Small Red Polished Bowl with Pierced Lug and Fire-Cloud

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

A small, fairly shallow hemispherical bowl on a rounded base, its rim thinned and wavering in the way of a vessel pinched up by hand. At the left the rim thickens into a small lug pierced horizontally, the hole still open. The surface carries an orange-red slip, polished to a soft, low sheen and flecked with fine white specks of burial deposit.

Low on the body at the right a sooty grey-black fire-cloud spreads over the curve of the wall, with a fainter shadow of the same kind at the lower left. The rim has several small losses along its edge, and a short crack runs down from the rim beside the lug.

Commentary

This is the plainest form of the Red Polished knob-lug bowl, Stewart's Class XIII F2: a hemispherical bowl with a single lug at the rim and no incised ornament [1]. It was one of the commonest vessels of Early Cypriot Cyprus. Kehrberg's tally of the north-coast tombs finds the plain knob-lug bowl in every tomb she examined, with 43 examples in a single tomb at Vounous [2]. Åström's lists of such bowls run from Early Cypriot II into Middle Cypriot I, and a plain example with no decoration and no find-spot cannot be placed more narrowly within that span [3].

The feature that sets this bowl apart within the group is its fire-cloud. Red Polished pottery was fired at low temperatures, probably well below 750°C [6], most likely in open or bonfire-type firings without a closed kiln. Where fuel or ash lay against the pot, or the flame played unevenly on one side, the iron in the slip was reduced and the surface turned grey or black. On black-topped bowls potters exploited this deliberately; here it is accidental, a record of where the bowl sat in the fire. The patch sits low on the body, which suggests the vessel was fired lying on its side or resting mouth-down against other pots.

The closest museum parallels are small single-lug bowls of the same plain type. A bowl from Nicosia-Ayia Paraskevi in the British Museum has a slightly incurving rim and one pierced lug, and is catalogued as "mottled" for the same uneven firing [4]. A small undecorated black-topped bowl from Bellapais-Vounous in Cambridge has one lug pierced horizontally in the same way [5]; that bowl also bears a potter's mark under the lug, a feature Åström recorded on many knob-lug bowls from Vounous and Lapithos [3]. We know of no mark on this example.

The pierced lug probably held a cord, for hanging the bowl or for tying on a cover, though this is inferred from the form alone. Most complete bowls of this kind come from chamber tombs, where they were set out in quantity with the dead. The find-place of this bowl is not recorded.