- Museum number
- 1894,1101.505
- Description
-
Core-formed glass alabastron.
Opaque orange and opaque white trails, body and handles translucent cobalt blue with no white speckling.
Broad, horizontal rim-disc with tool-marks on upper and under surfaces; cylindrical neck above well-marked, rounded shoulder; tall, straight-sided, cylindrical body with faint expansion downward to rounded bottom. No handles.
Unmarvered thin white trail round edge of lip. Marvered white and orange trails dropped on at shoulder and wound downward, alternating, to basal angle; top and bottom revolutions straight, remainder combed into festoons in fifteen vertical strips.
Core-formed; rim-disc trailed on and tooled.
- Production date
- 400BC-275BC
- Dimensions
-
Diameter: 2.50 centimetres (body, max)
-
Diameter: 2.90 centimetres (rim)
-
Height: 10.80 centimetres
- Curator's comments
- BM Glass
Murray et al. 1900, 122. Fossing 1940, 108, fig. 79.
The only example in this subdivision, this piece resembles BM Glass 277-81 in shape, but differs from them in having no handles and in being decorated with festoons instead of feather pattern. It was found in tomb 171 at Amathus, Cyprus, a tomb not dated by its other contents. Fossing (1940, 108, fig. 79) discusses and illustrates it, mentioning also a similar piece without handles in Constantine Museum found at Collo, Algeria (Doublet and Gauckler 1892, 113, pl. 13, no. 6), but, strangely, takes no account of their being without handles. He puts them in his Hellenistic group of the mid-3rd to late 1st century BC. In so doing he separates them from some close parallels, which he assigned to his 4th- to early 3rd-century group, notably one found at Todi in Umbria (ibid. 91, fig. 99: G. Bendinelli, Mon. Antichi, XXIII (1914), col. 633, fig. 18) in a cemetery of the end of the 4th or the 3rd century, and another from the late 4th-century cremation-burial no. 2 in the Mal-Tepe tholos-tomb, Bulgaria (Fossing 1940, 107, note 2 and Filov 1937, 76, 78, 113, fig. 87). There seems, indeed, to be no reason why all these vessels and the handleless variant should not be accepted as belonging to one group.
- Location
- Not on display
- Condition
- Trail on lip mostly missing. Milky weathering-film with incipient pitting and iridescence on one side; other side mainly retains pristine sheen.
- Acquisition date
- 1894
- Department
- Greek and Roman
- Registration number
- 1894,1101.505
- Additional IDs
-
Miscellaneous number: DBH.0080 (Harden number)
