Jars and Pithoi

A jar, in Desmond Morris's structural vocabulary, is a "symmetrical vessel with wide neck," a class that takes in the vase, the beaker, the urn, the pot and the amphora [1, p. 48]. On this site it is one of the nine basic shapes, and the bucket holds the closed containers whose mouths are wide enough to reach into: storage jars, the big coarse pithoi of houses and storerooms, the Canaanite jars and Cypriot transport jars that carried goods by sea, and the small painted jars of Iron Age tombs. The two-handled painted amphora of the Iron Age belongs to the same family and has its own entry. A narrow neck makes a vessel a bottle, and one handle makes it a jug. Morris listed the jar among vessels for storing, for cooking and for display [1, p. 47], which is a fair summary of the range: the class runs from pithoi that were never moved once set in the floor to small jars too elaborate for the kitchen. The header image shows the Drakopoulos Bichrome tripod jar with double-loop handles, of Cypro-Geometric III to Cypro-Archaic I.

Definition and Morris's sequence

Morris's definitions are structural on purpose: they "do not depend upon or rashly imply any kind of function" [1, p. 48]. The jar is recognised by its symmetry and its wide neck, whatever its size, ware or presumed contents. His summary of its history fits in four sentences. In the Early Bronze Age the commonest jar is round-based and two-handled, with the handles set vertically; some flat-bottomed jars appear and continue into the Middle Bronze Age. By the Late Bronze Age jars "have become rare as a vessel type." In the Iron Age they return "in large numbers, normally with a ring base," horizontal handles rival vertical ones, and "the size of many of the jars increases dramatically" [1, p. 66].

Morris was writing about the fine pottery of tombs, and his "rare" applies to that. The coarse storage jar and the pithos never went out of use, and the Late Bronze Age is the period when the island's storage jars and imported transport jars are best documented. The sections below follow his sequence for the fine jars and add the storage and transport containers alongside.

Chalcolithic and Bronze Age beginnings

The earliest large storage jars in Cyprus are the pithoi of the Chalcolithic. At Kissonerga the first pithoi on the island are associated with an exceptional group of Middle Chalcolithic buildings whose construction required "a sector of society that had privileged access to the required labor," which is significant "in terms of the control of stored bulk commodities" [2]. In some Chalcolithic contexts pithoi seem to have held dry goods, judging by charred grain found with them, while their setting in pits elsewhere suggests liquids [3, p. 176].

The Philia facies brought a new set of closed shapes, and Jennifer Webb and David Frankel list "handled storage jars" and amphorae among its novelties, with rod handles and separately fashioned flat bases [4, p. 39]. The fine Red Polished jars of the Early Cypriot tombs are the round-based, two-handled vessels of Morris's description. He illustrates incised and relief-decorated examples between 22 and 29.3 cm high, two of them with a base "slightly flattened, but functionally" still round [1, p. 66], and a giant Plain Red Polished jar 63.5 cm high on a blunt nipple base, with spurred vertical handles, that weighs ten kilograms [1, p. 67]. The Drakopoulos Red Polished ear-lug jar pictured here, of about 2200 to 1900 BCE, is a plain example: a near-spherical body on a round base, a tall wide neck and two small pierced tab-lugs at the junction of neck and shoulder in place of handles.

In the Middle Cypriot period Morris's examples include Drab Polished jars of 21.3 and 23.2 cm, so unlike each other that he took them as a sign of the ware's lack of homogeneity [1, p. 66]. The Drakopoulos White Painted III to IV amphora with lozenge chains is a small handmade jar of about 1850 to 1650 BCE with a squat globular body, rounded base, tall wide neck and two pierced lug handles, painted in matt paint on a pale ground; it shows the Bronze Age round base persisting to the end of the period.

Hole-mouthed jars

A hole-mouthed (or neckless) jar has no neck at all: the body closes in towards the top and the rim is simply the lip of the opening, plain, thickened or turned slightly in or out. The form sits awkwardly in Morris's scheme. His bowl is a vessel whose opening is its widest part, and his jar needs a wide neck [1, p. 48]; a hole-mouthed jar narrows to its mouth but has no neck, so it falls between the two classes.

