Bottles

A bottle is a closed vessel with a narrow neck and either no handle or two. On this site it is one of the basic shapes, and the definition is structural: a narrow-necked pot with one handle is a jug, one squashed flat from side to side is a flask, and one with a wide neck is a jar. Cypriot bottles are small. The first are the handleless Red Polished bottles of the Early Bronze Age, pierced near the mouth for a cord or a stopper; then come the lugged White Painted bottles of the Middle Bronze Age, the wheel-made Red Lustrous spindle bottle and its handmade Base Ring copies in the Late Bronze Age, the two-handled bottles of the Iron Age, and finally the slim spindle bottles of the Hellenistic tombs. Most come from graves, and most were probably made to hold a small quantity of oil or some other valued liquid, though that is inferred from the narrow necks far more often than it is shown by analysis.

Definition: bottle, jug, flask

Desmond Morris reduced every simple Cypriot vessel to ten structural types, with definitions that "do not depend upon or rashly imply any kind of function." In his scheme a bottle is a narrow-necked vessel with no handles or with two [1, p. 48]. He separated it from the flask because the two words had "often been used interchangeably" in the older literature, and he wanted "flask" kept for vessels flattened sideways, the shape traditionally carried about by its owner [1, p. 65]. The site follows him, except that it drops his tenth type, the lidded box.

The museum and excavation literature does not always agree. The British Museum catalogues its handleless Red Polished pots from Bellapais-Vounous as "flask or bottle," and the small handleless pots that Ellen Herscher published from Sotira-Kaminoudhia are "flasks" in her report, defined as "handleless small vessels with a narrow neck" [2, p. 176]: bottles, on Morris's terms. A narrow-necked pot with two handles is a bottle for Morris and an amphoriskos (a little amphora) in many catalogues. The Late Bronze Age "spindle bottle" is named for its body, and some spindle bottles carry a single handle, which by the structural rule would make them jugs. This page keeps the names the literature uses and says where the structure disagrees.

Before the Bronze Age

Narrow-necked closed vessels described as bottles and flasks were part of the small repertoire of Chalcolithic pottery, alongside bowls and holemouth jars [3, p. C10]. They do not seem to be the ancestors of the Bronze Age bottle. Jennifer Webb and David Frankel, surveying the Philia facies that opens the Bronze Age, list bottles among the shapes that were new on the island, together with jugs, amphorae, round-based flasks, handled storage jars and cooking pots; only the tubular-spouted bowl has clear Chalcolithic antecedents [4, p. 39].

Early Bronze Age: Red Polished bottles

Morris calls small bottles "extremely popular in the Early Bronze Age." They usually had "two pierced holes near the mouth for a suspension cord, or for stopper-attachment," were typically handleless, and sometimes carried a pair of small lugs [1, p. 64]. Philia-phase potters already made them in Red Polished (Philia) ware [4, p. 15]. The best-known series comes from the north coast, from the tombs of Bellapais-Vounous and Lapithos: round-based bottles with a globular or pear-shaped body, a tall tapering neck and an everted rim, often fired black on the upper half and red below, and incised with zigzags, bands of lines and concentric circles filled with white lime. The British Museum's Red Polished incised bottle from Vounous (1939,0217.40), 17 cm high, black above and red below with a pair of string-holes under the rim, is a standard example; a plainer one is 1939,0217.22.

The Drakopoulos collection holds three bottles of this north-coast family. The black-topped bottle with stepped incised bands (the image at the head of this page) has a globular body and a boundary between black and red that rises and falls round the pot. The black-topped bottle with incised concentric circles (shown here) is small and squat, with circles threaded on horizontal lines at the neck and shoulder, and the pear-shaped bottle with linked concentric circles joins two tiers of circles with diagonal bands of lines. The article on Early Bronze Age incised bottles follows the regional types and the firing that produced the black tops.

