Figure scenes (battle scenes and scenes from mythology) largely predominate.  Black silhouettes, details marked with fine incisions, additions of purple and white (latter for linen and flesh of women).  Elaborate palmettos characteristic (III, Fig. 31).

IV.  CLASSICAL GREEK

Red Figured Period. 525 B.C.  Same clay and glaze, but whole vase covered with glaze and figures reserved showing in colour of clay, details being added with fine-drawn lines of glaze.

White Attic Vases.  The older style of figures drawn in outline on a light ground (e. g.  Naucratite and Rhodian ware), the space within outlines being filled more or less with wash of colour, survived in Athens side by side with the more usual black glazed ware, and in the fifth century was particularly affected for the class of funerary lekythi, vases made for offering at a tomb (III, Fig. 30).  Outlines at first drawn in black, then golden brown, lastly a dull red.

Miscellaneous.  Walls.  Sixth century.  Characteristic type of polygonal wall, each irregular stone very carefully fitted to its neighbours.

Fortifications usually built with square towers and bastions projecting from the curtain.

Round watch towers here and there to be met with.

Bricks.  Baked bricks rarely used till Roman days.  Bricks stamped by
King Nabis (early second century) have been found at Sparta.

Terra-cotta roof tiles (sometimes with stamped inscriptions) largely used.

Laconian Pottery Characteristics.  Fragments of black glazed Attic ware are the class of remains easiest to pick up on any Greek inhabited site, except perhaps in Laconia, where perhaps for political reasons the local style was never ousted and pursued its natural process of decay until Hellenistic times.  Use of white slip over pink clay complete at end of seventh century, then partial; abandoned by beginning of fifth century.  Characteristic patterns, squares, and dots (III, Fig. 28) seventh century; lotus and pomegranates sixth century and fifth century.

500 B.C.—­After the end of the fifth century, manufacture of vases at Athens decayed.  Supply chiefly from South Italy.  Growing use of additional white (rare in Attic red figure vases), sometimes addition of detail in yellowish brown, and a general coarseness of execution, mark the change.

Terra-cotta figurines (figures of everyday life, mostly female; head-quarters Tanagra in Boeotia) prevalent.

V. HELLENISTIC

300 B.C.  Side by side with decay of red-figure style appear two classes of vase that became very prevalent. (1) White designs, often floral, on totally black ground of inferior dull glaze. (2) Black ware decorated not by paint but by moulded figures and patterns.  Also the handles of unpainted jars with stamped impressions (buff clay) not uncommon.  Provenance mainly Rhodes.