A RARE BRASS-INLAID IRON MAMLUK DOOR KNOCKER Egypt, late 14th - early 15th century  Of typical shape, suspended from a split hoop, the handle with inner and outer cusped outlines, engraved with panels of scrolling arabesques and stylised vegetal tendrils divided by drop-motifs encased within brass-inlaid lines, the back plain, 14cm long excluding the hoop. Provenance: Christie's London, 1 May 2001, lot 227. In her doctoral thesis, Luitgard E. M. Mols researched in detail the great variety of existing Mamluk door knockers and she divided them up in different groups. Door knockers designed in the same shape and style of our lot are listed under the holes-and-bosses type category. These were mostly found in Egypt and appear to be well-known in bronze but less so in steel or iron, making our lot a rare example. The earliest known example of this group carries the name of Sultan al-Mansur Qala'un on its suspension disk, confirming the existence of this stylistic group already in the late 13th century. These door knockers became more and more stylised in the following centuries. Mols suggested that the origins of this type of hexagonal cusped door knockers might come from a unique pair of Mamluk dragon handles made for the mausoleum of Ibrahim al-Khalil at Hebron, dating 1286. The stylisation of dragon handles was probably not a Mamluk invention, as some specimens occured already in pre-Mamluk buildings in Aleppo and Damascus. That said, this design became so prominent that in the 19th century, during the so-called Mamluk Revival period, many door knockers were shaped and decorated in this fashion. Differently from our example though, the revival door knockers would have never had brass-inlaid decorations and the inlays would have been carried out with metal wire rather than proper metal sheets (Luitgard E. M. Mols, Mamluk Metalwork Fittings in Their Artistic and Architectural Context, Eburon Delft, 2006, pp. 58 - 61), suggesting an early 15th-century dating for our door knocker. A similar iron Mamluk door knocker was successfully sold in these rooms, 27 October 2017, lot 54.