A Timurid silver-inlaid iron bucket

Persia, 15th Century

Footnotes

Provenance
The collection of Alexander H. Morton (1942-2011).

Inscriptions: man hafara bi'ran li-a/khihu fa-qadd waq'a fihu, 'He who digs a well for his brother, will fall in it'.

For a similar bucket sold at Sotheby's New York see Antiquities and Islamic Art, 2 December 1988, lot 209.

Alexander Morton, universally known as Sandy, was a uniquely gifted scholar and linguist. Born in India his father Kenneth Morton CIE OBE was a member of the Indian Civil Service. His grandfather was Harold Hargreaves, who succeeded Sir John Marshall as Director of the Indian Archaeological Survey. The family left India in 1947 and settled in Cambridge. Sandy attended Rugby specialising in Classics, and then University College, Oxford. After obtaining a First in Classical Mods, he switched to take a final degree in Persian and Arabic. In 1964, supported by a scholarship, he left England for Iran and commenced work at the British Institute of Persian Studies in Tehran. He returned to London to study for a PhD at the School of Oriental and African Studies under Professor Ann Lambton, on Persian Travel Diaries of the 19th Century but never finished, lured back to Iran, where he became Assistant Director at BIPS.

Morton acquired a considerable knowledge of coins in Iran and on his return to England started work at the British Museum cataloguing their collection of Middle-Eastern glass Stamps. He remained in close contact with the British Museum throughout his life. He then moved to SOAS where he was appointed Senior Lecturer of the Persian Section of the Near and Middle East Department.

Sandy's books and articles covered a wide variety of topics including numismatics, the Ardebil Shrine, the Safavid dynasty and Persian poetry. Perhaps his best known publication is A Catalogue of Early Islamic Glass Stamps in the British Museum, published in 1985, the definitive work on early Islamic weights and stamps.

Important Notice to Buyers
Some countries e.g., the US, prohibit or restrict the purchase by its citizens (wherever located) and/or the import of certain types of Iranian-origin works. As a convenience to buyers, Bonhams has marked with the symbol R all lots of Iranian (Persian) origin. It is each buyer's responsibility to ensure that they do not bid or import a lot in contravention of the sanctions or trade embargoes that apply to them.