Two Fragments of a White Painted Deep Bowl with Panel Decoration

Cypro-Geometric III to Cypro-Archaic I, c. 850–600 BCE (probably c. 800–700 BCE) · White Painted ware · Wheel-made

Two large rim and body fragments of a deep, two-handled bowl in pale brown clay, each preserving one horizontal loop handle. A tall rim zone is ringed with fine encircling lines in dark brown paint above a heavier band. Below it, on the larger fragment, a panel of close-set vertical lines divides the reserved field, and a small circle with a central dot floats on its own beside the panel. The handles are painted dark, and their paint runs down onto the body in dark triangular spills; a broad dark band closes the lower wall. The foot is lost.

A crack across the larger fragment has been filled at some time with a blue-grey adhesive, clumsily applied. The same fragment carries two East Asian characters written vertically in black ink, an old ownership or inventory mark that has not yet been read.

Commentary

The fragments come from a deep bowl of the kind often called a skyphos, with a raised rim zone, two horizontal handles and a low foot or base-ring. Only dark paint is visible, so the ware is White Painted. The earlier description as "Bichrome kylix" is not supported by the surviving pieces: no red paint is preserved, and the deep profile with a tall rim excludes the shallow, stemmed kylix.

The decoration follows a standard formula. The Swedish Cyprus Expedition catalogue describes a "White Painted III bowl with base-ring; angular outline, and two horizontal handles. Encircling lines around rim and body; black handles, and a panel-pattern of vertical and crossed lines between handles" [1], and Gjerstad's type series places such bowls in White Painted III and IV, the late Cypro-Geometric and early Cypro-Archaic stages [2]. A complete skyphos in the Royal Ontario Museum, 920.68.81, dated c. 800–750 BCE, has the same tall rim zone of encircling lines, vertical-line panels and dark handles [3]. A bowl in the Penn Museum, 55109, with "panel ornament of three crossed lines between two bands of lines" on a ring base, shows the crossed-line variant of the panel [4]. Sherds of a large White Painted deep bowl in the World Museum, Liverpool, 56.217.8, have handles "shadowed onto the body" in the same way as here, and the museum record notes that specialists have placed that bowl anywhere from White Painted I to III, a reminder of how loosely these panel bowls can be dated from fragments [5].

On this evidence the bowl belongs between Cypro-Geometric III and Cypro-Archaic I, c. 850–600 BCE, with the closest dated parallel pointing to the eighth century BCE. Such bowls served for drinking and mixing at table and are common in tomb groups of the period. The two fragments match in fabric, paint and the number of rim lines and probably come from opposite sides of a single bowl, each preserving one of its two handles; whether they join or share a diameter has still to be checked. The ink characters may indicate that the fragments passed through an East Asian collection before they appeared on the European market.