One he said was from the
Umm an Nar period - some 5000 years ago. It
was a very fine thin piece of pottery with a
slight flare and a beautifully finished
rounded edge. I marveled that people could
produce something as fine as that so long
ago. Another shard that was possibly 1000
years younger was decorated with colored
stripes. It was also very thin, made of fine
clay. The third piece my friend showed me
was much thicker but still made with the
same fine clay as the previous one. It was
from a much later period when people seemed
to have lost some of the art of making fine
pottery.
During
my many desert walks I have come across
other areas that are liberally sprinkled
with potshards. Many of the pottery pieces
are discoloured with the soot of ancient
fires, lit by the desert inhabitants of
thousands of years ago to cook the local
equivalent of bouillabaise.
The oldest
pottery found in our region dates from the
‘Ubaid period – a culture that flourished in
southern Mesopotamia from the 7th
to the 4th millennium BC. This
was when men still hunted with flint
arrowheads and scraped the hides of the
animals they trapped and killed with small
stone scrapers. This type of pottery was
often decorated and has been found in
several areas of the UAE, from off-shore
islands in Abu Dhabi to Ras al Khaimah. It
was not made here, but imported from
Mesopotamia.
On Dalma
island in Abu Dhabi emirate a type of white
vessels, that had been unknown till the
early 1990’s, was found side by side with
‘Ubaid pottery. This pottery appears to have
been locally made, by grinding gypsum to a
powder and making it into a paste, from
which the vessels constructed layer by
layer. From the material published on this
type of stoneware, it is not clear if firing
was used to create the pots, but they do
seem to have been used for cooking.
The people
who traded the ‘Ubaid pottery may have been
instrumental in teaching local people how to
mould clay and how to fire it to make
durable pottery. The oldest fired pot, known
from the UAE, was found on Merawah island
during the Abu Dhabi Islands Archeological
Survey (ADIAS) in 1998. It happened to be a
complete pot, and has been dated to
3700-3400 BC. These dates are truly
remarkable because they are from the middle
of the Fourth millennium, an era about which
very little is known till now.
Local
pot-making really took off in the early
Third millennium – many potshards from this
period were found in the Hili 8 site near Al
Ain, during the work of Serge Cleuziou in
that region. They correspond in type to
pottery imported from Mesopotamia and found
in Hafit-type graves – local imitations, so
to say.
To make
clay pots you need clay and this is not
present in abundance in the desert. It needs
streams or creeks and an area with gentle
currents that allow depositing of silt.
These conditions occurred in certain areas
along the coastline in those early days.
Since that coastline is now quite far
inland, most clay found today in the UAE
comes from deposits inland from the coast of
Dubai and Ajman. I myself have found a very
fine grey clay along the top end of Dubai
creek and at al Jadaf, but this occurred
only in very small quantities and contained
a lot of salt that would make it unsuitable
for firing.
Some of
the first locally made pottery is quite fine
and simply decorated as described above. The
shards I saw recently were no more than 3 mm
thick. In the Wadi Suq-period (around 700
AD) the pottery is much more coarse, with
potsherds of large pots up to 15 mm thick
and very grainy. Around the 18th
Century AD people seemed to have regained
the former skills for pottery from Julfar
(near present day Ras al Khaimah) was
beautifully made, fine pottery. Local
pottery was not glazed until Islamic times.
In later
times pottery and even porcelain was
imported by sea from as far away as China,
but these were luxury items.
The large
storage pots for grains, that we can still
find in the courtyards of mountain farms and
the round-bottomed water jars – these were
(and still are) locally made. The water jars
with their round bottoms cannot stand on the
ground, but are hung from a tree, so that
the wind can evaporate the water that has
soaked into the porous clay. This causes the
water to cool down, so that even on a hot
summer day a cool drink is always available.
A
centre of pottery production was located in
the sandy plain of wadi Haqeel near Ras al
Khaimah. Suitable clay was found nearby in
the runoffs of mountain wadis.
