Red Polished Spouted Bowl

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

A deep, almost globular bowl on a rounded base, the wall curving in to a plain, slightly uneven rim. A tubular spout is set just below the rim and projects horizontally, its tip very slightly raised, with a clean round bore. Across the bowl from it, a little to one side, a rounded knob lug rises above the rim.

The red slip is burnished and patchy, deep red on the shoulders and around the spout, much of it veiled by a mottled whitish crust from burial. The interior is a paler buff-red with crust in the bowl. A distinct line encircles the root of the spout where it meets the wall.

Commentary

Spouted bowls are one of the standard Red Polished shapes, made alongside the far more numerous plain hemispherical bowls of Stewart's Class XIII [6]. The form has deep roots on the island: Webb and Frankel note that of all the Philia shapes, only the tubular-spouted bowl has clear local antecedents in the Chalcolithic [5]. In the Early and Middle Cypriot period the usual arrangement is the one seen here, a spout below the rim and a lug on the opposite side. A deep Vounous bowl in the Fitzwilliam Museum, from Tomb 90, has a tubular spout and a pierced vertical lug opposite it [1]; two bowls in Cambridge, one with a round base and inturned rim [2] and one with a mottled red and black surface [3], repeat the scheme.

Those larger bowls belong to the family Karageorghis calls the "milk-bowl", after the modern Cypriot vessel used for milking goats and sheep. He observes that the shape appears as early as Early Cypriot I and is deep at first, becoming shallow in its Middle Cypriot development [1]. This bowl is small and deep, with a rounded base, and it resembles the Ashmolean's spouted bowl of 10.3 cm height, dated to Early Cypriot III [4]. A date of c. 2200–1900 BCE fits the shape, with the caveat that small plain spouted bowls changed slowly and a closer date needs a tomb context. The find-place is unrecorded.

The spout implies pouring or serving from the bowl. What was poured is unknown, and the "milk-bowl" label is a modern analogy that says nothing about the contents. The lug could have been pierced for a cord, though no hole is visible from the side shown here.

The line around the spout root could be the seam left where the potter joined a separately modelled spout to the wall, or it could mark a break and a modern re-attachment. The two are hard to tell apart without close examination.