Pottery Wheel History

Inspirations both divine and down-to-earth If you believe in legend, the first potter's wheel belonged to a god. Both the Chinese goddess Nu Kua and the Dyak god Salampandai were said to have fashioned the first humans directly from clay. The Sumerians, Aztecs, and Jews (among others) have similar stories. But in Egyptian mythology, the god Khnum not only used clay, but he actually formed the bodies of human children on a pottery wheel and then placed them in their mothers' wombs. Human pottery wheel history, however, is much more down-to-earth than divine. Before the pottery wheel The first pottery wheels were invented at least 5,000 years ago. Prior to the wheel's invention, people made pots via "coiling": rolling clay into long, serpentine pieces, connecting the ends in a circle, and adding additional coils in layers to form the swelling or tapering body of a clay vessel. Coiling is still performed all around the world today.

The need to turn coiled pots as they were being created likely played a major role in the conception of the pottery wheel. Mats, leaves, dishes, plates, bowls and other easily turned objects are known to have been used as bases by the early creators of coiled pottery. These were eventually replaced in many places by hand-turned turntables.

The first pottery wheels

It's not known precisely where or when the first pottery wheel was invented, and it's highly probable that it was developed separately in multiple times and places. Egyptian tomb drawings from about 4,500 years ago show potters using turntables and kilns. Pottery wheels and fragments of wheels have also been found in Mesopotamia that date back over 5,000 years.

According to the book Ancient Mesopotamian Materials and Industries, the invention of the pottery wheel "has been assumed from the evidence of the vessels produced on them," e.g. pottery ware that could be made only with a pottery wheel, such as goblets or stemmed bowls with regular curves and smooth spirals.

Mesopotamian pottery experts have pinpointed the end of the Ubaid period (approximately 4,000BC) as the time when an important innovation was made: "setting the wheel's axle in bearings and hence the creation of an actual potter's wheel."