Photos of the Beautiful Ancient Minoan Pottery & Pots

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Photos of the Very Best Beautiful Ancient Minoan Pottery & Pots Museum Antiquities from the best archaeology museums. Photos by photographer Paul E Williams. (TIP – use the icons below the slideshow for thumbnail photos and info)

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Photos of the Best Ancient Minoan Pottery & Pots

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Photos of the very best Minoan Pottery.

In the absence of written records Minoan pottery has been used as a tool for dating the mute Minoan civilisation. Its restless sequence of quirky maturing artistic styles reveals something of Minoan patrons’ pleasure in novelty while they assist archaeologists in assigning relative dates to the strata of their sites.

Minoan Pottery Exports

Pots that contained oils and ointments, exported from 18th century BC Crete, have been found at sites through the Aegean islands and mainland Greece, on Cyprus, along coastal Syria and in Egypt, showing the wide trading contacts of the Minoans.

The pottery of the Minoans consists of vessels of various shapes, which as with other types of Ancient Greek pottery may be collectively referred to as “vases”, and also “terracottas”, small ceramic figurines, models of buildings and some other types.

Some pieces, especially the cups of rhyton shape, overlap the two categories, being both vessels for liquids but essentially sculptural objects.

The finest achievements came in the Late Minoan period, with the palace pottery called Kamares ware, and the Late Minoan all-over patterned “Marine Style” and “Floral Style”.

The best and most comprehensive collection is in the Heraklion Archaeological Museum (AMH) on Crete.

Minoan Pyrgos Ware Pottery

Pyrgos Ware – The major form was the “chalice”, or Arkalochori Chalice, in which a cup combined with a funnel-shaped stand could be set on a hard surface without spilling. Incised Ware – Incised Ware, also called Scored Ware, were hand-shaped, round-bottomed, dark-burnished jugs and bulbous cups and jars (“pyxes”). Favored decor was incised line patterns, vertical, horizontal or herring-bone.

Minoan Ayios Onouphrios Ware

Agyios Onouphrios, Lebena – The painted parallel-line decoration of Ayios Onouphrios Ware was drawn with an iron-red clay slip that would fire red under oxidizing conditions in a clean kiln but under the reducing conditions of a smoky fire turn darker, without much control over color, which could range from red to brown. A dark-on-light painted pattern was then applied.

Minoan Koumasa and Fine Gray Ware

Koumasa and Fine Gray Ware – the geometric slip-painted designs of Koumasa Ware seem to have developed from the wares of Aghios Onouphrios. The designs are in red or black on a light background. Forms are cups, bowls, jugs and teapots.

Minoan Kamares Ware Pottery

Kamares Ware – was named after finds in the cave sanctuary at Kamares on Mt. Ida in 1890. It is the first of the virtuoso polychrome wares of Minoan civilization, though the first expressions of recognizably proto-Kamares decor predate the introduction of the potter’s wheel. Finer clay, thrown on the wheel, permitted more precisely fashioned forms, which were covered with a dark-firing slip and exuberantly painted with slips in white, reds and browns in fluent floral designs, of rosettes or conjoined coiling and uncoiling spirals. Themes from nature begin here with octopuses, shellfish, lilies, crocuses and palm-trees, all highly stylized.

All photos can be downloaded as editorial royalty free images. Property Rights belong to the relevant museums.