Another interesting find from the 2019 season was a seemingly quite ordinary fragment of the handle of a medium-sized pottery vessel from the 8th century BC. The fragment was found near close room S15 on the remains of a dry brick wall. In terms of shape and appearance, it is a fairly typical part of a jug with a trefoil spout, which was a very distinctive type of a vessel used in Urartian society between the late 9th and mid- 6th centuries BC. The special feature of the discovered fragment is the impression of a small stamp located in the lower part of the handle. This impression in literature is referred as potter’s stamp – a mark left in the form of an imprint or an engraved symbol confirming the fact that a given vessel was made in a specific pottery workshop. It was a peculiar quality mark used by local potters producing fairly uniform-looking vessels for military personnel or the Urartian administration. The presence of stamps on red burnished vessels is most often attested from the most important Urartian sites, such as Tušpa, Ayanis, Argištihinili or Bastam. In the case of smaller sites, finds of stamped pottery fragments are extremely rare. The reason for this can be seen in the rather limited distribution of high-quality and wheel-turned red burnished vessels trough provincial settlement. It should be mentioned that the red burnished vessels constituted an imported good, not only the container in which the transported products were stored. The use of this type of vessel was undoubtedly a sign of social connection with the ruling class of the empire.
The stamped fragment discovered in 2019 is already the second find of this type object from the Metsamor. In the first case, the impression of a small stamp was also in the lower part of the handle of a small trefoil jug. This is where the similarities ends, because the fragments were stamped with completely different seals. In the case of the fragment discovered earlier, a seated mountain ibex is engraved on a small stamp, while the stamp from 2019 bears the image of a scorpion. An additional element of the stamp visible under the scorpion’s tail is a single cuneiform sign, which may have been some form of an additional symbol distinguishing the potter.
The image of a scorpion is unique in the scale of the entire collection of potters' stamps. Suffice it to say that the scorpion is not among the rich collection of impressions from Erebuni and Armavir. This gives rise to the assumption that the vessel discovered at Metsamor may have been either a product made by a local potter using such a stamp, or more likely made outside the region. Perhaps the explanation should be found in the results of the petrographic analysis that will be performed shortly on the discovered fragment.
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