Scribe’s Pen Box

This scribe’s pen box, of elongated octagonal form, is decorated on its exterior with tortoiseshell, mother-of-pearl and bone inlay in a design of interlocking trefoil motifs. The interior of the box has a removable shallow tray with silver mounts, which would have been used to store the scribe’s writing utensils.
By the second half of the sixteenth century, Ottoman woodworkers had begun to employ inlays of mother-of-pearl and tortoiseshell, two materials that were technically difficult to work. The tortoiseshell was generally laid over the metal foil to give it a lustrous quality, and mother-of-pearl plaques were frequently inlaid with black mastic to further emphasise their luminosity. The fine quality decoration upon this pen box suggests its commissioning by a member of the Ottoman courtly elite and was probably used by an important scribe.