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 ...
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).