JOHN BOARDMAN

THE EARLY GREEK SHERD AT NINEVEH

The Assyrian site of Nineveh on the Tigris

has fallen on and off lists and maps of finds
of early Greek pottery (e.g., J. Boardman,
OJA 9 (1990) 174, fig. 1) through uncertainty
about the identity of a piece mentioned in the
report of 1929, ‘one proto-Geometric sherd’
(R. Campbell Thompson and R.W. Hamilton,
Archaeologia 79 (1929) 138). The few pieces
of Greek pottery from the excavation of the
area of the temple of Nabu had been
inspected by Mr Forsdyke and Professor
Beazley. The general assumption, no more
than a guess which, being repeated, became a

fact, that the fragment was from a pendent-
semicircle skyphos is in fact correct. Andres
Reyes indicated to me its present location in
Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery
(not London, as generally assumed) and I am
indebted to Dr Philip Watson for permission
to see and photograph it (Figure). Its greatest
width is 4.4 cm, diameter not easily deter-
mined but clearly a relatively large specimen.
The clay is a clean pinkish-orange, within the
Euboean range as known to me. The paint is
brown, rather streaky within, where there is a
thin reserved stripe in the rim, and thinned
for the semicircles. The rim is slightly
concave and high for the class, which places
it relatively early in the Sub-Protogeometric
series (V.R.d’A. Desborough in Lefkandi I
(ed. M.R. Popham, 1980) 300). The class is
well represented in the plentiful finds of
Euboean pottery at Al Mina at the mouth of
the River Orontes, 400 miles west of Nine-
veh, and on nearby Syrian sites (OJA 9
(1990) 169–90). Distribution thins north and
south and this is the furthest flung example to
the east.

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375

Figure 1

Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery 1989.A.343.

Cup fragment from Nineveh