pottery

80:7.2About 12,000 B.C. a bril­liant tribe of And­ites mi­grated to Crete. This was the only is­land set­tled so early by such a su­pe­rior group, and it was al­most two thou­sand years be­fore the de­scen­dants of these mariners spread to the neigh­bor­ing isles. This group were the nar­row-headed, smaller-statured And­ites who had in­ter­mar­ried with the Van­ite di­vi­sion of the north­ern Nod­ites. They were all un­der six feet in height and had been lit­er­ally driven off the main­land by their larger and in­fe­rior fel­lows. These em­i­grants to Crete were highly skilled in tex­tiles, met­als, pot­tery, plumb­ing, and the use of stone for build­ing ma­te­rial. They en­gaged in writ­ing and car­ried on as herders and agri­cul­tur­ists.

80:8.4The Danu­bians were An­don­ites, farm­ers and herders who had en­tered Eu­rope through the Balkan penin­sula and were mov­ing slowly north­ward by way of the Danube val­ley. They made pot­tery and tilled the land, pre­fer­ring to live in the val­leys. The most northerly set­tle­ment of the Danu­bians was at Liege in Bel­gium. These tribes de­te­ri­o­rated rapidly as they moved away from the cen­ter and source of their cul­ture. The best pot­tery is the prod­uct of the ear­lier set­tle­ments.

79:1.4When cli­matic con­di­tions made hunt­ing un­prof­itable for the mi­grat­ing And­ites, they did not fol­low the evo­lu­tion­ary course of the older races by be­com­ing herders. Com­merce and ur­ban life made their ap­pear­ance. From Egypt through Mes­o­po­ta­mia and Tur­kes­tan to the rivers of China and In­dia, the more highly civ­i­lized tribes be­gan to as­sem­ble in cities de­voted to man­u­fac­ture and trade. Ado­nia be­came the cen­tral Asian com­mer­cial metropo­lis, be­ing lo­cated near the pres­ent city of Ashkhabad. Com­merce in stone, metal, wood, and pot­tery was ac­cel­er­ated on both land and wa­ter.

80:1.2In the east­ern trough of the Med­i­ter­ra­nean the Nod­ites had es­tab­lished one of their most ex­ten­sive cul­tures and from these cen­ters had pen­e­trated some­what into south­ern Eu­rope but more es­pe­cially into north­ern Africa. The broad-headed Nod­ite-An­don­ite Syr­i­ans very early in­tro­duced pot­tery and agri­cul­ture in con­nec­tion with their set­tle­ments on the slowly ris­ing Nile delta. They also im­ported sheep, goats, cat­tle, and other do­mes­ti­cated an­i­mals and brought in greatly im­proved meth­ods of met­al­work­ing, Syria then be­ing the cen­ter of that in­dus­try.

76:3.8The Adamites greatly ex­celled the sur­round­ing peo­ples in cul­tural achieve­ment and in­tel­lec­tual de­vel­op­ment. They pro­duced the third al­pha­bet and oth­er­wise laid the foun­da­tions for much that was the fore­run­ner of mod­ern art, sci­ence, and lit­er­a­ture. Here in the lands be­tween the Tigris and Eu­phrates they main­tained the arts of writ­ing, met­al­work­ing, pot­tery mak­ing, and weav­ing and pro­duced a type of ar­chi­tec­ture that was not ex­celled in thou­sands of years.

81:2.18It was from these early huts that the sub­se­quent idea of all sorts of bas­ket weav­ing in­de­pen­dently orig­i­nated. Among one group the idea of mak­ing pot­tery arose from ob­serv­ing the ef­fects of smear­ing these pole frame­works with moist clay. The prac­tice of hard­en­ing pot­tery by bak­ing was dis­cov­ered when one of these clay-cov­ered prim­i­tive huts ac­ci­den­tally burned. The arts of olden days were many times de­rived from the ac­ci­den­tal oc­cur­rences at­ten­dant upon the daily life of early peo­ples. At least, this was al­most wholly true of the evo­lu­tion­ary prog­ress of man­kind up to the com­ing of Adam.

81:2.19While pot­tery had been first in­tro­duced by the staff of the Prince about one-half mil­lion years ago, the mak­ing of clay ves­sels had prac­ti­cally ceased for over one hun­dred and fifty thou­sand years. Only the gulf coast pre-Sume­rian Nod­ites con­tin­ued to make clay ves­sels. The art of pot­tery mak­ing was re­vived dur­ing Adam’s time. The dis­sem­i­na­tion of this art was si­mul­ta­ne­ous with the ex­ten­sion of the desert ar­eas of Africa, Ara­bia, and cen­tral Asia, and it spread in suc­ces­sive waves of im­prov­ing tech­nique from Mes­o­po­ta­mia out over the East­ern Hemi­sphere.

81:2.20These civ­i­liza­tions of the And­ite age can­not al­ways be traced by the stages of their pot­tery or other arts. The smooth course of hu­man evo­lu­tion was tremen­dously com­pli­cated by the regimes of both Dala­ma­tia and Eden. It of­ten oc­curs that the later vases and im­ple­ments are in­fe­rior to the ear­lier prod­ucts of the purer And­ite peo­ples.

77:4.7And all this ex­plains how the Sume­ri­ans ap­peared so sud­denly and mys­te­ri­ously on the stage of ac­tion in Mes­o­po­ta­mia. In­ves­ti­ga­tors will never be able to trace out and fol­low these tribes back to the be­gin­ning of the Sume­ri­ans, who had their ori­gin two hun­dred thou­sand years ago af­ter the sub­mer­gence of Dala­ma­tia. With­out a trace of ori­gin else­where in the world, these an­cient tribes sud­denly loom upon the hori­zon of civ­i­liza­tion with a full-grown and su­pe­rior cul­ture, em­brac­ing tem­ples, met­al­work, agri­cul­ture, an­i­mals, pot­tery, weav­ing, com­mer­cial law, civil codes, re­li­gious cer­e­mo­nial, and an old sys­tem of writ­ing. At the be­gin­ning of the his­tor­i­cal era they had long since lost the al­pha­bet of Dala­ma­tia, hav­ing adopted the pe­cu­liar writ­ing sys­tem orig­i­nat­ing in Dil­mun. The Sume­rian lan­guage, though vir­tu­ally lost to the world, was not Semitic; it had much in com­mon with the so-called Aryan tongues.

78:8.2It was dur­ing the flood­times that Susa so greatly pros­pered. The first and lower city was in­un­dated so that the sec­ond or higher town suc­ceeded the lower as the head­quar­ters for the pe­cu­liar artcrafts of that day. With the later diminu­tion of these floods, Ur be­came the cen­ter of the pot­tery in­dus­try. About seven thou­sand years ago Ur was on the Per­sian Gulf, the river de­posits hav­ing since built up the land to its pres­ent lim­its. These set­tle­ments suf­fered less from the floods be­cause of bet­ter con­trol­ling works and the widen­ing mouths of the rivers.

66:5.24Art and sci­ence were at a low ebb through­out the world, but the rudi­ments of physics and chem­istry were taught the Dala­ma­tians. Pot­tery was ad­vanced, dec­o­ra­tive arts were all im­proved, and the ide­als of hu­man beauty were greatly en­hanced. But mu­sic made lit­tle prog­ress un­til af­ter the ar­rival of the vi­o­let race.