With the
demand for household pottery having
disappeared with the arrival of plastic, the
pottery skills have not been passed on to a
new generation and few local people now know
how to mould a pot or fire a kiln.
The
underground kilns that were still in use
twenty years ago have fallen into disrepair
as have the stone houses of the erstwhile
potters.
Present day
potteries are all operated by Indian
expatriates and are mainly located in the
neighbourhood of Siji and Masafi. Picking
one at random, I visited a medium-sized
operation just off-road in Thoban. At the
entrance to the compound sat a pottery
chicken on a pedestal, covering his ear with
his wings like a chicken-version of the
hear-no-evil monkey. A friendly young man
named Vijay came out to greet me and when I
commented on the chicken he said, grinning:
“Just a joke!”
Vijay told
me that the clay he uses is mainly imported
from Iran and India, but some fine clay
comes from Dubai and Ajman. The designs used
to make the various pots and ornaments are
often of Indian origin, although Vijay can
make any design you may want. Witness to
that were five meter-high terracotta angels,
ordered by someone for Christmas and never
collected.
In the dim
concrete shed several men were turning pots
at their wheels. One was moistening the clay
in a small electric mixer and another was
sculpting details on a replica of a Dubai
coffeepot. Vijay mentioned that one worker
can make up to a hundred small bowls or
ornaments, but large pots can take up to 2
or 3 days to finish. Rows upon rows of pots,
figurines and bowls were set out to dry – a
process that takes several days. The Indian
influence showed in a battery of elephants
in one corner, while in the middle of the
floor large herds of camels stood all facing
the same way.
In another
corner stood some rough straight vessels,
still unfinished. Vijay showed me how they
are shaped by the potter holding a round
stone on the inside of the vessel while
beating the outside with a wooden club.
We went
outside to look at the kilns. The old
wood-burning kiln had been abandoned in
favour of one that runs on diesel.
“I can get
a much better quality now”, said Vijay,
“With the old wooden furnace you were never
sure of the outcome, because the temperature
was not the same in every part of the kiln.
The pots at the bottom would be well fired,
while the ones on top would not be done yet
and would break easily. The diesel kiln can
reach a temperature of 900 to 1000 degrees
centigrade and the result is a good strong
pot”. He picked up a giant incense burner
from the piles standing around and tapped it
with his knuckles. A clear sound rang out,
as if from a bell. Vijay smiled: “That is
the sound of well-fired pot!”
How long
does the pot stay in the kiln?
“It takes
twenty four hours to fire the pots and then
another twenty four hours for the kiln to
cool down.”
Vijay and
his workers provide pots for the local
markets and for some shops in the cities.
Also recently there have been occasional
exports to the United States.
When I
asked about the turnover in this particular
pottery, he said that only the six winter
months have good results, while in the
summer months sales are low.
The
largest pots in the compound – huge vessels
that reached as high as my chest - came to
200 dhs, I was told. I remarked that a while
ago I had bought some large pots as
planters, but that a few weeks of watering
the plants had made the pots dissolve. “That
won’t happen with these pots”, Vijay said,
not without pride – and proceeded to sell me
two smaller pots as garden planters. At 10
dhs a piece I could take the risk of a short
life! My next stop was at the Friday market
near Masafi, where several stalls carry the
pots of many different potteries. Here very
few pots still had their natural colour.
White, green and sometimes multi-coloured
paint had been applied with abandon. Besides
pots, there were also fairy castles with
onion-domed turrets and cute houses that
looked as if they could have been made out
of gingerbread. The least attractive were
the black-and-gold pots that were
spray-painted as I watched.
I asked
for the price of some pots that were similar
in size and appearance to the ones I had
just bought, to see what the mark-up would
be. “Twenty dirhams, madam” – and when I
turned away without buying, I heard: “….for
you a discount!”
It does
not seem like a gold mine to me, this
pottery business – at least not for the
potters and the stall holders at the market.
As I walk back to the car my eye is drawn to
a row of clay feet displayed on the ground.
This is amazing kitsch – unless it is again
a joke…
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