MOORISH LAMP AND MORTAR
(Moorish. Museum of Granada)
All of the lamp (continues Amador) that properly belongs to it, is the open-work shade, together with the graduated set of spheres which we now observe on top.[92] The lowest part is clearly an inverted bell, from which project four decorative pieces. This is believed by Amador to be a Spanish bell, dating from the fifteenth century, designed for striking with a hammer, and proceeding from some monastery or convent plundered by the Moors. Indeed, one of the two inventories discovered at Alcalá mentions “a bell with a hole in it, which used to belong to a Moorish lamp,” thus countenancing the widespread supposition that the lamps of the mosque of Cordova were made of the Christian bells of Compostela, which the fierce Almanzor caused to be conveyed upon the aching backs of Christian captives to the Moorish court and capital of Andalusia.
It is probable, therefore, that the lamp of the third Mohammed of Granada is now composed of two lamps, and that the primitive arrangement of its parts was altered by the ignorant. Eight chains would formerly suspend it, in the following order of its tiers or stages, from the dome of the mezquita. First and uppermost would come the shade; then, next to this, the set of tapering spheres; and, last and lowest, the saucer or platillo, which has disappeared. Further, and as Koranic law prescribed, the lamp would hold two lights—one to be kindled on the saucer, and the other underneath the shade.
Other articles of Spanish-Moorish ornamented bronze are thimbles, buckets, and the spherical perfume-burners which were used to roll upon the stone or marble pavement of a dwelling. Moorish thimbles, conical and uncouthly large, are not uncommonly met with at Granada. I have one, of which the above is an outline sketched to size.
Sometimes these Moorish thimbles are inscribed in Cufic lettering with phrases such as—“(May) the blessing of God and every kind of happiness (be destined for the owner of this thimble)”; or else the maker's name—“The work of Saif”; or a single word—“Blessing.”
