This beautifully crafted vessel is made of purple-pink breccia, featuring fine white inclusions. Its elegant design is characteristic of pre-and early dynastic stone vases. The vessel has two tubular string hole handles on the shoulders of its squat rounded body, along with a wide rounded disk rim, all sitting on a flat base. The interior is well hollowed. Vessels like this were highly prized in antiquity and were likely used to store valuable and exotic perfumed oils or ointments.
There is general agreement that in Pre-Dynastic Egypt, the vases were made entirely by hand, and the considerable skill exhibited led Egypt to be called the "civilization of stone." While their experience was primarily with flint formed into tools, they soon began to make stone vases, which required great skill to craft and were considered luxury items. Their permanence made these vessels highly prized as goods meant to accompany the deceased into the afterlife. Initially, the vessels that appeared in burials were small in size, often bulbous or cylindrical pots with rims and lug handles, such as this example.
Around 3000 BCE, a full range of materials was being skillfully worked, often in large sizes, and by the Early Dynastic period, enormous, beautiful stone pots were made as temple offerings, replacing ceramics as the most luxurious grave goods. Like their ceramic counterparts, stone vessels were intended to hold actual or symbolic contents (food, oils) necessary for the afterlife.
Reference: Winifred Needler, Predynastic and Archaic Egypt in The Brooklyn Museum, New York: The Brooklyn Museum (1984), #121, pg. 242-243.
Joan Crowfoot Payne, Catalogue of the Predynastic Egyptian Collection in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford: Clarendon Press (1993), #1187, pg.142.
For the form, cf: Hayes, Scepter of Egypt, vol. I, p. 23, fig. 15.
Medium: Purple breccia
Dimensions: Height: 3 3/4 inches (9.5 cm), Width: 5 1/2 inches (14 cm)
Condition: Minor loss to rim that has been repaired; otherwise intact and in excellent condition overall. An outstanding example.
Provenance: Harold Eliot Leeds (1913 - 2002), New York, founder of the graduate program of Interior Design at Pratt Institute, thought to have been acquired in the 1950s/1960s, thereafter Leed's companion, Wheaton Galentine (1914 - 2011), director and cinematographer, known for Treadle and Bobbin (1954), Skyscraper (1959) and Color and Texture in Aluminum Finishes (1956).
