Edmund de Unger

After going to London in 1934 to learn English, he studied economics at Kiel Institute for the World Economy, law at the University of Budapest and history at Hertford College, Oxford.

"[3] The majority of carpets that form the core of the Keir Collection remain in the 18th century Manor House on Ham Street in Richmond, London, which was de Unger's home up to his death in 2011.

A small but representative portion of classical oriental carpets from Persia, Turkey and Mughal India are on display in the Pergamon Museum of Islamic Art.

With Werner Abegg as mentor de Unger moved on to mediaeval and Renaissance woven cloth from Europe, particularly Italy and Spain, and in number these items dominate the collection.

Because of the difficulty of working with the very hard medium, only the caliph and his immediate court could afford these objets d'art, which varied in size from small animal forms to large vessels.

In 1068, however, the large collection of treasures in the Caliph's palace in al-Qahira (now part of modern-day Cairo) was dispersed throughout the medieval world as the result of a revolt by the unpaid army.

Several of these rare sculpted rock crystals came to form parts of reliquaries in Medieval church treasuries, in mountings made for gold and precious stones.

De Unger acquired several rock crystal pieces from this period for his collection including a fine vessel decorated with palmettes, set in an elaborate gold casing with handles formed of foliage and winged dragons.

[8] In October 2008, an 11th-century Fatimid rock crystal ewer was acquired for the Keir Collection at a public auction in Christie's by de Unger's son, Richard, for over £3 million.

Set in a medieval Italian gold and enamel mount, the ewer had earlier in the year been offered for auction in Somerset as a nineteenth-century French claret decanter with an estimated price of between £100 and £200.

When de Unger requested an export order so that the ewer could go on display in Berlin, the UK government sought its own evaluation from Sotheby's, who returned a figure of £20 million, beyond the means of any public British art collection.

With a change of government, Sotheby's figure was accepted and the ewer, one of only a very small number of surviving rock glass vessels of this type, is now on display in the Pergamon Museum of Islamic Art.

With intricate designs in luxurious gold and blue or polychrome, these date from the twelfth to the fifteenth century and originate from Syria, Spain, North Africa (particularly Mamluk Egypt), Iraq, Iran and India.

The miniature paintings on detached folios, which form the bulk of de Unger's collection, contain illustrations of Persian epic poems, including the celebrated Shahnameh, the "Book of Kings", of Firdausi and the Khamsa of Nizami.