Cypro-Minoan and Other Potmarks on Late Bronze Age Pottery

In this plenary lecture for the COMPAS project workshop at the University of Cyprus, Nicolle Hirschfeld examines potmarks on Late Bronze Age pottery from Cyprus and the wider Eastern Mediterranean, looking back over nearly four decades of research that began with the oxhide ingots of the Uluburun shipwreck and discussions with Vronwy Hankey.

The first half of the talk traces how early scholarship treated single marks on vases as evidence of Cypro-Minoan writing. After the British Museum excavations of 1896 recovered inscribed clay balls alongside marked vessels, Stanley Casson compiled a 1937 catalogue of sixty-one signs across diverse media without separating local objects from imports. John Franklin Daniel established a stricter methodology in 1941, arguing that isolated potmarks should only be identified as script if they occurred on Cypriot pottery and had parallels in multi-sign inscriptions. When lengthier tablets came to light from 1953 onwards, Émilia Masson assembled the fundamental Cypro-Minoan signaries, though she still included single vase marks.

Hirschfeld explains why determining whether a mark belongs to the Cypro-Minoan script matters even though the script remains undeciphered. It affects the definition of the signary itself, shows how far knowledge of the writing system reached into the Cypriot rural hinterland, and tracks its presence abroad at Ugarit, Tiryns, Aphek, and Ashkelon.

Because many marks are simply non-script symbols, numbers, or workshop codes, the second half of the talk sets out physical criteria for investigating their function. The primary distinction is whether a mark was applied before or after firing. Hirschfeld reviews washy painted marks on Mycenaean pottery, which Claude Schaeffer took as pre-firing evidence for Cypriot manufacture, and calls for pigment analysis and microscopy to test how they overlap the lustrous decoration. For incised marks, she describes experiments cutting into fired sherds with Vassos Karageorghis, practice incisions left on a sherd in Stockholm by Einar Gjerstad, and a stirrup jar handle from Kalavasos Ayios Dhimitrios whose clean groove cuts into the pink fired core.

She concludes with further avenues for future work: contrasting visible incised handle marks with hidden painted base marks, isolating local systems at Kouklia and Kourion or on pithoi and jugs, studying closed contexts from shipwrecks and tombs, using 3D imaging to identify individual hands, and analysing vessels that carry multiple or competing marks.