Vessels: The Object as Container 2019934391, 9780198832577

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V ESSEL S

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V I SU A L C O N VE RS AT I O N S I N A RT A N D A RC H A E O LO G Y General Editor: Jaś Elsner Visual Conversations is a series designed to foster a new model of comparative inquiry in the histories of ancient art. The aim is to create the spirit of a comparative conversation across the different areas of the art history and archaeology of the pre-modern world—across Eurasia, Africa, Australasia, and the Americas—in ways that are academically and theoretically stimulating. The books serve collectively as a public platform to demonstrate by example the possibilities of a comparative exercise of working with objects across cultures and religions within defined, but broad, historical trajectories.

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Vessels The Object as Container

Edited by

CL AU DI A BR I T T E N H A M

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1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Oxford University Press 2019 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2019 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2019934391 ISBN 978–0–19–883257–7 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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The authors dedicate this book with gratitude to their students and to the attendees at the Global Ancient Art conferences, whose conversation and debate have inspired these essays.

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P RE FA C E Richard Neer The Chicago Center for Global Ancient Art was founded in 2009 by members of the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago. Its animating idea is that a new research paradigm is emerging within art history. Antiquity was, of course, one of the original topics of this discipline as it emerged in Europe in the eighteenth century. For many years, however, art history derived its basic research questions, and its accepted ways of answering such questions, from the study of more recent epochs: the Latin Middle Ages, the European Renaissance, nineteenth-century Paris, 1960s New York. That situation is changing: as the discipline grows and expands, new questions, and new ways of answering them, start to appear. The Center, in particular, explores two developments in recent scholarship: an increasing tendency amongst art historians to study archaeological corpora, and a corresponding tendency amongst archaeologists to move beyond functionalism into “art-historical” topics like beholding, iconography, materials, phenomenology, stylistics, and aesthetics. What happens when these two worlds collide? We define ancient in procedural terms: wherever it is from, whenever it was made, art is “ancient” if our knowledge of it derives to a significant degree from archaeological data: stratigraphic, archaeometric, typological/stylistic, even quantitative. Antiquity is, in short, a function of method. Because these methods apply to a broad range of regions and corpora, this definition makes it possible to speak in global, comparative terms: a comparativism, however, not so much of the objects of knowledge as of the ways of producing and ordering them. Scholars of ancient China, Greece, and Mexico may work with radically different materials and possess radically different research skills, yet they all use similar kinds of data, and produce facts in similar ways. In a discipline that still partitions itself according to nation, religion, and date (we have sinologists and classicists, modernists and Islamists), these affinities of method provide a new, “horizontal” way to organize research. On offer, in short, is a comparativism of method. Perhaps the most controversial, even tendentious aspect of this program is the use of the term art. This usage may seem cavalier: art, we are sometimes told, is a quintessentially modern concept that can be applied to older or alien materials only on pain of gross anachronism. We do not pretend to know in advance the compass of this term, or the limits of the aesthetic. On the contrary, it is only by testing the methods of art history against the materials and protocols

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Preface

of archaeology that we may be in a position to discover whether our questions are well-formed, our answers cogent. Like “global” and “ancient,” in short, our use of the term “art” is procedural, a function of method: a usage that, in its turn, enables comparison across cultures, times, and places. Each volume in this series examines, and compares, a basic concept or category of art-historical and archaeological inquiry. Unlike the widely available Handbooks or Companions to standing fields of inquiry, these books do not codify or survey well-defined bodies of knowledge. They are, instead, exploratory: at once primers for students seeking to expand their research horizons, and provocations to specialists. On offer, in short, is theory from the ground up: an apt description, we hope, of a truly archaeological history of art.

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CO NT E NT S List of Illustrations

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List of Contributors

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Introduction

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Claudia Brittenham

1. Ancient Greek Vessels between Sea, Earth, and Clouds6 Richard Neer

2. A Roman Vessel for Cosmetics: Form, Decoration, and Subjectivity in the Muse Casket

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Jas ́ Elsner

3. When Pots Had Legs: Body Metaphors on Maya Vessels

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Claudia Brittenham

4. Practice and Discourse: Ritual Vessels in a Fourth-Century bce Chinese Tomb

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Wu Hung Index

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L I S T O F I L L U S T RAT I O NS 1.1 Attic black-figure eye-cup by Exekias: eyes and battles. 9 1.2 Chalcidian eye-cup by the Phineus Painter. 11 1.3 Boeotian kantharos in the form of a ship and of a boar, by the Painter of Boston 01.8110: triton, sirens, dolphins. 12 1.4 Attic bilingual cup by the Painter of London E2: youth with a transport amphora, ships. 13 1.5 Attic red-figured cup in the manner of Douris: Herakles in the cup of the Sun. 14 1.6 Attic black-figure eye-cup with phallic foot by the Lysippides Painter (“the Bomford Cup”). 15 1.7 Attic black-figure cup in the shape of a female breast (mastos).16 1.8 East Greek oil flask in the shape of male genitalia (aidoion).17 1.9 Attic red-figured cup by Epiktetos: satyrs disporting with amphorae. 18 1.10 Attic red-figure statuette-vase (rhyton) in the form of a satyr abusing a donkey. 19 1.11 Early Corinthian trick vessel of the Komast Group. 20 1.12 Terracotta flask in the form of a maenad, from Phanagoria. 21 1.13 Attic Middle Geometric belly-handled amphora from the Kerameikos cemetery. 23 1.14 Attic Late Geometric belly-handled amphora by the Dipylon Master (“the Dipylon Amphora”): laying out of corpse, mourner. 25 1.15 Attic white-ground le ̄kythos with false bottom by the Achilles Painter. 27 1.16 Attic white-ground le ̄kythos by the Vouni Painter: visit to the tomb. 28 1.17 Attic white-ground le ̄kythos by the Achilles Painter: visit to the tomb, ghost with psyche ̄.29 1.18 Attic black-figure loutrophoros. Body: laying out of corpse. Neck: mourners (including one with a loutrophoros).31 1.19 Stele of Aiskhron of Kephale, from Attica: loutrophoros with figural scene. 32 1.20 White-ground le ̄kythos by the Painter of London 1905: visit to the tomb, with loutrophoros-stele.33 1.21 Athens, Kerameikos cemetery: Koroibos peribolos tomb. 34 1.22 Attic grave stele: woman leaning on loutrophoros.36 1.23 Attic loutrophoros stele: gymnasium scene. 37 1.24 Attic grave stele of Panaitios: vessels. 39 1.25 Attic grave stele of Panaitios: detail of boy rolling hoop. 40 2.1 The major surviving items from the Esquiline Treasure now in the collection of the British Museum. 51

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List of Illustrations

2.2 The Muse Casket from the Esquiline Treasure. 2.3 Hanging bowl from the Water Newton Treasure, excavated in England in 1975. 2.4 Fourth-century mosaic figure of a servant carrying a square casket on three chains, from Piazza Armerina in Sicily. 2.5 Detail of a fourth-century silver repoussé figure of a servant carrying a round casket with a lid hanging from chains, from the Projecta Casket of the Esquiline Treasure. 2.6 The Toiletry Casket from the Sevso Treasure.  2.7 The Muse Casket from above. 2.8 The fluted dish from the Esquiline Treasure. 2.9 The fluted dish from the Mildenhall Treasure, excavated in England in 1942. 2.10 The fluted dish from the Mildenhall Treasure, exterior view, upside down (with base ring at top). 2.11 The Muse Casket, medallion at the top of the domed cover. 2.12 The Muse Casket, open, with the interior containers (four cylindrical canisters and one flask, all in silver) in place. 2.13 The Muse Casket, fully open with the interior containers displaced and fully visible. 2.14 The Sevso Casket, base showing the internal pierced silver disk to accommodate seven flasks of equal diameter.  2.15 The Muse Casket, exterior of base: vase with central shaft, vine with rosette and furled leaf and birds, flanked by Urania and Melpomene. 2.16 The Muse Casket, exterior of base: vase with central shaft, vine with grapes and birds, flanked by Clio and Polyhymnia. 2.17 The Muse Casket, exterior of base: muse partly covered by solder: either Erato or Terpsichore. 2.18 The Muse Casket, exterior of base: vase with central shaft, vine with rosette and furled leaf and birds, flanked by Euterpe and Thalia. 2.19 The Muse Casket, exterior of base: front with wreath and birds flanked by Calliope and Urania. 2.20 Jug with the nine Muses, found in western Russia. 2.21 Lady at her toilet with a servant maid, open domed-lacquer toiletry casket with interior vessels by her side. Admonition Scroll, after Gu Kaizhi.  3.1 Basal-flange bowl excavated from Burial PNT-025, Tikal. 3.2 Tetrapod bowl with bird lid, excavated from Burial PNT-062, Tikal. 3.3 Tetrapod bowl showing a bird on the lid catching a fish; four peccary heads form the supports for the vessel.  3.4 Tripod bowl from Uaxactun Burial A20.  3.5 Basal-flange bowl with a bird on the lid and a turtle on the basal flange, excavated from Burial PNT-062, Tikal.

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List of Illustrations  

3.6 Tripod vessel from Burial 10, Tikal. 3.7 Line drawings of the tripod vessel from Burial 10, Tikal.  3.8 Teotihuacan Thin Orange Ware tripod vessel with lid.  3.9 Teotihuacan tripod vessel with stucco decoration. 3.10a–b  Tripod vessel from Tikal Problematical Deposit 50.  3.11a–b  Tripod vessel from Burial 10, Tikal. 3.12a–b  Tripod vessel from Burial 10, Tikal.  3.13 Mold-made heads from Teotihuacan figurines. 3.14 Teotihuacan, aquatic scene from the Zona 5-A apartment compound.  3.15 Río Azul Tomb 1. 3.16 Plan of Burial 10, Tikal, Yax Nuun Ahiin’s tomb. 3.17 Lidded vessel from Burial 10, Tikal. 3.18 Stucco-painted lidded tripod vessel from Burial 48, Tikal. 3.19 Plan of Burial 116, Tikal, Jasaw Chan K’awiil’s tomb. 3.20 Jade mosaic vessel from Burial 116, Tikal, Jasaw Chan K’awiil’s tomb. 3.21 Line drawing of text on jade mosaic vessel from Burial 116. 3.22 Cylinder vase from Burial 196, Tikal, supernatural scene with hummingbird messenger. 3.23 Jade mosaic funerary mask, from the tomb of K’inich Janaab Pakal of Palenque. 3.24 Jade mosaic vessel from Burial 196, Tikal, perhaps Yikin Chan K’awiil’s tomb. 4.1a–b  “Design of Cuo’s funerary park,” found in Cuo’s tomb. 4.2 Cross-section of Cuo’s tomb reconstructed by Yang Hongxun. 4.3 Cuo’s tomb. 4.4 Photo of Cuo’s tomb, showing the second level and “storage pits.” 4.5 Reconstruction of Cuo’s tomb. 4.6 Drawing of the west chamber. 4.7 Drawing of the east chamber. 4.8 Group A in the west chamber. 4.9 Hu (vessel), commissioned by Cuo. 4.10 Ding (tripod), commissioned by Cuo. 4.11 Group B in the west chamber. 4.12 Group B in the west chamber. 4.13 Hu with an inscription by Ci from the east chamber. 4.14 Possible grouping of some objects in the east chamber. 4.15 Bronze lamp from the east chamber. 4.16 Inlaid table stand from the east chamber. 4.17 Middle stand of a folding screen from the east chamber. 4.18 Gold belt plaque, Siberia.  4.19 Inlaid hu from the east chamber. 4.20 Cylinder-shaped object from the east chamber. 4.21 Pottery ding from Cuo’s tomb. 4.22 Pottery he (pitcher) from Cuo’s tomb. 4.23 Pottery basin with a sculpted bird from Cuo’s tomb.

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List of Illustrations

4.24 4.25 4.26 4.27

Bronze basin with a sculpted bird from Cuo’s tomb. Group C in the west chamber. “Tomb quelling beast” from Tianxingguan Tomb 1. Pottery dou (stemmed dish), Shandong.

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Whilst every effort has been made to secure permission to reproduce the illustrations, we may have failed in a few cases to trace the copyright holders. If contacted, the publisher will be pleased to rectify any omissions at the earliest opportunity.

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L I S T O F C ONT RI B UT O RS Claudia Brittenham is Associate Professor of Art History and the College at the University of Chicago. Her research focuses on the art of Mesoamerica, especially Central Mexico and the Maya area, with particular interests in the materiality of art and the politics of style. She is the author of The Murals of Cacaxtla: The Power of Painting in Ancient Central Mexico (University of Texas Press, 2015), The Spectacle of the Late Maya  Court: Reflections on the Murals of Bonampak (University of Texas Press, 2013; co-authored with Mary Miller), and Veiled Brightness: A History of Ancient Maya Color (University of Texas Press, 2009; co-authored with Stephen Houston, Cassandra Mesick, Alexandre Tokovinine, and Christina Warinner). Jaś Elsner is Professor of Late Antique Art at the University of Oxford and Humfry Payne Senior Research Fellow in Classical Archaeology and Art at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He has been a Visiting Professor in Art History at the University of Chicago since 2003, and also at the Divinity School since 2014, and was Senior Research Keeper in the Empires of Faith Project on art and religion in late antiquity at the British Museum from 2013 to 2018. Since 2009 he has been an Honorary Foreign Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2017 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. He works on art and its many receptions (including ritual, religion, pilgrimage, viewing, description, collecting) in antiquity and Byzantium, including into modernity, with strong interests in comparativism, global art history, and the critical historiography of the discipline. Richard Neer is Barbara E. and Richard J. Franke Distinguished Service Professor in Art History, Cinema & Media Studies and the College at the University of Chicago, where he is also Director of the Franke Institute for the Humanities. From 2010 to 2018 he was the Executive Editor of the journal Critical Inquiry, where he continues to serve as a co-editor. He has published widely on Greek art, early modern French painting, stylistics, and cinema. His most recent volumes are Art and Archaeology of the Greek World: A New History, 2500–100 bce , 2nd  edition (Thames & Hudson, 2018); Davidson and His Interlocutors, co-edited with Daniele Lorenzini (special issue of Critical Inquiry, Winter 2019); and Pindar, Song, and Space: Towards a Lyric Archaeology, co-authored with Leslie Kurke (Johns Hopkins, 2019). He is also editor of Conditions of Visibility, another volume from the Center for Global Ancient Art, forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Wu Hung is Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor of Art History and the College at the University of Chicago, and also Director of the

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List of Contributors

Center for the Art of East Asia and Consulting Curator of the Smart Museum of Art. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, and sits on the boards and advisory committees of many research institutes and museums in both the United States and China. He has published widely on both traditional and contemporary Chinese art, experimenting with different ways to integrate these conventionally separate phases into new kinds of art historical narratives, as exemplified by two of his most recent books, A Story of Ruins: Presence and Absence in Chinese Art and Visual Culture (Princeton University Press, 2012) and Zooming In: Histories of Photography in China (University of Chicago Press, 2016). Several of his ongoing projects follow this direction to explore the interrelation between art medium, pictorial image, and architectural space, the dialectical relationship between absence and presence in Chinese art and visual culture, and the relationship between art discourse and practice. The contributors to this volume are the founding members of the Center for Global Ancient Art at the University of Chicago.

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Introduction Claudia Brittenham

The vessel might seem an unproblematic category. Vessels are, after all, essential to human survival. They are necessary to contain water, to cook, to store food and goods for future use. Nearly all societies have made and used them; indeed, clay vessels, or their fragments, are one of the principal kinds of archaeological data that give us empirical access into distant worlds of the past. A good proportion of ancient art in museum collections around the world consists of things we would categorize as vessels. Such ubiquity makes vessels central to many kinds of historical investigation. Archaeologists rely on quantitative surveys of durable potsherds to answer questions about chronology, population, trade, and the function of particular spaces, while close attention to the iconography on vessels furnishes important documentary evidence about many aspects of ancient society. Yet as the essays in this volume demonstrate, such approaches by no means exhaust the perspectives that vessels may offer on ancient societies. Many vessels—and assemblages of vessels— were in their own time sites of considerable intellectual power, smart and sophisticated commentaries on the very categories that they embody. On closer examination, the category of the vessel is complex. A vessel is defined not only by its shape, but also by its function, by the presumption that it contains something, though that something may be concealed when the vessel is in use and is not always easy to reconstruct from the archaeological record. But what about a Greek rhyton, a drinking horn with an opening at the bottom, so that liquids poured into one end stream out the other? What about an unused vessel that never held its intended contents; a Maya chocolate pot, broken and then repaired in a way that is no longer watertight; or a thin and fragile gu cup from a Chinese tomb, the form so attenuated that it could never be used? “Is it really a vessel?” is perhaps the least interesting question we can ask about these objects. As Richard Neer argues in his essay in this volume, for us as much as for the ancient Greeks, the value of the category “vessel” might lie precisely in its openness.

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In the ease with which the functional becomes conceptual, the ease with which the idea of a container develops into a compelling metaphor, we can see ancient people thinking through objects. In exploring how vessels can both reflect and shape ideas about the world, it becomes obvious that the analytical techniques ready to hand are only the beginning—and, indeed, that our ways of classifying and studying ancient vessels often work against a deeper understanding of their ancient meaning. As several essays in this volume mention, the way that archaeological reports frequently separate vessels by medium (clay in one place, wood or metal in another) and then further sort them by shape and chronology works against fine-grained studies of context and assemblage. It also makes it harder to see the play among media that frequently characterizes vessels the world over. Likewise, art historians’ focus on only the finest, most iconographically dense objects—the ones most suited to traditional art-historical analysis—not only leaves its practitioners open to ­accusations of elitism but also neglects vital relationships between these most elite objects and the class or series of more mundane objects from which they emerge. Vessels, like so many other kinds of ancient art, challenge traditional arthistorical methods, for which the normative object is a flat painting made by a named artist and intended for display. In what follows, I outline some of the defining characteristics of vessels that pose the greatest methodological challenges for their study. A vessel is not flat. As a putative container—be it for a liquid, a solid food, or a more evocative substance like incense—a vessel has certain functional constraints. By necessity it has an inside and an outside. The whole cannot be seen at once; the surface is continuous and topologically complex. Vessels are the ultimate tactile or haptic objects, utterly unsympathetic to the optic discourses governing so much contemporary high art and to the flat photographic discourses dominating our contemporary virtual consumption of art, whether as reproductions in books and journals or as images in the world of the internet. When we encounter a rolled-out image of the scene on a Greek vase or a Maya cylindrical chocolate cup, we must also strive to recall the way the image spreads over a three-dimensional surface, not all visible simultaneously, requiring that the vessel be rotated in the holder’s hands. A vessel is interactive. Contrary to the current museum model of objects ­unavailable behind glass cases, vessels cry out to be handled, turned, peered into, opened, fondled, eaten from. A vessel exists to connect a human being, its user, to the materials stored inside the object. A vessel is thus always one element of a triangle: the material form in which the user and the substance can meet, the relic or memory of both a particular moment of personal usage and of a social institution of usage prevalent at a given time and place. For ancient societies, it is a window—however opaque or pellucid, however clear or obscure its modes of

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INTRODUCTION  

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usage—into how a world worked, how people used things, how they crafted items to enable their further use of things, and how they thought about these processes of crafting and using. Yet a vessel not only invites human interaction, but also may define a particular kind of space. A space where wine is mixed in a dinos in ancient Greece is a symposium; a space where a reliquary contains a relic is a shrine in Buddhist or Christian tradition; a place where the nine ritual vessels are assembled in the proper order in China is a tomb or a temple that honors the ancestors. Of course, vessels don’t always show up in the archaeological record in the contexts in which they were used; rarely do we find an interrupted meal, for example, perfectly preserved, or a ritual procession in progress. And places where vessels do tend to aggregate, like tombs, may be only the final stop on a long itinerary. In other cases, as in Inka feasts, vessels might be destroyed after their use and only painstakingly pieced back together in modern times. No vessel is sui generis. Any vessel is an entry into a long series of objects related by morphological and functional constraints, by the pragmatic ­possibilities of the kinds of material in which its class of objects was normally made, as well as by the bonds of tradition. If archaeology has traditionally focused on the aggregate at the expense of the individual object, art history often places too much emphasis on the genius of an individual work, losing sight of the series to which it belongs. Yet even the most exquisitely decorated vessels, or the vessels made out of the most precious materials, or even the ritual vessels elaborated beyond the possibility of function are in dialogue with more humble and utilitarian objects. Our evidence is always partial. Vessels that survive whole or in good enough shape to be restored to something of their former glory, the kinds of objects most likely to make their way into museums and other collections, are—we must remember—only one small fraction of the vessels used in antiquity. Many more vessels ended up in the midden or trash heap, worn out and used up, and those fragments, particularly of clay vessels, might then find other uses, as supports for spindles, as ballast for sailing ships, or as saggers to protect yet more pots during firing. Vessels made out of perishable substances—wood, gourd, or animal hides, for example—are radically underrepresented, as are vessels made of precious metals such as gold, silver, or bronze that were often converted back into currency or into another precious thing. Clay was always a choice, and its centrality to archaeological schemes of classification and chronology should not blind us to that. Finally, vessels as they have come to us in the archaeological record often exist as part of assemblages. They may be part of matched sets of objects of similar function and appearance, such as a set of wineglasses, that create relationships of commensality and equality among those that hold them; or there may be groupings of items with disparate functions, whose combination is required by ­tradition, such as the nine types of ritual vessels required for a Chinese tomb or the

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numerous items of silverware so often found in late Roman hoards. As Wu Hung argues in his essay in this volume, we need to pay more attention to the act of assemblage itself as an intellectual and creative endeavor. Because of its place within such a bound system, some substitution of any given vessel might be possible within the logic of its culture, like Saussure’s chess piece that can be replaced with a walnut. Although functional constraints may be more stringent for vessels than for chess pieces, one can still drink wine out of a coffee mug if all of the wineglasses are in use, yet even this example demonstrates how tightly our conception of a vessel is bound to its intended contents and function. Indeed, vessel typologies, which name and classify vessels by their shape and function, privilege this kind of analytical rigidity, ignoring possibilities of play and pragmatic substitution. The very precision of terminology, with its instrumental uses to help us assign dates or places of production, can be a distraction from broader questions, and we need to be aware of the distinctions between ancient emic vocabularies for discussing and using vessels and our modern impulse to typologize and classify. The essays in this volume all go beyond and cut across traditional vessel ­typologies. Richard Neer’s essay complicates the very category of the vessel in Classical Greece, arguing that this category was, for the ancients as for us, open and unbounded, subject to creative reinterpretation around the margins. Ranging freely from eye-cups—simultaneously wine vessels and masks—to kraters in the form of ships to vessels shaped like bodies or body parts to stone relief sculptures of vessels marking graves, he demonstrates just what a fruitful and porous concept the vessel was in ancient Greece, in contexts from the tipsy symposium to the stillness of death. Jas ́ Elsner’s essay focuses on a Late Antique silver vessel recovered from a cached hoard. A container for cosmetics, with further vessels contained within, it raises issues about inside and outside, concealment and revelation, gender, ornament, and the process of self-adornment that it supports. Ultimately, he concludes, the meaning of the object resides in the now-lost play between container, contained, and user—or indeed users, for the vessel surely addressed the bodies and subjectivities of servants as well as elites. Yet morphology is not meaning, and formal similarity may conceal significant difference, as I suggest in a study of vessels found in royal tombs at the Maya city of Tikal during the first millennium ce. Examining three distinct historical moments when vessels with human heads on the lids asserted a metaphorical equivalence between a human body and a vessel, I argue that the precise ­resonances of the body metaphor changed dramatically over the years, from a potentially unsuccessful evocation of a generic female body to a eulogistic portrait of a deceased king. At the same time, the context of the body metaphor moved from the realm of the living to that of the dead, from vessels made for courtly feasts

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and only later deposited in tombs, to objects made specifically for funerary ­ urposes. Here, the artists of later vessels productively cited earlier exemplars, p transforming their meaning in the process. Assemblage as well as the forms of specific vessels may be a site of significant meaning, as Wu Hung argues in his study of a fourth-century bce Chinese royal tomb. By paying close attention to the contexts and materials of the many vessels recovered within the tomb, he is able to regroup them into sets, to reconstruct different rituals carried out around the death of the king of Zhongshan, and to tie them to the very particular historical circumstances surrounding his death. Equally important, he demonstrates that these rituals represented a particular kind of Confucian piety on the part of the king, his heir, and their advisors. The goal of bringing together such geographically and chronologically ­disparate objects of study in a single volume is not to seek abstract generalizations about the nature of vessels the world over. On the contrary, the essays demonstrate a conviction that the most fruitful comparative conversation is one that is historically grounded and contextually sensitive. Such comparison throws into relief assumptions that we each take for granted in our particular time and place of study and offers a new range of propositions to test against our respective corpora. It also creates space for methodological experimentation and for reflection about method, allowing us to look productively anew at familiar things. In the end, all the authors agree, what matters as much as the function and shape of a vessel is context—not just that the vessel effectively held what it was meant to hold but the social situations in which the vessel was used and displayed. And, here, a vessel in the archaeological record can capture only a part of a complex and multisensory experience: the delicious aromas rising from steaming hot dishes; the increasingly fluent wit of tongues loosened by wine; the solemn majesty of the proper ritual music attending an offering. Such context can never be fully reimagined, but we hope that the essays gathered in this volume suggest new avenues for investigating some of the ancient world’s most p ­ ersistent material metaphors.

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Ancient Greek Vessels between Sea, Earth, and Clouds Richard Neer

We do not know the boundaries because none have been drawn. To repeat, we can draw a boundary—for a special purpose. Does it take this to make the concept usable? Not at all! Except perhaps for that special purpose. Ludwig Wittgenstein 2009, §I.69

For François Lissarrague What is a vessel? It is, first and foremost, a tool. It is a tool historically, in the prosaic sense of an item manufactured in the more or less distant past for the purpose of containing something. But a vessel is also a tool for historians: vessel is a taxonomic term, naming a category of data that we use to build arguments. An animating idea of the present volume is that these two tools may not be identical. It is for this reason that it makes sense to ask: What is, what counts as, a vessel? One might rephrase this question more precisely to say: What are the necessary and/or sufficient conditions of being a vessel? This way of putting it is very Greek, even Socratic. But what if there are no such conditions, nothing that does the work of essence when it comes to vessels? That seems, in fact, to be the case when it comes to Archaic and Classical Greek materials. This is not to say that ancient Greek vessels had nothing in common beyond the fact that they were called vessels (angeia, skeue ̄). What these objects had in common is that they were vessels, which is to say that they answered to a certain use. In early Greece, the application of a term like vessel was arbitrary, not random, and could be projected into new and unexpected contexts. There is no answer to the question, What is a vessel? if, like Socrates, we take it to request a definition; the demand for a definition only leads to problems. I will make this point informally, by demonstration and reductio.

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It may be tempting to identify the two ways of using the word vessel that I have just described with the anthropologist’s distinction between emic and etic categories.1 How does the “insider’s view,” the emic category, of a given type-concept relate to the “outsider’s perspective,” the etic one? This way of putting the matter begs the question in at least two ways. The first way has to with the distinction itself, the second, with the notion of category that it implies. Regarding the first, a comparative archaeology brings out very quickly the flimsiness of the emic/etic distinction. Exactly because archaeological evidence is so sparse and archaeological inference so ampliative, it is apparent that we come to know emic categories only through etic ones, only through our own “schematization” of the evidence. Insofar as the vessel is a primary tool by which we come to know the ancient past, a basic category by which we identify and organize data, it is a precondition, not a product, of research. No emic categories, therefore, without etic ones, and so the distinction collapses. This is old hat. It is hardly news that taxonomies are the sine qua non of historical discourse, even as they predetermine what sorts of questions we may ask of our data, indeed, what can count as data at all. When it comes to vessels, archaeologists have often drawn attention to just this point; the evidentiary status of typology is a recurrent obsession of the discipline.2 In classical archaeology, more specifically, critics often point to the tradition of classifying and publishing finds by type, as opposed to findspot. In this subfield, it remains standard practice to segregate vessels from the other finds and publish them according to shape in site reports; the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, for instance, uses this format to publish the finds from the Athenian Agora, the flagship excavation of American classical archaeology.3 Alternatives—publication by assemblage, for instance—are less common in synoptic volumes but more usual in preliminary publications or supplementary volumes.4 The latter method is more congenial to thick, contextualist description and, accordingly, often gets singled out for praise. Digital publication is tending to obviate the distinction by making any number of sorting options available in a single publication; for now, however, the vessel continues to play a structuring role in the organization of data. But the issue goes deeper than tabulation and hyperlinking. Neither the traditional taxonomy (exemplified in the stand-alone volume devoted to vessels of some kind or another) nor the leading alternative (exemplified in the site report organized by assemblage) really puts pressure on the basic category. Even an   Headland and Pike 1990.   For basic orientation on the topic of typology see Adams and Adams  1991; Wylie  2002, 42–56; Trigger 2006, 298–9. Key texts of the “typology debate” are collected in Deetz 1971. 3   See, for instance, Moore 1997. 4   For a fine example of such publication, see Lynch 2011. For a compromise involving large amounts of data and a truly heroic system of cross-referencing, see Runnels, Pullen, and Langdon 1995. 1 2

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assemblage-based report will still, typically, include a heading for pottery and, below that, subheadings for different types of vessel.5 To see how the category of vessel remains a basic structuring principle, it suffices to note that pottery or ­ceramics does not really include everything made of ceramic or pottery, at any rate in classical archaeology. There is a separate category, terracotta, for items made of fired clay that are not vessels, which may or may not include prosaic things like roof tiles. One and the same material can be pottery when it is in vessel form and terracotta when it is in figurine form. Pottery, in short, is willy-nilly a subcategory of the larger heading: vessel. This brings us to the second, more interesting way in which the emic/etic ­distinction begs the question of historical meaning: the operative notion of a category. In contrasting the historical, emic concept of vessel with the modern, etic one, my claim is not that we have two concepts, each with necessary and/ or sufficient conditions of identity, and that these concepts turn out, on close inspection, to be dissimilar. My claim is, rather, that the ancient concept is not bounded in the relevant way at all. The ancient Greek category simply lacks exhaustive conditions altogether; this is not to say it is not a proper category or that the Greeks lacked a concept of the vessel. The emic vessel is in this case a mirage both by virtue of being emic and by virtue of being a category in an inapt sense of the term. Most of what follows is concerned with making this second point, in the hopes that doing so will lend credibility to the first. The question of what, if anything, a vessel might turn out to be can become acute when a vessel seems to become something else. In the Greek drinkingparty or symposium, a space of intoxication and double-seeing under the sign of Dionysos, god of wine and drama, a cup need not be merely a cup. It can also be a mask, as in the famous class of so-called eye-cups (Figure 1.1). This type seems to have its origins in East Greece, and the first Athenian examples date to around the middle of the sixth century.6 Its peak of popularity was in the third quarter of the century; it disappears thereafter, only to return briefly to vogue in the late Archaic. Such cups interact with their users and viewers—the two need not coincide—in a distinctive fashion. For whatever else they may be, eye-cups are all, in a way, masks.7 The drinker will don this mask every time he takes a sip of wine, and he will remove it every time he pauses to speak, listen to music, or play a game. By the same token, the cup will return the gaze of any beholder; the eyes   See Runnels, Pullen, and Langdon 1995.   For the history of the type see Williams 1988. For a general discussion of intoxication at the symposium see Osborne 2014. 7   A classic discussion of eye-cups and their relation to masks is Ferrari 1986. On the type’s thematization of beholding see Neer 2002, with earlier bibliography. More recently see Bundrick 2015; Grethlein 2016. The present discussion draws liberally on the one in Neer 2002. 5

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F igure 1.1.  Attic black-figure eye-cup by Exekias: eyes and battles. Clay, ca. 550 bce. Munich, Antikensammlungen 8729; Beazley Archive Database no. 310403. Photo © Richard Neer.

“animate” it. This play between ingesting something, bringing it inside, and masking, turning an outer face, was for the Greeks endlessly fascinating. The Dionysiac emblem par excellence, the mask figures the alienation from self that defines both dramatic performance and drunken reverie.8 The Greek word for this state is ecstasy or ek-stasia, literally, a “standing apart from” the self. With an eye-cup—any eye-cup—the symposiast becomes an actor, a participant in a little drama of presence and absence. One minute he is there among friends, and the next he is gone, replaced by the staring eyes of the cup/mask. He shuttles between the two, as the vessel’s eyes replace his own. The poet Theognis apostrophized himself—that is, stood outside himself to address himself—in very much these terms in the sixth century bce: My heart, to all your friends keep turning about your painted complex self [poikilon e ̄thos] to your painted complex self, properly mixing your temperament to the like of each. Have the temperament of a tangled cuttlefish, who always looks like whatever rock he has just clung to. Now be like this; then, at another time, become someone else in your coloring.9

Or, again, addressing his young lover: Kyrnos, to all friends turn a painted complex self [poikilon e ̄thos], properly mixing your temperament to the like of each; now follow this man, now like another raise up your temperament. Surely skill is even better than great virtue.10   On masks see Frontisi-Ducroux 1991; Frontisi-Ducroux 1995.   Theognis 213–18 IEG. On the poikilon ethos ̄ and pottery see Neer 2002, 14–23, 98–100. 10   Theognis 1071–4 IEG. 8

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The eye-cup—vessel as mask—literalizes this conceit. Donning it in the act of drinking, one literally turns a painted, complex self to one’s friends. The interior of the cup in Figure 1.1 shows Dionysos reclining on a boat as though it were a couch; dolphins cavort around him, which we know from the god’s Homeric Hymn are in fact Etruscan pirates whom Dionysos has metamorphosed. Donning the mask, ingesting the supernatural drink, one is confronted with the power of the wine-god to seize the unready and transform them utterly. Such fluidity has limits. Often the center of an eye-cup contains the face of Medusa, whose gaze turns men to stone.11 The monstrous, grinning face is what the drinker would see as he poured the intoxicating liquid down his throat; at the very moment that the eye-cup mask goes on and the wine empties out, a new set of eyes stares you in the face. If the mask exemplifies or effects a certain vinous fluidity of identity, then the Gorgon’s stare does the opposite, turning drinkers to stone at the very moment they imbibe the supernatural. Behind the mask, shielded from the eyes of his comrades, the drinker has no privacy, no respite, but is one-to-one with Medusa. The result is an allegory of the Greek drinking-party, a space of controlled and carefully regulated alterity: to don a mask, to ingest the mind-altering drug, is to be turned to stone, fixed and pinned in a petrifying gaze. The imagery on the exterior of eye-cups is similarly changeable. Examples from ancient Rhegion (modern Reggio di Calabria), a fabric known as Chalcidian, are particularly flamboyant in this regard (Figure 1.2).12 In many cases, vegetal tendrils surround the eyes and scroll outward towards matching palmettes that decorate the handles; a little lotus flower blossoms at dead center. Yet the tendrils are also, obviously, a nose and a pair of ears. This doubleness, a sort of visual pun, is very much to the purpose. Just as the cup is a mask to transform the drinker, to give a “complex painted character,” so its imagery is fluid and changeable, complex and painted in its own right.13 Returning to dolphins and metamorphosis: liquid imagery inevitably calls to mind the sea, a constant presence in Greece, even as one who is drunk can feel the earth heave like the ocean swell.14 Hence marine imagery abounds on Greek vessels, oftentimes as complex and playful as the more overtly Dionysiac theme of masking. A simple cup can undergo a sea change into something rich and strange. Athenaeus, the ancient world’s most erudite foodie, gives a vast alphabetized list of the names of Greek drinking cups in the eleventh book of his compendious Deipnosophistai, or “Banquet of Sages”; a startling number have   The iconography of Medusa has been much discussed; particularly outstanding is Mack 2002. More recently, see Grethlein 2016. 12   On Chalcidian the essential study is Iozzo 1993. See also Iozzo 1999; Iozzo 2010. 13   On metaphors of fluidity in Greek vase-painting, see Gaifman 2013. 14   On marine imagery and the symposium see Corner 2010, with earlier bibliography. For the place of marine imagery in ceramic iconography see Lissarrague 1990a, 107–22. 11

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F igure 1.2.  Chalcidian eye-cup by the Phineus Painter. Clay, ca. 520 bce. Malibu, J. Paul Getty Museum 86.AE.50. J. Paul Getty Museum. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.

to do with ships or boats. Thus a Boeotian cup or dipper takes the form of a little boat, as it were to sail what Homer called the winedark sea, oino¯pon ponton (Figure 1.3).15 Dolphins skip along the sides, in company of a triton or merman and the sirens whom Odysseus encountered. The handle has become a curving ships’ stern, which in Greece would be carved to resemble the head of a waterfowl (note the little eye); meanwhile, the prow of the ship takes the form of a wild boar, a ferocious beast known to charge hunters just as a ship might ram an opponent. The result is a cup made to look like a boat made to look like a wild hog. The spatial logic is curious: a boat floats on the sea, but this cup does not float atop liquid; rather, it contains it. What’s inside and what’s outside interchange, not for the last time.16 The Greeks never drank wine neat but always mixed it with water, and the central element of their drinking parties was the large bowl (dinos or krater) in which the two liquids mingled and mixed and blended.17 In some case, a flotilla of ships circles the inside of the rim—sailing that “winedark sea.”18 When filled, this bowl becomes an ocean to drain. A similar conceit governs an Attic drinking cup in the  On this vessel see Kilinski  1978, 181–2, 191; Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum Paris, Louvre fasc. 17: 27–8. 16   There is some uncertainty in the literature as to whether to call this a dipper (kyathos) or a highhandled cup (kantharos); Beazley favored the former, the Louvre curators the latter. 17   See Lissarrague 1990b; Langner 2014; McNiven 2014; Schlesier 2016. 18   For this motif see Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum Boston, Museum of Fine Arts fasc. 2: 9. Available online at http://www.cvaonline.org. 15

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F igure 1.3. Boeotian kantharos in the form of a ship and of a boar, by the Painter of Boston 01.8110: triton, sirens, dolphins. Clay, ca. 570–560 bce. H. 17 cm, W. 27 cm, D. 16.5 cm. Paris, Musée du Louvre CA 577. Beazley Archive Database no. 300345. Photo Hervé Lewandowski. © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY.

British Museum: filled not quite to the brim, it too will give you floating ships and sporting dolphins (Figure 1.4).19 If you drink the whole ocean’s worth of wine you are transported; at center is young man holding a pointed amphora, the kind used to ship wine from distant parts, hence an emblem both of intoxicating drink and of places far away.20 Wine takes you elsewhere and so, again, a vessel is a boat. The exterior of the cup shows young men sampling wine from such another pointed amphora, as if to reinforce the point. Here again there is a play of inside and out: an amphora bearing wine comes from afar by ship; the amphora leaves the ship, the wine leaves the amphora and pours into a cup; drain the cup and the ships are high and dry, and at the bottom of the cup we fine another container, another vessel. The result is a continuum, like nested Russian dolls. The longest journey by sea in the ancient Mediterranean would take you beyond the Pillars of Herakles to the uttermost West, where the sun sets. Wine 19   Attic bilingual cup by the Painter of London E2: youth with a transport amphora, ships (London, British Museum E2; Beazley Archive Database no. 202287). For discussion of this cup see Lissarrague 2009. On this motif in cups see Oakley 1994. On the iconography of dolphins see Vidali 1997. 20   For the iconography of the pointed amphora see Cahn 1988.

