Bulletin du Musée National de Varsovie (42.2001)

of different shapes), “relief bowls”, “so called Megarian bowls” or “‘Megarian’
bo wis” (stressing conventional character of this term). This group of pottery
has always aroused a great deal of interest among scholars resulting in many
articles devoted to excavations and considerable progress in the studies.4
Nevertheless, numerous problems, especially those concerning chronology
and localisation of most workshops, are still waiting to be solved.

Three of the above-mentioned bowls (inv. no. 198563, 198564 and
198565) were transferred to the National Museum in Warsaw in 1946 from
the repository in Bytom, the fourth bowl (inv. no. 198933) was brought from
Ząbkowice in 1947. The first and the second bowl belonged to the Arnold
Vogell's collection created on the territories of Southern Russia and were
described and published by Robert Zahn.5 The only information about the
place where they were found was a short notę in an article by Ernst von Stern,
who had published the bowl with relief decoration from Olbia before. Von
Stern wrote that there were thirty five specimens of Megarian pottery found
in Olbia in the VogeH's collection in Nikolaievo.6 * From 26th to 30th of May, 1908
the collection was put out for auction in Cassel and described in a large
catalogue/The bowls discussed in this article were published in the auction
catalogue under numbers 285 and 269. Zahn mentions the auction in the
postscript of his article, giving the list of bowls sold together with names of the
buyers, very valuable information. He wrote that the bowles of our interest
were sold to Breslau (present-day Wrocław). A 1938 publication by Eva
Schmidt describing a collection of antiąuities from the Stadtmuseum in
Breslau8 mentions three semicircular Megarian bowls with rich relief
decoration (leaf ornament, egg and dart pattern, stars, rosettes and animal
frieze). Ali these circumstances indicate that the three bowls brought from
Bytom might be the ones mentioned in the publication in 1938. The numbers
preserved on the vessels which - as it was shown - appeared to be the
inventory numbers of the Museum in Breslau/Wrocław may serve as a definite
prove of their origin. The annual inflow datę with regard to the museum objects
constituted an integral part of number. By all means, two numbers confirm
thereby that the items were acąuired in 1908, whereas the third one provides
information about the acąuisition of the bowl in 1933.

4 Sources of reference, cf.: V Gassner, Das Sudtor der Tetragonos-Agora. Keramik und Kleinfunde.
(Forschungen in Ephesos, XIII/1/1), Vienna 1997, and (concerning Russian sources)
S.A. Kovalenko, “K voprosu o proiskhozhdenii reliefnykh chash s nadpisyu ‘KIPBEI’”, Yestnik
Moskovskogo Unwersiteta, series 8: Istoriya, 1987, 6, pp. 70-80.

1 R. Zahn, “Hellenistische Reliefgefasse aus Sudrussland”, Jabrbuch des Deutschen Archaologischen
Instituts, XXIII, 1908, cat. nos 36 and 16.

6 E.R.F. Stern, “Vaza s reliefnymi ukrasheniami z 01vii”, Izviestiya imperatorskoy Arkheologicbeskoy
komissii, 1902, 3, pp. 93-113.

M. Cramer, J. Boehlau, Griechische Altertumer sudrussischen Fundorts aus dem Besitze des
Herm A. Yogell, Karlsruhe 1908.

8 E. Schmidt, “Die Antiken der Kunstsammlungen der Stadt Breslau”, Die Hohe Strasse,
Breslau 1938, p. 287.

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