#amphora

Roman Cobalt Blue Glass Jug with Symbols of Dionysiac Revelry,

A Cobalt-blue Glass Jug with low foot ring, tapering clindrical body, cylindrical neck with flaring rim turned in, and pale blue-green concave handle with high thumb-rest, the body modl blown in relief with symbols of Dionysiac revelry, the six panels containing an amphora with high handles, Pan pipes, cymbals, a calyx krater with voluted handles, crossed thyrsoi, and an oinochoe, a pattern of tongues above and below.

Roman, ca. 1st century A.D.

~ Panathenaic Prize Amphora (Attic Black-figure Panathenaic Prize Amphora).

Artist/Maker: Attributed to the Marsyas Painter

Date: 340-339 B.C.

Place of origin: Attica

Period: Classical period, Late

ᴀᴍᴘʜᴏʀᴀ ʜᴀɴᴅ-ᴘᴀɪɴᴛᴇᴅ ᴄʜᴏɴᴋ ᴅ20 | webstore link

A Shared Mediterranean

Two photographs, two places that seem far apart: Jaffa, Palestine (early 1900s) and the Marchesato of Crotone, Southern Italy's Calabria (c. 1950s).

The same gesture: carrying water on the head.

The resemblance is not accidental.

It points to a Mediterranean shaped by shared practices, common solutions, and bodies that learned to move in the same way to meet the same needs.

These images show a rural and communal world that connected the shores of the sea for centuries: water, daily work, gestures passed down without writing, only through the body.

Looking at them today helps us understand that Palestine is not a distant or alien place.

It is part of the same Mediterranean continuity.

And what is being destroyed today is not only a territory, but a way of inhabiting the world built on relationships, gestures, and shared everyday life.