Download All information was obtained from the History for Kids website for

All information was obtained from the History for Kids website for pottery.
http://www.historyforkids.org/learn/arts/pottery/index.htm
Introduction
Pottery is dishes, plates, cups, and cooking pots made out of clay. It is a good idea to
make dishes and pots out of clay for several reasons. Clay is cheap and easy to get,
pretty much anybody can make a useful pot out of it, and you can make it waterproof
pretty easily too. Plus it can be made very beautiful, if you know what you are doing.
And it is easy to make yours look different from your neighbor's.
People first started making pottery out of clay around 6000 BC, near the beginning of
the Neolithic period. They may have begun to make pottery as a way of storing grain
safely when they started farming. Probably they had always known how, but just hadn't
done it much, the same as planting seeds. In the beginning, pottery was made by just
pushing a hole into a ball of clay, or by making a long snake of clay and coiling it up into
a pot shape. Many early pots, meant to be used once and thrown away, are nothing
more than a large lump of clay that someone socked their fist into, the way you might
sock your fist into a catcher's mitt. These were just lightly fired in a fire of dry weeds.
The coiled kind of pot was often fired in a hotter fire, probably by being put in an open
campfire or bonfire.
By around 3000 BC, at the beginning of the Bronze Age, people had begun to use the
slow potter's wheel. This is a little platform made of wood that you build the pot on; you
can turn it around so that instead of having to walk around your pot you can sit still and
turn the pot around. In the hands of someone who is good at using it, it does make
potting a lot faster.
But by 2000 BC, the slow wheel had been almost entirely replaced in Europe and Asia
by the fast wheel, which is also a platform, but one which spins on an axle, like a top.
You can start it spinning with a push or a kick, and then draw the pot gradually out of
the lump of clay. Using the fast wheel, a good potter can make a pot every minute or so,
and all of them almost exactly the same. It's much faster than coiling or the slow wheel,
and so pots got much cheaper than they had been before. The Indo-Europeans,
migrating at this time into Greece and Italy and China, brought the idea of the fast wheel
with them.
From the beginning, people used pottery as a way of constructing their social identity, or
showing who they were and how they were different from other people. Many of the
designs used on pottery were borrowed from cloth, which was also used to identify
people of one group or another. Greek pottery is very different from West Asian pottery
of the same time, and both of them are different from Egyptian pottery, or Chinese
pottery. Etruscan pottery is different too, but similar to Greek pottery in many ways
The beginning of the Roman Empire saw some big technological and economic
changes in the Western pottery industry. First, people began painting pottery red
instead of black. Then they began making it in molds instead of painting it. Around the
same time, the Phoenicians invented glass-blowing, and this made glass cheap enough
to be a serious competitor with pottery. People pretty much stopped making pottery
cups, and everyone drank out of glasses. Even a lot of bowls, and little things like
perfume containers, were made out of glass.
Also, by about 100 AD, most of the nicer pottery used in the Roman Empire was made
in North Africa and shipped by boat all over the Empire, using the sea and the rivers.
The Arab invasion of North Africa around 700 AD ended the North African pottery trade,
and after that pottery was locally made again for some time in the West, and not very
good. The next great developments in pottery were not in the West but in Sui Dynasty
China, where potters began to make porcelain (PORR-se-lenn) cups and pitchers
around 700 AD. This gleaming white pottery was popular not only in China but in West
Asia too. But it was very expensive in West Asia, because it had to be carried all the
way from China on donkeys and camels. So the West Asian potters invented lead
glazes, which made ordinary pots look white and shiny. This made a kind of imitation
porcelain which was a lot cheaper.
A little later on, European and Chinese potters began using lead glazes too. About 1200
AD, potters of the Yuan dynasty in China began to use different color glazes to create
designs on their pots. Chinese pottery was still the best and the most expensive. So
West Asian potters also used these colored glazes to imitate Chinese designs, and
Europeans used colored glazes to imitate the West Asian designs.
African Pottery
People first began to make clay pots in Africa about 6000 BC. From Sudan and Ethiopia
to Egypt, the pottery styles are very similar.
By 400 BC, West African Nok and Yoruba potters were making pottery, as well as large
clay sculptures.
Around 75 AD, North African potters began to imitate imported Roman pottery, and
soon they began to export their imitation Roman pottery all over the Mediterranean,
Europe, and West Asia. By about 100 AD, the African pottery had driven Roman
pottery-makers out of business, and most of the clay plates and cups used in the whole
Roman Empire were made in North Africa.