In Cypriot excavation reports the term appears mostly as one possible reading of a rim sherd, because a neckless rim from a closed jar and the rim of a deep inturned bowl look much the same once broken. At the Early Cypriot settlement of Sotira-Kaminoudhia, excavated by Stuart Swiny, Ellen Herscher catalogued rim fragments "of deep bowl or hole mouth jar": one with a slightly flaring plain rim, in a White Painted-type fabric with chalky slip and red paint, from Unit 3 in Phase I, and another with a slightly inverted plain rim from unstratified deposits [5, p. 241]. Her cautious wording is typical: the shape is attested at the site, but whether as jar or bowl cannot be settled from the sherds.

The hole-mouthed jar term in the catalogue has no object assigned to it yet. Whole neckless jars in museum collections are usually catalogued simply as jars or as deep bowls, and they will be added to the term as records are reclassified.

Spouted jars

A spouted jar is a closed jar with a pouring spout set on the shoulder or body. In the Bronze Age it belongs to a family of spouted vessels that runs from open bowls to amphorae, and the boundaries within the family are drawn differently by different excavators. At Sotira-Kaminoudhia, Herscher's Spouted Bowl Type D is in effect a jar: "a globular jar-like vessel with small flat base, flaring rim and horizontal handle at mid-body opposite the spout," in Red Polished Mottled fabric. She called it an "uncommon type of spouted jar" distinctive of southern Cyprus, with variants in Drab Polished ware in the west; the earliest examples date to Early Cypriot III and the shape continues into the Late Bronze Age [5, p. 196]. Her Type B, globular or piriform with a small vertical handle at the rim, was the common spouted bowl of the south coast in Early Cypriot III [5, pp. 195–196], and a Red Polished spouted amphora (P127) came from the same settlement [5, p. 74].

In the Middle Bronze Age workshop site of Ambelikou-Aletri, Jennifer Webb and David Frankel published a small Red Polished III spouted jar (no. 39) of the form James Stewart had classed as his Type XE "amphora-shaped milk bowls": an ovoid body on a flat or round base, with parallels at Lapithos, Vounous, Karmi and Marki [6, p. 54]. A Drab Polished piece from the site (no. 858) has a long tubular spout with a flaring rim, matched by Drab Polished spouted jars from Avdimou-Kamares, Episkopi-Phaneromeni and other western sites [6, p. 58].

The catalogue's spouted jar term also gathers Iron Age and later vessels. Some are jars in the strict sense, such as the British Museum's White Painted spouted jar of about 1050 to 900 BCE, with a globular body on a splaying foot, a basket handle arching over the mouth and a tubular spout on the shoulder, or the Metropolitan Museum's Hellenistic spouted jar with lid, two-handled and 30.8 cm high. Others, such as the Bichrome spouted jugs and oinochoai, have a single handle and are jugs by Morris's definition [1, p. 48]; the Ashmolean's Red Polished spouted globular feeder is a small Bronze Age example of the family.

Cooking pots

Morris lists cooking as a function served by both the bowl and the jar [1, p. 47], and Cypriot cooking pots are best treated as a functional class: jars and deep bowls in coarse, gritty fabrics, often blackened from the fire.

The sequence is clearest in the Early and Middle Bronze Age. In the cemetery at Sotira-Kaminoudhia, Herscher's cooking pot Types A and B have "wide flat bases, fairly globular bodies, and two opposed handles," unlike the early cooking pots of Vounous, whose bases are smaller and raised from the body. Type B, squatter and more globular, was the standard cooking pot of the Philia phase and one of the shapes introduced at that time; its soft fabric carried a large amount of inclusions to cope with heating. The settlement's Types C and D, of Early Cypriot III to Middle Cypriot I, have a small flat base and one handle much larger than the other, in a hard cooking fabric, and were widely distributed in central and southern Cyprus. The same deposits produced tripod legs, pot supports and griddles with Anatolian prototypes [5, pp. 219–221].

