Flasks

A flask is a closed vessel that has been flattened from side to side. On this site it is one of the basic shapes, and the definition is the structural one of Desmond Morris: the squashed body makes a pot a flask whatever its handles, and a narrow-necked pot that is round in section is a bottle. On that definition Cypriot flasks begin in the Middle Bronze Age, when White Painted potters hung them with pierced lugs; return in the Late Bronze Age as the lentoid "pilgrim flask" of Red Lustrous and Base Ring ware; and continue in the Iron Age as a flat, circular, two-handled vessel. The excavation literature uses the word more loosely, for Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age pots that are not flattened at all, and those uses are explained below. Most Cypriot flasks come from tombs and sanctuaries; residue analysis has identified the contents of only a few.

Definition: Morris's flask and the excavators' flask

Morris's scheme sorts Cypriot vessels into ten types by structure alone [1, p. 48]. His flask is a vessel "flattened sideways, giving them a 'squashed' appearance." He admitted that "the words 'bottle' and 'flask' have often been used interchangeably," and separated them because "traditionally, flasks were vessels that were carried about with their owners," a squashed shape being easier to carry [1, p. 65]. He then made a chronological claim: "For some reason they are absent from the Early Bronze Age period, but become common in the Middle Bronze Age where they are often festooned with pierced lugs for some sort of string attachment. In the Late Bronze Age they reappear as 'Pilgrim Flasks' and then re-surface again in the Iron Age as circular, two-handled vessels" [1, p. 65].

The excavators of Early Bronze Age sites do find "flasks," and the conflict is one of vocabulary. Jennifer Webb and David Frankel list "round-based flasks and juglets" among the standard Red Polished (Philia) shapes at Philia, Vasilia and other sites, and count round-based flasks among the shapes new to the island in that phase [2, pp. 15, 39]. Ellen Herscher, publishing Sotira-Kaminoudhia, defines flasks as "handleless small vessels with a narrow neck, a shape that goes back to the Philia Phase in Cyprus" [3, p. 176]. Neither definition mentions flattening, and Herscher's is Morris's bottle exactly. The British Museum catalogues its round-based Red Polished pots from Vounous as "flask or bottle"; one of them (1939,0217.22) has a globular body, a round base, a tall tapering neck and a pair of string-holes below the rim, a bottle on Morris's terms. The two usages describe the same pots. When an Early Bronze Age report says "flask," a reader using the site's scheme should expect a handleless narrow-necked pot, round in section, and look for it under bottles.

Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age "flasks"

Pots called flasks first appear in the Early to Middle Chalcolithic, as part of a small repertoire with bowls, holemouth jars and bottles [4, p. C10; 5, p. 345]. They are classed as vessels for serving liquids and for carrying them short distances [4, p. C11; 6, p. 191; 7, p. 176]. Jennifer Webb's study of potting at Marki describes how such small closed vessels were made: the neck was formed as a solid cone of clay, set into the body and pierced with a stick [8]. Webb and Frankel do not see these as the ancestors of the Philia flasks, which they count as novelties [2, p. 39].

In the Early Bronze Age the north-coast cemeteries of Bellapais-Vounous produced many round-based Red Polished "flasks," and on the south coast the flasks of Kaminoudhia are the defining pottery of the cemetery. Herscher found that at Kaminoudhia one shape, the flask, dominates the Red Polished South Coast ware [3, p. 151]. They are 14 to 20 cm high, have flat bases and two pairs of opposed holes just below the rim, and are the most highly decorated vessels on the site, with incised and punctured zigzags, chevrons and herringbone made with a broad, flat-ended tool [3, pp. 151, 176]. One of them, P80, is close in shape and decoration to Philia-phase flasks and may be an early stage of the type [3, p. 176]. The Vounous flasks differ: their necklines are more articulated and "their bases are round even from the earliest stage" [3, p. 176]. James Stewart had judged South Coast pottery purely ceremonial; Herscher pointed out that the Kaminoudhia flasks are made in a harder, functional version of the fabric and have holes for closing the mouth, and suggested that they lead to the Brown Polished and black-topped bottles of Early Cypriot III, which appear to have carried "some widely traded substance" [3, p. 152]. The decorated Early Bronze Age bottles, including the three in the Drakopoulos collection, are treated under bottles.

