Red Polished Bowl with Pierced Knob Lug

Early Cypriot II–Middle Cypriot I, c. 2200–1900 BCE · Red Polished ware · Hand-made

A plain hemispherical bowl on a rounded base. The rim is thin and slightly incurving, and visibly uneven: it rises and dips round the circuit, and one side sits lower than the other, the marks of a bowl built by hand without a wheel. A small knob lug projects just below the rim and is pierced horizontally. The red slip covers inside and outside. The exterior shows a network of fine scratches, whitish calcareous flecks from burial and a few small pits on the lower body. A grey fire-cloud darkens the wall around the lug. The interior is smoother and more evenly red.

Commentary

This is the plain knob-lug bowl, Stewart's Class XIII F2 [1], the most ordinary vessel of the Red Polished repertoire. In the north-coast tombs Kehrberg tabulated it occurs in every one, and in quantity: he recorded 43 in a single Vounous tomb and 59 in one tomb at Lapithos-Palealona [2]. Close parallels include British Museum 1888,0927.9 from Nicosia-Ayia Paraskevi, a mottled Red Polished bowl with a slightly incurving rim and one pierced lug [3], and Ashmolean AN1896-1908.C.8, a red polished hemispherical bowl from the same cemetery dated Early Cypriot III–Middle Cypriot II [4].

A plain bowl of this type cannot be dated closely on its own. The form runs from Early Cypriot II into Middle Cypriot I [5], so c. 2200–1900 BCE is the safest range, and it may be somewhat wider. The find-place is unrecorded.

The rim tells how the bowl was made. The potter built the wall by hand, thinned it towards the lip and burnished the slip with a smooth tool, leaving the rim uneven where a wheel would have trued it. The lug was pressed on and pierced before firing. A cord through the hole could have hung the bowl on a wall or tied down a cover, although this use is inferred from the form alone. The fire-cloud beside the lug comes from uneven heat in an open firing.

Morris cautions that calling such bowls "cups" assumes a drinking use for which there is no hard evidence, and that they may also have held small offerings of food [6]. Most complete examples come from tombs, but bowls of this shape were also everyday tableware in Early and Middle Cypriot villages.