Squat Jar with Lug Handles (c. 3400–3300 BCE): Art, History and Details

Squat Jar with Lug Handles (c. 3400–3300 BCE) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

Buff-colored pottery decorated in red paint is characteristic of the later Predynastic period. The spirals and wavy lines on this jar imitate the appearance of more costly vessels made of hard stones.

Object facts

• Title: Squat Jar with Lug Handles
• Date: c. 3400–3300 BCE
• Culture: Egypt, Predynastic (5000–2950 BCE), Naqada IIb (3650–3300 BCE)
• Type: Vessels
• Technique: marl clay pottery
• Dimensions: Diameter: 23.5 cm (9 1/4 in.); Diameter of mouth: 8.6 cm (3 3/8 in.); Overall: 14.5 x 23.2 cm (5 11/16 x 9 1/8 in.)
• Collection: Egypt - Predynastic
• Department: Egyptian and Ancient Near Eastern Art
• Accession number: 1920.1987

Collection credit

Gift of the John Huntington Art and Polytechnic Trust

Further reading listed by the museum

• inkenstaedt, Elizabeth. "Prehistoric Egyptian Pottery." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 75, no. 3 (1988).
• Berman, Lawrence M., and Kenneth J. Bohač. Catalogue of Egyptian Art: The Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1999
• Sims, Lowery Stokes. The Persistence of Geometry: Form, Content, and Culture in the Collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2006.

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.