Another Neurodivergent Queer Writes A Blog!

Faience aryballos (oil flask) in the form of a fish

6th century BCE
East Greek

Via the Met: "The fish has been identified as a native Egyptian species, Tilapia nilotica." So this aryballos is doubly fascinating: in the first place, like the hedgehog aryballos I shared yesterday, its faience, a pottery medium developed in Egypt involving crushed quartz with alkali/lime. Secondly, the fish itself is (apparently) a fish of the Nile, yet it was produced by Greeks for other Greeks. Both of these fascinations go to show how interconnected the ancient Mediterranean really was and that such sharp distinctions between Greeks, Egyptians, Phoenicians, etc., are hard to maintain in the face of the evidence.