page_title: Ancient Egyptian pottery
section_title: Firing
hierarchical_section_title: Ancient Egyptian pottery / Production / Firing
caption_attribution_description: Kalabougou is a village located across the Niger river from Ségou (Mali). The village is known for its craftsmanship, particularly pottery of which the women of the village are traditionally employed in. The potters of Kalabougou are major suppliers of pottery for sale in Bamako, as well as to nearby Segou. “(...) Firings take place in Kalabougou every Saturday and Sunday in the late afternoon. By mid-afternoon, many women and their daughters have brought unfired pots from the compounds where they were made to the firing place, a process that takes many hours. On each trip, a woman carries two pots on her head and one in her hand. Here wavy-lipped flower pots, along with pots for storing water, cooking, and carrying embers, can be seen. (...) When the women and girls have brought all the pots to the firing place, they begin to construct the mound by placing a layer of branches on the ground. The pots are positioned on and amid the branches and then grass is piled high to complete the mound. Although the mound contains the pots of many women, who are related through their husbands' extended families, each women is responsible for her own or her immediate family's pots within the mound. When a mound is completed and the ground around has been swept clean of residual combustible material, a senior potter lights the fire. A handful of grass is lit and the woman runs around the circumference of the mound touching the burning torch to the dried grass. Some mounds are still being constructed as others are already burning. (...)” —“The women of Kalabougou” by Janet Goldner, article published on African Arts, Spring 2007, Vol. 40, No. 1, Pages 74-79.
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: In the firing process, the clay is transformed from a malleable material to a rigid one. Up to this point it is possible to make the clay malleable again by making it wet. After firing, damaged vessels, like misfirings, are nearly unfixable.
  In order for the transformation of the clay into this final and moisture-less form, it must be heated to a temperature of 550–600 °C. Before this, at around 100 °C, residual moisture escapes into the air and at 300 °C the chemically-bonded water of crystallization also escapes. The supply of oxygen during the firing process is critical, since it is used up as the fuel is burnt. If more is not supplied (e.g. through a vent), an atmosphere rich in carbon monoxide or free carbon will develop and it will create a black or brown-black Iron(II) oxide, which gives the fired pottery a grey or dark brown colour. This is called a reducing firing. In an oxidating firing by contrast, a continuous supply of oxygen is maintained. The iron in the clay absorbs oxygen and becomes the red or red-brown Iron(III) oxide. The resulting pottery has a red-brown colour.
  The simplest and earliest firing method is the open fire. The vessel to be fired is covered and filled with flammable material. It is placed on the a flat piece of ground, surrounded by a low wall, or put in a pit. During the firing process, the potter has relatively little control. The vessel is in direct contact with the flames and the fuel, which heats quickly and then cools down again quickly.
  Optimisation of the firing process became possible once the pottery was placed inside a chamber with a vent and separated from the fuel of the fire, i.e. a kiln. This technological leap was made in the early Old Kingdom at the latest, but possibly in the Early Dynastic or late Predynastic period.
  The simplest form of a kiln was a shaft with no separation of the area where the fuel was burnt from the chamber where the ceramics were placed. This could be loaded through a shaft and then set on fire through an opening on the ground. This opening enabled a continuous supply of oxygen, which could be used to create an oxidising atmosphere. The oven now had to reach a set firing temperature in order to heat the clay in the firing chamber. As a result, the fire lasted longer and burnt more consistently.
  The next technological advance was the introduction of a grating, which separated the fuel from the pottery being fired. This prevented smoky flames and carbonised fuel from coming in contact with the ceramics and leaving flecks and smudges on it. The vessels being fired were placed in the upper part, with the opening underneath. The hot air rose up to the vessels and circulated around them, indirectly firing the clay. Shaft ovens of this type, with a grating, are attested in Egyptian art and by archaeology from the Old Kingdom onwards.
caption: Firing pottery on an open fire in a village on the Niger in Mali (photo from 2009).
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