Henri Frankfort discovered approximately six hundred fragments of goblets in one of the chambers of the Abu temple at Tell Asmar, in the stratum designated “Archaic Shrine III.” Delougaz writes,

The goblets are tall and narrow, with a solid foot. They were obviously mass-produced. As you may recall, several of the Tell Asmar statues are shown clasping a goblet of this type. The goblets must, therefore, have had some ritual significance. Only this explains why so many were found intentionally broken and left inside a chamber of the temple. Delougaz notes that the same style of goblet was found in the Sin Temple of Khafajah, in temples V and VI, which date to the Early Dynastic period (ED I).

Woolley finds goblets at Ur

Sir Leonard Woolley, the director of the excavations at Ur, also found solid-footed goblets at the important Sumerian city located on the southernmost portion of the Sumerian plain. Intending to dig all the way to “the bottom of Mesopotamia,” Woolley opened a probe which he designated “Pit F.” In the uppermost levels of the probe, Woolley uncovered the foundations of buildings constructed with plano-convex bricks. He dated these foundations to the Early Dynastic period, when, as we’ve seen, plano-convex bricks are thought to have entered into use. Beneath this level, Woolley began to find solid-footed goblets and also the earliest remnants of buildings constructed with flat bricks instead of plano-convex. Here is how Woolley describes the stratum containing the goblets:

The stratum was well defined, and not more than three feet deep. Directly beneath it, Woolley began to find the polychrome painted pottery characteristic of the Jemdet Nasr period. Woolley notes that an identical sequence was also encountered at Kish.

Based on Woolley’s discoveries in Pit F, the production of solid-footed goblets appears to have been confined to a relatively brief period immediately following the Jemdet Nasr period. The goblets may therefore be dated to the beginning of the Early Dynastic (ED I-II). Like the flowerpots of the Uruk and Jemdet Nasr periods, and the v-shaped bowls and cornets of the Ghassulian culture, the solid-footed goblets belong to a type of mass-produced pottery turned on the fast wheel. Just as large quantities of Ghassulian cornets were found in the temple at Ein Gedi, intentionally broken, so were hundreds of solid-footed goblets found in the Abu Temple at Tell Asmar, intentionally broken.