Slipped Jug from Enkomi (AM 2664)
Unknown · Late Bronze Age, undated in the museum record
A jug of fired clay, about twenty centimetres high and fourteen across, its surface coated with a slip, the thin wash of fine clay that potters applied before firing to give a smooth, uniform finish. Look at the proportions: a globular body, a neck for pouring and a handle for the hand. The plain surface lets you concentrate on the potter's skill in throwing or building an even, well-balanced vessel, and on the colour and texture that the slip and the kiln gave it.
The jug comes from Enkomi, the great Late Bronze Age town of eastern Cyprus, where the French mission excavated houses, sanctuaries and richly furnished tombs from the nineteen thirties onward. The museum record for this piece is brief and gives neither a date nor an acquisition history, so its context must be read from its companions in this case, which range across the Late Cypriot period between about sixteen hundred and one thousand and fifty BC. Everyday vessels like this one were the ordinary furniture of Cypriot homes and graves at a time when the island's copper made it one of the richest places in the eastern Mediterranean.
Did You Know? Cyprus gave its name to copper, the metal that made Bronze Age Enkomi rich.
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