My ongoing research project A carved history. Reappraising material culture from early Islamic Iran focuses on the material culture and epigraphic sources in Arabic and Persian from the pre-modern Iranian world. It aims at assessing their potential as primary sources on the cultural history of the eastern Islamic regions, by cross-checking them with manuscript sources, complementing and questioning the traditional historiographical narrative. An important part of the project deals with the remains of the architectural decoration in stucco of two early Iranian mosques (ca. 8th-9th century), located in Samarkand (Uzbekistan) and Balkh (Afghanistan). The analysis of the largely unpublished corpora of fragments in carved stucco is enhanced through comparisons with stucco  architectural decoration from the core regions of the Abbasid Caliphate (esp. Syria and Iraq). The main objectives are 1) retracing the circulation of techniques, patterns, and, most likely, craftsmen across the Islamicate world; 2) determining how continuity and change in artistic practices reflect the transformations of the political and social context. Parallel research is devoted to epigraphic sources, in particular monumental and funerary inscriptions as well as inscribed objects produced under the first Turko-Iranian dynasties (10th-12th century). The main topics investigated are: the interaction of Arabic and Persian in the epigraphic culture of the eastern Islamic world; Persian poetic inscriptions and their link with the manuscript tradition; craftsmen’s signatures and the production process of inscribed objects; the stylistic development of epigraphic scripts across places, time and media.