Ring Vase with a Human Head
Unknown · 1st millennium BC
Shaped like a hollow ring standing on edge, this terracotta vessel carries a modelled human head at the top, so that the pot seems to have a face. Liquid poured in would flow around the ring; the head probably served as the spout or the filling opening. The vase is about seventeen centimetres wide and made of plain fired clay.
It comes from Kaluraz in Gilan, near the Caspian Sea in northern Iran, where cemeteries of the first millennium BC have yielded imaginative pottery in animal and human shapes. Ring vases are known across the ancient Near East and were probably used to pour libations, their odd shape making the act of pouring a small performance. The Louvre received the piece as a gift in nineteen sixty three. Together with the bronzes of Luristan it shows that the Iron Age communities of the Iranian highlands invested craft and wit in objects made for burial and ritual.
Did You Know? Pour from this vase and the liquid runs in a circle before it comes out through the little head.
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