page_title: Ancient Egyptian pottery
section_title: Rotating pilaster
hierarchical_section_title: Ancient Egyptian pottery / Production / Shaping / Rotating pilaster
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Keramikherstellung im Alten Ägypten nach einer Darstellung in der Mastaba des Ti aus dem Alten Reich; Aufziehen eines Kruges auf dem Drehuntersatz
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: During the Chalcolithic, the rotating pilaster came into use for the manufacture of ceramics. This may have arisen from the desire to make the body and especially the opening of the vessel being made symmetrical. The technique can be clearly recognised from a horizontal rotation mark in the opening of the vessel. Unlike the potter's wheel, there was no fixed axis around which rotations were centred.
  The pilaster used in this technique could by a bowl, plate, basket, mat, textile, or even a pottery sherd. This pilaster was rotated along with the vessel, as the potter shaped it. The rotation technique was used only for the creation of the vessel's shell. The earlier techniques were also used for other parts of the manufacturing process. Thus, on finished vessels, traces of free modelling are found, especially in the lower parts, but the edges were turned after the completion of the whole vessel.
caption: Creation of a vase using a rotating pedestal, from a depiction in the Mastaba of Ti
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