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Boat-shaped vessel with spout. (Courtesy of the Vedat Nedim Tör Museum, Istanbul) -
Boat-shaped vessel with spout. Detail of decorated side. (Courtesy of the Vedat Nedim Tör Museum, Istanbul) -
Boat-shaped vessel with spout. (©Archaeological Exploration of Sardis/President and Fellows of Harvard College)
Boat-shaped vessel with spout
The Lydians and their World
(2010)
Cat. 70
- Date
- Ca. 600-550 BC, Lydian
- Museum
- Manisa, Archaeological and Ethnographic Museum, 6689
- Museum Inventory No.
- 6689
- Sardis or Museum Inv. No.
- P86.015
- Material
- Ceramic
- Object Type
- Pottery
- Pottery Shape
- Boat-Shaped Vessel
- Pottery Ware
- Lydian Painted - Orientalizing
- Pottery Attribution
- Site
- Sardis
- Sector
- MMS
- Trench
- MMS-I 86.1
- Locus
- MMS-I 86.1 Locus 120
- B-Grid Coordinates
- E151.6 - E151.8 / S61.2 - S61.4 *99.5
- Description
- Broken and mended; one end of the vessel missing and restored. Broken and mended in antiquity (repair holes). Exterior: Orientalizing decoration in two registers, the upper register showing, on one side, hound chasing hare, on the other side three cows, one suckling a calf; a lower register shows gamboling fish. Interior, marbling. Preserved length 0.18 m, preserved width 0.125 m, height to rim 0.095 m.
- Comments
- The restored end replicates the surviving end, like matching ends of two other Lydian boat-shaped vessels; one (inscribed with a text in Lydian, no. 30 in the Lydian corpus) recovered from a grave at Sardis (grave no. 23a; excavated in 1913 by the Butler Expedition; now at Princeton, Princeton University Art Museum no. 29.195); the other now at the Manisa, Archaeological and Ethnographic Museum, no. 6397 (from the New York Art Market); Greenewalt 1984-1997. The fish on the lower body support identification of the vessel shape as that of a boat.
No. 70 belongs to a genre of narrow-spouted or sieve-spouted vessels, which are common in Phrygia (see Sams 1977) and are commonly identified as drinking cups for beer, the narrow spouts and sieves serving to filter out chaff; individual sieves also were used to filter wine lees, and appear with wine-drinking paraphernalia.
Found discarded in a pile of rocks dumped in the court of a Lydian house (Area 4-6, with Nos. 67, 71, 76, 77, 79, 89, 98, 99). It had already been mended once, and then broken again, before it was discarded in antiquity with the rocks.
- See Also
- Greenewalt, “Lydian Pottery”; Greenewalt, “Bon Appetit”; Cahill, “Persian Sack”.
- Bibliography
- Cahill in Greenewalt et al. 1990, 152-153, figs. 15-16.
- Author
- CHG