Despite many years work on the technology of pottery production it is perhaps surprising that the origins of the potter's wheel in Egypt have yet to be determined. This volume seeks to rectify this situation by determining when the potter's wheel was introduced into Egypt.
Despite many years work on the technology of pottery production it is perhaps surprising that the origins of the potter's wheel in Egypt have yet to be determined. This volume seeks to rectify this situation by determining when the potter's wheel was introduced into Egypt.
In Excavations at the Seila Pyramid and Fag el-Gamous Cemetery, the excavation team provides crucial information about the Old Kingdom and Graeco-Roman Egypt. While both periods have been heavily studied, Kerry Muhlestein and his contributors provide new archaeological information that will help shape thinking about these eras. The construction and ritual features of the early Fourth Dynasty Seila Pyramid represents innovations that would influence royal funerary cult for hundreds of years. Similarly, as one of the largest excavated cemeteries of Egypt, Fag el-Gamous helps paint a picture of multi-cultural life in the Fayoum of Egypt during the Ptolemaic and Roman periods. Excavations there provide a statistically impactful understanding of funerary customs under the influence of new cultures and religion.
How did the Ancient Egyptians maintain control of their state? Topics include the controlling function of temples and theology, state borders, scribal administration, visual representation, patronage, and the Egyptian language itself, with reference to all periods of Egyptian history, from the Old Kingdom to Coptic times.
Proceedings of a workshop held in Berlin, 2018, focusing on manufacturing activities identified at archaeological sites. New excavation techniques, ethnographic research, archaeometric approaches, GIS, experimental archaeology, and theoretical issues associated with how researchers understand production in the past, are presented here.
The Oxford Handbook of Egyptology offers a comprehensive survey of the entire study of ancient Egypt, from prehistory through to the end of the Roman period. Authoritative yet accessible, and covering a wide range of topics, it is an invaluable resource for scholars, students, and general readers alike.
For over 25,000 years, humans across the globe have shaped, decorated, and fired clay. Despite great differences in location and time, universal themes appear in the world’s ceramic traditions, including religious influences, human and animal representations, and mortuary pottery. In Global Clay: Themes in World Ceramic Traditions, noted pottery scholar John A. Burrison explores the recurring artistic themes that tie humanity together, explaining how and why those themes appear again and again in worldwide ceramic traditions. The book is richly illustrated with over 200 full-color, cross-cultural illustrations of ceramics from prehistory to the present. Providing an introduction to different styles of folk pottery, extensive suggestions for further reading, and reflections on the future of traditional pottery around the world, Global Clay is sure to become a classic for all who love art and pottery and all who are intrigued by the human commonalities revealed through art.
This volume, focusing on pharaonic sites, is the first of a series, bringing to publication the records of the Archaeological Survey of Sudanese Nubia (ASSN). These records represent a major body of data relating to a region largely now lost to flooding and of considerable importance for understanding the archaeology and history of Nubia.
An unparalleled assemblage of Archaic black-figure painted pinakes (plaques) was uncovered near Penteskouphia, a village west of ancient Corinth, over a century ago. The pinakes-represented by over 1,200 fragments-and their depictions of gods, warriors, animals, and the potters themselves, provide a uniquely rich source of information about Greek art, technology, and society. In this volume, the findspot of the pinakes is identified in a contribution by Ioulia Tzonou and James Herbst, and the assemblage as a whole is fully contextualized within the Archaic world. Then, by focusing specifically on the images of potters at work, the author illuminates the relationship between Corinthian and Athenian art, the technology used in ancient pottery production, and religious anxiety in the 6th century B.C. The first comprehensive register of all known Penteskouphia pinakes complements the well-illustrated discussion.
This is the first monograph that deals with the Middle Assyrian remains at Tell Sabi Abyad, northern Syria. It offers a detailed description of the ceramics excavated between 1991 and 1998 in the project of Leiden National Museum of Antiquities. The study integrates technological, morphological, stylistic, and archaeological data to come to an understanding of pottery production and use. The book contains seven lavishly illustrated chapters and six appendices presenting the raw data on typology, pottery kilns, archaeometric analyses and functional analyses. The large-scale excavation and the excellent preservation of pottery workshops, tools and kilns as well as the meticulous study of technology and standardization provide a unique insight into the organization of pottery production. The chapter on function and use combines information on performance characteristics, shape and capacity, traces of use, depictions of vessels in iconography and information from texts, in an attempt to reconstruct how vessels were used. In a contribution by Dr. Frans Wiggermann two cuneiform texts from Sabi Abyad dealing with pottery have been published, and a first step has been taken to connect the ceramic repertoire with Middle Assyrian vocabulary. This study will be interesting to Near Eastern archaeologists, ceramicists and Assyriologists as well as to students of craft production in archaeology or ethno-archaeology. Dr. Kim Duistermaat is director of the Netherlands-Flemish Institute in Cairo. She has participated in archaeological research projects in the Netherlands, Egypt and Syria, where she directed the Netherlands Institute for Academic Studies in Damascus between 1997 and 2005.