Poetic Inscriptions and Gift Exchange in the Medieval Islamicate World

The use of poetry in inscriptions on luxury objects is a notable feature in the arts of the Islamicate world, particularly in the case of gifts, in which the verses articulate underlying social relations. Scholars often consider such inscriptions within a frame of literal reference, as alternative sources of documentary evidence and/or as ekphrastic descriptions of the object on which they appear. Moving beyond mimesis, this study takes up the figurative dimensions of poetry, exemplified here by the trope of prosopopeia, which gives a fictive voice to inanimate objects and allows the inscribed gifts to speak for themselves and to their recipients. The essay demonstrates the significance of recited and inscribed poetry in the gift economy of the Islamicate world. It shows the widespread nature of the phenomenon by outlining the history of poetic inscriptions, with special attention to the use of the first-person voice, from Graeco-Roman antiquity to Byzantium and on to the Islamicate world. Narrowing the focus to medieval Iberia, it offers a case study of a tenth-century ivory pyxis made near Umayyad Cordoba to test the value of introducing a theory of prosopopeia, and the analysis of poetic figuration more generally, to the study of luxury gifts in the Islamicate world. Prosopopeia, I argue, makes objects into subjects through the speaking “I,” and with the performance of subjectivity comes the construction of agency. In the case of the Umayyad pyxis, a reading attentive to the prosopopeia in the inscription helps restore agency to women in the gift exchange.