Cylinder-seal impressions on storage vessels from Late Bronze Age Cyprus: exploring the materiality of an idiosyncratic mechanism

Artemis Georgiou, delivering the Edgar Peltenburg Fellowship lecture, examines the small corpus of pithoi from the Late Bronze Age in Cyprus that bear relief friezes rolled from cylinder seals. After briefly outlining her fellowship project on maritime transport containers from Porphyrios Dikaios's excavations at Enkomi, she turns to how these relief bands were made and used.

Unlike stone cylinder seals used to secure containers, the rollers employed on Cypriot pithoi were rolled directly onto the wet vessel wall or onto an added band of finer, lighter clay before firing. None of the rollers survive, but wood-grain imprints identified by Joanna Smith show that at least some were carved of wood and stood up to 8.4 centimetres high. Apart from one 14th-century BC heirloom impression from Episkopi, the corpus dates to the late 13th and early 12th centuries BC. Alassa has yielded 190 impressed fragments from at least eight rollers, followed by Maa-Palaeokastro with 26, Episkopi-Bamboula with eight, and Palaepaphos with three, alongside a single possible Cypriot import at Frattesina in Italy.

Georgiou surveys the shared repertoire of themes: chariot hunts at Alassa, Maa-Palaeokastro, Analiondas, and Athienou; a hunter kneeling before a lion at Alassa; bulls with interlocked horns restrained by human figures at Enkomi, Episkopi-Bamboula, and Palaepaphos; warriors fighting griffins and lions; crouching griffins stamped with the same seal at both Alassa and Episkopi-Bamboula; goats or birds flanking olive trees; and a row of murex shells at Hala Sultan Tekke. She compares these scenes to luxury objects from elite burials, especially carved ivory game boxes, pyxides, and mirror handles.

Because most impressed pithoi come from large storage buildings such as Building II at Alassa and Building III at Maa-Palaeokastro, Georgiou interprets the friezes as a visual marking system within regional administration. She weighs whether the scenes indicated contents such as olive oil, elite ownership during the 13th-to-12th-century transition, or goods reserved for ceremonial feasts linked to an oral heroic cycle. Comparing their south-western concentration with the distribution of Cypro-Minoan inscriptions and stone cylinder seals at Enkomi, Kition, Kalavasos, and Maroni, she argues that Late Cypriot communities used distinct regional administrative tools. In the discussion afterwards, she addresses connections between wood, ivory, and bronze workshops, residue analysis at Alassa, and whether seal impressions ever co-occur with Cypro-Minoan marks.