Frying pans

Frying pans is the descriptive nickname for a type of Early Cycladic II artifacts from the Aegean Islands around 2700-2200 BCE.

The other side, regarded as the reverse, is usually slightly wider and highly decorated by incision in the clay, evidently with considerable care, and sometimes using wooden stamps for repeated motifs.

The other is the "Syros type" with a concave undecorated side, and a two-pronged handle; decoration of main circular field with stamped concentric circles or spirals, often accompanied by incised depictions of longboats or what is sometimes interpreted as female genitalia.

A 2009 study concluded, via experimentation, that the frying pans work effectively as mirrors when filled water or olive oil.

[5] Olive oil is generally believed to have been too rare and expensive to be used for this purpose in the early Cycladic period, though recent discoveries on the island of Keros of a large pyramid, complex plumbing systems, and highly advanced metallurgy suggest that olive oil may not have been as rare as was once believed.

Doumas connected the issue of trade and exchange of goods before the invention of money with this, proposing that salt might have served as a valuable material, while leaving no archaeologically detectable traces.