Red Polished Hemispherical Bowl with Two Rim Lugs

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

A hemispherical bowl with a rounded base and a thin, plain rim, its profile full and even. Two small lugs project from the rim at roughly opposite points. One is a low, rounded nub. The other is a larger tab pinched up from the rim and notched along its top edge, where the clay appears to have broken away; a small chip in the rim sits beside it.

The slip is unusually bright: an even, saturated orange-red over the whole exterior and interior, smoothly burnished, with only light scratches and a scatter of pale lime specks from burial. Faint burnishing strokes are visible inside below the rim.

Commentary

The bowl is a plain Red Polished hemispherical bowl of Stewart's Class XIII F [1]. The usual form has a single knob lug at the rim, often pierced as a string-hole; this example has two, which places it with the two-lug variant that Morris illustrates beside the one-lug bowls [5]. A bowl in Cambridge, undecorated and with two lugs on the rim, is a close structural parallel [3]. Neither lug shows a clear piercing from the side shown here, and the notched top of the larger lug may be the remains of a string-hole that has broken through.

The date follows the long life of the type, c. 2200–1900 BCE. A one-lug bowl of the same shape from Nicosia-Ayia Paraskevi in the British Museum is dated c. 2150–1950 BC [2], and another from Kamarouthkia in Cambridge, with the same slightly inturned rim, is described as possibly of the Red Polished III group [4]. That difference in label illustrates a standing problem: Stewart's sub-wares I to IV mix fabric, date and region, and Merrillees noted that the knob-lug bowl Stewart assigned to Red Polished II is in practice mostly Red Polished III [6]. The bowl is best described simply as Red Polished ware.

What sets this piece apart is its surface. The even orange-red colour shows a firing that stayed oxidising all round the pot, without the black rim of the black-topped bowls or the dark fire-clouds of the mottled ones, and the burnish survives with little wear or deposit. Such bowls probably served for individual portions of drink or food [5]. The find-place is unrecorded.