This article is written in the deepest admiration of the work of Jean-Pierre Olivier and Frieda Vandenabeele, which laid the foundation for such studies. I am grateful for their kind permission to reproduce images to L. Godart, R. Koehl (courtesy of instap), P. Mountjoy, J.-P. Olivier, Y. Tzedakis, P. Warren, the British School at Athens and the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies. Line drawings from both VO and COMIK were made by L. Godart. I would like to thank for comments and further references John Bennet, John Killen, Philomen Probert, Richard Hitchman, Donna Kurtz, Peter Warren and José Melena. I am also grateful to José Melena for originally accepting the article for Minos and to Julián Méndez Dosuna for seeing it through the final publication. Any remaining errors or omissions are my own. The article was submitted before Koehl’s 2006 magnum opus on Aegean Bronze Age rhyta had appeared; I attempted in the revised version to take new data into account but it was not possible to pursue here all points of interest in light of his new study.