The stories were meant to be told, I believe, by a wandering troupe of actors. The suggestion is that while some of the troupe performed the Iliad for the males of a household, others performed the Odyssey the women. Josiah Wedgewood is famous for inventing Jasper Ware. Most often the body is blue. Another famous English ceramist was Josiah Spode who is credited in the West with inventing the lovely, translucent bone china.
Bone ash is an old ceramic raw material.
It had always been used for making the cupels used to assay and purify gold. Bone china, though delicate in appearance is very strong. A puzzling question of the Paleolithic Age is the slowness of technological and cultural development until the arrival of modern Man, homo sapiens sapiens . Some of the earlier cultures appear to have been essentially stagnant for many hundreds of centuries.