1965.03

Attic Black-Glaze Askos

Presented by the Museum of Classical Archaeology, Cambridge. Ht (body) 3.2cm; diam. 8.2cm.

Some fragments of the mouth are missing. The handle is of segmental section. The foot is offset. The glaze is slightly misfired and it has flaked from much of the upper body and handle. The underside is reserved and reddened: it bears a neatly-written graffito reading API.

The letters scratched on the bottom were probably the beginning of the owner’s name, e.g. Aristophanes, Aristotle, or many other such names. Other vases with ΑΡΙ inscribed on them have been found at Naukratis in Egypt, in Cyprus and in Italy as well as in Greece. See in general R. Hackl, Münchener Archäologische Studien. Festschrift Adolf Furtwängler (Munich 1909) 1-106, and A.W. Johnston, Trademarks on Greek Vases (Warminster 1979). Johnston’s article “Trade Marks on Greek Vases”, Greece and Rome 21, 1974, 138-152 provides a simpler but interesting introduction.

This type of askos, doubtless designed for table oil, first makes its appearance about 480 bc (with an example decorated by Makron) and is particularly common in the last third of the fifth century. Our example perhaps belongs about 425 BC; see the discussion in B.A. Sparkes and L. Talcott, The Athenian Agora xii: Black and Plain Pottery (Princeton 1970) 157-160 and more recently J. Boardman, A. Parkin and S. Waite (eds), On the Fascination of Objects: Greek and Etruscan Art in the Shefton Collection (Oxford 2016) 77-81. For surveys of the various types of askos, see Beazley, American Journal of Archaeology 25, 1921, 325-326 and Snijder, Mnemosyne 1, 1933-34, 34-60.

J.R. Green with B. Rawson, Catalogue of Antiquities in the Australian National University, A.N.U. (Canberra, 1981) 43.