Egyptian, Pre-Dynastic period, late 4th - early 3rd millennium B.C.

Basalt

H: 6.5 cm (2.5 in)

Serial: 18164

This bowl has a globular body equipped with two small disk-shaped handles drilled with a circular hole. The protruding lip terminates in a flat rim. The rounded base does not provide the container with good balance. Such vessels made of fired clay or carved from stone were largely widespread in Egypt between the last centuries of the 4th millennium B.C. and the early following millennium. They may vary in size, from miniature examples to specimens exceeding 20 centimeters high and 15 centimeters in diameter.

The manufacture of stone vases is a frequent subject of wall paintings in the Old Kingdom, but very few ancient workshops were discovered. This iconography suggests that the craftsman started carving and polishing the outer surface, and then pierced the interior using a stone drill (composed of a wooden shaft with a fork at the bottom, which held the stone drill, a crank and two stones serving as weight): for a regular and centered drilling, as well as for a better stability, this tool was rotated back and forth. During this process, the vessel was placed in a hole in the ground or in the workbench. The final polishing was achieved by rubbing the surface with a hard stone, sand or emery. These thick-walled vessels were generally intended to store and preserve foodstuffs, ointments and cosmetic oils. These substances had various everyday uses (medicines), and also played a prominent role in religious rites (offerings, daily anointing of the statues, etc.) and in the funerary sphere (preparation of the mummies, belief in the rejuvenating and generative properties of these substances). It is therefore not surprising that a large number of stone vessels were regularly deposited in the shrines and in the funeral monuments.

CONDITION

Complete; chips on the rim; polished surface dotted in places.

Provenance

Ex-French private collection, Paris, France, collected before 1980.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

PAGE-GASSER M., WIESE A. B., Egypte, Moments d’éternité, Art égyptien dans les collections privées, Suisse, Mainz on Rhine, pp. 37-39, nos. 16-17 (terracotta).

SPENCER A. J., Catalogue of the Egyptian Antiquities in the British Museum, vol. V, Early Dynastic Objects, London, 1980, pls. 18-20, nos. 206.

On the manufacture of stone vessels, see:

STOCKS D. A., Making Stone Vessels in Ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt, in Antiquity, A Quarterly Review of Archaeology 67, pp. 596-603.