Persian and Islamic Locks: Combination Dials, Padlocks, and Wooden Pin Locks

A Combination Lock from about 1200

The David Collection in Copenhagen holds a "fragment of a box with a combination lock" (inventory no. 1/1984). The record published by Museum With No Frontiers dates it to Hegira 597 / 1200–1201 CE, under the Great Seljuqs. It gives the place as "Iran, Isfahan?" with a question mark. The box is cast and hammered brass inlaid with silver and copper. Its inscription names the maker as the astrolabe maker Muhammad ibn Hamid al-Asturlabi al-Isfahani.

The record describes the mechanism this way: "The four double dials, each of which can be set in 16 positions, allows for 4,294,967,296 combinations." When the right combination is set, the dials release an inner metal plate connected both to an outside handle and to the locking mechanism. The maker's trade matters here. Astrolabes are precision instruments with engraved, rotating scales, and the same skill in graduated rotating parts appears in the lock's dials.

This article does not call the box the "first" combination lock. The sources read for this batch do not make that claim.

Al-Jazari's Locks (1206)

The engineer Ismail al-Jazari (1136–1206) worked in the Jazira, the upper Mesopotamian region, at the court of the Artuqid dynasty. He was not Persian. His Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices was completed in 1206. According to the historian of technology Donald Hill, as cited in Wikipedia, it describes "a large metal door, a combination lock and a lock with four bolts." Together with the David Collection box, it shows that combination locks were known to craftsmen and engineers in the eastern Islamic world around 1200.

Brass Padlocks in Museum Collections

The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds brass padlocks that its Islamic Art department attributes to "India or Iran," both bought through the Rogers Fund in 1910:

• 10.100.165. Cast brass, 18th century, 10.5 cm high, "probably made in" India or Iran.
• 10.100.187. Brass, probably 18th century, 4.8 cm high, "attributed to" probably India or Iran.

The museum's own cautious wording shows how hard it is to assign a region to padlocks from this broad area. Many collections face the same problem.

Wooden Pin Locks and Animal Padlocks in Persia

Pitt-Rivers' 1883 study of primitive locks and keys records two kinds of lock in use in Persia in his own time:

• Wooden pin locks. These are worked by a key that lifts loose pins from a wooden bolt. Pitt-Rivers cites J. Romilly Allen, who had written on Scottish wooden locks and had obtained one in Persia. Pitt-Rivers illustrates an "exactly similar" lock from Yarkand in the India Museum. He notes that the type was also used in Turkey. He concluded that wooden key-drawn pin locks had spread "over the region extending from Egypt to Yarkand."
• Spring padlocks in animal forms. Allen told Pitt-Rivers he had "himself seen them used in Persia in the forms of animals." Pitt-Rivers suggested that the animal-shaped padlocks of Egypt, Persia, and China probably belonged to a common tradition.

Pitt-Rivers' ideas about a single origin and spread from one region to another belong to the 1880s. Modern scholarship may weigh them differently. The observations themselves are useful evidence that these lock types were in use.

For the wooden pin lock in earlier periods, see Mesopotamian locks and Egyptian locks. For later puzzle mechanisms, see puzzle locks.

Related Topics

• Combination Lock
• Padlock
• Puzzle Lock
• Ancient Locks
• Mesopotamian Locks
• Chinese Locks

Sources