Sumerian Circular Stone Bowl
Sumerian Circular Stone Bowl
A conical bowl, with a perfectly flat circular bottom that provides a good balance to the vessel.
3rd millenium B.C.
H: 4.5 cm ; D: 12 cm
In stock
Product Description
A conical bowl, with a perfectly flat circular bottom that provides a good balance to the vessel. Flat and angular lip. The mottled stone, covered with small darker inclusions, gives the surface a unique and original decoration. The vessel has an accurate, perfectly regular shape; it would have been shaped using a potter’s wheel, and hollowed out by drilling.
The ancient iconography of the Egyptian funerary paintings seems to indicate that the stone carvers started by stabilizing the vase in a hole in the ground or on a worktable. Then they sculpted and polished the exterior before hollowing out the interior with a drill.
From the Neolithic period, when the nomadic populations started to settle, stone vessels quickly became prominent in Near Eastern economies: they can indeed be found everywhere, in Egypt or in the Near East, in various shapes, dimensions and stones, and of many uses.
