Room 02 of 07 · Philia and Early Cypriot

The Early Bronze Age

Burnished red clay, cut with patterns and filled with white: the pottery of the island's first Bronze Age villages.

36pieces

Around 2500 BC a new set of habits reached Cyprus with the Philia culture: new ways of spinning thread and of making pots, some of them traceable to Anatolia. For the next six centuries the island's fine pottery was Red Polished: built by hand, coated in red slip, burnished until it shone and often incised with patterns filled with white lime.

Most of what survives complete came out of tombs, above all the great cemeteries of the north coast at Vounous and Lapithos, because the dead were buried with pots by the dozen. One excavated tomb at Vounous held forty-three bowls of a single type.

The thirty-six pieces in this room run from the plainest bowl to the modelled birds and beasts of the north-coast potters. Three of them have rooms of their own: the double-necked bird jug and a pair of plank figures.

Chapter I · Red Polished bowls

A shelf of red bowls

The hemispherical bowl with a single pierced lug is among the commonest pots in the tombs of the north coast: one tomb at Karmi, between Vounous and Lapithos, held fifty-nine of them. Each was built by hand, and on many the rim rises and dips as it goes round.

Some are black at the rim and red below. That is the fire's work. Bowls set mouth-down in the fuel were starved of air at the rim, which turned black, while the base stayed red, and a laboratory study of black-topped pottery has shown that the black runs below the surface, so it is no paint. Potters did this on purpose. The same effect, by accident, left the grey fire-cloud on this small bowl. What the bowls held is unknown; the usual label, drinking cup, has never been demonstrated. More on Red Polished.

Black-topped Red Polished Tulip Bowl with Incised Spiral-armed Cross, Circles and Arcades

In focus

Black-topped Red Polished Tulip Bowl with Incised Spiral-armed Cross, Circles and Arcades

Early Cypriot I–II, c. 2300–2000 BC

A tulip bowl: deep, on a small pointed base, so that it cannot stand on its own and had to be held or set in a hollow. Its incised decoration centres on a four-armed cross whose double-line arms coil into spirals, a motif uncommon in Red Polished and the subject of a separate essay. Similar spiral work decorates the hilt of a Red Polished model knife from Vounous Tomb 51, now in the Louvre. The bowl had been photographed in the Goodman Collection by 1969.

Catalogue entry

Thirteen bowls and a jar

A second tulip bowl leads the shelf, covered in a basketwork lattice of white-filled strokes; its closest museum parallel, also from Vounous, is in the British Museum. Most of the rest are plain knob-lug and hemispherical bowls, black-topped or mottled; one is incised all over and one has a spout. A small ear-lug jar has pierced tabs in place of handles. The whitish crust on some is burial deposit, unrelated to the white lime pressed into incised lines.

14 pieces

Chapter II · Incised Red Polished

Cut, then filled with white

Jugs were the commonest closed shape in Early and Middle Cypriot tombs. The pattern was incised into the clay and filled with white lime, so that it stood out against the red: concentric circles, chevrons, hatched triangles and ladders of short strokes. Clay was added as well as cut away, in a second spout, a horned handle, a snake.

The cutaway beak mouth on several of these jugs is a Bronze Age fashion that did not survive into the Iron Age, a quick guide to date. None of the pieces here has a recorded tomb.

Bottles that travelled

Small handleless bottles, many of them black above and red below, were made on the north coast and travelled: examples turn up far to the south and centre, at Marki, Alassa, Kalavasos and Episkopi. At the settlement of Sotira-Kaminoudhia one was kept in a wall niche inside a house, so the living used them as well as the dead. What they carried is unknown. More on the class.

3 pieces

Red Polished One-Handled Jar with Concentric Circles, Deneia Style

In focus

Red Polished One-Handled Jar with Concentric Circles, Deneia Style

Early Cypriot III to Middle Cypriot II, c. 2100–1800 BC

Once listed as a jug, this is a wide-mouthed one-handled jar, sometimes called a mug. Double rings alternate with ladders and cross-hatching, and a row of small round impressions circles the neck, all filled with thick white paste. Its closest match, in the Louvre, is assigned to the Deneia style: Deneia, in the Ovgos valley of north-western Cyprus, was among the busiest pottery centres of its day, known for heavily drawn circles and multiple pierced lugs. This jar's own find-spot is unrecorded.

Catalogue entry

Beaks, spouts and circles

Eleven jugs and juglets. Some have two openings, a cutaway beak and a separate side-spout, as on this two-spouted jug, whose closest parallel, in Cambridge, was excavated by James Stewart; one opening probably filled and the other poured. The black juglet is Black Polished, a dark-fired relative of Red Polished. At the plain end of the range, a large jug has only a small upturned horn on its handle.

11 pieces

Chapter III · Modelled clay

Birds, beasts and people

Red Polished potters gave animals a leading part. They set birds between the necks of jugs, paired heads on pouring vessels and ran clay snakes down their sides. People they made flat: the plank figures of the north coast are slabs of clay with a head and a neck, and nearly a third of the free-standing examples have more than one neck.

None of this adds up to a religion we can read. Which animal a head represents is often uncertain, and no text names a god. Two doors in this chapter lead to rooms of their own, one for the double-necked bird jug and one for the pair of plank figures.

Masterpiece · c. 2300–2000 BC

The Double-Necked Bird Jug

Two necks, two modelled birds, and its closest cousins in the tombs of Vounous.

Reassembled from about thirty fragments, the jug stands c. 57 cm high, near the top of the size range for a small group that Desmond Morris attributed to a single Vounous potter. Two flat birds stand one above the other between its necks. Its nearest parallel, from Vounous Tomb 54 and now in the Louvre, has only one.

Enter the masterpiece

Red Polished Two-Headed Zoomorphic Askos with a Bull and a Long-Eared Head

Red Polished · In focus

Red Polished Two-Headed Zoomorphic Askos with a Bull and a Long-Eared Head

Early Cypriot III–Middle Cypriot I, c. 2100–1850 BC

A hollow pouring vessel shaped as an animal with a head at each end: a bull at one, a long-eared animal, probably a donkey or a deer, at the other, joined by a tall loop handle. Its closest parallel, in the Ashmolean Museum, pairs a bull with a stag on the same short-legged body. Both necks carry old repairs, and a photograph of 1969 already shows the vessel as it is now, though whether the two heads and the body began as one pot has never been tested. The two-headed askos has an article of its own.

Catalogue entry

A horned beast and a snake

A small animal vessel with two mismatched horns, one twisted like rope and one plain, was once catalogued as a rattle. The label has been withdrawn: the only Bronze Age rattles known from Cyprus are the owl-headed ones of the Late Bronze Age. Beside it, a spouted jug carries a zigzag of applied clay read as a snake, a creature that recurs in relief on Red Polished jugs, including one from Vounous Tomb 87A.

2 pieces

Masterpiece · c. 2000–1800 BC

The Plank Figures

Two flat clay figures, one with two necks and one with three, and fifty-three years in the Ashmolean.

The two-necked figure has a single torso with one small breast on each side, so it is unclear which head, if either, is meant to be female. Three-necked figures are rarer still: the other plank is one of only two or three complete examples on record, and its nearest comparison is in Berlin.

Enter the masterpiece

Back to The Neolithic

Next room · 03 · Middle Cypriot

The Middle Bronze Age

c. 1900 BC to 1650 BC

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