The Walters Art Museum: Plate With A King And Queen

The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland displays quite a few Ancient Islamic art pieces, including the silver dish entitled “Plate with a King and Queen” (Figure 1). Constructed in Iran during the 6th or 7th century, this dish depicts a wedding between the two people. It is twenty-three centimeters in diameter and is supported at the bottom, making it five and one-fifth centimeters in height.

Figure 1. “Plate with a King and Queen”
This is a common type of Sasanian art piece. The Sassanian Empire was around from 226 to 651 A.D. and at its greatest extent encompassed present day Iran, Iraq up to the Euphrates River and parts of Armenia and Georgia. This empire was a successor of the Persians and is known for Zoroastrianism, a religion
Coin with Image of Kavadh II
Sasanian crowns of kings often looked liked helmets and incorporated a korymbos, or ball of hair covered by a veil situated at the point of the crown. The king on this silver plate has a bowl-shaped crown with three pyramid-shapes viewed by the viewer. There is another bowl-shape that supports the korymbos.
Both the king and queen are wearing common clothing for kings and queens of that time period. They are both wearing suras and are decorated with jewelry. The queen is wearing a rounded string bracelet, necklace and earrings. The king is decorated with with a necklace, earrings and a belt with a sword.
The heads of both the kings and queen are oriented away from the viewer. This was common at the time and it is very rare to seen an image of a person in frontal view. The lack of three-dimensional perspective in the image is also common in the artwork of the period. Above the king and queen’s heads is a patterned semicircle which can be interpreted as the sun.
These images give a clue to what people looked liked and how they interacted during the Sassanid Empire. The queen is rather odd and not what I would presume to be an ideal womanly figure. She has rather large body parts including wide eyes, a thick neck and large, long ears. The king also has rather strange body figures, but not as odd in comparison with the female. He has a beard and long
In these artworks, both king and queen are interacting lovingly. They are both facing each other and looking into eachothers eyes while the king is playing a rattle instrument and holding a ring in between him and his new wife. Both are sitting on a platform which is topped with flat pillows. These platforms were common in Sussanian parties and the number of pillows in which a person was sitting on indicated their status. As seen in this dish, the king has a higher status than the queen, thus sitting on more pillows. Both individuals are displayed in a laid-back posture. Often, there is at least one image of food. In this particular piece, they are surrounded by what appears to be some sort of fruit on a plate and three boar heads are below their