Two-handled jar

This jar has a globular body, a flat base, a high neck and a flaring mouth with two handles (one of which is restored) connected at the rim and shoulder. It is made of a black clay on a potter’s wheel, with the handles added afterwards. It was excavated at Tepe Nush-i Jan, an Iron Age hilltop site about 60 km sound of Hamadan in western Iran. Nush-i Jan was occupied in the 7th and 6th centuries B.C., and its occupants are generally thought to be the Medes, an Iranian people known from Assyrian, Achaemenid and Biblical sources. Though the textual sources portray them as a powerful empire, archaeological evidence for the Medes has yet to sustain this impression. Rather, they seem to have lived in scattered fortified sites in western and central Iran, without any clear capital. Nush-i Jan, one of the best known of these sites, features two temples, a columned hall, and a fort. This jar was found in the Central Temple, a tower-like structure in the middle of the site. Thus it may have been used in a ritual performed there.