Miniature Faience Jar with a Nilotic Scene
Unknown · Late Cypriot IIIC, circa 1150 to 1050 BC
A little jar of faience, only fourteen centimetres tall, glazed in blue and black and decorated in relief. Walk around it if you can: a nude woman, a cow and a bird are set among papyrus stems, as if standing in a marsh of the Nile delta. The figures were moulded rather than carved, and the coloured glaze pools in the hollows, giving the tiny scene depth. Faience, a glassy paste fired to a shine, was an Egyptian speciality, and the papyrus thicket is a thoroughly Egyptian image of abundance and rebirth.
The jar was found at Kition, present-day Larnaca on the south coast of Cyprus, and purchased by the Louvre in eighteen ninety-six. The museum dates it, with a question mark, to the very end of the Bronze Age, around eleven hundred BC, a period when the island's towns were rebuilding after the upheavals that ended the great palace civilisations. Its Egyptian style raises a question you can weigh yourself: was it imported from the Nile, or made on Cyprus by craftsmen who had learnt Egyptian techniques and imagery? Either way it is a small, complete example of the luxury trade that linked the two shores.
Did You Know? The nude woman among papyrus stems is a Nile delta image of fertility, transplanted onto a vessel found on Cyprus.
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