Kalligeneia and Hieros Arotos

Abstract

An Attic cup of Siana shape, said to come from excavations in Rhodes, was presented to the British Museum in 1906 by Sir Henry Howorth (Pl. II). The lip is decorated with a wreath—interrupted above the handles—of alternate purple and black ivy-leaves set in two rows, one point-upwards, the other point-downwards, on a central horizontal stem. The reserved band on which the figures and handles are set comes immediately below the lip, save for a narrow black stripe; the rest of the bowl is black, but divided by a horizontal band of tongue-pattern; the tongues, pointing upwards, are alternately black and purple, except in two places where two blacks accidentally come together. Black underlies the purple and the white everywhere, except under the purple tongues, but the white, used only for women's flesh, has almost entirely disappeared. The interior is plain black. The date will be before 560 B.C.Let us look at the two scenes which appear one on each side of the cup: they are roughly drawn, but vigorous and interesting: begin with that which, as I hope to show, comes first in time (Pl IIIa). On the left, a woman is seated to right on a stool: she is dressed in purple; her hair is loose and she holds her left hand to her head in an attitude of grief, with which the gesture of the open right hand well consorts. On the right of the scene, another woman stands to left beside a naming altar (Pl IIIe). Her dress is a black peplos. She wears a broad belt, the upper band of which consists of a repeating Ѕ pattern; her hair is gathered into a small knot on the nape of the neck, and in her hands she holds out by its handles a liknoh, from the front end of which three corn-stalks project. Within are shown other objects; the scale is so small and the drawing so poor that it is not possible to identify them all: some are probably fruits, the central one almost certainly a phallus.