An important post-sasanian silk shirt, Khurasan or Central Asia, 7th-9th century

the shirt opening to the front with a v-shaped collar and short sleeves, woven with cream, honey and blue silk threads, with a repeat pattern of confronting pheasants each clasping a pearled disc or crown in its beak and standing on a stylised base

In overall fair condition, intact, with some discoloration due to ware consistent with age, few loose threads with small hole to right-hand side of front, as viewed.
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Textiles of such luxury as the present example were produced to indicate the rank and wealth of their owners. Skilled textile workers were sourced from various conquered lands and as a result their works display a fusion of styles and techniques. This shirt, which was woven from fine cream, honey and blue silk threads, reveals the re-usage of Sasanian royal iconography which remained in vogue in the post-Sasanian period.

The shirt is decorated with a repeat pattern of grand, standing pheasants facing each other. They all hold wreaths in their beaks with three pearl-like pendants that were either, as on the present example, in their beaks, or hung around their necks such as on a silk textile with a similar pattern now in the Benedictine Jouarre Abbey (Splendeurs des Sassanides, exhibition catalogue, Brussels, 1993, no.129). Such wreaths would have indicated that they belonged to the royal household. One should also note the pearl band across the wings and frontal floral decoration to the top of the wing, details that feature specifically on textiles made after the Arab conquests (see Harper, P., The Royal Hunter. Art of the Sasanian Empire, New York, 1978, p.137).   

On the present shirt, this wreath is separated from the fluttering pennants that billow directly behind the pheasants' necks, comparable to representations on fresco fragments from Qyzil monastery in Chinese Turkestan, now in The Hermitage, St Petersburg, and the Museum für Indische Kunst, Berlin (illustrated in Beurdeley, C., Sur les Routes de la Soie. Le grand voyage des objets d'art, Fribourg, 1985, p.117, no.117). These mural decorations and the present shirt demonstrate the relationship between diverse artistic media and their influence upon one another across time and space. The motif of the pheasant with its regal connotations remained a potent symbol of power and luxury travelling along trade routes, across empires and down the centuries perpetuating the iconography of the Sasanian lineage long after its political demise.