Of the ninety-eight different shapes current during one or another phase of Troy VI, no less than ninety are new in that period. There is thus a sharp break in the ceramic tradition between Troy V and Troy VI, made even more emphatic by the strong ceramic continuity detectable throughout the Trojan Early Bronze Age (i.e. Troy I-V).
A hallmark of the pottery of Troy VI is a gray ware, termed "Gray Minyan" by the excavators, which closely resembles in its wheelmade manufacture and lustrous, soapy-feeling surface the Gray Minyan pottery of Middle Helladic Greece. French, however, has argued convincingly that the gray-burnished pottery of Troy VI should not be termed "Minyan" since it is a local West Anatolian Middle Bronze Age ware in all probability derived from the so-called "Inegöl Gray ware" of the Early Bronze 3 period found in the region southeast of the Sea of Marmara. Indeed, there is even some gray ware in Troy V, so that the gray ware of Troy VI could be said to have had some local antecedents at Troy itself.
Middle Helladic Gray Minyan is similar to the gray ware of Troy VI in conception and even to some extent in technique, but the shape ranges of these two ceramic classes are different with the single exception of the ring-stemmed (or Lianokladhi) goblet. The presence of this shape in Trojan gray ware, along with the presence of Middle Helladic (and probably Cycladic) Matt-painted wares, are evidence for contacts between Troy VI and the Greek Mainland during the Middle Bronze Age. French argues that the idea of a gray-burnished ware was very probably exported to Greece during the latest Early Bronze 2 period when Anatolian influence is to be detected in the Kastri Group and Lefkandi I assemblages.
The first Gray Minyan (or Fine Gray-burnished) ware appears at Lerna in Early Helladic III (Lerna IV) when the pottery of Mainland Greece had become "anatolianized" as a result of the fusion of the "Lefkandi I" and Early Helladic IIA (or Korakou culture) traditions. It should be noted that the Bass bowl of Lerna IV is totally absent from the Trojan shape repertoire. Middle Helladic Gray Minyan is the result of an internal development on the Greek Mainland unrelated to developments in Western Anatolia. The Greek Bass bowl is modified into the ring-stemmed goblet during the early MH period and then is adopted by the Trojans in Early Troy VI. This fact indicates that Troy VI begins only after the Middle Helladic period has started in Greece. Thus Troy V is probably at least partially contemporary with early Middle Helladic.
Matt-painted pottery, always rare at Troy and probably always imported from the southern Aegean, begins to appear in Troy VIb. Mycenaean pottery begins in Troy VId as LH I and continues in Troy VIe as LH II, in Troy VIf-g as LH II-IIIA, and in VIh as mostly LH IIIA but with a little LH IIIB. The destruction of Troy VI thus took place in Mycenaean terms during the LH IIIB period. In the last phases of Troy VI, Mycenaean pottery is locally imitated in the form of painted vessels made in the local Tan Ware.
Dartmouth University, Prehistoric Archaeology of the Aegean
