Compound silk twill, the colours faded, the pattern dominated by roundels with pairs of confronted lions, Iran or western Central Asia, 800-1000.

Most of the pattern survives. It is dominated by a roundel with a complex border that contains a pair of lions, standing (statant) and confronted, and other motifs. Addorsed pairs of running quadrupeds are set above and below the roundels, which can also be analyzed as groups of four quadrupeds in two rows of two between the roundels. One pair, with three spots on a dark ground, has curled tails and looks to the front. The other pair, pale in colour and with bushy tails, has the head turned back. We know from other examples that the fragments of pattern along the vertical sides of the textile once formed a stylized, tree-like arrangement of plant-based motifs, which were level with the groups of four quadrupeds (see V&A: 763-1893).

Samite: 1/2 twill, 1 binding warp, 3 main warps, 3 pattern wefts; warp silk undyed and weft silk tan, blue and blue-green.

Like 763-1893, this textile is comparable with the shroud of St Mengold in the collegiate church of Notre Dame at Huy in Belgium. This large silk textile (length 1.95 m) has an inscription on its reverse that was first interpreted as a text in Soghdian, and on this basis Dorothy Shepherd identified the shroud as an example of "Zandaniji" silk, that is, silk manufactured in the village of Zandanij near Bukhara (now in Uzbekistan) in the 7th century. See D.G. Shepherd and W.B. Henning, “Zandaniji Identified?” In Aus der Welt der islamischen Kunst: Festschrift für Ernst Kühnel zum 75. Geburtstag am 26. 10. 1957, Berlin, 1959, pp. 15–40. (See also D.G. Shepherd, “Zandaniji Revisited”, in Documenta Textilia: Festschrift für Sigrid Müller-Christensen, ed. M. Flury-Lemberg and K. Stolleis, Munich, 1980, pp. 105–22; S. Whitfield, ed., La route de la soie: Un voyage à travers la vie et la mort, Brussels, 2009, pp. 32–3.) Radiocarbon dating of the shroud of St Mengold showed that Shepherd’s dating was too early. There is a high probability (95.4%) that it was produced between AD 780 and 980, and a probability of 68.2% that it was made between 870 and 970. See Nicholas Sims-Williams and Geoffrey Khan, “Zandaniji Misidentified”, Bulletin of the Asia Institute, vol. 22 (2008), pp. 207–13, p. 208. In addition, when Nicholas Sims-Williams examined the inscription in 2011, he found he could not read the “Soghdian” text, which he presumed was Arabic. This was confirmed by Geoffrey Khan, who published the text as
لعبد الرحمن الامير بثمن / و ثلثين دينارا غير ثلث
“Belonging to ‘Abd al-Rahman the Commander, [acquired] for 38 dinars less one third.” The use of the gold dinar as the unit of account places the note in Egypt or Syria or, less probably, Iraq, while the unit of account in East Iran at this time was the silver dirham. The palaeographic features of the inscription suggest a dating in the 9th century. See Sims-Williams and Khan, “Zandaniji Misidentified”, pp. 210–11.
Although this textile has a pattern derived from the same source as V&A: 763-1893, there are significant variations. The scaling of the motifs is different, for example, and the quadrupeds immediately below the roundel have only three spots.

Similar textiles have been preserved in other European cathedrals, and fragments from pieces used as sutra wrappers were found in Dunhuang, China, and are now in the British Museum and in the Pelliot collection at the Musée Guimet, Paris. See When Silk was Gold: Central Asian and Chinese Textiles, ed. James C.Y. Watt and Anne E. Wardwell (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1997).

1746-1888