page_title: Ancient Egyptian pottery
section_title: Social context of production
hierarchical_section_title: Ancient Egyptian pottery / Social context of production
caption_attribution_description: English: Statue of man making pottery
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 place of the ceramic industry in the wider social and economic context of ancient Egyptian society has been treated only cursorily in research to date.
  Tomb decorations and pottery models provide only a few pieces of evidence for the context of pottery production. Depictions from the Old Kingdom are closely linked with brewery and bakery scenes (although these are also depicted separately at times). This indicates that pottery production was an independent part of food production. However, the inhabitants of tombs desired food and drink in the afterlife, not empty vessels.
  Models of pottery workshops from the First Intermediate period and the Middle Kingdom give only a little indication of where the production took place. In all cases they are depicted in the open air - sometimes in a courtyard. More information is offered by the Middle Kingdom scenes in the tombs at Beni Hasan. Here pottery production is shown taking place alongside other crafts, like carpentry, metal-working, textile production, and the manufacturing of stone vases - and much less frequently with food production. This trend continues in the only depictions we have from the New Kingdom, in the tomb of Kenamun in Thebes.
  The models only ever show one or two men at work, which might indicate that production was carried out on a small scale. In almost all depictions, the works are male. There are a few examples from the Old Kingdom of women participating in the production process, e.g. helping to load the kiln. Little is known about the individual workers, but they were surely of low social status. That they were not part of higher society is also indicated by the absence of epigraphic evidence for this vocation. This is also illustrated by the Satire of the Occupations:
  The potter is beneath the earth,
  although his lifetime is beneath the living.
  
  He rummages in the mud more than pigs,
  
  in order to burn his pots.
  
  His loincloth is stiff from the clay,
  
  his belt is a rag.
  
  The air in his nose,
  
  actually(?) comes from his kiln.
  — Satire of the Trades
  On the other hand, pottery production had an important place in Egyptian culture. As part of everyday life it belonged to a level where perfection did not matter. From that point of view it was less about social stratification than about a stratification of the value which people attach to things. It would therefore be wrong to say that Egyptian potters were despised. There was a strong sense that the process was a creative one. Thus, the word for 'potter' (qd) is the same one used for 'building' walls and structures. Even the activities of creator gods were depicted using the image of the potter. The ram-headed creator god Khnum was shown creating gods, men, animals and plants on the potter's wheel. This suggests high esteem for ceramic production.
  Stephan Seidlmayer investigated the social and organisational circumstances of pottery production in the transitional period from the Old Kingdom to the Middle Kingdom, asking how the archaeological evidence can be connected to the image of the historical situation which we have built up from other sources. He concludes that the economic situation in the Old Kingdom favoured a centralised, standardised, and specialised production in great quantities, using complicated procedures. The organisational capacity of the state enabled focused production with high-quality pottery suitable for storage and transport in the context of the extensive distribution of goods by a centralised system. In the late Old Kingdom and the First Intermediate period, the centralised system deteriorated. It was replaced by decentralised production in small quantities for the circulation of goods within relatively small areas. In order to achieve high output, it was necessary to compromise on the quality of the wares. The profound transformation of the archaeological material indicates the extent of the social transformation which affected the whole cultural system at this time.
caption: Statue of a potter
exif: {}