Room 04 of 07 · Late Cypriot
The Late Bronze Age
Cypriot pottery crosses the eastern Mediterranean, and borrows the look of the Aegean.
In the Late Bronze Age, c. 1650–1050 BC, Cyprus became a trading island. Its copper went abroad, and so did its pottery: Base Ring juglets and White Slip bowls reached Egypt, the Levant and Anatolia in large numbers.
Seven pieces represent the period here. Four are Base Ring, a thin, hard-fired ware that rings like metal when tapped. One is a White Slip bowl of the kind found at Enkomi. One is a jar that looks Mycenaean and was made in Cyprus. The last is a clay rattle shaped like an owl.
Juglets for the export trade
Base Ring pots were made by hand, yet their walls are thin and their shapes crisp, and many scholars think the potters were copying metal vessels. One juglet has a raised collar on its neck where the handle joins, usually read as a copy of the collar that held the handle on a metal jug. The small long-necked juglet, the bilbil, was the most widely exported Cypriot pot of its age.
Whether it carried opium is an old question. The largest residue study, of seventeen vessels, found oils scented with herbs such as mint and sage. Smaller studies have found traces of opium alkaloids: in one sealed juglet in the British Museum, and in eight of twenty-two vessels from graves at Tel Yehud in Israel, local Canaanite pots among them. The fairest summary is that bilbils held valuable oils, mostly scented or medicinal, and occasionally something with opium in it. More on Base Ring.
In focus
Base Ring II Double Juglet with White-Painted Decoration
Late Cypriot IIA–IIC, c. 1450–1200 BC
Two bilbils fused at shoulder and belly, their necks joined by an arching bridge. The top is damaged, so it is unclear whether the vessel had two open mouths or a single handle spanning them; parallels in the Metropolitan Museum and the Ashmolean show both arrangements. Each half could have held a different oil.
Red and grey bilbils
Base Ring is usually fired grey-black. The white-banded bilbil came out a warm red-brown, a well-known result of firing with plenty of air. Close parallels have been found at Minet el-Beida, the port of Ugarit, and at Amarna in Egypt. The larger jug, its white lattice varied between its two faces, is the kind that mostly stayed at home in Cypriot tombs.
A Mycenaean look, made in Cyprus
From the fourteenth century BC Mycenaean pottery reached Cyprus in quantity. A good deal of what looks Mycenaean on the island was made there, by Cypriot potters working in the Aegean manner, and clay analysis has proved it for the class of three-handled jars shown here. An Aegean shape on Cyprus does not, by itself, mean an Aegean potter or settler.
Beside the jar sits the other signature Cypriot fine ware of the age, White Slip: handmade, coated in a thick milky slip and painted in brown. Mycenaean imports and local imitations.
In focus
Cypriot Three-Handled Jar in the Mycenaean Style with Running Spirals
Late Cypriot IIA–IIB, c. 1375–1300 BC
A wheel-made jar with three small shoulder handles and linked running spirals, c. 1375–1300 BC, once described as an Aegean import. Neutron activation analysis of a jar of this class from Hala Sultan Tekke, and a wider programme of portable XRF work, have since shown that these jars were made in Cyprus. Cypriot painters left signs of their own: they used a matt paint where imports have a lustrous one, and they usually linked their spirals the opposite way to Aegean painters. Its closest parallels are jars from Enkomi Tombs 66 and 83, excavated for the British Museum in 1896. More on the class.
A milk bowl
The White Slip II bowl, with its wishbone handle, row of dots under the rim and ladder stripes, matches a bowl from Enkomi in the British Museum almost line for line. The nickname milk bowl comes from the colour of the slip; what these bowls held is unknown. In the Levant they turn up mostly in houses, while Base Ring bilbils turn up more often in graves. White Slip ware.
The owl rattle
About forty-five of these hollow clay birds are known. Most have no recorded find-spot; nearly all of the rest come from tombs, mostly in eastern Cyprus around Enkomi. They hold loose pebbles and rattle when shaken. They were long called toys. None, though, comes from a child's grave, and clay this fragile would not have survived play. A ritual sound-maker, perhaps for the dead, is the leading reading, and it remains circumstantial. Even the owl is a modern reading of the flat face with its pierced eyes. Relatives turn up in the Levant, at Lachish and Ugarit.
In focus
White Painted VI Owl-Headed Rattle
Late Cypriot I–II, c. 1650–1300 BC
Pierced eyes, pointed ears and grey-black stripes on a pale body. The body copies the White Shaved dipper juglet, which the Enkomi area exported in quantity to the southern Levant, and its closest match in the British Museum shares the same striped scheme. The type's specialist and several museum catalogues disagree on its date, so it is given here as a range, Late Cypriot I–II. Music and sound in ancient Cyprus.
