The genesis of this book came over ten years ago, during the portion of my doctoral research which addressed the mina’i tiles formerly attached to the pair of palace kiosks built by the Rum Seljuq Sultan Kilij Arslan II in Konya. The similarities, in terms of technique and iconography, between both other mina’i tiles and the mass of extant vessels led me to do further work on the material. It became apparent that despite the widespread popularity, and superfluity of brief descriptions in almost all the survey books of Islamic ceramics, there was no monograph on the topic. There was not even a basic system of classification, a lacuna all the more surprising given the rivers of ink which have been spilled in the study of Persian miniature painting, and the major role that mina’i plays in the genesis of that style of painting. While regularly hinted at in the literature, it has not previously been examined in reference to the broad diversity of decoration on mina’i ware. As has been noted by Robert Hillenbrand, paper was far more vulnerable than ceramics, and the ceramic record provides a far larger reservoir of material for the understanding of the early development of Persian painting than the very limited surviving examples from the arts of the book.

Despite the increasing awareness among scholars, curators, dealers and collectors that a large number of the previously published, and seemingly complete, vessels are deeply problematic, the reliance on extensively overpainted vessels in order to build an argument as to the meaning of the iconography still persists to this day.