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Cinerary Amphora with Lid
Unknown · 3rd to 2nd century BC
A slim amphora with its lid still in place, decorated not with the black figures of classical Athens but with garlands of ivy leaves in white paint on the neck and belly, the festive style of the Hellenistic world. Between the garlands the body is ribbed with vertical flutes and carries small figures in relief: a reclining satyr at a banquet, and figures that may be an Amazon and a maenad. The vase is intact. Scratched into the shoulder is a short Greek text, an epitaph, for this is not a wine jar but an urn. Ashes and fragments of bone are still inside.
Vases like this were the standard cremation urns of Greek Egypt and its neighbours in the third and second centuries BC; similar vessels have been found by the hundred in the cemeteries of Alexandria. The clay and style point to Alexandria or to Crete, but this example was found in Cyrenaica, the Greek province of Libya that belonged to the Ptolemaic kingdom. The Louvre bought it in 1851. It is displayed in this room devoted to the Ptolemaic world as a reminder that ordinary people, not only kings, lived and died in Greek Egypt.
Did You Know? The vase still holds what it was buried with: the ashes and bones of the person named in the inscription on its shoulder.
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