The following three chapters look more closely at the stone vessel traditions of the Bronze Age eastern Mediterranean. Each one is organised by region proceeding from Egypt to the Aegean in a roughly anticlockwise direction. This chapter looks at stone vessels in the third millennium, the period during which many of the areas concerned begin to come into more intense contact with each other. The date ranges are chosen for convenience only and, though some sociopolitical patterns do correlate with these divisions, many stone vessel traditions discussed here begin earlier or persist until later on. As a result, some prefacing of the discussion with earlier developments or reiteration of details in later chapters is inevitable but has been limited to topics where arbitrary division might otherwise obscure the argument.

Egypt

The Pre-Third Millennium Background

An obvious place to begin a survey of this kind is with the earliest evidence for Egyptian stone vessels, the most prolific and long-lived industry in the eastern Mediterranean. The first Egyptian vessels attested in Lower Egypt are made of limestone, basalt, and metasiltstone and are found in the southern Delta in late fifth- to early fourth-millennium BC farming settlements such as el Omari and Merimda (Debono and Mortensen 1990: pl. 14.5, 29.3–6; Eiwanger 1988: pls. 57.1173–4). These are just one of a number of artefact types, including figurines, maceheads, and palettes that suggest limited craft specialisation and the emergence of a wider set of social roles.