Proto-Attic loutrophoros

In the later part of the 8th century BCE, and for about a century, the Geometric Style began to give way to a different sensibility informed by the art of Syria and Phoenicia, the Orientalizing Period.

The cultural background saw Assyrian advances to the Mediterranean coast, accompanied by Greek mercenaries and displacing Greek merchants. Phoenicians settled in Cyprus and the West, while Greeks established trading colonies in Syria, and in Ischia. Massive imports of raw materials, including metals accompanied the transfer of craft skills into Greece. The Phoenician alphabet encouraged a spectacular leap in literacy, and the oral traditions of the epic in their final phase began to be transcribed into leather scrolls, and some Greek myths reflected Mesopotamian classics. Burkert has argued that migrating seers and healers transmitted their skills in divination and purification ritual with elements of the mythological wisdom and has suggested direct literary Eastern influence at the beginning of Greek literature. Relief from Assyrian capital of Dur Sharrukin, showing transport of Lebanese cedar (8th c. ... Phoenicia was an ancient civilization in the north of ancient Canaan, with its heartland along the coastal plain of what is now Lebanon and Syria. ... The island of Ischia near Naples, Italy. ...

In Attic pottery, the distinctive style known as proto-Attic was marked by floral and animal motifs; it was the first time descernibly Greek religious and mythological themes were represented in vase painting. The bodies of men and animals were depicted in silhouette, though their heads were drawn in outline; women were drawn completely in outline.

At the other important center of this period, Corinth, the orientalizing influence can also be observed though the tendency there was to produce smaller highly detailed vases in the so-called proto-corinthian style which prefigured the black-figure technique. A black-figure krater (mixing bowl), 6th century BC, National Archaeological Museum, Athens The black-figure pottery technique is a style of ancient Greek pottery painting in which the decoration appears as black silhouettes on a red background. ...

References

• Payne, H., Protocorinthian Vase-Painting, 1933
• Boardman, J., Early Greek Vase Painting: 11th-6th centuries BC, 1998
• Burkert, W. The Orientalizing Revolution: Near Eastern Influence on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Age, 1992.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:

Greek Orientalizing pottery