alabastron
- Museum number
- 1903,1215.10
- Description
-
Alabaster alabastron with Cypriot Syllabic inscription in Eteo-Cypriot (?); long cylindrical body, with rounded base, narrowing to short cylindrical neck; mushroom rim splaying slightly towards the edge; two small lugs on upper part of body of vessel; an inscription, approximately 5 cm long, is incised below one of the lugs in shallow characters, six or seven in number and separated into two groups by a space; the vessel is intact but restored from three pieces, except for a chip underneath the rim and one on the middle of the body.
Two old Egyptian Department registration numbers are written on the body of the vessel (98333 on the neck and, more faintly, 89330 between the lugs).
- Production date
- 600BC-400BC
- Dimensions
-
Height: 29.50 centimetres
-
Length: 5 centimetres (inscription)
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Weight: 610 grammes
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Width: 5 centimetres
- $Inscriptions
-
- Curator's comments
- Two old Egyptian Department registration numbers are written on the body of the vessel (98333 on the neck and, more faintly, 89330 between the lugs).
The alabastron was discovered or collected by Luigi Palma di Cesnola but ended up in personal Lang's collection where it remained until 1903. When Lang left Cyprus in 1872, he gave around 1500 fragmentary items to Cesnola in exchange for a dozen pieces of high quality (BM GR archives, Original Letters 1869-72, vol. 2). This is possibly one of these exchanges, through it was commonplace for the antiquarian community to give or swap items from their excavations and collections, and Lang says that he ceded Cesnola the right to excavate at Golgoi so he may have been given items from the site before this time
For Cypriot parallels from established archaeological contexts see: SCE IV/2, fig. 39 no 38 (Marion); Chavane 1990, 78-80, esp. nos 588-656 passim and pl. XVIII (Amathus); Salles and Chavane 2003, 336-7 nos 811-19 and figs 263, 265 (Kition-Bamboula, Hellenistic levels). See Chavane 1990, 77-8 for a general comment (with bibliography) on the difficulty of dating these vessels on form alone.
Bibliography:
Chavane M.-J. 1990, La nécropole d'Amathonte. Tombs 110-385. IV. Les petits objets (Nicosia).
Salles J.-F. and Chavane M.-J. 2003, 'Les petits objets' in J.-F. Salles ed. Kition-Bamboula IV. Les niveaux héllenistiques (Paris), 331-46.
- Location
- Not on display
- Exhibition history
-
Exhibited:
2018 May-Sep, Hong Kong, Hong Kong Museum of History, An Age of Luxury
2019 Apr-Aug, Barcelona, CaixaForum, An Age of Luxury
2019-2020 Sep-Jan, Madrid, CaixaForum, An Age of Luxury
2020 Feb-May, Seville, CaixaForum, An Age of Luxury
- Acquisition date
- 1903
- Department
- Greek and Roman
- Registration number
- 1903,1215.10
