Published Catalogue Text: Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Bronzes at the Harvard Art Museums
This footless bowl is plain on the outside. The interior rim is thickened, and the inside of the vessel is densely covered with fine, concentric lines around a centering mark. A corresponding mark on the outside confirms that the bowl was finished on a lathe. A hole (c. 0.5 cm in diameter) was punched just below the thickened rim. This hole is worn along its vertical axis, suggesting that some kind of handle was attached here and that the vessel was in use for a period of time prior to deposition in the grave (1). On the exterior, there is a faint textile pseudomorph to the left of the hole (2).
The bowl was found together with a small pottery jug and cup as well as several beads in a plundered grave at Gammai near the northern border of modern Sudan. The grave consisted of a trench with the burial placed in an undercut side chamber. Similar, often deeper, bronze bowls bearing lathe-turned and various other kinds of decoration, and in a few cases equipped with a ring handle, were common during the late and post-Meroitic periods, the time of the Ballana Culture (also known as the “X-Group”) in Lower Nubia.
NOTES:
1. Compare O. Bates and D. Dunham, “Excavations at Gammai,” in Varia Africana 4, eds. E. A Hooton and N. I. Bates, Harvard African Studies 8 (Cambridge, MA, 1927) 1-123, esp. 40, 54, 62, and 65; Graves 115 no. 2, E 1 no. 2, E 99 nos. 5-6, and T 10 no. 2b; pls. 31.3.B, 32.5.C, 32.5.F-G, and 65.2, 65.5, and 65.7-9; W. B. Emery and L. P. Kirwan, The Royal Tombs of Ballana and Quostol (Cairo, 1938) 287, type 31 (there are over 40 examples listed in the following pages), fig. 100.31, pls. 71 and 73; B. B. Williams, Meroitic Remains from Qustul Cemetery Q, Ballana Cemetery B, and a Ballana Settlement, The University of Chicago Oriental Institute Nubian Expedition 9 (Chicago, 1991) 158, figs. 168.a, 226.c, and 264.d, pls. 93.a and 94.c; and D. Wildung, ed., Sudan: Ancient Kingdoms of the Nile, exh. cat., Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris; Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung, Munich (New York, 1997) 382-88 (no. 464 has a small ring handle).
2. Other bowls also preserve traces of a textile, in which they may have been wrapped at burial; see Bates and Dunham 1927 (supra 1) 44, Grave 188, no. 2; and Wildung 1997 (supra 1) 386, no. 460.
Susanne Ebbinghaus
