Unnumbered pageScan 44 of 77
Continued from scan 43
… Cylinder seal impression on pithos
Sh 615 Fragment from rim of large pithos; vat, or even larnax. [margin: wheelmade.] The rim has been greatly thickened and appears to have been slightly deverted. It is profiled somewhat in the manner of a cornice, with a slight lateral depression delineating it from the wall of the vessel. The thickening and flattening of the rim provides an ample, almost flat surface on which to impress a design. Clay: grayblue to light graybrown throughout fired, light purplish brown at the surface with gray-blue spots, exceptionally well cleaned for pithos ware with only occasional larger grits but numerous small white particles. Surface areas seem well-smoothed for the most part. While different from the fabric of other fragments described above this fabric does not look non-Cypriote.
Impressed while damp on the top, inner matrix side of the rim in rather high relief is an apparently continuous frieze possibly by a cylinder seal. Only the upper part of the design is extant, the lower having been struck off in a shallow fracture of the amphora between rim surface and inner wall. At first glance the design appears to consist of running spirals. A minute inspection of the sherd, while not entirely excluding the possibility, does not substantiate it, either. It appears more probable that the design consists of imperfectly made concentric circles (an inner and an outer) which are not tangent. These are interrupted, possibly at intervals of two, by a vertical bar crossed at the top, the presence of which virtually obviates the possibility that we have here to do with a running spiral. If the vertical member be completed as an iota the design may look something like the following: (drawing) or as a Tau. (drawing) It is not likely to have been any tree.
The upper edge of the design is a slight ridge of clay thrown up in a somewhat uneven manner by the rolling, quite unlike what one would expect had an ordinary cylinder seal been used. The effect is much too irregular, with a kind of arching over the "iota"
[margin left: EH of design!]
65 figures hard to readstruck struck outadded written in above” jug ditto, and what it repeatsword reading not certain