Tripod cooking pots were part of the Middle Bronze Age kitchen. Ambelikou-Aletri produced two tripod-based cooking pots in Red Polished Coarse ware in Area 1 and a much smaller one in Area 2, and over 550 cooking pot sherds, ranging from almost miniature to large vessels; pot marks on the handles and rims of cooking vessels at Marki may have identified their size and capacity [6, p. 57]. The British Museum's Red Polished III tripod cooking pot, 12.5 cm high with three stump feet and blackened from use, is a small example.

In the Late Bronze Age cooking pots stayed handmade and round-bottomed, set directly on the coals of simple hearths. That tradition ended with Late Cypriot IIC at most settlements, including Enkomi, Pyla-Kokkinokremos and Kalavasos-Ayios Dhimitrios; only a few sites such as Alassa kept the old kitchen into Late Cypriot IIIA. The new pots of Late Cypriot IIIA were flat-based and matched the Mycenaean one-handled cooking jug (FT 65) and two-handled cooking amphora (FT 66) "in all details," while the Aegean tripod cooking pot (FT 320) was hardly used in Cyprus [7, p. 199]. More examples are under all cooking pots in the catalogue.

Pithoi

A pithos is a very large storage jar, too heavy to move once filled. The earliest Cypriot pithoi, of the Chalcolithic, are described above, and from the Philia phase onward pithoi were also reused as burial containers [4]. In the Middle Bronze Age they were common at the workshop site of Ambelikou-Aletri, two in Area 1 and seven or more in Area 2, in both pottery and copper workshop units. The typical form has a piriform or ovoid body on a raised stump base, a broad cylindrical neck widening slightly to a round mouth with a flaring rim, and opposed angled vertical handles from mid-neck to shoulder. They range from 78.8 cm to 1.09 m in height. A horizontal relief band with oval finger impressions runs round the base of the neck, two necks carry relief bucrania, and some bases bear impressions of the matting they stood on while drying [6, p. 56]. Webb and Frankel cite similar pithoi at Marki, at Sotira-Kaminoudhia, and at Alambra, where five stood in a storeroom on low circular curbs of stone and mud plaster and two had relief heads of horned animals on the neck [6, p. 56]. Late Bronze Age fragments in the Cyprus Museum, Nicosia, catalogued as a relief frieze, come from relief-decorated pithoi. See all pithoi in the catalogue, including the Larnaca Museum's large Bronze Age pithos, recorded as about 2 m tall.

By the Late Bronze Age the pithos was a well-established type, with very coarse fabric, thick walls and heavy rims; the Medelhavsmuseet has a Plain White pithos from the cult house at Ayia Irini. Their size and weight meant most were made locally, probably by specialists who travelled between communities [8, p. 159]. Survey at Arediou found pithos sherds in buff fabrics with angular stone inclusions, and showed regional differences in how raw materials were obtained and prepared [9]. The same work relates the variety of pithos forms to the storage of different products: wide-necked pithoi, which could be scooped from, for cereals and other solids, and tall narrow-necked ones for liquids such as olive oil. "Mega-pithoi," with walls more than 4 cm thick, belong with the central storage facilities of administrative centres such as Kalavasos-Ayios Dhimitrios and may have served the collection and redistribution of surplus [9].

Cypriot pithoi also went to sea. Plain White Handmade pithoi of the Middle Bronze Age have been identified in late Hyksos contexts at Tell el-Dab'a in Egypt and at Ugarit in Syria [10, p. 241]. The Uluburun ship carried several Cypriot pithoi, one holding pomegranates and another a mixed cargo of smaller Cypriot vessels, and four of the five pithoi from the Point Iria wreck were identified as Cypriot by petrographic analysis [10, p. 241]. A pithos was therefore a shipping container for other goods as well as for the island's own produce. Traffic ran the other way too: fragments of a Late Minoan III pithos made in northern Crete were found at Pyla-Kokkinokremos [11, p. 239].

Late Bronze Age fine jars and imported transport jars

The potter's wheel arrived at the start of the Late Cypriot period, about 1650 BCE [12], but for centuries the handmade White Slip and Base Ring wares continued alongside wheel-made pottery [12; 13, p. 27]. Among the fine wares the jar is scarce, as Morris said. The Drakopoulos three-handled jar in the Mycenaean style pictured here is a jar of another kind: a small wheel-made piriform jar on a tall splaying foot, with three small horizontal handles high on the shoulder and a frieze of linked spirals in matt orange-red to brown, made in Cyprus in Late Cypriot IIA to IIB, about 1375 to 1300 BCE, after an Aegean model (see Mycenaean imports and local imitations and the article on Cypriot connections and Aegean styles).

