It does look a bit like a big flower pot or maybe a burial urn doesn't it.
As long as it's a pre-1899 flower pot mortar it's OK! 
Ok Gary, first of all, neither you nor Douglas reprimanded me for not capitalizing Marine, and Gyrene, (I just noticed this when checking out the post, and edited it) this may be a serious offense, for all I know you could both be stripped of your former Jarhead status for missing this, secondly: Never give a clown like me any encouragement, (you should have posted one of these
not a
) because I'll just keep going on and on and...........
Some of these 18th Century mortars do look like huge glorified flower vases, don't they?
Gary, you have a post where you were saying you had an interest in this style of antique European mortar; well if you ever get the chance to get one, and you think your wife might not be too thrilled about you spending all that money on your hobby, maybe this ploy would work: You give the mortar to her as a gift, and tell her it's a large bronze Ming Dynasty flower vase, and the bed is the stand made to display it in the parlor. When you feel like firing it you tell her you have to take it to a conservator to have the bronze treated to preserve it (you'd have to clean out the BP residue thoroughly before you brought it back into the house). If she ever asked what the little hole was for on the side near the bottom of the vase, all you'd have to reply is that it was there to drain the water from the vase so the Chinese Emperor's servants could perform this task without having to herniate themselves trying to lift the monster (to make this look more realistic you could make a little cork to insert in the vent).
