The NAS Logo Explained

The following text is taken from Valerie Fenwick's Editorial of the IJNA (2000) 29.1:1-2

As it happens, the logo is no more than one of a number of versions of the 'truth' of a painting on a bichrome Cypriot jug only 16cm high. That painting, we can only surmise, conveys true information about a contemporary ship which the artist sought to depict in about the 7th century BC.

For the NAS logo only the main part of the representation was selected because the complete drawing was too elongated for a neat design. On the other hand scholars of iconography appear to have reproduced the scene incompletely, either because the coarse joke created by the fish was not appreciated or because it was not understood.

The result of this bowdlerism has led to errors of interpretation even in the British Museum where the pot is exhibited (GR 1926.6-28.9), 'The ship is propelled from the stern by a helmsman with two oars; a crewman lowers an anchor from the bow and another falls off the stern of the ship towards a fish. The sail (the zig-zag line) is attached at the bottom of the mast [sic]'. The humour of the scene has not been grasped; the defecating crewman has become a man overboard; the fish and the objects of its attentions are not understood; and the quarter-rudders are even identified as the method of propulsion.

This in turn leads to the supposition that the ship is underway; thus the crewman in the bow must be casting the anchor, although it is clear that he is in the act of climbing aboard with it. Lest it be thought that the British Museum is alone in this, there are other published examples; some scholars omit the fish, others the squatting man but not the faeces; there are errors in details of the hull and in the angle of the rudder blades.

Does this matter? In that it is symptomatic of academic sloppiness and failure to evaluate iconographic evidence within its context, it certainly does. The setting and apparent purpose, the oeuvre, the scale of the image, material and technique all need to be taken into account if iconography is to be used as 'ancient evidence'.

V. Karageorghis and J. des Gagniers published the jug as No. XI. I in the second volume of La ceramique chypriote de style figure, age du Fer (Rome, 1974) and commented that the hull is in the form of a crescent, not as truly seen, but as the result of removing the image from the strong curvature of the pot. When the jug is viewed the hull appears quite flat-bottomed along its mid section. In other words transferring the image to paper distorts the visual image. The authors delicately describe the scene at the stern, sur une rame du gouvernail, un homme accroupi est peint en silhouette....De son posterieur part un file de points, reliee a un poisson nageant obliquement derriere lui.'

The ship is a merchantman carrying items rarely depicted but commonly found on the Mediterranean seabed, namely amphoras and stone anchors. The representation does not occur in the usual context of either a carefully draughted, expensive work of art, or an impromptu graffito. It appears on a minor object in everyday use, competently painted with bold brush-strokes. The artist has confidently selected the elements of the scene to wrap around a three-dimensional surface. He has left us the problem of reproducing his intended image on the two-dimensional page.