The main transport jar on the island in this period was imported. The "Canaanite jar" was the standard storage and shipping vessel of the Levant from the Middle Bronze Age into the Iron Age [14, p. 119; 15]. Its ovoid body, thin walls and narrow base suited stacking in storerooms and ships' holds [15; 16], and inscriptions and residues show that such jars carried pistacia resin, honey, wine and oil [15]. They are well attested at Late Bronze Age sites in Cyprus, especially the coastal centres of Maa-Palaeokastro and Pyla-Kokkinokremos [14, pp. 119–120].

The types matter. The angular-shouldered commercial jar (Pedrazzi Type 5-4), highly standardised and used in palace-managed long-distance trade, is surprisingly scarce in Cyprus; the commoner type is the "bellied" jar (Pedrazzi Type 4-2) of coastal Syrian origin, which suggests that Cyprus often acted as a crossing point for goods in these jars and had strong links with the Syrian coast [14, p. 123]. Four-handled slender jars of southern Levantine origin and Egyptian-style jars also occur at Maa and Pyla [14, p. 124]. Whether any Canaanite jars were made in Cyprus has been debated; stylistic imitations may exist, but neutron activation analysis has not matched them with Cypriot clays, and the great majority were imported [14, pp. 126–127].

Iron Age jars

After the end of the Late Bronze Age, exchange continued in a more decentralised form [17, p. 49; 18, p. 392], and the early Iron Age (Cypro-Geometric) potters developed shapes that combined Aegean and Levantine elements, among them the belly-handled amphora of Aegean inspiration [19, p. 5]. Jars now came back in the numbers Morris described, wheel-made and normally on ring bases, though his own examples also stand on flat and pointed ones. His Iron Age examples include a large cylindrical White Painted jar 28.1 cm high with a carinated shoulder and two horizontal handles, two small flat-based Bichrome jars of about 10 cm, and an ovoid Bichrome jar 18.5 cm high on a pointed base with two vertical handles [1, p. 67].

Einar Gjerstad's Archaic repertoire includes a squat jar, almost neckless, set on a low foot or on three loop legs and often fitted with double handles [20]. The Drakopoulos tripod jar pictured here has all of these features: a broad, nearly flat shoulder, a short collar mouth, three legs each made from a strip of clay bent into an arch, and on each side of the shoulder a double-loop handle in which two arched rolls of clay meet and drop into one stem, the outline of a pair of horns. It dates between Cypro-Geometric III and Cypro-Archaic I, about 850 to 600 BCE. Another small jar in the collection, the Bichrome IV face-neck jar of the Kourion type, has a squat globular body on a low ring foot, two short upturned loop handles at the widest point, and a short wide neck modelled as a human head, with a pinched nose, painted ringed eyes and pierced ears painted red.

The two-handled amphorae are the largest painted jars of the period, and the amphora entry treats them in full. The Drakopoulos examples include a Bichrome IV amphora with shoulder handles and banded decoration, 32 cm high, a red-slipped amphora with pale crosses on the shoulder, probably of Bichrome Red ware, 29 cm high, and a Bichrome IV amphora with a lotus-and-bud shoulder frieze of a class of large amphorae common in the east of the island.

Iron Age production was regional. Each of the city-kingdoms had its own workshop traditions in shape, fabric and decoration [14, p. 306]. Amathus developed a local style early, favouring the Bichrome technique and making globular jugs earlier than elsewhere on the island [21]; the workshops of Salamis became known in the Cypro-Archaic period for a pictorial style with dense floral decoration and scenes in panels or in the free field [14, p. 342]. Vessels in the "Amathus style" are rarely found outside their home kingdom [14, p. 347].

