Bridge-spouted jar

This pitcher is reconstructed from several pieces. Although the complete profile does not survive, enough remains to determine that it has a flat base, a bulbous body, a spout on one side and a double handle on the other. Three vertical lines decorate the vessel’s shoulder, and there are three raised knobs on one side of the body. The spot where the handle and the spout meet the rim is decorated with a horned animal head. The pitcher is made of a buff clay on a potter’s wheel and then burnished, with the handles and spout added.

The pitcher was excavated at Tepe Nush-i Jan, an Iron Age hilltop site about 60 km sound of Hamadan in western Iran. Nush-i Jan was occupied in the 7th and 6th centuries B.C., and its occupants are generally thought to be the Medes, an Iranian people known from Assyrian, Achaemenid and Biblical sources. Though the textual sources portray them as a powerful empire, archaeological evidence for the Medes has yet to sustain this impression. Rather, they seem to have lived in scattered fortified sites in western and central Iran, without any clear capital. Nush-i Jan, one of the best known of these sites, features two temples, a columned hall, and a fort, where this pitcher was discovered.

Spouted pitchers are a well-known feature of the Iron Age, especially in northwestern Iran. They are found in domestic contexts as well as in tombs, and presumably they were used to pour liquids containing dregs, such as wine. They do not, however, appear to be associated with any specific cultural group; rather they are part of a shared material culture tradition. This pitcher suggests that the Medes participated in this tradition. In fact, in the reliefs on the Apadana at Persepolis, constructed ca. 510-480 B.C., the Medes are depicted carrying a vessel very similar to this one, albeit lacking the animal component. This suggests that the Medes, who are thought to have migrated into western Iran sometime in the early first millennium B.C., adopted many aspects of existing material culture traditions, which is partly why Median art remains so difficult to identify.