FURTHER READING
Anthony Aveni, “Pre-Columbian Images of Time.” In Th e Ancient
Americas: Art from Sacred Landscapes, ed. Richard Townsend
(Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1992), pp. 49–59.
Anthony Aveni, Between the Lines: Th e 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, Th e Oxford Com-
panion 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, Th e Cultic Calendars of the Ancient Near East
(Bethesda, Md.: Capital Decisions Ltd., 1993).
Laura nce R. Doyle a nd Edwa rd W. Fra n k, “Ast ronomy of A f rica.” In
Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology and Medi-
cine in Non-Western Cultures, ed. Helaine Selin (Dordrecht,
the Netherlands: Kluwer, 1997).
Robert K. Englund, “Administrative Timekeeping in Ancient Mes-
opotamia,” 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: Th e First Archaeo-
astronomical Evidence in Sub-Saharan Africa,” Science 200
(1978): 766–768.
Edward M. Reingold and Nachum Dershowitz, Calendrical Calcu-
lations (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
E. G. Richards, Mapping Time: Th e 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: Th e Epic Quest to Invent the Perfect
Calendar (New York: J. Wiley, 2000).
▶ ceramics and pottery
introduction
Th e making of ceramics arose independently in several dif-
ferent parts of the world. It seems that for every culture that
learned to make ceramics, the fi rst ceramics were functional:
Th ey 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. Th e earliest designs on 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: unfi red, partially
fi red, and fi red. Firing involves baking a clay object in high
heat to dry and solidify it. Unfi red pottery was usually dried
in sunlight, which had signifi cant 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. Th e 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 oft en guessed
at. It is possible that early potters learned about fi ring af-
ter accidentally dropping clay into a fi re; 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 par-
tially fi red pottery are found in almost every ancient pot-
tery-making society.
Fired pottery was the most desirable kind of ceramics.
It held its shape better than unfi red or partially fi red pottery,
which invited potters to experiment with the shapes of their
products. Th us, with fi red pottery come works of art such
as human, animal, and plant fi gures. Th e earliest attempts
at complete fi ring probably involved covering pottery com-
pletely with fi ery wood and ash in an open fi re. 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
fl ow 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. Th e
Romans invented a horizontal kiln, and such a kiln was in use
in China by 200 b.c.e., achieving temperatures over 2100 de-
grees Fahrenheit. Th is advance allowed for the development
of porcelain in the 700s c.e.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 any-
where in the world. Nearly all the rest of Africa, however,
knew nothing of the potter’s wheel until Arabs or Euro-
peans introduced it during the Middle Ages. Without the174 calendars and clocks: further reading