The compressed globular body of the bronze vessel is supported on a high, thin-walled, slightly slanted foot, the tall narrow cylindrical neck rising to a garlic-head mouth consisting of six “cloves” forming the “bulb,” each segment hollow on the interior. The vessel is covered overall with a thin green patina, the dark. Charcoal-grey metal of the body showing through in areas.
When seeing an illustration of a garlic-head vessel in the Sackler collection, it was rather surprising as that vessel seemed almost a perfect mate to the vessel we had acquired. The proportions were in almost perfect accord, even the surface was similarly patinated in soft green against the dark metal body (fig. 1). In discussing the Sackler vessel, Jenny So notes that such vessels are “found mostly in third-century BC Qin tomb in Shaanxi and at Hubei.”1
and one almost identical to the Sackler vessel was excavated from a Qin period tomb in Hubei.1 (note how they differ in the footnote).
Another example stylistically close to these vessels was excavated from a 2nd century BCE western Han tomb of Zhao Mo, a king of Nanyue, in Guangzhou, most noted for its spectacular jade suit (fig. 2). The Nanyue vessel might have been produced contemporaneously with the tomb or earlier than the date of the burial and thus more in accord with the dating of the Sackler vessel.
While the garlic-headed vessel shape appears to have originated during the late Eastern Zhou period and while we still do not understand how or why this eccentric mouth formation came into being, the shape did not go away. The evolution of the type is briefly addressed in Kaikodo Journal VII, “The Power of Form,” Spring 1998, no. 62, pp. 188 and 274-275, in a discussion of a ceramic version of the shape from the Sui dynasty.
1. Jenny So in Eastern Zhou Ritual Bronzes from the Arthur M. Sackler Collections, New York and Washington D.C., 1995, p. 289.
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Fig. 1: Bronze garlic-head vessel, late Eastern Zhou dynasty, 4th-3rd century BCE, the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art, after Jenny So in Eastern Zhou Ritual Bronzes from the Arthur M. Sackler Collections, New York and Washington D.C., 1995, no. 52, p. 288.
Fig. 2: Bronze garlic-head vessel, Western Han dynasty, 2nd century BCE, from the tomb of a Nanyue king, after Zhongguo kaogu wenwu zhimei, 9 (Royal Tomb of Nanyue, Guangzhou, Guangdong province), Beijing, 1994, pl. 35.
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