Falling in Love

19. The First Potter

Collective humanity owes a great debt of gratitude to the first potter.

Before his days the art of boiling, though in one sense very simple and

primitive indeed, was in another sense very complex, cumbersome, and

lengthy. The unsophisticated savage, having duly speared and killed his

antelope, proceeded to light a roaring fire, with flint or drill, by the

side of some convenient lake or river in his tropical jungle. Then he

dug a big hole in the soft mud close to the water's edge, and let the

water (rather muddy) percolate into it, or sometimes even he plastered

over its bottom with puddled clay. After that, he heated some smooth

round stones red hot in the fire close by, and drawing them out gingerly

between two pieces of stick, dropped them one by one, spluttering and

fizzing, into his improvised basin or kettle. This, of course, made the

water in the hole boil; and the unsophisticated savage thereupon thrust

into it his joint of antelope, repeating the process over and over again

until the sodden meat was completely seethed to taste on the outside. If

one application was not sufficient, he gnawed off the cooked meat from

the surface with his stout teeth, innocent as yet of the dentist's art,

and plunged the underdone core back again, till it exactly suited his

not over-delicate or dainty fancy.

To be sure, the primitive savage, unversed as he was in pastes and

glazes, in moulds and ornaments, did not pass his life entirely devoid

of cups and platters. Coconut shell and calabash rind, horn of ox and

skull of enemy, bamboo-joint and capacious rhomb-shell, all alike, no

doubt, supplied him with congenial implements for drink or storage. Like

Eve in the Miltonic Paradise, there lacked him not fit vessels pure;

picking some luscious tropical fruit, the savoury pulp he chewed, and in

the rind still as he thirsted scooped the brimming stream. This was

satisfactory as far as it went, of course, but it was not pottery. He

couldn't boil his joint for dinner in coco-nut or skull; he had to do it

with stone pot-boilers, in a rude kettle of puddled clay.

But at last one day, that inspired barbarian, the first potter, hit by

accident upon his grand discovery. He had carried some water in a big

calabash--the hard shell of a tropical fruit whose pulpy centre can be

easily scooped out--and a happy thought suddenly struck him: why not put

the calabash to boil upon the fire with a little clay smeared outside

it? The savage is conservative, but he loves to save trouble. He tried

the experiment, and it succeeded admirably. The water boiled, and the

calabash was not burnt or broken. Our nameless philosopher took the

primitive vessel off the fire with a forked branch and looked at it

critically with the delighted eyes of a first inventor. A wonderful

change had suddenly come over it. He had blundered accidentally upon the

art of pottery. For what is this that has happened to the clay? It went

in soft, brown, and muddy; it has come out hard, red, and stone-like.

The first potter ruminated and wondered. He didn't fully realise, no

doubt, what he had actually done; but he knew he had invented a means by

which you could put a calabash upon a fire and keep it there without

burning or bursting. That, after all, was at least something.

All this, you say (which, in effect, is Dr. Tylor's view), is purely

hypothetical. In one sense, yes; but not in another. We know that most

savage races still use natural vessels, made of coco-nuts, gourds, or

calabashes, for everyday purposes of carrying water; and we also know

that all the simplest and earliest pottery is moulded on the shape of

just such natural jars and bottles. The fact and the theory based on it

are no novelties. Early in the sixteenth century, indeed, the Sieur

Gonneville, skipper of Honfleur, sailing round the Cape of Good Hope,

made his way right across the Southern Ocean to some vague point of

South America where he found the people still just in the intermediate

stage between the use of natural vessels and the invention of pottery.

For these amiable savages (name and habitat unknown) had wooden pots

'plastered with a kind of clay a good finger thick, which prevents the

fire from burning them.' Here we catch industrial evolution in the very

act, and the potter's art in its first infancy, fossilised and

crystallised, as it were, in an embryo condition, and fixed for us

immovably by the unprogressive conservatism of a savage tribe. It was

this curious early observation of evolving keramic art that made

Goguet--an anthropologist born out of due season--first hit upon that

luminous theory of the origin of pottery now all but universally

accepted.