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F igure 1.4.  Attic bilingual cup by the Painter of London E2: youth with a transport amphora, ships. Clay, late sixth century bce. London, British Museum E2. Beazley Archive Database no. 202287. Photo © Richard Neer.

can take you there, too. A cup by or near Douris illustrates the myth of Herakles’s journey to the West. The drinker, on draining his cup and feeling the god’s power—the alcohol—take effect, sees the hero riding in the golden cup of the Sun which the titan Helios has given him to come back home (Figure 1.5).21 There was much disagreement in antiquity as to the exact shape of this vessel. The painter has followed the poet Arktinos of Miletos (fr. 8) in representing it as a large cauldron as opposed to a small mug. Specifically, it is what modern scholars would call a dinos, that is, a bowl for mixing wine and water. The historian Pherekydes describes how Ocean tried to swamp the vessel, but Herakles fended him off with bow and arrow, a story that provides a ready conceit for the consumption of wine.22 Having drained the cup, feeling a bit tipsy, we will see the hero brandishing his bow to avoid being overcome himself. Herakles is inside our wine vessel, and within the picture he is inside another wine vessel, such that the picture’s setting and its narrative content double up, another example of the Russian doll effect. Within the picture, the hero is trying to keep dry, to keep liquid out of his wine vessel, and he only becomes visible when we have successfully drained the liquid from our own (do not try to make sense of this after a few

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  For the story see Athenaeus 11.469d–470d.

22

 Pherecydes, FrGrH 3 F 18a.

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F igure 1.5.  Attic red-figured cup in the manner of Douris: Herakles in the cup of the Sun. Clay, ca. 480 bce. Vatican, Museo Gregoriano Etrusco 16563. Beazley Archive Database no. 205336. Photo Alinari/Art Resource, NY.

drinks; one of the challenges of this material is, precisely, to understand the logic of inebriation, which differs from syllogism). When a cup is not a mask or a ship it can be a body part. A late Archaic eyecup in Oxford doubles up its own predicates: between the eyes is another pair of eyes, the mask of a satyr in lieu of a nose (Figure 1.6). The interior shows Greek drinkers dressed up like men of Lydia, a wealthy kingdom to the east of

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F igure 1.6.  Attic black-figure eye-cup with phallic foot by the Lysippides Painter (“the Bomford Cup”). Clay, ca. 520 bce. Oxford, Ashmolean Museum 1974.344. Beazley Archive Database no. 396. Photo © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford.

Smyrna—more role playing.23 Then the foot of the cup is no foot at all but a tripod made of a penis and scrotum.24 So the cup is also a body, presumably the satyr’s body to go with his smiling face. Associations are piling up atop one another with polymorphous perversity. This curious object has a nickname, the Bomford Cup; it is, more formally, an Attic black-figure type A kylix attributed to the Lysippides Painter; but vessel is mask is body, nose is mask is face, foot (pous) is sex. The research question is starting to change. If we began by asking What is a vessel? then that question, it emerges, cannot be posed in isolation from What is a mask? What is a face? and so on. Questions of this sort are not necessarily inimical to our modern taxonomic categories, but classification does tend to decide them in advance. When the Bomford Cup is classified as, exactly, a cup, as opposed to a fantasmatic maskvessel-surrogate phallus, it is not difficult to see why this should be so; we have to classify it somehow, and cup seems as good a shorthand as any. The inadequacy of the term should not be too hard to keep in mind. If this point seems   On this custom see Neer 2002, 19–23, with earlier bibliography, to which add Yatromanolakis 2007, ch. 2; Moore 2008. 24   For a recent overview of phallus-footed vases see Coccagna 2009, 111–41. 23

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­ ncontroversial, still it does have some methodological consequences, notably in u underscoring the poverty of quantificatory approaches to such material. A statistical study of the distribution patterns of type A black-figure kylikes can exclude or include such an object only at its peril. What is a vessel? And so we enter the realm of phantasmagoria. If a vessel can be a body, then the body can shatter when dropped, and every piece can become a vessel in its own right, like the splinters of the broom in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.25 Take the mastos, or breast-shaped cup, which cannot stand up on its own and must be drained before being set down (Figure 1.7).26 This type has its origins in Corinth and migrated to Athens in the sixth century bce. A horizontal handle at the rim allows it to hang from a peg while projecting outward to give, as Kathleen Lynch puts it, an “ ‘anatomically correct’ ” view.27 This effect is a good indication of the sheer open-endedness of these puns, rhymes, tropes, and displacements; if a wall

F igure 1.7.  Attic black-figure cup in the shape of a female breast (mastos). Clay, ca. 520–500 bce. London, British Museum B376 (1837,0609.37.a). Beazley Archive Database no. 313. Photograph: © The Trustees of the British Museum. 25  For more general discussions of bodily fragmentation in Greek literature, see DuBois  1996; Griffith 1998. 26   For a discussion of the mastos shape see Lynch 2002, 419–22; Coccagna 2014. For a convenient overview of plastic vases see True 2006. More detailed discussions are Ebbinghaus 2008; Williams 2008. 27   Lynch 2002, 420.

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can have a breast, does the wall thereby become a torso, and does the house of which it is a part become a body? At some point such questions become overliteral and silly, but it is hard or impossible to specify that point with any precision. Presumably it will shift depending on any number of factors, like whether the beholder is drunk or sober. To conclude from this incertitude that the question lacks heuristic value for research would be hopelessly reductive. This breast-cup too can bear eyes, hence can be a mask. On the example in Figure 1.7, satyrs cavort under the handles while swirling ivy leaves mimic ­eyebrows. The eyes are white on one side, black on the other, giving a positive/negative effect that seems to enact visually the curious shifting of the iconography: black is white, wine is milk, breast is face is vessel, nipple is mouth, drinking is nursing. As with the Bomford Cup, there seems nothing intrinsically pernicious about classifying such artifacts as vessels; it only becomes pernicious when the classification proceeds at the expense of the fantastical or perverse instead of being the methodological precondition of our own recognition of perversity and difference. A masculine counterpart to the mastos is the aidoion, or “shameful vase”: small oil flasks in the shape of male genitalia (Figure 1.8). These little vessels were popular on the island of Rhodes in the 500s bce; a well-accessorized man would let one dangle from his wrist.28 The oil would be perfumed and could be used as a scent, for hygiene (the Greeks did not use soap), as a moisturizer, or as a sexual lubricant. Fantasy builds on fantasy in this case, in ways that can bring a blush to the cheeks of even the most jaded art historian. We have already seen how drinking vessels can play on inside and outside in terms of ingesting wine and wearing

F igure 1.8.  East Greek oil flask in the shape of male genitalia (aidoion). Clay, ca. 550–500 bce. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art 1999.78. Classical Purchase Fund, 1999. Photo courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

28

  For a recent discussion see True 2006, 241. See the classic study by Beazley 1927/1928.

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masks but, in this case, things are even more literal. For consider: one is supposed to manipulate the genitalia with one’s hand until viscous oil squirts out and then to rub or smear the substance all over one’s body. This container comes alive when it ejaculates (the comedian Aristophanes already thought of this joke, as seen in a notorious passage in his play Frogs).29 Conversely a vase can be penetrated; in the tondo of a cup dated to the end of the sixth century, a satyr is doing his best with a transport amphora, over-literalizing the conceit that a pot can be like a body and reversing the normal polarity of inside and out (Figure 1.9).30 Instead of the contents of a vessel going into his body, a part of his body is going into the vessel. In short a Greek vase is somatic, with an interior and an exterior, but the relations are fluid. Human bodies are not the only ones subject to this metamorphosis. Tapping a long Near Eastern tradition, for instance, the Athenians produced cups shaped like donkeys and deer, rams and dogs.31 A donkey vase, says Aristophanes (Wasps, ll. 614–16), brays when you pour its contents. It is unclear

F igure 1.9.  Attic red-figured cup by Epiktetos: satyrs disporting with amphorae. Clay, ca. 510–500 bce. London, British Museum E 35. Beazley Archive Database no. 200482. Photograph © The Trustees of the British Museum.

  Oil as lubricant and sexual puns on oil-flasks: Henderson 1972.   Illustrated here is an Attic red-figured cup by Epiktetos, ca. 510–500 bce (London E 35; Beazley Archive Database Number 200482). Other examples include works by the Nikosthenes Painter (Kassel, Staatliche Antikensammlung inv. no. ALG214; Beazley Archive Database no. 14933); Euthymides (Paris, Louvre CP11072; Beazley Archive Database no. 200148); and Skythes (Palermo V 651; Beazley Archive Database no. 200431). On these scenes in general see Lissarrague 1990c; Lissarrague 2013, ch. 5. 31  Ebbinghaus 2008. 29 30

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how we are to take this statement. Does the pot really make some sort of a noise, or are we to imagine the splashes and gurgles of wine as somehow like braying, or is the wine itself a visual metaphor, pouring from the donkey as though it were sound?32 Given the often puerile sense of humor on offer in Greek pottery, it is to be expected that such jokes of pouring and filling can become obscene, as on a recently discovered plastic vase from Ravenusa comprising a donkey, itself carrying a wine vessel, that brays when abused by a satyr (Figure 1.10).33 A trick vase of the early sixth century is perhaps a bit less crude in its play on the themes of corporeality, ingestion, and visibility (Figure 1.11).34 Although modeled on Egyptian flasks in the form of Bes, the benign god of childbirth, as

F igure 1.10.  Attic red-figure statuette-vase (rhyton) in the form of a satyr abusing a donkey. Clay, ca. 490–470 bce. Ravanusa, Museo Archeologico San Lauricella. Photo Distritto Touristico delle Miniere.

  Gaifman 2013, 51, on the idea of “pouring” music.  Fiorentini  2003; True  2006, 244. For everything there is to know about Greek donkeys see M. Griffith 2006. On puerile humor see Mitchell 2009. 34   Illustrated here is an Early Corinthian trick vessel of the Komast Group, ca. 600–575 bce (Paris, Louvre CA 454), on which see Lissarrague 1990a, 48–9. On trick vases see Noble 1968. On the iconography see Dasen 2015. 32 33

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F igure 1.11.  Early Corinthian trick vessel of the Komast Group. Clay, ca. 600–575 bce. 20.5 cm × 20 cm. Paris, Musée du Louvre CA 454. Photo Hervé Lewandowski. © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY.

usual the Greek craftsman has interpreted the type in terms of wine and Dionysos. Here it becomes a portly gent holding a mixing bowl between his knees. But his body is in fact hollow and connects to the bowl by an open hole. Two holes in back serve as vents: fill the bowl with wine and half flows into the man’s body; tilt it back and all the wine will trickle inside; you then put your thumb over the vents and return to the upright position. The wine stays inside the man. Hand it to a friend while removing your thumb from the vents and the wine will flow magically into the bowl. Drink it down and it keeps on coming. It is not enough to drain the bowl, you have to drain the whole body and base as well before you are done. Far more tame are the small vessels in the form of maidens and young men— the former being more common than the latter, for it is always congenial to the Greeks to consider a woman as a vessel (Figure 1.12).35 Froma Zeitlin has described how, from Hesiod through the Hippocratic corpus, a woman is variously an 35  Terracotta flask in the form of a maenad, from Phanagoria, 4th century bce (St. Petersburg, Hermitage inv. no. T.1852.53). See Higgins 1967, 32–7 (East Greek “Aphrodite Group”); Williams 2008 (Attic figure-vases).

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F igure 1.12.  Terracotta flask in the form of a maenad, from Phanagoria. Clay, fourth century bce. St. Petersburg, Hermitage T.1852.53. Photo © Richard Neer.

­all-consuming stomach (gaste ̄r) and a storage-jar (pithos) within which a child can be kept (like fermenting wine, perhaps) until poured out.36 The satyr’s action in Figure 1.9 is slightly more comprehensible in this light. People are vessels, too, and so are their figural representations. Christopher Faraone has shown that the idea of a statue as a container or a receptacle ran deep in Greek thinking about images; in this he has been followed at greater length by Deborah Steiner.37 The mythological paradigm is, of course, the Trojan horse, itself one of the first incidents from the Trojan cycle to appear in Greek art. But epic provides numerous other examples, like the magical automata into which Hephaistos sets mind, wits, voice, and strength; or Pandora, a fair form containing a bitch’s brain and holding her sealed jar. Other accounts mention a bronze lion into which Hephaistos sets beneficial pharmaka or drugs, and a hollow   See Zeitlin 1996, 64–8.   Faraone 1992, 18–35, 94–112; Scheer 2000, 20–1, 120–3; Steiner 2001, 79–134. Extending the discussion to sculpture: Neer 2010, on which the present discussion draws liberally. 36 37

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statue of Artemis into which Medea likewise sets pharmaka, these ones harmful. The legendary craftsman Daidalos was specially associated with the quasi-magical filling of statues; he animated a statue of Aphrodite by filling it with mercury, built the hollow bull in which Pasiphaë conceived the Minotaur (think of our donkey vase), and also built the giant robot Talos, filled to the brim with vital fluid—ichor—that the Argonauts would eventually drain.38 The Late Archaic poet Simonides can say (albeit mockingly) of a grave stele that it contains menos, a liquid, vital force akin to semen.39 Plato provides several examples, like a hollow bronze horse in which King Gyges finds a giant corpse and a ring of invisibility.40 More famous are the carved or molded silens of the Symposium, each of which conceals, beneath its lumpen exterior, a little image of the god.41 Such vessels are metaphors for Socrates, an ugly man of divine soul. These varied examples attest to a sense that statues are somehow hollow. Sometimes they contain secrets, drugs, or an evil nature; other times they hold a vital force, like Talos’s ichor or the mercury inside the Aphrodite of Daidalos. Susan Kane has recently described statues of the goddess Demeter from Cyrene, in what is now Libya, with internal compartments to hold aporrhe ̄ta or “secret things.”42 In the Greek imagination, and sometimes in reality, a statue is a vessel, for good or ill. The categories body, pot, and statue interrelate in ways that are difficult if not impossible to hold in view. Just so, a vessel can be a statue or, more precisely, a substitute or stand-in, what the Greeks called a se ̄ma or sign. This function is especially clear in mortuary contexts. Vessels can hold dead bodies (or, more often, cremated remains) and at once stand in for, and iconically depict, the deceased.43 From the Kerameikos cemetery in Athens comes a Middle Geometric belly-handled amphora, a shape associated specifically with women that could often hold the ashes of the deceased (Figure 1.13).44 Is it stretching a point to see a hint of anthropomorphism in this squat shape? “Dead metaphors” like belly and neck—which the Greeks used no less than modern English speakers to designate the parts of a vessel—can suddenly spark back to life when one sees the handles as arms, the compass-drawn circles as breasts, and so on.45 John Boardman is probably right to dismiss this   On Daidalos see S. P. Morris 1992; Frontisi-Ducroux 2000. 40   Simonides fr. 581 PMG. Cf. Giacomelli 1980.  Plato, Republic 2.359d–e. 41  Plato, Symposium 215a–b, 216d. On this passage see Steiner 2001, 88–9, 132–4. 42   Kane 2008. For aporrhe¯ta see Pausanias 4.26.7–8 and 8.15.1–2. 43   For a recent overview of Greek burial customs see Vlachou 2012, 378–9 for marker vases, with earlier bibliography. For Athenian rituals in particular see Walter-Karydi 2015. On the “semi-figural” status of vases and other items not usually classed as sculpture, see Gaifman 2012, especially 243–70. 44   On the gendered associations of certain shapes see Boardman 1988; Strömberg 1993; Whitley 1996. 45   For the iconography of a woman’s body as a vessel see Lissarrague 1995. 38 39

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F igure 1.13.  Attic Middle Geometric belly-handled amphora from the Kerameikos cemetery. Clay, late ninth century bce. Athens, Kerameikos Museum. Photo © Richard Neer.

resemblance as a rationale for the choice of shape itself, but we need not go so far as to suppose that belly-handled amphorae were selected for women’s graves because they resembled women; if anything, the reverse is more likely, and the resemblance itself is conditioned by the association of the shape with feminine graves.46 In these cases, the metaphor of woman-as-vessel attains to visibility in the sense that it structures perception itself; we can see the entity in question under various aspects: now as a simple pot, now as a (figure of a) woman, by virtue of a Gestalt shift. I do not wish to deny that such artifacts are vessels in the most prosaic sense, specifically Middle Geometric belly-handled amphorae, nor to mount a cheap attack on modern taxonomies by highlighting their inevitable reductiveness. Reductive they may be, but that is the whole point of technical vocabulary; archaeologists use words like vessel as specialist tools. Trouble arises only if we use 46

  Boardman 1988, 172.

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these tools for tasks to which they are unsuited. In the 1980s and 1990s, for instance, there was a vogue for quantifying the Geometric pottery from Athenian graves to track the correlations of styles with different ways of disposing of bodies and to work up the results in graphs and charts.47 The authors of these studies, notably Ian Morris and James Whitley, produced superb scholarship of enduring relevance. Even admirers may, however, voice reservations. In such cases, technical terms like Middle Geometric belly-handled amphora trump all others; there is no room for words like quasi-iconic, corporeal, and so on. The danger of tautology is, in such cases, acute, for it is not clear what the tabulations actually measure. Once the category of vessel becomes fraught and vexed, it is fair to ask what we are doing when we count (say) belly-handled amphorae, make graphs of their chronological and spatial distribution, and so on. Perhaps the chief use of the category is, precisely, that it generates data that can be presented in this convenient form. The apparatus produces the artifact, a point no less relevant for being a truism. Rather than casting this problem as a conflict between emic and etic categories, however, it might be more productive to see it as a dissonance of disciplines. It is the special merit of art history, as against the social sciences, that it tends to fetishize the particular artifact, to get lost in mazy byways of cultural associations and perceptual structures. In this way it is in a position to bring out the historically specific, qualitative mode of being of such artifacts and, in so doing, enable us to use the tools appropriately. Returning to Geometric belly-handled amphorae: oversized examples of this shape evolved to serve as markers atop the grave, often with the dead woman literally depicted on its surface (Figure 1.14).48 There could still be an ash urn inside the grave as well, along with subsidiary vessels. In these cases, the marker vase represents in three registers at once: iconic, metaphoric, metonymic. Iconically, the marker vase bears pictures of the deceased, laid out on a bier at  center. Metaphorically, by substitution, its shape signifies a female body. Metonymically, finally, the marker signifies the contents of the grave: as a vessel, it evokes the ash urn that lies hidden in the grave itself. Such cases bring out the limitations (and the usefulness) of the concept vessel. On the one hand, we need the concept—and need to attribute it to the Greeks—if we are to make sense of the symbolic functioning of the marker vase. On the other, the poverty of a reductive functionalism becomes obvious once the term takes its place within a larger order of what were, for the Greeks, simple facts. Pots can stand in for bodies, can sometimes be bodies, can flirt with an almost sculptural “iconicity,” and yet be pots all the same. A marker vase holds nothing but air, which is not to   I. Morris 1987; Whitley 1991.   For recent overviews see Boschung 2014; Vlachou 2017. The masculine equivalent to the bellyhandled amphora is the pedestalled mixing-bowl or krater, often accompanied by a stone slab; see Bohen 1997. In these cases the corporeal evocation might be phallic. 47 48

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F igure 1.14.  Attic Late Geometric belly-handled amphora by the Dipylon Master (“the Dipylon Amphora”): laying out of corpse, mourner. Clay, ca. 800–750 bce. Athens, National Archaeological Museum 804. © Vanni Archive/Art Resource, NY.

suggest that the prosaic function of the vessel as container is wholly irrelevant but that our commonsense taxonomy is so schematic as to lead, potentially, to misunderstanding. Later still, actual statues and slabs of stone would come to play the role of substitute or sign. Sixth-century Attica knew grave monuments both freestand-

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ing and relief.49 These monuments served both a social and a ritual function (if the distinction is even cogent): potential officeholders in Athens had to prove citizenship in part by being able to point to the tombs of their ancestors, which made effective marking of graves a matter of practical urgency, at any rate for elites.50 But when democracy became truly dominant after 480 bce, for fifty years there were no figural stone monuments over Athenian graves.51 Stelai, such as there were, were often blank or decorated with a floral crown, unpretentious monuments for a city dominated by an ideology of citizen equality. A special class of oil flask, the white-ground le ̄kythos, comes into its own at about this time.52 Decorated with colorful figures on a fragile white ground, these vessels were too delicate for daily use and were exclusively mortuary goods, either going into graves or serving as offerings above ground. Many le ̄kythoi depict fancy monuments unattested in the archaeological record. Although ostentatious tombs were out of favor in Athens, deemed uncongenial to democracy, they did not disappear entirely; instead, they were displaced into the iconography of the vessel. This displacement makes sense according to the logic of substitution that subtends Greek mortuary monuments; the vessel stands in for a monument that itself stands in for the deceased. A substitute for a substitute, the painted vessel/monument gives an ambivalent presence-in-absence to a marker that, in turn, gives a no less ambivalent presence-in-absence to the dead— who are all around us but gone beneath the earth. Often these offerings are purely symbolic; more than a few le ̄kythoi have false bottoms, so they fill up to the brim with just a little bit of oil (Figure 1.15). If you cannot afford, or are disinclined, to spend a full flask’s worth, then a token gesture will do. In a less serious context, there exist drinking cups with false bottoms, so that what looks like a gigantic serving is in fact little more than a swallow.53 The idea seems to be humorous—a practical joke. There is, therefore, a contrast between these two types of deceptive vessel. In the case of le ̄kythoi, the false bottom maintains felicitous exchange, as between living and dead; it keeps up appearances by means of what the English common law would call a peppercorn payment, a nominal consideration that ensures reciprocity. In the case of trick cups, on the other hand, the false bottom disrupts such exchange, but in a humorous way that has its own felicity: in lieu of a drink you are getting a joke, a different sort of gift that can, in its own way, be reciprocated with a counter-joke or a laugh.54 What is a vessel? Now it is a symbolic marker, quite apart from its nominal function as a 50   D’Onofrio 1985; Vlachou 2012.   On these inspections see Feyel 2009.  I. Morris 1992, 1994. 52   The bibliography is immense: for guides see Kurtz 1975; Oakley 2004. See also Walton et al. 2010. 53  E.g., a black Boeotian kantharos presented to the Ashmolean by Sir John Beazley: Oxford, Ashmolean Museum 1929.656 (Beazley Archive Database no. 680006). See Noble 1968. 54   On jokes as social gifts that circulate, see Cohen 1999. 49 51

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F igure 1.15.  Attic white-ground le kythos ̄ with false bottom by the Achilles Painter. Clay, ca. 440 bce. Athens, National Archaeological Museum 1963. Beazley Archive Database no. 213944. Photo © Richard Neer.

container—that is, when its point is not conspicuously to fail to hold a serving. In each of these two cases, the vessel works precisely by failing to work. Even when unmarked, a grave stele is always a bit anthropomorphic, or at least potentially so; it flirts with iconicity and thereby gives a curiously ambivalent presence to the absent deceased.55 For example, the blank, upright slab is often decorated with broad ribbons (in some cases, real marble stelai are found with the ribbons painted on).56 On a le ̄kythos by the Vouni Painter now in New York, for example, women bring gifts to a tomb that has two richly bedecked stelai (Figure 1.16).57 As with a stele, so with a vessel: a le ̄kythos in Malibu shows a lustral 55  On grave stelai as aniconic or quasi-iconic renderings of the deceased see Ridgway  1993, 230; Gaifman 2012, 243–70 (with particular reference to painted representations). 56   For a list of stone stelai with painted ribbons see Kingsley 1975. 57  On scenes at the grave see Oakley  2004, 145–214 (esp. pp. 152–3); Schmidt  2005, 45–58; Oakley 2008; Arrington 2014; Closterman 2014; Arrington 2015, 254–5; Walter-Karydi 2015, 135–64; Collard 2016, 153–70; McGowan 2016.

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F igure 1.16.  Attic white-ground le kythos ̄ by the Vouni Painter: visit to the tomb. Clay, ca. 460–450 bce. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art 35.11.5. Purchase, anonymous gift, 1935. Photo courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

water jar (loutrophoros) being adorned in similar fashion.58 This way of dressing up the stele or the vessel is a good indication of its role as an aniconic representation of the deceased. Whatever its mortuary function, it evokes a ritual known as phyllobolia or “petal throwing,” when a victorious athlete or performer would be pelted with flowers (an ancestor, perhaps, of the modern ticker-tape parade) and well-wishers would bind ribbons on his body.59 It is axiomatic in Greece that when a young man dies in battle his beauty is preserved forever, such that death can be a kind of backhanded victory; for this reason, perhaps, the dead on the vessels are beautiful like victors even if they have never really won anything at 58   Malibu, J. Paul Getty Museum 83.AE.42, a white-ground le¯kythos of Class ATL; Beazley Archive Database no. 13350. 59  On the connection between the ribbons on stelai and athletic victory (victory over death?) see Miller 2009, 42–4. On phyllobolia see Blech 1982, 109–91 (victors’ crowns); Kephalidou 1996, 38–43; Kephalidou 1999. On ribbons see Lehmann 2012.

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all.60 Some le ̄kythoi simply show Nike, goddess of victory, bearing such a ribbon aloft, underscoring the essential similarity between the visit to the tomb and the proclamation of victory.61 Another le ̄kythos in New York (recently the subject of a superb discussion by Nathaniel Jones) shows the connection between stele and deceased, the one a quasi- or semi-iconic representation of the other (Figure 1.17).62 A mourner, in dark red at left, has come to a tomb where a stele is bound with a ribbon. This stele intervenes between the mourner and another, paler youth at right. This latter

F igure 1.17.  Attic white-ground le kythos ̄ by the Achilles Painter: visit to the tomb, ghost with psyche ̄. Clay, ca. 440 bce. New York, Metropolitan Museum 1989.281.72. Gift of Norbert Schimmel Trust, 1989. Beazley Archive Database no. 1140. Photo courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

  On the “beautiful death” see Vernant 1991, 50–74, 84–91.   Nike: for example, a white-ground le¯kythos by the Carlsruhe Painter of the mid-fifth century (New York, Metropolitan Museum 06.1021.129; Beazley Archive Database no. 209085). 62  Jones 2015. 60 61

bce

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figure is the eido¯lon, literally the “apparition” of the deceased. Hovering above his head is a little black winged figure, what is generally understood to be his psyche ̄ or soul.63 The ghost touches the stele, as if to visualize the basic continuity between the aniconic marker and itself, a quintessentially iconic ­apparition. The tangible stele, present in the here and now, is literally the mediating term between living and dead, standing midway between mourner and shade. It is in contact with the latter while under the eye of the former—a representation of the deceased that hovers, as it were, between iconicity and its opposite. What, then, is this vessel? A depiction of the graveside on a token to be left beside or within a grave, the oil-flask in this case depicts the very reciprocity it is supposed to effect, a sort of performative gadget for the generation of pious contact with ghosts. In such cases, the sheer elasticity of the vessel as a category—its ability to be a mask, a body or a body part, to disclose its contents and to hide them— becomes a way to think the limit of life and death. Sometimes vessels and other objects can stand in place of stelai. In such cases, the principle of metonymy frequently obtains. The special shape known today as a loutrophoros is a case in point (Figure 1.18).64 At marriage the loutrophoros would carry water for the bathing of bride and groom; it could also be used in the grave of an unmarried youth or maiden, commemorating the ceremony the deceased had failed to attain during life and, perhaps, a ritual washing of the body. Often the imagery will refer to death; scenes of mourning are not uncommon. The shape itself, a sort of elongated amphora, is of great antiquity and represents something of an anachronism in Classical Athens. It looks back to the Late Geometric II and Early Protoattic amphorae that functioned as marker vases in the first part of the seventh century bce. It is not entirely clear whether the shape served a lustral purpose in the earlier periods or whether a type of vessel hallowed by tradition acquired a ritual association only at a later date. Sometimes mortuary loutrophoroi bear images of grave stelai and even, in one case, a statue, the image reiterating the commemorative function.65 From the middle of the fifth century through the late fourth, marble versions of the loutrophoros could also crown graves, in evident imitation of seventh-­century   On the vexed distinction between psyche¯ and eido¯lon, with particular reference to this le¯kythos, see Vermeule  1979, 8–11. I follow Vermeule in using the term psyche ¯ for little winged stick figures, and eidolo¯n for more fully realized figures that are otherwise indistinguishable from the living. However, intermediate cases do exist, and ancient usage is imprecise; other scholars use the terms in the opposite fashion. See Sourvinou-Inwood  1995, 58 n. 136; Johnston  1999; Arrington  2014; Arrington  2015, 254–5; Jones 2015, 825–6. 64  For a recent overview of the shape see Mösche-Klingele  2006. See also Schmidt  2005, 79–85; Closterman, 2007a; Sabetai 2009; Hannah 2010; Mösch-Klingele 2010; Barringer 2014; Arrington 2015, 208–17. For skepticism about the associations of loutrophoroi see Bergemann  1996. For loutrophoroi dedicated by Athenian brides see Papadopoulou-Kanellopoulou 1997. On grave markers in the classical period see Closterman 2007b. 65   Discussed most recently in Barringer 2014. 63

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F igure 1.18.  Attic black-figure loutrophoros. Body: laying out of corpse. Neck: mourners (including one with a loutrophoros). Clay, late sixth century bce. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art 27.228. Funds from various donors, 1927. Beazley Archive Database no. 3746. Photo courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

practice (though there can have been few of the earlier markers still intact atop graves after some two hundred and fifty years of earthquakes and war); the costly stone vessels are durable substitutes for cheaper and more fragile clay ones.66 Numerous examples are known, although it is not always clear whether a given vessel stood over the tomb itself or at the boundary of the grave precinct. The standard shape has two upright handles; this shape decorated graves of unmarried men who had died in battle. A variant with two horizontal handles at the shoulder and an upright one at the neck evokes the three-handled water jar or hydria, a woman’s shape used for fetching from the well; this version stood over graves of unmarried women.67 The gendering maintains the correlation between vessel and deceased that goes back to Geometric. The vessel is a 66  Schmaltz  1970; Kokula  1984. A tomb crowned with a loutrophoros over 2m in height has been found in the Athenian Kerameikos: Ohly 1965. 67  On hydriai see Schmidt 2005, 222–78; Trinkl 2009.

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stand-in or substitute for the deceased—or, more accurately, a stand-in for the stele or statue that might, in an earlier era, have stood in for the deceased. Other metonymic linkages were possible: a woman’s tomb could be crowned with a basket for holding wool since spinning and weaving were women’s work; a man’s tomb could be crowned with a lyre, with le ̄kythoi serving as offerings at the base of the monument.68 Importantly, a single marker could be reused or stand for multiple graves in a family plot, so that with time they came to signify types of person rather than unique individuals, even when they bore inscriptions naming the latter.69 From here it is a short leap to having the vessel take the place of, or merge with, the stone grave stele. Instead of a real loutrophoros atop the tomb, you can have a stele with a representation of a loutrophoros (Figures 1.19–1.20). From

F igure 1.19.  Stele of Aiskhron of Kephale, from Attica: loutrophoros with figural scene. Marble, ca. 370 bce. H. 1.16 m, W. 0.47 m. Paris, Musée du Louvre MNC 2279/Ma 3119. Photo © Richard Neer. 68  Tomb with wool-basket (kalathos): Attic white-ground le¯kythos by the Achilles Painter (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum 3746; Beazley Archive Database no. 213987). Tomb with lyre: Attic whiteground le¯kythos by the Sabouroff Painter (Berlin, Antikensammlung 3262; Beazley Archive Database no. 212316). 69   See Closterman 2007b.

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F igure 1.20. White-ground le kythos ̄ by the Painter of London 1905: visit to the tomb, with loutrophoros-stele. Clay, ca. 450 bce. London, British Museum GR 1906.5-12.1. Beazley Archive Database no. 209254. Photo © Richard Neer.

ca. 450 bce it becomes possible to carve a loutrophoros or a le ̄kythos onto the front of a stele in the place that an image of the deceased would have occupied in an earlier era. If Geometric marker vases could stand in front of slabs, now the two have merged into a single composite. This sequence makes the logic of metonymic and metaphorical substitution especially clear; in broad outlines, the history of Attic tomb monuments begins with vessels and proceeds to statues and figured stelae, thence to stelai with vessels in lieu of human figures. It is no longer quite right, in such cases, to call the stele an aniconic representation of the deceased. Better to say that it is a three-dimensional object bearing a relief representation of a marker vase—a marker vase that is, in its turn, the metonymic sign of the deceased. The point of the vessel is no longer to hold the liquid that washes the body or, indeed, to hold anything at all but to be a sign of that body, and as such it can be rendered in stone just like a body can. The result is that the stone sign (the stele), bears a representation of the clay or metal sign (the vessel), each of which signifies the dead. If a statue can be a vessel, then so can a stele; if a stele can be a sign of the dead, then so can a vessel; any one or all three can be a figure

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of the absent body, proceeding variously by iconic representation, conceptual association, simple contiguity, or some combination of the above. Medium and iconography coincide in such composite cases. Relief is, after all, betwixt and between, neither sculpture in the round nor painting, and a pot is, as we have seen, both a sign and a vaguely, elastically iconic representation, a body.70 The full spectrum is on display in the precinct of Koroibos in the Kerameikos cemetery (Figure 1.21).71 Here a family took three monuments commemorating recently deceased ancestors and refurbished the family tomb, so that instead of standing for individuals the monuments stood for categories of person within the clan. For the women is the figural grave relief at far left, showing a woman

F igure 1.21.  Athens, Kerameikos cemetery: Koroibos peribolos tomb. Early fourth century bce. The sculptures are modern reproductions in situ. Photo © Richard Neer.

70

  Neer 2010, ch. 5.

71

  Brückner 1909, 131–4, no. 34; Knigge 1991, 131–4, no. 34.

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bedecking herself as for marriage or death.72 The stele bears the name of the original deceased, one Hegeso, but after the plot was reconfigured she came to stand, in effect, for all the matrons of the family. At center, for the men, is a tall, phallic stele, blank but for a pair of rosettes at eye level; it bears a list of names of the family’s senior adult males.73 Lastly, at right, is a stele for the unwed, bearing a loutrophoros in relief.74 Its inscription reads “Lady Soundness-of-Mind, daughter of generous Hades, here lies Kleidemos of Melite, son of Kleidemides. Most of all he honored you, good at war, and Manly Virtue. Once he was his father’s pride; now, his mother’s sorrow.”75 Like the others, this stone too seems to have come to stand for a class of dead, not an individual, notwithstanding the specificity of its inscription. The result is that the three modes of commemoration— metaphorical, metonymic, and iconic—appear in juxtaposition as a deliberate, ex post facto ordering of a hitherto messy and improvisational practice. To this tidy picture, however, we must add a circular depression or socket immediately to the left of Hegeso’s stele—probably to hold a stone le ̄kythos, carved in the round, now lost.76 One would like to imagine that this vessel commemorated the one remaining category of person: infants. In any event, the original ensemble would have consisted of, from left to right, a freestanding le ̄kythos of stone, a figural relief, a blank rosette stele, and a relief loutrophoros. There are many ways to parse this ensemble. One might think of it as involving two vessels that flank a central pair of deep figural relief and blank stele, yielding an ABBA pattern. Alternately, one might contrast relief and nonrelief, yielding ABAB. One might see a progression from three dimensions to two, leaving the loutrophoros relief and the unmarried men at right as permanent outliers, neither fish nor fowl: ABCX. Or, if the supposition that the le ̄kythos represented infants is correct, then one would have women and children at left, men at right: AABB. And so on. The rules of combination, if there are any, remain obscure, but this obscurity is at least partly a function of the indeterminacy of the rules governing the application of the concept vessel in this context. Another stele combines the two types: a woman leans upon a loutrophoros (Figure 1.22).77 As on the le ̄kythos in New York, the physical contact between figure and symbol suggests a root affinity between the two, and one can get lost in the layers: a stele, itself a marker, showing a woman leaning on what might just as well be her own marker, in a complex interplay that it takes some patience to pick apart. Start from the fact that the stele as a whole marks the dead. Its face then shows the deceased iconically; she leans upon a vessel that also represents   Hegeso stele: Athens, National Museum 3624; Clairmont 1993, 2.150; Inscriptiones Graecae I3 1289.   Rosette stele: Athens, Kerameikos Museum I 273; Inscriptiones Graecae II2 6008. 74   Loutrophoros stele: Athens, Kerameikos Museum I 274; Clairmont 1993. 75   Inscriptiones Graecae II2 6859. Author’s trans.    76  Brückner 1909, 106. 77   Athens, National Museum 3891 (Clairmont 1993, 1.182). 72

73

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F igure 1.22.  Attic grave stele: woman leaning on loutrophoros. Marble, early fourth century bce. Athens, National Archaeological Museum 3891. Photo © Richard Neer.

her, but symbolically. As we have seen, however, a woman is also, in Greece, a vessel or a container just as, in this case, the loutrophoros also is, or stands for, a woman. The composition invites us to contrast the two in terms of texture and surface: the woman all flowing lines of drapery, a liquiform surface revealing the body it veils; the vessel smooth, uninflected, giving no clue as to what if anything might slosh or gurgle inside. What unites the two is not just pose but the cloth, which cascades from the woman’s arm to run like a waterfall off the shoulder of the pot. Drapery swirls and flows, as if to evoke the liquid inside the vessel, leaving little to the imagination—and that is partly the point. The body is visible through the garment, through a stone membrane, as it were, that renders completely visible what we do not literally see; we do not see her body (it is covered in cloth), but then again we do see it. As if that were not enough, the woman also evokes a famous statue of the goddess Aphrodite; she strikes the pose of the deity who, at about this time, had been represented leaning on a pillar.78 Just as the 78   The statue is Aphrodite-in-the-Gardens of Alkamenes, which has a late echo in a statue now in the Louvre (inv. Ma 414): see Delivorrias 1968; Romeo 1993; Rolley 1999, 141. Cf. Neer 2010, 190–2.

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loutrophoros, which is present, symbolizes the absent deceased and her social state, so the represented figure, which is also present, evokes the goddess, who is also absent. Thus the deceased seems to hover between the symbol and the statue, visible vessel and invisible goddess. Even sculpted vessels can bear figure scenes, evoking their painted predecessors (the stone would itself have been painted).79 A good example is a very modern-looking scene of soccer practice, or something like it, on a relief loutrophoros from Piraeus, now in Athens (Figure 1.23).80 The action transpires in a gymnasium; a youth, presumably the deceased, balances a ball on his knee while a child looks on. To the right, a horos or boundary stone marks the edge of the scene.81

F igure 1.23. Attic loutrophoros stele: gymnasium scene. Marble, late fifth century bce. Athens, National Archaeological Museum 873. Photo © Richard Neer.