Pot from the Congo, ca. 1000 AD
About 200 AD, the Nok and Yoruba cultures in West Africa evolved into the Ife and
Benin kingdoms.
Further south, in Congo, the Kisalian culture produced its own style of pottery beginning
about 900 AD.
Islamic pottery from Carthage (Byrsa Museum), ca. 1100 AD
Even after the collapse of the Roman Empire, North African pottery factories continued
to operate and to sell pottery throughout the Mediterranean area. After the
establishment of the Islamic Empire in the late 600s AD, North African potters continued
to work. Imitating Chinese pottery imported from West Asia, North African potters now
colored their pots white with various colors, using metal and glass glazes as we do
today
Byzantine Pottery
After the fall of the western part of the Roman Empire, the remaining part of the Roman
empire in West Asia and Egypt kept on using Roman red pottery. But by around 700
AD, after Heraclius, Byzantine potters began to make tin-glazed pottery, just like in the
neighboring Umayyad empire. This glazed pottery looked a lot like the Islamic glazed
pottery, and continued to be used all through the rest of the Byzantine empire.
ca. 1300 AD (Metropolitan Museum, New York)
This bowl, for instance, is done in the sgraffito or "scratched" style, where you scratch
through the thick glaze to make a pattern. This style was also popular in the Abbasid
empire.
Chinese Pottery
Pottery bowl from Henan in Northern China, about 3500 BC (Musee Guimet, Paris)
Then the pots were painted with black swirling spirals and geometric shapes, and
sometimes with human faces. Later on, artists in China used a brush to paint their
pottery, and the designs became more sophisticated.
Pottery jar from Gansu in North-West China, about 2500 BC (Musee Guimet, Paris)
Art in China (Oxford History of Art Series), by Craig Clunas (1997). Not specifically for
kids, but a good introduction to the spirit of Chinese art. Warning: this one is not
arranged in chronological order. Instead, it has chapters on sculpture, calligraphy, and
so on.
Pottery jar from Gansu in North-West China, about 2500 BC (Musee Guimet, Paris)
Old Kingdom Egyptian Pottery
You might think that Egyptian art would start out not very good, and then little by little
people would learn more about carving and painting and their art would get better and
better.
But that would be wrong, not just for the Egyptians but for most people all over the
world. Changes in art styles are much more complicated than that, and the best
technique is often at the beginning instead of at the end.
The Old Kingdom of Egypt lasted about 500 years, from 2686 to 2160 BC. Most of the
art we have from the Old Kingdom comes from tombs. Some of it comes from the walls
of the tombs, either the pyramids of the Pharaohs or the tombs of less important men
and women. The picture just above is from the tomb of the Pharaoh Sesostris (sehSOSS-triss). The picture shows a man making offerings, surrounded by hieroglyphic
writing which is prayers to the gods. Look especially at the carving. Can you see how it
was done? The sculptor has carefully chipped away all the background limestone and
left only the man and the writing. That is a lot of work!
Other art is three-dimensional and was found in the tombs, like this bust of King Zoser,
from the Third Dynasty of Egypt, around 2600 BC. Old Kingdom statues are generally
very serious-looking, almost sad, and have great big deep eyes. They show how much
the Pharaoh worries about his people and tries to take care of them. At the same time
they are very strong-looking too.
Etruscan Pottery
Etruscan black figure pottery from about 510 BC (Louvre)
When the Etruscans were ruling most of Italy, in the 500's and 400's BC, they were
making two kinds of fancy, expensive pottery.
Etruscan red figure from about 410 BC
One kind of pottery was basically in the same style as Greek pottery of the same time
period. First the Etruscans made black-figure pottery, and then they followed the Greeks
in making red-figure pottery. But Etruscan vase painters had their own ideas too. The
people on Etruscan pots tend to be livelier than on Greek pots, and looser in their
movements.
The other kind of Etruscan pottery was all black, often with molded decorations on it.
We call this second kind of Etruscan pottery bucchero (BOO-ker-oh), from the Spanish
word for a vase.
Etruscan bucchero pot
Some people think that bucchero was supposed to look like silver pots, for people who
couldn't afford silver. You can see that it looks shiny. But even this black bucchero
pottery may have been pretty expensive. Ordinary people mostly couldn't afford it, and
they used plain pottery without any fancy finishes on it.
