In addition to earthenware and metal artefacts, articles made of other solid materials – glass, wood and bone – were also manufactured in these regions, as was fine-quality paper.

It was during the ninth and tenth centuries that glass-making flourished in these regions. Tableware and chemical glassware, perfume flasks and other everyday articles came into widespread use. They rarely exhibit figurative motifs; patterns are simple and were made either by blowing in moulds or by using stamps. There are original glass figures of birds and glass medallions with impressed and relief patterns from the palaces of Afrasiab and Termez, used for interior decoration. The range of motifs is quite varied: vegetal patterns, representations of birds, animals and fish, and also scenes showing a hunt or a rider carrying a bird on his forearm. Arabic characters are occasionally encountered. The style of representation is typical of the pre-Mongol period. According to contemporary accounts, coloured-glass inlay for use in interior decoration was a special form of the glazier’s art. However, no examples of such decorative glass have been preserved.

Bone-carving from the eighth to the sixteenth century is represented by large quantities of everyday items: ear picks, small spoons, conical buttons and other small articles. In the eighth and ninth centuries plaques and wafers of bone were still found with engraved images recalling pre-Islamic traditions. One such is a bone plaque depicting an archer: discovered in Transoxania, it follows the iconography of late Sogdian art. Engraved bone artefacts are not found in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, but various articles made of bone continued in everyday use. Of interest in this regard are some chessmen found in Samarkand, small stylized statuettes representing various pieces as horsemen, birds and animals. From the fourteenth to the sixteenth century, bone was mainly used for sword hilts, knife handles and components of military equipment. Jewellers also used ivory to make small perfumery articles and as incrustations in a variety of caskets and items of women’s toiletry.

Surviving examples of artistic woodwork include decorative elements in various types of buildings. Some thematic wood panels carved in relief have been discovered by archaeologists as part of the interior decoration of eighth-century buildings in Usrushana and Sogdia in which pre-Islamic artistic features are quite noticeable. In the ninth and tenth centuries local traditions and stylistic trends in the caliphate as a whole began to interact; this may be seen in the style of the carving on a column from Oburdon in the eastern part of Transoxania, which shows a remarkable interplay of animal and vegetal motifs, sculptural forms and three-dimensional ornamentation in which the artist displays great originality and imagination.

In the centuries that followed, the style of wood-carving developed along the same lines as in other arts and crafts. Examples of woodwork taken from the interiors of works of architecture dating from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century bear witness to the high artistic standards of medieval wood-carvers. Among these are the carved cenotaph with inscriptions in thuluth, naskh and Kufic from the fourteenth-century mausoleum of Sayf al-Dīn al-Bākharzī in Bukhara and the carved door from the fifteenth-century mausoleum of Shams al-Dīn Kulyāl in Shahr-i Sabz, whose inscriptions are set against a background of flowing vegetal ornament. These monuments illustrate the two main types of decorative carving. In the first, we find the simple decorative technique of grooved or incised pattern, and in the second, the more complex high-relief carving in which the ground is cut away. In terms of style, the wood-carving of Khurasan and Transoxania from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century retained common artistic features.