174 calendars and clocks: further reading FURTHER READING Anthony Aveni, “Pre-Columbian Images of Time.” In The Ancient Americas: Art from Sacred Landscapes, ed Richard Townsend (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1992), pp 49–59 Anthony Aveni, Between the Lines: The Mystery of the Giant Ground Drawings of Ancient Nasca, Peru (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000) E J Bickerman, Chronology of the Ancient World, 2nd ed (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1980) Bonnie Blackburn and Leofranc Holford-Strevens, The Oxford Companion to the Year: An Exploration of Calendar Customs and Time-Reckoning (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000) John Britton, “Treatments of Annual Phenomena in Cuneiform Sources.” In Under One Sky—Astronomy and Mathematics in the Ancient Near East, ed John Steele and Annette Imhausen (Münster, Germany: Ugarit Verlag, 2002): 21–78 Mark E Cohen, The Cultic Calendars of the Ancient Near East (Bethesda, Md.: Capital Decisions Ltd., 1993) Laurance R Doyle and Edward W Frank, “Astronomy of Africa.” In Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures, ed Helaine Selin (Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Kluwer, 1997) Robert K Englund, “Administrative Timekeeping in Ancient Mesopotamia,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 31 (1988): 121–132 Sharon Gibbs, Greek and Roman Sundials (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1976) Robert Hannah, Greek and Roman Calendars: Constructions of Time in the Ancient World (London: Duckworth, 2005) Hermann Hunger and David Pingree, Mul.Apin: An Astronomical Compendium in Cuneiform (Horn, Austria: Verlag Ferdinand Berger and Soehne, 1989) B M Lynch and L H Robbins, “Namoratunga: The First Archaeoastronomical Evidence in Sub-Saharan Africa,” Science 200 (1978): 766–768 Edward M Reingold and Nachum Dershowitz, Calendrical Calculations (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2001) E G Richards, Mapping Time: The Calendar and Its History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000) Alan E Samuel, Greek and Roman Chronology: Calendars and Years in Classical Antiquity (London: Taylor and Francis, 1972) Duncan Steel, Marking Time: The Epic Quest to Invent the Perfect Calendar (New York: J Wiley, 2000) ▶ ceramics and pottery seem to have had no other purpose than to beautify Potters employed whatever materials they had at hand to color their pottery, using red, yellow, brown, and black probably because those colors could be made out of minerals or, in the case of black, out of charcoal Ancient ceramics were of three kinds: unfired, partially fired, and fired Firing involves baking a clay object in high heat to dry and solidify it Unfired pottery was usually dried in sunlight, which had significant limitations One was that pottery making had to be seasonal, because wet weather would destroy wet pottery and cloudy skies would prevent sunlight from drying the clay Another limitation was that sun-dried clay did not hold together well The clay would crumble and fall apart with use Partially fi red pottery is usually of clay that was fi red literally in an open fi re How ancient potters discovered the technique of fi ring is not known, though it is often guessed at It is possible that early potters learned about firing after accidentally dropping clay into a fire; alternatively, they may have used pots for boiling water or cooking stews and discovered that the bottom parts of the pots hardened, kept their shapes better than the bottoms of unfi red pots, and were more durable than unfi red bottoms Examples of partially fi red pottery are found in almost every ancient pottery-making society Fired pottery was the most desirable kind of ceramics It held its shape better than unfired or partially fired pottery, which invited potters to experiment with the shapes of their products Thus, with fired pottery come works of art such as human, animal, and plant figures The earliest attempts at complete firing probably involved covering pottery completely with fiery wood and ash in an open fire Sometime during the 3000s b.c.e the vertical kiln was invented It was heated at the bottom, and heat rose up out of the top; pottery was placed in a chamber over the heat Temperatures between 850 and 1300 degrees Fahrenheit could be reached, but the flow of heat meant that the pottery would be unevenly baked Another important development in the third millennium b.c.e was the invention of the potter’s wheel, which allowed potters to work faster and to shape wet clay as it spun The Romans invented a horizontal kiln, and such a kiln was in use in China by 200 b.c.e., achieving temperatures over 2100 degrees Fahrenheit This advance allowed for the development of porcelain in the 700s c.e introduction The making of ceramics arose independently in several different parts of the world It seems that for every culture that learned to make ceramics, the first ceramics were functional: They were vessels for carrying liquids or grain, containers for storage, pots for cooking, pitchers for pouring, cups for drinking, or utensils used in cooking or eating It is a sign of a universal desire to have beauty in one’s life that pottery that was both decorative and functional came to predominate in the world’s ancient cultures The earliest designs on pottery AFRICA BY KIRK H BEETZ The skills for making ceramic objects were not developed equally in ancient Africa In northeastern Africa, where the potter’s wheel was imported from the Near East, the manufacture of pottery became as sophisticated as anywhere in the world Nearly all the rest of Africa, however, knew nothing of the potter’s wheel until Arabs or Europeans introduced it during the Middle Ages Without the