Iron Age Wheel-made White Painted Plates

The three plates on this page have sometimes been described as "White Slip," a name that does not fit them. White Slip is a handmade ware of the Late Bronze Age, with a thick white coating and quite different shapes. These plates were thrown on the wheel in the early Iron Age and painted in a single dark matt paint on pale buff clay: they are White Painted ware of the Cypro-Geometric period.

The flat two-handled plate is one of the few Cypriot shapes whose first appearance can be dated. Maria Iacovou showed that it does not occur in Proto-White Painted, the pottery of the 11th-century transition from the Bronze Age. It is "a shape of local inspiration that appeared first in the White Painted, Bichrome and even Black Slip Painted wares of advanced Cypro-Geometric I groups," and "its circulation is indeed limited to the Cypro-Geometric period" [1, p. 202].

On these plates the main design goes on the underside, and the interior carries little more than a few rings and a dark rim. On the largest, 40 cm across with its handles, four arms of parallel lines cross the base like the spokes of a wheel round a small target of circles, two of them framing chequered triangles. The excavators of recent tombs at Palaepaphos-Skales concluded that "these dishes must have been displayed, when not in use, since their main decoration is confined to the base" [3, Tomb 203]. That remains a hypothesis.

The second plate, 33 cm across, has four framed, cross-hatched triangles radiating from a ring of concentric circles, with four freehand wavy lines between them. The Swedish excavators recorded the same scheme in Lapithos Tomb 408, where a White Painted I plate 34.5 cm across has "four lattice triangles meeting in a circle on base" [2]. Both of these plates are dated c. 1050 to 850 BC.

The third and smallest, 25 cm across, has a closed ring of solid triangles pointing outward round a nest of circles, so that the underside reads as a star. Its shape and the weight given to concentric circles suggest a later date, c. 950 to 750 BC, and its closest parallels, in the Hermitage and in Atlanta, are dated by their museums into the Cypro-Archaic.

The plates and their place in the Cypro-Geometric repertoire are covered in Lesson 7 of the pottery course, and the shape itself in the compendium's dish entry.