Late Minoan grey hardstone bowl
Simplified Minoan stone vessel. These bowls usually show a decoration in relief of flower buds, here missing, and for this characteristic are named blossom bowls or bird’s nest bowls for their shape. Possibly containing aromatic oils, spices, or perfumes, they were used in both domestic and funerary contexts. The vessel, made of serpentine, dates to the Late Minoan I period, a very common type in stone production. This vessel is circular, flat with a flat rim and convex body, a wide mouth, and interior smoothed and carved cylindrically, with grinding grooves visible; the rounded shoulders tamper to a flat wide base. On the body, close to the rim, four equidistant groups of four incised vertical lines.
Object number: 127.070.
Date: 15th century B.C.
Parallels: Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum 76.AA.22; London, British Museum 1921,0515.25; for an example in calcite Boston, Museum of Fine Arts 09.598; compare with an earlier example New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art 14.89.15, 26.31.431 and Budapest, Museum of Fine Arts 2001.8.A; compare with blossom bowls Athens, Museum of Cycladic Art ΝΓ1095 and New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art 2001.761.6.
References: Warren, P., Minoan Stone Vases, Cambridge, 1969, no. P546; Georgiou, H., "A Late Minoan Stone Vase", The J. Paul Getty Museum Journal 5, 1977, pp. 175-176; The Ernest Brummer Collection, vol. II, Ancient Art: Zurich, 1979, no. 667; Greek Art of the Aegean Islands, exhibition catalogue, Metropolitan Museum of Art: New York, 1979, p. 90; Warren, P.M., “Stone Vessels in Minoan Crete” in Minoan and Greek Civilization from the Mitsotakis Collection, Athens, 1992, pp. 151-155; George, R. L., and Fischer, K. L., “Serpentine and Steatite Artifacts from the Washington County, Pennsylvania Hatfield Site: Descriptions and Theories of Origins”, North American Archaeologist, vol. 20, no. 1, Jan. 1999, pp. 31–45; Flouda, G., Vavouranakis, G., Katsaros, Th., Ganetsos, Th. and Tsikouras, B., “Non-destructive investigation using Raman spectroscopy of stone archaeological artefacts from Apesokari-Crete (Greece)”, in R. Radvan, S. Akyuz, M. Simileanu, V. Dragomir (eds.), Proceedings of the 3rd Balkan Symposium on Archaemetry, 29-30 October 2012, Bucharest, 2012, pp. 45-51; for a very close parallel see “The Minoans of Crete”, Archaeology, .
Photo by Steve Morton