Pithos is the ancient Greek word for Pandora’s jar in Hesiod’s account.
A pithos was a large storage vessel used in the ancient Greek world, commonly for commodities such as grain, oil, or wine. Hesiod uses this type of container in the Pandora story. It was not the small, portable box imagined by many modern readers.
The “box” tradition developed through translation history and later retellings. Erasmus of Rotterdam used the Latin word pyxis, meaning a box or small container, in a sixteenth-century version of the story. That choice helped establish the familiar phrase “Pandora’s box” in European languages.
An amphora was also a Greek vessel, but it normally had two handles and a narrower form than a pithos. A krater was used for mixing wine and water, while a lekythos was a smaller vessel often associated with oil. Those distinctions make pithos the specific answer for Hesiod’s container.