On the south coast the picture is different. At Sotira-Kaminoudhia the handleless narrow-necked pots of the cemetery are in Red Polished South Coast ware, 14 to 20 cm high, with flat bases and two pairs of holes opposed just below the rim, and they are the most highly decorated vessels on the site [2, pp. 151, 176]. James Stewart had thought the elaborate South Coast pottery purely ceremonial; Herscher answered that the Kaminoudhia pots are made in a harder, clearly functional version of the fabric, with holes for closing the mouth, and suggested that they are the predecessors of the later Brown Polished bottles and the north-coast black-topped bottles, which "appear to have been containers for some widely traded substance" in Early Cypriot III [2, p. 152]. The Brown Polished bottles, small and round-based, with two opposed holes in the rim, were probably brought to Kaminoudhia for their contents from elsewhere in the south, perhaps the Kalavasos area [2, p. 152]. A north-coast black-topped bottle found at Kaminoudhia shows that the bottles themselves moved across the island.

Not every name in the literature survives the structural test. Morris illustrates a small Black Polished bottle of the Early Bronze Age that "is sometimes called a 'feeder bottle' for a baby" [1, p. 64], a label that states a use no one has demonstrated.

Middle Bronze Age: White Painted bottles

In the Middle Bronze Age "the typical White Painted bottle had two small pierced lugs" [1, p. 64]; Morris's own examples are 7 to 10 cm tall. The Ashmolean holds a White Painted IV bottle from Nicosia-Ayia Paraskevi.

The closed vessels that left the island in this period were mostly jugs. The majority of Cypriot imports in the Levant were handmade White Painted jugs with a globular body and a narrow neck, part of a repertoire that also included bowls, cups and tankards [5]. Cypriot pottery of the period has been found at more than thirty sites in the Levant and at Tell el-Dab'a in the Egyptian Delta [6, p. 160], and in Egypt a class known as Painted Tell el-Yehudiyeh ware took up the wavy and straight-line decoration of the White Painted Pendent Line Style, often on a globular body with no direct Cypriot parallel [6, p. 159]. The White Painted II jug with a cut-away neck and lattice panels in the Drakopoulos collection (shown here), catalogued in the collection's bottle series, shows the boundary: its narrow tubular neck and egg-shaped body are bottle-like, but the loop handle from neck to shoulder makes it a jug.

Spindle bottles

A spindle bottle is a tall, slender closed vessel with a long narrow neck and a body that narrows to a small base. Two unrelated Cypriot shapes carry the name. The first is the wheel-made Red Lustrous bottle of the Late Bronze Age and the handmade Base Ring copies of it, described in this section. The second is the handleless fusiform bottle of the Hellenistic period, which Morris also calls a spindle bottle and most catalogues call an unguentarium. Museum titles use the name for both, so the date and fabric decide which is meant: a burnished red or dark slipped surface, a ring base and often a single handle from neck to shoulder point to the Late Bronze Age; a plain, unhandled, wheel-ridged body on a stem or tiny flat base points to the Hellenistic. The Cyprus Museum in Jacksonville shows the two side by side, with a Late Bronze Age spindle bottle in a polished red fabric and a group of three Hellenistic spindle bottles. See all spindle bottles in the catalogue.

The Late Bronze Age (c. 1650 to 1050 BC) added two kinds of bottle. Morris's "Cypro-Mycenaean" bottles have two small handles and a ring base; his example, in Cypro-Mycenaean ware, is 17.1 cm tall [1, p. 64]. The better-known kind is the spindle bottle.

The Red Lustrous Wheel-made spindle bottle is tall and slender, its body tapering to a small ring base under a long neck. The ware is made on the wheel from fine red clay with a burnished surface, and its repertoire is small: the spindle bottle, the lentoid flask and the arm-shaped vessel, a long tube ending in a hand that holds a small cup [7, p. 60; 8]. Production began in the sixteenth century BC and lasted about 350 years [7, p. 60]. The British Museum holds a typical spindle bottle, and the Metropolitan Museum's Cesnola spindle bottle, 30.3 cm tall, has a mark on its base, as many Red Lustrous bottles do. At Kalavasos-Ayios Dhimitrios the ware comes mainly from the richest tombs [9].

