“In most cases these (_i.e._ the Aylesford) vases, which for elegance of form may almost vie with the ceramic products of Italy or Greece, are divided into zones by the small raised ridges or cordons described above, the zones themselves being, in turn, decorated with finely incised linear striations. This type of vase, beautiful as it is in itself, is still more interesting from the comparisons to which it inevitably leads us. No one familiar with the ceramic forms of an important group of North-Italian cemeteries, belonging, for the most part, to the fourth or fifth centuries before our era, and of which the whole series of objects so admirably excavated and arranged by Professor Prosdocimi at Este[253] forms the most splendid illustration, can fail to be struck with the manifold points of resemblance presented by the urns before us with the most characteristic of the vase-types there represented. The contour of the type referred to, with its shoulders sometimes angular, sometimes abruptly rounded off, its inverted conical body divided into vertical zones by raised cordons, and tapering off to a pedestal below, can only be described as identical with that of some of the finest of the Aylesford specimens. The only perceptible difference is that, whereas the British urns are almost uniformly covered with a black or brown coating—the colouring matter may have been supplied by pounded charcoal—zones of the Euganean cineraries are coloured alternately with bands of graphite and red ochre. Some of the earlier of the Este vases are, however, of plain dark brown _bucchero_, and others, again, of later date, of an uniform red or grey. These North-Italian parallels have a still further value, inasmuch as they throw the clearest possible light on the actual genesis of this type. The cordoned vases of Este are, in fact, nothing more than copies in clay of certain forms of bronze _situlæ_; the commonest form of these, which is distributed through the whole of the geographical area where these vases are discovered, is zoned in the same way as the pots, the zones answering to an universal method of early metal industry, in accordance with which vessels were built up of bands of thin metal riveted together at the edges, each zone being often, in turn, defined by cordons or beads of metal. These cordons themselves in their more prominent form represent the wooden rings that surrounded and kept together the framework of wooden staves, to which in early times the metal plates themselves were riveted.” [253] _Notizie degli Scavi_, etc., 1882, pp. 5-37.