A silver and brass inlaid bidriware bottle (surahi), Deccan, India, early 17th century or earlier

the globular body composed of a series of vertical ridges, the tall slender neck rising from a register of petal shapes topped by a rounded flange to a series of spiralling ridges to a mouth with two raised bands, the decoration of the body in crescent-form vertical registers alternately of trefoil vegetal tendrils and scrolls of split-palmettes with quatrefoil motifs, the shoulder and neck with bands of similar motifs

Zebrowski 1997, no.270, p.185

Zebrowski talks of the use of this type of ridge to decorate a bottle as "profoundly Indian" (Zebrowski 1997, p.186). In his account of the evolution of the surahi he published this bottle giving it a date based on the supposed start of bidriware to the early seventeenth century, but allowing for the possibility of a sixteenth century date judged on its decorative vocabulary (ibid., p.187, no.270). In fact, he finds the inlaid motifs, in particular the trefoil and quatrefoil designs, so redolent of Timurid decoration that he raises the possibility of a "very early date for this remarkable bidri object" (ibid., p.190).