A jar with two handles
The word explains the shape. Amphora comes from the Greek amphi, on both sides, and phero, to carry: a jar you lift by two handles, one on each side, set between a narrow neck and a wide body. That shape solved a practical problem. A narrow mouth could be sealed, the handles let two hands, or two people, lift it, and the body held a large volume. In antiquity it was the all-purpose container, the jerrycan of the Mediterranean, used for storing and transporting wine and food.
Most amphorae were plain, and you would never find them in an art book. But the same shape, made in fine clay and painted, also became one of the most prestigious objects a Greek potter could make, alongside other Greek vase shapes such as the krater and the hydria. So an amphora had at least four lives.
The working jar: stamped for trade
The first life was trade. Plain transport amphorae carried wine and oil by sea, and some, like those of Rhodes, were stamped like modern packaging. A Rhodian amphora in the Metropolitan Museum, made between the late third and the mid-second century BCE and 81.2 cm tall, carries a stamp on each handle. One gives the month, Panamos, and the name of the magistrate in office, Pythogenes; the other gives the maker, Hephaistion. In practice, a stamp did the job of a batch number on a modern bottle: it told everyone when and by whom the jar was made.
The prize: oil for the winners
The second life was honour. Every four years the Panathenaic festival in Athens, held in honour of Athena, included games, and the winners received amphorae of a special shape and size, each filled with about 40 litres of olive oil from groves sacred to the goddess. Athena always appeared on one side, following a traditional formula; the other side showed the contest the prize was won in. On a Met example of about 530 BCE, five runners sprint across the vase. The type lasted: another Panathenaic amphora in the Met was made in 366/365 BCE, almost two centuries after the first ones.
The grave marker
The third life was memory. In eighth-century Athens, a very large painted amphora could stand on a grave as its monument. The Dipylon amphora, made around 755-750 BCE and 1.60 metres tall, marked the grave of a woman in the cemetery by the Dipylon gate. Its bottom has a hole, so the liquid offerings poured into it ran down to the dead, and its painter put in it one of the first Greek scenes with human figures: the dead woman laid out on her bier, surrounded by mourners.
The masterpiece
The fourth life was art. Its two sides offered two large fields for pictures, and Athenian painters filled them in black-figure and later in red-figure. Exekias, who signed as both potter and painter, used one around 540-530 BCE for his Achilles and Ajax bent over a board game, now in the Vatican.
An amphora in the Metropolitan Museum, made around 530 BCE in the workshop of the potter Andokides, even shows both techniques at once. On one side Herakles and Apollo struggle over the Delphic tripod; on the other Dionysos stands between a satyr and a maenad. The red-figure decoration is attributed to the Andokides Painter and the black-figure decoration to the Lysippides Painter, probably two different artists sharing one pot at the moment red-figure was being invented. Vases like this one are called bilingual. The clay, the slip and the firing have their own guide: how they were made.
Where to see it
The Metropolitan Museum in New York shows the stamped Rhodian amphora, the Panathenaic prizes and the Andokides amphora. The Dipylon amphora is in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, and Exekias’s Achilles and Ajax in the Museo Gregoriano Etrusco of the Vatican Museums. Check opening times before you go.
Sources
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Athenian Vase Painting: Black- and Red-Figure Techniques”, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History (2002).
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, collection records 74.51.357, 14.130.12, 56.171.6a, b and 63.11.6.
- Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports, Odysseus: Dipylon amphora (National Archaeological Museum 804).
- Musei Vaticani, “Anfora attica a figure nere firmata da Exekias” (inv. 16757).
