Base Ring II Jug with White-Painted Lattice Bands

Late Cypriot II, c. 1450–1200 BCE · Base Ring II ware · Handmade

A tall jug with an ovoid body set on a splayed ring foot, a long cylindrical neck that opens into a broad, flaring rim, and a strap handle running from the upper neck to the shoulder. The handle's outer face is cut with two longitudinal grooves. The surface is a matt dark grey-black, flecked all over with small rust-coloured spots of encrustation. Decoration is in thin white paint laid on with a loose, quick hand. Groups of four or five horizontal lines ring the neck at intervals. On the body, groups of parallel lines run from the shoulder towards the foot; on one side they are drawn vertically, and on the other two oblique groups cross to form a lattice. The paint is worn in places but the scheme reads clearly. The ring foot is intact.

Commentary

The fabric, the handmade build and the white-painted linear decoration on a dark matt ground identify this as Base Ring II, the later of the two main phases of the Late Cypriot Base Ring tradition defined by Åström [1]. Base Ring is a thin-walled, hard-fired ware, formed without the wheel and finished on a turntable; petrographic study has shown a fairly standard set of fabrics across the island [2]. In the earlier Base Ring I style, vessels were ornamented with relief ridges and applied snakes; in Base Ring II, relief largely gives way to white paint, usually in groups of parallel lines like those here. The two styles overlapped in time, so the division is stylistic and only loosely chronological. White-painted jugs of this kind belong to Late Cypriot II, conventionally c. 1450–1200 BCE.

The shape, with its tall neck, wide flaring mouth and grooved handle, is the standard Base Ring II jug. The closest named parallels are three painted Base Ring II jugs in the Ashmolean Museum from Larnaka-Laxia tou Riou, of which AN1896-1908.C.91 (H. 23.7 cm) shows the same dark body divided by crossing bundles of white lines [3]. A smaller jug in the Cesnola Collection at the Metropolitan Museum, 74.51.1131, pairs horizontal neck lines with oblique body stripes in the same manner [4]. The body profile of this piece sits a little off the vertical, a common trait of Base Ring jugs, which were built by hand [5].

Base Ring II was one of the most widely exported Cypriot wares. Juglets and jugs reached the Levantine coast, Syria and Egypt in large numbers during the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries BCE [6][7]. The larger jugs are less often exported than the small juglets, and in Cyprus they turn up chiefly as tomb goods, where they probably held liquids for the funeral or for the dead. Their contents are unknown.

The lattice formed by the crossing line groups is a recurring motif on Base Ring II, and the painter here has varied the scheme between the two faces of the pot, giving one side plain vertical bundles and the other a crossed panel. Without a recorded find-spot, the jug cannot be assigned to a particular workshop or region; misfired Base Ring II pots from Enkomi show that the ware was made there, and it was probably produced at other centres as well [7].