Decorated Jar with Boat Scenes (c. 3300–3100 BCE): Art, History and Details

Decorated Jar with Boat Scenes (c. 3300–3100 BCE) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

The decoration painted on this jar shows two multi-oared boats traveling through fertile riverbanks lined with trees and aloe bushes. Rows of triangles indicate the desert hills in the background. The Nile was Egypt’s primary means of transportation and communication, since river traffic was far more efficient than travel by land. The concept of boat travel permeated all aspects of Egyptian life and religion. The sun god Ra was believed to travel by boat across the heavens by day and through the underworld by night. Funerary texts describe the trip to the afterlife as a journey by boat, and scenes of boats figured prominently in tomb decoration.

Object facts

• Title: Decorated Jar with Boat Scenes
• Date: c. 3300–3100 BCE
• Culture: Egypt, Predynastic (5000–2950 BCE), Naqada IIc–d (3650–3300 BCE)
• Type: Vessels
• Technique: marl clay pottery
• Dimensions: Diameter: 28.2 cm (11 1/8 in.); Diameter of mouth: 15.2 cm (6 in.); Overall: 32 cm (12 5/8 in.)
• Collection: Egypt - Predynastic
• Department: Egyptian and Ancient Near Eastern Art
• Accession number: 1914.639

Collection credit

Gift of the John Huntington Art and Polytechnic Trust

Further reading listed by the museum

• Brewer, Douglas J. Ancient Egypt: The Origins. 2005. p. 20.
• Wamberg, Jacob, and Gaye Kynoch. Landscape As World Picture: Tracing Cultural Evolution in Images. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2009. pp. 113.
• Cleveland Museum of Art, and Martha L. Carter. Egyptian Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland, Ohio: The Museum, 1963.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.