Fig. 170.—Lamps.
The older higher form of lamp which, like the bowls, has often owner’s marks punctured in groups of dots, is not intended to stand, and the base is always rounded while the later lower form has a small flattened base. Handles first make their appearance on the shallow glazed lamps, often in the form of a separate piece added on. On these lamps also the usual ornamentation of rows of dots and beads first appears. In this and in the development of shape, the influence of the Greek lamp that came in about this period is not to be ignored. This was a shallow pottery lamp with a short semi-cylindrical nozzle, always well glazed and of the finest clay, and combined an elegance of appearance with a high level of practical utility such as had not been approached in Babylonia during the course of thousands of years. In the later Parthian forms the nozzle became less and less distinct from the body of the lamp, which was then moulded in two separate pieces, an upper and a lower half. They were rarely unornamented and were invariably glazed. Green glazed polylychnae were also produced in Greek fashion with several nozzles on one side, or with many all round them. All of these are apparently oil lamps.
In yet later Sassanide times a lamp was in use which consisted of a small saucer in which the nozzle was formed by pinching it together with the fingers into the shape of a trefoil; this was intended to contain solid fat, and has generally a separate foot worked on to it. It was always glazed blue or green with a black edge. Of a period at present undetermined, and of unknown origin, is a boat-shaped lamp of black stone. The wick passed through a hole in the solid prow, and in the other rounded end there was also a solid piece left, in which a vertical hole was bored to contain the stick that formed the handle.
All the earlier vases, which are distinguished by very poorly-formed flattened bases, are adapted for a state of culture in which a table was not reckoned among the household furniture of the ordinary folk. It was Greek civilisation that first brought the table into general use.
The great storage vessels for dry goods are of semi-globular form with an annular roll for the foot. Inside one of these and half-way up its height there are three projecting brackets, on which a second jar could be placed for special purposes. The great Pithos which played so important a part in western culture does not appear here.
Hellenistic vases are found in abundance, but always in fragments, and also an earlier form with black figures and a Greek inscription (see Fig. [167]). The shape cannot always be made out, but beside plates there are the cylix, the aryballos, the alabastron, and others. This ware, which is always highly polished, is not found in the graves, and we may therefore conclude that the Greeks of that period had a special cemetery which we have not yet found. A green glazed rhyton (Fig. [171]) in the form of a calf’s head lay in the upper levels of Merkes. The masses of pottery and glass fragments of the Sassanide and Arab levels of Amran still await examination by specialists.
Fig. 171.—Glazed rhyton.
