The Greek word for the large jar in the oldest surviving Pandora myth is pithos.
In Hesiod’s Works and Days, Pandora opens a pithos, a substantial storage container used in the ancient Greek world. Such jars could hold products including grain, oil, or wine. The myth’s original container was therefore a jar, not the small hinged box familiar in modern illustrations.
The “box” wording became established through a later translation tradition. The Renaissance humanist Erasmus rendered the Greek term in Latin as pyxis, meaning a box, and that choice helped shape the phrase now used in English and many other languages.
A krater was a vessel for mixing wine and water, an amphora commonly had two handles and a narrower body, and a lekythos was a smaller vessel often associated with oil. None is the container named in Hesiod’s Pandora story.