Black-on-Red Globular Trefoil Jug with Concentric Circles

Late Cypro-Geometric to Cypro-Archaic I, c. 850–600 BCE · Black-on-Red ware · Wheel-made

A jug with a nearly spherical body on a low, neat ring base, a narrow cylindrical neck and a small trefoil mouth, chipped at the rim. The handle, oval in section, springs from the rim and lands high on the shoulder. The whole surface is covered in an orange-red slip, now matt and worn, with white lime patches on the lower body and around the handle root.

The black ornament is spare. A broad band rings the base of the neck and a thinner line runs just below the mouth. On the shoulder, two groups of five fine concentric circles sit one on each side of the vessel, each drawn with an even hand and a small central dot. A faint circular mark on the front may be the ghost of a third group, but wear makes it impossible to confirm. The rest of the body is plain.

Commentary

The red slip with matt black paint places the jug in Black-on-Red ware, the Iron Age fine ware that Gjerstad defined as slipped red or orange and decorated with thin black lines, bands and sets of small concentric circles [1]. An older description of this piece as "White Painted with a reddish hue" does not fit: the colour sits in a slip laid over the whole surface, and White Painted is decorated on the light clay itself. A second possibility is Bichrome Red, which uses the same red ground but adds white paint to the black [2]; no white is visible here, so Black-on-Red is the better reading. Black-on-Red is normally burnished, and any surviving burnish would show under raking light.

In shape the piece is a trefoil-lipped globular jug, a larger companion of the small Black-on-Red perfume juglets, assigned by Gjerstad to his Types I (III) and II (IV) [1][3]. Schreiber's study of the stratified finds showed that several shapes Gjerstad placed in his later stage, the trefoil-lipped vessels among them, already appear in the earliest firm contexts, so the typology alone does not narrow the date much [3]. We therefore give the full span of the ware's floruit, c. 850–600 BCE. The Black-on-Red jug in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (IV 1530), dated 750–600 BCE, and a Black-on-Red II (IV) jug with trefoil spout and globular body published in the Department of Antiquities catalogue Ancient Cyprus: Cultures in Dialogue are close in form and ornament [4][5].

The decoration shows the restraint typical of the ware. Where Bichrome workshops of the same years covered jugs with circle systems and pictorial scenes, Black-on-Red potters kept to bands and a few carefully spaced targets. The red slip of the ware has been read as a clay imitation of the sheen of copper-alloy vessels [3]; the suggestion is plausible but unproven.

The ware was long called "Cypro-Phoenician", a name that implied a Phoenician origin. Current work treats Black-on-Red as a Cypriot product exported widely to the Levant and Cilicia [3]. A jug of this size served at table for oil, wine or water. Its findspot is not recorded.