Eggshell Ware Pottery in Achaemenid Mesopotamia

Abstract

The major obstacle facing the student of Mesopotamian post-Assyrian ceramics is the lack of reliably dated pottery earlier than the Seleucian-Parthian material from Seleucia and Ctesiphon. The condition of the sites from which this pottery was recovered precluded stratigraphic recovery, even when this was attempted. Gibson's work at Nippur led him to suggest (1975: 76) that many ceramics classified as late Neo-Babylonian pottery are actually Achaemenid and some considered Achaemenid are Seleucid. The extensive excavations conducted at Babylon in the 1890's yielded material from the period of Achaemenid control, but the relevant sections have not been fully published. These ceramics were excavated on a palace site and are not “common ware”, or pottery in ordinary daily use.Pottery from sites in southern Mesopotamia varies in its value for the study of mid-first millennium B.C. regional ceramics. This variability results from its manner of recovery and its context. The late pottery excavated at Ur by Woolley and his predecessors was almost entirely from graves (see Taylor 1855a and 1855b; Hall 1919) and included a large number of shapes with imprecise stratigraphic attributions. However, the corpus recovered was of great value for its typological variety. In one sense, the Ur pottery is a “perfect” collection of its period, because it is the result of intentional rather than accidental deposition and is therefore likely to show one form of contemporaneous usage. Once the large Ur corpus has been checked, it may be used to illuminate material from smaller sites, or from surveys.