Greek Pottery
Very few Greek painted pictures have survived the 2500 years since they were painted.
So most of what we know about Greek art comes from the pictures they painted on
fancy pottery. Pottery, even if it gets broken, can be put back together, and a good deal
of it has even survived whole, mostly in Etruscan tombs.
Greek painted pottery changed a good deal over time, from the Stone Age to the
Hellenistic period.
Stone Age Greek Pottery
Around the time that people in Greece settled down in houses and villages, and began
planting their own crops and herding animals, they also began to produce pottery. This
Neolithic period was around 6000 BC. The first pottery was plain, but very soon people
began to decorate it. The earliest kind of decorated pottery in Greece is called Rainbow
Ware, though it is really only black and red, because of the way the colors blend into
each other.
In the Middle Neolithic, people began producing another kind of pottery with red and
white decoration in geometric patterns, which is known as Sesklo ware. Sesklo ware got
to be very well known around Greece, so much that other towns began to make cheap
knockoffs of it for people who couldn't afford the real thing.
Then in the Late Neolithic, the Dimini people made a new kind of pottery, black and
cream-colored, often in spirals.
Early Bronze Age Greek Pottery
When the Indo-European Greeks arrived in Greece around 2100 BC, they brought with
them a new kind of pottery known as Minyan Ware. Minyan ware is kindof boring to look
at, because it is just plain gray all over (though it is a rather attractive gray, and wellmade in nice shapes).
A depas cup in Minyan ware
But the big difference from the Stone Age pottery is that this Minyan Ware is made on a
potter's wheel. The potter's wheel allowed pots to be made faster and easier, and that
made them cheaper, so more people could have nice dishes to eat off and nice cups to
drink out of.
Late Bronze Age Greek Pottery
In the Late Bronze Age, or the Mycenean period, around 1500 BC, the Greeks
began to make pottery with designs on it. Again (as in the Dimini period) the
background is usually cream-colored and the design is painted on in black and red.
Sometimes the designs are just geometric patterns. Other times they show a painting of
a man fighting, or people driving a chariot, or imaginary wild animals borrowed from the
art of Western Asia.
In the end of the Mycenean period, after the Greeks had conquered Crete,
Mycenean potters began to imitate Minoan (Cretan) pottery styles. But where the
Minoans liked to paint wildly flowing sea creatures, fish, seaweed, and octopuses, the
Mycenean imitations of these are much stiffer and more symmetrical (and don't look so
much like octopuses or seaweed!).
1st is Minoan octopus vase
2nd is a Mycenean version of the same thing
(this is sometimes called the Palace style)
Dark Age Greek Pottery
With the collapse of Mycenaean civilization around 1200 BC, Mycenaean pottery
manufacturing also went downhill. People had other things to worry about than making
fancy dishes. Nobody had anything to buy them with anyway. And nobody knew how to
do it anymore. A lot of the Dark Age pottery was apparently made at home by people
who didn't know much about it: it is often made by hand instead of on a potter's wheel,
and all lopsided, without any decoration.
Sub-Mycenaean jar
Even the few pots which are still made sort of in the Mycenean style are sloppy, and
tend to be lopsided. The old octopus and seaweed designs get to be just one or two
wavy lines drawn around the belly of the pot.
Submycenaean pot from Dartmouth Classics Dept.
But the Dark Age didn't last forever. Later on, about 1000 or 900 BC, people began to
make better pots again. People who study pots call this new style the Proto-Geometric,
because it comes before the Geometric style. One interesting part of this new style is
that the pots have lots of circles on them, one inside the other, like on this pot here:
Geometric Greek Pottery
Gradually the Sub-Mycenean pottery of the Greek Dark Ages developed into a new
style called the Geometric. As times improved in Greece in the Archaic Period, around
900 BC, people began to want better dishes again too, and potters began to pay more
attention to what they made. Instead of just the one wavy line of the Sub-Mycenean
style, now lots and lots of lines and patterns began to crowd over every inch of the pots.
Elizabeth Barber thinks they might have been copying patterns from West Asian
clothing they got in trade from the Phoenicians.
Geometric grave marker
Athenian vase
Two cities in particular developed special ways of decorating pots. These were Corinth
and Athens. In Corinth, where many ships from Phoenicia stopped, people began to
make tiny little pots for perfume, which they decorated with mythical animals in a West
Asian style. These became very popular, and soon the potters of Athens began to also
try to make pots that would sell for high prices.
