Ancient Greek Pottery

An extremely important and long-standing industry in ancient Greece was the ceramics industry, giving rise to the huge number of pieces of pottery archaeologists and historians pore over. In reality, pottery production can almost be seen as a combination of a natural resources-based economy and a production-based economy, as the primary material-good clay-was a result of the natural geology. However, not all city-states made equal use of their clay resources, and only two-Corinth and Athens-were really active in pottery export in the Archaic Age (750 -500 BC) and following.

As with weaving, pottery no doubt began as, and in many places remained, a household industry, probably practiced exclusively in the summer when the clay and kindling wood were drier and easier to transport and burn. But evidence of a more concentrated effort at production for export appeared already in the Bronze Age (3000-1100 B c.) and continued in the Dark Ages (1100-800 B c ), as with the copious export of Euboean scyphi (drinking cups) to such locations in the Mediterranean as Cyprus, the Levant, and even Italy. These were followed by the Corinthian cups and scyphi, and finally the Athenian kylix (a shallow type of wine goblet). The demand for Greek vessels to drink out of appears to have stemmed from a desire for Greek things to drink, and amphorae and pithoi (storage vessels), especially from Attica, also proliferated in the Mediterranean.

This need for commercial production led to the rise of workshops and factories. Such workshops were usually family-owned businesses run by the head of the household, his sons (and possibly daughters), and, depending on the size of the industry, additional servants and/or slaves. The general assumption concerning many professional potters is that they were not citizens of the cities in which they worked. In Athens, these were the metics, or resident aliens, as well as slaves. The identity of the workers in the primary ceramic working area in Corinth-the Potters’ Quarter-is uncertain. But an inscribed pottery shard naming the Phoenician goddess Astarte suggests that there were Phoenician immigrants (from what is now Lebanon) working there, or at least a heavy Phoenician influence.

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