White Painted Double Bowl with Tall Loop Handle

Middle Cypriot II–III, c. 1850–1650 BCE · White Painted III–IV ware · Handmade

Two small globular bowls, joined along their sides, each with a round base and a short, slightly everted collar rim. From the point where the rims meet rises a single tall, narrow loop handle, open in a long oval, which ends in a forked finial of two short splayed arms.

The decoration is in brown matt paint, now faded, on a buff surface with darker patches. A wavy line runs round each collar above encircling lines, and on each body crossing bands of parallel oblique lines build a loose lattice of lozenges. The handle is striped with oblique strokes, crossed at its base, and the finial carries a painted X. The vessel appears intact.

Commentary

Composite vessels, in which two or more small bowls or jugs share a common handle, are one of the distinctive forms of Cypriot Bronze Age pottery. Frankel's glossary of White Painted shapes treats them as a class of their own [4]. The form was taken over from Red Polished III coupled vases of the late Early Cypriot and early Middle Cypriot periods and continued in White Painted.

The best published parallel is a White Painted III–IV double bowl in the Severis Collection, Nicosia, dated Middle Cypriot II–III and described as two bowls "joined by a common raised vertical loop handle, now missing", decorated in matt brown paint [1]. The present piece keeps the handle that the Severis bowls have lost, and shows how that element could dominate the vessel. A pair of joined White Painted bowls in the Ashmolean Museum is dated Middle Cypriot III [2]. At the grander end of the series stands a coupled vase from Lapithos Tomb 319, three deep globular bowls around a tall staff-shaped handle, catalogued as White Painted II and dated Middle Cypriot I–II [3]. The same idea of a tall central handle rising above small containers links all of them.

The dark matt paint, the wavy line under the rim and the lattice of crossed oblique bands fit the White Painted III–IV stage in Åström's scheme, which he placed in Middle Cypriot II–III [5]. The numbered classes are approximate and overlap between authorities, so a range is given here. No find-spot is recorded for this vessel.

The forked finial may be a schematic animal or bird head, or simply a flourish for the thumb. Similar double bowls on display in the Pierides Museum, Larnaca, are joined by handles in zoomorphic or anthropomorphic form, which makes a figural reading possible here, but the finial is too abstract to name. The function of such vessels is also open. Two linked cups suggest serving or offering two substances side by side, yet we know of no residue analysis for the type, and most examples come from tombs.