Mycenaean pottery in Jena – a contribution to the “collecting” of Mycenaean pottery vessels in the 19th and early 20th centuries AD

Abstract Mycenaean pottery was not only temporarily widespread in the Mediterranean region of the 2 nd millennium BC, but from the late 19 th century AD onwards it also entered numerous museums and other public collections “worldwide”, mainly due to trade in antiquities. Based on the thirteen Mycenaean pottery vessels from the Collection of Classical Antiquities of the Department of Classical Archaeology at Friedrich Schiller University Jena, this article focuses on the “collecting” of Mycenaean pottery vessels by public institutions in the German Empire up to and including 1914, the year in which World War I began. Regarding this topic, the legal regulations of the countries of origin of the objects kept abroad were given special consideration, not only the current German “Act on the Protection of Cultural Property (Cultural Property Protection Act – KGSG)” from 2016. Where provenance information could be found for the Mycenaean pottery vessels kept in Jena, which is true for eight vessels, they were purchased in the antiquities trade or acquired at an auction in 1908 and 1910. One of the vessels in Jena formerly belonged to the Julius Naue Collection. The information available, albeit very little, on the collecting processes of the Mycenaean pottery vessels kept in Jena is in line with the results of Birgit Sporleder’s study of the “Originalsammlung” of the Winckelmann Institute of Berlin Humboldt University. In addition, it does not contradict the results of Matthias Recke, who studied the collecting of ancient Cypriotica in Germany, which has unique aspects. According to the inventory book, six of the vessels in Jena are at least presumably from Rhodes, and one is presumably from Attica. In terms of shape, the Jena collection is dominated by the stirrup jar. The same is true for the Mycenaean pottery vessels published so far in the Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum (CVA) for Germany, on the one hand in general, on the other limited to acquisition for and/or entry into the corresponding institution up to the end of 1914. The prominence of the stirrup jars suggests that the Mycenaean pottery vessels that came to the German Empire/Germany once belonged primarily to looted tombs, and that mainly burials of LH III were/are affected. Based on the CVA, the stirrup jar is also the probably most numerous Mycenaean vessel shape represented in European museums and collections today, based on those countries where no Mycenaean pottery was produced in the 2 nd millennium BC.