Bichrome Skyphos with Stags in Metopes

Probably Cypro-Archaic I, c. 750–600 BCE · Bichrome ware · Wheel-made

A deep two-handled drinking cup with a rounded lower body and a tall, flaring, slightly concave rim zone. The rim is washed in red-brown with a black band beneath it, and a horizontal loop handle, painted dark, springs from just below. Around the handle zone the painter set out a row of panels. Vertical bundles of lines frame a chequerboard beside the handle, and narrow ladders of small squares divide the field into metopes. In each metope stands a stag drawn in thin black line: a small lozenge body filled with red, a long stalk of a neck, branching antlers like a sprig of twigs, and stick legs ending in hooked feet. Black bands and a red zone run below. The cup is broken and mended, with join lines running through the animals, and pieces are missing; the base is not visible in the photographs. Fine wheel lines show across the pale buff surface, which carries grime and root marks.

Commentary

The shape is a skyphos, the deep Greek drinking cup with horizontal handles below the rim. Earlier descriptions of this piece as a kylix, and of its animals as goats, should be set aside: a kylix is a shallow bowl on a stem, and the animals carry antlers. The combination of black line and red fill on a light surface places it in Bichrome ware, the two-colour painted class of Cypriot Iron Age pottery that Gjerstad ordered in his Type I–VII sequence [1].

The skyphos was the one Greek Geometric shape that Cypriot potters took up and kept. Coldstream describes imitations of imported Euboean and Attic cups that "enjoyed a limited vogue throughout the 8th, 7th and early 6th centuries", and notes that from the late 8th century the Cypriot versions give up the solid-painted interior of their Greek models and adopt the Bichrome technique as normal [2]. Georgiadou treats the Cypro-Archaic skyphos in White Painted and Bichrome as a new drinking vessel of Aegean derivation, bound up with banqueting [3]. This cup belongs to that local series.

Its decoration follows the Greek model closely. Animals boxed between chequer and ladder panels are the scheme of the Geometric metopal skyphos, and Gjerstad already separated a Cypriot pictorial group in which the figures stay "geometrical or geometricising" and are "used as ornaments of metopes" [1]. The stags here are in that strand: diagrammatic, repeated panel by panel, with no ground line or setting. The Cypriot hand shows in the red body fills, the broad red rim and the red lower zone. On that basis a date in the late 8th or 7th century BCE, probably Cypro-Archaic I, fits best; the geometric syntax leaves open a date at the Cypro-Geometric III to Cypro-Archaic I transition.

Comparable Cypriot skyphoi include a Cypro-Geometric Bichrome cup in the Ashmolean Museum (AN1970.1061) [4], a mended Bichrome III example excavated by the Swedish Cyprus Expedition at Stylli, Tomb 10, now in Stockholm (St. 010:016) [5], a small Late Geometric cup in the British Museum (1953,0805.5) [6], and a Bichrome IV skyphos in the Metropolitan Museum illustrated by Georgiadou [3]. We know of no close parallel for the antlered stags in metopes on a published Cypriot skyphos, so the figural scheme on this cup is less common than its shape.

One question remains open. Because the metopal layout is so close to Greek Geometric work, the fabric should be examined to confirm local manufacture; the red fills and rim argue for Cyprus, and the cup is catalogued here on that basis. The interior, where Cypriot versions usually carry fine lines or bands, is not recorded in the photographs.