CIRCA MID TO LATE 3RD MILLENNIUM B.C.

This vessel is sculpted in relief in the so-called Intercultural Style. Related examples in chlorite or steatite are decorated along their entire surfaces with abstract patterns, vegetal and architectural motifs and naturalistic depictions of humans and animals. While scholars have hypothesized that the type originated from three workshops across the Near East, only one at Tepe Yaha in Kerman province has been discovered to date. Intercultural Style vessels were transported across the Bronze age world, from Syria to the Indus Valley and even on islands in the Persian Gulf (see H. Pittman, Art of the Bronze Age: Southeastern Iran, Western Central Asia, and the Indus Valley, pp. 13-23).  Pittman (op. cit., p. 21) observes that their wide dispersion suggests that they were “imported either for themselves or for their contents, perhaps as status objects, by members of the ruling elite in Early Dynastic Mesopotamia.”