• latw-70-1
    Boat-shaped vessel with spout. (Courtesy of the Vedat Nedim Tör Museum, Istanbul)
  • latw-70-2
    Boat-shaped vessel with spout. Detail of decorated side. (Courtesy of the Vedat Nedim Tör Museum, Istanbul)
  • latw-70-3
    Boat-shaped vessel with spout. (©Archaeological Exploration of Sardis/President and Fellows of Harvard College)

Boat-shaped vessel with spout

Date
Ca. 600-550 BC, Lydian
Museum
Manisa, Archaeological and Ethnographic Museum, 6689
Museum Inventory No.
6689
Sardis or Museum Inv. No.
P86.015
Material
Ceramic
Object Type
Pottery
Pottery Shape
Boat-Shaped Vessel
Pottery Ware
Lydian Painted - Orientalizing
Pottery Attribution
Site
Sardis
Sector
MMS
Trench
MMS-I 86.1
Locus
MMS-I 86.1 Locus 120
B-Grid Coordinates
E151.6 - E151.8 / S61.2 - S61.4 *99.5
Description
Broken and mended; one end of the vessel missing and restored. Broken and mended in antiquity (repair holes). Exterior: Orientalizing decoration in two registers, the upper register showing, on one side, hound chasing hare, on the other side three cows, one suckling a calf; a lower register shows gamboling fish. Interior, marbling. Preserved length 0.18 m, preserved width 0.125 m, height to rim 0.095 m.
Comments
The restored end replicates the surviving end, like matching ends of two other Lydian boat-shaped vessels; one (inscribed with a text in Lydian, no. 30 in the Lydian corpus) recovered from a grave at Sardis (grave no. 23a; excavated in 1913 by the Butler Expedition; now at Princeton, Princeton University Art Museum no. 29.195); the other now at the Manisa, Archaeological and Ethnographic Museum, no. 6397 (from the New York Art Market); Greenewalt 1984-1997. The fish on the lower body support identification of the vessel shape as that of a boat.

No. 70 belongs to a genre of narrow-spouted or sieve-spouted vessels, which are common in Phrygia (see Sams 1977) and are commonly identified as drinking cups for beer, the narrow spouts and sieves serving to filter out chaff; individual sieves also were used to filter wine lees, and appear with wine-drinking paraphernalia.

Found discarded in a pile of rocks dumped in the court of a Lydian house (Area 4-6, with Nos. 67, 71, 76, 77, 79, 89, 98, 99). It had already been mended once, and then broken again, before it was discarded in antiquity with the rocks.

See Also
Greenewalt, “Lydian Pottery”; Greenewalt, “Bon Appetit”; Cahill, “Persian Sack”.
Bibliography
Cahill in Greenewalt et al. 1990, 152-153, figs. 15-16.
Author
CHG