All the earlier vases, which are distinguished by very poorly-formed flattened bases, are adapted for a state of culture in which a table was not reckoned among the household furniture of the ordinary folk. It was Greek civilisation that first brought the table into general use. The great storage vessels for dry goods are of semi-globular form with an annular roll for the foot. Inside one of these and half-way up its height there are three projecting brackets, on which a second jar could be placed for special purposes. The great Pithos which played so important a part in western culture does not appear here. Hellenistic vases are found in abundance, but always in fragments, and also an earlier form with black figures and a Greek inscription (see Fig. 167). The shape cannot always be made out, but beside plates there are the cylix, the aryballos, the alabastron, and others. This ware, which is always highly polished, is not found in the graves, and we may therefore conclude that the Greeks of that period had a special cemetery which we have not yet found. A green glazed rhyton (Fig. 171) in the form of a calf’s head lay in the upper levels of Merkes. The masses of pottery and glass fragments of the Sassanide and Arab levels of Amran still await examination by specialists. [Illustration: FIG. 171.—Glazed rhyton. ] [Illustration: FIG. 172.—Glass goblet and jug. ] Several transparent glass goblets profusely decorated with polished concave facets lay near the rhyton. At the same Seleucid-Parthian level there were numerous fragments of transparent colourless or pale-blue glass vessels, among them finely-formed handles of oinochoae and amphorae moulded while the material was still soft (Fig. 172). The earlier glass is invariably opaque and multi-coloured. The usual form is the small alabastron either pointed or rounded at the base. The ornamentation consists of a web of multi-coloured glass lines encircling the vase, which is made of a rough gritty frit. The lines while still hot are broken first from above and then from below, thus forming lines roughly S-shaped (Fig. 173). These vases certainly date back here to the same early period as in Egypt (cf. Kisa, _Glas im Altertum_, i. p. 9, “about 1500 B.C.”). We need not necessarily regard them as imports, however, for the older the civilisations the more their products resemble one another. Thus the pottery vases of Nagada resemble those of Surgul. From the time of the Sargonids onwards, the importation of Egyptian glass and other wares may first be observed without any doubt, such as apotropaic eyes, weird scaraboids, and the like. Decorative glass beads made like the alabastrons just described, and which are general in Babylon in early times, date back as far as the fourth millennium in Fara. [Illustration: FIG. 173.—Ancient glass. ] [Illustration: FIG. 174.—Earthenware bell. ]