Athenian vase
Athenians were not as interested in West Asia as Corinthians were, and so they
invented a different style. In Athens the potters began to paint scenes from Greek
mythology on their pots, especially scenes from Homer's Iliad. To fit the scenes on, they
made larger pots than in Corinth.
A lot of the Athenian pots were for funerals. When people died, their relatives put these
pots in their graves, or used them as grave markers. Often these pots had funeral
scenes on them.
Corinthian vases
Athenian funeral scene (Dipylon vase, Athens)
Soon the Athenian pots were selling very well. The Corinthians began to try to cut prices
by producing shoddier pots, made faster and not so well. Instead of painting three
animals, they now painted one very long dachschund type animal. But these pots did
not sell so well. By about 550 BC, the Corinthians stopped making pottery to sell.
Black Figure Vases
In Athens, in the Archaic period, potters continued to make the clay pots with
mythological scenes on them. Gradually the scenes grew and took over more of the pot,
and the geometric decoration took up less and less. At the same time, a new painting
technique developed. Instead of painting figures of people in outline, the Athenian
potters began to paint people in silhouette: this is called black-figure, because the
people are all black.
Black-figure amphora by Exekias showing Achilles and Ajax
playing checkers
Actually black figure is done all with one type of clay. The clay found near Athens has a
lot of iron in it, so it looks black when it is wet. But if you fire it in an oven where there is
plenty of air getting in, the clay rusts, and turns red. This is because the iron mixes with
the oxygen in the air. If you fire it in an oven with no air getting in, the iron can't mix with
oxygen, and the pot stays black. So you can have either red or black pots.
So how do you get a picture? You make a pot the regular way, and let it dry a little
("leather-dry"). Then you mix a little of the wet clay with a lot of water, to make a kind of
paint (called the slip), which you use to make the black part of the picture. (You can't
see it now, because it is all the same color). And you let the whole thing dry. When your
pot is dry, you fire it in a kiln. First you give it a lot of air, so the whole pot turns red, slip
and all. This is because the oxygen in the air mixes with the iron in the clay to create
oxidized iron, which is red like rust or blood. Then you shut off the air supply, but just for
a little while right at the end of the firing. When the air runs out, the fire sucks oxygen
right out of the clay of the pot. But the places where there is slip, the slip is thinner and
easier to suck air out of. So the slip turns black (the color of iron with no oxygen in it)
faster than the rest of the pot (which is red, the color of iron with oxygen in it).
At first the Athenian potters didn't know much about drawing people, and their people
look a little funny. Later they got better at it. They began to care more about drawing the
muscles and the eyes right. They were especially careful about arranging the people in
the picture in a pleasing way.
One famous Athenian potter of this time was Exekias. Another is called the Amasis
painter.
Black figure vase painting lasted until about 525 BC.
Red Figure Pottery
Around 530 BC, Athenian potters were more and more frustrated by the black-figure
way of vase-painting. They wanted to paint figures that overlapped, for instance, which
was very difficult to do in black figure without the whole thing looking like just a big black
blob. And they wanted to be able to show the muscles better too. So somebody had an
idea: instead of painting the people black, why not paint the background black and leave
the people red? This is harder because you have to carefully paint all around the people
in the picture, but it makes the people look much more real. The slip and the firing are
exactly the same as in black figure.
Some of the greatest vases are in red figure. One of the most famous painters is the
Berlin Painter.
But by around 450 BC, just eighty years after the invention of red-figure painting, hardly
any vases were still being produced. We don't really know why this happened. Maybe it
just went out of style. Some people think that the Athenians became so rich that they all
used metal (bronze or silver) dishes instead of pottery. Maybe the Athenians were rich
enough that they didn't need to sell their pottery to other people. Also, the Etruscans,
who had bought a lot of this pottery, were no longer doing very well by 450 BC, and
maybe they couldn't afford to buy Athenian pottery anymore.
Based on the style of the vases he painted, the Berlin Painter lived about 500-480 BC.
His vases generally show one person, or a couple of people, alone in the middle of the
scene, with a lot of black around them.
One kind of pottery which does last longer is the white-painted lekythos, which was
placed on graves, like a tombstone. These tombstones were made until about 400 BC.
