White Painted Wheelmade Ware

White Painted Wheelmade (WPWm) is the name for a family of wheel-thrown, pale-bodied, dark-painted Cypriot wares of the Late Bronze Age, and in practice almost every modern use of it means one class: White Painted Wheelmade III, the locally made pottery of Aegean inspiration that became the island's standard tableware at the end of the thirteenth and during the twelfth century BC. Artemis Georgiou defines WPWm III as "locally made fine-ware ceramics of both open and closed forms, which largely draw inspiration from Aegean shapes and/or decoration, but also integrate characteristics from the repertoire of local Cypriot ceramics", dated to the end of Late Cypriot IIC and to LC IIIA [1, p. 79]. The term exists to replace half a dozen older labels, most of them Aegean, that had turned a question about pots into an answer about people. This entry covers the three numbered WPWm classes, the terminology problem that made the third one necessary, what the pottery looks like, and how it hands over to Proto-White Painted in the eleventh century.

One ware, many names

Before 1972 the same body of pottery was sorted into categories that implied different dates, origins and populations. Barbara Kling, who wrote her doctoral dissertation on the material, listed them in 1991: "matte-painted Levanto-Helladic ware; Rude or Pastoral Style; Late Mycenaean IIIB and Mycenaean IIIB:2; Mycenaean IIIC, or IIIC:1, or IIIC:1b; and Submycenaean or Debased Levanto-Helladic, later renamed Decorated Late Cypriot III ware" [2, p. 181]. Georgiou adds "Quasi-Mycenaean Linear", "Local Mycenaean IIIC:1b" and "Painted 'Submycenaean'" to the list, calling them "mere additions to the already perplexed state of research" [1, p. 80].

The most consequential name was "Mycenaean IIIC:1b". Arne Furumark introduced it to Cypriot archaeology for the pottery he excavated at Sinda, and Porphyrios Dikaios adopted it for his Areas I and III at Enkomi [1, p. 80]. At Enkomi, Dikaios used it for the Aegean-style fine ware of his Level IIIA, the beginning of LC IIIA, which he read as the rebuilding of the town by Mycenaean populations after the destruction of Level IIB; the deep bowl, or skyphos, became the marker of the class, and similar pottery already present in Level IIB was filed separately as "Late Mycenaean IIIB" [1, p. 80]. The pictorial kraters were a third category. Furumark called them "Rude Style" to signal their inferiority to Mainland work, and Vermeule and Vassos Karageorghis later renamed them "Pastoral Style" after their grazing and fighting bulls [1, pp. 80–81].

Kling's central observation is that these groups cannot be separated on the pottery itself. Levanto-Helladic or Late Mycenaean IIIB shallow bowls are "indistinguishable from most varieties of bowls called Decorated Late Cypriot III", and amphoroid kraters, strainer jugs and skyphoi appear in both "Mycenaean IIIC" and "Decorated Late Cypriot III" [2, p. 181]. The result, in her phrase, was "the situation in which one man's Decorated Late Cypriot III is another man's Mycenaean IIIC": the Swedish excavators at Idalion in the 1930s reported no Mycenaean IIIC, yet P. Ålin's restudy found types identical to those others called by that name [2, p. 181]. Her explanation is historical. Because LC IIC was equated with Late Helladic IIIB, Mycenaean-style pottery from LC IIC contexts was called IIIB; pottery of the next period, believed to reflect a new culture, was called IIIC; and "once assigned on the basis of these historical interpretations, the pottery classifications then served to confirm them" [2, p. 182].

Åström's series: WPWm I, II and III

The replacement term came from Paul Åström, who introduced White Painted Wheelmade III in 1972, first to replace "Decorated Late Cypriot III" and then, as others adopted it, to cover every class sharing the same technical features [2, p. 183]. It was one member of a numbered series in the Swedish Cyprus Expedition volumes, and Åström's own definitions show how he saw the sequence. White Painted Wheelmade I "is mainly a monochrome, contemporary variety of Bichrome Wheel-made Ware"; White Painted Wheelmade II "is essentially a painted version of the local Plain White Wheel-made I Ware"; and White Painted Wheelmade III "was locally made in Cyprus and is a further, local development of White Painted Wheel-made II Ware with Mycenaean and Syro-Palestinian influences" [3, pp. 748–749].

