page_title: Ancient Egyptian pottery
section_title: Surface treatment
hierarchical_section_title: Ancient Egyptian pottery / Production / Surface treatment
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Keramikherstellung im Alten Ägypten nach einer Darstellung in einem Grab in Beni Hasan; Formen des runden Bodens einer Schale.
context_page_description: Ancient Egyptian pottery includes all objects of fired clay from ancient Egypt. First and foremost, ceramics served as household wares for the storage, preparation, transport, and consumption of food, drink, and raw materials. Such items include beer and wine mugs and water jugs, but also bread molds, fire pits, lamps, and stands for holding round vessels, which were all commonly used in the Egyptian household. Other types of pottery served ritual purposes. Ceramics are often found as grave goods.
  Specialists in ancient Egyptian pottery draw a fundamental distinction between ceramics made of Nile clay and those made of marl clay, based on chemical and mineralogical composition and ceramic properties. Nile clay is the result of eroded material in the Ethiopian mountains, which was transported into Egypt by the Nile. This clay has deposited on the banks of the Nile in Egypt since the Late Pleistocene by the inundation. Marl clay is a yellow-white stone which occurs in limestone deposits. These deposits were created in the Pleistocene, when the primordial waters of the Nile and its tributaries brought sediment into Egypt and deposited in on what was then the desert edge.
context_section_description: The shaped vessel first had to be dried enough that the walls would be stable for further work. The clay was brought to roughly the consistency of leather, remaining damp enough that it could still be moulded and shaped. At this point paint, glaze and slip could be added if desired. After further drying the vessel was polished. There were two techniques for polishing the vessel's surface:
  Polishing by rubbing without pressure produced a consistent, light sheen. Examples include Old Kingdom jugs, jugs and dishes from the First Intermediate Period and possibly the Middle Kingdom.
  Polishing with a burnish or significant pressure on the vessel's surface. This results in very shiny surfaces, but only in rare cases of especially careful work (such as Meidum bowls of the Old Kingdom) are no polishing marks left behind. In the Thinis period and the Seventeenth and Eighteenth dynasties, potters made decorative patterns with the marks left by this polishing process.
  At this stage, impressions or incisions could also be made in the clay, "when the clay was still damp enough that it would not break in the process, but was dry enough that no raised areas would be left in the incisions." This was done with various tools, including bone or wooden nails, combs made from bone or shellfish, and flint knives.
  After an initial drying phase, the round base was finished. This was done by hand until the seventeenth dynasty, using a flat tool to cut and smooth the base. A foot was also cut by hand, or molded from an additional lump of clay. After the beginning of the seventeenth dynasty, the foot was instead made on the potter's wheel from the mass of clay used for the creation of the base of the vessel. At this point, bases and stands increasingly have rotation marks on the outside.
caption: Shaping the round base of a bowl in a depiction from Beni Hasan
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