Spindle Whorl with Incised Herringbone Bands

Early to Middle Cypriot, c. 2000–1725 BCE · Probably burnished clay (Black Polished or Red Polished ware), possibly stone · Handmade

A tall, bell-shaped spindle whorl, rising from a broad lower terminal to a rounded crown pierced by a wide central perforation. The sides fall into shallow vertical facets, and each facet carries an incised band: a single vertical stem with short oblique strokes set on either side, so that the bands read as herringbone or feathered leaves running from the rim of the perforation down to the base. Plain vertical lines separate some of the panels. The incisions look pale, possibly holding traces of white infill. The surface is smoothed and faintly lustrous, mottled mid-brown to dark brown and densely flecked with black spots. It is intact, with no visible chips on the photographed side.

Commentary

Terracotta spindle whorls first appear in Cyprus with the Philia facies around 2500 BCE, and the excavators at Sotira-Kaminoudhia considered it "certain" that modelled clay whorls were unknown on the island before then [2][1]. The class flourished from Early Cypriot III to Middle Cypriot II, and decorated examples belong mainly to those centuries; undecorated whorls tend to be later [1][3]. Most were made in the ordinary pottery fabrics of the day, Red Polished and, less often, Black Polished ware [1].

The shape here belongs to the conical-hemispherical family, and the decoration is the incised linear grammar of Red Polished pottery in miniature. The closest published parallel is a Black Polished whorl in the Cesnola Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (74.51.915), conical-hemispherical and 3.2 cm high, with "five vertical bands containing oblique lines" filled with lime; it is dated to Middle Cypriot I–II, c. 1900–1725 BCE, and attributed on stylistic grounds to the north coast, around Lapithos or Vounous [1]. A Red Polished whorl in the same collection (74.51.912) has vertical lines flanked by rows of short strokes, a close relative of the stem-and-stroke bands seen here [1]. Among excavated pieces, the Sotira report notes a possible "feather" pattern on two of its whorls and compares the "leaf" pattern on one of them with a whorl from Lapithos Tomb 314B [2][6]. On that evidence a date between the end of the Early Cypriot period and Middle Cypriot II is the most likely, with a Middle Cypriot date slightly favoured by the Metropolitan parallel.

Cypriot whorls were used on low-whorl spindles, the broad terminal facing upward, and that terminal usually carries its own decoration [1][3]. The broad end of this piece has not been photographed, so its base scheme is unrecorded. Whorls were used for spinning wool and flax, and their weight governed the fineness of the thread. They occur both in houses and in tombs, where they seem to belong to a person's tool kit; we know of no evidence for the older idea that they were buried so that the dead could go on spinning. Without a weight for this piece nothing can be said about the thread it produced.

The open question is material. The dense black speckling and the slightly translucent look of the surface in the photograph could be firing mottling and manganese spotting on burnished clay, which is what the parallels would lead one to expect, but the piece also looks somewhat like a soft speckled stone. Stone whorls are rare before the Late Cypriot period, although the Cyprus Museum does hold an incised Early Cypriot steatite whorl (W 264) [4]. If this piece proves to be stone, its date and the combination of stone with Red Polished style decoration would need to be reconsidered. The Cypriot whorl typology is set out by Crewe [5].