Where it was made is still argued. Kathryn Eriksson made the case for Cyprus: the island has the largest quantities, the full range of shapes and the longest sequence [10; 8]. Carl Knappett and colleagues replied in 2005 that each of these reasons is indirect [8]. Mustafa Kibaroğlu, Ekin Kozal and Patrick Monien have since compared the fabric with clays from northern Cyprus and from southern Anatolia, using petrography, chemistry and strontium and neodymium isotopes; they found the north Cypriot clays unrelated to the ware and clays in the Göksu valley of Rough Cilicia closely similar, and they name the Göksu valley as the most likely place of production [11, pp. 7, 16]. The newest analyses therefore favour Anatolia, although no workshop for the ware has been found anywhere [8; 11].

The narrow mouth of the spindle bottle, about 1 cm across, suits a free-flowing liquid [12]. Residue analyses of Red Lustrous vessels point mostly to plant oils, and some examples from the Hittite capital at Boğazköy had an interior lining of beeswax, which may be part of the contents or a treatment to seal the clay [12; 8; 13]. The spindle bottle is the form that went south and east: it is the commonest Red Lustrous shape in Egypt and the Levant, mostly in tombs, and in Lebanon twenty-three of the twenty-four known Red Lustrous vessels are bottles [13; 6, pp. 101–102]. In Anatolia the arm-shaped vessel is commoner, found in temples and houses, often broken, which suggests repeated ritual use; one proposal pairs the two shapes at Hittite sites, the bottle for carrying the liquid and the arm for pouring it, perhaps in anointing [13; 14, p. 183].

Cypriot potters copied the shape by hand. The British Museum holds two Base Ring I spindle bottles, both with the long tapering body and ring base of the Red Lustrous form: one from Maroni (1898,1201.101), 18.5 cm high, with incised interlacing lines on neck and shoulder and a cross-shaped mark at the base of the handle, and one from Dhali (1868,0905.19), 13.2 cm high, slipped red-brown, polished and incised with hatched bands and zigzags. Both have a single handle from neck to shoulder.

Late Bronze Age juglets: bilbils and their neighbours

The small closed vessels most often exported from Late Bronze Age Cyprus have one handle and so belong, by structure, with the jugs. They are summarised here because the literature often treats them as bottles. Base Ring ware, handmade with thin walls and a polished dark slip, appears at the beginning of the Late Cypriot period [15, p. 37; 16, p. 401]; its most widely exported form is the small juglet called a bilbil [17]. A Late Cypriot I bilbil in the Brooklyn Museum is typical, and the Base Ring II bilbil juglet in the Drakopoulos collection has the squat, slightly pear-shaped body on a ring foot, the tall tapering neck and bands brushed on in white paint.

Robert Merrillees proposed that the bilbil, inverted, imitates the seed head of the opium poppy and advertised a solution of opium inside; analyses of residues in some juglets have been reported to contain opium alkaloids [18, p. 812]. Double juglets, such as a Base Ring II double juglet in the Ashmolean and the Base Ring double juglet in the Drakopoulos collection, have been cited as further evidence, and dried remains survive inside some examples, though their nature is often unconfirmed [19, p. 158]. The question is still open, and the medicine page sets out the case. Base Ring juglets travelled into inland Syria and to Upper Egypt, where they occur in 18th Dynasty burials [20, p. 118; 19, p. 158].

Two other wares made small closed containers for export. White Shaved juglets, spindle-shaped and pared with a knife (one from Enkomi Tomb 3 is in the Medelhavsmuseet), imitate the Levantine dipper juglet and were probably commodity containers; Bucchero jugs with ribbed bodies (one from Enkomi Tomb 14 is also in Stockholm) are technically close to Base Ring II and have also been compared to poppy capsules [19, p. 158]. The White Shaved "dipper juglet" is discussed under dippers.

