A puzzling Pyxis

Above a zig-zag border, this blue barrel-shaped vessel is decorated with a relief of figures. At the rim, the figures emerge from the relief as in-the-round busts and heads. They face inward towards the opening, which is grooved to receive a lid. Two pairs of human figures are depicted. As they walk to the right, their lower bodies are shown in profile but their torsos are shown from behind. Between each pair is a bull walking to the left, raising its right foreleg. One of the bulls, now missing its head, stands beside a tree in form of a palmette with peculiar rolled volutes that leave so little space that the bull, unlike his counterpart, has been compressed into a stockier body and has to elevate his right foreleg even higher. The tree therefore may have been a later addition in the design phase. All of the people wear ankle-length garments, longer in the back than the front, held up by wide belts. The belts are divided in three, their ends dangling down the front of the body. Each person stands with the arm nearest his partner resting at his side, but places his other arm, fully modelled in three dimensions, along the rim of the vase. Only one arm is still preserved on the rim, stretching toward the preserved bull’s head. Because the figure immediately in front of the bull does not have enough space to place his forearm on the rim, his arm must have occupied the section by the bull’s ear, now broken off, or perhaps was never even depicted. The figures’ chests are emphatically carved, and in one case is adorned with a necklace. The relatively wide and squat heads originally had inlaid eyes. The hair is reminiscent of a tiered Egyptian wig, falling down to the chin and exposing the ears. Whether the figures are male or female has been hotly debated – but since their garments (with special belts and inclined hem) seem to originate in the Near East as a costume for goddesses, they may indeed be female.
The material of the vessel is uncommon and not native to Etruria. “Egyptian blue” is a calcium copper tetrasilicate (CaCuSi4O10) that had to be specially processed before being mixed with organic materials and then shaped and fired like ceramic. The technique was known in the Near East and Egypt from the second half of the second millennium BC. The motifs on the vase are also drawn from the Near East, suggesting that the piece may have been made in an area where Near Eastern and Egyptian influences coincided, such as Syria or the Phoenician realm. Yet the iconographic details pose problems for identifying the vase’s origin: its shape has no close parallels in the Near East; the motif of animals beside palm trees usually appears only in a symmetrical arrangement in which animals hieratically flank the “tree of life,” and bulls almost never appear; and the interaction between the women and the bulls is unclear, again with no good comparanda in Near Eastern iconography. Even the style raises questions, excluding a northern Syrian workshop and at best signalling a Syrian-Phoenician one that incorporated Egyptian influences (thus an example of the intermediate “hybrid style”). Near Eastern ivories present the best comparanda for the vase – but in Dirk Wicke’s opinion, a number of “misunderstandings” in the motifs may discount an origin in the Near East.
Since the material excludes Etruria as the place of manufacture, we might suppose that the vase was commissioned from the east by an Etruscan who wanted certain orientalizing motifs. Alternatively, an artisan from the west could have learned how to work the material in the Phoenician sphere and created the vessel without exactly reproducing the usual iconography. That the desires of an Etruscan clientele could actually steer production is known from other examples, like Attic ceramics of the sixth century BC: potters in Athens at that time adopted the Etruscan “Nikosthenic” amphora type and the stamnos type, painted them in black and red-figure to appeal to the Etruscan market, and exported them to Etruria.
In the late eighth and seventh centuries BC, the Etruscan elite in cities like Vulci, Tarquinia, Caere/Cerveteri, and even Palestrina grew hungry for luxury goods from the east and Egypt. They had come to know these objects through trade with the Phoenicians. At this time, then, several very rich burials contained imports from the east. One such, the so-called Tomb of Isis in Vulci, housed a number of imports which unfortunately were dispersed after their discovery. Several faience “New Year’s vases” among the contents (now in the British Museum) have been interpreted as imports from Egypt.
What function the Berlin pyxis may have served in the Vulci tomb is, like so much else about the object, unclear. It may have been a cosmetic container for a deceased woman. In any event it was an extraordinary and therefore extravagant luxury object, a source of great pride for its owner.