Strainer-Type Smoking Pipes in Ottoman Palestine: An Updated Review of Their Typology, Function and Distribution

This article discusses a rather marginal and hitherto little-studied type of Ottoman-period clay smoking pipe documented in Israel. Due to its morphology, we classified this kind of pipe “strainer-type pipe.” It includes two wheel-made variants which were probably locally manufactured and which are dated primarily to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries CE. Strainer-type pipes of related or different types were common in certain parts of Turkey and northern Iraq, as well as in the north-central Mediterranean (notably the Balkans, Italy, and southern France). We suggest that the initialization of the discussed southern Levantine strainer-type pipes was influenced by foreign prototypes, namely the Anatolian-Iraqi or European ones, which could have been brought to historical Palestine by merchants, officials, pilgrims, migrants, and/or soldiers in the Ottoman army.