The first two classes are rare and belong to the earliest wheelmade production on the island. The potter's wheel reached Cyprus only around 1650 BC, and in Late Cypriot I just a handful of wares were thrown on it: Plain White, Bichrome, White Painted and the Red and Black Slip wares, most of them also made by hand in identical shapes [4, pp. 185–186]. In Åström's tomb lists single WPWm II vases appear in LC IB groups such as Enkomi Swedish Tomb 8 [3, p. 681], and in the LC IIC levels of Enkomi WPWm II is among the older wares surviving "in small quantities" while the Rude Style and WPWm III "appear on the scene" [3, p. 689]. In LC IIA–B the wheel retreated further: the feasting set passed to handmade Base Ring and White Slip bowls and to imported Mycenaean kraters, though White Painted Wheelmade and a few other wares stayed on the wheel in small numbers [4, p. 186].

The Roman numeral caused an argument almost at once. In the discussion at the symposium published as Cypriot Ceramics in 1991, Karageorghis objected that "III" still implies a date in LC III. Åström replied that the numeral follows WPWm I and II, which precede it in earlier Late Cypriot phases; Kling added that no scholar using the term confined it to LC III, and that its value lay in covering both LC IIC and LC IIIA [2, p. 183]. The objection has not gone away. Georgiou, who uses the term for the Evreti material, still calls the "III" misleading "since it imposes an erroneous exclusive association with the Late Cypriot III period", citing Peter Fischer and Reinhard Jung to the same effect [1, p. 81].

The absolute dates in the table follow Georgiou's 2018 chronology (LC I 1650–1450, LC IIA–B 1450–1325, LC IIC 1325–1200, LC IIIA 1200–1100, LC IIIB 1100–1050 BC) [4, p. 178]; the attribution of WPWm I and II to particular phases rests on Åström's tomb and settlement lists [3, pp. 681, 688–689].

What WPWm III looks like

Kling's summary is still the working definition: "All of this pottery is wheelmade in a light colored fabric and decorated in a matt paint, although there is a great range of technical quality, even on the same shapes found together at the same site" [6, p. 282]. Open shapes predominate (cups, stemmed and shallow bowls, the deep bowl or skyphos, and kraters), while jugs with tubular or strainer spouts are "less common but typical"; decoration runs from simple banding to spirals, zigzags, chevrons, triangles and lozenges, with a small figural set of birds, fish, bulls and plants [6, p. 282].

Georgiou's catalogue of the two wells TE III and TE VIII at Evreti, in Palaepaphos, gives the fullest single-site description. The vessels are thin-walled, 0.3 to 0.6 cm, with a thin slip "in practically all cases lighter than the colour of the clay"; the commonest fabric is light pinkish or brownish buff and hard-fired [1, p. 81]. The paint "varies from light orange/red to dark brown to black, occasionally shaded", and it is generally matt, though some pieces have a more lustrous surface; colour variation on a single vase is a firing effect, with only three deliberate attempts at "bichromity" among hundreds of pieces [1, p. 82]. Deep bowls are the majority shape. Their handle zone usually carries curve-stemmed antithetic spirals, less often a horizontal zigzag or wavy band, a running "quirk" motif, vertical panels or, rarely, a bird [1, pp. 82–85]. Shallow carinated bowls with two strap handles occur "at practically every Late Cypriot site of the end of the 13th and/or the beginning of the 12th century BC", from Enkomi and Hala Sultan Tekke to Alassa, Episkopi-Bamboula and Sinda [1, p. 86]. Closed shapes include jugs, stirrup jars, hydriae and feeding bottles; the last carry vertical bands, a treatment foreign to Aegean feeding bottles and probably inherited from earlier Cypriot practice [1, pp. 97–98].

Several features have no Aegean pedigree at all. At Evreti Georgiou found one-handled bowls, hemispherical bowls with flattened bases, wheelmade versions of White Slip shapes and Base Ring bowls, and a handmade juglet of Base Ring shape in WPWm III fabric [1, p. 99]. Sherratt had seen the same "unclassifiable horrors", wheelmade Base Ring bowls and White Painted Wheelmade bowls with pure White Slip II decoration, in pieces from F.-G. Maier's Evreti excavations [5, p. 187]. Kling traced the elaborately painted strainer jugs to two groups: globular Aegean-shaped jugs in the "Sinda" style of tightly packed spirals, and tall ovoid jugs closer to local Cypriot forms, such as those from Alassa [6, p. 282]. A strainer jug from Kouklia combines LH IIIC-style birds with Cypriot Rude Style bulls on the same pot [2, p. 183]. Examples in the British Museum from Enkomi include a strainer jug and a conical bowl with spirals and latticed lozenges.

