probably notice that I really linger on the collections, especially in Indiana partly, but also in Detroit and Cincinnati and Toledo. Those places are really fascinating in the history of collecting because they came into ascendance after the European museums had kind of dropped away. World War I has really just kicked a boot into the buying power of the European institutions. And at that point you get the rise of these big civic institutions that were being founded in places like Detroit. So we're talking about like the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Toledo Museum of Art and the Cincinnati Art Museum. These come up as civic museums and they're all funded in part by industry money. They've got big industrialists kind of backing them. So obviously Ford in Detroit, Libby Glass in Toledo. Cincinnati was a very important inland port city. So you have money in those places, especially in sort of the 20s and 30s and 40s and even into the 50s and 60s that just wasn't around in some of the. It just wasn't there in the European context anymore. So they suddenly had this kind of buying muscle and they bought huge amounts of stuff. This was one of the biggest surprises to me when I came from the UK to Indiana in 2012, was to discover there was these really important, really exciting collections of material in the Midwest that just hadn't really been looked at all that much. Sometimes they were bought in places like Cincinnati, did not actually have an Islamic art expert on staff at the time that it was buying in this field. So they were bought and they came in and then there was a sort of question mark over sometimes precisely what to do with them. A lot of those places maybe had an Islamic art expert later who did some work with them. But, you know, they weren't able to do everything with them. So a lot of that stuff has kind of sat there for a very long time as well. So it's a story that has an ending that I was able to tell partly because I lived in the Midwest for 11 years. And of course, it brought me into very close contact with those collections. And they also provided me with all this material. That meant I could foreground all of these unpublished pieces in the book, which was one of the things I really wanted to do is not go through the stuff that everybody knows, but to show the incredible stories that are sort of built into the bodies of these pieces that most of my colleagues even had never seen. So that's a long, long way of explaining. But it is a big, complicated web of movement that changes over time as well.
- [43:19]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's a really interesting web, as you've described it. And I wonder, maybe you can give us an example or two of the things you were able to see that aren't otherwise written about or published. Like, you have an entire chapter devoted to some of these ceramics. Do you want to tell us about a few of. Sure.
- [43:35]
Dr. Margaret Graves
I mean, they actually go all through the book because a lot of the pieces from Cincinnati actually turned out to be really, really important. So I'll maybe talk about them, and then I'll talk about the pieces in Indiana. Cincinnati turned out to be the sort of last resting place, if I can say that, of quite a number of pieces that were actually a very important and famous collection, that was. It belonged to Decrin Kolikian, and he loaned it to the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1910, and it stayed at the Victoria and Albert Museum from 1910. And it was on display, and it was very well known and written about a lot at the time. This collection, which is like almost 200 pieces. And then when Dicker and Kalikian died in 1951, it immediately created a inheritance dispute. And that collection, the VA tried very hard to keep it, but that collection ended up going on to. Most of it went onto the market, and it ended up all over the world. A whole tranche of the pieces ended up in Cincinnati. And they are really fascinating because a lot of them, because they were in the VA by 1910, they have really unusually early fixed. That's a fixed point at which we know they weren't being modified anymore after that point. And we have some very early documentation for them. So they became actually really important pieces. And some of the. Some of them are extraordinary. There's an incredible Minay piece, which. That's a kind of overglazed decorative technique that tends to have a lot of little figures of people in it. It's a lovely minai piece, and a lot of it is an original object. But it's also had somebody in the early 20th century, before it went to the VA, drew on in silhouette, some more figures on the bottom of it. So there's just these black outlines of figures that never got completed on the bottom. They're very, very good. They're very well done, but they're completely. Some of them got cleaned off and some of them didn't. So you have really odd little puzzles like that that turned up through Cion. Then the last chapter of the book is a more closely focused case study of a group of ceramics that are in Indiana University. And this came out, you know, so I taught at IU for 11 years, and it was a wonderful place to work. And one of the amazing things about this, this working there was that I had this collection of about 50 pre modern Islamic surroundings kind of dropped in my lap. And they were unpublished and no one had worked on them. And the curator whose purview they came under was very clear, very open to me working on them, and very clear that she was a Japan specialist. She was not going to be able to work on this material. They didn't have the resources to do anything with it. So if I could do an interesting project on them, they would welcome it. So I had this. This golden opportunity at Indiana University with this unpublished collection which included quite a number, nearly 20 pieces of medieval Raqqa ware. After working a little bit with the collection, I went to the director of the museum and the curator of the museum and said, how would you feel about me doing a publication on these pieces that is not about the glories of Islamic ceramics production and the medieval achievements of those potters, but is much more focused on conditions and asking questions about the modern nature of these pieces and the ways that they've been reconstructed and what might have been done to them and to their eternal credit, because I can tell you, not every museum would welcome that particular conversation. To the credit of the director and curator there, they were wholeheartedly supportive of this and said, yeah, this is. I mean, the director said, this is exactly what a university museum should be doing. We should lead the way in a question. You know, questions like this. So they gave me permission to do all sorts of testing of the pieces and what I. One of the first things we did. I won't talk about the whole process of the project, but fairly early in the project I sought for and got funding to do thermoluminescence testing of all the pieces in that collection. And