Shapes of Vases

GREEK VASE STYLES

Shards - the life blood of the archaeologist. Bits and pieces of thousands of works of pottery, many possible to reassemble into the ancient food and liquid vessels, the vases, drinking cups, and oil carriers of the Ancient Greeks. Wood and fabric turn to dust in time, and metals usually end up the melted down spoils of war. If it were not for the worthless clay, fired to a rock-like hardness and left behind by invading armies to be buried in the dirt, we would know so very much less about previous peoples.

It's from these resurrected fragments that a story can be told, dates can be matched with names, and a fuller picture of a highly civilized, culturally developed people can be seen. For it is not the size of the temples or the ornateness of the King's furnishings which sets one culture off from the others, but rather the living standards of its ordinary citizens; the fullness of which the trappings of civilization, aestheticism and beauty for its own sake, has permeated their daily lives.

Nowhere is this characteristic of a developed civilization more evident than in ancient Greece, where the ordinary residents surrounded themselves with art on a daily basis in the form of their household pottery.

The Greeks had around 20 different vase styles, each with its own function; each perfectly formed for its purpose, and with most of them exquisitely decorated. On its own, each and every kitchen, storage, funerary, cosmetic or wine vase was a unique work of art that must have embellished the everyday lives of the ordinary people of ancient Greece.