The de Jure 'Artist' of the Bobrinski Bucket: Production and Patronage of Metalwork in pre-Mongol Khurasan and Transoxiana
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The Bobrinski bucket, made in Herat in 599/1163, is one of the most iconic metalwork objects studied by historians of Islamic art. To date, art historical scholarship on the bucket has focused on interpreting its decorative programme and identifying the decorator, Mas'ud ibn Ahmad, whose name is inscribed on the bucket, as the 'artist' who had the intellectual property of the design and its application. In this essay, I investigate the meaning of signatures left by 'artists' by examining the range of possible relationships between four men whose names appear in the dedication inscription of the Bobrinski bucket. The legal writings of Hanafī jurists from Khurasan and Transoxiana, including al-Sarakhsī (d. ca. 1090), provide an important, and hitherto unexplored, source for understanding the legal rights and responsibilities of the different parties involved in the production of a metalwork object from conception to final product, including the stages of commissioning, manufacture, sale, and repair. The treatment by Muslim jurists of the different forms of trade provides a better understanding of the potential legal and contractual capacity in which a metalwork artist could sign his work.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".