CHAPTER I

_INTRODUCTORY_

Importance of study of ancient monuments—Value of pottery as evidence of early civilisation—Invention of the art—Use of brick in Babylonia—The potter’s wheel—Enamel and glazes—Earliest Greek pottery—Use of study of vases—Ethnological, historical, mythological, and artistic aspects—Earliest writings on the subject—The “Etruscan” theory—History of the study of Greek vases—Artistic, epexegetic, and historical methods—The vase-collections of Europe and their history—List of existing collections.

The present age is above all an age of Discovery. The thirst for knowledge manifests itself in all directions—theological, scientific, geographical, historical, and antiquarian. The handiwork of Nature and of Man alike are called upon to yield up their secrets to satisfy the universal demand which has arisen from the spread of education and the ever-increasing desire for culture which is one of the characteristics of the present day. And though, perhaps, the science of Archaeology does not command as many adherents as other branches of learning, there is still a very general desire to enquire into the records of the past, to learn what we can of the methods of our forefathers, and to trace the influence of their writings or other evidences of their existence on succeeding ages.

To many of us what is known as a classical education seems perhaps in these utilitarian times somewhat antiquated and unnecessary, but at the same time “the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome” have not lost their interest for us, and can awaken responsive chords in most of our hearts. Nor can we ever be quite forgetful of the debt that we owe to those nations in almost every branch of human learning and industry. To take the most patent instance of all, that of our language, it is not too much to say that nearly every word is either directly derived from a classical source or can be shown to have etymological affinities with either of the two ancient tongues. Nor is it necessary to pursue illustrations further. We need only point to the evidences of classical influence on modern literature, modern philosophy, and modern political and social institutions, to indicate how our civilisation is permeated and saturated with the results of ancient ideas and thoughts. The man of science has recourse to Greek or Latin for his nomenclature; the scholar employs Latin as the most appropriate vehicle for criticism; and modern architecture was for a long time only a revival (whether successful or not) of the principles and achievements of the classical genius.

Now, those who would pursue the study of a nation’s history cannot be content with the mere perusal of such literary records as it may have left behind. It needs brief consideration to realise that this leaves us equipped with very little real knowledge of an ancient race, inasmuch as the range of literature is necessarily limited, and deals with only a few sides of the national character: its military history, its political constitution, or its intellectual and philosophical bent—in short, its external and public life alone. He who would thoroughly investigate the history of a nation instinctively desires something more; he will seek to gain a comprehensive acquaintance with its social life, its religious beliefs, its artistic and intellectual attainments, and generally to estimate the extent of its culture and civilisation. But to do this it is necessary not only to be thoroughly conversant with its literary and historical records, but to turn attention also to its _monuments_. It need hardly be said that the word “monument” is here used in the quasi-technical sense current among archaeologists (witness the German use of the word _Denkmäler_), and that it must bear here a much wider signification than is generally accorded to it nowadays. It may, in fact, be applied to any object which has come down to us as a memorial and evidence of a nation’s productive capacity or as an illustration of its social or political life. The student of antiquity can adopt no better motto than the familiar line of Terence:

Homo sum; humani nihil a me alienum puto.

For the very humblest product of the human brain or hand, a potsherd or a few letters scratched on a stone, may throw the most instructive light on the history of a race.

In no instance is this better seen than in the case of Assyria, where almost all that we know of that great and wonderful people is derived from the cuneiform inscriptions scratched on tablets of baked clay. Or, again, we may cite the stone and bronze implements of the primitive peoples of Europe as another instance where “the weak and base things of the world and the things that are despised” have thrown floods of light on the condition of things in a period about which we should have been completely in the dark so long as we looked only to literary records for our information. Nothing is so common that it may be overlooked, and we may learn more from a humble implement in daily use than from the finest product of a poetic or artistic intellect, if we are really desirous of obtaining an intimate acquaintance with the domestic life of a people.

Among the simplest yet most necessary adjuncts of a developing civilisation Pottery may be recognised as one of the most universal. The very earliest and rudest remains of any people generally take the form of coarse and common pots, in which they cooked their food or consumed their beverages. And the fact that such vast quantities of pottery from all ancient civilisations have been preserved to us is due

## partly to its comparatively imperishable nature, partly to the absence

of any intrinsic value which saved it from falling a prey to the ravages of fire, human greed, or other causes which have destroyed more precious monuments, such as gold ornaments, paintings, and statues of marble or bronze. Moreover, it is always in the pottery that we perceive the first indications of whatever artistic instinct a race possesses, clay being a material so easy to decorate and so readily lending itself to plastic treatment for the creation of new forms or development from simple to elaborate shapes.

