Monday, 3 August 2020

Classic-Hull: exploring the Crofts Collection (Cyprus)


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.

(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.   
The red pointer shows the location of Kourion in Cyprus (c) Google 2020

(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.




(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.



(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).



(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.







(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.







(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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