9. Turban helmet inscribed with the name of Sultan Ya‘qub. Iran or Western Anatolia, ca. 1478 – 90. Steel, silver; h. 11⅛ in. (28.3 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1904 (04.3.211)
10. Bashford Dean
11. Bashford Dean wearing an Italian infantry armor of about 1575 from his private collection, Riverdale, New York, ca. 1920
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distinctive type taking its modern name from the bulbous shape of the bowl, which is often forged with spiral fluting that suggests the windings of a cloth turban. The engraved ornament, usually covered with silver, consists of foliate arabesques and Arabic inscriptions that refer to a ruler’s honorific titles. The name of Sultan Ya‘qub, ruler of the Ak-Koyunlu (White Sheep Turkmen) from 1478 to 1490, inscribed on one of them (fig. 9) documents the Turkman origin of the group. The acquisition of the Dino collection not only brought the Museum a renowned collection of armor, the best in the United States, it also attracted the services of Bashford Dean (1867 –1928; figs. 10 – 13). Dean was professor of vertebrate zoology at Columbia University and the first curator of fishes in the Department of Vertebrate Paleontology (later the Department of Ichthyology and Herpetology) at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. One of the world’s experts on oyster culture, chimaeroids (primitive sharks), and armored fishes of the Devonian era, he was widely respected in the academic world as a brilliant scientist and inspired teacher. His textbook Fishes Living and Fossil, published in 1895, was written when he was only twenty-eight. He published 175 papers on the related subjects of zoology, biology, and paleontology, and his three-volume magnum opus, The Bibliography of Fishes (1916 – 23), became a standard reference and earned him the prestigious Daniel Giraud Elliot Medal awarded by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. Dean was also passionately interested in arms and armor and by 1904 had assembled the beginnings of what would become one of the most important private collections in the United States. His acquaintances never failed to remark on his parallel interests in armored fish and medieval armor. Dean was well educated, articulate, and passionate. He came from old Anglo-Dutch stock, and he was married to an heiress, Mary Alice Dyckman, whose Dutch ancestors farmed large tracts of land in northern Manhattan. (She and her sister donated Dyckman House to the City of New York in 1910, and it was subsequently restored under Dean’s direction.) His family