Stamnoi

Stamnos is a Greek name, and Morris kept such names out of his Cypriot vocabulary because they imply a known function and a Greek model [1, p. 48]. Museum catalogues still use it for a particular Iron Age jar: wide-mouthed and deep, with a short upright rim and two handles, often double, on the shoulder. The British Museum's Bichrome stamnos of Cypro-Archaic I, 25 cm high, is a plain example: two double vertical handles on the shoulder, a plain vertical rim, buff slip, and bands below the rim with rows of small circles on the body in purple and black. A larger Black-on-Red wide-mouthed jar in the same museum, of about 800 to 600 BCE, is catalogued as "stamnos or wide-mouthed jar": wheel-made, with a deep body slightly angular at top and bottom, a ring base, a narrow disc-like rim and a pair of double-loop handles in quasi-zoomorphic form (see Black-on-Red ware).

The broad shoulder of the stamnos made a good field for painting. The British Museum's Bichrome figural vase of about 750 to 600 BCE, with two upright handles below the shoulder, has on each side a large dotted snake facing a tree. A Bichrome IV stamnos published by Vassos Karageorghis and Jean des Gagniers in 1974 carries a motif of Greek derivation, which Georgiou sets beside a White Painted IV jug from Ayia Phyla and relates to imported oinochoai [22, p. 248]. Painted stamnoi of this kind belong with the Bichrome pictorial and free-field jars of the Cypro-Archaic period. See all stamnoi in the catalogue, among them the Cyprus Museum's free-field bird jar.

Hydriai

The hydria is the Greek three-handled water jar. Morris placed the name among the Greek terms he avoided, and grouped it with vessels for pouring [1, pp. 47–48]. In Cyprus the name covers three different things.

The first is the Cypriot hydria-shaped jar of the Iron Age. The British Museum's White Painted hydria of about 1050 to 1000 BCE has an ovoid-biconical body on a low ring base, a wide concave neck, two loop handles on the body and two smaller ones higher on the shoulder, and its Plain White hydria of about 600 to 400 BCE, 28 cm high, has the full Greek arrangement of two side handles and a third from shoulder to neck. Larger painted hydriai come from the Cypro-Classical tombs at Vouni excavated by the Swedish Cyprus Expedition: the Medelhavsmuseet holds White Painted VI hydriai from Tomb 1 (41.2 and 43 cm high) and Tomb 15 (43.5 cm). The White Painted VI pottery of Vouni Tomb 1 is dated to Cypro-Classical I [23, p. 410].

The second is the Hadra hydria, a Hellenistic vessel named after the Hadra cemetery at Alexandria, where it was used as a cinerary urn. It is a slim pot of about 40 cm with a rounded shoulder and splaying foot. Ink inscriptions with Ptolemaic regnal years on some thirty burial hydriai suggest a range from 269 to 197 BCE; only the big hydriai were exported, and they are very rare outside Alexandria, though found in Athens, Eretria, Thera, Rhodes, Cyprus and Ukraine, where some may be local imitations [24, p. 225]. Recent studies place the main production in Crete [25, p. 97], where the British Museum's example was made: a Hadra hydria, 42 cm high, of the late third century BCE, with laurel wreaths on neck and shoulder. A Hadra hydria from Cyprus in the Cesnola collection at Turin (MAE 27), 40.8 cm high, is dated 260 to 197 BCE; about one in ten of the Alexandrian urns bear the name of the deceased, which suggests urns for foreigners living abroad on business or in office, and perhaps the Cypriot ones were too [25, p. 97]. The Royal Ontario Museum's 'Hadra' hydria used as a cinerary urn was made in central Crete and found in Alexandria.

The third is a different material altogether: the British Museum's core-formed glass hydria of the fourth or early third century BCE, in translucent cobalt blue with opaque white and orange trails, borrows the shape on a small scale. See all hydriai in the catalogue.

Cypriot transport amphorae

The Iron Age also produced the first distinctly Cypriot maritime transport containers. Where the Late Bronze Age had relied on imported Canaanite jars, Cypriot workshops now made their own shipping jars, cheap mass-produced containers for moving bulk organic goods by sea [14, p. 422]. The commonest is the basket-handle amphora, found in tombs and settlements [26, p. 8; 14, p. 314]. These were multi-purpose containers; post-firing inscriptions on some have been read as meaning "olive oil," and changes over time, from flat to conical bases and towards longer bodies, may reflect the needs of systematic shipping [14, p. 425]. The article on Cypriot transport amphorae and the amphora entry follow the type further.

