Tracking the Cooking Pot à la stéatite: Signs of Cyprus in Iron Age Syria

Abstract

The cooking pot ? la steatite first appears at sites along the Syrian coast in the 12th century. Until recently, these cooking pots were considered an essentially Iron I coastal phenomenon with a few isolated appearances inland. New research indicates that these cooking pots can actually be tracked throughout Iron I and II as they penetrated inland Syria by way of the Orontes River, ultimately to become one of the dominant cooking pot forms of the later Iron Age. Both technological and stylistic elements of even the earliest variants show a strong relationship with Cypriot cooking wares; moreover, its distribution is largely consis tent with the distribution of locally produced Mycenaean style pottery in Syria. This study explores the Aegean re lationships of the cooking pot ? la steatite and addresses the question of the Sea Peoples and Cypriot immigrants in Iron Age Syria.*

Cooking in Iron Age Alalakh: Change and Continuity in Vessels’ Functional Role

“…The rim (folded over) is ranging between 12-25 cm and its volume is of c. 6-8 l. The hole-2 Percentages are given in reference to all the cooking pots in the phase. mouthed cooking pot is considered almost a standard during the Iron Age (Birney 2008) and at Alalakh is present on all the Iron Age phases. This cooking pot starts to appear during the Late Bronze Age II, although in very small quantities.…”

“…In these sites, the hole-mouthed cooking pot is used alongside the broad cooking pot. Although the hole-mouthed cooking pot appears in many sites of the Amuq valley and inner Syria around the beginning of the Iron Age (Birney 2008;Venturi 2020;Pucci 2019), the hole-mouthed cooking pot starts to appear at Alalakh at the end of the Late Bronze Age II (Montesanto 2020a;Horowitz 2020).…”