IN THE EARLY PART OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, archaeologists discovered Minoan Mycenae, and Crete, the palace of Knossos, the remains of the Minotaur’s labyrinth, and several thousand hunks of dried clay, all inscribed with a beautiful but unreadable script. It was the hey-day of the discovery that these cities, described in myths, had really existed on the Earth. Troy, Mycenae, Pylos had not been products of the fevered Homeric imagination, but of actual histories and events. Imaginations began to awaken.
The archaeologists who sought to decipher this odd script, most of which is called Linear B, were ready to find anything. Looking at one big disk of inscribed clay, F. G. Gordon translated it as “The Lord walking on wings the breathless path, the star-smiter, the foaming gulf of waters.” Another archaeologist translated it as “Arise, savior! Listen, Goddess, Rhea!” A third made it “Supreme—deity of the powerful throne’s star. Supreme—tenderness of the consolatory words.”
In fact, however, it eventually turned out that the vast trove of written clay said much more prosaic things, like “Thus the priestess and the key-bearers and the Followers and Westreus hold leases: so much wheat 21.6 units.” It was all records and inventories, storage documents of the sort one might find in the office at any city warehouse or country grain elevator.
But without the ability to contain, as well as produce, no culture can be created. To the inhabitants of the first cities, a warehouse was a miracle. The first discovery of settled life was that it was possible to save. To preserve and to transport what had been preserved, it was necessary to have containers. A cave had to be found; a house could be built. A niche stayed where it was, but a pot could travel.
The first free-standing containers, whether houses, fences, or baskets, were doubtless made of wood, straw, and leaves. The materials were easy to work and to shape with the simplest tools. Neither, however, was as impermeable as one might wish. The house lets in the wind and the cold; the basketry let in the damp and the mice.
No one knows when a change came, but it appears to have occurred at about the same time that alphabets were invented. Perhaps a woman had taken to lining her baskets with clay, in order to improve their water-holding capacity. Maybe she accidentally dropped the basket in the fire and removed it later to find that the wood had burned away, leaving a hard and apparently permanent container of clay, the first pot.
I prefer to think that she got the idea. Certainly, the children would have played with clay, delighting in its plasticity. Clay is found every-where on the surface of the Earth, and is particularly exposed along river banks, where the water cuts away the topsoil layer in its steep banks. Mothers and children, at least, would have spent a great deal of time by the river. Maybe a child, in imitation of basketwork, made the first pot out of clay. At the end of the day, her mother, coming to retrieve her from the bank where she’d been playing, took from her daughter’s hand this odd basket-that-wasn’t. She thought, Why not?
There were probably many such scenarios played out in separate small encampments wherever humans were beginning to settle, but each depended upon clay. And not one culture developed square pots. Pots and plates were broad and bellied objects, rounded like pregnant women. They were the containers of the precious principle by which a people might continue into the next generation. They were the definition of prosperity, which means, “to hope towards.”
Clay is plastic because it is made of infinitesimal plates that slide one across the other, held loosely in place by intervening layers of chemically combined water. It is very hard to pull the plates apart, but comparatively easy to slide them one across the other—as anyone who has tried to walk in the sticky gumbo-till clays that sometimes cover the surface of the Earth will tell you. It can be almost impossible to lift your foot out of the sucking mass of clay, while when you try to slide it forward, you may find it shoots ahead, leaving you sitting on your rump.
Why are some clays red, some white, and some brown, some even black? Every clay is simply an evolved expression of the Earth’s crust. It contains in corresponding proportions the important elements that go to make up crustal rock: silica, alumina, iron oxides, and in smaller quantities, oxides of manganese, calcium, potassium, and other elements. Long weathering has reduced these elements as far as water is able, making the particles very small and dissolving whatever compounds could be dissolved. The composition of clays determines their color.
All the rich colors come from the earth. They have to do with the temperament of iron. Pure sand is pure silica: it is white. Alumina is also whitish. The purity of porcelain dishes is owed to the fact that few impurities exist in them. They are entirely silica and alumina, the elements that together make up more than three fourths of the bulk of the Earth’s crust. But even on porcelain, this white is merely the canvas against which the theater of the warm and the cold colors comes to life.
Iron acts in clay as it does in the blood. When the blood is oxidized, its iron-rich hemoglobin is red; when the blood is poor in oxygen, the hemoglobin turns blue. Every potter knows that the same distinction exists among the clays. Any clay that contains iron—that is, almost all but the pure kaolins—will fire into a warm, red, yellow, or red-brown color, so long as there is plenty of oxygen in the atmosphere of the kiln. If you deprive the kiln of oxygen, the clay will fire to a cool color, a blue-green or a black or a deep purple. On the surface of the Earth the same holds true: clays exposed at the surface or in a porous soil run the whole gamut of reds, pinks, yellows, browns, ochres, but a waterlogged clay along a stream or a bog is a cold greenish-black.
The fresco painters of the Italian Renaissance found themselves in a peculiar position with respect to color. They had available to them a large number of vegetable- and mineral-derived pigments, but the technique of fresco (that is, working on wet plaster) limited them largely to the earth’s palette, because the alkali in the plaster tended to decompose and disperse the vegetable-based dyes. The very rich colors of Massaccio’s frescoes are almost all derived directly from the soil. The reds, browns, and yellows are from ochre. The green is from a reduced clay called terre verte. The umber came straight from the earth of Sienna. The whole Christian drama is expressed in the colors of the earth.