To trace the history of the art of working in clay, from its rise amongst the oldest nations of antiquity to the period of the decline of the Roman Empire, is the object of the present work. The subject resolves itself into two great divisions, which have engaged the attention of two distinct classes of enquirers: namely, the technical or practical part, comprising all the details of material, manipulation, and processes; and, secondly, the historical portion, which embraces not only the history of the art itself, and the application of ancient literature to its elucidation, but also an account of the light thrown by monuments in clay on the history of mankind. Such an investigation is therefore neither trifling in character nor deficient in valuable results.

It is impossible to determine when the manufacture of pottery was invented. Clay is a material so generally diffused, and its plastic nature is so easily discovered, that the art of working it does not exceed the intelligence of the rudest savage. Even the most primitive graves of Europe and Western Asia contain specimens of pottery, rude and elementary indeed, but in sufficient quantities to show that it was at all times reckoned among the indispensable adjuncts of daily life.

It is said that the very earliest specimens of pottery, hand-made and almost shapeless, have been discovered in the cave-dwellings of Palaeolithic Man, such as the Höhlefels cave near Ulm, and that of Nabrigas, near Toulouse; and pottery has also been found in the “kitchen-middens” of Denmark, which belong to this period. Such relics are, however, so rude and fragmentary, and so much doubt has been cast on the circumstances of their discovery, that it is better to be content with the evidence afforded by the Neolithic Age, of which perhaps the best authenticated is the predynastic pottery of Egypt.[1]

Abundant specimens of pottery have been found in long barrows in all parts of Western Europe; these are supposed to be the burial-places of the early dolichocephalic races, now represented by the Finns and Lapps, which preceded the Aryan immigration. The chief characteristic of this pottery is the almost entire absence of ornamentation. Neolithic man appears to have been far less endowed with the artistic instinct than his palaeolithic predecessor. Where ornament does occur, it appears to have a quite fortuitous origin: for instance, a kind of rope-pattern that appears on the earliest pottery of Britain and Germany, and also in America, owes its origin to the practice of moulding the clay in a kind of basket of bark or thread. It is also possible that cords of some kind were used for carrying the pots; and this reminds us of another characteristic of the earliest pottery, which, indeed, lasts down to the Bronze Age—namely, the absence of handles.

The baking of clay, so as to produce an indestructible and tenacious substance, was probably also the result of accident rather than design. This was pointed out as long ago as the middle of the eighteenth century by M. Goguet. In most countries the condition of the atmosphere precludes the survival of sun-dried clay for any length of time; moreover, such a material was more suitable for architecture (as we shall see later) than for vessels destined to hold liquids. Thus it is that Egypt, Assyria, and Babylonia alone have transmitted to posterity the early efforts of workers in sun-dried clay.

To return to the new invention. The savage conceivably found that the calabash or gourd in which he boiled the water for his simple culinary needs was liable to be damaged by the action of fire; and it required no very advanced mental process to smear the exterior of the vessel with some such substance as clay in order to protect it. As he found that the surface of the clay was thereby rendered hard and impervious, his next step would naturally be to dispense with the calabash and mould the clay into a similar form. These two simple qualities of clay, its plastic nature and its susceptibility to the action of fire, are the two elements which form the basis of the whole development of the potter’s art.

From the necessity for symmetrical buildings arose the invention of the brick, which must have superseded the rude plastering of the hut with clay, to protect it against the sun or storm. In the history of the Semitic nations the brick appears among the earliest inventions, and its use can be traced with various modifications, from the building of the Tower of Babel to the present day. It is essential that bricks should be symmetrical, and their form is generally rectangular. Their geometrical shape affords us a clue to ancient units of measurement, and the various inscriptions with which they have been stamped have elevated them to the dignity of historical monuments. Thus the bricks of Egypt not only afford testimony, by their composition of straw and clay, that the writer of Exodus was acquainted with that country, but also, by the hieroglyphs impressed upon them, transmit the names of a series of kings, and testify to the existence of edifices, all knowledge of which, except for these relics, would have utterly perished. Those of Assyria and Babylon, in addition to the same information, have, by their cuneiform inscriptions, which mention the locality of the edifices for which they were made, afforded the means of tracing the sites of ancient Mesopotamia and Assyria with an accuracy unattainable by any other means. The Roman bricks have also borne their testimony to history. A large number of them present a series of the names of consuls of imperial Rome; while others show that the proud nobility of the eternal city partly derived their revenues from the kilns of their Campanian and Sabine estates.