Cypriot amphorae and other decorated wares are found throughout the Levant [14, p. 305], and in Phoenicia Cypriot decorated amphorae and kraters were often used as cinerary urns [27, p. 134]. Three Archaic shipwrecks off the coast of Turkey carried Cypriot vessels together with East Greek amphorae, which suggests that Cypriot produce reached Aegean or Anatolian ports and was then reloaded onto smaller ships for regional trade [28, p. 191]. A wreck preserves one cargo at one moment, a static image of a moving trade [29, p. 180].

Uses: house, tomb and ritual

In houses pithoi were the main storage vessels, as at the settlement of Panayia Ematousa [30, p. 58], and smaller two-handled jars probably held food for daily use and may also have served at meals [31, p. 82]. Most complete jars, however, come from tombs. From the Bronze Age onward, pots were placed in graves either as possessions of the dead or as gifts made for burial [32, p. 162; 33, p. 16], and most grave goods were storage or serving vessels [34]. Small closed vessels such as juglets are assumed to have held perfumed oils for anointing the body [34; 35, p. 36]; in Late Bronze Age tombs Cypriot Base Ring juglets are found with Mycenaean stirrup jars and flasks, which suggests that scented oils from several regions were sought by the Cypriot elite [35, p. 38; 36, p. 323]. Larger jars may have held liquids and food for the dead, though the contents of locally made pots are hard to establish without analysis [37, p. 67]. Debris from feasting in some Late Bronze Age tombs includes storage and serving vessels left by the living, which places jars in ceremonies held for the dead [34].

Large jars sometimes became burials themselves. Pithoi served secondarily as burial containers as early as the Philia phase [4], and in the Early Iron Age large jars were used for infant burials, as at Kition-Bamboula [38]. Some painted jars carry imagery read as ritual: the Cypro-Geometric III Hubbard amphora bears images consistent with ritual symbolism [39, p. 31].

Scientific study

Provenance studies match a jar's clay to its source. Petrography identifies mineral and rock fragments under the microscope [40, p. 20; 41, p. 138], and it was petrography that identified four of the five Point Iria pithoi as Cypriot [10, p. 241]. Neutron activation analysis measures elemental composition for comparison with reference groups [42, p. 52; 40, p. 20], and showed that most Canaanite jars found in Cyprus were imported [14, p. 126]. The island's complex geology, and the lack of comparable chemical data for regions such as Syria, limit how precise such attributions can be [43, p. 165; 14, p. 126].

Organic residue analysis extracts traces of fats, oils, resins and waxes from the pot wall [44, p. 10]. Analysis of Red Lustrous Wheel-made vessels found oil-based contents, sometimes castor oil, and bitumen and beeswax, perhaps as waterproofing or as ingredients of medicines [45], and residue work has confirmed pistacia resin in Canaanite jars [15] and scented oils in Minoan stirrup jars from Enkomi [35, p. 38]. X-radiography of the vessel wall distinguishes wheel-thrown pots from coil-built ones finished on the wheel [46, p. 197; 47], and has shown the varied, experimental ways in which Cypriot potters fitted the wheel into existing handmade practice [48, p. 206].

Named examples

Summary

Morris's jar is a wide-necked symmetrical vessel, and its history on Cyprus has two strands. The fine jar of the tombs is round-based and vertically handled in the Early Bronze Age, scarce in the Late Bronze Age, and common, larger and more varied again in the Iron Age, when the tripod jar, the face-neck jar and the painted amphorae of the regional workshops appear. The storage and transport jar runs underneath it without a break: Chalcolithic pithoi at Kissonerga, handled storage jars from Philia, Late Bronze Age pithoi in settlements and on the Uluburun and Point Iria ships, imported Canaanite jars, and finally the Cypriot basket-handle amphora. What the jars held is known in a few cases from residues and inscriptions and inferred in most from their shape and findspot.