The absence of textual sources dealing directly with the decoration of mina’i ware means that the fragmentary objects must themselves act as their own archive. By reading the corpus of sherds it is possible to better understand the rich diversity of styles, as well as the technical mastery of materials, exhibited by the potters and painters of Kashan in the second half of the twelfth century and the early decades of the thirteenth century. Archaeological evidence has confirmed the general chronological range of production, with the exception of the tiles from Takht-i Suleyman, which show that although the technique appears to have died out in Kashan, it continued in at least one other location into the latter decades of the thirteenth century for the production of tiles. Mina’i ware is an overtly Persian style of ceramics that can be seen to have been traded widely across the Eurasian landmass and beyond, from Moscow to Kayalik, Aleppo to Jam, and Istanbul to Cairo.