Dado panel,

1115 CE

Around the beginning of the twelfth century, stone masons carved hundreds of panels to create a dado—decoration lining the lower part of a wall—for the ceremonial courtyard of a royal palace in Ghazni. The masons worked with the palace architect, Muhammad bin Husayn bin Mubarak, designers, and a poet to reproduce a poem on the dado’s upper register. These verses, honoring the patron, Sultan Mas‘ud III (r. 1099–1115), are among the earliest examples of monumental writing in Persian. The marks incised below the decoration would have guided the panels’ correct placement. This panel was later repurposed to decorate a tomb in the ziyara (shrine) to Imam al-Sahib in Ghazni. The conditions of its removal from a devotional context and transfer to the global art market, before being gifted to the Museum in 2001, are yet to be determined but postdate 1967, when it was last photographed in situ.

Martina Rugiadi, Associate Curator, Department of Islamic Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York