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 palæolithic 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 palæolithic 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 archæologists, 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 palæolithic 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 palæolithic 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 æsthetic 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 negroes 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 archæologist, from the actual handicraft of the
palæolithic potter. The West Indian negroes 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.