Iron Age: two-handled bottles and their contents

"The small bottles of the Iron Age period were also normally two-handled, but favoured a flat base" [1, p. 64]. Many catalogues file these as amphoriskoi. Pottery production moved decisively to the wheel after about 1050 BC, and Aegean-style tablewares replaced the old handmade traditions [16, p. 83]. The most characteristic small closed shapes of the Cypro-Geometric and Cypro-Archaic periods were the barrel-shaped jug and the lentoid flask [21; 7, p. 98]; the Drakopoulos collection holds a damaged Bichrome barrel jug.

The Iron Age container that travelled furthest was the small juglet of Black-on-Red ware, a ware of Levantine inspiration that was made in Cyprus [7, p. 98]. Black-on-Red juglets and small flasks, such as a juglet with concentric circles in the British Museum and the squat Black-on-Red juglet in the Drakopoulos collection, reached the Aegean, where they were used as perfume containers and imitated in the Dodecanese and Crete [7, p. 98; 22, p. 35]. Nicola Schreiber warns that the perfumed-oil reading is an assumption: no stopper has been found in or with a Black-on-Red juglet, even in intact tombs, so the vessels may have travelled for themselves as much as for anything inside them [23, p. 62]. Stoppers of wood, waxed cloth or leather would not survive, which leaves the question open [23, p. 63].

Unguentaria

"Later on, in the Hellenistic period, the tall, slender Spindle Bottles became popular" [1, p. 64]. Morris's two examples, in Plain White ware, are 17.2 and 20 cm tall, spindle-shaped on flat bases [1, p. 64]. The name collides with the Late Bronze Age Red Lustrous shape a thousand years earlier, and the two are unrelated. The Hellenistic vessel is the ceramic unguentarium, the small oil bottle that became a standard grave offering across the eastern Mediterranean. The Drakopoulos collection's fusiform unguentarium (shown here) is handleless and wheel-made, with throwing ridges left unsmoothed round the body, a long conical lower body and a tiny flat base; its rim is broken away. Because the type was made all over the Greek east, its shape alone cannot show where it was made.

Excavated tombs give the date. George McFadden, publishing a tomb of the Ayios Ermoyenis necropolis at Kourion in 1946, wrote that the fusiform unguentarium "first makes its appearance in Cyprus toward the turn of the fourth and third centuries B.C." and that he knew of none from an earlier context [24]. His three examples from one burial are in a grey-buff porous clay with a mushroom lip, a wheel-turned foot set off from the stem and a flat base, 22.7 cm tall; he placed them in the third century BC and put their thick walls and poor workmanship down to a local workshop rather than a late date [24]. The Athenian chronology he compared did not fit every Kourion piece, and one unguentarium from the same tomb, with a wide neck, he dated to the first century BC [24]. A well-defined shoulder, projecting lip and foot set off from the stem are early traits; a wide neck is a late one. The British Museum holds a smaller unguentarium from Kourion, 8 cm high, in coarse reddish-brown clay, with an almost biconical body and a splaying mouth.

The shape was not confined to clay. Unguentaria in pottery, stone and glass were in use around the Mediterranean from the end of the fourth century BC into the early Byzantine period, in two basic forms: a slender fusiform body, and a spherical or pear-shaped one [25, cat. 158]. A calcite (Egyptian alabaster) unguentarium of the third century BC in the Palma di Cesnola collection at Turin, 12.4 cm high, is an import; the local stone versions from the Amathus necropolis are of gypsum, with a pedestal base and a biconical body [25, cat. 158]. The Metropolitan Museum's Cesnola collection includes an alabaster unguentarium of the same family. Unguentaria are usually read as containers for perfumed oil, though cosmetic, medical and ritual uses have also been proposed, and the tall unstable foot of the fusiform type suggests a vessel filled shortly before use or made for a single funerary or votive offering [25, cat. 158]. See all unguentaria in the catalogue.

