History of Ancient Pottery: Greek, Etruscan, and Roman. Volume 1 (of 2)

by H. B. Walters; Samuel Birch

Homo sum; humani nihil a me alienum puto.

For the very humblest product of the human brain or hand, a potsherd or a few letters scratched on a stone, may throw the most instructive light on the history of a race.

In no instance is this better seen than in the case of Assyria, where almost all that we know of that great and wonderful people is derived from the cuneiform inscriptions scratched on tablets of baked clay. Or, again, we may cite the stone and bronze implements of the primitive peoples of Europe as another instance where “the weak and base things of the world and the things that are despised” have thrown floods of light on the condition of things in a period about which we should have been completely in the dark so long as we looked only to literary records for our information. Nothing is so common that it may be overlooked, and we may learn more from a humble implement in daily use than from the finest product of a poetic or artistic intellect, if we are really desirous of obtaining an intimate acquaintance with the domestic life of a people.

Among the simplest yet most necessary adjuncts of a developing civilisation Pottery may be recognised as one of the most universal. The very earliest and rudest remains of any people generally take the form of coarse and common pots, in which they cooked their food or consumed their beverages. And the fact that such vast quantities of pottery from all ancient civilisations have been preserved to us is due partly to its comparatively imperishable nature, partly to the absence of any intrinsic value which saved it from falling a prey to the ravages of fire, human greed, or other causes which have destroyed more precious monuments, such as gold ornaments, paintings, and statues of marble or bronze. Moreover, it is always in the pottery that we perceive the first indications of whatever artistic instinct a race possesses, clay being a material so easy to decorate and so readily lending itself to plastic treatment for the creation of new forms or development from simple to elaborate shapes.

To trace the history of the art of working in clay, from its rise amongst the oldest nations of antiquity to the period of the decline of the Roman Empire, is the object of the present work. The subject resolves itself into two great divisions, which have engaged the attention of two distinct classes of enquirers: namely, the technical or practical part, comprising all the details of material, manipulation, and processes; and, secondly, the historical portion, which embraces not only the history of the art itself, and the application of ancient literature to its elucidation, but also an account of the light thrown by monuments in clay on the history of mankind. Such an investigation is therefore neither trifling in character nor deficient in valuable results.

It is impossible to determine when the manufacture of pottery was invented. Clay is a material so generally diffused, and its plastic nature is so easily discovered, that the art of working it does not exceed the intelligence of the rudest savage. Even the most primitive graves of Europe and Western Asia contain specimens of pottery, rude and elementary indeed, but in sufficient quantities to show that it was at all times reckoned among the indispensable adjuncts of daily life.

It is said that the very earliest specimens of pottery, hand-made and almost shapeless, have been discovered in the cave-dwellings of Palaeolithic Man, such as the Höhlefels cave near Ulm, and that of Nabrigas, near Toulouse; and pottery has also been found in the “kitchen-middens” of Denmark, which belong to this period. Such relics are, however, so rude and fragmentary, and so much doubt has been cast on the circumstances of their discovery, that it is better to be content with the evidence afforded by the Neolithic Age, of which perhaps the best authenticated is the predynastic pottery of Egypt.[^[1]]

Abundant specimens of pottery have been found in long barrows in all parts of Western Europe; these are supposed to be the burial-places of the early dolichocephalic races, now represented by the Finns and Lapps, which preceded the Aryan immigration. The chief characteristic of this pottery is the almost entire absence of ornamentation. Neolithic man appears to have been far less endowed with the artistic instinct than his palaeolithic predecessor. Where ornament does occur, it appears to have a quite fortuitous origin: for instance, a kind of rope-pattern that appears on the earliest pottery of Britain and Germany, and also in America, owes its origin to the practice of moulding the clay in a kind of basket of bark or thread. It is also possible that cords of some kind were used for carrying the pots; and this reminds us of another characteristic of the earliest pottery, which, indeed, lasts down to the Bronze Age—namely, the absence of handles.

The baking of clay, so as to produce an indestructible and tenacious substance, was probably also the result of accident rather than design. This was pointed out as long ago as the middle of the eighteenth century by M. Goguet. In most countries the condition of the atmosphere precludes the survival of sun-dried clay for any length of time; moreover, such a material was more suitable for architecture (as we shall see later) than for vessels destined to hold liquids. Thus it is that Egypt, Assyria, and Babylonia alone have transmitted to posterity the early efforts of workers in sun-dried clay.

To return to the new invention. The savage conceivably found that the calabash or gourd in which he boiled the water for his simple culinary needs was liable to be damaged by the action of fire; and it required no very advanced mental process to smear the exterior of the vessel with some such substance as clay in order to protect it. As he found that the surface of the clay was thereby rendered hard and impervious, his next step would naturally be to dispense with the calabash and mould the clay into a similar form. These two simple qualities of clay, its plastic nature and its susceptibility to the action of fire, are the two elements which form the basis of the whole development of the potter’s art.