Middle Bronze Age: lugged flasks

The flattened flask proper appears in the Middle Bronze Age, in handmade White Painted ware. Morris's own examples show the range. One is "heavily flattened," with a beak spout, eight pierced lugs and a single small vertical handle, painted with orange lines and 24 cm tall; another, only 6.7 cm high, "appears to be the smallest one known from ancient Cyprus," and he wondered whether it belonged to a model group, was a child's toy, or held a liquid so precious that only a few drops were carried [1, p. 65]. He divides his flasks into round-based and flat-based groups [1, p. 65]. The Metropolitan Museum's Cesnola collection includes a flask with a horned handle of about 2000 to 1600 BC, 28.1 cm high, painted with horizontal, vertical and wavy lines. The many pierced lugs are the period's mark: Morris read them as fittings "for some sort of string attachment," which suits a vessel meant to be hung or carried.

Lentoid flasks

A lentoid flask has a body of two shallow convex halves joined at an edge, so that it is lens-shaped in section, with a narrow neck rising from the rim of the lens. The literature calls the same shape the pilgrim flask, and Gjerstad the pilgrim bottle [9, p. 181; 10]. It is the characteristic flask of the Late Bronze Age, but the body is older in Cyprus and the shape lasted into the Iron Age (see the next section). Handle arrangements separate the Cypriot groups. Georgiou distinguishes handmade White Painted flasks with handles from neck to shoulder; Bichrome Wheel-made and White Painted Wheel-made I flasks with loop handles on the shoulder, as on kraters; and the later Late Cypriot type of Base Ring and Red Lustrous ware, which combines two shoulder lugs with a third handle from neck to shoulder [11, pp. 212–214]. The site's catalogue gathers all lentoid flasks in the catalogue, and in Cyprus the Late Bronze Age flask was made in two very different ways.

The Red Lustrous Wheel-made lentoid flask belongs to the small repertoire of that wheel-made, burnished red ware, alongside the spindle bottle and the arm-shaped vessel [12]. The British Museum's Red Lustrous pilgrim flask (1876,0909.68), 29.5 cm high, has a lentoid body, a long narrow neck, two loop handles along the edges and a third handle at the back; the Medelhavsmuseet holds a Red Lustrous lentoid flask from Enkomi Tomb 11. The ware was widely distributed and is found in Hittite temples and houses as well as in elite burials on Cyprus [13; 14, p. 487]. Whether it was made in Cyprus at all is disputed. North Syria, Cyprus and Cilicia have all been proposed; Eriksson argued for Cyprus, because more than half the known pieces were found on the island and many carry potmarks of Cypro-Minoan character incised before firing [9, p. 181]. The bottle page sets out the evidence for a production centre in Rough Cilicia. Not every Red Lustrous flask is symmetrical: a Red Lustrous lentoid flask in the British Museum (1897,0401.1234) has one side rounded and the other convex, with a single handle from mid-neck to shoulder.

Base Ring potters made the same shape by hand. The British Museum's Base Ring I lentoid flask from Dhali (1868,0905.37, shown here), 16.5 cm high, has a sharp ridge round the edge of the lens, a long tapering neck with a funnel mouth and a strap handle at the back. Morris owned a similar Base Ring flask, 13.4 cm high, which he thought "probably borrowed from Wheelmade Red Lustrous artists by local Base Ring Ware potters" [1, p. 65]. A smaller Base Ring II flask in the British Museum (1897,0401.1311), 12.6 cm high, has the same long tapering neck, a strap handle and a burnished brown-red slip. The Metropolitan Museum's lentoid flask with an engraved sign near the base of the handle, possibly in the Cypro-Minoan script, belongs to the same period.

