General Information

Lydian Gray Ware is one of many regional versions of the long-lived, widespread tradition of Anatolian Gray wares, produced from the Early Bronze through the Iron Ages. All of these wares share a reduction-firing mode that results in both body and surfaces being fully gray. Date and origin can generally be distinguished by a combination of shape, surface treatment, wall thickness, and the degree of refinement of the clay. Gray ware vessels, whether for table, utility, or cooking use, were not usually items of wide exchange but instead comprised the bulk of a given region's household pottery. 

Lydian Gray Ware is made of the fine micaceous clay typical to Sardis and its environs, where the mica has a distinctive gold color. This clay also contains a considerable amount of iron oxide, which when fired in an oxidizing atmosphere results in a reddish color. Gray Ware is the same material, but fired in a reducing instead of an oxidizing atmosphere.

At its best, Lydian Gray Ware vessels have a light, silvery, self-slipped, and polished surface with a body reduced to a uniform gray throughout. A metallic-looking shiny coat on some vessels is in fact a silvery wash. Polishing or burnishing was done on the leather-hard body.

At Sardis, Lydian Gray Ware is found at all levels from the Late Bronze Age to Lydian I (the earlier sixth century), when it peters out, but it is particularly prevalent in the eighth and early seventh centuries B.C. 

At its best, Lydian Fine Gray Ware has a light, silvery, self-slipped, and polished surface with a body reduced to a uniformed gray throughout. Vessels were often covered with a silvery wash, followed by polishing or burnishing, that gives surfaces a metallic-looking shiny coast (Ramage, Ramage, Gurtekin-Demir 2021, p. 10).

Sardis (Turkey/Aegean)