There are 44
objects from Cyprus in the Crofts Collection.
They include a variety of objects which are all made from pottery or
glass. In this post we’re going to take
a detailed look at some of the Cypriot objects in the collection, however if
you’d like to see more you can explore the collection on the Hull Museums Collections website.
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(c) Hull and East Riding Museum: Hull Museums |
This pottery oil lamp was made using a mould. It’s a teardrop shape with a small lug handle
at the back and it is decorated with raised lines, running along its top
side. On top of the lamp there’s a
circular hole in the centre of the ‘bulge’ of the teardrop. That’s the filling hole, where oil or animal
fat would have been poured in to fill the lamp.
At the narrow end of the lamp, the small hole would have had a wick
placed in it. The wick would have been made
from linen, flax or papyrus. The lamp is
from Kourion (its Latin name is Curium) and dates to the late Roman period (7th
century AD).
Kourion was
an important ancient city-state on the southwest coast of Cyprus. Cyprus was annexed into the Roman Empire in
58 BC, becoming a peaceful and prosperous province. It had numerous public buildings which can
still be explored today like its theatre, baths and Agora as well as beautiful
mosaics in private houses.
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The red pointer shows the location of Kourion in Cyprus (c) Google 2020 |
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(c) Hull and East Riding Museum: Hull Museums |
This is a two-handled pottery vessel with a cylindrical raised
neck. It’s been made from a buff fabric
and the upper half (including the big looped basket handles) have been painted
black. Just above the widest part of the
body, the vessel has also been decorated with red paint. There are two parallel horizontal lines
running around the vessel and a row of short vertical lines radiating on either
side of the lines.
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(c) Hull and East Riding Museum: Hull Museums |
This is a single-handled oil lamp filler known as an askos. It was used for storing oil and for filling
up oil lamps (like the one you saw higher up).
It has an elliptical-shaped body (a squashed circle) and a long neck
projecting upwards at one end of the body.
The rim has been pinched when the clay was wet to form a spout. It also has a handle coming out of the neck,
going through a right angle to attach to the centre of the body.
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(c) Hull and East Riding Museum: Hull Museums |
Also from Kourion (Curium), this object is a lamp filler (askos). It is zoomorphic, meaning it represents an
animal – in this case a bull. It has two
horns on top of its head and the lower part of its face forms a tubular spout
with a hole through the mouth. There is
another hole on the bull’s shoulder, where the oil would have been poured into
the vessel. It then has a strap handle
from the rim of the filling hole through to the middle of its back. There is no further information about where
this object was found, however bull-shaped lamp fillers are typically found in
funerary contexts (burials).
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(c) Hull and East Riding Museum: Hull Museums |
This jug was also found in Kourion (Curium). It has a ‘trefoil’ rim and a handle which
comes out of the rim and reattaches to the body of the vessel. It has a round, globular body which has been
painted with several concentric circles (circles within circles) in black and
red. The use of concentric circles is
typical of decoration on pottery in Ancient Cyprus.
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(c) Hull and East Riding Museum: Hull Museums |
This bowl has a Y-shaped profile: it is a shallow bowl on a pedestal
base. It has one handle that projects
from the rim on one side. The handle is
a forked or wishbone handle.
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(c) Hull and East Riding Museum: Hull Museums |
The final object is another bowl – this one is from Kourion (Curium)
and dates to 1450 - 1250 BC (the Late Cypriot II period). In contrast to the previous bowl, this one is
hemispherical in shape with a round bottom.
It has a wishbone handle below the rim.
It has a buff slip (thin clay coating) and is painted with dark brown
cross-hatching around the rim with bands of cross-hatching forming columns
running down the outside of the bowl (known as ladder pattern friezes), from
the band at the rim to the bowl’s base.
This type of slip and decoration falls into the category of ‘White Slip
Ware’ which is a type of pottery made in Cyprus from 1600 BC until 1200 BC, and
is one of the most recognisable types of pottery made in Cyprus at that time.
In our next
post we’re going to explore the Roman oil lamps in the collection – check it
out!
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