A Medieval Persian Builder.

Lacking many of the documentary and archival sources available to scholars of the medieval Western world, historians of Islamic architecture are forced to turn to another feature of architectural decoration to reconstruct the building tradition: the written word. A builder's signature on a set of luster tiles in the Metropolitan Museum of Art allows us to connect the set to an early-14th-century shrine complex in central Iran. Reading of another inscription on the tiles, hitherto unnoticed and containing a signature and date, allows us to reconstruct the building campaign at the site and to evaluate the position of builders and potters in Mongol society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]