The lentoid body was hard to build by hand. Jeffra's experiments show that the lower half had to dry before the upper half could be added without collapse [15, p. 203]. The potter's wheel, known in Cyprus from the start of the Late Bronze Age [16, p. 11; 17, p. 25], made the job easier, yet handmade flasks went on being made beside wheel-made ones [15, p. 13]. Potters kept established habits even when a quicker method was available [18].

The lentoid body itself goes back to handmade White Painted ware at the end of the Middle Bronze Age. Georgiou lists four rare examples: from Milia Tomb 10, from the western acropolis of Idalion, from Kazaphani-Agios Andronikos Tomb 2A, and one exported to Megiddo Stratum X, of about 1650 to 1550 BC [11, p. 212]. The British Museum's White Painted String-hole Style flask (1899,1229.112), 26 cm high, has a lentoid body pierced with string-holes on neck and body, which ties the type to the lugged flasks above. Ruth Amiran held that the pilgrim flask appeared in Canaan in the Late Bronze Age, counted the Megiddo flask among its very few Middle Bronze Age antecedents, and left open whether the shape was born in Canaan or came from abroad; she also noted that a lentoid flask cannot be thrown in one operation, so two halves were thrown and joined and the neck and handles added [19]. Gjerstad took a firmer line in 1948: the two-handled pilgrim bottle was a Syrian type, and an earlier claim of Cypriot origin was impossible because the type did not appear in Cyprus before Cypro-Geometric I [10]. The Middle Cypriot flasks published since then undercut that argument for the body shape, although Lindy Crewe treats the lentoid flask as a novelty in the wheel-made wares of Late Cypriot I [11, p. 212]. Central Anatolia had its own long tradition of lentoid flasks, and the relief on the Bitik vase shows a worshipper carrying one on his back [9, p. 181].

The shape has been read as a travel vessel. Betancourt argued that the lens was designed to hang from pack animals, which suits the plain Late Cypriot flasks; Georgiou replies that the large painted flask from Kokkinotrimithia is worn on its lower half, not where a cord would rub, and holds far more than any Base Ring or Red Lustrous flask, so not every lentoid flask travelled [11, p. 214].

The Late Bronze Age also brought foreign flasks. From the mid-fourteenth century BC Mycenaean pottery reached Cyprus in quantity, and the trade shifted from tableware to small closed containers for wine and perfumed oil [20, p. 186] (see Mycenaean imports and local imitations). Among the imports was the globular Mycenaean flask, Furumark Shape 189, valued for its look and its lustrous paint and probably tied to the perfumed-oil industry of the Mycenaean palaces [21, p. 162; 22]. The Mycenaean lentoid flask proper is Furumark Shape 186, found mostly in the Cyclades and on Rhodes [11, p. 214]. Mycenaean pilgrim flasks painted with concentric circles also arrived, such as a Late Helladic IIIA2 pilgrim flask from Enkomi in the British Museum; the Cleveland Museum of Art holds a Late Helladic IIIA2 flask. Imported and locally made flasks circulated together, and a flask and its contents could express status and a share in an international culture of consumption [23, p. 202].

Iron Age: circular two-handled flasks

In the Iron Age the Cypriot flask became a flat circular body with two handles. Morris's examples, one in Bichrome and one in wheel-made White Painted ware, are 9.6 and 13.9 cm high [1, p. 65], and Einar Gjerstad traced the lentoid shape to Syria and Palestine [10]. The flask at the head of this page, a Cypro-Geometric III flask in the Metropolitan Museum, is two-handled, 15.6 cm high and painted with concentric bands in black and red; concentric circles are the commonest decoration on the shape [24, p. 13]. A Cesnola flask with a ring-shaped body of about 850 to 600 BC belongs, structurally, with the ring vessels under complex vessels.

