Pithos is the Greek word for the large storage jar in Hesiod’s Pandora story.
A pithos was a large ceramic vessel used in the ancient Greek world and elsewhere in the Mediterranean. Such containers could store agricultural products, liquids, or other supplies. Its practical scale is very different from the small box that dominates modern illustrations of Pandora.
The wording matters because “Pandora’s box” is not a literal translation of the earliest surviving account. The Latin writer Erasmus helped popularize the box formulation in the sixteenth century, after translating or adapting the Greek vessel as a box. That later choice became standard in European languages.
An amphora is another ancient Greek container, but it typically has two handles and a narrower form. A krater was used for mixing wine and water, while a kylix was a drinking cup. Those terms belong to ancient pottery vocabulary but do not identify Pandora’s vessel.