thermoluminescence testing is currently. It's the only widespread technique for dating ceramics that's currently available. And there are some outfits that do it commercially for museums. So what it does, you have to take a sample from the object and then it's tested in a particular way to do with the amount of radiation that it's absorbed. And what it can tell you, thermo luminescence testing can tell you, is that it doesn't tell you when the piece was made, but it tells you when it was last fired. So I thought this would be a perfect opportunity with these pieces that I was being given carte blanche to work on and, you know, to expose some of these questions about how old pieces actually are. I thought, well, let's get them all TL tested. So we did it with all of them. And the results are, you know, interesting. And there's of lots, lots of different bits of data we got back from it, but by far the most surprising result was that of the RACA wears. All of the pieces that are intact and perfect came back with TL test results that said they had been last fired within the last 250 to 100 years, which puts their last firing completely outside the range of when it was supposed to have happened. These are supposed to be 12th or 13th century optimism objects. So with that, I had a whole load of questions and I really dug into what actually happened with these pieces. And in the fifth chapter, you know, I do a lot of provenance research and a lot of research into the early history of the collecting of these objects. And we did more technical analysis. My best interpretation at the moment is that the pieces that we tested in Indiana that came back with those modern TL test results underwent refiring. I think they probably had new lustre surfaces put onto them and fired in the modern era. So probably the early 20th century. That by itself, if it was just Indiana, wouldn't be, you know, perhaps wouldn't be so remarkable. But everyone who knows this material will know that those Indiana pieces are very, very, very similar to much better known examples of the same type of ceramic that are in much more famous collects depictions. So the implications that we have because the Indiana pieces look basically identical with the pieces that are held elsewhere that have always been assumed to be unproblematic 12th 13th century survivals, the Indiana results suggest that actually we need to look at the entire corpus of Roca Warehouse, which Because it was one of the subjects of that collecting boom in the Pre World War I period. Those pieces are now in many, many major collections, public and private, and they are very, very well known and they've been on display for a very long time and they have been accepted up until now as whole products of the 12th, 13th century. So my hope as well is, I mean, that was obviously a complicated thing because it's always difficult politically if you're sort of raising questions about authenticity of pieces that are better known. So the pieces in Indiana weren't known at all, but their implications for the pieces in other collections are significant. My is that now that this research is published and I'm going to publish another article which is much more detailed scientific analysis, I didn't put into the book that this can be a sort of driver for some other collections to now start that kind of testing of those pieces and eventually hopefully we'll be able to have a much bigger conversation about those particular objects and what they might represent. Whether they do really, as the Indiana pieces certainly seem to suggest, represent not just medieval pieces, but actually a whole modern skill set being applied to those objects and then being refired in the modern era.
- [51:20]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
This book is such an interesting combination of all sorts of things that you and I have both mentioned as being kind of a strong suit of it in the beginning. But I think one entanglement that we deserves highlighting after that answer is how much it entangles the past, the present and the future as well. Because there are certainly quite a lot of takeaways that this book has pretty directly. And it sounds like in some follow up work you're doing doing too. So this is clearly something you're continuing to pay attention to and work on. Is there anything else you've got on your desk at the minute? Whether or not it's related to what we've been discussing that you want to mention as a sneak preview too?
- [51:55]
Dr. Margaret Graves
Yeah, I mean, of course I'm trying to deal with all the overspill from this book. There was so much more data than actually could go into it. So I'm working on a number of pieces that are smaller, more focused things. A lot, a lot of the work I hoped the book would do and also these other publications I hope will do as well is actually speak to my colleagues in museums as well. A lot of this book was written, it was able to be written full stop because I had the goodwill and the collaboration of a lot of curators and conservators and I wanted to kind of, you know, kind of give them an address back about where I think we might go with some of this material and also give them in the book. You know, I'm hoping to give them actually, you know, ways that they can kind of figure out what's going on with some of the pieces that they have in their collections and, you know, what kind of sort of frameworks of knowledge they might want to sort of address them to that are slightly different from the ones that we've used in the past. I'm also, I'm trying to figure a way through. I'm writing a piece about resource extraction and banking and antiquities collection through the archives of Calusco Benkian at the moment, which is making me really, really want to work on a book about the finance industry and the antiqu trade. That is a big project I think I've got in the future. And I'm also currently trying to work on a book about medieval metal casting and magic. So I've got multiple things I'm thinking about here. But I am also really, really hoping that with the publication of the book, I do really hope that the conversations with my museum colleagues are going to continue because those to me matter a lot. That's the most public facing part of the work that our field does. And I hope that I have made it clear that I really want to act in cooperation with museums at the same time that I'm trying to talk about things that I think have been difficult in the past sometimes for museums to talk about.
- [53:53]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, I think there will be lots of interesting conversations that come from this. And of course, anyone who wants more information. There's loads of details in the book titled Invisible Hands, Fabrication Forgery and the Art of Islamic Surroundings, published by Princeton University Press in 2026. Margaret, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [54:12]
Dr. Margaret Graves
Thank you. It was a total pleasure.
- [54:27]
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