A Story: The Making of Ancient Cypriot Pottery

This story is set in a village on the north coast of Cyprus, below the Kyrenia range, around 2100 BC, late in the Early Cypriot period of the Bronze Age, when the island's pottery was the hand-built, burnished red ware archaeologists call Red Polished. The people and their quarrels are invented, and so are their names, which we have borrowed from later Greek legend; no one knows what language was spoken on the island at this date. The clay, the tools and the order of the work follow what archaeologists have recovered from the broken pottery of Bronze Age villages such as Marki-Alonia [1]. Where the excavated record is silent we have filled the gaps from the practice of traditional Cypriot village potters recorded between the 1950s and the 1990s, so read it as a reconstruction with some liberties taken. The evidence for each step is set out in the first lesson of our pottery course, Clay, Hands, Wheel and Fire.

An Unforgiving Hill

Coaxing his stubborn donkey up the steep, thorny stretch of hillside in blistering heat was not Kinyras's idea of a good summer's day. Some days he had to hunt for clay. Today he knew exactly where to go, which only made the climb feel longer and duller, a chore that needed doing. He muttered that he should have gone to work with his father, who shaped wood in the shade down in the village, well out of the summer heat. A few hundred metres up the hill, he arrived.

He could see where he had last dug, what now seemed only a short while ago; with no rain since, the pit looked much as he had left it. He tied the donkey to a tree and lifted down the pair of baskets slung across its back, a rig that served him well even if it amused his wife. He felt the ground, trying to work out where the big tree had sent its roots. The best clay on this hill, soft, fine and almost free of stones, lay at this awkward spot, and the potters wanted it for their thinnest pots, the ones they would cover with cut lines. After a while he chose his place and began. He broke through the crust the sun had baked hard and soon found softer clay beneath. As he worked it loose he wished again that he had taken up his father's offer.

The baskets soon filled, though he knew better than to load them to the brim. A donkey would carry a heavy load, and a slope like this one, with the weight shifting at every step, was exactly where it would plant its feet and refuse. The donkey was the only equid on the island; horses are not securely attested in Cyprus until the Late Bronze Age, centuries later [2].

Sifting Through Dirt

Iphigenia saw the donkey picking its way down the hill, not a moment too soon. Kinyras, drained and beaten by the work, unloaded the baskets and led the animal off to rest and drink. Iphigenia felt the clay, judging its quality and how much work it would need before anyone could shape it. It was good, but it still needed cleaning.

She picked out the larger stones and roots by hand, a job worth doing well; the smaller grit could wait. Then she took up a beater she had made from a stout branch with its leaves still on, and set about the clay, heaped in a low mound on the ground, breaking the sun-hardened lumps into a finer, more even crumble. She worked outdoors, to keep the house clean, but under a small roof of brush so that the sun would not dry the clay any further. The crumbled clay went through a sieve to catch the grit she had left, and then into a basin of water to soak until it was ready to knead.

Coils, Slip and Fire

Days later the clay had been kneaded smooth, and Iphigenia sat down to build. There was no wheel; no potter on the island would use one for more than four hundred years. For a small bowl she pressed a lump into the base of an old broken bowl, which held the shape and let her turn the work with one hand while she pinched the wall up with the other. For a jug she laid coils one above another, smoothing each into the last, and made the neck separately. When the body was leather-hard, firm enough to handle but still damp, she pushed the neck into it and thrust the lower end of the handle right through the wall, so that its stub showed inside. The jug's flat base had dried on a reed mat and kept the print of the weave [1].

At the same stage she cut the decoration, rows of lines and zigzags drawn with a pointed tool. Then she wiped on the slip, a coat of finer, redder clay that ran down into the grooves, and when it had dried a little she rubbed the surface with a smooth pebble until it shone. Where she hurried, the pebble left narrow streaks [1].

They fired a few pots at a time in a shallow pit outside the village, starting with a low fire to drive out the last of the water so that nothing cracked, and building it up through the afternoon. She kept it well short of the heat at which the grains of lime in the clay would swell after cooling and pop little craters out of the surface. Where a pot leaned on its neighbour, or a smouldering branch lay against it, the red came out grey or black in a soft cloud. For the best bowls she wanted black on purpose. She pulled them out hot with a forked stick and set them mouth-down in a heap of smouldering ash and leaves, so that the rim and the inside turned black while the rest stayed red [1]. The line between the two never ran level, and she had long since stopped minding.

When the pots had cooled she pressed a white paste of crushed lime into the cut lines and wiped the surplus from the polished face, something she could never have done to the soft clay before firing without smearing the shine [1]. Kinyras looked along the row of red bowls with their black lips and white lines, and said nothing more about woodworking that evening.