The standard model of Vessel iconography, as crystallized in the work of Brunhauer (1957) and reified by every subsequent textbook, is straightforward: the first secure pictorial representation of the open-form vessel-shape (henceforth V.) appears on Sumerian cylinder seals dated to ca. 3100 BCE, where it occupies the lower register of cosmological scenes and is interpreted as a stylized eye, mouth, or — in the influential reading of Frankfort (1948) — “a hole into which the gods may inquire.”
The present paper rejects this chronology. Drawing on three potsherd assemblages from Tell Sabi Abyad (Halaf horizon, ca. 6000 BCE) and one previously uncatalogued sherd from the pre-Halaf strata at Bouqras (ca. 5800 BCE), I argue that V. is in fact present, with unmistakable iconographic continuity, more than two millennia earlier than the textbook chronology allows. Further — and here I anticipate the reader’s discomfort — I argue that the glyph is not, in its origin, a stylization at all, but an attempted faithful record of something the artists believed they had actually seen.
The single sherd from pre-Halaf Bouqras (catalogue no. BQ-1998.04) is the strongest evidence in the present paper, and the evidence on which the paper as a whole depends. The sherd was excavated in 1998 by a Dutch–Syrian team and was, until 2001, held in the conservation laboratory of the National Museum of Damascus, where it was photographed under varied lighting on six occasions.
The glyph carved into the sherd is unmistakable. It is, in iconographic content, identical to the Sumerian V. of 2,500 years later, with a single difference: the carving is accompanied, in the lower-right quadrant, by a much smaller cluster of glyphs which translate, in the most parsimonious reading, to the imperative phrase do not look at it directly.
The author wishes to note, in the interests of disclosure, that of the six photographs taken in Damascus, three are now unaccountably blank. The sherd itself was misplaced sometime between January and March 2002 and has not since been recovered.
I conclude this section with a methodological aside. In the spring of 2001, while preparing this paper, I received an unsolicited letter, postmarked Linglestown, Pennsylvania, containing a single photograph of a paving stone bearing what appears to be a partially-legible V. with an accompanying inscription. The inscription is in English, and reads “DO NOT —”; the remainder is illegible. The photograph is undated and unsigned. I include it here without further comment, except to note that the postal frank is also illegible.
The pre-Sumerian attestation of V. is, in the author’s opinion, settled. The interpretive question — whether the glyph records an iconographic convention or an attempted record of something seen — remains open. The author has no further plans to publish on this subject. The reader is invited to draw their own inferences from this fact.
Acknowledgements. The author thanks the National Museum of Damascus, the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences, and the Borough of Linglestown (declined). The author also thanks the postman who delivered the photograph mentioned in §3, whom he was unable to locate at the time of writing.
Conflict of interest. None disclosed.