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Watercolor reconstruction of a stemmed dish from Sardis showing Potnia Theron, interior. (Watercolor by Crawford H. Greenewalt, jr.) -
Watercolor reconstruction of a stemmed dish from Sardis showing Potnia Theron, exterior. (Watercolor by Crawford H. Greenewalt, jr.)
Stemmed Dish with Orientalizing Decoration: Potnia Theron
The Lydians and their World
(2010)
Cat. 36
- Date
- 600-570 BC, Lydian
- Sardis or Museum Inv. No.
- P66.006
- Material
- Ceramic
- Object Type
- Pottery
- Pottery Shape
- Stemmed Dish
- Pottery Ware
- Lydian Painted - Orientalizing
- Pottery Attribution
- Site
- Sardis
- Sector
- HoB
- Trench
- HoB
- B-Grid Coordinates
- W2 / S87 *98.5
- Description
- Stem and foot missing. Clay pink-orange-brown, soft, micaceous, friable. Inside and outside, cream-buff slip over which a decoration in matte grey-sepia and shiny orange-brown slip. Inside, figural composition of which female (?) face, wings, hands and arms, and snakes (?) survive. Outside, pendant and ascendent rosettes and free-field swastikas. Estimated diameter ca. 0.34 m.
- Comments
- The fragments were recovered from an extramural occupation quarter of Sardis (Expedition sector HoB), scattered over a zone ca. 30 m x 23 m. The interior composition evidently shows a potnia theron (goddess of wild creatures, a Homeric term borrowed in modern scholarship to designate a female figure, often winged, flanked by creatures, often of identical kinds, that she grasps or otherwise dominates) grasping snakes (?).
- See Also
- Greenewalt, “Lydian Pottery”.
- Bibliography
- Greenewalt 1970, 68-70, 84-85.
- Author
- CHG