  For the polychromy on these monuments see Koch-Brinkmann 2004; Posamentir 2004.   Athens, National Archaeological Museum inv. 873 (Clairmont 1993, 1.890). Ball-play is a somewhat undignified activity in an Athenian context but, as Lara O’Sullivan has recently emphasized, carried prestige at Sparta; this imagery might be subtly Laconizing. See O’Sullivan 2012. 81   On boundary stones see Ober 2005. For the related image of turning-posts in mortuary contexts see McGowan 1995. 79 80

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In this context it represents more than just the prosaic limit of a gymnasium (though it is that, too); the poet Bacchylides (5.144), for instance, can speak of a horos that delimits one’s life and separates it from death. It is this boundary that the relief thematizes; this is a work about limits and interfaces, the vividness of the depicted scene evoking the stele’s capacity to make present what we know to be absent, that is, our dead loved ones. Appropriately, therefore, the boundary stone on this vessel also resembles a grave stele, that is, exactly the sort of monument before which we stand. There is precedent for such ambiguity in the twenty-third book of the Iliad (ll. 326–33), when Nestor voices uncertainty whether a monument in the Trojan plain marks the grave of a mortal or the finish line of an ancient chariot track; the Greeks were perfectly capable of crossing up categories, troping one with another repeatedly. The result is another Russian doll: a stele that bears a vessel that bears a boundary stone that itself resembles the stele that bears the vessel. Visually, athlete and slab make a matched pair. On the one hand, the contour that runs from the nape of the youth’s neck over his left shoulder mirrors that of the cloth draped atop the boundary stone, each forming the same open, obtuse angle; on the other, the young man’s torso is in three-quarters view, his face in profile, just as the upright slab is in three-quarters view and the folded garment in profile to produce a visual rhyme.82 As on the Achilles Painter’s le ̄kythos (see Figure 1.17), the deceased is connected with his sign—with the difference that, in this instance, all is indirect and metaphorical. The Achilles Painter showed a ghost and a gravestone on the surface of a real clay vessel; the sculptor gives us a carving of a painted representation of a ghostly youth and a boundary stone that doubles as a gravestone, all on the representation of a clay vessel that is itself a slab. The perspectival effect is, for the period, virtuosic and gives the little tableau a pictorial vividness, a virtual three-dimensionality, quite out of keeping with the shallow relief and frontal orientation of the vessel it notionally decorates as painting. Yet everything hinges on our ability to see that which is not really there, to see a gravestone in a boundary marker, a dead man in an athlete, a painting in a stone, and so on. To produce such visibility is the job of this vessel that holds nothing. The dead, too, are present or, rather, their remains are so; but that presence is itself an absence, and the curious doubleness of the picturewithin-a-picture evokes that state. Most extravagant in this regard are the so-called Gefäßgruppenstele: relief representations of groups of vessels, often to be understood as standing before a stele like offerings to the dead. The monument of one Panaitios of Hamaxanteia from Athens is perhaps the best known of this class (Figure 1.24).83 Here the stele is 82 83

  On the iconography of shrouds and textiles on le¯kythoi see Closterman 2014.  On Gefäßgruppenstelen see Stupperich 1978; Bergemann 1996.

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F igure 1.24.  Attic grave stele of Panaitios: vessels. Marble, ca. 400 bce. Athens, National Archaeological Museum 884. Photo © Richard Neer.

itself the representation of a stele, with a ribbon draped over it—carved, of course— and a pair of oil flasks (alabastra) dangling from pegs. Set in front of the (depicted) stele is a (depicted) loutrophoros bearing a scene of a young cavalryman’s departure for battle; this is the deceased, in the sense that he is the cavalryman and in the sense that the loutrophoros stands in for him. Flanking that vessel/sign are two more images of offerings: le ̄kythoi, the one at right almost entirely lost and restored in

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F igure 1.25.  Attic grave stele of Panaitios: detail of boy rolling hoop. Marble, ca. 400 bce. Athens, National Archaeological Museum 884. Photo © Richard Neer.

plaster, the one at left bearing a relief picture of a boy rolling a hoop (Figure 1.25). Once again, a striking use of foreshortening gives the boy and his hoop a virtual presence that nothing else on the stele quite matches. The rest of the tableau establishes spatial relations by overlapping, every object facing the front plane of the relief either head-on or in profile, yet the boy runs at a three-quarter angle and twists his body, the hoop diminishing into an ellipse, all on the curving, projecting surface of the (depicted) vessel. Yet the boy is to be understood as a picture painted on the le ̄kythos; so it is the image on the vessel, or the image on the image of a vessel, that is most plastic and vivid.84 It gets wearisome to spell out, though the eye takes it in without difficulty; we have a relief image of a three-dimensional ensemble and then another relief image of a painting, layers of pictures in pictures. Taken in tandem they suggest a sort of membrane between living and dead, present and absent. A sculpted le ̄kythos is a container that functions as a sign exactly by containing nothing, and so too, one might say, does this stele. 84   For such effects in Athenian vase-painting, where a depicted or ghostly figure is rendered more vividly than others in the same scene, see Neer 1995, 134–40.

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Such intricacies may seem like merely art-historical conceits, remote from the real-world, empirical research of digging up potsherds and publishing them in site reports. The Socratic question with which we began—What is a vessel?—may seem not to have been answered so much as evaded. Categories cannot have been so blurred as I have been suggesting; nobody in ancient Greece ever tried to pour water from a carved loutrophoros, for instance. The Greeks themselves, in fact, were well aware of the dangers of metaphor creep when it came to vessels. Aristophanes’s play Clouds, first produced in 423 bce and revised a few years later, is notorious for its scathing portrayal of Socrates as a dangerous charlatan. The philosopher and his followers occupy a Phrontisterion or “Thinkatorium” where Socrates teaches that, instead of Zeus, the true lord of creation is Dinos, a word that can refer variously to a vortex and to a large cup or bowl for mixing wine.85 Some early Greek philosophers did, in fact, hold that a kind of primal, swirling vortex underlay the universe; for Empedocles, all things are like a ladle whirling at great speed, the earth held immobile within it like a liquid that does not slosh out due to centripetal force.86 Aristophanes, however, deliberately confounds this abstraction with a prosaic vessel of clay; he literalizes the metaphor to make it absurd. The protagonist, one Strepsiades, and his silly, fashionable son Pheidippides fall under the philosopher’s spell; all sorts of untranslatable puns ensue on the name Zeus (which in Greek often reads as Dia or Dios) and dinos (the name of the vessel) and also ho deina (which means “So-and-So”). At the end of the play, Strepsiades comes to his senses and finds himself before the doorway of the Thinkatorium, where a real, clay dinos stands to announce the theoretical commitments of its occupants.87 His son challenges him one last time to abjure the Olympian gods. Pheidippides: Old fool, is there such a thing as Zeus? Strepsiades: There is! Ph: There is not, not at all. “For Dinos reigns, having sloshed out Zeus.” Str.: Not sloshed out: that was my foolish thought, all due to this dinos here. Fool that I was, to take you, a piece of earthenware, for a god!88

With this, Strepsiades resolves to put the Thinkatorium to the torch. The moral seems straightforward: Aristophanes enjoins his audience to keep clear of just the sort of conceptual confusion I have been urging and to realize that a pot is a pot   On the shape see Bowie 1997, 5 and n. 32.  Ferguson  1971; Ferguson  1973; Ferguson  1979. Empedokles (fr. 31 A 67 DK): “Empedokles [claims that] the revolution of heaven as it circles with a swifter motion prevents the motion of the earth just like water in a ladle. For when a ladle is swung in a circle, although the water is often suspended just below the bronze, it does not travel downward with its natural motion for this same reason.” Translated by Daniel W. Graham, modified. 87 88   On the staging see Dover 1972, 108.  Aristophanes, Clouds 1470–5. Author’s translation. 85 86

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and that it is only overthinking that would lead you to confuse it with something else. But comedy is tricky, and in light of the poet’s wordplay and persistent irony it may be significant that Strepsiades, having scoffed at the idea that a clay vessel can be a god, nonetheless speaks to it as though it could hear and then proceeds to strike up a conversation with a stone figure of Hermes (ll. 1483–5), whose replies only Strepsiades can hear. He falls from the frying pan straight into the fire, which suggests that maybe the categories are not so clear after all. Or aren’t they? We are, after all, supposed to laugh at the buffoon who talks to stones and pots and renounces one anthropomorphism only to fall for another. As with the assemblage of stelai and vessels at the Koroibos precinct, the rules of interpretation are not clear—which seems, in this case, exactly the point. Sometimes a blurred, open-ended concept—a leaky concept, as it were, one that is not airtight but porous—is exactly what the situation requires. Comedy is one such situation, an exigency to which vessels answer very well indeed. So, what is a vessel? It is a useful category, to be sure; we need not change our formats of archaeological publication, an expedient that digitization will probably bring about of itself. Yet the archaeological category is useful only in highly specific ways and in highly specific situations. Vessel is in an important sense an arbitrary term, which is the very reason why it is useful (again, a tool). If anything, attempts to make the term other than arbitrary, as in a well-disciplined and rule-bound quantificatory study, will be so reductive as to be of dubious value except for what Wittgenstein called a “special purpose”: a highly circumscribed, even formalistic research program. A vessel can be a body or a body part; can play on what goes into the body and what the body goes into, what is visible on the surface and what is hidden from view; on the elasticity of iconicity and the power of fantasy; on the relation between the everyday and ritual, the drinking-party and the graveyard, variously to comic, obscene, or profoundly serious effect. That is, a vessel is not just a symbol and not just a useful tool but, in addition, a means to think concretely, to work through relations of depiction and prototype and beholder in ways that are open, leaky, non-dogmatic. Exactly because it drips and seeps and dribbles in this way, the concept is inexhaustible, like a bottomless cup.

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N eer , R. (2002), Style and politics in Athenian vase-painting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). N eer , R.  (2010), The emergence of the classical style in Greek sculpture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). N oble , J. V. (1968), “Some trick Greek vases,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 112, 371–8. O akley , J. H. (1994), “An Attic black-figure eye-cup with ships around the interior,” Archaologischer Anzeiger 109, 16–23. O akley , J. H. (2004), Picturing death in classical Athens: the evidence of the white lekythoi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). O akley , J. H. (2008), “Women in Athenian ritual and funerary art,” in N. Kaltsas and A. Shapiro (eds), Worshiping women: ritual and reality in classical Athens (New York: Onassis Foundation), 335–41. O ber , J. (2005), Athenian legacies (Princeton: Princeton University Press). O hly , D. (1965), “Kerameikos-Grabung. Tätigkeitsbericht 1956–1961,” Archäologischer Anzeiger, 277–376. D’O nofrio , A.-M.  (1985), “Kouroi e stele: iconografia e ideologia del monumento funerario arcaico in Attica,” Annali dell’Istituto universitario orientale di Napoli 7, 201–4. O sborne , R. (2014), “Intoxication and sociality: the symposium in the ancient Greek world,” Past & Present 222 suppl. 9, 34–60. O’S ullivan , L. (2012), “Playing ball in Greek antiquity,” Greece & Rome 59, 17–33. P apadopoulou -K anellopoulou , C.  (1997), Hiero te ̄s Nymphe ̄s: melanomorphe ̄s loutrophoroi (Athens: Ekdosē tou Tameiou Archaiologikōn Porōn kai Apallotriōseōn). P osamentir , R.  (2004), “Ornament und Malerei einer attischen Grablekythos (Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Kopenhagen),” in V. Brinkmann and R. Wünsche (eds), Bunte Götter. Die Farbigkeit antiker Skulptur (Munich: Staatliche Antikensammlungen und Glyptothek), 156–65. R idgway , B. S. (1993), The archaic style in Greek sculpture, 2nd edn (Chicago: Ares). R olley , C. (1999), La sculpture grecque, II. La période classique (Paris: Picard). R omeo , I. (1993), “Sull’ ‘Afrodite nei giardini’ di Alcamene,” Xenia 2, 3–44. R unnels , C. N., P ullen , D. J., and L angdon , S. (eds) (1995), Artifact & Assemblage: the finds from a regional survey of the southern Argolid, Greece. Volume 1: The prehistoric & early Iron Age pottery and the lithic artifacts (Stanford: Stanford University Press). S abetai , V. (2009), “Marker vase or burnt offering? The clay loutrophoros in context,” in A. Tsingarida (ed), Shapes and uses of Greek vases (7th–4th centuries B.C.) (Brussels: Centre de Recherches en Archéologie et Patrimoine), 291–306. S cheer , T.  S.  (2000), Die Gottheit und ihr Bild: Untersuchungen zur Funktion griechischer Kultbilder in Religion und Politik (Munich: C. H. Beck). S chlesier , R.  (2016), “Krate ̄r: the mixing-vessel as metaphorical space in ancient Greek tradition,” in F.  Horn and C.  Breytenbach (eds), Spatial metaphors: ancient texts and transformations (Berlin: Edition Topoi), 69–84. S chmaltz , B. (1970), Untersuchungen zu den attischen Marmorlekythen (Berlin: Mann). S chmidt , S. (2005), Rhetorische Bilder auf attischen Vasen. Visuelle Kommunikation im 5. Jahrhundert v.Chr. (Berlin: Reimer Verlag).

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S ourvinou -I nwood , C. (1995), “Reading” Greek death: to the end of the classical period (Oxford: Oxford University Press). S teiner , D. (2001), Images in mind: statues in archaic and classical Greek literature and thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press). S trömberg , A.  (1993), Male or female? A methodological study of grave gifts as sexindicators in Iron Age burials from Athens (Jonsered: Paul Åström). S tupperich , R. (1978), “Eine ‘Gefäßgruppenstele’ aus dem Kerameikos,” Boreas 1, 94–102. T rigger , B. (2006), A history of archaeological thought, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). T rinkl , E. (2009), “Sacrificial and profane use of Greek hydriai,” in A. Tsingarida (ed), Shapes and uses of Greek vases (7th–4th centuries B.C.) (Brussels: Centre de Recherches en Archéologie et Patrimoine), 153–74. T rue , M. (2006), “Plastic vases and vases with plastic attachments,” in B. Cohen (ed), The colors of clay: special techniques on Athenian vases (Los Angeles: J.  Paul Getty Museum), 240–9. V ermeule , E. (1979), Aspects of death in early Greek art and poetry (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press). V ernant , J.-P. (1991), Mortals and immortals: collected essays, trans. F. Zeitlin (Princeton: Princeton University Press). V idali , S.  (1997), Archaische Delphindarstellungen (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann). V lachou , V. (2012), “Death and burial in the Greek world,” Thesaurus cultus et ritum antiquorum VIII (Los Angeles: Getty Publications). V lachou , V. (2017), “Pottery made to impress: oversized vessels for funerary rituals—a view from Geometric Attica and beyond,” in V. Vlachou and A. Gadolou (eds), Terpsis: essays in Mediterranean archaeology in honour of Nota Kouroupp (Brussels: Centre de Recherches en Archéologie et Patrimoine), 191–208. W alter -K arydi , E. (2015), Die Athener und ihre Graber (1000–300 v. Chr.) (Berlin: de Gruyter). W alton , M. S., S voboda , M., M ehta , A., W ebb , S., and T rentelman , K. (2010), “Material evidence for the use of Attic white-ground lekythoi ceramics in cremation burials,” Journal of Archaeological Science 37, 936–40. W hitley , J. (1991), Style and society in dark age Greece: the changing face of a pre-literate society, 1100–700 BC (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). W hitley , J.  (1996), “Gender and hierarchy in early Athens: the strange case of the disappearance of the rich female grave,” Mètis: Anthropologie des mondes grecs anciens 11, 209–32. W illiams , D.  (1988), “The late archaic class of eye-cups,” in J.  Christiansen and T.  Melander (eds), Proceedings of the third symposium on ancient Greek and related pottery (Copenhagen: Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek), 161–72. W illiams , D. (2008), “Some thoughts on the potters and painters of plastic vases before Sotades,” in K. Lapatin (ed), Papers on special techniques in Athenian vases (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum), 161–72.

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W ittgenstein , L. (2009), Philosophical investigations, 4th edn, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and J. Schulte (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell). W ylie , A. (2002), Thinking from things: essays in the philosophy of archaeology (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press). Y atromanolakis , D.  (2007), Sappho in the making: the early reception (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Z eitlin , F.  (1996), Playing the other: gender and society in classical Greek literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).

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A Roman Vessel for Cosmetics Form, Decoration, and Subjectivity in the Muse Casket Jas ́ Elsner

I N T RODUCT ION

In 1793, laborers digging a well at the foot of the Esquiline hill in Rome came upon the ruins of an ancient house and buried therein what proved to be the largest and most spectacular silver treasure from antiquity discovered up to that time.1 The known surviving items of the so-called Esquiline Treasure—probably made in the second half of the fourth century ce and concealed by its last owners sometime in late antiquity to protect it from marauders or invading barbarians, but surely intended to have been recovered and reused by them—include some very famous pieces: the Projecta Casket, the Tyche statuettes of Rome, Constantinople, Antioch, and Alexandria, a number of dishes, spoons, and ewers (Figure 2.1).2 Among these is the Muse Casket, a circular vessel, just under 33 cm in diameter and a little less than 27 cm high when covered with its lid. It is made of sheet silver, shaped and decorated with repoussé and engraving.3 Its lid is a silver dome recessed from the edge of a flat rim and attached to the base by a soldered hinge, with a narrow tab opposite the hinge for raising and lowering   On the find see Shelton 1981, 11–24; Ridley 1996. For a summary of the archaeological conditions in which Late Antique silver has been found in relation to the kinds of contexts in which it may have been buried, see Leader-Newby 2004, 1–11. By contrast with the frequency of finds of silver plate dated to the fourth century from across the Roman empire, the Esquiline Treasure remains the unique discovery of a large hoard from the city of Rome itself: see Hobbs 2016, 250–62, esp. pl. 405 on 252. 2   Even in the limited number of items from the treasure that survive today, its total weight in silver is high for fourth-century hoards at 27,371 g—about the same as the Mildenhall Treasure (26,540)—and less only than the Trier and Kaiseraugst hoards (at 114,500 g and 61,031 g, respectively): see Hobbs 2016, 256, table 24. For some up-to-date remarks on the production, circulation, and assembly of these kinds of artifact, see Hobbs 2016, 263–72. 3   For detailed discussion of the casket, see Dalton 1901, no. 305, pp. 64–6; Buschhausen 1971, B.8, 214–17; Shelton 1981, no. 2, 75–7; Painter 2000, no. 116, 495–6. 1

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F igure 2.1.  The major surviving items from the Esquiline Treasure now in the collection of the British Museum. Excavated in Rome in 1793 and likely made there. Silver, some gilt, mid to late fourth century ce. Photograph © The Trustees of the British Museum.

the cover (Figure 2.2).4 Inside it has five smaller vessels for toiletries and cosmetics, so that the casket as a whole was made to be used as a container for unguents.5 The art of the toiletry box—as a vessel that contains other vessels—casts light onto a problem that is faced across cultures, namely, improving or elevating a person’s physical or spiritual state by operating a complex device—a container of containers—and using the contents stored therein.6 Different cultures may seek different symbolisms to structure the generation of meaning, based on their own specific traditions and ideologies. In the case of the Muse Casket, the artifactual logic—structured through the material invitation to open, close, and use a box, and to open, close, and use the containers within it—operates alongside an i­conographic rhetoric of surface decoration that alludes to the divine, that is in this case, to the Muses and the Dionysiac sphere. Meaning is the product of triangulating the artifactual logic of the object’s structure and 4   For some reflection on the complexity of morphology, decoration, and meaning in Late Antique manufactured boxes, see Elsner 2008; Elsner 2013; Elsner 2015, esp. 18–31. For some Islamic examples, see Graves 2018. 5   For its functions, see Shelton 1981, 27–8. 6   On the question of vessels as tools in ancient Greek art, see Richard Neer’s chapter in this volume.

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F igure 2.2.  The Muse Casket from the Esquiline Treasure. Circular with domed lid, shown closed, from the front with the lock and the tab for raising and lowering the cover. 32.7 cm in diameter, 26.7 cm in height, 4800 g in weight (including the five interior containers). Silver repoussé with engraved incisions and stippling. 330–380 ce. Photograph © The Trustees of the British Museum.

the iconographic implications of its decoration through the experience of a specific and given user at a given time. The user is both a body—manipulating the object with his or her own hands (carrying it, setting it down, opening it, opening its contents and using those contents, as well as putting them away, closing the container-casket, and putting that away)—and a subjectivity, whose responses of interpretation and understanding may be varied in relation both to the physical processes to which the object is called in aid and to the imagery that adorns it. Moreover, given the probable aristocratic nature of the box’s owners,7 we may expect it had more than one user—that is, not only the lady who receives the contents for styling and self-fashioning but also a variety of servants who may bring the vessel to its owner, open it, and may themselves apply the contents to their mistress. While the object’s material relations to the bodies of its users (whether elite or servant) remained broadly parallel in   See Cameron 1985 and Shelton 1985.

7

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functional terms, there was a broad range of potential subjectivities across a wide social scale of learning, experience, and autonomy.

T H E MUSE C A SK ET: A L AT E ROM A N BOX FOR COSM ET IC S

In its original conception, the Muse Casket was made to sit on its base or to be suspended on three chains, attached to the body by soldered plates and silver pins holding ring fittings, which (like the hinge) were fastened to the completed object showing very little care as to how their placement might affect its finished decoration.8 The three silver chains lead from the sides of the base to a large ring, from which the casket could be carried or hung. In form therefore, the Muse Casket is a domed circular box that adopts features of the hanging bowl—a form known from Roman times but particularly popular in post-Roman late antiquity (Figure 2.3).9 It thus adapts to objects of the elite toilet a form more usual for sympotic vessels (in both glass and metal) and also for hanging lamps.10 Images of serving women carrying caskets on chains appear both in the fourth-century procession mosaic from the vestibule of the baths in the late Roman villa of Piazza Armerina (Figure 2.4)11 and in the fourth-century paintings from a tomb at Silistra in Bulgaria.12 On the back of the Projecta Casket from the same find, in the central intercolumniation of the base, a female attendant between curtains appears to carry a circular casket suspended by chains from a ring (Figure 2.5),13 very much like the Muse Casket.14 If both objects were made in the same workshop by the same craftsmen for the same patron, as is possible and perhaps likely,15 then this might indicate a striking interreferentiality between them. While no other chained toiletry container survives with its chains, the silver casket from the Sevso Treasure, which only came to light on the art market in the late 1980s, with repoussé imagery of the toilet on its exterior, has three surviving oval soldering plates of about 3 × 2 cm set at nearly equidistant intervals along the body, leading those who published it to suggest that it too was originally suspended from three chains (Figure 2.6).16

  See Shelton 1981, 48 on the Projecta and Muse caskets; also Elsner 2007, 202.   See Bruce-Mitford 2005, 459–72. Silver examples are known from the Water Newton Treasure—­ see Bruce-Mitford 2005, 462—but also from the third-century Chaourse Treasure—see Baratte 1989, nos. 48 and 49, pp. 111–13—and the Coleraine Hoard—see Smith 1922, 73. 10   See Painter 2005, 81. 11   See Carandini, Ricci, and de Vos 1982, 331, fig. 200; Gentili 1999, vol. 3, 29–33. 12   See Dorigo 1971, 225–7, pl. 181. For an interpretation of this tomb, see Schneider 1983, 39–55. 13   See Dalton 1901, 66, and Shelton 1981, 74. 14 15   See Kent and Painter 1977, 45, and Elsner 2007, 212.   See Shelton 1981, 48. 16   See Mango and Bennet 1994, no. 14, 445–73, esp. 445–50. 8 9

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F igure 2.3.  Hanging bowl from the Water Newton Treasure, excavated in England in 1975. Thin sheet silver with repoussé and punched decoration, made to be hung from a wire attached in three places to the bowl. 18 cm in diameter, 10 cm in height, 220.4 g in weight. Late third to early fourth century ce. Photograph © The Trustees of the British Museum.

The decorations of the casket, both domed lid and base, are divided into s­ ixteen panels of alternating flat and concave faces, with the rim of the lid echoing this alternation to create what looks like a circle with florally inflected radiation when one gazes down on the cover from above (Figure 2.7). This shape, morphologically close to the fluted dish also from the Esquiline Treasure (Figure 2.8), as well as to other fluted silver bowls of the same period surviving from the Traprain Law and Mildenhall Treasures (Figures 2.9 and 2.10),17 but with its more formal finish on the outer rather than the inner side, creatively applies a set of forms familiar in Late Antique silver bowls and dishes to the more complex design of a closed box. Like the Projecta Casket from the same find and ancient collection (perhaps made for the same patrons by the same artisans), with its complex   On the morphological closeness, see Shelton 1981, 42. On the Esquiline dish, see Shelton 1981, no. 4, pp. 78–9; on the two dishes from Traprain Law, see Curle 1923, 36–40; on the Mildenhall dish, see Painter 1977, nos. 15–17, 29 and esp. Hobbs 2016, 178–94. 17

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F igure 2.4.  Fourth-century mosaic figure of a servant carrying a square casket on three chains, from Piazza Armerina in Sicily. Photograph Roger Wilson © R. J. A. Wilson.

F igure 2.5.  Detail of a fourth-century silver repoussé figure of a servant carrying a round casket with a lid hanging from chains, from the Projecta Casket of the Esquiline Treasure. 330–380 ce. Photograph © The Trustees of the British Museum.

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F igure 2.6.  The Toiletry Casket from the Sevso Treasure. Circular cylindrical body with a conical lid, shown closed from the front with a lady at her toilet surrounded by servants on the base and a winged eros between garlands and masks on the lid. The discolored ovals on lid and base to the right are the remains of solder for the fitting of the original clasp, while the discolored circle to the left, partially covering the chair of the seated lady, is solder from one of the three now lost chains. 20.7 cm in diameter, 32 cm in height, 2051 g in weight (though with clasp, chain, and internal containers missing). Silver repoussé. Late fourth or early fifth century ce. Hungarian National Museum; Inv. No. MNM RR 2014.1. Photograph © Hungarian National Museum.

trapezoidal shape in the form of two truncated pyramids,18 the Muse Casket attests to significant formal creativity in the shaping and conceptualizing of boxes in what is likely to be the single workshop responsible for the Esquiline Treasure. The flat surfaces of both cover and base are decorated with vases, vine motifs, and birds, executed in fine repoussé with incised lines for flutes in the vases or veins on the leaves and stippling on the vine tendrils, grape clusters, and birds. Only the front panel of the base beneath the tab has different decoration—a large wreath tied with a ribbon below and a rosette above, and with two birds   For discussions, see Buschhausen 1971, B.7, 210–14; Shelton 1981, no. 1, 72–5; Schneider 1983, 5–38; Painter 2000, 493–5; Elsner 2007, 200–24. 18

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F igure 2.7.  The Muse Casket from above, showing the domed lid with its central upper medallion and fluted decoration of sixteen radiating panels with alternating flat and concave surfaces. Photograph © The Trustees of the British Museum.

beneath. This has had a lock for a key restored inside it, and it may be that the restoration does in fact replace what was originally there (Figure 2.2).19 On the concave panels of the main body beneath arches that stand on fluted columns with Corinthian capitals (echoing the columnar articulation of the base of the Projecta Casket) are eight female figures with different costumes and attributes (e.g., see Figures 2.2, 2.15–19), who have been identified by scholarly consensus as eight of the nine Muses. At the top of the dome—aligned to be seen from the same side as the front panel with the lock, but unfortunately rather abraded and in worse condition than most of the rest of the imagery—is a small medallion with a lady seated on a folding stool in the open air beneath a tree (Figures 2.7 and 2.11). She is in a threequarters posture to the right but turns her head back to the left where she looks

  See Shelton 1981, 77 and 95, n. 7. On ancient Roman locks and keys, see for instance Manning 1985, 88–97; Guillaumet and Laude 2009 (for a rich range of examples). 19

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F igure 2.8.  The fluted dish from the Esquiline Treasure. Silver; fluted with engraved central medallion and twenty-four radiating panels with alternating flat and concave surfaces. 56.2 cm in diameter, 10.5 cm in height, 2703.8 g in weight. 330–380 ce. Photograph © The Trustees of the British Museum.

towards a bird that appears to be seated by or on her right wrist. There is a basket, perhaps containing fruit, beneath the bird. In her left hand she holds something—perhaps a fillet or a garland. The decorative scheme—looking down from the top—has the figure as the center of a circle of sixteen radiations, alternating between undecorated concave flutes and the unscrolling grapevines reaching back to birds and vases on the flat surfaces. Now, before we turn to issues of iconography, we should press the question of the object’s nature as a covered vessel. The whole point of a closed box—of a size to be moved, set down, and opened with relative ease by human hands—is the enticement to open it. With its hinge, its tab, its perhaps originally ancient lock and key, the Muse Casket speaks of secrecy and the desire to be opened, even more than the Projecta Casket, whose hinged cover just sits on its base. That desire is deliciously rewarded when we do raise the lid (Figure 2.12). Inside, set horizontally a little lower than half way down the body of the base, is a thin bronze plate with four circular holes pierced symmetrically around a fifth slightly

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F igure 2.9.  The fluted dish from the Mildenhall Treasure, excavated in England in 1942. Silver, fluted with engraved central medallion and twenty-eight radiating panels with alternating flat and concave surfaces. 40.8 cm in diameter, 11.1 cm in height, 2093 g in weight (including handles). Interior view. 325–75 ce. Photograph © The Trustees of the British Museum.

larger hole in the center. In the four outer holes are four cylindrical silver boxes with angular moldings beneath tight-fitting lids that flare outwards at the top. In the middle hole is a larger silver flask with a cylindrical body and a narrow sloping neck that terminates in a convex molding and an angular rim (Figure 2.13).20 The interior boxes, all with covers much plainer than the casket itself, are ­decorated with engraved lines that make circles along the cylinder bases and concentric circles on the lids. These lines are not incised but made of miniature vertical strikes that are designed to appear as horizontal lines from a distance but at the same time to enhance a glittering effect, especially if the boxes were kept shiny and polished.21 There are at least two surviving parallels. The round casket with a conical lid from the Sevso Treasure, smaller in diameter at just under 21 cm but taller than the Muse Casket at 32 cm, has a thin silver disk pierced with

20

  Dalton 1901, 66; Shelton 1981, 77.

21

  Shelton 1981, 77.

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F igure 2.10.  The fluted dish from the Mildenhall Treasure, exterior view, upside down (with base ring at top) to show formal parallels with domed lid of the Muse Casket. Photograph © The Trustees of the British Museum.

seven holes of the same size (six in a circle around a central one; Figure 2.14).22 This appears to have been originally set just below the rim of the main body.23 The internal flasks or boxes of silver or glass do not survive in this case. A further disk, probably of silver pierced like the Muse Casket with five holes, has recently been unearthed in the impressive Vinkovci treasure from Croatia. It is surely from a cosmetics box like the Muse and Sevso caskets, and it came with at least one cylindrical container with angular moldings and a flared lid, strikingly similar in form to those of the Muse Casket, as well as what may be a perfume flask.24   Mango and Bennet 1994, 450–4.   The placement of the Sevso disk at the rim of the casket (about 15 cm high) is based on surviving segments of solder. It is possible, however, that the solder was used for an inner lining of smooth silver to hide the uneven interior surface created by the repoussé technique—as is common in pre-Late Antique Roman silver (see Sherlock 1976, esp. 19)—and that the rim might have been fastened to this at a lower place within the casket. 24   The Vinkovci treasure was excavated in March 2012. It is not fully published or even restored yet. What the early photographs describe as a pyxis is certainly a casket from which the pierced disc, a trio of chains attached to a ring, and some small containers come. In shape and form it would make an object 22 23

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F igure 2.11.  The Muse Casket, medallion at the top of the domed cover. Photograph © The Trustees of the British Museum.

In the Muse Casket, the handleable size of the object in relation to the bodies of the lady of the house who would have used it and to her servants who would have carried it (roughly equivalent to the basket of fruit beneath the lady in the medallion on the top of the lid, figure 2.11, and similar to the caskets and accoutrements of the toilet carried by the serving women in the imagery on the base of the Projecta Casket) gives way on opening to some miniature vessels, filled we may guess with perfume and cosmetics. Those vessels, covered themselves, give further promise of opening—and access to the unguents or perfumes within. The first opening of the casket is thus itself a prelude to a series of openings and closures that are part of the business of selfadornment and styling in the female sphere of the late Roman elite.

very like the Sevso Casket. For some preliminary discussion of the treasure, see http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Vinkovci_Treasure; now Vrkić and Skelac 2016: see esp. 172–3, fig. 16 and catalogue nos. 13, 32, 33, and 37; and Vulić, Doračić, Hobbs, and Lang 2017, esp. nos. 41–3, p. 132, where the object is described as a cylindrical silver toiletry casket with conical lid, inset disk with five circular perforations for unguent vessels, of which two survive as nos. 42 and 43.

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F igure 2.12.  The Muse Casket, open, with the interior containers (four cylindrical canisters and one flask, all in silver) in place. Photograph © The Trustees of the British Museum.

The Muse Casket appears never to have had a lining attached to its interior to hide the uneven surface created by the use of the repoussé technique to decorate its front.25 What you see, then, is the reverse or negative image of the elegant decoration of the outside. In the case of a toilet casket, this carries some ­resonance. Just as the user opens the box in order to access the materials that will bring adornment and polish to her appearance, so the box’s interior—even as it furnishes access to those materials—offers a vivid image of the reverse of its own polished and refined exterior surface (compare Figure 2.13 with Figure 2.7). The very nature of the vessel—in relation to the material chosen for its making and the techniques selected for its decorative adornment and finish—produces this effect. The casket’s material nature in combination with its function as an engine or aid for personal adornment encapsulates both a visual reminder of the opposite of being made-up and polished and a memory of the hard work (in the use of repoussé, the work of hammering and punching out the decoration from the

25

  See Elsner 2007, 207 for the same issues in relation to the Projecta Casket.

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F igure 2.13.  The Muse Casket, fully open with the interior containers displaced and fully visible. Note the visibility of the reverse of the repoussé decoration of the lid in its interior. Photograph © The Trustees of the British Museum.

back) that went into its pristine decorative surface. One might argue that the lack of lining in the two Esquiline caskets, both great repoussé objects, is a sign of their not being at the peak of aristocratic production,26 but it is also possible   In favor of high value for silver, see Painter 1988; Painter 1993; for an argument for relatively lower value, see Cameron 1992. This debate notwithstanding, Leader-Newby (2004), 7, is surely right that the “ownership of silverware was part of the social fabric of the world of the late Roman elite.”. 26

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F igure 2.14.  The Sevso Casket, base showing the internal pierced silver disk to accommodate seven flasks of equal diameter. Hungarian National Museum; Inv. No. MNM RR 2014.1. Photograph © Hungarian National Museum.

(especially if we put them alongside the two unlined, iconographically rich, silvergilt situlas with scenes from the mythology of Hippolytus as well as the unlined toilet casket, all executed in repoussé and all from the Sevso Treasure)27 that we are looking at a Late Antique phenomenon in the move from lined to unlined repoussé. At any rate, to penetrate into the casket in order to get hold of materials that will bring finish and cosmetic beauty to its user’s external appearance is to be reminded of the work and the unfinish that is presented by the object’s rough and uneven repoussé interior. The casket comments on the artifice of its function even as it is being used. Whenever you open the box to be confronted with the five smaller flasks and containers, you are challenged by the incompleteness of the interior. In this object there is never ultimate finish—only a working towards it, in the same way that the task of cosmetic adornment is only completed for an occasion but needs to be repeated on a daily basis.   For the Sevso situlas see Mango and Bennet 1994, nos. 8 and 9, 319–63; for the casket Mango and Bennet 1994, no. 14, 445–73. Note these objects are heavy—the situlas nearly 4.5 kg and the casket 2 kg. 27

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F igure 2.15.  The Muse Casket, exterior of base: vase with central shaft, vine with rosette and furled leaf and birds, flanked by Urania and Melpomene. Photograph © The Trustees of the British Museum.

Let us move to the Muses on the exterior, which give the casket its modern name. They are not inscribed, unlike many examples, including some in metal work.28 But they are identifiable with some certainty by their attributes.29 Looking from left to right starting from the tab and lock in the front, the casket shows Urania, the muse of astronomy, draped in a mantle, leaning on a spirally fluted column and holding a rod over a globe that rests on a rectangular base (Figure 2.15). Next is Melpomene, the muse of tragedy, in a girded tunic carrying a club in her right hand and a tragic mask in her left; an open scroll is on the ground to the right (Figure 2.15). Third is Clio, the muse of history, holding a codex or diptych for writing in her left hand and with a scrinium containing rolls below her to the right (Figure 2.16). Fourth is Polyhymnia, the muse of mime, with a smaller mask in her left hand whose mouth is closed (Figure 2.16). Fifth, and 28   See in particular the pear-shaped ewer or vase with nine Muses (all with their names inscribed), in gilded and stippled silver repoussé, now in the Kremlin: see Bell 1979, no. 244, 261–2; Sterligova 2013, nos. 2–3, 106–9; also the fragments of a mid fourth-century bronze box found in the 1960s in a tomb in Hungary, which include named plaques of Clio, Erato, Melpomene, and Polyhymnia: Buschhausen 1971 A.38, 78–83; Bánki 1972, 61–2. 29   For the Muses and their attributes, see Wegner 1966; Türr 1971 (excluding discussion of Urania and Euterpe); the two Muse essays in Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae: Lancha 1994 and Faedo 1994.

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F igure 2.16.  The Muse Casket, exterior of base: vase with central shaft, vine with grapes and birds, flanked by Clio and Polyhymnia. Photograph © The Trustees of the British Museum.

F igure 2.17.  The Muse Casket, exterior of base: muse partly covered by solder: either Erato or Terpsichore. Photograph © The Trustees of the British Museum.

rather obscured by the soldering plate that was plonked over her left arm and any attribute she may have carried, is a figure that might either be Erato, the muse of lyric and especially erotic poetry, with a cithara, or Terpsichore, the muse of dance, with a lyre (Figure 2.17). Her agitated garment has been interpreted as indicating dance (implying Terpsichore), and in her right hand she carries a

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F igure 2.18.  The Muse Casket, exterior of base: vase with central shaft, vine with rosette and furled leaf and birds, flanked by Euterpe and Thalia. Photograph © The Trustees of the British Museum.

short pointed rod, perhaps a plectrum. Next is Euterpe, the muse of music and song, carrying a flute in each hand (Figure 2.18). Seventh is Thalia, the muse of comedy, with a shepherd’s crook in her right hand and a comic mask in her left (Figure 2.18). Eighth and last is Calliope, the muse of epic, who holds a scroll in both hands and stands beside a spirally fluted column with an ewer on top (Figure 2.19).30 If one takes them as pairs flanking the front panel with the lock, then Calliope and Urania are on either side, each with a spiral column to her right—though that of Calliope is stippled while that of Urania is executed in repoussé (Figure 2.19). Next are Melpomene and Thalia (Figures 2.15 and 2.18), tragedy and comedy, each with a mask. After that the opposite pairings seem less significant, on what is effectively the back of the casket. Iconographically, there are parallels with a ewer found in 1918–19 on the Sudzna River on the borders of Russia and the Ukraine, now in the Kremlin collections, which was probably made in the late fourth or early fifth century in the East (Figure 2.20).31 The body of the Russian piece is decorated in three zones with vines and grapes in the upper band and animals amidst acanthus in the lower band—all elements of the kind of imagery used on the Muse Casket. The nine Muses stand in a row or perhaps a procession in the central zone of the ewer, and   See Dalton 1901, 65–6; Buschhausen 1971, 215–16; Shelton 1981, 76–7; Lancha 1994, no. 8, 1015.   A stamp on the base strongly suggests it was made in the East: see Dodd 1961, no. 84, 236.

