The Cleveland Museum of Art

Collection Online as of December 19, 2025

Wide, open-mouthed, reddish-brown bowl that curves in from a central perimeter. The bowl has being painted with light sand colored vertical stripes that alternate between strips of horizontal zig-zags painted loosely down the side of the bowl and no paint. One of the plain strips has two zig-zags painted solely at the top.

White Cross-Lined Bowl with Turtle and Sun

c. 4000–3400 BCE

Egypt, Predynastic

(5000–2950 BCE), Naqada I–II (3900–3300 BCE)
Nile silt pottery
Diameter: 18.1 cm (7 1/8 in.); Diameter of mouth: 13.7 cm (5 3/8 in.); Overall: 6.7 cm (2 5/8 in.)
Gift of the John Huntington Art and Polytechnic Trust 1920.2008
Location: 107 Egyptian

Did You Know?

This bowl was built by hand from coils, then smoothed and burnished.

Description

Red polished vessels with white painted decoration (known as white cross-lined ware or C-ware) represent Egypt’s oldest known tradition in painted pottery. The decoration on this bowl, painted after firing, features the sun on the side and a turtle on the bottom of the vessel. The turtle was considered the enemy of the Egyptian sun god Ra because it preferred the murky river bottom to the sunlight.
  • provenance
    Possibly Gebelein. Purchased from Mohammed Mohasseb, Luxor, through Howard Carter
  • Cleveland Museum of Art, and Martha L. Carter. Egyptian Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland, Ohio: The Museum, 1963. Mentioned and reproduced: p. 3 archive.org
    Finkenstaedt, Elizabeth. “Prehistoric Egyptian Pottery.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 75, no. 3 (March 1988): 74–94. Mentioned and reproduced: p. 78-81, fig. 2 a-c, cover www.jstor.org
    Berman, Lawrence M., and Kenneth J. Bohač. Catalogue of Egyptian Art: The Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1999 Reproduced: p. 103, color p. 42 ; Mentioned: p. 103-104
  • {{cite web|title=White Cross-Lined Bowl with Turtle and Sun|url=false|author=|year=c. 4000–3400 BCE|access-date=19 December 2025|publisher=Cleveland Museum of Art}}

Source URL:

https://www.clevelandart.org/art/1920.2008