East side story

A Rajasthan tiger hunt picture and a silver kiddush cup from Khurasan with coeval inscriptions in Hebrew and Arabic starred at two sales that put the spotlight on the art of Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent

- Huon Mallalieu

IN 1854, the critic Coventry Patmore opined that his fellow poet Matthew Arnold’s Sohrab and Rustum would appeal only to scholars. He was wrong, it became a literary mainstay of the British Empire. I suppose that mine must be about the last generation to whom it is familiar, in my case because the prep-school master who taught it to me was so thrilled when he found that Sorabji, a Persian pupil, had the middle name Rustum. In his epic, Arnold wrote of the River Oxus flowing ‘through the hush’d Chorasmian waste, Under the solitary moon’, giving his readers the impression that Central Asia west of the Caspian and south of the Aral Seas was one great desert devoid of civilisation. Whatever it was like in Arnold’s time, or indeed today, in the 10th and 11th centuries, Chorasmia, Khurasan or Khwarazm was a powerful and highly cultured empire, at times lording it over modern Iran, Afghanistan and points north. This should not be a surprise, because it controlled the Silk Road from east to west and, almost as importantly, the Fur Road from Siberia.

Cultural influences came from all sides, Hellenistic and Buddhist from Gandara, Hindu from India, Roman, Byzantine, Persian and, increasingly, Islamic, and with wealth came highly skilled craftsmen. From very early times, there was a considerable Jewish presence and the melange of races and religions seems to have cohabited in comparative harmony. This was one of the factors that made a 3½in-high silver