In the last years of the nineteenth century, a group of glazed stonepaste (also known as fritware) vessels appeared in the showrooms of Europe and the United States. In the early years of the new century, scholars and connoisseurs started to associate the underglaze-painted and luster-painted wares with the ancient city of Raqqa in northeastern Syria. Largely abandoned since the mid-thirteenth century, the great walled city was at the time being repopulated by Circassians who, in the course of removing old bricks to build their houses, were uncovering large numbers of jugs, jars, and bowls. Although the bubble was to burst with the onset of the Great Depression, the craze for “Raqqa wares” in the preceding decades led U.S. collectors to pay extraordinary sums for the finest examples (in 1908, Charles Freer gave $6,000 for a single jar). As a result of this active market in the early twentieth century, “Raqqa wares” are among the best-represented Islamic glazed ceramics in international museum collections. Despite the ubiquity of extant artifacts, the study of the pottery of Raqqa has been beset by numerous problems. Until the 1980s most of the excavations on the site had been illicit operations, while the unreliable testimony...