Artemis Georgiou lectures in Toronto on Cypriot storage jars rolled with chariot hunts and griffins

Artemis Georgiou gives an invited lecture at the Archaeology Centre of the University of Toronto on the afternoon of Monday 2 November 2026 (16:00–18:00 local time) on the scenes rolled in relief onto a small group of Cypriot storage jars. The Royal Ontario Museum co-hosts the talk, which was announced under the title Lasting Impressions: Exploring the Iconography, Symbolism, and Meaning of Relief Friezes on Storage Vessels from Late Bronze Age Cyprus.

Georgiou directs COMPAS, a project at the University of Cyprus funded by a Starting Grant from the European Research Council. The jars are pithoi, large storage vessels, of the 13th–12th centuries BCE, late in the Late Bronze Age. Their friezes show chariot hunts, animals in combat, and warriors facing lions and griffins. Georgiou will look at what the scenes meant to those who saw them and what they said about rank and belief in the society that made them.

Rolled pictures on pithoi

The frieze was made by rolling a carved cylinder over the wet clay, usually round the shoulder of the jar and more rarely on the rim or handles, sometimes on an added strip of lighter clay [1, p. 129]. Grain marks on some impressions suggest that at least some rollers were wooden; they were much larger than the stone seals of the period, and the two used at Maa-Palaeokastro had estimated heights of about 4.8 and 4.5 cm [1, pp. 129–130].

In a 2016 study, Georgiou counted some 200 fragments with relief friezes at Alassa-Paliotaverna, 26 from Maa-Palaeokastro, eight vessels at Episkopi-Bamboula and three at Palaepaphos, against only two pithos fragments at Enkomi [1, p. 140]. A griffin frieze from Episkopi was rolled with the same cylinder as a pithos at Alassa, the only case she records of one roller used at two settlements. Building on Webb and Frankel's 1994 study of a pithos from Analiondas, she reads the friezes as marks setting certain jars, and perhaps their contents, apart, possibly for elites or for special occasions [1, p. 139]. At Alassa, where writing is almost absent, she suggests the rollers did the job that Cypro-Minoan inscriptions did at Kalavasos and Maroni [1, pp. 140–141]. The scenes on the Maa jars are described further in an article on cylinder-seal impressions.