“The Seals of Curium,” c. 1950

-1-

ANCIENT a.IMPRESSIONS ON POTTERY

The discovery at Curium of fragments of large jars decorated with impressed friezes produced by rolling an engraved cylinder over the neck, shoulder, or handle of a jar before the clay had dried, show that this old Levantine practise of decorating pottery may have been revived in Cyprus.

The earliest such sherd is from the neck of a large pot( cf. J.F. Daniel, AJA XLII, 1938, 266, Fig.5 and"the impression was made by rolling the seal up the neck while the clay was still soft." It is questionable whether an impression so made instead of circling the neck xxxxxxxxxxxxx/was really meant to decorate the jar, more likely it was intended to identify the jar as belonging to the owner of the seal. This device to identify the jar,xxxxxxxxx would have differed from the customary procedure in Babylonia, where the cylinder had ( cf. AJA LII, 1948, 181 s.v. no. 6) originated and where only the labels were sealed or the clay lumps which were pressed over the string fastening the covering of the jar

The other four imprints on pottery sherds were made with cylindrical objects larger/than any cylinder seals used in Western Asia in the second and early first millennium. The bands produced by such broad cylindrical rollers with their large designs were certainly intended to serve as decoration of the vessels. Indeed it is xxxxxxxx questionable whether these sherds should not properly be included among decorated pottery rather than sealed objects. The latter is justifiable only in view of the above mentioned earlier occurrences of pottery decoration by cylinder seals, a which with these late examples, however, is not connection of which with these late examples, however, is not indicated by the evidence at present available. The first sherd, long-tailed flying two birds symmetrically disposed on either side of a tree a second tree between their tails.

Handwritten: 579/ 07 N