A Greek Vase from Egypt

Abstract

Apart from the important Greek trading-town at Naukratis and the shorter-lived settlement at Tell Defenneh (Daphnai) there is little to show in Egypt for the early years of renewed relations between Greece and the kingdom of the Nile valley. Yet already in the eighth century B.C. a few Egyptian objects were reaching Greek lands; in the seventh Egyptians were employing Ionian Greek mercenaries and apparently themselves influencing Greece's first steps in monumental sculpture. Only slight finds of Greek pottery earlier than 500 B.C. have been made on Egyptian sites other than the two named above, notably at Memphis and at Egyptian Thebes, comprising the sanctuaries of Luxor and Karnak as well as the Theban Necropolis. The last-named complex was well known to the Greeks as Thebes of the Hundred Gates, mentioned in the Iliad (ix. 381–4). It is thence that the vase which forms the subject of this paper is said to come. The few fragments which are all that is preserved from it are in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (1924. 264: Plate I), the gift of Professor Sayce, having been bought by him in Luxor and said to have been found in Karnak. They have already been published by Miss E. R. Price in CVA Oxford ii. IId pl. 10 (401), 24, and associated with the Clazomenian class of Ionian black-figured vases. They seem to merit further attention because the scene figured on one side of the vase has not hitherto been identified, and because its identification may in turn throw a little light on the Greeks who lived in the heart of the Egyptian kingdom. Stylistically the vase can be dated to the decade 550–540 B.C.