White Cross-Lined Bowl with Turtle and Sun (c. 4000–3400 BCE): Art, History and Details

White Cross-Lined Bowl with Turtle and Sun (c. 4000–3400 BCE) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

Red polished vessels with white painted decoration (known as white cross-lined ware or C-ware) represent Egypt’s oldest known tradition in painted pottery. The decoration on this bowl, painted after firing, features the sun on the side and a turtle on the bottom of the vessel. The turtle was considered the enemy of the Egyptian sun god Ra because it preferred the murky river bottom to the sunlight.

Object facts

• Title: White Cross-Lined Bowl with Turtle and Sun
• Date: c. 4000–3400 BCE
• Culture: Egypt, Predynastic (5000–2950 BCE), Naqada I–II (3900–3300 BCE)
• Type: Vessels
• Technique: Nile silt pottery
• Dimensions: Diameter: 18.1 cm (7 1/8 in.); Diameter of mouth: 13.7 cm (5 3/8 in.); Overall: 6.7 cm (2 5/8 in.)
• Collection: Egypt - Predynastic
• Department: Egyptian and Ancient Near Eastern Art
• Accession number: 1920.2008

A detail from the museum

This bowl was built by hand from coils, then smoothed and burnished.

Collection credit

Gift of the John Huntington Art and Polytechnic Trust

Further reading listed by the museum

• Cleveland Museum of Art, and Martha L. Carter. Egyptian Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland, Ohio: The Museum, 1963.
• Finkenstaedt, Elizabeth. “Prehistoric Egyptian Pottery.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 75, no. 3 (March 1988): 74–94.
• Berman, Lawrence M., and Kenneth J. Bohač. Catalogue of Egyptian Art: The Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1999

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.