Chiefs, bound captives, and harpooned hippopotamuses: an exceptional unpublished C-ware vessel in the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto (inv. 900.2.13)

Abstract

This article presents a Predynastic C-ware beaker currently in the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto (inv. 900.2.13). The exterior is decorated with two mirrored scenes containing an exceptional series of bound captives under the domination of two ‘victorious figures’, as well as several tassel-like motifs which we propose to (re)interpret as powerfacts perhaps representing flails, an artefact common in later royal iconography that has not previously been identified prior to the time of king Narmer. On the interior, the beaker is decorated with two depictions of hunted hippopotamuses set among geome-tric designs. In modern times, a missing piece of the bea-ker was replaced with a sherd from a different C-ware vessel with decoration that doesn’t match the rest of the vessel, a pheno-menon never encountered before in the corpus of C-ware vessels, which inadvertently proves the authenticity of the beaker and of its fascinating decoration.