The Cypro-Archaic Period

Einar Gjerstad called it the free-field style: one large motif, drawn freehand on the undivided body of the pot, opposite the handle, with nothing to frame it. The bird is the favourite subject by far; of 294 bird-decorated vases in the standard catalogue, 188 are Bichrome IV. The style flourished on the pinched-mouth jug and grew up in the east of the island, with Salamis leading.

Their birds and fish are generic types, often built from the same pointed oval, and no species can be named from them. Free-field art.

In the west of the island painters built their pots out of concentric circles, set in columns, wreaths and rows; Gjerstad called it "a veritable circle dance on the pots". Many of the big amphorae carry only bands, which say little about date, so several here are dated by their profile instead.

The east preferred panels and plants. Its grandest product was the large lotus amphora, one of a close group of near-identical jars, several of which scholars think came from the same workshop. Nearly every complete jar of this kind survived because it was buried whole in a chamber tomb, and none has yet been tested for residues of what it held. Bichrome ware.

In a sanctuary a clay figure was a prayer that stayed. Left before the god in place of the person who gave it, it stood there until the sanctuary filled up and was cleared, and the figures were buried in pits; that is why so many survive broken.

The simplest were made in the snowman technique, a solid column of clay with pinched features. Riders were the commonest male offering, and at the sanctuary of Apollo Hylates at Kourion they swamp everything else: of some 2,000 figures found there, only about 110 were not riders or chariot groups. From about 650 BC the mould, which reached Cyprus from the Levant, let workshops press faces by the hundred and still finish the bodies by hand.

Limestone statues appear in Cypriot sanctuaries around 600 BC and, on the leading view, grew out of the older tradition of large terracottas, made in the same workshops. The local stone is soft and easy to carve, and it breaks at the neck, so heads survive far more often than bodies; nineteenth-century collectors then chose the portable heads and sold them on their own.

Both heads here wear the so-called Assyrian cap, standard for votaries from the late seventh century into the sixth, before Greek dress took over. Neither can be tied to a workshop: Golgoi, Idalion, Tamassos, Salamis and Kition all produced the type. Archaic limestone sculpture.