The Anatolian Roots of Early Helladic III Ceremonial Drinking Behaviour

One of the many features of the early Helladic (hereafter EH) III (ca. 2200/2150-2050/2000 B.C.) culture of southern Greece is the appearance of a distinctive ceremonial drinking service as a subset of a new and radically different ceramic assemblage. In the earlier stages of the EH III settlement of Lerna IV, as well as elsewhere in the northern Peloponnese, this service takes the form of extremely large and lavishly decorated narrow-necked jars accompanied by numerous small and simply ornamented handleless tumblers often called ouzo cups. In a later stage, the evidence from Lerna suggests that the elaborate decoration of the narrow-necked jars was abandoned while the ouzo cups were replaced by equivalently sized but shallower cups with two high-swung strap handles known as kantharoi ¹.

The jars, especially a particular noteworthy variety with three necks placed on the shoulder at 120-degree intervals, have a close parallel in a jar of equally large size from Karatas-Semay�k in Lycia that Machteld Mellink persuasively identified long ago as a communal drinking vessel ². The close morphological and functional similarities between these Northeast Peloponnesian and Southwest Anatolian ceramic types suggest that a new form of drinking behaviour may have diffused from Anatolia to Greece at the same time as did numerous other novel features of the EH III ceramic assemblage, including shapes, the earliest use of potter's wheel, and a marked preference for burnished surfaces.

¹ J.B. Rutter, Lerna. A Preclassical Site in the Argolid III: The Pottery of Lerna IV (Princeton 1995) 339-341, 354, 414-415, 650-651.

²M. Mellink, "A Four-spouted Krater from Karatas" Anadolu 13 (1969) 69-76.