Tag: north america

World History

The Magic of Faience

Post author By lbwriter
Post date March 27, 2023

San Diego Culture

Mehrgahr Blooms

Faience Invented

Making Magic

The Magic of Faience

The Magic of Faience

In 5500 B.C., TGD and biblical history dates are approximating, but they haven’t connected yet.

San Diego Culture

Southern California was settled by people of the Encinitas culture. Grinding stones and shells suggest marine and farming activities. It would endure until 1000 B.C. in the San Diego area.

Mehrgahr Blooms

Mehrgahr (Pakistan) has entered its greatest age, which will last 2000 years! Pottery was in use. Faience has appeared, perhaps originally from the Near East in trade. Manufacturing has blossomed. Creativity is invested in new crafting techniques: both arts and manufacturing. Long-distance trade developed further.

Specific technologies included updraft and large pit kilns, and copper crucibles.

In the arts, faience beads were made, which may have represented money as well as useful beauty. We do not know that. But the later use of wampum in North America puts the idea in my mind.

The first “button” seals, manufactured from terracotta and bone, used geometric patterns.

Terracotta figures became more detailed. They were painted and wore a variety of ornaments and hairstyles.

Burials were different throughout the period. Two flexed burials covered with ochre occurred during the early period. The amount of burial goods diminished, eventually consisting only of ornaments, with more left in burials of females. (Strange in what is assumed to be a paternalistic culture!)

Faience Invented

Egypt was still between cultures, but the art of faience was practiced. Quite possibly, it arrived through trade. The Egyptians fell in love with it and greatly developed its manufacture. Egyptian faience is a ceramic art with a silica body and brightly colored glaze.

Do not confuse Egyptian faience with the Italian faience of the Middle Ages. That is a totally different product.

Making Magic

Egyptian faience was made of easily available ingredients:

Quartz: white quartz pebbles were easily found in the desert

Alkaline salts: plant ash or salts of evaporated salt-water

Lime: limestone

Metallic colorant, most popularly copper

The dry ingredients were mixed with water to create a paste that was then formed into the object. Immediately, the faience differed from the clay. It slumped while modeled. It was not flexible. It cracked instead of bending and could not hold its own weight.

That made faience difficult to work with except for small items such as beads, or flat items such as tiles or plates.

Larger items were made in molds or shaped around cores that burned away when fired. And what a fire! Faience required the kiln to be at 900 degrees Fahrenheit.

The Magic of Faience

Any piece of finished faience has a core that is fragile and porous: quartz grains that seem powdered encased in a soda-line-silicate glass. This glass is transparent.

But looking through the glaze gives a magical effect. Light reflects off of the quartz in all directions. The result is seen as translucency with brightness in a variety of shimmering depths.

Faience became associated with magic. Religiously, the shimmer reminded Egyptians of sunshine rays and therefore the god Ra. The favored bright blue color made with copper was linked to fertility and rebirth.

It’s no surprise that faience, made of common materials, took its place beside precious stones and metals.

Everyone tried to have at least one shubati, ornament, or house god made of faience. Later, pharaohs used it liberally in pyramid ornamentation and grave goods.

Egyptian faience would maintain its importance for 4000 years.

Source Credit and Suggested Reading:

https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/egfc/hd_egfc.htm#:~:text=Faience%20may%20have%20been%20developed,gleaming%20qualities%20of%20the%20sun.

Photo credit: Mathias Reding on Unsplash

Tags ancient history, egypt, egyptian faience, faience, merhgahr, north america, pakistan, san diego, world history

World History

Atlatls, Personal Seals, and Temple Prototype

Post author By lbwriter
Post date March 23, 2023

Cultural Overview

New Products in North America

A Culture in Mesopotamia!

Greek Megaron: Prototype of Classic Temples!

Atlatls, Personal Seals, and Temple Prototype

We’ve jumped time to 6100 B.C. (TGD).

Cultural Overview

Nothing new is happening in China, Greece, or Pakistan. In Egypt, the Faiyum culture is gone with nothing to replace it. Merngarh in Pakistan is expanding from its farming community, but there are no significant changes.

However, because of the rising seas at the close of the last ice period, Britain is now an island! Although trade will continue through navigation, the British will become a closed community, beginning their own traditions.

New Products in North America

In North America, all sites demonstrate a proliferation of tools, trade goods, and burial items. Columbia River sites in Oregon concentrated tool making on salmon fishing. In Utah the emphasis was on wool, leather, fur, and basketry.

The Great Basin sites, where people lived in caves or rock shelters, added the atlatl (a curved stick for hunting), smoking pipes, medicine bags and the deer-hoof rattles possibly used in the ceremonies, seashell ornaments, and bird-bone whistles.

