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The Painted Pottery of Susa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 March 2011

Extract

When publishing recently the painted pottery found at al 'Ubaid I had necessarily to refer to that found by the French excavators at Susa and other mounds in that part of Persia. I pointed out that while at al 'Ubaid there were two types of painted pottery, the thick and the thin wares, which were contemporary and were associated with various types of plain and incised ware, and while there was a very definite difference between these wares and those of Susa and Musyan, yet certain analogies and parallels did exist both with the thin wares of Susa I and with the thick wares of Susa II, which have always been regarded as differing from each other very widely in date and in style, and the former of which was not associated with any other type of pottery.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Asiatic Society 1928

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References

page 35 note 1 Ur Excavations. Vol. I al-'Ubaid: Part II, The Cemetery, pp. 155 ff.

page 41 note 1 Mr. Frankfort objects to this explanation (his comment that “a levelling which produces one or two metres of practically clear soil is most unusual” is mistaken; that is just what the destruction of mud brick walls does; and the objection if valid at all would tell equally against his own theory) and supposes that the clean stratum is due to the desertion of the site and the gradual decay of its houses after a second period of occupation marked by red pottery and stamp seals brought in by strangers from the north.

page 45 note 1 M. Jéquier too is struck by the difference between the contents of this stratum and those of the graves: “Ici nous sommes en presence d'une civilization toute differente”; the difference may be due to the red pottery. being earlier (instead of later) than the painted wares of the graves, but the real point is that one cannot deduce the character of household utensils from the dummy pottery made for the dead according to a traditional formula.

page 47 note 1 To me it appears unquestionably later. The later date of Musyan might account for the really different feature of the site, namely, that for the graves the traditional skeuomorphic pottery has been abandoned and we find instead of it large polychrome jars.