Alabastra

An alabastron is a small, narrow-mouthed oil container with a long body, rounded or flat at the base, a short neck and a broad flat disc rim, usually with two small lugs on the sides in place of handles. The name comes from alabaster, the material of the early luxury examples, and the form originated in Egypt [19, p. 178]. Most Cypriot alabastra are stone, but terracotta, glass and bronze examples are also reported from tombs [19, p. 178], so the word names a shape before it names a material. Without handles, and with a narrow neck, the alabastron is a bottle on Morris's definition.

Egyptian calcite alabastra appear in the second half of the eighth century BC and spread round the Mediterranean and the Near East from at least the early sixth century BC to the Hellenistic age; their form barely changed, which makes them hard to date [25, cat. 159]. In Cyprus the form first appears in the Cypro-Archaic period and becomes common in the Cypro-Classical; alabastra were imported from Egypt or carved from local stone, held perfumed oil for grooming, especially by women, were used in funerals, and marked their owners' social rank [19, p. 178]. A Cypro-Classical II example from Polis Chrysochous-Ayios Dhimitrios, now in the Marion-Arsinoe Local Museum, is 17 cm tall, with a long cylindrical body, a short concave neck, a flat disc rim, two opposed elongated lugs and vertical tool marks from the carving [19, p. 178]. In the Hellenistic period solid imitations in local limestone appear, probably symbolic substitutes made for the grave [19, p. 178]. Egyptian production continued: a small calcite alabastron with a ridged neck in Turin, of the late Ptolemaic or early Roman period, is probably an import from Egypt [25, cat. 159].

The British Museum holds alabastra of 600 to 300 BC from Salamis and from Marion-Arsinoe, the second recorded as made in either Cyprus or Egypt. The largest group in the catalogue is the Metropolitan Museum's Cesnola series, among them an alabaster alabastron and a pointed alabastron. See all alabastra in the catalogue.

Function and find contexts

The case for what bottles held rests on their shape, their contexts and, for a few wares, residue analysis. A narrow neck slows pouring and is easy to close, and the paired holes on Early Bronze Age bottles suit a tied stopper or a carrying cord. The Red Lustrous residues point to plant oils; the opium reading of the bilbil is contested; and for most Cypriot bottles nothing has been analysed at all. Across the periods most complete bottles come from tombs (see Bronze Age chamber tombs) [26, p. 161; 9]. Chipped rims and worn handles on many tomb vessels show that they were used before burial and were not made for the grave [26, p. 162; 27, p. 110].

Late Bronze Age potters made fine containers both ways. Base Ring and White Slip stayed handmade for centuries after the wheel was known in Cyprus, while Red Lustrous was wheel-made from the start [16, p. 401; 28, p. 83]. Whatever their contents, these small containers show the island exporting processed goods as well as copper [29, p. 242], and their distinctive shapes may have told a buyer what was inside, much as a label would [6, p. 232].

Named examples

Summary

By Morris's definition a bottle is a narrow-necked vessel with no handle or two, and on that definition Cyprus made bottles from the Philia phase to the Hellenistic period. The Early Bronze Age string-hole bottle is the commonest and the most decorated; Herscher's work at Kaminoudhia suggests that some of these bottles carried a substance traded within the island by Early Cypriot III. The Late Bronze Age spindle bottle is the one bottle that crossed the sea in numbers, probably from a workshop in Rough Cilicia, and Cypriot Base Ring potters made their own handmade versions. The Iron Age two-handled bottle and the Hellenistic spindle bottle complete the sequence. Several museum names cut across the scheme: "flask" for Early Bronze Age bottles, "amphoriskos" for two-handled ones, and "spindle bottle" for two unrelated shapes a millennium apart.