Roman Pottery
Roman pottery began with Etruscan-style pottery, but soon developed a tradition of its
own. In general, pottery in Italy tended to be made in one color, rather than painted as
in Greece, and the decorations were molded into the clay rather than painted
Campanian Pottery
Throughout the Roman Republic, most Roman pottery was made near where it was
going to be used. This piece, from Southern Italy, is typical - black slip, over a red fabric.
Arretine pottery from Arezzo
But in the time of Augustus, people began to build big pottery factories, where they
made lots of good pottery to sell to other places. There were some factories in Italy,
near a town called Arezzo, and some in southern France (Gaul).
South Gaulish pottery
This pottery was made in a new way, which the Italians had learned from West Asian
potters in the recently conquered eastern areas of the Empire. Instead of being black
like earlier pottery, it was red. And the decoration was created by pushing the clay into
plaster molds, instead of by painting it on. Molding the decoration was much faster and
cheaper than painting it, so these factories could make great quality pottery and sell it
very cheaply. This pottery was a big hit, and the factories made a lot of money.
It didn't take very long for potters in other places to notice that this Arretine and South
Gaulish pottery was making some people a lot of money. By the time of Vespasian,
around 70 AD, this red, molded pottery was being imitated all over. In Spain, for
instance, the imitations are called Terra Sigillata Hispanica.
In North Africa, the imitations are called African Red Slip. This African pottery was very
successful. In fact, after about fifty years of production the African pottery had
completely put the Italian and South Gaulish factories out of business! After that, nearly
everyone in the western part of the Roman Empire, and even people living outside the
empire, used African Red Slip pottery. Archaeologists find this pottery in England and
Denmark, in Austria, in Spain, and as far east as Greece. And of course there is loads
of it in North Africa. (In the eastern part of the empire, people kept using Eastern
Sigillata).
African Red Slip
But, once they had put the competition out of business, the North African potters didn't
worry too much about producing beautiful pottery. African Red Slip gradually became
less carefully made.
African Red Slip continued to be the main luxury pottery for North Africa and Europe for
400 years, even after the fall of Rome. In North Africa, people continued to make it
under Vandal rule in the 400's and 500's AD, and right up until the Islamic invasions in
the late 600's AD brought with them a new kind of pottery, glazed with colorful glassy
glazes.
Islamic Pottery
It's easy to tell Islamic pottery from the pottery that came before, because it was just at
the time of the Arab conquests (about 600-700 AD) that potters began to use metalbased glazes on their pots.
A tin-glazed plate
This way of glazing pottery had been invented in West Asia during the Roman Empire,
but Roman potters didn't use it very much. Glass glazes became much more popular
during the early Abbasid empire, about 800 AD, as a way of imitating white Chinese
porcelain.
Islamic potters then began to experiment with lots of different glazes, often painting one
color over another, and sometimes firing the pottery more than once.
Tin- glazed bowl imitating Chinese pottery, ca. 850 AD
When the Mongols conquered Central Asia and China in the 1200's AD, there was more
trade between West Asia and China. Chinese pottery again became fashionable in
West Asia, and a lot of West Asian pottery began to copy Chinese colors and patterns.
From around 1400 AD
West Asia Stone Age Art
The earliest art known from West Asia is from about 9000 BC, soon after the end of the
last Ice Age. It's from Gobekli Tepe, in southern Turkey near the border with Syria. At
Gobekli Tepe, hunter-gatherer people built a big stone temple and decorated it with
carved foxes, lions, snakes, vultures, and other creatures.
A fox from Gobekli Tepe (9000 BC)
Soon after that, as people began to farm for their food, there is more art found at
Jericho in modern Palestine and at Catal Huyuk (CHAT-al-HOO-yook) in modern
Turkey. It dates to about 8000 BC. There are wall paintings in people's houses showing
hunting scenes. Aren't they a lot like the hunting scenes painted by the San of the
Kalahari desert in South Africa?
Hunters in a painting from a shrine in Catal Huyuk, about 7000 BC
The people of Jericho and other nearby towns also made sculptures of people, about
half life size, made out of plaster and tar. The one shown here, from Ain Ghazal, is now
in the Louvre museum in Paris.
People in West Asia about 7000 BC also began to make clay pots and to make woven
linen fabric out of flax.
Statue from Ain Ghazal (ca. 5000 BC)
They did not yet know how to weave wool, even though they were beginning to keep
sheep - they just kept the sheep for meat.
A plate from northern Mesopotamia, about 5000 BC