Khatam Box

Khatam box is a very detailed and elaborate handicraft, and crafting it requires much patience and attention. Khatam uses different color raw material and combines them to form regular polygons with different number of sides. Normally, the polygons are five, six, seven, eight, or ten sided. For the delicate triangles, wood, bone and metal are mostly used. High quality Khatam is inlaid with smaller, more delicate triangles. In one Khatam design, for making the smallest geometric unit, at least three triangles are used, and for the biggest unit, at most four hundred triangles are used.

This art found its way to Iran before the Safavid era and during the Mongol invasion of Iran, as a result of connections established between Iran and China. Presently, there is an inlaid minbar (pulpit) in the ancient Jameh Atigh Mosque in Shiraz which was built more than a thousand years ago.

All this precision and combination of art and geometry is very interesting for children. We can make them interested in this art from now on so that they can better understand the beauty of our nostalgia as a Persian mother or father.