30

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F igure 2.19.  The Muse Casket, exterior of base: front with wreath and birds flanked by Calliope and Urania. Photograph © The Trustees of the British Museum.

they are all inscribed and appear in a different order from those on the Muse Casket. In this case there was a gap between Clio and Calliope—at the two ends of the line of Muses—where the handle was once attached with solder (a more careful and thought-through relationship of form and decoration than on either the Muse or the Sevso Casket; see Figure 2.20). Like the Muses on the Muse Casket, those on the Kremlin jug wear a headdress with a feather, alluding to their victory over the sirens.32 Both sets of Muses wear long mantles of varying types. In the cases of Urania, Melpomene, Clio, Euterpe, Thalia, and Calliope, the attributes—respectively—of a globe, a tragic mask, a codex or diptych, two flutes, a comic mask, and a scroll appear on both objects.33 On the Moscow ewer Terpsichore holds a cithara and plectrum, and Polyhymnia a lyre, while on the Muse Casket Polyhymnia carries a mask, and Terpsichore (if it is she) might have held a cithara, but it is obscured by the soldering plate; she does however carry a plectrum in her right hand. Finally on the Kremlin ewer, Erato holds a staff.34 All   See Shelton 1981, 76.  So Sterligova’s assertion that the Russian ewer is unique for Clio holding a codex is incorrect: Sterligova 2013, 108. 34   For iconographical discussion of the Kremlin ewer, see Matsulevich 1934, in Russian, but with French summary at 119–25; Sterligova 2013, 108. It has been argued that Erato and Polyhymnia are mislabeled since the former often carries a lyre or cithara and the latter occasionally a scepter (see Bell 32 33

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F igure 2.20.  Jug with the nine Muses, found in western Russia, 1918–19. Silver repoussé. Side showing Urania, Calliope, and Clio (all inscribed) as well as the space where the handle was once soldered on. Photograph after Matsulevich, 1934.

this supports the sense that the iconographic mix on the Muse Casket is a normal instance of imagery in Late Antique silverware but that the specific tropes it employs are used in a creative way. Clearly there is something odd about showing only eight Muses instead of nine (by contrast with the Kremlin jug)—indeed, about choosing the Muses as a subject of decoration in a sixteen-sided polygon with only eight faces adorned by figures in human form. Admittedly, it is not abnormal for a selection of Muses to be used in Roman art; for instance, consider the pair of first-century ce silver 1979, 261), but arguably at this period strict identifications are anyway breaking down and what matters in antiquarian classicism is the sense that they are Muses. The very lack of labeling on the Muse Casket supports this.

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cups from the Berthouville Treasure, on each side of which a poet appears face to face with a Muse.35 But to select four is very different from selecting eight, which rather smacks of the deliberate exclusion of one—probably, if the consensus on identifications is right, Erato, the muse of lyric and love poetry. We may assume, however, that, without inscriptions, the Muses in the casket’s body were not definitively identifiable to most viewers and that the key issue is that one is missing, not which one specifically. One option is to see the lady in the medallion at the top of the lid—who may well be intended as a portrait of the lady of the house, the owner and user of the casket—as the ninth Muse. This possibility has been explicitly rejected on the argument that she has neither the hair ornaments of the Muses not any identifying attribute,36 but that judgment depends on an overly positivistic and insufficiently playful appreciation of the casket’s potential for encomium and panegyrical praise of its owner. The implication is surely on offer that the lady of the house, the casket’s user, who opens the box to extract its materials of self-adornment—is the ninth Muse to complement the eight on the base. Whether she is also the figure seated in pastoral leisure in the medallion at the top and whether that figure is also a representation of the ninth Muse is an open question—open to any particular viewer to decide on and to change her mind about if she so wishes. In effect, the Muse Casket presents on its exterior surface a picture of the kind of finish that opening it and using its contents was designed to achieve. On the lid medallion is a lady in the relaxed and carefree isolation of a rural idyll; beneath are eight manifestations of cultural life and literate education personified as the Muses, that is, adorned female deities.37 The object’s rhetoric of function and form offers the means to effect its user’s transformation into what it represents (what it says on the box, as it were). The claim that to be made up is to be cultured is a grand one—an act of panegyrical outrage one might even say! Since very early Greek times, the Muses and mousikê, their province, were associated with education,38 the paideia that was so central to the elite culture of the Roman

35   The first publication by Babelon misunderstood the subject as a scene of magic: Babelon 1916, nos. 13 and 14, pp. 105–16; see now Baratte 1989, no. 19, pp. 86–7. The fourth-century bronze-covered box from Hungary has only four Muses surviving (not eight, pace Lancha 1994, n. D1, 1017–18), but each is represented twice. There is a chance—if we believe what was excavated to reflect all of the nonperishable parts of the object—that the surviving plaques covered the front of a wooden frame and that these four Muses, twice shown in each case, were all the figural decoration. See the suggested restoration in Buschhausen 1971, A Tafel 38. 36   Shelton 1981, 77. 37   For a playful fourth-century poem on the Muses in relation to education and leisure, see Ausonius, ad nepotem Ausonium, Epistles 22.1–7. 38   See Murray 2004; Murray and Wilson 2004; Bundrick 2005, 49–51.

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world.39 The repeated presence of the Muses on all forms of Greco-Roman art is—wherever it appears—a potential claim to the cultural heritage of paideia, as well as to its cultural capital in affirming so-called civilized status.40 Whether in the public space of the baths, library, or theatre, in the domestic space of the private house or the funerary context of the sarcophagus and tomb, the presence of the Muses offered encomiastic embellishment and elaboration of the dedicatee’s praise and also of the dedicator or patron of the work of art. The Muse Casket borrows these norms,41 but in adapting the number of Muses to its ­material shape and design it brilliantly transforms them into an encomiastic cultural claim about the lady putting on her cosmetics.42 In doing the work that is implied by opening the box, the lady who owns it can become like those depicted on the box—the lady of pastoral leisure on the lid and a Muse herself, the ninth Muse missing from the base.43 But the play of eight represented Muses, plus one implied, is a complicated game. In Roman art, it is frequent to show the nine Muses plus one—the tenth figure being Apollo or Minerva, or (if eleven figures) both.44 While the model of the lady who uses the casket as the ninth Muse is easy, the implication of a missing Apollo is more complex. The Projecta Casket has been analyzed with what might be called aggressive and nonaggressive feminist readings. The aggressive model sees all the adornment and its revelry in the female sphere as directed to the pleasuring of the man of the house—who appears with his wife at the casket’s lid (in the place of the pastoral medallion of the Muse Casket).45 That implicit ownership of the woman and her world—whether as a mark of sexual control or of the politico-economics of the household—where all the constructions of the female sphere are for the satisfaction of men, belongs to the world of first-wave feminist readings of the John Berger type.46 Such an approach is arguably harder to sustain for the Muse Casket because the iconography contains no reference to men at all, but, should one incline that way,   For a general discussion, Marrou 1938; for a serious attempt to explore the world of elite paideia in the visual and material and well as cultural spheres, see the papers collected in Borg 2004. 40  On groups of Muses in the Roman world, see Lancha 1994, 1014–17; Faedo 1994, 1039–44; Schneider 1999, 191–234. 41   Note the importance of paideia in ancient silverware—Leader-Newby 2004, 123–216. 42   On Roman art as a series of mainly encomiastic gestures within a complex rhetorical system, see the essays collected by Elsner and Meyer 2014. 43   The conceit owes something to Roman literary culture’s play in erotic poetry on the poet’s Muse being not one of Apollo’s company but his beloved: see e.g. Ovid, Amores 3.12.15–18 and Sharrock 2002, esp. 225–6, citing Amores 3.1 and 2.18. 44   For examples, see Lancha 1994, 1020–1; Faedo 1994, 1041–3. 45   See for a feminist reading Wyke 1994, esp. 143–4. For a Marxist-inflected reading, see Schneider 1983, 5–38. 46   For instance Berger 1972, 45–64 or Mulvey 1989, with the critique of Pointon 1991. 39

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then the missing Muse can be said to imply—in a further recession of deferrals— the missing Apollo.47 And if we ask who is the Apollo around whom this band of Muses must dance, then it is surely the lord of the house, whose wife, daughters, and maidservants are among his chattels and who is so grand as not even to need to appear or be referred to on the casket he possesses. A more secondwave feminist reading of the Projecta Casket would argue that, whatever the socioeconomics of men and women—elite and serving—in the fourth century, nonetheless the casket’s imagery offers a celebratory space for the female sphere, one where the lady of the house (on the front of the base) is a mirror of Venus (on the front of the lid) and where women’s work in the toilet is given its due.48 This kind of reading emphasizes the encomiastic aspects of the Muse Casket and might posit that the game of the missing Muse could equally imply a missing Minerva as much as a missing Apollo. One may add that the space of the Muses and the cultural activity they personify in divine form sits alongside— or indeed is framed by—an insistent iconography of vine scrolls, grape clusters, and vine motifs, which may suggest a Dionysiac divine world as well as one grounded in nature. It may be thought one of the achievements of both caskets, and indeed of both together (as complementary objects from a single workshop and collection), that they create a relatively open interpretative space where multiple nuances are possible and then leave it free for female and male viewers to make their own creative and personal conclusions. One final set of observations: Clearly the casket’s purpose is adornment. But— unlike both the Projecta Casket and the Sevso Casket—the Muse Casket does not depict the process of adornment self-reflexively in its decoration. Indeed, it chooses an iconography of cultured education in the Muses of the base and of rural leisure within the female sphere in the medallion on top. It stresses, in other words, not female makeup or cosmetics, but the results of adornment in freeing the elite woman into a world of artistic activity and pastoral idyll. All this—both the cosmetic function of the casket and its paideia-related iconography—points to a world of artifice, culture, human constructions. But the figured panels in their architectural settings of arches on columns are interspersed with and set against an insistent imagery of the natural—that is, the vines, tendrils, grapes, and birds repeated in the flat panels of the base (see Figures 2.14, 2.15, and 2.17) and the vegetal spirals with leaves, grape clusters, and birds on the rinceaux of the lid (e.g., Figure 2.14).49 Now, none of this imagery is purely natural; it consistently rises from vases on both lid and base, and it attests to human cultivation, especially   In late Latin poetry Apollo is seated in the midst of the Muses in poem 3, nomina Musarum, of the Appendix Ausoniana (cf. also poem 5 line 70) and in the de Musis versus in the Dicta Catonis. 48   That at least is the thrust of Elsner 2007, 214–24. 49   For a brief but characteristically acute and suggestive discussion of the natural imagery of the Muse Casket, see Schneider 1983, 172–4. 47

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in the grapes. The lady in the medallion of the lid (see Figure 2.11)—sitting in the shade of her tree with bird and basket (conceivably a basket of grapes if one wants to extend the specific natural imagery of the rest of the casket to its top)— brings together the natural and the human emphases of the decoration, the nature-and-culture dialectic, which the iconography constructs. Ultimately, and with great elegance, the casket’s own visual commentary focuses on the object’s function as an artificer of the natural state of woman in order to embellish this with human-contrived enhancement—all the polish not only of physical perfumes and unguents but also of the education of the Muses. It is the two together—nature and culture—in all their resonances, that liberate the woman to be a sophisticated performer in elite society.50 That is both the message and the function of the Muse Casket as a vessel.

CONCLUSIONS

One issue of particular interest is that this kind of object was represented in social use in the arts of its culture of production. This is certainly a result of its relatively high social status and expense, as well as its significance in elite social ritual. The images of maids carrying caskets on chains—all from the fourth-century ad moment of the Muse Casket’s own production—undoubtedly socialize such objects’ meanings by placing them between an elite recipient of their contents and a world of servant women who applied the cosmetics they contained to their mistresses. The fact that serving women always carry such objects—not only in domestic contexts such as the Piazza Armerina floor (Figure 2.4) or the Projecta Casket (Figure 2.5) but also in the funerary environs of the tomb at Silistra— emphasizes and reinforces the female gendering of the Muse Casket in its contexts of use as well as its iconography. The images of caskets and case-sets in use from roughly contemporary contexts in China, such as on the Admonitions Scroll in the British Museum, which may be a later version of a painting created in the fourth century by the artist Gu Kaizhi (c. 345-406), are arguably close to the iconography of elite social usage in the later Roman empire (Figure 2.21); they speak of maids using such casket assemblages for the adornment of great ladies. Such images of cosmetic containers in use (in more than one culture) insist on the closeness of such objects to human beings, their place in adornment and in the wider cultural visualization of adornment, their mediation between social classes as items handled by maids in aid of their mistresses, and their insistent availability to handling.

  For a vision of the unification of culture and nature in the works of Philostratus as the heart of the Sophistic and educational enterprise of the third-century elite, see Swain 2009. 50

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F igure 2.21.  Lady at her toilet with a servant maid, open domed-lacquer toiletry casket with interior vessels by her side. Admonition Scroll, after Gu Kaizhi, fourth century ce, ink and color on silk, perhaps made between the sixth and eighth centuries. British Museum. Photograph © The Trustees of the British Museum.

The Muse Casket was most likely buried to hide it from invaders in the late fourth or early fifth century, when barbarians reached deep into Italy and indeed Alaric the Goth managed to sack Rome itself in 410. It was buried in order to be disinterred and reused in this world by whoever possessed it at the time of burial and was never intended to be, or functioned as, a funerary object. The material used, in the case of the Muse Casket, silver plate, was carefully and skillfully transformed—from sheet metal—through a variety of technical means and skillful crafting as well as a series of aesthetic effects to make it fit for an elevated patron. The casket’s interior advertises the repoussé working of its manufacture, through the deliberate unfinish of its final state, with the exposure of the negative, hollowed-out backs of the images that adorn its exterior. It makes a play of the decorative differences of exterior and interior surfaces (the former far more flamboyant than the latter), which themselves relate to the subtlety of convex and concave spatial forms in an object to a great degree contrived in the round. In the fluted panels of the domed lid of the Muse Casket, convex and concave

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are combined to complex effect in both exterior and interior. The need to construct a formal differentiation of inside and outside supports the use of negatives in the Muse Casket (themselves the product of the repoussé-making process) since the object eschews the spatial binary opposition of concave and convex for defining inside and outside which we would expect in a simpler circular form such as that of the Sevso Casket (Figure 2.6). In iconographic terms, the Muse Casket borrows the figural forms of naturalistic representation in the Greco-Roman tradition both for the images for the Muses on the base and for the female figure on the medallion atop the lid. The Muse Casket may indeed be seen as a deeply meaning-laden device for the achievement of physical transformation through the beautification of the individual. This may also imply a spiritual transformation in the sense of giving divine graces to the user, analogous to those of the Muses. But, equally, it can be taken simply and pragmatically as a vessel for the holding of unguents, perfumes, cosmetics, and other items of the toilet, whose iconography is no more than “meaningless” ornament. The range of potential meanings available within the culture is thus large—from the “purely decorative” to the “deeply meaningful” (and encompassing any stage on the spectrum between). Just as the formal structure of the surviving objects from antiquity and their iconographic meanings were triangulated by the subjective and bodily experience of their uses within their given cultures at the relevant periods of their production and usage, so these two sets of data—form and iconography—are triangulated in modernity by the scholar, viewer, or museum visitor who ventures an interpretation. Our access to ancient meanings, let alone the ancient parameters for the making of meaning, is extremely limited in modernity—which is why a wide spectrum between domesticating and exoticizing readings must exist and be allowed to do so. But, while we cannot approximate to even a small proportion of the contextual and cultural knowledge available to an ancient viewer in the time our objects were made, the basic triangular pattern of form, iconographic adornment, and viewing (meaning both bodily and subjective) not only remains in place in modernity but has two of its points effectively fixed in the same place as for antiquity. Despite the many changes to objects over time and as a result of treatment that includes archaeological interment and excavation as well as restoration, broadly speaking the structural form of the Muse Casket and its iconography remain the same—both for an ancient viewer or user and for its modern commentators. It is the third point in the triangle—viewing and especially its subjective (as opposed to physiological and bodily) aspects—that is radically different. In 1932, worrying about precisely this issue (although he expressed himself somewhat differently) Erwin Panofsky proposed with great acuity that we draw a conceptual line around historical objects to exclude the application of any forms of knowledge that belong to later periods or contexts than those in

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which our objects were made or flourished.51 That line was to be drawn from a compendium of knowledge acquired from texts and relevant contexts (historical and archaeological) in relation to any given object, and its merit was at least to exclude excessively “violent” or “subjective” forms of interpretation by modern scholars.52 The proposal was, and remains, brilliant. But nothing Panofsky, or any other scholar, subsequently wrote has been able to cast clearer light on the question of what, when one stays within the line of exclusion, is an appropriate adduction of a text or a context to help interpreters to generate meaning and historians to generalize from the object to a larger historical picture. For all the grand propositions of his later theory of iconology, Panofsky never constructed a protocol for what would be appropriate. There remains a vast and free space for interpretative creativity, judgment, and whimsy. What we can say is that the factor for determining meaning in a vessel of this kind is a physically embodied subjectivity who handles it. It is, in fact, true to say that unless meaning is supplied at the point of use by the user (or his or her audience), then these objects are largely meaningless—although they remain potential bearers of meaning when they are not being handled. That factor for determining meanings—an embodied subjectivity—remains the same whether meaning is supplied by a modern scholar or museum visitor, or a postulated ancient subject (such as the lady who possessed the Muse Casket). There is of course a very wide range of possible meanings that can be supplied at both these levels (in modern interpretation of all kinds and in the subjects of ancient history, as far as we can determine them). But in both cases, the objects themselves—as dynamic and complex structures with elaborate and subtle iconographies—offer certain constraints that help us limit, define, and determine at least some of the infinite plenitude of potential interpretations that might be offered. Those constraints have a certain artifactual logic, inherent in the material construction of boxes within boxes in the case of the Muse Casket, which structures a user’s desire in terms of increasing interiority and an urge to penetrate, while embodying that desire through the physical engagement with the object via handling, opening, and unpacking. The formal nature of the Muse Casket in consisting of containers within a container in relation to its function as a device used for the styling and beautification of the self, points to the possibility that certain kinds of manufactured objects may have effects in modulating subjectivity that are dependent on form as such and may be valid beyond cultural difference. We may add further that the difference between the ancient subject and the modern interpreter is perhaps an artificial one because ancient viewers—while they certainly did exist—can only exist now in modern interpretation. Nonetheless,   Panofsky 2012 [1932].   See Panofsky 2012 [1932], 476–7 on subjectivity and the violence of interpretation.

51 52

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the historical constraints of relevant texts and contexts do help us construct relatively more likely and culturally embedded ideals of ancient subjects than would be possible in any other way. We may say ultimately that the Muse Casket evokes an embodied subjectivity in the elite owner—one whose desire is both to see inside the box and to access its tangible contents—who is inevitably directed to a pattern (we may say a ­materially constituted narrative) of opening and unpacking, of closure and putting away. The discussion of subjectivity is complex because it very likely involves servants who do quite a bit of the handling on behalf of the owner (as in the images of hanging caskets in use), servants whose own responses may have been both similar and divergent from those of their employers. Not only are the caskets and their contents shaped and sized for human handling but what they contain is directly pertinent to the beautification of the human body. The Muse Casket speaks to the human body, therefore, in more than one way.53 Its material structure—in terms of a series of smaller containers with perishable and refillable materials placed inside the larger box—structures artifactually a series of practices, arguably social rituals, of adornment and of the toilet that are associated with ideas of self-transformation, which are in part central to elite identity within Roman culture. All this points, both within individual cultures and beyond them, to some possibility of generalization about embodied subjectivities in the context of the use of such objects. In that space where the embodied subject meets the object (defined by both form and decoration), art-historical meaning is generated.

ACK NOW L EDGM EN TS The detailed research for this paper was conducted while I was in receipt of a large grant from the Leverhulme Trust for the Empires of Faith Project, on late antique visual culture across Eurasia, at the British Museum. My gratitude is due with warmth and thanks to my colleagues on that project and at the Museum—notably Roger Bland, Richard Hobbs, and Christopher Entwistle (who organized excellent new photography of the Muse Casket) in the Department of Prehistory and Europe—as well as to the Leverhulme Trust. I thank especially the other authors within this volume, who are my dear colleagues in the Center for Global Ancient Art at Chicago, and the many participants at the wonderful conversation in Chicago in 2013 where the initial version of this chapter was presented. Thanks as well to Verity Platt, Jie Shi, Jeremy Tanner, and Jay Williams for improvements on an early draft.

  For the problematics of vessel as body and body as vessel—of vessels speaking to, imitating, perhaps even functioning as bodies—see Claudia Brittenham’s account of classic Maya vessels in this volume. 53

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R EF ER ENCE S B abelon , E. (1916), Le trésor d’argenterie de Berthouville (Paris: Lévy). B ánki , S. (1972), La collection du Musée Roi St Étienne: objets romains figures en bronze, argent et plomb (Székesfehérvár: Publications de l’Université de Saint-Étienne). B aratte , F. (ed) (1989), Tresors d’orfevrerie Gallo-romains (Paris: Éditions de la Réunion des musées nationaux). B ell , M. (1979), “Pitcher with the nine muses,” in K. Weitzmann (ed), Age of spirituality (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art), 261–2. B erger , J. (1972), Ways of seeing (Harmondsworth: Penguin). B org , B. (2004), Paideia: the world of the second sophistic (Berlin: de Gruyter). B ruce -M itford , R. (2005), The corpus of large Celtic hanging-bowls (Oxford: Oxford University Press). B undrick , S.  (2005), Music and image in classical Athens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). B uschhausen , H. (1971), Die spätrömische Metallscrinia und frühchristliche Reliquiare (Vienna: H. Bohlaus Nachfolger). C ameron , A. (1985), “The date and the owners of the Esquiline Treasure,” American Journal of Archaeology 89, 135–45. C ameron , A. (1992), “Observations on the distribution and ownership of late Roman silver plate,” Journal of Roman Archaeology 5, 177–85. C arandini , A., Ricci, A., and de Vos, M. (1982), Filosofiana: the villa of Piazza Armerina (Palermo: S. F. Flaccovio). C urle , A. (1923), The treasure of Traprain (Glasgow: Maclehose). D alton , O.  M.  (1901), Catalogue of early Christian antiquities and objects from the Christian east (London: British Museum Press). D odd , E.  C.  (1961), Byzantine silver stamps (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection). D origo , W. (1971), Late Roman painting (London: J. M. Dent & Sons). E lsner , J.  (2007), Roman eyes: visuality and subjectivity in art and text (Princeton: Princeton University Press). E lsner , J.  (2008), “Framing objects we study: three boxes from late Roman Italy,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 71, 21–38. E lsner , J. (2013), “Closure and penetration: reflections on the Pola casket,” Acta ad archaeologiam et artium historiam pertinentia 26, 183–227. E lsner , J. (2015), “Relic, icon and architecture: the material articulation of the holy in east Christian art,” in C. Hahn and H. Klein (eds), Saints and sacred matter: the cult of relics in Byzantium and beyond (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Publications), 13–40. E lsner , J. and M eyer , M. (eds) (2014), Art and rhetoric in Roman culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). F aedo , L. (1994), “Musae II,” Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae 7, 1030–59. G entili , G. V. (1999), La villa Romana di Piazza Armerina, Palazzo Erculio, 3 vols. (Osimo: Fondazione Don Carlo).

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G raves , M. S. (2018), Arts of allusion: object, ornament and architecture in medieval Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press). G uillaumet , J.-P. and L aude , G. (2009), L’art de la serrurerie gallo-romaine (Dijon: Éditions Universitaires de Dijon). H obbs , R.  (2016), The Mildenhall treasure: late Roman silver plate from East Anglia (London: British Museum Press). K ent , J. and P ainter , K. (1977), Wealth of the Roman world (London: British Museum Publications). L ancha , J. (1994), “Musae I,” Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae 7, 1013–30. L eader -N ewby , R. (2004), Silver and society in late antiquity (Aldershot: Ashgate). M ango , M. M. and B ennet , A. (1994), The Sevso treasure, pt. 1, supplementary series of Journal of Roman Archaeology 12, 1–480. M anning , W. (1985), Catalogue of the Romano-British iron tools, fittings and weapons in the British Museum (London: British Museum). M arrou , H.  (1938), MOYCIKOC ANHP: Étude sur les scènes de la vie intellectuelle figurant sur les monuments funéraires romains (Grenoble: Didier et Richard). M atsulevich , L. (1934), Une sepulture d’un roi barbare en Europe orientalle (Moscow: Les Éditions de l’État). M ulvey , L. (1989), “Visual pleasure and narrative cinema,” in L. Mulvey, Visual and other pleasures (London: Macmillan), 14–28. M urray , P. (2004), “The muses and their arts,” in P. Murray and P. Wilson (eds), Music and the muses: the culture of mousike ̄ in the classical Athenian city (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 365–89. M urray , P. and W ilson , P. (2004), “Introduction: mousike ̄, not music’, in P. Murray and P Wilson (eds), Music and the muses: the culture of mousike ̄ in the classical Athenian city (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 1–8. P ainter , K. (1977), The Mildenhall treasure (London: British Museum). P ainter , K. (1988), “Roman silver hoards: ownership and status,” in F. Baratte (ed), Argenterie romaine et byzantine (Paris: De Boccard), 97–111. P ainter , K. (1993), “Late Roman silver: a reply to Alan Cameron,” Journal of Roman Archaeology 6, 109–15. P ainter , K. (2000), “Il Tesoro dell’Esquilio,” in S. Ensoli and E. La Rocca (eds), Aurea Roma (Rome: Bretschneider), 140–6. P ainter , K. (2005), “A note on the Water Newton hanging-bowl and other Roman hanging vessels,” in R. Bruce-Mitford, The corpus of late Celtic hanging-bowls (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 81. P anofsky , E. (2012 [1932]), “On the problem of describing and interpreting works of art,” trans. Katharina Lorenz and Jaś Elsner, Critical Inquiry 38, 467–82. P ointon , M.  (1991), Naked authority: the body in Western painting 1830–1908 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). R idley , R. T. (1996), “The finding of the Esquiline Treasure: an unpublished letter,” The Antiquaries Journal 76, 215–22. S chneider , L.  (1983), Die Domäne als Weltbild: Wirkungsstrukturen der spätantiken Bildersprache (Wiesbaden: Steiner).

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S chneider , C. (1999), Die Musengruppe von Milet (Mainz: Von Zabern). S harrock , A.  (2002), “An a-musing tale: gender, genre and Ovid’s battles with inspiration in the Metamorphoses,” in E. Spentzou and D. Fowler (eds), Cultivating the muses (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 206–27. S helton , K. J. (1981), The Esquiline Treasure (London: British Museum Publications). S helton , K. J. (1985), “The Esquiline Treasure: the nature of the evidence,” American Journal of Archaeology 89: 147–55. S herlock , D. (1976), “Silver and silversmithing,” in D. Strong and D. Brown (eds), Roman crafts (London: Duckworth), 11–24. S mith , R.  (1922), A guide to the antiquities of Roman Britain in the Department of British and Medieval Antiquities (London: British Museum). S terligova , L. (ed) (2013), Byzantine antiquities: works of art from the collection of the Moscow Kremlin museums (Moscow: Moscow Kremlin Museums). S wain , S. (2009), “Culture and nature in Philostratus,” in E. Bowie and J. Elsner (eds), Philostratus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 33–46. T ürr , K. (1971), “Ein Musengruppe hadrianischer Zeit,” MAR 10, 9–35. V rkic,́ Š. and S kelac , G. (2016), “The Vinkovci Treasure: results of the preliminary analysis of a hoard of silver items from Late Antiquity,” Journal of the Archaeological Museum in Zagreb 49, 145–218. V ulic,́ H., D orac ̌ i c ́ , D., H obbs , R., and L ang , J. (2017), “The Vinkovci Treasure of Late Roman silver plate: a preliminary report,” Journal of Roman Archaeology 30, 127–50. W egner , M. (1966), “Die Musensarkophage,” ASR 5, 93–110. W yke , M. (1994), “The woman in the mirror: the rhetoric of adornment in the Roman world,” in L.  Archer, S.  Fischler, and M.  Wyke (eds), Women in ancient societies (London: Macmillan), 134–51.

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When Pots Had Legs Body Metaphors on Maya Vessels Claudia Brittenham

A body is a vessel. A vessel is a body. This metaphor frequently proved irresistible to ancient artisans, yet the conceptual work that it did varied greatly across time and space. A Moche stirrup-spouted vessel in the shape of a human head, perhaps a portrait of a specific individual,1 is by no means the same as a Protocorinthian aryballos where an elaborately coiffed female head tops the swelling curves of the oil flask beneath (for more on body metaphors in Greek ceramics, see Richard Neer’s essay in this volume).2 Neither is like a ritual wine beaker in the shape of a fantastical bird, every inch of its cast bronze surface patterned with symmetrical masks.3 But morphology is not meaning. Saying that a vessel is shaped like a body is where the inquiry must begin, not where it ends. In this chapter, I trace the shifting meanings associated with the body metaphor in Maya pottery from the city of Tikal, located in modern Guatemala. Between 300 and 800 ce, there were at least three moments when lids adorned with human heads caused vessels to be read as bodies. Vessels became a medium of fruitful dialogue with the past, as each iteration of the theme clearly drew on previous precedent, but used it to radically different ends. What began as a relatively unpopular adjunct to a predominant world of animal body metaphors on clay serving dishes before 400 ce became a satisfying way to integrate foreign forms in succeeding decades and the key touchstone in a pair of archaizing vessels made out of precious jade centuries later. Within this chain of associations,

1  Donnan 2004; Donnan 2006. However, generic, mold-made versions seem to have been just as popular and efficacious; see Trever 2012. 2   E.g., Louvre CA 931; see Neer 2012, fig. 4.18. 3   E.g., Yang 1999, cat. no. 48. For the zoomorphic images on the surfaces of the bronze vessels, see Wu 2016.

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the bodies invoked became increasingly specific, their meanings more and more politically charged. It is surprisingly difficult to write about an individual vessel in isolation. Bound by the constraints of function and tradition, each vessel is an entry into a series of similar objects. Much of the interest—and what makes the examples here so distinctive—is in the way that they play on the existing constraints and conventions of their genre, eking new meaning out of small but conceptually significant changes in decorative program. Getting at how this is accomplished means paying close attention to each individual vessel, while also thinking about series, context, assemblage, interaction, and intended contents. The vessels discussed here are selected not for their representative nature but rather for the richness of their resonance with one another, for the continuities and contrasts in their conceptual programs. Through a close examination of these morphologically similar vessels, I will consider changing patterns of elite sociality and international relations as they play out in the Maya tomb. By following the transformations of the body metaphor, this chapter cuts across traditional typologies of Maya vessels, which segregate objects first by material and then by chronology, context, and form.4 Each of the vessels ­considered here was recovered from a royal or elite tomb at Tikal, part of a rich assemblage of funerary offerings deposited with the deceased. And while there is much to be learned from the close contextual reading of an entire offering program, what is striking about Maya burial assemblages is their very diversity: there is no parallel to the codified set of vessels required in Chinese burials (see Wu Hung’s chapter in this volume for Chinese ritual vessels and for the value of a contextual reading of an entire offering program).5 Because most whole Maya vessels are found in tombs—or presumably looted from them—there is always a suspicion that the vessels found in tombs were made expressly for burial. Yet it is common for vessels in tombs to show signs of wear and sometimes even repairs, suggesting that many objects were deposited in burials after a long life above ground.6 In the tomb, it may be that the contents were sometimes more important than the vessels. This tension—between the vessel’s prior life above ground and  its function in the funerary assemblage, between the contents and the ­container—animates all of the vessels discussed in this chapter. 4   For example, the University of Pennsylvania Tikal Project divides ceramics from other “artifacts,” including the jade vessel that will be discussed here. Within the ceramics report, objects are grouped by the burials in which they were found; burials are then presented in order of discovery within each ceramic phase; see Culbert 1993; Moholy-Nagy 2008. 5   For approaches to the Maya tomb, see Coe 1988; Fitzsimmons 2009; Scherer 2015. 6   Sometimes, at that moment of deposition, bowls or plates have a cylindrical hole drilled in their centers, rendering them useless for quotidian function once they have been placed in the tomb; see Martínez de Velasco Cortina 2014. This once again suggests a rich prior life rather than an object made for burial.

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T H E FOU R-L EG GED E A RT H A N D T H E BA SA L -F L A NGE WOM A N

On a serving dish recovered from an elite tomb at Tikal, ca. 300–400 ce, the lid converts the vessel into a body (Figure 3.1). A knob projecting from the center of the lid is modeled with a human head, gendered female by its coiffure and face paint.7 Chin angled slightly upwards, the face gazes into the distance, exposing an elongated neck and revealing delicately modeled nostrils. It is an expensive body, with markers of elite status inherent in it and applied to it. The sloping forehead (the result of childhood cranial modification), the raised scarification at both sides of the mouth, and the stretched earlobes are beautifying tactics begun

F igure 3.1.  Basal-flange bowl excavated from Burial PNT-025, Tikal. This burial was found in Structure 5D-84-5 of the Mundo Perdido group. Clay, fourth century ce. 26 cm diameter, 24.5 cm tall. Museo Nacional de Arqueologia y Etnología, Guatemala. Photo © Justin Kerr, Kerr Portfolio K4896.

7   Contemporary polychrome images of women are hard to come by, but note the striking similarity to the pattern of face paint on the women of the painted radial pyramid at Calakmul, several centuries later; see Carrasco Vargas and Cordeiro Baquiero 2012. For body paint, see Houston, Stuart, and Taube 2006, 22–4.

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from infancy to adolescence; the large earspools, elaborate hairstyle, face paint, and painted red lips are later cosmetic interventions that further augment the elite body.8 A delicate tracery of dotted lines converts the rounded lid into a gently billowing blouse or huipil, while simultaneously suppressing close attention to anatomy below the neck.9 A knotted cord of red and cream delineates the neckline of the garment, and at the rim of the lid, a step-fret pattern simultaneously serves as garment and vessel border, capitalizing on a geometric pattern common to both textile and pottery decoration. Small circles within the step-frets convert them into schematic serpents with curling tails, another clever play on the simultaneous properties of perception. Vessel and lid reveal markedly different conceptions of space and decoration, while preserving the same red, black, yellow, and cream color scheme, a restricted repertoire of colors typical of pottery of this period. On the outside of the vessel bowl, figures emerge against a ground, the planar decoration of curvilinear, stylized serpents confined within panels against a black surface, while on the lid, the sculptural conception unifies the three-dimensional figural subject and its twodimensional polychrome decoration. Yet despite this disjunction, there is no question that lid and base were employed together, at least in the final context of the tomb, and the dissonance between figural regimes indeed adds creative tension to the vessel.10 At the same time unusual and representative, this vessel was excavated from an elite tomb in the Mundo Perdido complex at Tikal, perhaps home to the city’s royal family during the third and fourth centuries ce. Found on the central axis of the upper platform of a small temple, this burial of an adult man, between twenty-one and thirty-five years old at death, was moderately luxurious for its time.11 The walls of the tomb were painted red, and seven stone slabs sealed the 8   A cognate example, unprovenanced, also has jade inlays in the teeth, another marker of elite status and beauty. See Kerr Portfolio 6944, http://research.mayavase.com/portfolio_hires.php?search=6944& date_added=&image=6944. For scarification and dental modification, see Houston, Stuart, and Taube, 2006, 18–22; Romero 1958. 9   The cognate vessel, Kerr Portfolio 6944, has rudimentary arms painted on the curving lid, a much less satisfying formal solution. 10   This kind of dissonance is not uncommon; most basal-flange or tetrapod vessels with modeled figural lids have similarly planar decoration, only loosely related to the figure, on the sides (see Figure 3.2 and Figure 3.3). The unprovenanced cognate object, Kerr Portfolio 6944, also displays a similar decorative disjunction, but a feathery border on both lid and vessel makes their intended unity more clear. 11   Burial PNT-025 was dated to the Manik 2 phase (300–400 ce); for details, see Laporte and Fialko 1987, 142. Burial PNT-025 was found inside Structure 5D-85-5, the fifth excavated substructure of the northernmost of three small temples on the top of an elongated platform running north to south, to the east of the principal pyramid of the Mundo Perdido group. Originally part of an observatory complex called an E-group, by the time this tomb was deposited, Structure 5D-85 had become one of a series of temple structures without astronomical function, the site of several important burials. For more on the architectural history of the Mundo Perdido group, see Laporte and Fialko 1995.

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top of the crypt. The burial goods consisted of six vessels, a necklace of bone beads, a bone figurine, shell pendants, three spondylus shells, a stingray spine, a jade pectoral, and fragments of pyrite (perhaps from a mirror), all covered with abundant cinnabar—a relatively generous assemblage, very much in keeping with the other burials nearby, though certainly not the richest among them.12 This has led the excavators to suggest that the tomb housed a member of the royal family, though probably not a king.13 The vessel under consideration was by far the most elaborate of the six vessels buried in the tomb, which also included two basal-flange bowls with cylindrical knobs and nonfigural lids; a basal-flange bowl without a lid; and yet another unlidded basal-flange bowl, inside which nestled a rounded effigy vessel with its spout shaped like the head of a long-beaked bird.14 In this assemblage, the lidded lady stands out for its quality of decoration and the boldness of its sculptural conception, yet its relationship to the body in the tomb is probably not as direct as a portrait, for the vessel body is female, while the body in the tomb was male.15 Equally importantly, the funerary context in which this vessel was found may not have been its sole or original context of use. Though this particular vessel does not show many signs of wear, other such vessels do, suggesting a rich life above ground before their eventual deposition. Ranging from just under one foot to nearly two feet in diameter, lidded serving bowls like this one seem likely to have contained tamales, stews, or hot dishes for communal meals; indeed, residues of maize and cacao have been found in some examples.16 Perhaps the contents of the vessels may have been as important as their forms, as they carried this tradition of consumption into the afterlife. So this lidded lady likely began as a serving vessel for elite feasts, where she would have contained some kind of hot food for communal delectation.17 This vessel is a creative departure from the usual run of body metaphors in Early Classic Maya pottery. A particular popular conceit, at Tikal and elsewhere,   For example, the adjoining tomb, the sepulcher of a middle-aged woman, featured eight vessels, several of them exquisitely decorated, as well as a comparable or finer assemblage of precious materials. See Laporte and Fialko 1987, 142. 13   Laporte and Fialko 1995, 62–3.    14  Laporte and Fialko 1987, figs. 8 and 12. 15   Of course, Richard Neer’s observations on Greek funerary sculpture are an apt caution here—a kore could be the sēma or marker on a young man’s tomb; an insistence on such a direct relationship may reveal our own limited imagination. See Neer 2010; Neer 2012, 114. It is also important to note that biological sex might not correlate with lived gender and that the remains present in a Maya tomb might be insufficient to identify someone assigned male at birth who identified as female; textiles and other markers of dress do not survive, and burial assemblages can be quite similar for both men and women. 16   For residues in Maya vessels, see Coe 1990, vol. 2, 484 and passim; Hurst et al. 1989; Pincemin Deliberos 1994, 51–7, 75; McNeil, Hurst, and Sharer 2006; Loughmiller-Newman 2013. For ancient Maya cuisine, see Coe 1994, 120–68. 17   Given that food preparation was female labor, the lidded lady can seem to present the fruits of her labor within her own body. I am grateful to Ariana Iranpour for the suggestion. 12

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was to convert the vessel into the body of a bird, its head and beak forming a handle, while the birds’ wings and tail are painted on the domed lid of the ­basal-flange bowl. Four stubby legs could raise the vessel body off the ground, ­simultaneously reading as a surplus of limbs for the bipedal bird above.18 In Figure 3.2, that bird is probably an ocellated turkey (Meleagris ocellata), one of the principal protein sources for the ancient Maya and perhaps precisely the kind of meat flavoring a dish inside the vessel.19 But more often, the birds are aquatic ones, like a long-necked cormorant or heron whose beak forms the handle of a tetrapod vessel in the Yale University Art Gallery collection (Figure 3.3). Once again, the wings of the bird spread out, painted on the lid, as the head and neck arch into the air—and into the round, pulling an unlucky fish with it from two

F igure 3.2.  Tetrapod bowl with bird lid, excavated from Burial PNT-062, Mundo Perdido Structure 5D-88, Tikal. Clay, fourth century ce. Museo Nacional de Arqueologia y Etnología, Guatemala. Photo © De Agostini Picture Library/G. Dagli Orti/Bridgeman Images.

