Glazed Bricks from Western Iran
An article in The Art Newspaper for September concerns a collection of 51 glazed polychrome bricks from the Mannaean site of Qalaichi near Bukan in Western Iran that have recently been returned to Iran from Switzerland. They were looted in the 1980s and taken to a bonded warehouse in Switzerland where they were seen in 1991 […]
The High Price of Luxury Trade in the Parthian and Sasanian Periods
In the last decades of the 2nd century BC, envoys from the Han dynasty of China were met on the banks of the Oxus River (modern Amu Darya) by an escort of Parthian cavalry. The Chinese historian Sima Qian (c. 145–86 BC) reported that “twenty thousand horsemen” were sent by the Parthian king to accompany […]
