Influences.—The political changes that destroyed the Mycenaean power had also interrupted Aegean relations with Asia and Egypt, but when contact was restored, about the loth century, the new Greek world became doubly linked with the ancient foreign civilizations, by its colonies on the coast of Asia Minor as well as by its own and Phoenician commerce. The effects of oriental contact are visible in all Greek arts after the gth century. The actual commodities that served Greek vase painters for models have not been identified, and if, as is pos sible, they were textiles, cannot have survived. They seem to have been brightly coloured, for touches of red and white paint enliven the black figures in all the orientalizing styles. But accurate drawing and incised contours suggest metal prototypes, and some bronze and silver bowls and cups engraved in the same manner have been found in Greece and Italy. (See BRONZE.) Oriental motives in the late Geometric style, besides the bands of animals, are cable-pattern (guilloche), palmettes in bands or panels, and base-rays. The latter are derived from the petals of a flower calix; originally Egyptian, they are a common feature of Asiatic pottery, and particularly of late Hittite vases. These novelties broke up the conventional Geometric art, and the succeeding local wares bear very little resemblance to one another.
The principal early orientalizing styles are Protocorinthian, Protoattic, Island (Melian), and Ionian (Rhodian). They belong broadly to the 7th century. The true Protocorinthian fabric was located in the Argolid, where a very precise and simple geometric style had been established. Preci sion is the distinguishing feature of Protocorinthian ware, and is accentuated by the miniature forms of nearly all existing vases. They are made of the smooth pale yellow clay which distinguishes the local Mycenaean fabric, and which invites fine craftsmanship by its plasticity. Conical cups (skyphoi) and pointed oval scent bottles (lekythoi) are typical forms. Their earliest subgeometric ornament of simple linear patterns was soon displaced by bands of animals, particularly running dogs, palmettes and lotus, cables and rays, all of which were in turn subordinated to a main frieze containing human or monstrous figures, sphinxes, chimaeras, cen taurs and the like. The background in the figure-friezes is filled with detached ornaments, in this style typically the dot-rosette, a device which belongs properly to metal reliefs, where it is simply executed with a round-nosed punch. The influence of metal-work is also visible in the sharpness of this style and in its use of engraving to define outlines and inner markings of the silhouettes. The colour is enriched with patches of dull red and white, as if inlaid on the black-glaze figures, for details such as manes, throats and bellies of animals, armour, clothes and hair of men. Masterpieces of the Protocorinthian style are the Chigi
vase in the Villa Gierlia at Rome, a large jug with an amazingly elaborate battle-piece and hunting-scenes in three friezes, and two small scent-bottles, with fancifully modelled tops and hardly less elaborate hunts and battles on their bodies, in Berlin and London (the Macmillan lekythos). A purely decorative Protocorinthian scheme consists of scales or tongues closely incised on a black glazed surface and painted alternately white and red, together with thin bands and dot-rosettes in the same bright colours. Large and small vases are entirely or partially covered with these ornaments. This fabric was largely exported, particularly to Italy, where it was more or less successfully imitated by Greek and Etruscan potters. Another Protocorinthian group consists of little vases moulded in natural forms, squatting men, busts and heads, animals, birds and shells. They were largely copied from Egyptian faience figures, and in their turn influenced the Egyptian vase-shapes. Large quantities of these Egyptian blue-glazed wares were exported from the Greek settlement of Naucratis, and some were evidently made there, or in some Greek colony in Asia, for the style of many pieces is more Greek than Egyptian, and one found in Rhodes bears a Greek inscription. The same shapes, particularly heads in helmets, were made in ordinary Greek pot tery in Rhodes, and other plastically decorated fabrics from the same island are made of black ware like the Etruscan bucc/iero nero. Large storage-jars, with plastic patterns worked in relief or impressed in friezes with engraved cylinders, are also rep resented on Ionian sites. Protoattic pottery exhibits the same developments as Protocorinthian, but in a very different style. Vases and their painted decoration are large and vigorous, their fabric rather coarse, in red clay. Various stages of development are called by names of places where typical examples have been found, Phaleron and Vourva. They illustrate the intrusion and refinement of the Oriental repertory, from the animal-frieze with its close array of filling-ornaments to the isolation of human sub jects in a clear field. The Island style is as bold as the Attic ; it affects heavy spiral ornaments, gay colours, and ambitious nar rative-subjects. Crete was a main channel of the new influence, but its pottery is not yet adequately represented. A typical Island form is a large high-necked bowl with a tall conical foot. Some examples, usually attributed to Melos, are painted over a white slip.