Red Polished Bowl with an Incised Mark

Early Cypriot III–Middle Cypriot II, c. 2100–1750 BCE · Red Polished ware · Hand-made

A shallow hemispherical bowl with a rounded base and a simple, slightly thickened rim. The surface is heavily worn to a granular grey-brown, with the red slip surviving only in scattered patches and streaks, most strongly on the right side and lower body.

Just below the rim sits an oval zone, flattened and smoother than the surrounding wall and outlined by a shallow groove. Within it are deep incised strokes: one long diagonal line crossed by three or four short oblique cuts, giving the effect of a branch or feather. At the far left, on the curve of the rim, is a second raised feature, probably a lug, which also seems to carry an incised line.

Commentary

The shape is the ordinary hemispherical Red Polished bowl of the Early and Middle Cypriot periods, related to Stewart's Class XIII F [1]. The worn, drab surface makes the grade of the ware hard to judge. A thin grey-brown body of this kind fits the later Red Polished series better than the glossy early bowls, and a broad date of Early Cypriot III–Middle Cypriot II is proposed on that basis, with the proportions matching bowls of that date in Oxford [4] and London [5].

The incised sign is the reason for including the bowl in a catalogue, and also its main problem. Marks cut into Red Polished bowls before firing are well documented. Åström's corpus of pot-marks records them on knob-lug bowls from Vounous and Lapithos, noting that "the marks on the bowls are applied near the lugs" and occur on decorated and undecorated bowls alike [2]. His examples include a horizontal mark about 12 mm long beneath the lug of a bowl from Vounous Tomb 151, and a stroke immediately below the string-hole of another [2]. A small Vounous bowl in Cambridge carries a potter's mark under its lug [3]. The position of the sign on this bowl, beside the rim feature, fits that pattern.

Other features do not fit so easily. The published marks are simple strokes and groups of lines cut directly into the wall; we know of no parallel for a mark set inside a smoothed, grooved oval panel, and the texture of the oval differs from the rest of the surface. It may be an ancient smoothed or applied pad, a later fill or restoration of a damaged area, or the result of cleaning. Until the object has been examined under magnification and ultraviolet light, to see whether the grooves are worn and whether burial deposit runs into them, the sign is best described as an incised mark, possibly a potter's mark. The bowl was previously published on this site as a bowl with linear decoration of the Archaic period; that attribution is withdrawn.