Technically, WPWm III marks the moment Cypriot potters adopted wheel-throwing wholesale. Georgiou notes rilling, parallel striations and compression ridges on the Aegean-style finewares, which denote throwing with rotative kinetic energy, while large jugs, amphorae and hydriae show coil seams from a mixed coil-and-wheel method; she stresses that these are macroscopic observations awaiting laboratory study [4, p. 186]. Her wider point is that the wheel had been available for four centuries, so its sudden prevalence around 1200 BC needs a social and economic explanation, not a technological one [4, pp. 177, 191].

Chronology and the LC IIC/IIIA problem

The pottery was once the main instrument for dividing LC IIC from LC IIIA, and that is exactly where it failed. In the older view, Kling wrote in 2000, LC IIIA saw "a sharp ceramic break" in which handmade Late Cypriot wares were "completely replaced" by Aegean-style wheelmade pottery, coinciding with an island-wide horizon of destruction and the arrival of Aegean newcomers [6, p. 287]. Neither premise survived. Virtually identical types occur in contexts of both periods, and the disruptions at different sites were not synchronous [6, p. 287].

Sherratt traced the unravelling. Karageorghis's 1965 publication of the Palaepaphos-Mantissa tombs showed traditional LC II tombs with many "Late Mycenaean IIIB" bowls and a skyphos; Hala Sultan Tekke Tomb 1 and Kition Tomb 9 told the same story; and Kition Floor IV produced fragments of local skyphoi before its abandonment [5, p. 186]. Åström's own 1972 lists already recorded occasional WPWm III in LC IIB and nine WPWm III vases among several hundred sherds and pots from the later part of Sinda Period I, dated LC IIC [3, pp. 688–689]. Karageorghis and Demas responded by creating an LC IIC:2 phase, defined by small numbers of skyphoi in still-used LC II tombs and ended by a horizon of destruction; Sherratt objected that the scheme depends on assuming that events at different sites were contemporary and causally linked [5, pp. 187–189], and Kling that no stratigraphy shows such a phase [6, p. 288].

Sherratt's own conclusion is the one most later work follows: there is "no single point in the middle where a clear overall division between two separate periods can be drawn", and WPWm III is best read as "the steady but gradual development, over a prolonged Late Cypriot IIC-IIIA time span, of a comprehensive painted wheelmade ware" suited to centralised mass production [5, p. 191]. Its growth can be measured. By Enkomi Level III and Kition Floor III, White Painted Wheelmade pottery made up almost half of the associated pottery, and its repertoire now covered functions once served by many local and imported wares [5, p. 192].

Workshops, imports and exports

Chemical analysis settles where the pottery was made. Kling noted in 2000 that the limited analyses available showed clay compositions "consistent with production at several different sites in Cyprus" [6, p. 282]. The larger neutron activation programme by Penelope Mountjoy and Hans Mommsen, as summarised by Georgiou, located a significant group of specimens to the Kouklia area and showed that Paphian wheelmade finewares reached Enkomi, Kition, Hala Sultan Tekke, Alassa, Kalavasos and Apliki, and overseas Tarsus, Acco, Ashkelon and Megiddo [1, p. 99].

The class also has a prehistory in Mycenaean imports. Cypriots imported Mycenaean vessels "by the hundreds" from the fifteenth to the thirteenth century, closed containers for their contents and drinking sets including pictorial kraters [4, p. 187]. From the late fifteenth or early fourteenth century, local workshops began copying a few Aegean shapes, and "the earliest Mycenaean forms reproduced by the Cypriot workshops were the small three-handled piriform jars", mostly used in the tombs of Enkomi; in the thirteenth century the local range grew to Pastoral Style amphoroid and bell kraters, shallow bowls, jugs and stirrup jars [4, p. 187]. Sherratt reads the Pastoral kraters as among the first steps, perhaps as early as the Amarna period, with drinking vessels copied before containers [5, p. 192]. Yet Georgiou found piriform jars rare in the later WPWm III corpus at Evreti, although the shape had been imported from Mycenaean Greece "in great quantities" [1, p. 98], and Sherratt noted how few Aegean container shapes WPWm III reproduced at all [5, p. 194]. Åström warned in 1972 that some Mycenaean IIIA2 vases in Enkomi tombs had been "tentatively attributed to White Painted Wheel-made III Ware, but analysis of the clay is needed" [3, p. 688].