18   A point of terminology: these vessels are referred to basal-flange bowls or tetrapod bowls, depending on whether they have a prominent lower ridge or four leglike supports underneath. The two forms seem to have been relatively interchangeable: both functioned as elite serving vessels and grave goods. 19   Coe 1994, 124–5.

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F igure 3.3.  Tetrapod bowl showing a bird on the lid catching a fish; four peccary heads form the supports for the vessel. Clay, fourth century ce. 27.3 × 27.32 cm. Yale University Art Gallery 2001.82.1a-b. Gift of Peggy and Richard M. Danziger, LL.B. 1963. Photo © Yale University Art Gallery.

into three dimensions.20 This trope of the fishing bird dragging its catch into three dimensions was so pleasing that it was repeated again and again, in a variety of different styles, suggesting that this theme found favor at many royal courts. If the surface decoration of the vessel pointed to its intended contents, perhaps the flexibility was part of its appeal; either fish or fowl—or both together—would bring the food inside the dish into congruity with its outer container. As these aquatic birds rise from the surface of their respective vessels, it seems that the body of the vessel is not only the body of the bird but also a body of water, another frequent theme on Maya vessels, perhaps an apt allusion to the soupy contents inside. A shallow tripod dish from the nearby city of Uaxactun makes precisely such a claim as an undulating band filled with small dots wraps around its outside, using the convention for representing water to play on the contents of the vessel (Figure 3.4).21 Fanciful aquatic creatures, including a shark   Fields and Reents-Budet 2005, 128; Finamore and Houston 2010, 50–1.   This vessel is from Burial A–20 at Uaxactun. Smith 1955, vol. 2, figs. 11f, h; Finamore and Houston 2010, 91. 20 21

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F igure 3.4.  Tripod bowl from Uaxactun Burial A20. The orange band in the center with the small dots inside is a familiar Maya convention for representing water. Clay, fifth century ce. 13 × 25 × 25 cm. Museo Nacional de Arqueologia y Etnología, Guatemala. Photo © Jorge Pérez de Lara.

and a waterlily serpent, intertwine with the aquatic band on the exterior, showing this watery realm as a place of vivid, thrashing movement. A lidded basal-flange bowl from another elite tomb at Tikal spells out the equation (Figure 3.5). An aquatic bird forms the lid, using the familiar convention of beaky handle and painted wings; the undulating scrolls on the sides of the bowl symbolize water, making explicit the idea that the vessel is like a body of water; and the basal flange of the bowl is rendered as a turtle, with projecting head and swimming legs.22 This might appear to be a simple scene of aquatic beasts swimming together through the water, were it not that the Maya sometimes conceptualized the surface of the earth as a giant turtle or caiman floating on the sea.23 So this bird-and-turtle vessel is not just any lake scene, but also a microcosm. The four legs undergirding tetrapod bowls may also allude to this idea of the vessel as a world, for the Maya have long believed that the earth was supported 22   For discussions of this vessel, see Gallenkamp and Johnson 1985, 124; Laporte and Fialko 1995, 59–63; Laporte and Fialko 1987, 142; Finamore and Houston 2010, 48–9. 23   For the turtle as the surface of the earth, see Schele and Freidel 1990, 92–4 and passim; Miller and Martin 2004, 57, 87; Taube 2010, 210–13. This idea also lends added meaning to a basal-flange bowl whose lid is patterned like a turtle carapace, now in the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; see Miller and Martin 2004, 87; Fields and Reents-Budet 2005, 131.

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F igure 3.5.  Basal-flange bowl with a bird on the lid and a turtle on the basal flange, excavated from Burial PNT-062, Mundo Perdido Structure 5D-88, Tikal. Clay, fourth century ce. 16.5 cm diameter, 22.5 cm tall. Museo Nacional de Arqueologia y Etnología, Guatemala 11416a,b. Photo © Jorge Pérez de Lara.

by four world-bearers, often called bacabs, placed at the four directions. On these elongated supports, the firing holes become eyes or mouths for supporting creatures, most often the peccary, a kind of wild boar, but sometimes also a bird (see Figures 3.2–3.3). As Linda Schele first noted, the words for peccary and turtle in most Mayan languages are near homonyms, distinguished only by vowel quality, so by a process of substitution, the peccaries are also like that turtle that was the surface of the earth on the vessel from Tikal in Figure 3.5.24 Other cosmogonic myths are likely referenced in basal-flange bowls as well, including a gory but still-obscure story about a jaguar-iguana surrounded by severed heads; this myth is difficult to decipher as it does not seem to have persisted into periods with more extensive written documentation.25   Looper 1991, cited in Finamore and Houston 2010, 50. See also Schele and Miller 1986, 280.   The most spectacular example is a giant basal-flange bowl with a jaguar-spotted iguana excavated from Becan; see Finamore and Houston 2010, 250–3. At Tikal, both jaguar and iguana versions have been found in Burial 22, Burial PNT-025, and Burial PNT-062; see Culbert 1993, figs. 22–4; Laporte and Fialko 1995, figs. 29a–b. Similar vessels were also found at Holmul; see Callaghan and Neivens de Estrada 24 25

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There is thus much at play—and also at stake—in these clever pots, a great deal of meaning to be teased out of their apparent disjunctions. Many of these vessels seem almost to label their contents; their subjects—turtles, fish, birds, frogs, iguanas, peccaries—are all potential sources of food, perhaps precisely the meat flavoring the dishes inside.26 Sophisticated conversation pieces, they might have provoked delight and amusement at a royal feast. Yet there are more serious overtones as well, with many vessels seeming to replicate the order of the world. This was a coherent and fully worked out system of metaphors, upon which potters could ring endless series of changes, no vessel quite like any other. However, none of these layers of meaning transfers perfectly onto the female vessel. While her shape pertains to the same playful ethos as the other vessels, she is neither a comestible, nor a microcosm, nor a body of water. By her rarity, we might wonder if she is perhaps faintly unsettling, not quite as pleasing as the metaphors drawn from the animal world. The incipient violence that one must do to the female body when lifting the heavy lid of this vessel, either smothering her face or wringing her neck, poses challenges of interaction not encountered with the avian bodies; indeed, grasping the neck of a turkey or cormorant while opening a vessel may be part of the point. Perhaps this vessel seemed just too pregnant with meaning, too charged a body to fit into this universe of symbols. While the human body was never a particularly popular vessel form in the Maya area during the third and fourth centuries, it proved strangely resilient, and indeed proliferated during the tremendous social upheavals of the late fourth century ce.27 EN T ER I NG T H E WAT ER

On a vessel from the tomb of Tikal king Yax Nuun Ahiin (r. 379–404 ce), the lid is once again rendered as a human head, chin lifted and gazing into the distance (Figure 3.6). But the shape of the vessel beneath is completely different: a tall, cylindrical tripod with an angular lid, whose form is derived from the vessels of Teotihuacan, a powerful city far to the north. The vessel continues to read as a 2016, 155. For the potential parallels to this cosmogonic myth, see Velásquez García 2006; Chinchilla Mazariegos 2006; Taube 2010, 204–6. 26   Hamblin 1984; Coe 1994, 120–60. In this light, the rarity of deer on these Early Classic serving vessels is striking, for this was certainly one of the major and most ideologically significant sources of protein in the ancient Maya diet. Dogs were likely raised and eaten as well. Plant foods—such as maize, squash, beans, and mushrooms—are also absent on these vessels. 27   Examples of this kind of vessel are quite rare, though the sample of Early Classic tombs is small. In addition to the unprovenanced vessel cognate to the one discussed here (Kerr Portfolio 6944), there is a vessel with a human head recently excavated from the Diablo tomb at El Zotz; see Houston et al. 2015, 138–40; the tomb also featured several vessels with howler monkey lids. There is also a tetrapod vessel with human torso on the lid, excavated from a royal tomb in Structure III at Calakmul; see Pincemin Deliberos 1994, 57–75. Note that this last vessel is likely later in date, post-378 ce, a date fitting with the tighter linkage between entombed body and represented body, which seems more similar to the later examples discussed later.

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F igure 3.6.  Tripod vessel from Burial 10, Tikal, 404 ce. Clay and painted stucco. 24.5 cm tall, 8.8 cm diameter. Museo Nacional de Arqueologia y Etnología, Guatemala 10,029a,b. Photo © Jorge Pérez de Lara.

body, but in a slightly different way: now the elongated sides of the vessel seem to signify the body, the angle of the lid suggesting the angle of shoulders and their approximate position in human anatomy. But the decoration of the vessel refers less explicitly to the corporeal metaphor outlined on the lid; rather than being clad in painted textiles, the lid is encircled by five cartouches containing glyphic text, and on the sides of the vessel, diagonal bands enclose fish and sharklike creatures (Figure 3.7).28 While this vessel has much in common with the earlier example, it is also a site of radical change. In the decades between the two burials, Tikal came into intense contact with the Central Mexican city of Teotihuacan, nearly one thousand kilometers to the north. With a population of over one hundred thousand living in apartment compounds on a tightly regulated urban grid, Teotihuacan was a  great Mesoamerican power, a city unlike any other in the region.29 While   Coggins 1975, 164–5; Culbert 1993, fig. 19c. While one of the figures has the distinctive projecting tooth, curling nose, and dorsal fin of the Maya xok or shark, the other two animals have more fishlike mouths and fins. For aquatic iconography, see Finamore and Houston 2010, 18–21. 29  For background on Teotihuacan, see Millon 1981; Berrin and Pasztory 1993; Cowgill 1997; Pasztory 1997; Solís 2009; Cowgill 2015. 28

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F igure 3.7.  Line drawings of the tripod vessel from Burial 10, Tikal. Line drawings from Tikal Report 25A, fig. 19a. Courtesy of the Tikal Project, Penn Museum.

F igure 3.8.  Teotihuacan Thin Orange Ware tripod vessel with lid. Clay, third–fifth century ce. Museo Nacional de Antropología, Mexico. Photo by the author.

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F igure 3.9.  Teotihuacan tripod vessel with stucco decoration. Clay and painted stucco, ca. 200–450 ce. Height 13.5 cm. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Phil Berg Collection (M.71.73.179).

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F igure 3.10a.  Tripod vessel from Tikal Problematical Deposit 50. Line drawings from Tikal Report 27A, fig. 128a. Courtesy of the Tikal Project, Penn Museum.

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F igure 3.10b.  Tripod vessel from Tikal Problematical Deposit 50. Line drawings from Tikal Report 27A, fig. 128a. Courtesy of the Tikal Project, Penn Museum.

exchanges between Teotihuacan and the Maya region had been going on for years—perhaps even influencing the architectural forms of the Mundo Perdido complex where the vessel in Figure 3.1 was found—Teotihuacan involvement in Maya politics became more direct in 378 ce, when the death of Tikal king Chak Tok Ich’aak coincided with the “arrival” of a lord from Teotihuacan.30 This laconic textual allusion bespeaks considerable political upheaval, perhaps even a Teotihuacan-led military intervention; the next king of Tikal, Yax Nuun Ahiin, seems to have been the son of a Teotihuacan lord and a local Tikal woman. His public monuments show an interlacing of Teotihuacan and Maya conventions— and so, too, do the materials in his tomb, including the vessel in Figure 3.6. Pots at Teotihuacan had legs, too, but only three of them. This tripod vessel shape was a signature of Teotihuacan, occurring in a variety of sizes from personal cups to elaborate basins. The shape of Teotihuacan tripod vessels is relentlessly abstract. When they have lids, those lids have a simple sloping shape and are topped with a cylindrical knob, with none of the figural play that characterizes Maya vessels; the most anyone has ever seen in them is a faint architectonic analogy (Figure 3.8).31 Teotihuacan tripods may be absolutely unornamented, the simple quality of the pottery sufficient unto itself—often a kind of clay called Thin Orange Ware for its dazzling lightness. Or the surfaces can be incised, stamped with molds, or covered with stucco and then painted with repeating images (Figure 3.9). Tripod vessels were among the goods that Teotihuacanos brought with them as they pursued diplomatic strategies in the Maya region.   Laporte and Fialko 1995, 66; Stuart 1999; Martin and Grube 2008, 28–36.   Pasztory 1997, 156–9. Teotihuacanos did conceptualize vessels as bodies, most often the bodies of human males, often with some kind of physical deformity, though dogs and birds are also represented. See Solís 2009, cat. nos. 55, 101b, 102, 107, 125, 179, 209, 210, 269. Unlike the Maya basal-flange and tetrapod bowls, these objects treated the vessel itself as a body rather than using a lid to transform the meaning of a rounded bowl, and this kind of personification never crept into tripod bowls; the categories remained conceptually distinct. 30 31

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One tripod vessel, found at Tikal, simultaneously documents and illustrates the process, picturing figures in characteristically Teotihuacan dress carrying lidded tripod vessels in their hands, preceded by a line of armed warriors (Figure 3.10).32 The vessel from Yax Nuun Ahiin’s tomb clearly references the Teotihuacan tripod tradition, but it could never be confused with a vessel from the ­metropolis (compare Figure 3.6 to Figures 3.8 or 3.9). The three slab legs and the use of painted stucco rather than fired slip to decorate the vessel are distinctive emulations of Teotihuacan tradition and, simultaneously, repudiations of previous Maya practice. At the same time, the elongated shape of the vessel, its humanheaded knob, and the decorative program, with its innovative inclusion of text, all diverge from Teotihuacan models and have precedents in Maya tradition. Yet the vessel cannot be characterized as a simple pastiche of Maya and Teotihuacan forms; instead, what is striking is how Teotihuacan technologies are recruited to create Maya meaning, though that meaning itself changes in the process.33 The function of the vessel is different as well. The text running around the lid of the tall tripod indicates that it did not contain solid food to be shared at a feast but instead liquid cacao, or chocolate. Contact with Teotihuacan brought not only new vessel shapes but also new forms of consuming this most symbolically weighted elite beverage.34 During the Preclassic period, spouted jars were   Greene and Moholy-Nagy 1966; Coggins 1975, 177–82; Culbert 1993, fig. 128; Schele and Freidel 1990, 161–3; Reents-Budet et al. 2004b, 787. 33   Chemical analysis of the vessel does not offer clear evidence about its origin, although it does rule out manufacture at either Teotihuacan or Kaminaljuyu. The composition is unlike any other samples in the Maya Ceramics Project database, except a tripod vessel from Tikal Burial 48, and notably unlike the other 600+ samples from Tikal. Reents-Budet and colleagues suggest that it was the product of a specialized workshop in the Tikal region, see Reents-Budet et al. 2004b, 779 and passim. See also Culbert 1993, fig. 19. 34   Cacao residues were found in a tripod vessel nicknamed “the Dazzler” from the Margarita tomb at Copan, likely the burial of the spouse of Copan’s dynastic founder, and in other tripod vessels from tombs at Copan; McNeil, Hurst, and Sharer 2006, 233–4. Not all tripods or cylinder vessels that have been analyzed test positive for cacao, however: see McNeil, Hurst, and Sharer 2006, 235–6; Loughmiller-Newman 2013. For chocolate in Mesoamerica, see Coe and Coe 1996; McNeil 2006; Dreiss and Greenhill 2008. 32

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used for preparing and serving cacao, although perishable gourds may have been used for drinking.35 Teotihuacan-style tripod vessels quickly replaced these spouted vessels, heralding new modes of preparing and serving cacao.36 While large serving dishes, appropriate for solid foods, were still manufactured and placed in tombs, much of the focus of decoration shifted to tripods and, later, to other types of vessels for cacao consumption. The smaller scale of the vessel in Figure 3.6 suggests a more personal mode of consumption, an impression reinforced by the text on the lid of the vessel naming it as a personal possession.37 Unlike the lidded lady of a generation ago, this is not a unitary object. Instead, it is one of a set of three vessels of very similar form, each stuccoed and painted on its sides with a slightly different subject—three shark heads in diagonal bands on one vessel and a pair of seated lords in square cartouches on the other (Figures 3.11–3.12). Texts on the lids of all three vessels indicate that they were intended to contain cacao. The texts are terse and badly eroded iterations of a dedicatory formula common on ceramic vessels beginning at about this time; each includes a statement of possession (yuk’ib, “it is his cup”), specifies the contents (a particular kind of kakaw or cacao), and names the owner of the vessel. Unfortunately, these parts of the texts are damaged, and it is unclear whether a deity, the ruler, or another person is named as the owner of each vessel.38 The three vessels each may specify their contents as a different kind of cacao, perhaps making them a matched set.39 The association of each vessel with a particular owner—and the textual notation of this relationship—marks a significant   Powis et al. 2002; Joyce and Henderson 2010.   The spouted bird effigy vessel found in Burial 10 may have been one of the last of these spouted vessels. Coggins 1975, 153–5; Culbert 1993, fig. 18b. Neutron activation analysis suggests that this vessel may have been made in Veracruz; see Reents-Budet et al. 2004b, 779. 37   This smaller scale also lessens the risk of violence in interaction that had troubled the earlier figural program of the basal-flange woman; this is a lid to pick up gently with respectful fingertips, not to grasp with the whole hand. Of course, there is also a possibility that this object was made for funerary use, in which case these questions of interaction become less relevant. 38   The three vessels may name different owners. The vessel in Figure 3.6 may say that it belongs to “the son of ” (T535, unich) a person with an undecipherable name, which is not easily identified with the name of Yax Nuun Ahiin’s father. The vessel with the shark heads in diagonal dividers is the only one to include the traditional dedicatory formula opening (alay t’abay, “here it is raised up; it is offered”), and its owner is described as the bolon tz’akbu ajaw, which might be read either as the ninth ruler in a lineage (that is, potentially Yax Nuun Ahiin’s deposed predecessor) or as the Nine Ordered Lords, a group of deities known from other inscriptions. The vessel with the seated lords on its sides lists its owner as the yune or “son of ” the waxak tz’akbu ??, perhaps the eighth ruler; but the numeral is eroded and might originally have been a nine. For the “Primary Standard Sequence,” which David Stuart has proposed renaming the “Dedicatory Formula”; see Stuart 2006; Stuart 2013. 39   The vessel in Figure 3.6 names its contents as sa’al kakaw, perhaps cacao mixed with maize gruel or cacao from the city-state now known as Naranjo (also the contents of K7529; see Stuart 2006, 194–5), while the vessel with the shark heads seems to contain tzih cacao, a now-mysterious but relatively common formulation (Stuart 2006, 196–7), and the third vessel contains yet another kind of cacao, now difficult to decipher. For more on cacao recipes, see Beliaev, Davletshin, and Tokovinine 2010; Hull 2010. 35 36

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F igure 3.11 a and b.  Tripod vessel from Burial 10, Tikal, 404 ce. Clay and painted stucco. Photo © Justin Kerr, K8157, and line drawings from Tikal Report 25A, figure 19b, courtesy of the Tikal Project, Penn Museum.

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F igure 3.12 a and b.  Tripod vessel from Burial 10, Tikal, 404 ce. Clay and painted stucco. Photograph by Linda Schele © David Schele, courtesy of the Foundation for Ancient Mesoamerican Studies (FAMSI), and line drawings from Tikal Report 25A, figure 19a, courtesy of the Tikal Project, Penn Museum.

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shift in patterns of consumption. This is a new form of sociality, distinct from the anonymous, unmarked feasting dishes of the previous era. Instead of the simple knob of a Teotihuacan tripod vessel, each of the three vessels is topped by a mold-made head that causes the entire vessel to read as a body, incorporating it into a system of metaphor that had been common in elite Maya tombs for over a century. But significantly, these human heads are not hand-modeled, like the head of the female vessel in Figure 3.1. Instead, they are mold-made, likely from the same mold, adopting a technology fundamental to the art of Teotihuacan.40 The unpainted surfaces of the heads emphasize the distinctive finish of a mold-made object; they contrast with the painted stucco on the sides of the vessel but echo the unpainted slab legs that underpin the vessels, another citation of Teotihuacan form and technology.41 Significantly, the nearly identical heads rendered with this Teotihuacan technology are not like the heads made with molds at Teotihuacan, which characteristically have a trapezoidal shape, with prominent foreheads, pointed chins, and elongated eyes (Figure 3.13). Indeed, these heads—with their beaky noses, jutting lower lips, and outsized eyes—seem instead to mark difference from a Teotihuacan physical ideal, and hand-modeled elements added to each mold-made head serve to differentiate them slightly. That they are gendered male suggests a closer relationship between the bodies on the vessels and the body with which they are entombed than was the case in Figure 3.1.

F igure 3.13.  Mold-made heads from Teotihuacan figurines, Field Museum, Chicago. Photo by the author.

  Berlo 1982; Pasztory 1997, 148–50; Sugiyama 1998; Sugiyama 2002.   It may be the distinctive surface finish of a mold-made object, as much as the capacity for mass reproduction, which artists outside Teotihuacan strive to emulate. See discussion in Brittenham and Nagao 2014, 84. Mary Miller has made a similar suggestion about the use of molds in Maya Jaina-style figurines (personal communication, 2012). 40 41

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Still, it is premature to characterize these faces as evocations of the specific f­eatures of an historical individual. Portraiture is rare in Early Classic Maya art, and it is hard to recognize any physical characteristics of Yax Nuun Ahiin from his other depictions in these three vessels.42 Instead, these heads are more similar to the heads topping lidded tripod vases from other Maya tombs.43 The tufted coiffure, tinted red and dressed with beads, recalls the hair of the Maya Maize God, a divine model frequently invoked at the moment of royal death.44 Removing the lid of the vessel—and thus decapitating the Maize God—creates another fruitful resonance with Maya myth. Just as the mold-made head mobilizes Teotihuacan technology to make a Maya analogy, so too does the decoration on the sides of the vessel. Here, the novelty is the use of painted stucco—a Teotihuacan technique par excellence, though the unusual colors suggest local experiments seeking to duplicate an unfamiliar technology.45 On two of the three vessels, fish inhabit the diagonal watery bands on the sides of the vessel, reasserting the Maya metaphor of the vessel as a body of water (see Figure 3.4). Yet instead of using the undulating scrolls that typically indicate water in Maya art, the diagonal bands signifying water here draw on Teotihuacan conventions for aquatic borders (Figure 3.14).46 The head on the lid thus seems to stand for a body that might be emerging out of—or descending into—a watery realm. This is a fruitful convergence: och ha’,

F igure 3.14.  Teotihuacan, mural painting of aquatic scene from the Zona 5-A apartment compound. Fourth-fifth century ce. Museo de Murales Teotihuacanos Beatriz de la Fuente, Teotihuacan. Photo by the author.

  Portraiture is not at all common in Maya art of this period; instead, textual names and costume attributes serve to distinguish individuals. For exceptions (all of them considerably later than the fifth century), see Spinden 1916; Griffin 1976. For an unusual example of ethnic cariacature on one of these mold-made vessel lids, see Houston, Martin, and Taube 2016. 43   For example, K2027, K7528, K7529, or K7530, all unprovenanced vessels listed in the Maya Vase Database. Not all of these heads may have been made with molds, however. 44   For the Maize God, see Taube 1985. For royal death and the Maize God, see Schele and Mathews 1998, 95–132; Miller and Martin 2004, 52–8. 45   For Teotihuacan stucco, see Castillo Tejero 1968; Conides 2001. For Maya experiments to replicate Teotihuacan color, see Houston et al. 2009, 78–88. 46   Winning 1987, 2: 7–14. See also Brittenham 2015, 62–7. 42

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F igure 3.15.  Río Azul Tomb 1. 417 ce. Photo by George Mobley, courtesy of George Stuart, Center for Maya Research, Boundary End Center.

or “he entered the water,” was one of the ways of recording a death in Maya inscriptions.47 This idea of entering the water dominated the symbolic programs of many elite Maya burials. At a nearly contemporary tomb from the site of Río Azul, for example, the walls are painted with giant scrolls of water, replicating the watery underworld into which the king would travel upon his demise (Figure 3.15).48 Tikal Burial 10, Yax Nuun Ahiin’s tomb, likewise contained many precious materials from aquatic sources, including three turtle carapaces, spondylus shells, stingray spines, and a headless crocodile (Figure 3.16).49 But this entire tomb program is already condensed into the microcosm of the vessel in Figure 3.6. This transformation of the body metaphor seems so apt to the tomb that one might wonder if this vessel were made for it—or perhaps remade, if the ­fragile stucco coating were added to the vessel just before its deposition.50

47   Houston 2010, 74; see also 282. The Maize God also “enters the water” on his demise, riding in a canoe paddled by deities and accompanied by anthropomorphic animals in attitudes of mourning; see Freidel, Schele, and Parker 1993, 82–100. 48   For Río Azul Tomb 1, 417 ce, see Adams 1986; Adams 1999. 49   The crocodile is likely also a play on Yax Nuun Ahiin’s name, “First/Green/Precious ?? Crocodile.” For the burial, see Coggins 1975, 146–8; Coe 1990, vol. 2, 479–87, fig. 160. 50   Clemency Coggins notes that stucco coatings are found exclusively on vessels in funerary contexts at Tikal; see Coggins 1975, 112. At the nearby site of Holmul, burials in Building B included several polychrome basal-flange dishes covered with stucco in Teotihuacan-emulating tones, as if updating these vessels and preparing them for burial. See Merwin and Valliant 1932; Fields and Reents-Budet 2005, 244–5.

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F igure 3.16.  Plan of Burial 10, Tikal, Yax Nuun Ahiin’s tomb, 404 ce. The three stuccoed and painted lidded tripod vessels are found at loci 4, 6, and 8, to the east of the body. Tikal Report 14, Figure 160. Courtesy of the Tikal Project, Penn Museum.

This trio of vessels was among over thirty vessels found in Yax Nuun Ahiin’s tomb, by far the richest burial at Tikal in its time, as befitted such a great prince.51 In the tomb, many different experiments with vessels converge. In addition to the three mold-made and stuccoed vessels described earlier, there are two very

  Coggins 1975, 146–76; Coe 1990, vol. 2, 479–87, fig. 160; Culbert 1993, figs. 14–21.

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similar vessels, with tripod legs and heads perhaps made from the same mold, but with incised instead of stuccoed decoration. The tomb also featured a two-part incense effigy vessel with an old fire god sitting on a stool made of crossed human femurs, lifting a human skull in his hands, and a burnished brownware tripod vessel with the descending body of an acrobatic Maize God on its lid. Another tripod vessel, hewing more closely to Teotihuacan traditions, has a ring-shaped knob on its lid. One of the last gasps of the bird metaphor so common on fourth-century vessels occurs on a ring-stand bowl with a hemispherical lid, whose rounded knob is ornamented with staring eyes and a pointed avian beak (Figure 3.17).52 But instead of continuing the metaphor onto the sides of the vessel, the smooth rounded surfaces become the spaces for another kind of ­decoration, utterly disconnected from the figural knob: astonishingly frontal busts of Teotihuacan deities and other Teotihuacan symbols are painted on stucco on the upper and lower halves of the hemispherical bowl. The smooth

F igure 3.17.  Lidded vessel from Burial 10, Tikal, 404 ce. Clay and painted stucco. Photo by Michael Coe.   Exactly what kind of bird is represented here is unclear. The feathery rings around the eyes recall the Maya glyph for mo’ or macaw, but the shape of the beak is quite un-macaw-like. See Coggins 1975 173–6; Culbert 1993, figs. 15–16. 52

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F igure 3.18.  Stucco-painted lidded tripod vessel from Tikal Burial 48, 457 ce. Clay and painted stucco. Photo by Michael Coe.

contours of Teotihuacan vessel shapes proved inhospitable locales for nonhuman body metaphors, their surfaces difficult to convert into the organic contours of an avian body, and after several problematic meldings of the two traditions, the bird’s head fades away.53   A vessel from Burial 48 at Tikal, 457 ce, shows another unsuccessful attempt to meld the two traditions; here, a bird perches amidst watery cartouches on the lid of an incised blackware tripod vessel, bodies of birds and aquatic borders decorating the body beneath, echoing a solution earlier adopted on tall tetrapod vessels in the burials of the Mundo Perdido complex. But it is not an entirely satisfying solution; the vessel is no longer a body, the handle merely an echo of the bird incised on the vessel wall. See Culbert 53

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By contrast, the tripod vessel as male body proved a popular theme. Dozens of examples are known, from burials at Tikal, Río Azul, Holmul, and other sites in the Petén heartland, as well as numerous unprovenanced examples (Figure 3.18).54 Yet other Maya city-states in intense contact with Teotihuacan, such as Kaminaljuyu in the Guatemalan highlands, never adopted the metaphor.55 And even in the Petén, this body metaphor faded away quickly in the sixth century, after the collapse of Teotihuacan and Tikal’s disastrous defeat in a war with the rival Maya city-states of Caracol and Calakmul. In the wake of Teotihuacan’s collapse, tripod vessels abruptly vanished from Maya ceramic inventories, as art turned away from the great failed metropolis as rapidly as it had turned toward Teotihuacan during its period of splendor.

BODI E S OF JA DE

Forgotten for centuries, the body-as-vessel metaphor experienced an unexpected resurgence at Tikal early in the eighth century. Burial 116 (Figure 3.19), the tomb of Jasaw Chan K’awiil (r. 682–734 ce), featured a singular vessel topped with a human-headed lid—this time, made out of jade (Figure 3.20).56 Nearly three hundred jade plaques were assembled to create this mosaic vessel, each affixed to a now-eroded wooden armature with a wood dowel, each dowel hole capped with a tiny piece of jade. On the lid, a face once again gazes into the distance, chin lifted. It is a strikingly idealized face, emphasizing the long nose, sloping forehead, and slightly crossed eyes considered beautiful by the Maya, features characteristic of the Maize God, the divine model of physical perfection, and also reflective of elite body modification practices.57 Above the sloping forehead, a shock of short hair stands up in front of a diadem of trimmed feathers and circular forms, perhaps simply large jade ornaments, though some scholars have seen the eyes of a raptorial bird in the headdress.58 The neck tapers sharply 1993, fig. 31. This vessel, too, has few imitators at Tikal, though it proves popular at Uaxactun; see Smith 1955, figs. 6, 8, 10. An example also turns up in the La Ventilla apartment compound at Teotihuacan, see Solís 2009, 453. A Teotihuacan tripod vessel with a small owl on its lid, now in the Museo Nacional de Antropología, may also respond to this trend. 54  See examples from Tikal Burials 10, 22, and 48 in Culbert 1993, figs. 20a, 20b, 26c, 30b. Unprovenanced examples include K5932, K7528, K7529, K7530, K8042, K8954 (all from the Maya Vase Database at http://research.mayavase.com/kerrmaya.html). The vessels from the Sub-Jaguares tomb at Copan, 525 ce, are slightly later than most of these other examples; they may copy Tikal models (indeed, several vessels in Copan tombs seem to have come from the Petén and not from Teotihuacan). See Reents-Budet et al. 2004a; Fields and Reents-Budet 2005, 230–2. 55   Kidder, Jennings, and Shook 1946; Wetherington 1978. 56   Moholy-Nagy 2008, 52–3. For Burial 116, see Coggins 1975, 456–548; Coe 1990, vol. 2, 604–10. 57   Miller 2009. 58   Moholy-Nagy 2008, 52. The bird identification seems doubtful at this point.

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F igure 3.19.  Plan of Burial 116, Tikal, Jasaw Chan K’awiil’s tomb, 734 ce. The jade mosaic vessel was found in pieces at locus 53 in the northeast corner of the tomb. Tikal Report 14, Figure 260. Courtesy of the Tikal Project, Penn Museum.

before connecting to a circular ridge on the sloping lid, creating a sense of fragility very much unlike the sturdier figures of Burial 10, some three hundred years earlier. But as on those vessels, a text encircles the lid of the vessel, naming it as the container for a particularly rare kind of cacao and claiming it as the possession of Jasaw Chan K’awiil, holy lord of Tikal (Figure 3.21).59 Beneath the lid, the   Stuart 2006, 199–201. The text is difficult. It does not include the standard dedicatory formula but instead begins with the date 9 Imix and continues with a passage that seems to describe the iximte’el (or maize-tree-like) cacao contained within the vessel as coming from a mythical origin place and the k’an 59

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F igure 3.20.  Jade mosaic vessel from Burial 116, Tikal, Jasaw Chan K’awiil’s tomb. 734 ce. Height with lid 28.8 cm, vase diameter 8.8 cm, lid diameter 10.4 cm. Photo © Kenneth Garrett.

straight sides of the cylinder vessel are carved with fluted grooves, like some contemporary clay vessels.60 nahb or “precious pool,” an expression for the sea. The text then names the owner of the vessel as Jasaw Chan K’awiil, giving him the titles k’uhul mutul ajaw (holy Tikal lord), 4 k’atun ajaw (four twenty-year period lord). See discussion later in this chapter, and also Houston 2010, 75.   Indeed, one such vessel with fluted sides is included in the tomb, at locus 3 on Figure 3.19; Culbert 1993, fig. 68b. For more examples, see Culbert 1993, figs. 56, 57, 80, 91. See also K4338, K7148, K8286, K8497, K8796, and K9099. 60

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A

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F igure 3.21.  Line drawing of text on jade mosaic vessel from Burial 116. Tikal Report 27A, Appendix 14, Figure 97. Courtesy of the Tikal Project, Penn Museum.

There can be no doubt that this is an archaizing object, a deliberate citation of the kind of vessel found in fifth-century burials at Tikal, like the trio of tripod vessels from the tomb of Yax Nuun Ahiin, pictured in Figures 3.6, 3.11, and 3.12.61 By 734, no Maya vessels had human-headed lids. Unlidded cylinder vessels were the norm, their straight-walled sides a fertile space for pictorial narrative; indeed, over a dozen such vessels were included in Burial 116 (Figure 3.22).62 Where Jasaw Chan K’awiil and his artisans encountered a prototype for this vessel remains unknown. It cannot have been the vessels from Burial 10 discussed earlier, which remained undisturbed until their excavation by the University of  Pennsylvania Tikal Project in the 1960s. Perhaps eighth-century builders encountered a fifth-century tomb during the massive new architectural construction program that heralded Tikal’s resurgence as a great power during Jasaw Chan K’awiil’s reign, or perhaps an early vessel was preserved as an heirloom

  Coggins 1975, 489–91.   For narrative, see Miller 1999, 194–9. The disappearance of the lids suggests further changes in cacao consumption, which have yet to be carefully studied. An occasional geometric lid is pictured on a cylinder vase, and also on Piedras Negras Panel 3, but the majority of cylinder vases, in pictures and in the archaeological record, appear to have been unlidded (or to have had perishable lids). For cylinder vases in Burial 116, see Coggins 1975, 491–548; Culbert 1993, figs. 68–75. 61 62

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F igure 3.22.  Cylinder vase from Burial 196, Tikal, supernatural scene with hummingbird messenger. Clay, eighth century ce. Photograph by Linda Schele © David Schele, courtesy of the Foundation for Ancient Mesoamerican Studies (FAMSI).

above ground.63 In either case, what is striking is that this vessel clearly hearkens back to the moment in the fifth century when Tikal emulated Teotihuacan, but it does so without citing any of the specifically Teotihuacan features of that artistic moment. Instead, it focuses on the adaptations that Maya artists had made to bring Teotihuacan vessels into Maya tradition. That is to say, this vessel is neither a tripod vessel, nor mold-made, nor decorated with painted stucco—all the ways that a Teotihuacan prototype was directly invoked three centuries earlier in the object in Figure 3.6. Instead, it is the cylindrical shape, the human-headed lid, and the dedicatory text around the lid that directly relate to this earlier moment. Jasaw Chan K’awiil’s reign is characterized by just such coded returns to Tikal’s contested Teotihuacan heritage. While his public monuments enter into the current of contemporary Maya royal representation, the lintels at the top of   Coggins proposes that a fifth-century tomb might have been encountered during the renovations to Structure 5D–33, where Jasaw Chan K’awiil rebuilt the temple above fifth-century ruler Siyaj Chan K’awiil’s tomb. See Coggins 1975, 491. 63

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his funerary temple show him dressed in a costume derived from Teotihuacan, celebrating a victory that just happened to coincide with a significant anniversary of Tikal’s engagement with Teotihuacan.64 Likewise, in the private spaces of the royal palace, Jasaw Chan K’awiil pictured himself as a ruler in Teotihuacan garb, holding a bound captive from the rival city of Calakmul.65 Yet the meaning of Teotihuacan was different in 734 ce than it had been in 404 ce; no longer a great power to ally with, Teotihuacan was instead part of Tikal’s own complicated but illustrious past. Transmuting clay into jade elevated the status of the vessel in Burial 116, a fitting way to emphasize the significance of its archaizing gesture. In doing so, it also shifted the meaning of the vessel, tying it more closely to the king’s body. Maya kings frequently were buried wearing pounds of jade necklaces, bracelets, and other ornaments; Jasaw Chan K’awiil’s own tomb contained over sixteen pounds of worked jade, including a collar of circular jade beads weighing eight and a half pounds.66 More importantly, the mosaic technique likens this vessel to the mosaic masks that covered the faces of many Maya rulers in their tombs (Figure 3.23).67 Like the face on the jade vessel, these masks created an idealized visage of the dead ruler, emphasizing his (or her) resemblance to the Maize God, while simultaneously recording body modifications that had taken place and capturing an approximation of the features of the ruler. Like these jade death masks, the mosaic vessel in Burial 116 may have been a posthumous creation and perhaps a portrait of the ruler.68 At the very minimum, the text was inscribed late in Jasaw Chan K’awiil’s life or, more likely, after his death; it names him as a 4 k’atun ajaw, a ruler who reigned (or at least lived) during four successive twenty-year periods, an honor the king must have been at least sixty years old to attain.69 A strikingly original and sumptuous object, it is a fitting tribute to an illustrious king.

  Temple 1 Lintel 2 pictures Jasaw Chan K’awiil in Teotihuacan War Serpent garb, rendered in Maya style; Lintel 3 shows purely Maya regalia, but the date chosen for the commemoration of Tikal’s victory over Calakmul, September 14, 695, is the thirteen k’atun anniversary of death of Spearthrower Owl (the Teotihuacan lord who was Yax Nuun Ayiin’s father). Jasaw Chan Kawiil’s accession on May 3, 682, is also one day short of the 308th anniversary of Spearthrower Owl’s coronation. See Coggins 1975, 390–5; Martin and Grube 2008, 44–5. 65  In a stucco relief on Structure 5D–57 on Tikal’s Central Acropolis; see Coggins 1975, 391–5; Schele and Mathews 1998, 86; Brittenham 1999, 18–24. For the use of Teotihuacan iconography in the Late Classic period, see Stone 1989. 66   Coggins 1975, 457. 67   Martínez del Campo Lanz 2010; Filloy Nadal 2010. For an Early Classic mosaic mask at Tikal, see Moholy-Nagy 2008, 50–1, figs. 88–91; for mosaic in other contexts, see 26–30, figs. 63–81, 136. 68   Many scholars have characterized it as a portrait. See, e.g., Martin and Grube 2008, 47. 69   Jasaw Chan K’awiil’s birth date is unknown, but he reigned for a 54-year period from 682–734 ce, Martin and Grube 2008, 44–7. 64

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F igure 3.23.  Jade mosaic funerary mask, from the tomb of K’inich Janaab Pakal of 683 ce. Museo Nacional de Antropología, Mexico. Photo by the author.

