Black-on-Red One-Handled Bowl with Wavy-Line Rim

Cypro-Geometric III–Cypro-Archaic I, c. 850–600 BCE · Black-on-Red ware · Wheel-made

A bowl on a low ring foot, its conical lower body swelling to a shoulder. Above the shoulder rises a short, slightly concave rim finished with a rolled lip. A single horizontal loop handle sits just below the rim. The lower body carries a plain orange-red slip, with the wheel ridges clearly visible. The rim zone is paler, buff-pink, and holds a black wavy line between framing bands. Black paint coats the handle and runs down onto the body beneath it. Short transverse bars cross the top of the lip all the way round.

Inside, a broad black band circles the mid-wall. Below it the floor is filled with dense, hair-fine concentric circles struck on the wheel, closing on a small reserved dot at the centre.

Commentary

The bowl is Cypriot Black-on-Red ware: wheel-made, red-slipped and painted in matt black [1]. The shape is Gjerstad's Black-on-Red I (III) bowl type 4, which he defined by its raised, concave rim and single horizontal handle below the rim, and which he considered a new shape within the Cypriot repertoire. His type 10 of the following stage, with a "contracted, raised rim", continues it [1]. A Black-on-Red bowl with one horizontal handle in the Ashmolean Museum (AN1953.299; H. 8.2 cm, D. 16.3 cm), dated to the Cypro-Archaic period, has the same basic form. So does Kourion-Kaloriziki K 696, a deep bowl of Cypro-Archaic I date with "one small hor. ribbon handle well below rim" and concentric circles at the centre of the interior [2].

The decoration mixes two habits. The dense interior circles are typical of Black-on-Red open shapes. Kaloriziki K 683 has "a wide zone of hair-fine multiple" concentric circles inside, much like the floor of this bowl [2]. The wavy line on the rim is less usual. Gjerstad noted only "a few instances" of rectilinear ornaments in early Black-on-Red, borrowed from contemporary White Painted and Bichrome pottery [1]. The barred lip has parallels on the rims of the barred Kaloriziki plates K 697 and K 702 [2].

This borrowing points slightly towards the earlier part of the ware's life, but the evidence is thin. Gjerstad's sequence of stages has proved unreliable as a clock, because forms he assigned to the second stage turn up in the first mainland contexts [3]. First Cypriot production is now placed around 900 BCE [4]. A range of c. 850–600 BCE is therefore given here.

The bowl would have served as a drinking or serving bowl. Complete examples of the type are known mostly from tomb groups. The paler rim zone raises a genuine question. It could be a thinner application of slip or simply wear. If added white paint were ever found there, the bowl would move into the Bichrome Red class, but no white is visible. A dark line running down the body from the handle also needs examination in hand, to establish whether it is paint or a mended crack.