A Note on a Rattling Attic Black Glaze Cup in Dublin

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In the Classical Museum of University College, Dublin, there is a small black glaze Attic cup (inv. no. V3020; provenance unknown) belonging to the Vienna-Cup group (Plate IV, 1–4). It is 7·7 cm high and 13·8 cm in diameter (20 cm at the handles). It has been broken and repaired at some time and parts of the handles are modern, and some of the lip is restored (apparent on Plate IV, 3 and 4). It might be as well to point out that the foot is whole and has never been broken. The cup is almost wholly black, except for the insides of the handles, the outside edge and resting surface of the foot, and the centre of the foot which are all reserved (Plate IV, 1 and 2). It looks quite normal, but if one picks it up and tilts it, one hears a rattling, almost a ringing, sound from the foot which is not only hollow, but contains three small clay pellets, as revealed by an X-ray examination (Plate IV, 3 and 4). There is no vent hole.The cup is to be dated to some time within the period 475–450 B.C. I do not know of any parallels among the Vienna-Cup group, but there is another black glaze cup in Leningrad (Hermitage B 721; Plate V, 1) which belongs to the Kalliades-Brygos group and which has a hollow foot and rattling pellets just like those on the Dublin cup. The Kalliades-Brygos group is generally dated to between 500 and 470 B.C. This would mean that the Leningrad cup is probably earlier than the Dublin example, but they both still belong to the first half of the fifth century. The relevance to the discussion of a fragmentary foot in Toronto (Royal Ontario Museum 923.13.11) from a cup of Cup-Type C painted by Skythes c. 500 B.C., is debatable. In the case of this foot there is a hollow channel around the edge as in the Dublin and Leningrad examples, but it differs from them in that there was originally a small rectangular hole in it, the left side of which is preserved (Plate V, 2, far left). The hole was apparently never closed, so that it is unlikely that the hollow held pellets as did the others, or if it did, there might have been a temporary stopper of, say, unbaked clay. The hole is a puzzle, for it seems too big to be merely a vent hole.