Plenty of evidence to the same effect is now forthcoming for the modern

inquirer. Among the ancient monuments of the Mississippi valley, Squier

and Davis found the kilns in which the primitive pottery had been baked;

and among their relics were partially burnt pots retaining in part the

rinds of the gourds or calabashes on which they had been actually

modelled. Along the Gulf of Mexico gourds were also used to give shape

to the pot; and all over the world, even to this day, the gourd form is

a very common one for pottery of all sorts, thus pointing back, dimly

and curiously, to the original mode in which fictile ware generally

came to be invented. In Fiji and in many parts of Africa vessels

modelled upon natural forms are still universal. Of course all such pots

as these are purely hand-made; the invention of the potter's wheel, now

so indissolubly associated in all our minds with the production of

earthenware, belongs to an infinitely later and almost modern period.

And that consideration naturally suggests the fundamental question, When

did the first potter live? The world (as Sir Henry Taylor has oracularly

told us) knows nothing of its greatest men; and the very name of the

father of all potters has been utterly forgotten in the lapse of ages.

Indeed, paradoxical as it may sound to say so, one may reasonably doubt

whether there was ever actually any one single man on whom one could

definitely lay one's finger, and say with confidence, Here we have the

first potter. Pottery, no doubt, like most other things, grew by

imperceptible degrees from wholly vague and rudimentary beginnings. Just

as there were steam-engines before Watt, and locomotives before

Stephenson, so there were pots before the first potter. Many men must

have discovered separately, by half-unconscious trials, that a coat of

mud rudely plastered over the bottom of a calabash prevented it from

catching fire and spilling its contents; other men slowly learned to

plaster the mud higher and ever higher up the sides; and yet others

gradually introduced and patented new improvements for wholly encasing

the entire cup in an inch thickness of carefully kneaded clay. Bit by

bit the invention grew, like all great inventions, without any inventor.

Thus the question of the date of the first potter practically resolves

itself into the simpler question of the date of the earliest known

pottery.

Did pal******* man, that antique naked crouching savage who hunted the

mammoth, the reindeer, and the cave-bear among the frozen fields of

interglacial Gaul and Britain--did pal******* man himself, in his rude

rock-shelters, possess a knowledge of the art of pottery? That is a

question which has been much debated amongst arch********, and which

cannot even now be considered as finally settled before the tribunal of

science. He must have drunk out of something or other, but whether he

drank out of earthenware cups is still uncertain. It is pretty clear

that the earliest drinking vessels used in Europe were neither bowls of

earthenware nor shells of fruits, for the cold climate of interglacial

times did not permit the growth in northern latitudes of such large

natural vessels as gourds, calabashes, bamboos, or coco-nuts. In all

probability the horns of the aurochs and the wild cattle, and the

capacious skull of the fellow-man whose bones he had just picked at his

ease for his cannibal supper, formed the aboriginal goblets and basins

of the old black European savage. A curious verbal relic of the use of

horns as drinking-cups survives indeed down to almost modern times in

the Greek word _keramic_, still commonly applied to the art of pottery,

and derived, of course, from _keras_, a horn; while as to skulls, not

only were they frequently used as drinking-cups by our Scandinavian

ancestors, but there still exists a very singular intermediate American

vessel in which the clay has actually been moulded on a human skull as

model, just as other vessels have been moulded on calabashes or other

suitable vegetable shapes.

Still, the balance of evidence certainly seems to show that a little

very rude and almost shapeless hand-made pottery has really been

discovered amongst the buried caves where pal******* men made for ages

their chief dwelling-places. Fragments of earthenware occurred in the

Hohefels cave near Ulm, in company with the bones of reindeer,

cave-bears, and mammoths, whose joints had doubtless been duly boiled,

a hundred thousand years ago, by the intelligent producer of those

identical sun-dried fleshpots; and M. Joly, of Toulouse, has in his

possession portions of an irregularly circular, flat-bottomed vessel,

from the cave of Nabrigas, on which the finger-marks of the hand that

moulded the clay are still clearly distinguishable on the baked

earthenware. That is the great merit of pottery, viewed as an historical

document; it retains its shape and peculiarities unaltered through

countless centuries, for the future edification of unborn antiquaries.

_Litera scripta manet_, and so does baked pottery. The hand itself that

formed that rude bowl has long since mouldered away, flesh and bone

alike, into the soil around it; but the print of its fingers, indelibly

fixed by fire into the hardened clay, remains for us still to tell the

story of that early triumph of nascent keramics.

