Ancient Egyptian pottery

Pottery in hieroglyphs
qerhet (qrḥt) Pottery
Pot with depiction of a galloping horse from the 18th Dynasty (white background style)

Ancient Egyptian pottery includes all objects of fired clay from ancient Egypt.^[1] 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 moulds, 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 flooding of the Nile. 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.

Our understanding of the nature and organisation of ancient Egyptian pottery manufacture is based on tomb paintings, models, and archaeological remains of pottery workshops. A characteristic of the development of Egyptian ceramics is that the new methods of production which were developed over time never entirely replaced older methods, but expanded the repertoire instead, so that eventually, each group of objects had its own manufacturing technique. Egyptian potters employed a wide variety of decoration techniques and motifs, most of which are associated with specific periods of time, such as the creation of unusual shapes, decoration with incisions, various different firing processes, and painting techniques.

An important classification system for Egyptian pottery is the Vienna system, which was developed by Dorothea Arnold, Manfred Bietak, Janine Bourriau, Helen and Jean Jacquet, and Hans-Åke Nordström at a meeting in Vienna in 1980.

Seriation of Egyptian pottery has proven useful for the relative chronology of ancient Egypt. This method was invented by Flinders Petrie in 1899. It is based on the changes of vessel types and the proliferation and decline of different types over time.