Stamnos

A stamnos (Ancient Greek: στάμνος; plural stamnoi) is a type of ancient Greek vase used to serve and store liquids. Stamnoi have a wide mouth, a foot, and two handles, and were usually made with a lid. The earliest known examples come from archaic Laconia and Etruria, and they began to be manufactured in Athens in the middle of the fifth century BCE. Attic stamnoi, often finely decorated, were mostly made for export to Etruria. They are often found in funerary contexts, and may have been purchased specifically for this use; in vase-paintings, they are often shown being used to mix or serve wine, sometimes with a ladle. They were painted in red-figure, in black-figure and using Six's technique, by artists including Oltos, Euphronios, Smikros, Polygnotos, the Berlin Painter and the Kleophrades Painter. Their manufacture ceased around 420 BCE, possibly due to the reduction in trade between Athens and Italy brought on by the Peloponnesian War and the failure of the Sicilian Expedition in 415–413 BCE. Local examples continued to be made in Italy, and vessels of similar shape were made in Athens into the Hellenistic period (323–30 BCE). In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, stamnoi were sometimes thought to be associated with the god Dionysos, and occasionally named "Lenaean vases" after a claimed connection to the Dionysian Lenaea festival. This connection is now considered doubtful, since the artwork on stamnoi does not seem to favour Dionysiac themes more than that of other vase-types, and the large number of exports among the known examples of stamnoi makes it unlikely that they were used for religious rituals in Attica in any large number.