Cypriot flasks influenced their neighbours. An eleventh-century BC flask from Alaas is painted with radially set triangles, a motif from the Proto-White Painted tradition that continued into Cypro-Geometric I and shaped the decoration of flasks on Rhodes [25, p. 14]; the Yale University Art Gallery holds a Rhodian lentoid flask of about 1000 BC. An Aegean variant with a trefoil rim has been read as a refinement of a possible Cypriot original [25, pp. 14, 16]. Black-on-Red potters made small flasks as well as juglets, and Black Slip Grooved ware produced a pilgrim flask that seems to copy metal vessels and is commonest around Amathus [26, p. 98].

Flasks also came in from Phoenicia. Small Levantine containers are the commonest ceramic import in Cypro-Geometric Cyprus, found mainly in tombs, and a deposit in the necropolis of Idalion contained five fragmentary Phoenician flasks [27]. Residues in similar flasks from Levantine sites include cinnamaldehyde, the main compound of cinnamon [28, p. 9]. Traffic ran the other way too: Cypriot barrel juglets and related small containers went to the Levant in the tenth and ninth centuries [29]. The Drakopoulos collection's damaged Bichrome barrel jug (shown here) is a jug by structure, a thrown body closed at both ends and laid on its side.

Cypriot and Phoenician flasks can look so alike that shape alone does not separate them. The British Museum catalogues a pilgrim flask from Amathus, 13.5 cm high with two handles and concentric bands, as Phoenician ware or a local Cypriot version. Petrography has settled some cases [30; 31, p. 161; 32, p. 229]. Ayelet Gilboa and Yuval Goren showed that a flask from Alaas, Phoenician in style, was made of Mamonia clay from southwestern Cyprus, so it was a Cypriot product carried across the island [30].

After the Cypro-Classical period the flask continued in other materials. At Panayia Ematousa, Roman levels produced free-blown glass flasks with thin walls, light green or blue glass and spherical or pear-shaped bodies, used at table and for cosmetics [33, p. 45].

Function and contents

A flask is a container for liquid with a narrow neck that slows pouring [6, p. 191; 24, p. 13]. Morris's reason for the name, that flasks were carried about by their owners, is a statement about the word's history and has not been tested on Cypriot finds. Residue analyses of Red Lustrous vessels, flasks among them, identified plant oils, sometimes with beeswax, bitumen, pine resin or castor oil, which suggests scented, cosmetic or medicinal preparations; the residues vary more with findspot than with vessel shape, so the ware did not carry one commodity [13; 12; 34]. Phoenician flasks of the early Iron Age carried cinnamon [28, p. 9]. Wine and, more speculatively, opium diluted in oil or wine have been proposed for other flasks [20, p. 307; 35, p. 37]. Ancient substances were often mixed and could serve several purposes at once, which modern categories of food, drug and perfume do not fit [36, p. 62].

Find contexts

Most complete Cypriot flasks come from tombs and sanctuaries [25, p. 14; 27; 3, p. 151; 37, p. 24]. In graves they may have held provisions for the dead or be the remains of libations poured at the burial [27; 38, p. 60; 39, p. 227], and the number of small slow-pouring vessels in some tombs shows how much precious liquids mattered in funerary rites [27]. Whether these flasks were used in life and then buried, or made for the grave, is often unclear [37, p. 24]. Flasks also occur in settlements and shipwrecks, which shows that they were part of everyday use and long-distance trade [32, p. 131; 20, p. 187].

Named examples

Summary

By Morris's definition a flask is a vessel flattened sideways, and on that definition Cyprus made none in the Early Bronze Age. The "flasks" of Philia, Vounous and Kaminoudhia are handleless narrow-necked pots, bottles in the site's scheme, and the clash is one of vocabulary: the pots themselves are not in dispute. The flattened flask arrives in Middle Cypriot White Painted, festooned with lugs for a cord; the lentoid pilgrim flask of the Late Bronze Age was made on the wheel in Red Lustrous and by hand in Base Ring; and the Iron Age two-handled flask carried Cypriot decoration to Rhodes while Phoenician flasks brought cinnamon to Cyprus. Plant oils and cinnamon are the only contents shown by analysis.