The mosaic vase has a single echo. Another jade mosaic vessel was found in Burial 196, perhaps the tomb of Yikin Chan K’awiil, Jasaw Chan K’awiil’s heir (r.  734–?46/66; Figure 3.24).70 The two vessels have often been treated as a matched set: perhaps husband–wife, perhaps father–son.71 Yet the facture and conceit are sufficiently different—in details like the shape of the edge of the lid, the size of the tesserae, the fluting of the cylinder, and the conception of the face—that it seems more likely that they represent the work of two different

70   Exactly who is buried in Burial 196 remains unclear. A bone in the tomb inscribed with a date in 754 ce provides a terminus post quem for the burial, and another vessel in the tomb is inscribed with Yik’in Chan K’awiil’s name (see Figure 3.22). But the tomb is inside a relatively modest structure and may instead be the tomb of Yik’in Chan K’awiil’s successor; Martin and Grube 2008, 50. For Burial 196, see Hellmuth 1967; Coe 1990, 641–6. 71   See, e.g., Martin and Grube 2008, 48–9; Moholy-Nagy 2008, 52. Coe interpreted the shingled hairstyle as definitively female; we now know that it is characteristic of the Maize God and may be worn by either sex.

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F igure 3.24.  Jade mosaic vessel from Burial 196, Tikal, perhaps Yikin Chan K’awiil’s tomb. Eighth century ce. Height with lid 24.3 cm, diameter 9 cm. Photo © Justin Kerr, Kerr Portfolio 4887.

artisans, perhaps somewhat separated in time.72 In the later example, the vessel is fully a body, so much so that it can be adorned with its own freestanding jade ornaments.73 Bearing the shingled hairstyle of the Maize God, but no text 72   For example, the vessel from Burial 196 has many clearly reused or recycled tesserae, while the vessel from Burial 116 does not, and its sides are not fluted, although many more clay vessels with fluted sides were included in this tomb. Culbert 1993, fig. 91; Moholy-Nagy 2008, 52. 73   This vessel was found in an almost entirely fragmentary state, so the reconstruction is in many ways hypothetical (and based on the reconstruction of the vessel from Burial 116). The projection from the

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naming its owner, this vessel seems a retreat from the specificity of the portrait in Burial 116.

W HOSE BODI E S?

When the subject of a work of art is the human body, it immediately triggers a search for a referent: just whose body is represented here? What kind of a body is it? Yet even great specificity of features—not a notable quality of any of the vessels studied here—may not signify an individual, and, conversely, a portrait may be so generic in its features that only text or context can identify it as referring to a specific individual.74 This puzzle poses challenges for all three of the vessels considered in this essay: each may or may not have been understood to refer to a specific individual, and that reference may or may not be encoded in the object in ways that we can now recover. Yet the lidded lady in Figure 3.1 still seems different, in significant ways, from the jade king in Jasaw Chan K’awiil’s tomb illustrated in Figure 3.20. In a universe of vessels constituted as birds, turtles, jaguars, and iguanas—generic creatures all—the human figure on this vessel also seems more generic than particular, its link to the body it is entombed with almost circumstantial. It might have been a possession of this deceased man, but it is unlikely to have been his portrait. Perhaps it was deposited in the tomb simply because it was an elegant container for the food offering held within it; it likely had a life above ground as a serving dish at courtly feasts before its deposition. By contrast, the cacao vessel in Figure 3.6 was more directly tied to a particular royal body, an inscription on it specifying its intended contents and making a still-obscure statement about its ownership. Yet the body on this vessel was still multivalent. One of a series, replicated with Teotihuacan mold-making technology, the vessel simultaneously read as the body of the king and the body of the Maize God, descending into the water at the moment of death. Yet in spite of this productive ambiguity, one thing about the body was certain: it was a Maya body, the inclusion of the figural lid a way of naturalizing a foreign vessel shape through the metaphor of a local body, now a marked category in a way that it was not a generation earlier.75 While the particular program on the vessel in Figure 3.6 seems especially apt for a royal burial, the aquatic decoration on the sides causing the head on the lid to read as a body “entering in the water,” other vessels with body of the cylinder vessel seems particularly problematic, but it seems possible that the necklace was a completely separate and removable piece. Hellmuth 1967, vol. 2, 177–80; Moholy-Nagy 2008, 52–3.   Grabar 1992, 184.   While the body of the lidded lady in Figure 3.1 is Maya as well, the category is unmarked, taken for granted in a way that could no longer be the case after the “arrival of strangers” from Teotihuacan. 74 75

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the same figural head, made with the same kind of mold, do not enact this metaphor. This motif, rendered in fragile stucco, raises questions about the use and function of this vessel: Was it made exclusively for the grave? Was a preexisting vessel stuccoed over with a funerary theme before being buried? Or did the stuccoed vessel have a use-life prior to its interment, the fitness of its program for a tomb pure coincidence? Much of the same formal vocabulary took on new meaning in the vessel in Figure 3.20, three centuries later. Made in a deliberately archaizing style, this vessel refers directly to the body of the king. The face may even be his portrait; a text around the lid of the vessel names it as his possession. Yet this may not have been a sumptuous object to use during life; the text seems to suggest a posthumous—or at least very late in life—dedication, and the technique of jade mosaic, used for funerary masks for Maya royalty, may have bound this object to the tomb. Staggeringly labor intensive, using the most precious material known to the ancient Maya, this singular object seems particularly suited for the grave. These three vessels, formally very similar, not only mean different things, but signify in different ways, each responding to past and present tradition, political circumstances, and functional constraints. Each was a container for luxurious foodstuffs, but the materials contained, and, more importantly, the patterns of elite sociality that dictated the ways that these vessels might have been used changed significantly over time. From vessels made to be used at feasts for the living, and only afterwards deposited in graves of the dead, the body metaphor became more and more tightly bound to the royal body, until it could only picture the dead king, on his way to becoming the Maize God.

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L aporte , J.  P.  and Fialko, V.  (1995), “Un reencuentro con Mundo Perdido, Tikal, Guatemala,” Ancient Mesoamerica 6, 41–94. L ooper , M. (1991), “The peccaries above and below us,” Texas Notes on Precolumbian Art, Writing, and Culture 10, 26–31. L oughmiller -N ewman , J. (2013), “The analytic reconciliation of Classic Mayan elite pottery: squaring pottery function with form, adornment, and residual contents” (Ph.D. dissertation, State University of New York at Albany). M c N eil , C.  (ed) (2006), Chocolate in Mesoamerica: a cultural history of cacao (Gainesville: University Press of Florida). McNeil, C., Hurst, J., and Sharer, R. (2006), “The use and representation of cacao during the Classic period at Copan, Honduras,” in C. McNeil (ed), Chocolate in Mesoamerica: a cultural history of cacao (Gainesville: University Press of Florida), 225–36. M artin , S.  and Grube, N.  (2008), Chronicle of the Maya kings and queens, 2nd edn (London: Thames & Hudson). M artínez de V elasco C ortina , M. A. (2014), “Cerámica funeraria maya: las vasijas matadas” (tesis de maestría, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México). M artínez del C ampo L anz , S.  (ed) (2010), Rostros de la divinidad: los mosaicos mayas de piedra verde (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropolgía e Historia). M erwin , R. E. and Valliant, G. C. (1932), “Ruins of Holmul, Guatemala,” Memoirs of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology 3, 20–35. M iller , M. E. (1999), Maya art and architecture (London: Thames & Hudson). M iller , M. E. (2009), “Extreme makeover: how painted bodies, flattened foreheads, and filed teeth made the Maya beautiful,” Archaeology 62, 36–42. M iller , M. E. and Martin, S. (2004), Courtly art of the ancient Maya (San Francisco and New York: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and Thames & Hudson). M illon , R.  (1981), “Teotihuacan: city, state, and civilization,” in J.  Sabloff and V. Bricker (eds), Archaeology: handbook of the Middle American Indians, Supplement 1 (Austin: University of Texas Press), 198–243. M oholy -N agy , H. (2008), The artifacts of Tikal: ornamental and ceremonial artifacts and unworked material, Tikal Report 27A (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology). N eer , R.  (2010), The emergence of the classical style in Greek sculpture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). N eer , R. (2012), Greek art and archaeology: a new history, c. 2500–c. 150 BCE (New York: Thames & Hudson). P asztory , E.  (1997), Teotihuacan: an experiment in living (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press). P incemin D eliberos , S. (1994), Entierro en el palacio: la tumba de la Estructura III, Calakmul, Campeche (Campeche: Universidad Autónoma de Campeche). P owis , T.  G., Tarka Jr, S.  M., Hurst, W.  J., Hester, T.  R., and Valdez Jr, F.  (2002), “Spouted vessels and cacao use among the Preclassic Maya,” Latin American Antiquity 13, 85–106. R eents -B udet , D., Bell, E., Traxler, L. P., and Bishop, R. L. (2004a), “Early Classic ceramic offerings at Copan: a comparison of the Hunal, Margarita, and Sub-Jaguar

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tombs,” in E.  Bell, M.  Canuto, and R.  Sharer (eds), Understanding Early Classic Copan (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology), 159–90. R eents -B udet , D., Bishop, R. L., Bell, E., Culbert, T. P., Moholy-Nagy, H., Neff, H., and Sharer, R. (2004b), “Tikal y sus tumbas reales del clásico temprano: nuevos datos químicos de las vasijas de cerámica,” in J. P. Laporte, B. Arroyo, H. Escobedo, and H.  Mejía (eds), XVII Simposio de Investigaciones Arqueológicas en Guatemala, 2003 (Guatemala City: Museo Nacional de Arqueología y Etnología, Guatemala), 777–93. R omero , J. (1958), Mutilaciones dentarias prehispánicas de México y América en general, Serie Investigaciones (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia). S chele , L. and Freidel, D. (1990), A forest of kings: the untold story of the ancient Maya (New York: William Morrow and Company). S chele , L. and Mathews, P. (1998), The code of kings: the language of seven sacred Maya temples and tombs (New York: Scribner). S chele , L. and Miller, M. E. (1986), The blood of kings: dynasty and ritual in Maya art (New York and Fort Worth: George Braziller, Inc. in association with the Kimbell Art Museum). S cherer , A. (2015), Mortuary landscapes of the Classic Maya: rituals of body and soul (Austin: University of Texas Press). S mith , R. E. (1955), Ceramic sequence at Uaxactun, Guatemala, 2 vols. (New Orleans: Middle American Research Institute). S olís , F.  (ed) (2009), Teotihuacan: cité des dieux (Paris: Musée du Quai Branly and Somogy Éditions d’Art). S pinden , H.  J.  (1916), “Portraiture in Central American art,” in F.  W.  Hodge (ed), Holmes anniversary volume: anthropological essays presented to William Henry Holmes in honor of his seventieth birthday, December 1, 1916 (Washington, DC: J. W. Bryan Press), 434–50. S tone , A. (1989), “Disconnection, foreign insignia, and political expansion: Teotihuacan and the warrior stelae of Piedras Negras,” in R.  A.  Diehl and J.  C.  Berlo (eds), Mesoamerica after the decline of Teotihuacan, A.D.  700–900 (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection), 153–72. S tuart , D. (1999), “The arrival of strangers: Teotihuacan and Tollan in Classic Maya history,” in D. Carrasco, L. Jones, and S. Sessions (eds), Mesoamerica’s Classic heritage: Teotihuacán to the Aztecs (Niwot: University Press of Colorado), 467–90. S tuart , D. (2006), “The language of chocolate: references to cacao on Classic Maya drinking vessels,” in C. McNeil (ed), Chocolate in Mesoamerica: a cultural history of cacao (Gainesville: University Press of Florida), 184–201. S tuart , D. (2013), “Glyphs on pots: decoding Maya ceramics,” Sourcebook for the 29th Maya Meetings at Texas, the University of Texas at Austin, http://decipherment.files. wordpress.com/2013/09/stuartceramictexts.pdf. S ugiyama , S.  (1998), “Archaeology and iconography of Teotihuacan censers: official military emblems originated from the Ciudadela?” Teotihuacan Notes: Internet Journal for Teotihuacan Archaeology and Iconography 1–2, http://archaeology.asu.edu/teo/ notes/SS/NoteI_2SS.htm.

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S ugiyama , S. (2002), “Censer symbolism and the state polity in Teotihuacán,” report submitted to FAMSI, http://www.famsi.org/reports/97050/. T aube , K. A. (1985), “The Classic Maya Maize God: a reappraisal,” in V. M. Fields (ed), Fifth Palenque Round Table, 1983 (San Francisco: Pre-Columbian Art Research Institute), 171–81. T aube , K. A. (2010), “Where earth and sky meet: the sea in ancient and contemporary Maya cosmology,” in D. Finamore and S. D. Houston (eds), Fiery pool: the Maya and the mythic sea (Salem, MA and New Haven: Peabody Essex Museum and Yale University Press), 202–19. T rever , L.  (2012), “Portraits, potatoes, and perception: toward a sense of Moche artistic vision” (paper presented at the College Art Association Annual Conference, New York). V elásquez G arcía , E.  (2006), “The Maya flood myth and the decapitation of the cosmic caiman,” PARI Journal 7, 1–10. W etherington , R. (ed) (1978), The ceramics of Kaminaljuyu, Guatemala (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press). W inning , H.  von (1987), Iconografía de Teotihuacán: los dioses y los signos, 2 vols. (México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas). W u H ung (2016), “Rethinking meaning in early Chinese art: animal, ancestor, and man,” Critical Inquiry 43, 139–90. Y ang X iaoneng (ed) (1999), The golden age of Chinese archaeology: celebrated discoveries from the People’s Republic of China (New Haven: Yale University Press).

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4

Practice and Discourse Ritual Vessels in a Fourth-Century bce Chinese Tomb Wu Hung

It is only qi 器 (vessel, insignia) and ming 名 (name, title) that cannot be granted to others, because these are what enable a ruler to govern. It is by name and title that he secures confidence; it is by that confidence that he preserves vessels and insignia; it is these vessels and insignia that store li 禮 (ritual, propriety); it is rituals and propriety that are essential to the practice of righteousness; it is righteousness that produces benefit; and it is benefit that brings peace to people. These are the principles of governance. Zuo’s Commentary on The Spring and Autumn Annals1

Supposedly articulated by Confucius himself (ca. 551–ca. 479 bce), this tightly knit political rhetoric provides a logical context for understanding the intrinsic relationship between qi (vessel, insignia, instrument) and li (ritual, rite, propriety),2 a central concern of Rujia 儒家—the School of Confucians—in the second half of the Eastern Zhou, from the fifth to third century bce.3 The idea that vessels store essential ritual codes is stated more plainly in the Book of Rites: “The round and square food containers fu 簠 and gui 簋, the stand zu 俎, and the tall   Legge 1871a, vol. 2, 339–44; translation modified.  Both li and qi have many different meanings. For a discussion of these two terms, see Wu 1995, 18–24. 3   It is possible that during the Eastern Zhou, discourses on rites and ritual artifacts were developed by more than one philosophical school. See Riegel 1995. But systematic discussions of li and liqi only appear in works by Rujia. The corpus of Confucian ritual texts consists mainly of the so-called San li 三禮 (Three Ritual Texts): Zhou li or the Rites of Zhou, Yi li or the Etiquette and Rites, and Li ji or the Book of Rites. The dates of these texts have been the subject of a continuous debate. Most scholars believe that Zhou li and Yi li were written during the late Eastern Zhou, perhaps between the fifth and third centuries bce. Li ji was compiled during the Western Han; but it includes chapters that were written during the Warring States period. For the dating, history, and content of these three texts, see Loewe 1993; Nylan 2001, 168–201. For a detailed study of Li ji, see Wang 2007. 1 2

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dish dou 豆, with their regulated forms and decoration, are the vessels (qi) embodying ritual propriety (li).”4 One of the major intellectual forces at the time, Rujia developed the notion of li on two fronts: as a principal concept in its political, moral, and aesthetic teachings, and as specific rules governing different kinds of ritual performances, including the use of ritual vessels and other ritual paraphernalia on special occasions. Accordingly li is applied to two major aspects of human lives: ceremonies and  related practices; and social conventions—primarily those of law, human relations, and morality—that govern the working of society at large. These two aspects overlap. In the idealized society envisioned by Eastern Zhou Confucians, ceremonies and ritual vessels reflect and regulate human relationships and thus determine legal and moral standards. In this sense a bronze or pottery vessel can embody ritual codes and social principles. Whereas the Confucian theory of li has been a central subject in modern scholarship on traditional Chinese philosophy, the Confucian discourse on qi has received much less attention. To those who study Eastern Zhou material and visual culture, this lack is related to another overlooked issue concerning the relationship between discourses and practice: In what way were Confucian ritual writings, especially those on ritual vessels and procedures, connected to actual ritual performance? This question is not general but specific and historical because the predecessors of Rujia arose from ritual specialists, and many of its members carried on this profession in the late Eastern Zhou and even the Han. This is why Confucian ritual texts are often practical guides to conducting ritual affairs. How can we connect these writings to contemporary ritual objects, tombs, and other ritual structures found through archaeological excavations? More explicitly, can we imagine a scenario in which Confucian ritualists conducted sacrifices and funerary rites to express their ideas about ritual and ritual vessels? This again is not a hypothetical question. The Analects records many instances in which Confucius’s disciples asked the master about how to practice certain rites and about their meaning. Indeed, after Confucius passed away, his student Gongsun Chi 公孫赤 designed his funeral, most likely based on his teacher’s instructions.5 This chapter takes this kind of record as a cue to reexamine a fourth-century bce burial—a royal mausoleum of the state of Zhongshan 中山 in which two intact chambers contained some eighty vessels and many other objects. A close look at the grouping, placement, and interrelationship of these objects reveals an unambiguous effort on the part of ritual practitioners to articulate the concept of qi through furnishing a tomb for a king, someone who thoroughly internalized

  Ruan 1980a, 1530. See Legge 1967, vol. 2, 100.   Ruan 1980a, 1284; Legge 1967, vol. 2, 139–40.

4 5

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Confucian ideas in his own political propaganda. In so doing, this study shares a fundamental methodological premise of the current volume, characterized by Claudia Brittenham as the need to “cut across traditional typologies of Maya vessels that segregate objects first by material and then by chronology, context, and form.”6 On the other hand, it also responds to a crucial issue raised in Richard Neer’s chapter concerning the relationship between “insider’s view” and “outsider’s perspective” in interpreting ancient objects.7 Instead of conceptualizing these two positions as mutually exclusive, this chapter demonstrates a complex process of both synchronic and diachronic interactions between ritual practice and discourses, objects and concepts, and embodied knowledge and external ­categorization.

T H E TOM B

Sometime before his death in 309 or 308 bce,8 Cuo , king of Zhongshan in Eastern Zhou China, commanded his chief minister, Chancellor Zhou 賙, to design a mausoleum for him and his wives. The order was duly carried out, and two copies of the architectural plan were made, one stored in the royal archives and the other buried with the king after he died. This second copy was discovered in 1977 in a large grave at Pingshan 平山 about 160 miles south of Beijing; inscriptions on other unearthed objects identify the tomb occupant as Cuo.9 The design of the mausoleum—the earliest known architectural drawing from ancient China—is extravagantly delineated with inlaid gold and silver threads on a bronze plate 96 cm long and 48 cm wide (Figure 4.1a). Using geometric shapes and abundant inscriptions, the designer detailed the placement and measurements of various components of a double-walled funerary park. The central area, called “neigong” 内宫 (the inner palace), houses five graves in a horizontal row, with the king’s tomb flanked by those of his two queens and two principal consorts (Figure 4.1b). An edict is inscribed next to the central square that represents Cuo’s burial, as if projecting the king’s order from inside the grave. It records his commission of the mausoleum’s design and warns that anyone who fails to follow it will be executed without remit; their punishment will extend to their sons and grandsons.10 The severe tone nevertheless discloses his anxiety about the   See Brittenham’s chapter in this volume, p. 82.   See Neer’s chapter in this volume, p. 7. 8   Unless noted, the dates of various events in Zhongshan history are based on Li and Li 1979, 167–9. 9   Hebei Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics 1995. 10   Hebei Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics 1995, vol. 1, 105. The entire inscription reads: “The king ordered Zhou to design the dimensions and measurements of the funerary park, and to have officials who are in charge of the matter draw the plan. Those who fail to construct the funerary part will be executed without remit. To those who fail to follow the king’s order, their punishment will extend to their sons and grandsons. One copy [of this design] will be buried (with me), and one will be stored in the royal achieves.” 6 7

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(a)

(b)

F igure 4.1 a and b.  “Design of Cuo’s funerary park,” excavated from Cuo’s tomb at Pingshan, Hebei, Chinan. Late fourth century bce. b) After Cuo mu: Zhanguo Zhongshan guo guowang zhimu (Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe, 1995), pl. 2, fig. 33.

project’s successful realization, a premonition soon to be vindicated by events following his demise. Despite the enormous effort put into an exhaustive excavation over four years (1974–8), archaeologists failed to spot any trace of the walls and ritual offices specified in the architectural design. Among the four planned burials for Cuo’s wives, only one was actually constructed, probably by Cuo himself for a “Sorrowful Queen” (Ai Hou 哀后), a title that alludes to her premature death. The abandonment of the mausoleum project can be explained by a political crisis that unfolded soon after Cuo’s death, which prevented the next king, Ci 𧊒, from fulfilling his father’s vision; not long after he ascended the throne, Zhongshan was attacked by two neighboring states, Zhao 趙 and Yan 燕, in 306 bce. Ci fled

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to Qi 齊 in 300 when he lost most of his kingdom. He died the next year in exile, just before Zhongshan was finally annihilated in 296. Framed by these events, the construction of Cuo’s tomb occurred when Zhongshan was still at the height of its power before slipping into a quick decline. The inscription on a large bronze tripod Cuo commissioned records that Zhongshan joined the state of Qi in a military campaign against the state of Yan around 314 bce: “Now my elder [minister] Zhou has recently led a horde of three armies to punish an unethical state [i.e., the state of Yan]. Brandishing drumsticks and tolling bells, he broke through and opened up the [walled] frontiers for several hundred li in every direction and various cities numbering several score. He was able to match and defeat a powerful state.”11 (For a fuller discussion of the tripod, see p. 137.) The campaign’s success significantly enriched Zhongshan and elevated its standing among competing political ­powers. The inscription on a hu 壺-vase from the same tomb mentions “new ­territories” (xin tu 新土) that Zhongshan acquired after the military operation; even the bronze m ­ aterial used to cast this vessel was seized from Yan. The grandeur and rich furnishing of Cuo’s tomb likewise reflected his political ambition and achievement. The tomb was a complex structure. Shi Jie’s recent study allows us to see it as the sequential realization of three ritual spaces one atop another (Figure 4.2).12 First, a vertical shaft, 8.2 meters deep and 13.7 × 12.6 meters at the bottom, was dug into the underground rock layer. It functioned as the burial chamber and was sealed by additional stone walls on all sides. A timber structure was then built inside this stone envelope to house the king’s multilayered coffin. This part of the tomb was completely destroyed by fire, set probably by ancient robbers after looting this most secret section of the grave. The mouth of this underground shaft reached ground level and was surrounded by an open platform, accessed from two broad ramps north and south (Figures 4.3–4.4). After the king was interred and the underground shaft was filled with dirt, this platform was transformed into an enclosed space 30 meters long on each side. Towering earthen walls were built around this space, whose significance as a solemn ritual ground was further suggested by additional architectural framing: the surrounding walls were carefully plastered, painted, and ornamented with fake columns. Nothing was left on the surface of this ground, however. Instead, three “storage pits” have been found next to the mouth of the burial chamber.13 The one at the northeast corner was never used, but the other   Translation from Mattos 1997, 107–8.    12  Shi 2015.   This unusual design possibly originated in the Shandong area. A recently discovered tomb at Linzi, dating from the fifth to early fourth century bce, has a broad platform surrounding the grave pit. A storage pit containing bronze rituals, along with four small auxiliary graves, is constructed on this level. Linzi District Bureau of Cultural Relics 2013. 11 13

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F igure 4.2.  Cross-section of Cuo’s tomb reconstructed by Yang Hongxun. After Yang Hongxun, Gongdian kaogu (Beijing: Zijincheng chubanshe, 2001), p. 180.

two contained numerous ritual vessels and valuable objects, which had fortunately escaped tomb robbers’ reach.14 It is possible that some of these objects had been displayed in the walled space during a ritual performance before being stored in the pits. Finally, after sealing the storage pits, people buried this temporary ritual space, this time under an artificial mound made of rammed earth. They then built two layers of porticoes around the mound and erected an offering shrine on the summit. Architectural remains found on the mound have allowed the late Yang Hongxun 楊鴻勛 (1931–2016) to envision the final form of Cuo’s tomb as an imposing pyramid surrounded by timber structures (Figure 4.5).15 The excavation of Cuo’s tomb was a sensational event in modern Chinese archaeology.16 Subsequent research has evolved around three pivotal issues: the 14   The pit at the northeast corner of the space was left empty. No credible explanation has been proposed to explain this phenomenon. 15   Yang 2001, 177. Also see Klose 1985. 16   Cuo’s mausoleum also included two groups of auxiliary burials beyond the tomb proper. The first group includes four sacrificial pits, arranged in parallel rows south of the tomb. Two long wooden-framed trenches flanked the southern ramp to constitute an underground royal stable, each containing a dozen or so horses and four chariots, as well as a tent and weapons. The shorter trench next to them stored the king’s hunting facility, including two dogs wearing gold and silver neck rings. A “boat pit” lay further west, in which three large boats and two smaller ones constituted a royal fleet. Connected with a nearby river with a long ditch, the pit could be turned into an underground harbor when filled with water. Then there was the second group of auxiliary burials, consisting of six small graves surrounding the rear (north) side of Cuo’s tomb. Each containing a female body in double timber coffins, they were furnished with

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F igure 4.3.  Cuo’s tomb. Pingshan, Hebei, Chinan. Late fourth century bce. After Cuo mu: Zhanguo Zhongshan guo guowang zhimu (Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe, 1995), p. 28.

mausoleum’s architecture, the history of Zhongshan as revealed by newly ­discovered inscriptions, and the achievement of Zhongshan art.17 No systematic study has focused on the holdings of the two storage pits as integral assemblages of ritual artifacts. This is a serious lack because the two pits constitute the only bronze and pottery vessels as well as jade ornaments. These grave goods and the women’s body position— they all had their heads oriented toward the king’s tomb—have led the excavators to identify the tomb occupants as Cuo’s minor consorts or female attendants. Because these six tombs have different shapes and because their pottery vessels show clear differences, the excavators suggest that these tombs were constructed at different times, and that their occupants, instead of being sacrificed during Cuo’s funeral, died of natural causes. Hebei Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics 1995, vol. 1, 198. 17   See appendix four in Hebei Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics 1995, vol. 1, 590–9 and the bibliography in Xiaolong 2004.

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F igure 4.4.  Photo of Cuo’s tomb, showing the second level and “storage pits.” After Cuo mu: Zhanguo Zhongshan guo guowang zhimu (Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe, 1995), pl. 12.

F igure 4.5.  Reconstruction of Cuo’s tomb by Yang Hongxun. After Yang Hongxun, Gongdian kaogu (Beijing: Zijincheng chubanshe, 2001), p. 179.

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intact section of this great tomb. It can be expected that an attentive contextual study of their content can tell us much about the function and meaning of different vessels and related ritual practices. Architecturally, due to their ample ­interior spaces and planked walls, floors, and ceilings, these so-called pits (keng 坑) are better conceived as carefully constructed chambers. The east chamber is 11.32 meters long and 2.54 meters high; the west chamber is 5.5 meters long and of the same height. Small teams of ritual specialists could have easily worked inside these spaces to arrange their abundant content—including over eighty bronze and pottery vessels and inlaid sculpture and furniture—into discrete groups. To define these groups and parse their interrelationship is to decipher the ritual codes “stored” in the objects.

T H E C A SE OF T H E F I F T EEN T R I PODS: DECONST RUCT I NG T H E E XC AVAT ION R EPORT

The study of the two chambers necessarily starts from a close reading of the excavation report because the original tomb was completely disassembled and emptied during the archaeological operation. We are lucky in this case because the report, a monumental two-volume set consisting of 600 pages of text, 236 drawings, and 280 photographs is one of the most comprehensive archaeological documents to have been produced in China in recent years. The fruit of the decade-long tireless work of a team of archaeologists, it also integrates valuable contributions from historians, epigraphers, metallurgists, zoologists, and even food chemists.18 Rarely do we find in comparable volumes such detailed records of minute observations, from barely visible imprints of a decayed lacquer tray to the scant residue in a wine container. But an excavation report, even an extremely detailed one, can never substitute for its subject, but must transform the physical site and artifacts into a textual construct based on disciplinary conventions. In the present report, the principal method used to inventory and describe the objects is a multilayered typological classification. Based on the two criteria of material and function, the report divides the objects into twenty basic groups. The first nine groups consist of objects made of bronze, iron, gold and silver, clay, jade and stone, agate and crystal, glass, bone and horn, and lacquered wood, respectively. The remaining groups pertain either to functional type (such as weapons, musical instruments, chariots and horse fittings, boats, and construction tools) or register surviving components of some disintegrated architectonic structures. Most of these categories are then subdivided into finer classifications. For example, bronze objects are divided into forty-nine subcategories with fifteen   For the participants in this project, see Hebei Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics 1995, vol. 1, 600.

18

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ding 鼎-tripods classified into three types and seventeen hu-vases classified into three types and seven subtypes. This part of the report is 239 pages long, f­ ollowed by another large 100-page chapter that reproduces and transcribes inscriptions found on 174 objects. This method of inventorying and describing archaeological finds serves specific purposes, mainly to facilitate studies of unearthed objects and inscriptions as independent entities of scholarly inquiry; its debt to the long tradition of antique collecting and epigraphic study is obvious. A negative consequence of this method is to divorce objects and inscriptions from their physical contexts, which largely disappear from the itemized descriptions. The fifteen bronze ding-tripods, for example, were found at separate locations in the two chambers among p ­ ottery vessels, lacquer wares, carved jades, and musical instruments. When taken out from these real assemblages and divided into self-contained ­typological units, these ritual objects are effectively severed from ritual activities because any ritual performance must take place at a specific time and in a specific location. In other words, although admirably detailed, the categorization of artifacts in the excavation report cannot be used as the direct basis for the present investigation, which aims to explore the ritual function and meaning of the objects from the two chambers. A separate section in the report entitled “The Distribution of Tomb Furnishing” provides the appropriate basis instead.19 Despite its compactness— the part about the two chambers consists of merely three pages of description, two inventory lists, and two drawings—this section offers a spatial mapping of the unearthed objects. Most important, the drawings and lists allow us to reinstall the objects roughly to their original positions and reconstruct the chambers’ condition prior the objects’ removal (Figures 4.6–4.7). I say “roughly” because these materials were not provided for this purpose. The drawings are small and offer only one-dimensional views from above; the lists arrange objects according to their mediums rather than locations. Still, starting from this section, we can obtain an analytical foundation to process the rest of the report. The fifteen bronze ding-tripods offer an example to demonstrate this research method, which will be employed throughout this chapter to make various observations and arguments. Earlier I mentioned that the excavation report classifies the tripods into three types. The first type, termed sheng ding 升鼎 or lao ding 牢鼎 by the excavators, includes nine tripods of decreasing sizes; the largest one is over half a meter tall while the smallest one is 17.4 cm high.20 This seemingly ­objective, technical account has important interpretative implications. Because ancient texts routinely use the number of ding-tripods in a set to signify its owner’s social status, the study of “the regulations of ding-tripods of 19 20

  Hebei Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics 1995, vol. 1, 46–64.   Hebei Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics 1995, vol. 1, 110–14.

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(a)

(b) 91

97 96 1

2

26 59

54

101

62

47

42

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F igure 4.6.  Drawing of the west chamber. After Cuo mu: Zhanguo Zhongshan guo guowang zhimu (Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe, 1995), fig. 29.

graded sizes” (lieding zhidu 列鼎制度) has become a central topic in Chinese archaeological scholarship. Following this scholarly tradition, the excavation report includes a discussion of such regulations as applied to Cuo’s tomb. It cites the Rites of Zhou (Zhou li 周禮) and its Han dynasty commentary to confirm that nine is the proper number for a royal set of sheng ding or lao ding and concludes that “because by this time Zhongshan rulers had assumed the title of king, it is natural that Cuo’s tomb contained nine sheng ding.”21 This conclusion has been   Hebei Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics 1995, vol. 1, 505.

21

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F igure 4.7.  Drawing of the east chamber. After Cuo mu: Zhanguo Zhongshan guo guowang zhimu (Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe, 1995), fig. 28.

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used widely as an i­ mportant piece of “archaeological evidence” for Eastern Zhou regulations of ritual vessels.22 This conclusion was arrived at, first of all, by isolating the fifteen ding-tripods as a self-contained group for classification. We can almost visualize that after these objects were brought back from the excavation site they were put together and arranged according to their relative sizes. It must have been thrilling to note that nine of the ten tripods from the west chamber seem to form a graded sequence. Even though their different shapes and materials were quite obvious, the temptation to identify them as a single set for the deceased king trumped all negative evidence.23 The main problem with this identification is not even the mismatched shapes and materials of the nine tripods—there have been cases in which bronze vessels or bells of different origins were assembled into a set for ritual display—but their separate locations and divergent uses in Cuo’s tomb. Turning to the “The Distribution of Tomb Furnishing” section, we find that the first and third largest tripods in this supposed set were originally placed at the northwestern corner of the west chamber, together with another tripod which the report classifies as a different type because it has a protruding spout (nos. 1, 2, 10 in Figure 4.6). The remaining seven tripods in the “set” were found near the south edge of the chamber. Unlike the neat alignment of the three tripods at the opposite end, the positions of these seven tripods did not suggest any attempt at a formal display. Instead they seem to have been thrown together with other bronze and pottery vessels into a random mess (nos. 3–9 in Figure 4.6). Traces of food were found in all these ten tripods from the west chamber. Here the excavators made a valuable effort to have the residue analyzed before the objects were cleaned for the purpose of exhibition. They did not include a formal report of the analysis in the volume, however, but mention the result in a number of places.24 Based on this scattered information, we realize that the three aligned ding in the northwestern group, including the spouted tripod, originally contained meat stew; that pig, sheep, and dog bones were found in the three larger tripods in the southern group; and that the remaining four tripods in the southern group yielded remains of meat but no animal bones. Clearly, these ten tripods were not only installed in different locations but also used in different ritual sacrifices. Not coincidently, the last four small tripods that held boneless meat were made as a separate set.25 This example illustrates the basic method I use in this chapter to study the ritual vessels and other objects from Cuo’s tomb. My reexamination of the fifteen   A recent example is Liang 2008, 96.   Hebei Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics 1995, vol. 1, 506. Although accepting that Cuo’s tomb yielded a set of nine graded ding-vessels, Jenny So has noted that this supposed set “is made up of a single large ding, two different pairs, and a set of four; it did not originate as a set.” So 1995, 61. 24   Hebei Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics 1995, vol. 1, 63, 111, 114, 506–7. 25   So 1995, 61. 22 23

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ding does not refute the notions of sets, units, or assemblages—that vessels formed discrete groups in ritual performance—but rather determines such groups based primarily on contextual factors revealed by the archaeological excavation, not on preconceived textual definitions. Because of their distinct locations and sacrificial content, it appears that the ten ding from the west chamber belonged to at least two groups of three and seven when they were installed in this space. The remaining five bronze ding-tripods, nearly identical and standing in a straight row in the east chamber, constituted another group (see nos. 1–5 in Figure 4.7). The identity and ritual function of these groups are not self-evident, but must be explored within the larger assemblages of ritual artifacts of which they were integral elements. Conversely, such an exploration also helps reveal the intention behind these larger assemblages.

SACR I F ICI A L V E S SEL S

Vessels dedicated to ancestors The drawing of the west chamber shows that artifacts were placed in specific areas to form three unambiguous groups separated by empty spaces, located near the chamber’s northeast, northwest, and southwest corners (see Figure 4.6). Among them, the northwest group (group A) occupied the largest area, about a quarter of the entire chamber. It was also the least crowded; whoever installed the objects here did not pile them up as in the other two groups but put them next to one other to form a horizontal spread. In the back row of this display, against the north wall, were the three aligned ding-tripods mentioned earlier (Figure 4.8). In front of them were four identical bronze li 鬲-tripods and a pair of bronze dou 豆-stemmed dishes, all originally containing meat stew as the three ding did. In front of these bronze vessels, a large rectangular iron basin held more than three hundred jade carvings, many coated with red pigment. Next to the basin were two sets of musical instruments—fourteen bronze bells and thirteen chime stones—originally hung on decorated stands but now fallen on the ground. Beyond the bell set, at the south end of the assemblage, an isolated square hu-vase stood amidst clusters of carved jades.26 Among the twenty hu-vases found in the two chambers, this hu is unique in having four

  The placement of this vase at the exact middle point of the chamber’s west wall seems deliberate: similar situations have been observed in other Eastern Zhou tombs. For example, in the tomb of Marquis Yi of the state of Zeng (fifth century bce), a special vase was found in a comparable position in a simulated ritual hall filled with ritual vessels and musical instruments. See Hubei Provincial Museum 1989, no. 38 in fig. 35, p. 68. 26

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F igure 4.8.  Group A in the west chamber. After Cuo mu: Zhanguo Zhongshan guo guowang zhimu (Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe, 1995), fig. 29.

flamboyant dragons climbing up the four edges; their bold silhouettes are echoed by the exaggerated knobs on the lid (Figure 4.9). This hu and the largest ding at the northwest corner are the only two bronzes in this chamber that bear long inscriptions (Figure 4.10). The text on the ding consists of 469 characters, while the one on the hu has 450 characters. Covering the surface of the two vessels in evenly spaced vertical lines, these are the longest bronze inscriptions from the Eastern Zhou period (771–221 bce). Both texts are written in a sophisticated literary style full of classical allusions. The calligraphy is superb, too; the elegant, well-proportioned characters reflect not only the inscriber’s calligraphic training but also his extraordinary skill in engraving nearly a thousand characters on hard bronze with such ease and confidence. The hu inscription starts with a paragraph that explicates the context and purpose of engraving the text on a bronze vessel:27

  Originally translated by Cook 1980, 22–5. Slightly modified by Xiaolong 2004 and again by Wang 2013, 228–30, and by this author. 27

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F igure 4.9.  Hu (vessel), commissioned by Cuo. Excavated from Cuo’s tomb at Pingshan, Hebei, Chinan. Late fourth century bce. Hebei Provincial Museum.

