Aryballos

Corinthian aryballos from the Berlin Collection of Antiquities .

Athletes with Strigilis and Aryballos on an oinochoe by the Pisticci painter , 5th century BC Chr.

An aryballos is a small vessel from ancient Greece with a spherical belly, a narrow neck and a wide, flat mouth plate.

Aryballoi can have a wide, ribbon-shaped handle or a double handle and were used to store aromatic liquids , especially anointing oils. Some specimens have feet; others were not made on a potter's wheel , but hand-formed and accordingly do not have a round shape, but different decorative outlines such as that of an owl. In terms of function, the aryballos is comparable to the alabastron and the lydion .

While the alabastron was used by women, the aryballos is an ointment vessel for men and was mainly used by athletes to take care of the body. Aryballoi were worn on a wrist strap and contained partly pure oil, partly scented oils. The name Aryballos actually refers to the leather pouch in which the bottle was normally placed. In ancient times, however, it was not only used for the shape of the vessel, which is what today's research calls it, but also for lekythoi and other vases.

Most of the preserved aryballoi are made of clay (cf. ceramics , (Greek) vases ), but bronze and faience are also known. Most of them come from Corinth , partly from Attica .

literature

• JD Beazley : Aryballos. In: The Annual of the British School at Athens. Vol. 29, 1927/28, ISSN  0068-2454 , pp. 187-215.
• Andrew J. Clark, Maya Elston, Mary Louise Hart: Understanding Greek Vases. A Guide to Terms, Styles and Techniques. J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles 2002, ISBN 0-89236-599-4 , p. 69.
• Stephan Karl, Paul Bayer, Hubert Mara and András Márton: Advanced Documentation Methods in Studying Corinthian Black-figure Vase Painting , Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Cultural Heritage and New Technologies (CHNT23), ISBN 978-3-200-06576-5 , Vienna, Austria, 2019.

Web links

Commons : Aryballoi  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• GigaMesh Software Framework : Advanced documentation methods in studying Corinthian black-figure vase painting on YouTube , accessed on November 27, 2018 ( computed tomography and unrolling of the Corinthian Aryballos No. G26 from the Archaeological Collection of the University of Graz , see also doi: 10.11588 / heidok. 00025189 ).