The introduction of the wheel allowed for the utilization of the wheel-forming technique to produce ceramic artifacts with radial symmetry. One of the first breakthroughs in the fabrication of ceramics was the invention of the wheel, in 3,500 BCE. However, it was not until 1,500 BCE that Egyptians started building factories to create glassware for ointments and oils. At the beginning of the Bronze Age, glazed pottery was produced in Mesopotamia. Instead, simple glass items, such as beads, have been discovered in Mesopotamia and Egypt dating to 3,500 BCE. The heat from the fire melted the rocks and mixed them with the sand, forming molten glass.Īrcheologists have not been able to confirm Pliny’s recount. The Roman historian Pliny reported that the first man-made glass was accidentally produced by Phoenician merchants in 5,000 BCE, when, while resting on a beach, they placed cooking pots on sodium-rich rocks near a fire. It is known that, around 7,000 BCE, people were already using sharp tools made from obsidian, a natural occurring volcanic glass. Pottery was either monochrome or decorated by painting simple linear or geometric motifs. The early products were just dried in the sun or fired at low temperature (below 1,000☌) in rudimentary kilns dug into the ground. Starting approximately in 9,000 BCE, clay-based ceramics became popular as containers for water and food, art objects, tiles and bricks, and their use spread from Asia to the Middle East and Europe. Use of ceramics increased dramatically during the Neolithic period, with the establishment of settled communities dedicated to agriculture and farming. It is believed that from China the use of pottery successively spread to Japan and the Russian Far East region where archeologists have found shards of ceramic artifacts dating to 14,000 BCE. In the Xianrendong cave in China, fragments of pots dated to 18,000-17,000 BCE have been found. The first examples of pottery appeared in Eastern Asia several thousand years later. In this location, hundreds of clay figurines representing Ice Age animals were also uncovered near the remains of a horseshoe-shaped kiln. It is a statuette of a woman, named the Venus of Dolní Věstonice, from a small prehistoric settlement near Brno, in the Czech Republic. The oldest known ceramic artifact is dated as early as 28,000 BCE (BCE = Before Common Era), during the late Paleolithic period. Once humans discovered that clay could be found in abundance and formed into objects by first mixing with water and then firing, a key industry was born. Ceramics is one of the most ancient industries going back thousands of years.
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