It was in the fourteenth year [of the king’s reign, 316 or 315 bce]28 that King Cuo of Zhongshan commanded the chancellor of state, Zhou, to select the auspicious metals of Yan and to cast a sacrificial hu vessel, according to the required measurements of the pure sacrifice, [which] can be taken as norm and constant [rule] in order to present [in a feast] offerings to God on High, and in order to make sacrifices to the former kings. Solemn and dignified, earnest and reverent,   This date is suggested by Sun Zhichu and supported by Gilbert  L.  Mattos. See Sun 1979, 277; Mattos 1997, 110. 28

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F igure 4.10.  Ding (tripod), commissioned by Cuo. Excavated from Cuo’s tomb at Pingshan, Hebei, Chinan. Late fourth century bce. Hebei Provincial Museum.

and not daring to be idle or negligent, [thus] he took his opportunity to record what was praiseworthy, and brilliantly inscribe the lofty merits—to have rebuked the changes of Yan’s [leadership]—and so to warn succeeding kings.

Following this, Cuo praises his ancestors in the first person and vows to follow their model: It was my august ancestors Wen 文, Wu 武, ancestor [grandfather] Huan 桓, and my late father, Cheng 成: those ones, who being in possession of pure virtue, and the handed-down instructions, by extending them [down through time], made them reach the sons and grandsons to use. It is what I imitate: being merciful, filial, broadminded, and kind, they promoted the worthy and employed the competent.

While these words make clear that the hu was dedicated to royal ancestors, the next part of the inscription salutes Chancellor Zhou for his loyalty and statesmanship and justifies Zhongshan’s conquest of Yan,29 blaming the latter for   Wang Haicheng rightly points out that the unusually long and elaborate praise of Chancellor Zhou is an unusual feature of all three long inscriptions from Cuo’s tomb, and provides a very interesting interpretation. See Wang 2013, esp. 215–18. 29

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corrupting the correct relationship between ruler and minister and ignoring the solemn duty of ancestor worship. In response, Zhou declares his devotion to Cuo and restates the importance of worshiping royal ancestors in safekeeping the state: “Those sage kings of old considered obtaining the worthy men their duty, and by virtue of that they won over the people. Therefore, [if a king is] respectful in words and decorum, the worthy men will come. If the widespread love is deep, the worthy men will be close [at hand]. If the levied taxes are moderate, then the common people will be attached [to the ruler].” Cuo acknowledges Zhou’s wisdom and concludes the text with an admonition to later Zhongshan rulers: Ah, true, indeed, are such words! Clearly inscribed them upon [this] wine vessel, to be seen on it throughout time. With full respect and deep reverence, clearly proclaim to future generations: it is disobedience that gives rise to disaster and it is obedience that gives rise to blessings. Record it in the bamboo annals to warn succeeding kings: it is virtue that will keep the people attached [to the ruler]; it is by righteousness that one may last long [as a ruler]. May the sons of sons and the grandsons of grandsons forever treasure and use [this vessel] without limit.30

The text on the ding was composed in the same year and probably engraved by the same inscriber. While it shares the central themes of the hu inscription in glorifying royal ancestors, praising Chancellor Zhou, and condemning Yan, it has a stronger autobiographical flavor. In this text Cuo recalls his childhood experience and speaks about his late father and grandfather in a more intimate manner: “In former days, my later forefather King Cheng, suddenly left behind his many subjects when I, the Unworthy, was but a young and naïve child. It was a governess that I obeyed . . . In former times, my ancestor [grandfather], King Huan, and my brilliant later father, King Cheng, toiled in person for the sake of the state, and traveled the four directions, in order to take on the worries and burdens of the state and home.”31 In fact, unlike the hu inscription, this text has a consistent first-person voice, and Cuo speaks directly to his descendants in the final paragraph: “You, when great do not be excessive; when wealthy do not be arrogant; when there are many [of you] do not be haughty, for when neighboring states are difficult to be kept as friends, enemies will be at [your] sides. Alas! Remember it! May the sons of sons and the grandsons of grandsons forever treasure and use [this vessel] in peace, and not neglect their state.”32 Both vessels revive the old practice of commemorating a historical event by dedicating sacrificial bronzes to ancestor deities. Starting from the late Shang dynasty (twelfth–eleventh century bce), aristocrats began to commission ritual bronzes to commemorate important events in their lives. During the Western   Based on Wang 2013, 228–30, with minor modifications. 32   Mattos 1997, with minor modifications.   Mattos 1997.

30 31

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Zhou (eleventh–eighth century bce), a long inscription cast on a ritual vessel often concludes such a commemoration with an ancestral dedication and ends the whole text with this formulaic line: “May the son of sons and the grandsons of grandsons forever treasure and use [this vessel].”33 This practice was later explained in the “Tradition of Sacrifices” (Jitong 祭統), a chapter in the Book of Rites, possibly written around the fourth century bce:34 A tripod [at the sacrifices] has an inscription on it. The commissioner of the inscription names himself, and takes occasion to praise and set forth the excellent qualities of his ancestors, and clearly exhibits them to future generations . . . . By casting such a discourse on a ritual vessel, the inscriber makes himself famous and proves that he is entitled to sacrifice to his ancestors. In the celebration of his ancestors he exalts his filial piety. That he himself appears after them is natural. And in the clear showing of all this to future generations, he is giving instruction.35

The close affinities between this statement and the Zhongshan inscriptions are obvious. Indeed, as we will discuss later in this chapter, the revival of the Western Zhou tradition was very likely guided by members of the Rujia clique, ritual practitioners who were also developing a discourse on ritual. Dedicated to Cuo’s deceased predecessors, the tripod and vase would have been kept in his ancestral temple to symbolize the continuation of the royal family line; as such they would be known as “vessels of grave importance” (zhong qi 重器) on which the fate of the state lay.36 But why were such “temple vessels” buried with Cuo when he died? Does this contradict their self-professed role of honoring ancestors and admonishing future generations? This seeming contradiction can be explained, at least tentatively, by a commentary in a ritual text: when a nobleman died, if he was ranked higher than a dafu 大夫, his tomb furnishings would include not only “spirit vessels” (ming qi 明器)—symbols of death—specially made for this tomb but also sacrificial vessels that he had used in worshiping his ancestors.37 Hayashi Minao first connected this textual reference with archaeological finds.38 According to him, Zhou bronze vessels with ancestral dedications in their inscriptions were buried in tombs because making offerings to ancestors was a routine activity in a Zhou aristocrat’s life. Since the Zhou people envisioned the afterlife as a continuation of this life, they would have expected that the dead would continue to worship his ancestors in the underground world. Correspondingly, the formulaic concluding sentence of many bronze inscriptions, “May the sons of sons and the grandsons of grandsons forever treasure and use [this vessel],” “refers to sons   For the early development of such “narrative” inscriptions, see Wu 1995, 56–61.   Wang 2007, 169–70 dates this chapter to the mid-Warring States period in the fourth century bce. 35   Ruan 1980c, 1606. Translation based on Legge 1967, vol. 2, 251. 36   Mencius uses this term in this sense. Ruan 1980b, 2681. 37   Zheng Xuan’s commentary on Yi li, in Ruan 1980c, 1149. See Wu 2006, esp. 78–9. 38   Hayashi 1993. 33 34

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and grandsons who will eventually join him in the family grave and thus be able to use family bronze vessels in sacrifices continually.”39 Whether this theory can explain all entombed sacrificial vessels over a millennium is a different matter. Hayashi’s proposition seems especially strong for the late Eastern Zhou because his most compelling evidence comes from this period. One piece of this evidence is a fourth-century bce tripod, whose inscription states that Jia 嘉, the owner of the vessel, “will use it to make sacrifices to his ancestor Duke Kang eternally, even when his body will have rotted in the underground realm.”40 Underlying this statement is an old belief that after a person dies his soul would continue to possess consciousness and the ability of movement. Applying this belief and Hayashi’s theory to interpreting Cuo’s tomb, we can suggest that group A in the west chamber constituted a special assemblage of sacrificial paraphernalia for former ancestors. As mentioned earlier, these objects were arranged into a spatial display that differed from the other assemblages in the chamber. The two inscribed bronzes, the centerpieces of this display, e­ xplicitly identify the receivers of the ritual offering as Cuo’s ancestors, while Cuo, though physically dead, remained the one who continued to offer sacrifices to his ancestors and to give instructions to his descendants. Several other features of this assemblage support this interpretation. First, bronze bells and chime stones were standard ceremonial musical instruments used in temple sacrifices. In Cuo’s tomb they appeared only in this assemblage. Second, all bronze vessels in this group originally contained meat stew, called geng 羹 or da geng 大羹 in Eastern Zhou ritual books.41 Geng was only offered in the most solemn ancestral sacrifice because, according to commentaries on these texts, this kind of tasteless soup was invented in the remote past before people developed more elaborate culinary skills. Presenting it in ancestral sacrifices was a symbolic gesture to “return” to their origin.42 Third, carved jades, the most precious objects in ancient China, were found only here in the two storage chambers; their huge quantity attests to the sacredness of the place. Moreover, based on their physical appearance and inscriptions, the excavators have suggested that these were old jades from Cuo’s collection.43 It is thus fitting that they were offered to his ancestors together with the two sacrificial vessels. Finally, as we will discuss later, a large number of black pottery spirit vessels were buried in all other areas except for this assemblage. It is highly possible that such conspicuous absence served to disassociate the ritual display in this area from   Hayashi 1993, 57.   “Yongyong yinsi, xiuyu xiatu, yishi Ganggong” 永用禋祀, 朽于下土, 以事康公. Hayashi 1993, 57. The English translation of the inscription in Hayashi’s essay is not precise. The summary provided here is based on Zhao 1981. 41 42   Ruan 1980d, 662; Ruan 1980c, 1984.   Ruan 1980e, 1741. 43   Hebei Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics 1995, vol. 1, 165. 39 40

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the “inauspicious rites” (xiong li 凶禮) of a funeral and to associate it with “auspicious rites” (ji li 吉禮) performed at the ancestral temple. We will return to this point in the last section of this chapter.

Vessels used in a grave sacrifice In the preceding discussion on group A, we have already noted five features of group B, a second assemblage of artifacts at the southeast corner of the west chamber (see Figure 4.6). First, unlike group A, group B did not contain any vessels with dedicatory inscriptions that identify them as objects previously housed in the royal ancestral temple. Second, unlike group A, it contained neither ceremonial musical instruments nor jade carvings. Third, the bronze vessels in this group were mixed with pottery spirit vessels. Fourth, among the bronze vessels in this group, traces of sacrificial meat were found in seven ding-tripods. None of them contained the geng meat stew. The three larger ding in this group yielded pig, lamb, and dog bones, respectively; no bones were found in the four small tripods. Finally, the placement of the objects in group B did not indicate a clear order. The seven bronze ding were not arranged in a straight row; the four hu were scattered all over, lying above shards of pottery vessels (Figures 4.11–4.12). Instead of forming a ritual display, objects seem to have been deposited here with little concern for formal regularity.

F igure 4.11.  Group B in the west chamber at the time of the excavation. After Cuo mu: Zhanguo Zhongshan guo guowang zhimu (Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe, 1995), pl. 52.1.

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F igure 4.12.  Group B in the west chamber, line drawing. After Cuo mu: Zhanguo Zhongshan guo guowang zhimu (Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe, 1995), fig. 29.

These last two features suggest that the bronze vessels in group B had been used in a sacrificial ritual prior to their burial. Before identifying this ritual occasion, however, we need to have a closer look at the components of group B as a whole. Based on information scattered in the excavation report, this assemblage included nineteen bronze vessels, fifteen pottery vessels, and a few lacquer wares that have disintegrated, leaving only tiny metal fittings. Remains of sacrificial food and wine were observed in all bronze vessels. The pottery vessels contained nothing: as “spirit articles” they were by definition unusable (see later discussion in this chapter). The bronze vessels consist of four kinds: seven ding-tripods, four large and two small hu-vases, four fu 簠-food containers, and two dou-stemmed dishes. The combination of these four types reflects careful planning because each is conventionally associated with a major category of ritual offerings: ding for meat, fu for grain, hu for wine, and dou for food ground into a paste. Although the number of each type of vessel diverges from textual records of a king’s ritual paraphernalia, the number of each type—seven ding, four hu, four fu, two small hu, and two dou—betrays a sense of regularity. But if these vessels were used in a sacrifice before being deposited in this chamber, what kind of sacrifice was it? Since the vessels themselves do not offer an explicit answer to this question, we need to seek additional evidence from comparable archaeological examples. One such example of seminal importance is Baoshan 包山 tomb 2 at Jiangling 江陵, Hubei province.44 Dated to 316 bce, this burial of a high minister in the Chu court was nearly contemporary with Cuo’s mausoleum. Undisturbed before the excavation, it yielded some two thousand artifacts along with four sets of “grave inventory lists” (qiance 遣册) written on bamboo slips. Stored in the different compartments around the central burial chamber, these lists identify these spaces as well as their content. One list in the east compartment, for example, calls the   Jingsha Railroad Archaeological Team of Hubei Province 1991.

44

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place a “food chamber” (sishi 飤室) that contained “bronze vessels of the food chamber” (sishi zhi jinqi 飤室之金器). The list in the west compartment states: “Objects in this rear [chamber] of the casket are used in traveling”; and the excavators did indeed find in this room various intimate objects that one would take on a journey. More relevant to the present chapter, two bamboo slips identify vessels stored at the south end of the east chamber as “bronzes used in the Great Zhao (Da zhao 大兆) ceremony,” including five different kinds of ding-tripods and other vessels used to offer grain and drink. Many parallels can be found between these vessels and those in group B in Cuo’s tomb. For example, the inventory list calls the two largest ding-tripods from the Baoshan tomb a “beef cooker” (niu xu 牛鑐) and a “pork cooker” (tun xu 豚鑐); indeed the first tripod contained a shoulder blade of an ox when it was discovered. As we have observed in group B in Cuo’s tomb, these objects were also randomly stored in Baoshan tomb 2, as this description in the excavation report attests: “No patterns are found in the placement of the bronze ding-tripods, whereas real ritual vessels and ‘spirit vessels’ intermingle. Different types of ding appear unevenly on different levels, some standing straight while others on their sides.”45 But in this case, we know from the accompanying inventory list that these vessels, along with a group of spirit articles, had been used in a Zhao 兆 ceremony before their entombment. Erya 爾雅, the oldest surviving Chinese dictionary, explains zhao as “the burial ground,” a definition confirmed by other pre-Qin texts such as the Rites of Zhou.46 Accordingly the Great Zhao ritual recorded in the Baoshan inventory list should mean a grand funerary ritual performed in the graveyard. The Chinese scholar Hu Yalin 胡雅麗 has suggested that Da zhao should be an alternative name for the Da zang 大葬 (Great funeral) ceremony prescribed in the Etiquette and Rites.47 This hypothesis is questionable because zhao and zang have different meanings; zhao refers to the place of the burial while the basic meaning of zang is “to bury” or “to conceal” the corpse.48 Moreover, according to the reference in the Etiquette and Rites, the Da zang ceremony is conducted outside the ancestral temple, before the funerary procession moves to the graveyard. It is difficult to imagine that all the ritual vessels used in the rite, with food and wine inside, could easily be transported to a distant burial site and buried there. More likely, simply as the term Da zhao indicates, the ritual was a “grave sacrifice” held near or even inside the tomb. We mentioned earlier that a temporary ritual space of considerable size was constructed in Cuo’s tomb after the burial chamber was filled and that the storage chambers were located on this level (see Figure 4.3).   Jingsha Railroad Archaeological Team of Hubei Province 1991, vol. 1, 69.   Xu 1987, 94. Also see Ruan 1980d, 786, and Ruan 1980e, 2156. 47 48   Hu 1991, vol. 1, 508.   Ruan 1980a, 1292. See Legge 1967, vol. 1, 155. 45 46

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It is possible that a zhao-grave sacrifice for the deceased king was performed in this space. Afterwards, all paraphernalia used in the ritual were buried in the chamber. Similar practices must have started much earlier than the late fourth century bce. In an undisturbed tomb from the Spring and Autumn Period (770–475 bce) near Taiyuan 太原, Shanxi province, archaeologists found a large group of seventy bronze vessels at the north part of the grave pit above the coffin chamber. “Unlike the coffins and burial furnishings that were neatly arranged,” Joy Beckman reports, “ . . . [these bronze vessels] were stacked somewhat randomly on top of each other.”49 Once again they contained sacrificial food, and a number of the ding yielded the bones of oxen, boar, sheep, and birds. Beckman concludes: “The fact that these vessels were not arranged once inside the tomb, but at some time prior to burial, indicates that their contribution to the spectacle of the funeral occurred outside the grave and not within.”50

Offerings from the son A third group of bronze vessels were heaped at the southern end of the east chamber (see Figure 4.7). One of them, a hu-vase, bears a long inscription in the midsection of its round body (Figure 4.13). As if to highlight its special status, this vessel was placed at the southeast corner of this chamber, as a counterpart of the largest tripod at the northwest corner in the west chamber. We have learned that Cuo dedicated this tripod to his ancestors when he was alive. His heir, Ci, engraved the inscription on the vase after his father’s death. It starts with these sentences: I, Ci, heir and succeeding son, dare, glorifying and extolling, to proclaim: formerly, the preceding king was merciful and loving, and was bright in all aspects; his dedication and thoroughness are without limits. Day and night he did not forget about rescinding punishment and fines, thereby sympathizing with those innocent ­people.51

This statement seems to echo the inscription on the Cuo hu cited earlier, which begins by glorifying past ancestors (see p. 136). The resonance between the two texts continues when Ci also elaborately praises Chancellor Zhou’s meritorious conduct, especially the commanding role he had played in conquering Yan, which resulted in incorporating hundreds of miles of Yan’s land into Zhongshan’s “new territory.” It was in this conquered land that Zhou welcomed Cuo to hold a grand hunting party, during which the king’s entourage “gathered like a forest; his charioteers and assistants joined together in harmony; his steeds, four abreast, thrust forward; and he acquired fresh meat and [cured] dried meat, offering   Beckman 2002, 25.    50  Beckman 2002, 25.   Originally translated by Cook 1980, 112.

49 51

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F igure 4.13.  Hu with an inscription by Ci from the east chamber. Excavated from Cuo’s tomb at Pingshan, Hebei, Chinan. Late fourth century bce. Hebei Provincial Museum.

them to the former kings.”52 Ci’s remembrance of this event leads to the concluding dirge of the inscription: Alas! The virtues of the former king are not what anyone could make obtainable again! In streams of flowing tears, I dare not rest in peace. With respect I ordered   To some scholars, this paragraph tells that after Zhou defeated Yan, he held a hunting party in the new territory as a form of funerary service for Cuo, who had died by that point. See Li and Li 1979, esp. 161. But since we know from various sources that Cuo died after the military campaign was completed, this reading seems illogical. I have thus accepted an alternative reading of the text proposed by Cook and other scholars. 52

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abundant sacrifices to be offered to the former king in the new territory. [This order] should never be violated generation after generation, in order to seek out and build upon the merits and illustrious [fame] of the previous king. Of the sons of sons and the grandsons of grandsons, let there not be any who are disrespectful; with great reverence offer sacrifices.53

Although elegantly composed, this text seems to have been hurriedly carved on an existing vessel; an inscribed date on the bottom of the hu indicates that it was made in the thirteenth year during Cuo’s reign. Stylistically it is a rather ordinary hu without any elaborate features, and in fact an identical hu with the same date but without the commemorative inscription was found next to it. Moreover, the inscription was carved by two different hands. As the excavators have noted, the engraving of the first twenty-two columns is “clumsy and poor,” and the characters are “crude and awkward,” while the last thirty-three columns were carved by a much more skilled inscriber “with superb technique.”54 We still do not know what caused such inconsistency, but it seems that some circumstance made it necessary to engrave the commemorative inscription on a vessel before a skilled inscriber became available. The inscription offers a clue to think about this circumstance: it states that the sacrifice was held in the new territory away from the Zhongshan capital. Because the ancestral temple in the capital was the legitimate place to conduct ancestral sacrifices, it is interesting to speculate why an exception was made in this case. It is possible that Ci was in the new territory when he heard about his father’s death; a sentence in the inscription—“In streams of flowing tears, I dare not rest in peace”—seems to convey his immediate emotional response. The unconventional place of the sacrifice also explains his ­reminiscence of his father’s hunting party in the new territory, which would provide a legitimate reason for conducting an urgent sacrifice in this place. This interpretation may be supported by an intriguing feature of the bronze vessels stored in this part of the east chamber: unlike those in the west chamber, most of them were found empty. The hu inscribed with Ci’s long commemorative inscription was aligned with several other ritual vessels against the west wall, forming a straight row (see Figure 4.7). When they were excavated, this hu, a typical sacrificial “wine vessel” (jiu qi 酒器), contained pure water. The next four wine vessels—two more hu and a pair of he 盉—were empty; and a set of five ding-tripods had no food in them.55 Interestingly, however, the excavators

53   Cook translates “xianzu” as “ancestors.” Because the inscription makes it clear that it was written to commemorate Cuo after he died, “xianzu” should refer to Cuo rather than all ancestors of the Zhongshan royal house. 54   Hebei Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics 1995, vol. 1, 124. 55   Of the twenty-five bronze vessels found in the east chamber, only one hu (DK: 13) is noted in the excavation report as having contained wine when it was found.

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noticed that these tripods bore “traces of soup” and “oil stains” on the surface,56 implying that the sacrificial meat had been discarded before the burial. How to  explain this phenomenon? Considering the circumstance suggested in Ci’s inscription, it is possible that these vessels, together with the inscribed hu, were used in the sacrifice held in the new territory soon after Cuo’s death. These objects were then brought back to the capital to be buried in Cuo’s tomb. Because they were neither part of Cuo’s temple vessels nor vessels used in the zhao-grave sacrifice, they were kept separately from the two groups of bronze vessels in the west chamber but were stored together with many utilitarian and luxury objects, possibly Ci’s additional offerings to his late father.

U T ENSI L S A N D F U R N I T U R E

Called yong qi 用器 in Eastern Zhou ritual texts, utensils and personal furniture formed a special category of objects normally used in a domestic environment. This does not mean that they were cheap and plain. To the contrary, for an Eastern feudal lord or aristocrat, this category of objects offered them the greatest possibility to display their wealth and taste for extravagance. In Cuo’s tomb, luxury objects and furniture were largely absent in the west chamber,57 but they took over about seven-eighths of the floor space of the long, trenchlike east chamber (see Figure 4.7). If we divide the chamber down the middle, we find the north half contained at least eight major pieces of architectonic structure, furniture, sculpture, and utilitarian objects, which may have been used together in a palace hall (Figure 4.14). These include, moving from the center to the north end, a double-panel folding screen, a small table stand decorated with dragon, phoenix, and deer images, a folding tent, a tree-shaped lamp, and two pairs of fantastic beasts. Except for the lamp, all others are inlaid with ornate patterns of gold, silver, and other precious materials. It is no exaggeration to call these objects the most brilliant sculptural and decorative works we possess from the Eastern Zhou period. Three essential features of these works are fantastic imagery, intricate design, and a dazzling color effect. They no longer just exhibit stiff frontal views of men and animals; rather, it is possible to appreciate them from various angles. The bronze lamp placed at the northwest corner takes the shape of a gigantic tree, whose individual branches support thirteen lamp holders (Figure 4.15). The spiraling dragon

  See Hebei Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics 1995, vol. 1, 114.   The only exception is a pair of sculpted winged beasts in group A. An identical pair is found in the east chamber. But they seem to have no practical function, and we do not know if they have any particular religious significance. 56 57

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F igure 4.14.  Possible grouping of some objects in the east chamber. After Cuo mu: Zhanguo Zhongshan guo guowang zhimu (Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe, 1995), fig. 123.

climbing the central branch may be the mythological Zhulong 燭龍, whose name literally means “lamp dragon.” Other images on this tree-lamp, however, are derived from the observed world: singing birds perch on the tree, and monkeys reach out toward two men who stand under the tree to feed the animals. The designer has captured a moment in life and created a lively and delightful atmosphere. A different visual strategy was employed in the design of several other works from this chamber. Mostly consisting of animal images, they bear exquisitely inlaid patterns while showing exotic, foreign features. Among these, the square table stand consists of four dragons and four phoenixes; their bodies, wings, and horns all interlock, forming one of the most ingenious interlaced designs from ancient China (Figure 4.16). Scholars have found West Asian and Central Asian influences in some of these animal images, such as the paired mythical beasts, whose winged bodies and gaping mouths connect them with the four dragons on the table.58 While this view is not universally accepted,59 the central stand of the folding screen (placed separately toward the southern end of the chamber),   See Rawson 1999, esp. 22.   Lothar von Falkenhausen, for example, categorically rejects this view, especially when such “exotic” forms are used as indicators of Zhongshan’s non-Chinese origin. See Falkenhausen 2006, 260–1. 58 59

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F igure 4.15.  Bronze lamp from the east chamber. Excavated from Cuo’s tomb at Pingshan, Hebei, Chinan. Late fourth century bce. Hebei Provincial Museum.

which represents a tiger in the act of devouring a deer (Figure 4.17), almost certainly derived visual elements from the steppes. Both the animal-combat motif and the emphasis on life motion are trademarks of steppe art, as exemplified by a famous Scythian gold plaque in the Siberian Collection of Peter the Great, now in the Hermitage Museum (Figure 4.18). It would be a mistake, however, to view the Zhongshan tiger stand as a direct copy of steppe art. Created in the late fourth century in central China, the object transforms a small combat

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F igure 4.16.  Inlaid table stand from the east chamber. Excavated from Cuo’s tomb at Pingshan, Hebei, Chinan. Late fourth century bce. Hebei Provincial Museum.

scene on a plaque into one on a monumental scale, half a meter long and weighing twenty-six kilograms. The cultural and artistic fusion is also reflected in the creative use of inlay decoration. Instead of forming abstract designs, the gold and silver inlays accentuate the patterns of the animal’s skin. Turning to the other half of the east chamber, we find a fairly broad area south of the folding screen, which was once occupied by several rectangular objects made of perishable materials. Of these, only the one next to the screen can be identified (see Figure 4.7). Made of lacquered wood, it had completely decomposed by the time of the excavation, but the traces of its lacquer surface and the four surviving bronze ring-handles indicate that it was an unusually large rectangular basin, over 1.5 meters long and close to 1 meter wide. Two curious pottery objects found nearby, which the excavators have identified as clay “pumice stones,” clinch its identity as a bathtub. Called shuang 㼽 in ancient China, the pottery objects are made of hard, high-fired clay; each has an elongated oval shape that curves up on both ends. The convex side is incised with extremely fine wave patterns and tiny dots, creating a rough surface effective for scrubbing the skin. Two yi 匜-pitchers placed near the basin further confirm its identification

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F igure 4.17.  Middle stand of a folding screen from the east chamber. Excavated from Cuo’s tomb at Pingshan, Hebei, Chinan. Late fourth century bce. Hebei Provincial Museum.

F igure 4.18.  Gold belt plaque. Fifth–fourth century bce. Siberian collection of Peter I, Russia, Siberia. The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Inv. no. Si-1727.1/6.

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as a bathtub. Narrowing at one end into a pouring channel, an yi is a type of “water vessel” (shui qi 水器) that had been used since the late Western Zhou for ritual cleansing of the hands. Grouped with bathing instruments in Cuo’s tomb, however, it must have acquired a more mundane function by the late Eastern Zhou. Other objects placed near the bathtub included two square lacquer boxes, two sets of bronze shallow bowls, a tiny lacquer tripod, and a small bronze basin. The lacquer wares were ornamented with silver fittings. Each set of bronze bowls was ingeniously made to have five graded vessels, one nested inside another. Placed next to the bathtub and yi-pitchers, these intimate objects were likely toilet a­ rticles. Some thirty vessels and many other objects were densely packed near the southern end of the chamber, seemingly forming a self-contained assemblage like those in the west chamber. A closer observation rejects this initial impression, however, and reveals instead many links between this group and other sections of the chamber. Most convincingly, some objects found here were actually components of the architectonic structures in the north section. These include four bronze pegs used to secure the folding tent. They were discovered together with a heavy hammer, which would be used to knock the pegs into the ground.60 Similarly, the screen in the north section had been disassembled before the burial; their three animal-shaped bases were stored in the southern section.61 Moreover, several objects in this section show strong stylistic and aesthetic affinities with the sculptures and furniture in the northern section. Two identical square hu-vases, for example, are richly inlaid with copper and turquoise to form, in Jenny So’s words, “a profusion of small, endlessly varied spiraling elements [that] are crowded into the interstices of the basic diagonal grid.”62 Unlike sacrificial vessels made of pure bronze, color has become a dominant feature of these secular, luxury vessels (Figure 4.19). There is also a cylinder-shaped object in this group (Figure 4.20). Never seen before in Eastern Zhou bronze r­epertories, it must have been a Zhongshan invention. Its three “rhinoceros” feet resemble animal sculptures from this chamber, suggesting that they were products of the same workshop. In fact, scholars have long doubted the identification of some of these objects as ritual implements. To So, miniature vessels in this group are “clearly not intended as ritual paraphernalia . . . Other artifacts, including a variety of fittings, a frame and base for a low table, and lamps, are plainly objects for secular use or adornment.”63 Jessica Rawson and Emma Bunker likewise considered that the pair of inlaid hu might be secular objects.64 The present discussion confirms their

  Hebei Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics 1995, vol. 1, 276–8.   Hebei Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics 1995, vol. 1, 261–4. 62   Wen 1980, 307. Here So describes a very similar hu from Sanmenxia in western Henan. 63 64   So 1995, 63.   Rawson and Bunker 1990, 47–8. 60 61

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F igure 4.19. Inlaid hu from the east chamber. Excavated from Cuo’s tomb at Pingshan, Hebei, Chinan. Late fourth century bce. Hebei Provincial Museum.

observations but goes further to suggest that the east chamber was conceived as a whole to store various things dedicated to Cuo, probably by his heir Ci. This would explain the mixture of ritual vessels, utensils, and luxury goods, as well as the clear separation between the two chambers. To this end, it should be pointed out that by disassembling the screen and tent and by placing their disjoined parts at different locations in the east chamber, the ritual practitioner “eliminated” the functionality of these utilitarian objects and transformed them into a specific type

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F igure 4.20.  Cylinder-shaped object from the east chamber. Excavated from Cuo’s tomb at Pingshan, Hebei, Chinan. Late fourth century bce. Hebei Provincial Museum.

of ritual object. Xunzi 荀子 (ca. 312–230 bc), a leading Confucian theorist of the late Eastern Zhou, wrote in his Discourse on Rites (Li lun 禮論): To furnish a grave with “lived objects” [sheng qi 生器, i.e. objects that had belonged to the dead when he was living] is to symbolize that the dead has changed his path. But only token articles are taken, not all that he used, and though they have their original shape, they are rendered unusable.65 65

  Translation partially based on Watson 1963, 104.

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Whereas this statement defines the disassembled utilitarian objects in the east chamber as “lived objects,” in the same essay Xunzi also distinguishes such objects from “spirit articles” that “have the shape of real objects but cannot be used.”66 This association leads us to observe another category of artifacts in Cuo’s tomb— pottery vessels specially manufactured for the tomb.

SPI R I T V E SSEL S

Based on Xunzi’s definition, forty-eight vessels from the two storage chambers can be identified as spirit articles. These are all shiny black pottery wares d ­ ecorated with incised and scraped geometric patterns, faintly floating on the dark surface (Figure 4.21). However striking in visual effect, these elegant ceramic objects are actually soft, low-fired wares; their black surface resulted from a special burning process.67 Their shapes and modeling further reinforce their identity as spirit

F igure 4.21. Pottery ding. Excavated from Cuo’s tomb at Pingshan, Hebei, Chinan. Late fourth century bce. Hebei Provincial Museum.

66

  Watson 1963, 104.   

67

  Li Z. 1979, 93–4.

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F igure 4.22. Pottery he (pitcher). Excavated from Cuo’s tomb at Pingshan, Hebei, Chinan. Late fourth century bce. Hebei Provincial Museum.

articles. A he, for example, has a sharply angular spout in the shape of a duck’s head, which can barely pour water (Figure 4.22). A plate has a central column supporting a sculpted bird (Figure 4.23). Although its function is unclear, the form is clearly derived from a type of bronze vessel, exemplified by a plate from the same tomb (Figure 4.24). It is important to realize that when displayed in funerary rites, these vessels must have formed a startling visual contrast with the two other kinds of vessels—the sacrificial vessels made of pure bronze and the secular utensils with colorful, inlaid surfaces. In the Eastern Zhou ritual texts, spirit vessels are also called “ghost vessels” (gui qi 鬼器) as contrasted to “human vessels” (ren qi 人器), an alternative name for sacrificial vessels used in the ancestral temple.68 The contrasting appearances of these two types of objects manifested their separate connections with the realm of death on the one hand and with human society on the other. Not all assemblages in Cuo’s tomb included such black ghostly spirit vessels, however. As mentioned earlier, they were absent in group A in the west chamber.   Ruan 1980a, 1290. See Legge 1967, vol. 1, 151.

68

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F igure 4.23.  Pottery basin with a sculpted bird. Excavated from Cuo’s tomb at Pingshan, Hebei, Chinan. Late fourth century bce. Hebei Provincial Museum.

I have proposed that this absence is related to the purpose of this particular assemblage of ritual paraphernalia: they were presented here to symbolize Cuo’s continuing homage to his ancestors in the afterlife (see p. 139). In Eastern Zhou ritual texts, ancestral sacrifices are classified as “auspicious rites” because they connect the living members of a clan or lineage to their collective origin (this is also why they are called “human vessels”), whereas funerary ceremonies are categorized as “inauspicious rites” because they express grief over the death of a kinsman. These texts instruct that the paraphernalia and clothes used on these two ritual occasions should be carefully distinguished. In his Discourse on Rites, Xunzi states emphatically that “rites are strictest in dealing with auspicious and inauspicious occasions, making certain that they do not impinge upon each other.”69 According to the Rites of Zhou, a major responsibility of a district master (Xiangshi 鄉師) is to inventory the district’s ritual paraphernalia at the beginning of each year and to provide correct ones to facilitate auspicious or

69

  Translation consulted Watson 1963, 98.

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F igure 4.24.  Bronze basin with a sculpted bird. Excavated from Cuo’s tomb at Pingshan, Hebei, Chinan. Late fourth century bce. Hebei Provincial Museum.

inauspicious occasions.70 Understood in this context, the distribution of pottery spirit vessels in Cuo’s tomb mapped out two symbolic spheres: whereas their exclusion from group A guaranteed the “auspiciousness” of this particular display, their existence in three other assemblages signified the connection between these groups of objects and “inauspicious” funerary rites. Presence or absence, however, is only one of several ways with which spirit vessels signified ritual occasions and purposes. Their specific types, numbers, and proportions in a group of tomb furnishings also indicated the special nature of this assemblage. To understand this second significance we can start from group B in the west chamber, which we have encountered when discussing its bronze ritual vessels (see p. 140–3). Fifteen spirit vessels belonged to this assemblage, including four ding-tripods, four hu-vases, four dou-stemmed dishes, two small hu-vases with ball-shaped bodies, and one duck-shaped he vessel (see Figure 4.13). It is clear that ding, hu, and dou dominated this combination (twelve out of fifteen); their equal numbers also made them members of a coordinated set. Significantly,   Ruan 1980d, 714.

70

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these three types also constituted the majority of the bronze ritual vessels in this assemblage (thirteen out of nineteen). Although these two subgroups of pottery and bronze vessels do not match each other precisely in shape, their parallel typology and similar volume would generate an impression of equilibrium between bronze vessels and pottery vessels in the ritual display, with the latter appearing as the former’s “inauspicious” shadows. It should be noted that furnishing an aristocratic tomb with a combination of functional ritual vessels and unusable spirit vessels had become a widespread practice by the fourth century bce and that people around China had invented different ways to make such combinations. Some tombs contrasted standard bronze vessels with miniature vessels, others yielded matching sets of “current style” vessels and “archaistic” vessels, and still others combined functional vessels with unusable articles made of clay or wood.71 In Baoshan tomb 2, for example, bronze vessels used in the Da zhao ceremony were found together with twenty-five wood objects, which according to the accompanying “grave inventory list” were used in the same ceremony. The excavators have noticed that except for a lacquered stand, “all others were crudely made and had no lacquer coating, and should have been made as spirit articles.”72 Using this example as a comparative case, we can suggest that in Cuo’s tomb, the bronze and pottery vessels in group B were used together in a similar grave sacrifice. At the northeastern corner of the west chamber is group C (see Figure 4.6). Arranged in a rectangular area, this assemblage is considerably smaller than groups A and B. Nine pottery spirit vessels constituted the eastern half of the assemblage, including two bowls, one yan 甗-steamer, two basins, one special basin with a sculptured bird in the middle, one yi-pitcher, one duck-shaped he, and one cylinder-shaped vessel (Figure 4.25). This combination differed significantly from the spirit vessels in group B in its typological components. Not only did it lack ding, hu, and dou, the three major types of ritual vessels in group B, but it consisted mainly of water vessels (yi-pitcher and basin) and food vessels (steamer and bowl), which must indicate a different kind of sacrifice. Although it is difficult to identify this sacrifice precisely, two clues may reveal its nature. One clue is the complete absence of bronze vessels in this assemblage. Considering this group together with groups A and B, we find an interesting pattern: ritual vessels in group A were all made of pure bronze; group B combined bronze and pottery vessels; group C included only pottery spirit vessels. We have proposed that group A excluded spirit vessels because it simulated an “auspicious” ancestral sacrifice conventionally held in a temple and that group B included both real and spirit vessels because they had been used in a grave sacrifice for the dead.   Some of these examples are discussed in Wu 2006, 73–6.   Jingsha Railroad Archaeological Team of Hubei Province 1991, vol. 1, 488.

71 72

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97 96

88

89 521

159

90

86 85

93 92

87 98

522

63

64

63

F igure 4.25.  Group C in the west chamber. After Cuo mu: Zhanguo Zhongshan guo guowang zhimu (Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe, 1995), fig. 29.

Following this logic, the exclusion of bronze vessels in group C must have a particular significance. The absence of real food and drink in the spirit vessels further suggests that the offering was not presented to former ancestors or the tomb occupant; in ancient China, sacrifices to one’s forebears always involved feeding their spirits. This leads to the second clue, provided by the remains of an unknown object originally placed next to the spirit vessels. The excavation report offers only a few words about these remains: “[Together with the pottery spirit vessels] were fragments of deer antlers stuck on iron rods.”73 The drawing accompanying this description offers more information, however, and shows that the entire western half of the group C area was covered by fragments of a disintegrated object, among which were multiple pieces of deer antlers, iron sticks wrapped with “vine bark” (藤皮), and gold foil (see Figure 4.25). What was this object? In another place in the report, the authors speculate that the antlers “may have been inserted into the head of a sculptured beast made of wood.”74 Although no supporting   Hebei Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics 1995, 81.   Hebei Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics 1995, 250.

73

74

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evidence is given, this speculation is likely inspired by the kind of tomb sculpture conventionally called a “tomb quelling beast” (zhenmu shou 鎮墓獸). Indeed, widely found in Eastern Zhou tombs, especially in the Chu 楚 area, variations of these sculptures always have one or more pairs of deer antlers inserted in its head (Figure 4.26). The identity of the beast has been the subject of a prolonged debate. No consensus has been reached; but a recent discovery possibly connects this image for the first time with an inscribed name. In a mid-Eastern Zhou tomb

F igure 4.26.  “Tomb quelling beast” from Tianxingguan Tomb 1, Jiangling, Hubei. Wood. Fourth century bce.