The Drakopoulos collection's Mycenaean-style piriform jar sits exactly on this boundary. Its three shoulder handles, running spirals and banded lower body match fourteenth-century Late Helladic IIIA2 jars such as a piriform jar from Enkomi in the British Museum, catalogued as made in Greece, and a pithoid jar of LH IIIA1–IIIA2 early in the Metropolitan Museum. Whether the Drakopoulos jar is an Aegean import or one of the early Cypriot copies of the shape cannot be decided from its appearance, as Åström's caution makes clear; only fabric analysis could settle it, and no clay analysis of this jar has been published. On either reading it belongs to the imported repertoire that WPWm III grew out of, and it is older than most of the class. The article Cypriot Connections and Aegean Styles in the Late Bronze Age discusses it further.

Beyond the island, Gunnar Lehmann places WPWm III in the latest Late Bronze Age layer at Ugarit and, as "Mycenaean IIIC:1", among the vessels imported to Syria, Lebanon and Palestine, where it overlaps with locally produced "IIIC:1b"; he notes that in Cyprus "the earliest appearance of White-Painted Wheelmade III predates the assumed arrival of Mycenaean settlers" [7]. The overlap with the pottery of the Philistines and of the northern Levant is why the terminology matters outside Cyprus as well.

Pots and people

The WPWm III label was coined to separate description from interpretation, and the interpretation is still argued. Karageorghis's position, restated through the 1990s, associates the appearance of skyphoi in LC IIC:2 and their mass appearance in LC IIIA with Mycenaean settlers, supported by hearths, fortifications, weapons, handmade burnished ware, bathtubs and religious iconography [6, p. 288]. Sherratt's alternative ties the ware to urbanisation and administrative centralisation in LC IIC, the conditions under which industrial mass production of pottery might begin, much as palace control had produced the standardised LH IIIA and IIIB export wares of the Greek Mainland [5, p. 191]. Kling found the stylistic sources too many to fit a single migration: the Aegean links run to the Cyclades, the Dodecanese, east Attica and Crete, and the best-painted Cypriot pieces combine them "into unique Cypriote styles" [6, p. 282].

Georgiou's 2018 synthesis keeps both strands in view. A migration of Greek speakers in the twelfth century "can be corroborated by the shift in the island's language", but the island's material culture "resists a straightforward or linear association" between those arrivals and the change in pottery [4, p. 187]. On this reading WPWm III is a Cypriot industry that answered the loss of Mycenaean imports and the collapse of older markets, made by potters whose ethnicity the pots cannot reveal. For the wider argument see the Mycenaean entry and Maria Iacovou's case against a Cypriot Dark Age.

Into Proto-White Painted

WPWm III ends in LC IIIB, when Maria Iacovou's Proto-White Painted replaces it. Her definition treats the successor as the resolution of the WPWm III problem: "The polymorphy of the painted pottery of LC IIIA that tortures us in search of a common term ... is put to rest once Proto-White Painted appears. Its appearance marks the coming together of all the earlier painted wares of LC IIIA", and it "could not have been suddenly imported to Cyprus by newcomers; it was the result of a local amalgamation" [8, p. 204]. Lehmann's table places the Wavy-Line or Granary Style and Proto-White Painted together in LC IIIB, contemporary with LH IIIC Late and Submycenaean in the Aegean [7]. Proto-White Painted in turn leads to the White Painted I of the Cypro-Geometric period, described in the White Painted ware entry.

Museum examples

The British Museum holds a Pastoral Style bell-krater fragment with two birds from Enkomi and, from Maroni, a WPWm III Pastoral Style bell-krater rim with the heads of two stags or goats, catalogued under Furumark type FS 281; on this site see also a complete Pastoral Style bell krater from Enkomi (see British Museum). The older names survive in museum catalogues: the Ashmolean Museum still lists a rim fragment from Denia-Kafkalla, presented by Hector Catling in 1953, as "Decorated Late Cypriot III ware". The label keeps the pre-1972 classification; the sherd belongs to the ware that Åström's term now covers.

WPWm III is also well published from Kourion. On the scholar behind the term, see Paul Åström and Cypriot archaeology; on potting generally, Pottery Production in Bronze Age Cyprus.