From the next step in the progress of the manufacture—namely, that of modelling in clay the forms of the physical world—arose the plastic art. Delicate as is the touch of the finger, which the clay seems to obey, almost as if comprehending the intention of the potter’s mind, yet certain forms and ornaments which require a finer point than the nail gave rise to the use of pieces of horn, wood, and metal, and thus contributed to the invention of tools. But modelling in clay was soon superseded by sculpture in stone and metal, and at length only answered two subordinate ends: that of enabling the sculptor to elaborate his first conceptions in a material which could be modified at will; and that of readily producing works of a small and inexpensive form, for some transitory purpose. The invention of the mould carried this last application to perfection, and the terracottas of antiquity were as numerous and as cheap as the plaster casts now sold by itinerants.

The materials used for writing have varied in different ages and nations. Stone and bronze, linen and papyrus, wax and parchment, have all been used. But the Assyrians and Babylonians employed for their public archives, their astronomical computations, their religious dedications, their historical annals, and even for title-deeds and bills of exchange, tablets, cylinders, and hexagonal prisms of terracotta. Some of these cylinders, still extant, contain the history of the Assyrian monarchs Tiglath-pileser and Assurbanipal, and the campaign of Sennacherib against the kingdom of Judah; and others, excavated from the Birs Nimrud, give a detailed account of the dedication of the great temple by Nebuchadnezzar to the seven planets. To this indestructible material, and to the happy idea of employing it in this manner, the present age is indebted for a detailed history of the Assyrian monarchy; whilst the decades of Livy, the plays of Menander, and the lays of Anakreon, confided to a more perishable material, have either wholly or partly disappeared.

The application of clay to the making of vases was made effective by the invention of the potter’s wheel. Before the introduction of the wheel only vessels fashioned by the hand, and of rude unsymmetrical shape, could have been made. But the application of a circular table or lathe, laid horizontally and revolving on a central pivot, on which the clay was placed, and to which it adhered, was in its day a truly wonderful advance. As the wheel spun round, all combinations of oval, spherical, and cylindrical forms could be produced, and the vases not only became symmetrical in their proportions, but truthfully reproduced the potter’s conception. The invention of the wheel has been ascribed to all the great nations of antiquity. It is represented in full

## activity in the Egyptian sculptures; it is mentioned in the Scriptures,

and was certainly in use at an early period in Assyria. The Greeks and Romans attributed it to a Scythian philosopher, and to the states of Athens, Corinth, and Sikyon, the first two of which were great rivals in the ceramic art. But, as will be explained hereafter, it was introduced at a very early stage in the history of civilisation upon Greek soil (see p. 206).

Although none of the very ancient kilns have survived the destructive influence of time, yet among all the great nations baked earthenware is of the highest antiquity. In Egypt, in the tombs of the first dynasties, vases and other remains of baked earthenware are abundantly found; and in Assyria and Babylon even the oldest bricks and tablets have passed through the furnace. The oldest remains of Hellenic pottery in all cases owe their preservation to their having been subjected to the action of fire. To this process, as to the consummation of the art, the other processes of preparing, levigating, kneading, drying, and moulding the clay were necessarily ancillary.

The desire of rendering terracotta less porous, and of producing vases capable of retaining liquids, gave rise to the covering of it with a vitreous enamel or glaze. The invention of glass was attributed by the ancients to the Phoenicians; but opaque glass or enamels, as old as the Eighteenth Dynasty, and enamelled objects as early as the Fourth, have been found in Egypt. The employment of copper to produce a brilliant blue-coloured enamel was very early both in Babylonia and Assyria; but the use of tin for a white enamel, as discovered in the enamelled bricks and vases of Babylonia and Assyria, anticipated by many centuries the rediscovery of that process in Europe in the fifteenth century, and shows the early application of metallic oxides. This invention apparently remained for many centuries a secret among the Eastern nations only, enamelled terracotta and glass forming articles of commercial export from Egypt and Phoenicia to every part of the Mediterranean. Among the Egyptians and Assyrians enamelling was used more frequently than glazing; hence they used a kind of faience consisting of a loose frit or body, to which an enamel adheres after only a slight fusion. After the fall of the Roman Empire, the art of enamelling terracotta disappeared except amongst the Arab and Moorish races, who had retained a traditionary knowledge of the process. The application of a transparent vitreous coating, or glaze, to the entire surface, like the varnish of a picture, is also to be referred to a high antiquity. Originally intended to improve the utility of the vase, it was used by Greeks and Romans with a keen sense of the decorative effects that could be derived from its use.

In Greece, although nearly all traces of the Stone Age are wanting, and little pottery has been found which can be referred to that period,[2] yet the earliest existing remains of civilisation are, as we shall see later, in the form of pottery; and Greece is no exception to the general rule. But the important difference between the pottery of Asia and Egypt and that of Greece is that only in the latter was there any development due to artistic feeling. Of the Greek it may be said, as of the medieval craftsman, _nihil tetigit quod non ornavit_. In the commonest vessel or implement in every-day use we see almost from the first the workings of this artistic instinct, tending to exalt any and every object above the mere level of utilitarianism, and to make it, in addition to its primary purpose of usefulness, “a thing of beauty and a joy for ever.” Feeble and rude it may be at first, and hampered by imperfect knowledge of technique or capacity for expression—but still the instinct is there.