The relics of pal******* pottery are, however, so very fragmentary, and

the circumstances under which they have been discovered so extremely

doubtful, that many cautious and sceptical antiquarians will even now

have nothing to say to the suspected impostors. Among the remains of the

newer Stone Age, on the other hand, comparatively abundant keramic

specimens have been unearthed, without doubt or cavil, from the long

barrows--the burial-places of the early Mongoloid race, now represented

by the Finns and Lapps, which occupied the whole of Western Europe

before the advent of the Aryan vanguard. One of the best bits is a

curious wide-mouthed, semi-globular bowl from Norton Bavant, in

Wiltshire, whose singular shape suggests almost immediately the idea

that it must at least have been based, if not actually modelled, upon a

human skull. Its rim is rough and quite irregular, and there is no trace

of ornamentation of any sort; a fact quite in accordance with all the

other facts we know about the men of the newer Stone Age, who were far

less artistic and ******* in every way than their ruder predecessors of

the interglacial epoch.

Ornamentation, when it does begin to appear, arises at first in a

strictly practical and unintentional manner. Later examples elsewhere

show us by analogy how it first came into existence. The Indians of the

Ohio seem to have modelled their pottery in bags or nettings made of

coarse thread or twisted bark. Those of the Mississippi moulded them in

baskets of willow or splints. When the moist clay thus shaped and marked

by the indentations of the mould was baked in the kiln, it of course

retained the pretty dappling it received from the interlaced and woven

thrums, which were burnt off in the process of firing. Thus a rude sort

of natural diaper ornament was set up, to which the eye soon became

accustomed, and which it learned to regard as necessary for beauty.

Hence, wherever newer and more improved methods of modelling came into

use, there would arise an instinctive tendency on the part of the early

potter to imitate the familiar marking by artificial means. Dr. Klemm

long ago pointed out that the oldest German fictile vases have an

ornamentation in which plaiting is imitated by incised lines. 'What was

no longer wanted as a necessity,' he says, 'was kept up as an ornament

alone.'

Another very simple form of ornamentation, reappearing everywhere all

the world over on primitive bowls and vases, is the rope pattern, a line

or string-course over the whole surface or near the mouth of the vessel.

Many of the indented patterns on early British pottery have been

produced, as Sir Daniel Wilson has pointed out, by the close impress of

twisted cord on the wet clay. Sometimes these cords seem to have been

originally left on the clay in the process of baking, and used as a

mould; at other times they may have been employed afterwards as

handles, as is still done in the case of some South African pots: and,

when the rope handle wore off, the pattern made by its indentation on

the plastic material before sun-baking would still remain as pure

ornament. Probably the very common idea of string-course ornamentation

just below the mouth or top of vases and bowls has its origin in this

early and almost universal practice.

When other conscious and intentional ornamentation began to supersede

these rude natural and undesigned patterns, they were at first mere

rough attempts on the part of the early potter to imitate, with the

simple means at his disposal, the characteristic marks of the ropes or

wickerwork by which the older vessels were necessarily surrounded. He

had gradually learned, as Mr. Tylor well puts it, that clay alone or

with some mixture of sand is capable of being used without any

extraneous support for the manufacture of drinking and cooking vessels.

He therefore began to model rudely thin globular bowls with his own

hands, dispensing with the aid of thongs or basketwork. But he still

naturally continued to imitate the original shapes--the gourd, the

calabash, the plaited net, the round basket; and his eye required the

familiar decoration which naturally resulted from the use of some one or

other among these primitive methods. So he tried his hand at deliberate

ornament in his own simple untutored fashion.

It was quite literally his hand, indeed, that he tried at first; for the

earliest decoration upon paleolithic pottery is made by pressing the

fingers into the clay so as to produce a couple of deep parallel

furrows, which is the sole attempt at ornament on M. Joly's Nabrigas

specimen; while the urns and drinking-cups taken from our English long

barrows are adorned with really pretty and effective patterns, produced

by pressing the tip of the finger and the nail into the plastic

material. It is wonderful what capital and varied results you can get

with no more recondite graver than the human finger-nail, sometimes

turned front downward, sometimes back downward, and sometimes used to

egg up the moist clay into small jagged and relieved designs. Most of

these patterns are more or less plaitlike in arrangement, evidently

suggested to the mind of the potter by the primitive marks of the old

basketwork. But, as time went on, the early artist learned to press into

his service new implements, pieces of wood, bone scrapers, and the flint

knife itself, with which he incised more regular patterns, straight or

zigzag lines, rows of dots, squares and triangles, concentric circles,

and even the mystic cross and swastika, the sacred symbols of yet unborn

and undreamt-of religions. As yet, there was no direct imitation of

plant or animal forms; once only, on a single specimen from a Swiss lake

dwelling, are the stem and veins of a leaf dimly figured on the

handiwork of the European prehistoric potter. Ornament in its pure form,

as pattern merely, had begun to exist; imitative work as such was yet

unknown, or almost unknown, to the eastern hemisphere.

