The 8th century inlaid wooden panel currently on display in the gallery, “Arab Lands and Iran under the Umayyads and Abbasids, 661-1258”, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is an object that offers broader cultural, social, and artistic value than its limited geographically and temporally centered gallery moniker implies. The wooden panel sits in an artistic landscape that is not inherently bound to strict cultural or religious structures, but instead represents a diachronic desire to invoke ideas of contemplation, transcendence, and otherworldly insight through material forms. This paper marks a shift in the interest in this object starting not from its Islamic nature, but rather its intended function. However, the function of this object is not entirely conclusive. Based on its findspot in ‘Ain al-Sira cemetery near Fustat (or Old Cairo) in Egypt, it was readily attributed as a cenotaph panel. Yet, closer analysis, particularly work from the object conservation team at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, reveals that it was likely a portion of a chest containing sections of the Qur’ran. If such an assertion proves true, Islam is certainly a defining characteristic of the panel’s social narrative, yet it is not the subject of that story, nor its author. Instead, the panel is connected across temporalities to concerns of how divinity and its associated materials are invoked, physically contained, mediated, and accessed. This paper uses the multi-temporal production of divinely-centered imagery as a launching point where analysis from close-looking, semiotics, and historiography are applied to the specific design and orientation of the inlaid wooden panel. The conclusions posed in this paper urge us to question concepts of periodization and canon formation ideologically in disciplines such as art history and pragmatically through museums and in gallery spaces. What does it mean for objects like this panel to be placed in a gallery solely defined through an Arab perspective? How can this disrupt the relational cultural and religious historicities present within it? These are the questions that I hope this work introduces, problematizes, and subsequently unpacks across disciplines.