History of Ancient Pottery: Greek, Etruscan, and Roman. Volume 1 (of 2)Walters, H. B. (Henry Beauchamp)
History
History of Ancient Pottery: Greek, Etruscan, and Roman. Volume 1 (of 2)
Walters, H. B. (Henry Beauchamp)
Mythology, Classical, in art; Pottery, Ancient; Pottery, Etruscan; Pottery, Greek; Pottery, Roman
Greek tombs are not usually very remarkable in character,[49] being for
the most part small and designed for single corpses; this may possibly
account for the comparatively small size of the vases discovered on
most Hellenic sites. In the earlier tombs at Athens and Corinth the
pottery was found at a very great depth below the soil. The six
shaft-graves in the circle at Mycenae are of great size, and contained
large quantities of painted pottery; an exact reproduction of the
sixth, found by M. Stamatakis in 1878, with its contents, is in the
National Museum at Athens. Here also are reproductions of two typical
fifth-century Greek tombs containing sepulchral lekythi,[50] and
showing how the vases were arranged round the corpse.[51]
Rock-graves are seldom found in Greece, the normal form of tomb being a
hole or trench dug in the earth, either filled in with earth or covered
with tiles (as at Tanagra). The rock-grave is almost exclusively
Asiatic, but some fine specimens were found at Kertch in the
Crimea.[52] Some large ones have also been found in Rhodes,[53] but the
most typical form of tomb there is a square chamber cut out of the hard
clayey earth, approached by a square vertical shaft and a door. They
generally contained single bodies, round which were ranged vases and
terracotta figures. Sir A. Biliotti, in his diary of the excavations at
Kameiros (1864), also records the finding of tombs cut in the clay in
the form of longitudinal trenches, covered with flat stones forming a
vaulted roof. Others were merely troughs cut in the surface of the rock
and covered with stones and earth. In the shafts of the first type of
tomb large jars or πίθοι were often found containing the bones of
children (see page 152). Nearly all these tombs have yielded Greek
vases of all dates. In the island of Karpathos[54] Mr. J. T. Bent found
tombs containing early pottery, consisting of two or three chambers
with stone benches round the sides.
[Illustration: FIG. 1. INTERIOR OF COFFIN FOUND AT ATHENS, SHOWING
ARRANGEMENT OF VASES.]
The tombs of Cyprus are especially interesting for two reasons:
firstly, that they exhibit types not found elsewhere; and, secondly,
that they vary in size and character at different periods of the
island’s history. In the earliest tombs of the Bronze Age period (down
to about 800 B.C.) we find a very simple type, consisting of a mere
oven-like hole a few feet below the surface of the ground, with a short
sloping δρόμος leading to it (Fig. 2). These tombs have very rarely
been found intact, and in most cases are full of fallen earth, so that
exact details of their original arrangement can seldom be obtained.
Each tomb generally contained a few exported Mycenaean vases and a
large number of local fabric, usually hand-made and rude in character.
The rich cemetery of Enkomi is, however, an exception, for here we find
large _built_ tombs, with roofs and walls of stone. Sometimes the
Bronze Age tombs were in the form of a deep well.[55]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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