In America, it was quite otherwise. The forgotten people who built the

mounds of Ohio and the great tumuli of the Mississippi valley decorated

their pottery not only with animal figures, such as snakes, fish, frogs,

and turtles, but also with human heads and faces, many of them evidently

modelled from the life, and some of them quite unmistakably genuine

portraits. On one such vase, found in Arkansas, and figured by the

Marquis de Nadaillac in his excellent work on Prehistoric America, the

ornamentation consists (in true Red Indian taste) of skeleton hands,

interspersed with crossbones; and the delicacy and anatomical

correctness of the detail inevitably suggest the idea that the unknown

artist must have worked with the actual hand of his slaughtered enemy

lying for a model on the table before him. Much of the early American

pottery is also coloured as well as figured, and that with considerable

real taste; the pigments were applied, however, after the baking, and so

possess little stability or permanence of character. But pots and vases

of these advanced styles have got so far ahead of the first potter that

we have really little or no business with them in this paper.

Prehistoric European pottery has never a spout, but it often indulges in

some simple form of ear or handle. The very ancient British bowl from

Bavant Long Barrow--produced by that old squat Finnlike race which

preceded the 'Ancient Britons' of our old-fashioned school-books--has

two ear-shaped handles projecting just below the rim, exactly as in the

modern form of vessel known as a crock, and still familiarly used for

household purposes. This long survival of a common domestic shape from

the most remote prehistoric antiquity to our own time is very

significant and very interesting. Many of the old British pots have also

a hole or two holes pierced through them, near the top, evidently for

the purpose of putting in a string or rope by way of a handle. With the

round barrows, which belong to the Bronze Age, and contain the remains

of a later and more civilised Celtic population, we get far more

advanced forms of pottery. Burial here is preceded by cremation, and the

ashes are enclosed in urns, many of which are very beautiful in form and

exquisitely decorated. Cremation, as Professor Rolleston used feelingly

to plead, is bad for the comparative anatomist and ethnographer, but it

is passing well for the collector of pottery. Where burning exists as a

common practice, there urns are frequent, and pottery an art in great

request. Drinking-cups and perforated incense burners accompany the

dead in the round barrows; but the use of the potter's wheel is still

unknown, and all the urns and vases belonging to this age are still

hand-moulded.

It is a curious reflection, however, that in spite of all the later

improvements in the fictile art--in spite of wheels and moulds, pastes

and glazes, stamps and pigments, and all the rest of it--the most

primitive methods of the first potter are still in use in many

countries, side by side with the most finished products of modern

European skill and industry. I have in my own possession some West

Indian calabashes, cut and decorated under my own eye by a Jamaican

negro for his personal use, and bought from him by me for the smallest

coin there current--calabashes carved round the edge through the rind

with a rude string-course, exactly like the common rope pattern of

prehistoric pottery. I have seen the same Jamaican n*****s kneading

their hand-made porous earthenware beside a tropical stream, moulding it

on fruits or shaping it inside with a free sweep of the curved hand, and

drying it for use in the hot sun, or baking it in a hastily-formed kiln

of plastered mud into large coarse jars of prehistoric types, locally

known by the quaint West African name of 'yabbas.' Many of these yabbas,

if buried in the ground and exposed to damp and frost, till they almost

lost the effects of the baking, would be quite indistinguishable, even

by the skilled arch*******, from the actual handicraft of the

pal******* potter. The West Indian n*****s brought these simple arts

with them from their African home, where they have been handed down in

unbroken continuity from the very earliest age of fictile industry. New

and better methods have slowly grown up everywhere around them, but

these simplest, earliest, and easiest plans have survived none the less

for the most ordinary domestic uses, and will survive for ages yet, as

long as there remain any out-of-the-way places, remote from the main

streams of civilised commerce. Thus, while hundreds of thousands of

years, in all probability, separate us now from the ancient days of the

first potter, it is yet possible for us to see the first potter's own

methods and principles exemplified under our very eyes by people who

derive them in unbroken succession from the direct teaching of that

long-forgotten prehistoric savage.