There is indeed at first but little in Greek pottery to differentiate it from that of other nations possessing any decorative instincts. As M. Pottier[3] has pointed out, there is a universal law which manifests itself in nascent art all over the world: “More than once men have remarked the extraordinary resemblance which the linear decoration of Peruvian, Mexican, and Kabyle vases bears to the ornamentation of the most ancient Greek pottery. There is no possibility of contact between these different peoples, separated by enormous distances of time and space. If they have this common resemblance at the outset of their artistic evolution, it is because all must pass through a certain phase, resulting in some measure from the structure of the human brain. Even so at the present day there are savages in Polynesia who, by means of a point applied to the soft clay, produce patterns exactly similar to those found on Greek or Cypriote pottery of fifteen or twenty centuries before our era.” Or to take a later stage of development, the compositions of vase-paintings of the sixth century B.C. are governed by the same immutable laws of convention and principles of symmetry as the carvings of the Middle Ages. Instances might be multiplied _ad infinitum_; but the principle is universal.

* * * * *

A question that may be well asked by any visitor to a great museum is, What is the use of the study of Greek vases? The answer is, that no remains of Greek art have come down to us in such large quantities, except perhaps coins, and certainly none cover so long a period. Portraying as they do both the objective and subjective side of Greek life, they form perhaps the best introduction to the study of Greek archaeology in general. In no other class of monuments are the daily life and religious beliefs of the Greeks so vividly presented as in the painted vases. Their value to the modern student may be treated under four separate heads: (1) Ethnological; (2) Historical; (3) Mythological; (4) Artistic.

(1) =Ethnological.=—On this subject we have already touched in this chapter, pointing out that pottery has an exceptional importance, not only as one of the most universal and instructive illustrations of the early developments of a single nation, but for purposes of comparison of one nation with another. Sculpture, painting, architecture, and other arts have a more limited range, and tell us nothing of domestic life or social progress; but the common utensils of daily life, like flint implements or bronze weapons, are of incalculable value for the light that they throw on the subject, and the evidence which, in the absence of historical data, they afford. We have also called attention to the prevalence of universal laws acting on the development of the early art of all nations.

Thus in dealing with the early history of Greece, before historical records are available, we are enabled by the pottery-finds to trace the extent of the Mycenaean civilisation, from Egypt to the Western Mediterranean; we may see Homeric customs reflected in the vases of the Geometrical period from Athens; and in the decorative patterns of the succeeding period we may see signs of close intercourse with Assyria and a knowledge of Oriental textile fabrics. The finds in Rhodes, Cyprus, and the islands off Asia Minor also testify to a continued and extensive intercourse between the mainland of Greece and the Eastern Aegean.

(2) =Historical.=—The historical value of Greek vases rests partly on the external, partly on the internal evidence that they afford. In the former aspect those of historic times, like those of the primitive age, confirm, if they do not actually supplement, literary records of Greek history. Thus the numerous importations of vases from Corinth to Sicily and Italy in the seventh century B.C. show the maritime importance of that city and the extent of her commercial relations; while in the succeeding century the commercial rivalry between her and Athens is indicated by the appearance of large numbers of Attic fabrics in the tombs of Italy along with the Corinthian; the final supremacy of Athens by the gradual disappearance of the Corinthian wares, and the consequent monopoly enjoyed by the rival state. The fact that after the middle of the fifth century the red-figured Attic vases are seldom found in Sicilian or Italian tombs shows clearly the blow dealt at Athenian commerce by the Peloponnesian War, and the enforced cessation of exports to the west, owing to the hostility of Sicily and the crippling of Athenian navies; and the gradual growth of local fabrics shows that the colonists of Magna Graecia at that time began themselves to supply local demands. Instances might be multiplied.

But the internal evidence of the vases is of even greater value, not only for the political, but still more for the social history of Greece. By the application of painting to vases the Greeks made them something more than mere articles of commercial value or daily use. Besides the light they throw on the Greek schools of painting, they have become an inexhaustible source for illustrating the manners, customs, and literature of Greece. A Greek vase-painting—to quote M. Pottier— is not only a work of art, but also an historical document. Even when all artistic qualities are lacking, and the vase at first sight is liable to be regarded as a worthless and uninteresting production, a closer inspection will often reveal some small point which throws light on a question of mythology, or of costume or armour. Or, again, an inscription painted or even scratched on a vase may be of surpassing philological or palaeographical importance. For instance, the earliest inscription known in the Attic alphabet is a _graffito_ on a vase of the seventh century B.C. (see