Beaker with geometric decoration

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This beaker has a narrow, flat base, straight sides, and an everted rim. It is made of buff clay, with painted black decoration, including vertical lines and rows of triangles. Wheel lines on the interior indicate that it was made on a potter’s wheel. This beaker was excavated at Tepe Sialk, near Kashan in central Iran. The site of Sialk is spread over two mounds. The northern mound was inhabited from ca. 6000 to 4000 B.C., and the southern mound, where this beaker was found, from ca. 4000 B.C. until perhaps 2500 B.C., when the site abandoned for nearly a millennium. The people lived in houses made of mudbrick, and buried their dead under the floors. Thus is it difficult to say whether this beaker comes from a domestic or a funerary setting. Quite possibly it was used as a drinking vessel, and then later deposited with a body during a funeral ritual.

Ancient Near Eastern Art

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Met's Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art cares for approximately 7,000 works ranging in date from the eighth millennium B.C. through the centuries just beyond the emergence of Islam in the seventh century A.D. Objects in the collection were created by people in the area that today comprises Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Syria, the Eastern Mediterranean coast, Yemen, and Central Asia. From the art of some of the world's first cities to that of great empires, the department's holdings illustrate the beauty and craftsmanship as well as the profound interconnections, cultural and religious diversity, and lasting legacies that characterize the ancient art of this vast region.

Metropolitan Museum of Art