Bowl

A tulip shaped bowl with a slightly concave nipple base and vertical concave lugs that are horizontally pierced. The bowl has the typical Black topped on Red Polished decoration of the Early Cypriot Bronze Age. The bowl would have been made by hand and the decoration would have been the result of planning in the firing process. One of the lugs has two holes on each of its side and the appearance of a bull. The external upper body of the bowl is decorated with two zones of deeply incised and white filled zig zags and simple line patterns at the lower part of each side. The black area of the rim also has two thin lines of zig zags running along it. The interior of the bowl is black. One of the external sides of the bowl has considerably lost all of its red slip. The bowl came from the tomb 134 of the cemetery A in Vounous and the tomb is recorded by the excavators as a single burial which was not reused. Tulip shaped bowls would have been used in funerary ceremonies and they would have significant ritual significance. Their sophisticated designs perhaps indicate for the need of the regional communities of the North to re-inforce and assert their regional identity through material culture.