A Culture in Mesopotamia!

But the best news is that Mesopotamia has awakened at last!

The Halaf culture, lasting one thousand years, was now first seen at Sakce Gözu, which is in Turkey near Syria. The most important site was located in what today is in the suburbs of Mosul, Iraq.

Halaf culture existed primarily in the valley of the Khabur River, although its beautiful pottery was found throughout Mesopotamia.

Bowls and plates are frequent finds. Nude female figures made of terracotta show traces of pigment as if clothes were painted on them. The earliest stamp seals known in the Near East began in the Halaf culture.

Greek Megaron: Prototype of Classic Temples!

It’s 5700 B.C. (TGD) in Sesclo of the Thessaly area of Greece. A new form of architecture has been developed. It’s called a “megaron house,” although later traditional megarons were not houses to live and sleep in, but were great halls for meetings, celebrations, and/or religious worship.

We don’t know the purpose of this oldest megaron. Maybe it was just the house of the most important or richest man.

It sits on the apex of the hill. (Where have we seen a structure on the highest place before?) Today, only the foundation remains, but we can learn much more from archaeological finds.

The megaron is surrounded by circular stone walls that separate it from the simple houses. It is rectangular and sits on an east-west axis. The foundation is stone. Finds indicate that the walls were brick and the roof was timber.

To enter, you walked through the porch, then the entrance to the main chamber. This chamber is almost square. It has a clay floor and a square clay hearth. On the northwest corner two oblong stone structures act as an area to prepare, serve, or assemble whatever is required. Three conical holes in the middle of the floor would have held the timbers that supported the roof.

Beyond the square room is the back room, possibly for storage. Later, a trapezoid area on the east would become a back porch.

Well! This is quite fancy for Greece! And the megaron is the prototype for the splendid temples of classic Greece.

Photo credit: Marinela Malcheva on Unsplash

Tags ancient history, atlatl, britain, faiyum, gmegaron house of sesclo, halaf culture, mehrgarh, mesopotamia, north america, world history

World History

Back to North America: Clovis Culture

Post author By lbwriter
Post date October 24, 2022

The Clovis Culture

How Early Cultures Fit Together

Back to North America: Clovis Culture

After the Pre-Clovis culture disappeared from North America, the Clovis people showed up. They, too, are thought to have originated in Siberia. (What was it about Siberia? And where did Siberian people come from?)

Instead of wandering through Europe, the Clovis people traveled through Mongolia to Alaska, possibly over a land bridge between Alaska and Asia.

Their presence is noted in fifteen hundred locations across the United States (except Florida) and also down into Central, then South America. They, too, disappeared.

Like the Soluteans, the Clovis people are known for a unique weapon “point.” They flint knapped and pressure flaked their points.

But Clovis points, made from flint, jasper, chert, and obsidian, have a concave base with a groove on each side extending one-third of its length. This is called “fluting,” and it allowed the point to be fastened onto the arrow or spear shaft rather than just being tied onto it.

Because these points have not been found in Siberia or Mongolia, it is thought the points were developed in North America. Maybe they found Pre-Clovis points and they inspired the Clovis people?

Clovis tools also included end scrapers (tools with the scraper on the end) for processing hides, gravers and burins for engraving, spokeshaves for woodworking, and “wrenches” for straightening shafts.

The disappearance of the Clovis people coincided with a return of cold weather that destroyed the plant food of both animals and people.

During this time, a number of animals became extinct: giant bison, mastodon, gomphotheres (elephant-like mammals with four enormous tusks: two upper and two lower), giant sloths, tapir, camelops (a camel seven feet tall at the shoulder), horses, and some smaller animals.

Their disappearance was probably a combination of climate change and overhunting.

One grave containing two teenagers was found with grave goods. Powdered red ochre was found on the remains.

So, what happened to the Clovis people? Did they starve?

How Early Cultures Fit Together

Traditional DatingCulture

40,000 BCarcheological site lowest level at Kostenski, Central Russia

23,000 BCSolutrean culture established in Europe

19,000 BCZarzian culture appears in the Caucasus and Zagros regions

18,000 BCSolutreans arrive in North America? Pre-Clovis culture

14,500 BCSolutreans disappear

13,000 BCEnd of the last Ice Age

11,300 BCClovis culture appears in North America

11,000 BCSwiderian culture appears in Central Europe

10,500Swiderian culture enters eastern Anatolia?

10,500Zarzian culture vanishes

I’ll bet you have guessed which culture we will look at next time!