Pendent Semicircles at Veii: a Glimpse

Abstract

The persistent absence of pendent concentric semicircles in the West is commonly regarded as surprising. MG skyphoi with this motif are among the earliest Greek types at Al Mina, and Boardman has suggested that ‘Euboean workshops may have stopped making them by the time Pithekoussai was founded’, though he later qualified this: ‘I think all it demonstrates is how very little we still know about early colonisation or precolonial days in Italy.’ The earliest imported type in Italy—all that is left of Blakeway's pre-colonial period of ‘trade before the flag’—is normally taken to be the Atticizing Euboeo-Cycladic MG II chevron skyphos, or ‘Cycladic cup’, long known from pre-Hellenic Cumae and joined recently by many examples from other native Iron Age cemeteries at Capua and Pontecagnano in Campania and at Veii in southern Etruria. In its turn, the chevron skyphos is so far absent from the oldest Western Greek colony, Pithekoussai, where the extensively imitated Corinthian LG ‘Aetos 666’ kotyle currently begins the sequence in the Valle San Montano cemetery, the Scarico Gosetti, and the Mazzola metal-working site.