Embracing the New: The Perception of Cypriot Pottery in Egypt

The starting point for this paper is the question of why the distribution of Cypriot pottery in Egypt was so different from that in the Levant. While there is no reason to expect them to be the same, the differences are marked (see the works of Merrillees [1968], Gittlen [1975, 1977, 1981] and Bergoffen 1989). The differences are not only in quantity, although Canaan certainly imported far more Cypriot wares than did Egypt, but also in kind. In Egypt, closed forms, mainly Base-ring, predominated (see Merrillees 1968, 7, 78–89, and references there), whereas in Canaan open shapes were as