White Painted Plate with a Sawtooth Star on the Underside

Cypro-Geometric II–III, c. 950–750 BCE · White Painted ware · Wheel-made

A medium-sized wheel-made plate with a curved wall, a flat raised disc base and two horizontal loop handles, lightly peaked, set just below the rim. The paint is a single matt grey-brown on a warm buff clay. The underside carries the main design: on the base disc, a reserved central dot inside a nest of concentric circles, all enclosed by a ring of solid triangles pointing outward, so that the whole reads as a many-rayed star. Around the base run groups of fine encircling lines and two broad bands, and the handles are painted solid, the paint carried in wide strokes onto the wall at their roots.

The interior is much worn. Only faint concentric circles at the centre and a dark rim survive, with a single drip of paint near one handle. The fabric is gritty with small voids, and there is a pale patch at the root of one handle that may be an old fill.

Commentary

This is a White Painted plate of the Early Iron Age, painted in one dark colour on the pale clay. It has been described as "White Slip", but that name belongs to a handmade ware of the Late Bronze Age and fits neither the shape nor the decoration. The flat two-handled plate is a Cypriot shape that first appears in advanced Cypro-Geometric I tomb groups and is essentially confined to the Cypro-Geometric period [1].

The decoration distinguishes it from the earlier plates in this collection. In place of latticed triangles radiating from a central cross, the base carries a closed ring of solid triangles round concentric circles. The growing weight given to concentric circles is a feature of later Cypro-Geometric painting [2], and the solid-triangle ring belongs with a group of plates that museums date late. A plate in the Hermitage, painted in black and red, has a zone of dark sawtooth triangles round the centre and is dated by the museum to c. 750–600 BCE [3]; a two-handled plate in the Carlos Museum, Atlanta, with a similar zone of triangles, is catalogued as Cypro-Archaic I [4]. In size, this plate matches a Cesnola plate in New York of about 25 cm with handles, dated Cypro-Geometric II [5], and its heavily painted handle roots recall the British Museum White Painted plate whose handle paint continues onto the body "like a festoon" [6].

A date of c. 950–750 BCE, Cypro-Geometric II–III, fits both the shape and the ornament. Because the closest parallels for the triangle ring are painted in two colours and dated by their museums into Cypro-Archaic I, a date at the Geometric-to-Archaic transition in the 8th century is possible. Whether the handled plate continued into the Archaic period is an open question on which published opinion differs [1].

Like its excavated counterparts, the plate is most likely to have come from a tomb, where such plates were laid with other vessels. The worn interior shows that it was used, or at least exposed to long abrasion, while the underside, with its sharp star, has kept its paint far better.