General Information

Southern Levantine Black-Burnished Ware is a ware family produced in the Iron Age across the southern Levant at sites in Palestine, Transjordan, and modern-day Syria. SLBBW is made from a reduced, dark gray fabric with a dark gray to black exterior slip and a polished look resulting from burnishing. The forms produced with this ware vary from: shallow saucers, bowls, mortars, and juglets. Bowls and juglets are the primary forms in both Iron I and Iron II, though there is measurable diachronic variation in aspects of these shapes, such as rim curvature and handle size and placement. This ware is not related to black-slipped Greek or Cypriot vessels (see Cypriot Iron Age Black Slip and Cypriot Black Slip Painted (Iron Age) wares), SLBBW is reduced throughout and produced primarily in Transjordan.

Gitin suggests that SLBBW may have inherited some of its distinctive characteristics, in style and manufacturing, from Assyrian ceramic traditions, particularly pertaining to one form - the “small shallow round-sided bowl” (Gitin 2015: 396). The Assyrian influence on this ware family is clear by the 8th century BCE, when potters began employing the Assyrian fast wheel to manufacture higher quality SLBBW with a more finely levigated fabric. By this time, production of SLBBW seems to have been based in Ammon and central Jordan. The consistency and quality of this ware at sites like Tall Jawa in Transjordan in the 8th century BCE even point to the utilization of specialized kilns, where even heat distribution allowed for highly effective reduction firing and very little discoloration in the vessels. *

*The above description was summarized from: Daviau, P.M. Michèle; Graham, Andrew J.. "Black-Slipped and Burnished Pottery: A Special 7th-Century Technology in Jordan and Syria" Levant 41 (2009), 41-58

Tell en-Nasbeh (Israel-Palestinian Authority/Central Highlands)

Tall Jawa (Jordan/Central Highlands)