Vessel

This cylindrical vessel has a flat base (though the interior bottom is rounded) and a flaring mouth. Four vertically pierced lugs emerge from the shoulder, with four corresponding holes below them near the base. The vessel is made of gray clay with incised decorations which have been filled in with white powder. The decorations include several horizontal and vertical lines, horizontal rows of circles, and images of birds. The birds are rendered in outline, but based on the shape of their bodies and their short legs, they are probably ducks.

This vessel was excavated at Susa in southwestern Iran, the capital of the Elamite kingdom. Similar vessels have been found at Uruk, Telloh, Nippur, Tell Hassan, Tell Asmar and Nuzi in Mesopotamia and at Anshan, Godin Tepe and Chogha Gavahneh in Iran, with near identical decorations. It is thus very likely they were produced in a single workshop and exported, but on current evidence it is impossible to say where. It is also difficult to say what purpose these vessels were intended to serve, since their shapes are quite usual and not paralleled in other ancient ceramic corpora. Possibly they were intended to imitate stone vessels.