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at Xichuan 淅川, Henan province, archaeologists found a bronze base with a hollowed pole rising from its top.75 Based on a pair of deer antlers found next to it and the rotten wood inside the pole, scholars believe that this base once supported a “tomb quelling beast.” Unlike similar bases, it bears an inscription on its bottom, which identifies the object, or more likely the image it once supported, as a “zu shi” 且埶. Lai Guolong has argued that this term is equivalent to “zu wei” 祖位 and “jian mu wei” 漸木位 in excavated texts from Chu tombs related to the occult. He further noted that, in these texts, “zu wei” and “jian mu wei” are listed together with “those who died of abnormal and violent death” and “those who have no descendants and whose family lines are broken.” These are ­ominous ghosts as subjects of exorcism, not subjects of prayer and worship.76 Although we still do not know what a “zu shi” is exactly, Lai’s discussion provides a possible interpretation for group C: if the deer antlers found here indeed belonged to a sculptured image of a “zu shi” and was therefore related to  ­ominous ghosts, it becomes understandable why nothing used in regular ancestor worship, including bronze vessels and food and drink, were present here and why only the “inauspicious” black spirit vessels accompanied the image. We can also offer a hypothetical explanation to the spatial juxtaposition between group C and group A—two assemblages arranged around the opposite corners on the chamber’s north side. What we find here, it seems, are two groups of objects dedicated to two kinds of dead: glorious ancestors who eternally receive sacrifices from their descendants, and homeless ghosts whose dangerous impact has to be forever exorcised. No matter how attractive, however, this interpretation must remain a strict hypothesis, not only because it is almost impossible to reconstruct the disintegrated object or image originally placed next to the spirit vessels in group C, but also because “tomb quelling beasts”—or “zu shi”—have been found mainly in the Chu area, not in the North. Moreover, Lai’s theory still awaits more detailed examination and proof. But even if the disintegrated object/image cannot be securely identified as a “zu shi,” the remains of deer antlers still offer strong evidence to tie this assemblage to the dark realm of the underworld. In the shamanistic prayer “Summoning the Soul” (Zhao hun 招魂) attributed to the third-century bce poet Qu Yuan 屈原, the Earth Lord in the Land of Darkness is described as a creature with “dreadful horns on its forehead.”77 In art, beasts with deer antlers only appear in the underground realm, as demonstrated in the silk painting from Mawangdui tomb 1 of the early second century bce, as well as on a black coffin from the same burial.78 And, as mentioned above, all known

  Henan Provincial Institute of Archaeology and Cultural Relics 2004, p. 26, fig. 24, p. 109, fig. 104.   Lai 2013, 41.    77  Qu 1985, 225.    78  See Wu 1992.

75 76

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“tomb quelling beasts” wear deer antlers, and these sculptures have only been found in tombs, not above ground. The last three spirit vessels from Cuo’s tomb, including two bowls and an yi-pitcher, were found in the east chamber. These are small objects that do not imitate important ritual vessels, and they are placed at two separate locations amidst practical utensils. The bowls were found at the southern end of the chamber, one inside a large bronze plate, the other next to a heavy pottery basin, whose thick wall and unadorned surface distinguish it from fragile spirit vessels. The pitcher was originally put next to the bathtub in the middle of the chamber. Instead of forming a separate group, these three black spirit vessels seem to have been used as a kind of token to symbolize death. Mixed with functional objects, they transformed these objects into grave goods for the tomb occupant.

PR ACT ICE A N D DISCOU R SE

The practice of burying sacrificial vessels, utensils, and spirit articles in graves had existed long before Cuo’s time. Earlier we mentioned that many bronze sacrificial vessels dedicated to former ancestors were found in Western Zhou graves. The tomb of Fu Hao 婦好, a thirteenth-century bce Shang queen, contained seven vessels bearing the “temple names” of two ancestresses. David Keightly has ­speculated that Fu Hao may have used these objects during her lifetime to worship them and brought the vessels with her to the afterlife.79 The same tomb also yielded ninety bronze vessels with Fu Hao’s own name cast on them. Because a Shang aristocrat received a temple name after his or her death (that is, when he or she became a subject of ancestor worship), these ninety vessels should have come from her own possession and can be identified as shengqi or “lived objects.” The practice of making and burying specially designed spirit vessels in graves can also be traced to Shang and even earlier. Wu Ruzuo has identified a large class of extremely thin black pottery from the Shandong Longshan culture (ca. 2400–ca. 1900 bce) as ritual vessels; one of his reasons is that these fragile objects only furnished the richest tombs.80 With these and many other precedents, it appears that Cuo’s tomb followed a long tradition in ancient China to furnish an aristocratic grave with sacrificial vessels, utensils, and spirit articles. What is special about this tomb is the distinct rationality behind the arrangement of the two storage chambers: there is a systematic effort to synthesize previous mortuary practices, to group vessels and objects into complex categories, and to construct interrelated ritual displays based on such categorization.

79

  Keightley 1991.

80

  Wu 1989, esp. 39–41.

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What this rationality reveals suggests the direct involvement of Confucian ritualists in conducting Cuo’s funerary rites and furnishing his tomb. Significantly, both transmitted historical texts and newly excavated documents demonstrate the strong presence of Rujia in Zhongshan and a strong Confucian influence on the state’s official ideology. Strategies of the Warring States (Zhanguo ce), a book compiled between the third and first century bce, states that “Zhongshan singlemindedly practiced [the doctrine of ] benevolence and righteousness (ren yi 仁義) and honored the Confucian learning (ru xue 儒學).”81 When Cuo’s tomb was first discovered, scholars quickly noticed that the three long inscriptions from it derive many literary expressions from key Confucian texts. Fundamental virtues hailed by Rujia—such as benevolence, righteousness, integrity (de 德), and propriety—are stressed over and over, just as “honoring worthies” (shangxian 尚賢) is emphasized as a ruler’s primary duty.82 Regarding this last emphasis, we have cited a passage from the inscription on the Cuo hu: “Those ancient sage kings considered obtaining worthy men their duty, and by virtue of that they won over the people. Therefore, [if a king is] respectful in words and decorum, worthy men will come. If widespread love is deep, worthy men will be close [at hand].” Zhongshan’s enemies, however, considered such “virtue” a fatal weakness and took advantage of it. Again recorded in Strategies of the Warring States, when King Wuling of the Zhao 趙武靈王 (r. 325–299 bce) was planning to attack Zhongshan, he sent his minister Li Ci 李疵 to check on Zhongshan’s conditions. Upon his return Li reported that Zhongshan could be defeated because its ruler “has folded back the canopy of his carriage to go into the meanest alleys to pay his respects to seventeen hundred men of worth”: Because he is promoting gentlemen, people pursue names instead of substance. Bringing worthies to court has made his farmers lazy and his soldiers timid. A state in this condition which did not finally perish is yet to be heard of.83

The phrase “pursuing names” (wu ming 務名) refers to “rectifying names” (zhengming 正名), an essential doctrine in Confucian teaching. It is recorded in the Analects that in responding to Zhong You’s 仲由 question about the most urgent matter in establishing good governance, Confucius said: “What must be done is to rectify names.” This is because “if names be not rectified, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success. When affairs cannot be carried on to success, ritual and music do not flourish.”84 “Rectifying names” is therefore intrinsically connected to the Confucian project of defining rites and   This passage from Zhangguo ce is cited in Yue 2008.   For related discussions, see Li X. 1979, 39–41; Liu and Li 1979; Kong 2008. 83   Based on Crump, Jr. 1970, 582.    84  Legge 1871b, vol. 1, 263–4. 81 82

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ritual objects. In discussing Cuo’s tomb, we have cited multiple passages from Confucian ritual texts to explicate the arrangement of the two chambers. These texts demonstrate that Eastern Zhou Confucian ritualists classified manufactured objects first into two general categories: yongqi as practical utensils used in daily life, and liqi as instruments of ritual performances and embodiments of ritual codes. Liqi as an inalienable class of artifacts, in turn, consists of many classes and types of vessels and objects, each defined primarily according to the ritual occasion it serves. Among the five main ritual occasions (sacrifice, funerary service, greeting, military, and festival), sacrifice and funerary service deal with departed family members, with sacrifices dedicated to generations of ancestral deities and funerary services conducted for the recent dead. Vessels and other instruments are defined to reinforce these and other distinctions. A careful reading of Eastern Zhou ritual texts provides important clues to trace the formation of such definitions. Although this is not the purpose of this chapter, a brief review of some key references to spirit articles helps illuminate this process. The earliest prescription for the use of such objects appears in Etiquette and Rites, listing spirit articles to be displayed on two ritual occasions on the day of interment.85 These include various jars and baskets containing food and drink, as well as weapons, utensils, and personal belongings of the deceased. No sacrificial vessels or bronze objects are included. On the other hand, none of the objects on the list are specifically made for the tomb, and the text pays no attention to the visual appearance of these objects. Spirit articles in this sense are therefore still not separated from lived objects and do not yet constitute a specific category of artifacts in Confucian ritual writings. This situation changes radically toward the late Eastern Zhou; in Xunzi’s Discourse on Rites and certain chapters of the Book of Rites, spirit articles and lived objects are defined as separate but complementary categories in an increasingly rationalized system of funerary ­ araphernalia. p For Xunzi, the central idea of the funerary service is “to adorn the dead as though they were still living, and send them to the grave with forms symbolic of life.”86 He does not exclude lived objects from grave furnishings, but he requires them to be rendered useless. As for spirit vessels, he asks that the wooden ones not be carved and the pottery ones not be formed in the same way as real utensils. Together, “the articles used by the dead when he was living retain the form but not the function of the common article, and the spirit articles prepared especially for the dead man have the shape of real objects but cannot be used.”87 The same idea is repeated in the “Tangong” 檀弓 chapter of the Book of Rites, which

85

  Ruan 1980c, 1148–9.

  Watson 1963, 103.

86

87

  Watson 1963, 104.

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Wang E 王鍔 dates to the end of the Eastern Zhou.88 In this chapter a new tendency associates spirit vessels and sacrificial vessels with different historical strata in China’s past. Thus Yuan Xian 原憲 told Zhen Shen 曾參 that in furnishing tombs, people of the Xia dynasty used spirit articles, those of the Shang used sacrificial vessels, and those of the Zhou combined both.89 By saying this he implies that this last method should set the standard; for Rujia, ritual practices of the Zhou are always looked at as the most authentic model. At the same time, Yuan Xian’s statement also reveals a new historical consciousness about ritual artifacts, as well as an effort to construct a succinct “dynastic histories” of ritual paraphernalia and programs. This effort is also demonstrated by several other passages in “Tangong”: [In the time of Shun 舜] of Yu 虞 they used earthenware coffins; under the sovereigns of Xia, they surrounded these with an enclosure of bricks. The people of Shang used wooden coffins, the outer and inner. The people of Zhou added the surrounding curtains and the feathery ornaments.90 Under the sovereigns of Xia they preferred black [as the color of ritual paraphernalia] . . . Under the Yin dynasty they preferred what was white . . . Under the Zhou dynasty they preferred what was red.91 Under the sovereigns of Xia, the corpse was dressed and coffined at the top of the steps on the east . . . The people of Shang performed the same ceremony between the two pillars . . . The people of Zhao perform it at the top of the western steps, treating the deceased as if he were a guest.92

The people of Zhou use the bian 弁 cap at interments; those of Shang used the xu 旴 . . . . Under the Shang, they presented condolences immediately at the grave; under the Zhou, when the son had returned and was wailing . . . . Under the Shang, the tablet was put in its place on the change of the mourning at the end of twelve months; under the Zhou, when the [continuous] wailing was over . . . . Under the Shang, the corpse was thus presented and then coffined in the temple; under the Zhou the interment followed immediately after its presentation [in the coffin].93 88   A typical passage from “Tangong” reads: “In dealing with the dead, if we treat them as if they were entirely dead, that would show a want of affection, and should not be done; or, if we treat them as if they were entirely alive, that would show a want of intelligence, and should not be done. On this account the bamboo artifacts [made for the dead] should not be suited for actual use; those of earthenware should not be able to contain water; those of wood should not be finely carved; the zithers should be strung, but not evenly; the mouth organs should be prepared, but not in tune; the bells and chime stones should be there but have no stands. These objects are called ‘spirit articles’ because they are created to honor the spirit of the dead.” Ruan 1980a, 1289; Legge 1967, vol. 1, 148. For the dating of the “Tanggong” chapter, see note 95 below. 89   Ruan 1980a, 1290. 90   Ruan 1980a, 1276; Legge 1967, vol. 1, 125. Translation modified. 91   Ruan 1980a, 1276; Legge 1967, vol. 1, 125–6. Translation modified. 92   Ruan 1980a, 1283; Legge 1967, vol. 1, 138–9. Translation modified. 93   Ruan 1980a, 1302–3; Legge 1967, vol. 1, 169–72. Translation modified.

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It is important to realize that these mini-histories of ritual performances and paraphernalia served practical purposes. Earlier we mentioned that Confucius’s student Gongsun Chi arranged the funerary ceremony for the Master. What he did—again we learn this from “Tangong”—was to combine customs from all Three Dynasties to decorate the hearse, adorning Confucius’s coffin in the Zhou style and flanking it with banners made in the Xia and Shang fashions.94 In doing so he placed the Zhou model in the center, while incorporating secondary forms from previous dynasties to give the ritual display a pan-historical character. This leads us back to Cuo’s tomb. Constructed at the very end of the fourth century bce, its date is close to that of “Tangong.”95 Our discussion of the two storage chambers in the tomb has revealed some notable patterns in selecting and grouping vessels and objects, which show three kinds of parallels with the Confucian discourse on ritual vessels and tomb furnishing. First, the arrangement of the vessels and other objects in the two chambers reflects a classification system that is very similar to what we have found in the ritual texts. As we have noticed, artifacts from Cuo’s tomb belong to three categories with different functions and visual appearances: the first group consists of sacrificial vessels, made of pure bronze and sometimes bearing long commemorative inscriptions. The second group consists of utilitarian objects, often brilliantly inlaid and exhibiting naturalistic or fantastic images. Vessels in the third group—black, low-fired potteries—are unusable and evoke a ghostly quality. With such clearly articulated distinctions, the furnishing of the tomb seems to have been guided directly by the ritual prescription that a high-level tomb should be equipped with not only spirit vessels and lived objects from the former possessions of the dead, but also sacrificial vessels dedicated to the former ancestors.96 It is also interesting to note that the installation method of some major utilitarian pieces seems to closely follow the instructions in Xunzi’s Discourse on Rites and the Book of Rites, which require lived objects to be dismembered before being buried in a tomb. Second, by including both sacrificial and spirit vessels in tomb furnishings, the ritual practitioners were self-consciously following the Zhou model as specified by Yuan Xian in “Tangong.” The effort to re-embrace Zhou ritual culture can also be detected in other aspects of Cuo’s tomb. Most definitively, the three long inscriptions from this tomb—in fact, the longest inscriptions on all Eastern Zhou bronzes—construct a direct relationship between Zhongshan and Zhou. The practice of inscribing lengthy commemorative texts on bronze vessels, a distinct   “As the adornments of the coffin, there were the wall-like curtains, the fan-like screens, and the cords at its sides, after the manner of Zhou. There were the flags with their toothed edges, after the manner of Shang; and there were the flag-staffs bound with white silk, and long streamers pendent from them, after the manner of Xia.” Ruan 1980a, 1284. Translation based on Legge 1967, vol. 1, 139–40. 95   For a detailed discussion of the date of this chapter, see Wang 2007, 251–67. 96   See Zheng Xuan’s commentary on Yi li in Ruan 1980c, 1149. 94

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Western Zhou tradition, had largely disappeared during the Eastern Zhou. By reviving this tradition and citing standard expressions from Western Zhou bronze inscriptions (such as “May the sons of sons and the grandsons of grandsons forever treasure and use [this vessel]”), Cuo and his heir Ci made it clear that they were returning to the Zhou ways. In terms of the form of the two vessels, the projected dragon motifs on the hu are uncommon on contemporary vessels, but they recall an earlier decorative style that can be traced to the Western Zhou.97 Third and finally, the three groups of artifacts found in Cuo’s tomb seem to embody different historical temporalities through presenting different period styles; the black spirit vessels that appeared around this time in Zhongshan and some other areas in northern China seem to resurrect a remote pottery tradition of prehistoric Shandong (Figure 4.27); the sacrificial bronzes continue or revive Zhou ritual art; and the utilitarian objects reflect the contemporary taste for extravagance. Moreover, when Chinese archaeologists opened Cuo’s mausoleum,

F igure 4.27. Pottery dou (stemmed dish), third to second millennium bce, Shandong. Longshan Culture. Photo by the author.

97

  So 1995, 61.

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they were surprised to find that the tomb’s interior had a complex color scheme: the walls were painted white; red pigment covered the surface of bronze vessels and jades; and the pottery spirit articles were all shiny black. A passage from the “Tangong” chapter cited earlier offers a possible reference for this scheme: “Under the sovereigns of Xia they preferred what was black . . . Under the Yin dynasty they preferred what was white . . . Under the Zhou dynasty they preferred what was red.”98

R EF ER ENCE S B eckman , J.  (2002), “Minister Zhao’s grave: staging an Eastern Zhou burial,” Orientations 34, 22–6. C ook , C. A. (1980), “Chung-Shan bronze inscriptions: introduction and translation” (MA thesis, University of Washington). C rump , J. I., Jr (trans) (1970), Chan-Kuo Ts’e (Oxford: Clarendon Press). F alkenhausen , L. von (2006), Chinese society in the age of Confucius (1000–250 BC): the archaeological evidence (Contsen Institute of Archaeology, University of California at Los Angeles). H ayashi M inao (1993), “Concerning the inscription ‘may sons and grandsons eternally use this [vessel],’ ” Artibus Asiae 53, 51–8. H ebei P rovincial I nstitute of C ultural R elics (1995), Cuo mu: Zhanguo Zhongshanguo guowang zhi mu [Tomb of Cuo: The mausoleum of a Zhongshan king of the Warring States period], 2 vols. (Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe). H enan P rovincial I nstitute of A rchaeology and C ultural R elics et al . (2004), Xichuan Heshangling yu Xujialing Chu mu [Chu tombs at Heshangling and Xujialing in Xichuan] (Zhengzhou: Daxiang chubanshe). H u Y ali (1991), “Baoshan erhao Chu mu qiance chubu yanjiu” [A preliminary study of the inventory lists from Baoshan tomb 2 of the Chu state], in vol. 1 of Jingsha Railroad Archaeological Team of Hubei Province, Baoshan Chu mu [Chu tombs at Baoshan] (Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe). H ubei P rovincial M useum (1989), Zenghou yimu [Tomb of Marquis Yi of the state of Zeng] (Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe). J ingsha R ailroad A rchaeological T eam of H ubei P rovince (1991), Baoshan Chu mu [Chu tombs at Baoshan], 2 vols. (Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe). K eightley , D. N. (1991), “The quest for eternity in ancient China: the dead, their gifts, their names,” in G.  Kuwayama (ed), Ancient mortuary traditions of China (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art), 12–25. K lose , P. (1985), “Das Grab des Königs Cuo von Zhongshan (gest. 308 v. Chr.)” [The tomb of King Cuo of Zhongshan (d. 308 BCE)], Beiträge zur allgemeinen und vergleichenden Archäologie 7, 1–93.

  Hebei Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics 1995, vol. 1, 505; Legge 1967, vol. 1, 125–6.

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K ong D eqin (2008), “Zhanguo Zhongshan sanqi mingwen de wenxue jiedu” [A literary interpretation of the inscriptions on three Zhongshan bronze vessels of the Warring States period], Minzu wenxue yanjiu [Nationalities Literature Research], 2. L ai G uolong (2013), “Shezhe de zaixian, wuxing de canlie: Zhanguo Qin Han muzang yishu zhong renxiang guannian de zhuanbian” [The presence of invisible: changing attitudes toward human figures during the Warring States and the Qin-Han transition], in Wu Hung, Zhu Qingsheng, and Zheng Yan (eds), Gudai muzang meishu yanjiu [Studies on ancient tomb art], vol. 2 (Changsha: Hunan meishu chubanshe), 19–54. L egge , J. (trans) (1871a), The Ch’un Ts’ew with the Tso Chuen, in The Chinese classics, 7 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press). L egge , J. (trans) (1871b), Analects, in The Chinese classics, 7 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press). L egge , J. (trans) (1967), Li Chi: book of rites, 2 vols. (New York: University Books). L iang Y un (2008), Zhanguo shidai de dongxi chabie: kaoguxue de shiye [Differences between east and west during the Warring States period: an archaeological perspective] (Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe). L i X ueqin (1979), “Pingshan muzangqun yu Zhongshanguo de wenhua” [A group of burials and culture of the Zhongshan kingdom], Wenwu 1, 37–41. L i X ueqin and L i L ing (1979), “Pingshan sanqi yu Zhongshanguo shi de ruogan wenti” [Three inscribed vessels from Pingshan and issues about the history of the Zhongshan kingdom], Kaogu xuebao 2, 147–70. L i Z hiyan (1979), “Zhongshan wangmu chutu de taoqi” [Pottery vessels unearthed from the tombs of Zhongshan kings], Gugong bowuyuan yuankan 2, 93–4. L inzi D istrict B ureau of C ultural R elics (2013), “Shandong Zibo shi Linzi qu Xindian erhao Zhanguo mu” [Xindian tomb 2 of the Warring States period at Linzi, Zibo, Shandong], Kaogu 1, 32–58. L iu L aicheng and L i X iaodong (1979), “Shitan Zhanguo shiqi Zhongshanguo lishi shang de jige wenti” [A preliminary exploration into several issues in the history of Zhongshan during the warring states], Wenwu 1, 32–6. L oewe , M.  (1993), Early Chinese texts: a bibliographical guide (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California). M attos , G. L. (trans) (1997), “Eastern Zhou bronze inscriptions,” in E. L. Shaughnessay (ed), New sources of early Chinese history: an introduction to the reading of inscriptions and manuscripts (New Haven: Birdtrack Press), 107–8. N ylan , M. (2001), The Five “Confucian” Classics (New Haven: Yale University Press). Q u Y uan (1985), “Zhao hun,” in D. Hawkes (trans and annot), The songs of the South: an ancient anthology of poems by Qu Yuan and other poets (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics). R awson , J. (1999), “The eternal palaces of the western Han: a new view of the universe,” Artibus Asiae 59, 5–58. R awson , J. and Bunker, E. C. (1990), Ancient Chinese and Ordos bronzes (Hong Kong: The Oriental Ceramic Society of Hong Kong). R iegel , J. (1995), “Do not serve the dead as you serve the living: the Lüshi chunqiu treatises on moderation in burial,” Early China 20, 301–30.

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I NDE X Note: Page numbers in italics indicate figures. Achilles Painter  27, 29, 32n68, 38 aidoion (oil flask in the shape of genitalia)  17, 17–18 alabastron (oil flask)  39 alcohol, see drinking; wine amphora 12, 13, 18, 18, 22–4, 23, 25, 30 Analects, see Rujia ancestors  3, 26, 34, 133, 136–9, 156, 161 temple  138–40, 142, 145, 155 animation 8–9 anthropomorphism  10, 22, 24, 27–9; see also body metaphor antlers, see zhenmu shou Aphrodite  22, 36, 72 Apollo 71–2 aquatic imagery, see water archaeology  3, 7, 128–32, see also classification: in archaeology Argonauts 22 Aristophanes Clouds  41–2 Frogs 18 Wasps 18 Arktinos of Miletos  13 Artemis 22 art history, methodologies of  2–3, 5, 24 aryballos (flask)  81 assemblage  1, 3–4, 5, 7, 38, 82, 96, 129–33, 141, 156, 157–8 Athens  16, 24, 26, 30 Agora 7 Kerameikos cemetery  22, 31n66, 34 attendants 52–3, 55, 56, 61, 74 Bacchylides 38 Baoshan 141–142 Beckman, Joy  143 Berger, John  71 bird as food  86, 143 as vessel  85–7, 86, 87, 88–90, 89 hummingbird  109

imagery 56–8, 65, 66, 68, 72–3, 103–4, 105–6, 146, 147 in vessel  155, 155, 156, 158 boar 11, 12, 89, 143 Boardman, John  22 boat, see ship body absent  26–7, 33–4, 36–7, 38 as vessel  20–2, 105 female  4, 20–3, 24, 32, 34–5, 57–8, 83–4, 90; see also mastos male  99, 105; see also aidoion, phallic symbolism metaphor  4, 14–18, 22, 24, 42, 81–2, 85–6, 91, 99, 101, 104–5 royal, and death  5, 85, 110–11, 113–14 box  51–4, 56, 58, 62, 64, 70 bronze bell  124, 132, 133, 139 lamp 146–7, 148, 151 plate  58–9, 122, 162 statue 21–2 tripod, see ding Bunker, Emma  152 burial  24, 26, 74, 32, 34–5, 167–8; see also stele auxiliary 125–6n16 elite 84–5 female  23–4, 30, 31–2, 34–5, 125–6n16; see also Fu Hao royal  4, 5, 122–5; see also Cuo: mausoleum of; Tikal: burials visit to the tomb  27–30, 28, 29, 33 cacao  1, 2, 85, 95–6, 106, 113 Calakmul  105, 110 Caracol 105 ceramics, see pottery Chak Tok Ich’aak (Tikal king)  94 chocolate, see cacao chronology and archaeological classification  1–3, 24, 82, 122 Chu (state)  141, 160–1

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Ci (son of Cuo, king of Zhongshan)  123, 143–6, 152, 167 cinnabar 85 classification  15–16, 17, 38, 162–3; see also vessel: as category in archaeology  1, 7, 24, 42, 82, 128–9, 132–3 clay  8, 31, 33, 41, 94; see also pottery collecting ancient  54, 72, 129, 139 modern  1, 3, 4, 67, 148 column  53, 65, 67, 72, 124, 145, 155 Corinthian capital  57 comparativism  5, 7, 81–2, 141–2, 158 Confucianism, see Rujia Confucius  121, 163, 166; see also Rujia contextualization  5, 73, 75–7, 82, 120–1, 127–33 Corinth 16 cosmetics  17, 51, 61, 71, 72, 73, 75, 83–4 cosmology  88–9, 101 crocodile 101 Cuo (king of Zhongshan)  122–4, 137, 167 mausoleum of  123, 124–8, 125, 126, 127, 130, 131, 134, 140, 141, 147, 159 Cyrene 22 Da zang (Great funeral ceremony)  142; see also zhao Daidalos 22 damage  3, 57, 82, 85, 96; see also fragmentation decoration  54–8, 68–9, 74–5, 84–5, 146, 154; see also engraving; molding; repoussé; stucco as self–fashioning  51–3, 72–3, 77, 83–4, 151 inlay 149 of tomb monuments  27–8 punched  54, 62–3 Demeter 22 ding (tripod)  124, 128–33, 136, 140, 141–2, 145–6, 156 inscriptions  134, 137–9, 166–7 pottery  154 dinos (mixing bowl) in Aristophanes’ Clouds 41–2 vase  4, 2, 11, 13 Dipylon Master  25

Dionysos  8–9, 10, 20, 51, 72 Discourse on Rites (Li lun), see Xunzi dou (stemmed dish)  120–1, 133, 141, 157–8, 167 Douris 13, 14 drapery  36–7, 38 drinking  9, 10, 11–12, 13–14, 17; see also symposium; wine Eastern Zhou dynasty  120–1, 130–32, 133n26, 139, 160–1, 165–8 eidōlon (soul of the deceased)  29–30 elite  2, 4, 26, 52, 53, 61, 70–3, 77, 82, 83–4, 85, 95–6, 105, 114; see also attendants emic–etic  4, 7, 8, 24, 122 Empedocles 41 engraving  50, 59; see also inscriptions Epiktetos  18 Erya (early Chinese dictionary)  142 Etiquette and Rites (Yi li)  120n3, 164 Exekias  9 eye–cup 8–10, 9, 11, 15, 14–18 Faraone, Christopher  21 feast  3, 4–5, 85, 95–6, 113–14 figurine  8, 18–19, 50, 99 folding screen  146, 147, 150, 151, 152–3 food  85, 87, 90, 90n26, 142, 164; see also feast; sacrifice: and food fragmentation  1, 3, 16, 85, 112n73, 159, 166 fu (grain vessel)  120, 141 Fu Hao (Shang queen and general)  162 funerary objects  4–5, 22–3, 26, 85; see also vessel: ritual offering  26, 39–40, 82; see also sacrifice rituals  5, 28, 30, 143 gaze  8, 10, 83, 105; see also eye–cup Gefäßgruppenstele, see stele gender  16–18, 35–6, 61, 71–2, 73, 85, 85n15, 99, 111; see also burial: female; woman geng (meat stew)  139–40 Gongsun Chi  121, 166 gorgon, see Medusa grave, see burial

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grave monument, see stele gu (vessel)  1 gui (vessel)  120 gui qi (ghost vessels), see ming qi Gu Kaizhi  73, 74 Gyges (king of Lydia)  22 handling  2, 5, 18, 52, 73, 75, 90, 96n37, 100 Han dynasty  121, 130 hanging bowl  53, 54, 55, 77; see also mastos Hayashi Minao  138, 139 he (wine pitcher)  145, 155, 155, 157–8 Hephaistos 21 Herakles 12–13, 14 Hermes 42 Holmul 105 Homer 11 Iliad 38 Homeric Hymn to Dionysos 10 horos (boundary stone)  37–8; see also vessel: and boundaries hu (wine vessel)  129, 135, 140, 141, 144, 151, 152, 157 inscriptions  124, 133–6, 137, 143–6, 163 with dragon motif  167 humor  16, 18, 19, 26, 41–2, 90 Hu Yalin  142 hydria (water vessel)  31 ichor (vital fluid)  22 iconography  1, 34; see also decoration and iconology, see Panofsky, Erwin of the Muses  65–70 identity  10, 77; see also decoration: as self–fashioning Iliad,  see Homer Inka 3 inscriptions  101, 122, 125–6, 129, 161 on vessels  96, 113, 134–5, 138–9, 166; see also hu: inscriptions; ding: inscriptions inside–outside  4, 11, 12, 18, 75 intoxication, see drinking jade  81–2, 85, 105–6, 128 and royal body  110–13, 111, 114

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carvings  129, 133, 139, 168 vessel  107, 108, 112 jaguar–iguana  89, 113 Jasaw Chan K’awiil (Tikal king)  108–10; see also Tikal: Burial 116 jiqi (sacrificial vessel), see vessel: ritual Jones, Nathaniel  29 Kaminaljuyu 105 Kane, Susan  22 kantharos (drinking cup)  12 Keightley, David  162 kingship  4, 5, 163; see also jade: and royal body K’inich Janaab Pakal (Palenque king)  111 krater, see dinos lacquer  128, 129, 141, 149, 151 Lai Guolong  161 lēkythos (flask)  26–7, 27, 28, 29, 29, 31, 33, 33, 35, 38, 39 li (cooking tripod)  133 li (ritual propriety), see Rujia Li ji, see Book of Rites Li lun (Discourse on Rites), see Xunzi Longshan culture  162, 167, 167 looting  82, 124–5 loutrophoros  (water jar) 28, 30–3, 31, 35, 37, 39, 41 Lynch, Kathleen  16 Lysippides Painter  15–16, 15, 17 maize 85 Maize God  100, 103, 105, 110, 112–13, 114 making of meaning  75–6, 82, 95 marble,  see stone marriage  30, 34–5 mask  4, 8–10, 15, 17, 56, 65–7, 68, 110, 111, 114; see also eye–cup mastos (breast-shaped vessel)  16, 16–17 materiality  5, 8, 51–3, 62–4, 71, 76–7 Mawangdui 161 Medea 22 medium  2, 34 perishable  3, 77, 96; see also lacquer Medusa 10 menos (vital fluid)  22 mercury 22

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metal  3, 33, 65, 148; see also bronze; silver metaphor  2, 5, 38, 90; see also  body: metaphor metonymy, see substitution Minerva  71, 72 Minotaur 22 ming (name, Rujia concept)  120, 163 ming qi (spirit vessel)  157–9, 164–6, 165n88 black pottery  138–40, 141, 168 pottery and bronze  154–7, 162, 167 Moche 81 molding  99, 99–100, 103 Morris, Ian  24 Muses  51, 57, 75; see also  iconography: of the Muses and paideia (education)  70–1, 72 musical instruments  128, 129, 139, 165n88; see also bronze: bells; stone: chime Nestor 38 Nike 29 Odysseus 11 ornament, see decoration Painter of Boston 01.8110  12 Painter of London 1905  33 Painter of London E2  13 Panofsky, Erwin  75–6 Pasiphaë 22 personification 70–2 phallic symbolism  15, 15, 35; see also aidoion pharmaka  (drugs) 21–2; see also  vessel: contents of Phineus Painter  11 Piazza Armerina  53, 55, 73 Pingshan 122;  see also Cuo Plato Republic 22 Symposium 22 pottery  1–3, 8, 19, 84; see also clay Chinese  125–6n16, 129, 132, 150; see also ming qi: black pottery Greek (Attic)  6–42 Greek (Chalcidian)  10 Greek (Corinthian)  20

Greek (Geometric)  22–25, 30, 31, 33 Greek (Protoattic)  30 Maya  81, 85, 94 Projecta Casket  50, 53, 54–5, 57, 61, 71–2, 73 Qi (state)  124 qi (vessel), see ming qi; yongqi; vessel: ritual Qu Yuan  161 Rawson, Jessica  152 Reggio di Calabria  10 repair  1, 82; see also restoration repoussé 50, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 56, 62–4, 63, 67, 69, 74–5 Republic, see Plato restoration  3, 39–40, 57, 75 Rhegion, see Reggio di Calabria Rhodes 17 Río Azul  101, 101, 105 rhyton (conical and/or zoomorphic vessel)  1, 19 Rites of Zhou (Zhou li)  120n3, 130, 156 ritual performance  121, 129; see also sacrifice Rome  50, 74 Rujia  5, 120–2, 128–9, 163–6; see also Xunzi sacrifice  121, 125–6n16, 135, 138, 156 and food  132, 141–3, 145–6, 158–9, 161 satyr  14–15, 17, 18, 18, 19, 19, 21 Schele, Linda  89 sēma (sign)  22, 85n15 seriality  2, 3, 82, 113 serpent  84, 88 servants, see attendants set, see assemblage sex  17–19, 21, 71, 85n15; see also gender Shang dynasty  137, 165–6, 168; see also Fu Hao shark  86, 87–8, 91, 96 shells (spondylus)  85, 101 shengqi (“lived object”), see yongqi Shi Jie  124 ship  3, 4, 10–13, 12, 13 shuang (clay “pumice stone”)  149 sign  33–4, 38; see also se ̄ma silver  4, 50, 53–4, 74 Simonides 22

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snake, see serpent Socrates  6, 22, 41 statuettes, see figurines Steiner, Deborah  21 stele  25–6, 32–5, 40; see also loutrophoros; vessel: as grave marker depicted on vessel  27, 29–30, 38, 39 of Aiskhron of Kephale  32–3, 32 of Hegeso  34–5, 34 of Panaitios of Hamaxanteia  38–40, 39, 40 steppe art  148–9 stingray spines  85, 101 stone chime  133, 139 marble  27, 30, 32, 36, 37, 39, 40 monuments, see horos, stele vessels  31, 34–5, 37–8 storage of vessels  141–2, 145–6, 151–3 pit 124–6, 127, 139, 142–3, 162, 166 within vessels  1, 2, 21, 51, 128; see also vessel: within vessel; vessel: contents of Strategies of the Warring States (Zhanguo ce)  163 stucco  91, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100–3, 103, 104, 114 substitution  30, 31–2, 35 subjectivity 76–7 symposium (banquet)  3, 4, 8, 53 Symposium (dialogue),  see Plato Taiyuan 143 Talos 22 tamales 85 Teotihuacan  91–4, 103–5, 110; see also molding; stucco tripods  92, 93, 94–6, 109 terminology  4, 15–16 terracotta 8 Theognis 9–10 Tianxingguan 160 Tikal and Teotihuacan, see Teotihuacan Burial 10  91, 92, 97, 98, 101–3, 103, 108 Burial 48  104, 104n53 Burial 116  105–6, 106, 107, 108, 113 Burial 196  109, 112 Burial A20  88 Burial PNT–025  83 Burial PNT–062  86, 89

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Mundo Perdido complex  84–5 Problematical Deposit 50  93 timber structure  124, 125 tomb, see burial tradition, continuity of  82, 95, 109, 121, 129, 138, 162, 167; see also making of meaning treasure Berthouville 70 Esquiline 50, 51, 52, 54, 55, 56, 58 Law and Mildenhall  54, 59, 60 Sevso 53, 56, 59, 64 Vinkovci 60 Water Newton  54, 60 tripod  91, 94–5, 103–5, 129; see also ding; Teotihuacan: tripods Trojan horse   21 turtle  88, 89, 89, 90, 101, 113 typology, see classification in archaeology use  2–3, 4, 5, 74; see also vessel: as tool; yongqi Venus, see Aphrodite vessel and boundaries  30, 31, 38, 40 as boat, see ship as body  4, 34, 42, 90, 108–9, 112–13; see also body metaphor; eye–cup as category  1–2, 4, 6–8, 24, 30, 42 as grave marker  24, 26, 30–3, 35, 38; see also burial: funerary vessel as mask, see eye–cup as statue  22–3 as tool  3, 6–7, 23–4 as world  88–9, 101 contents of  19–22, 30, 51, 70, 82, 87–8, 90; see also cacao; geng; ichor; wine interaction with, see handling materiality of, see materiality ritual  3, 137–8, 145, 151, 155, 162 within vessel  4, 12–13, 38, 51–2, 59–60, 64, 76, 151 viewing  5, 8–9, 75; see also eye–cup violence  90, 94, 96n37, 161 Vouni Painter  28 Wang E  165 water  10–13, 86–8, 91; see also ship and death  100–1, 113–14, 162

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wear, see damage Western Zhou dynasty  138, 151, 162, 166–7 Whitley, James  24 wine  4, 5, 8, 18–19, 14, 142; see also drinking; Dionysos as sea  11–14 woman  4, 32, 34–5, 57–8 as vessel  20–3, 24, 36, 82, 83–4, 90 Wuling (king of Zhao)  163 Xia dynasty  165, 168 Xunzi Discourse on Rites (Li lun)  153–4, 156, 157, 164, 166 Yan (state)  123, 124, 135–7, 143 yan (steamer)  158 Yang Hongxun  125, 125, 127 Yax Nuun Ahiin (Tikal king)  90, 94, 95; see also Tikal: Burial 10 yi (water pitcher)  149–51, 158, 162 Yikin Chan K’awiil (Tikal king)  111, 112

Yi li, see Etiquette and Rites Yin, see Shang yongqi (practical objects)  146–9, 162, 164; see also vessel: as tool Zeitlin, Froma  20–1 Zeus 41 Zhanguo ce, see Strategies of the Warring States zhao (grave sacrifice, burial ground)  142–3, 146, 158 Zhao (state)  123, 163 zhenmu shou (tomb quelling beast) 159–62, 160 Zhongshan kingdom, see Cuo; Ci Zhong You  163 Zhou (minister of Zhongshan)  122, 124, 136–7, 143–4 Zhou li, see Rites of Zhou Zhulong (lamp dragon) 146–7 zoomorphism 18–19 zu shi (ominous ghosts), see zhenmu shou