124 Beginnings of Porcelain 



any mention of them; they are foreign to the works of Cicero and Varro, 

 as well as to the poems of Horace, Ovid, and Vergil. Propertius (born 

 about 49 B.C.) is the first to make a distinct allusion to them. They 

 are further mentioned by other poets, like Statius, Juvenalis, and 

 Martialis. Pliny is the only one to give a somewhat more detailed, 

 though insufficient, description. The first centuries preceding and 

 following our era, accordingly, were the period when the murrines 

 formed the fashion of the day in Rome; and porcelain was not then 

 made in China. The Chinese records relative to the Roman Orient 

 and Persia are reticent as to trade in pottery; and the fact remains 

 that in Persia, India, Egypt, Greece, or Rome, has never been dis- 

 covered a specimen of Chinese porcelain of such age that could lay 

 claim to being regarded as murrine. 1 



In the light of our present knowledge, the porcelain hypothesis 

 must be characterized as a failure, and as being doomed to oblivion. 

 The efforts of the men, however, who formulated their thoughts along 

 this line, have not been entirely futile; for, as it so frequently happens, 

 error will ultimately lead us to the knowledge of truth. The champions 

 of porcelain murrines were quite correct in the pursuit of one point of 

 view, — that the murrines were of pottery, not, as has been asserted, 

 of a mineral substance. Their fundamental error lay mainly in the 

 rash manner in which they jumped at the conclusion that Chinese 

 pottery was involved; while we plainly have to adhere to the fact, 

 transmitted to us by the ancients, that the murrine vessels were wrought 

 in the Empire of the Parthians, and that, as stated by Propertius, they 

 were baked or fired in Parthian furnaces. They were consequently 

 products of Iranian pottery; and the peculiar coloration described by 

 Pliny obviously hints at a beautiful and elaborate glazing which was 

 brought out on those vessels. My thesis, accordingly, is that the 

 famed murrines of the ancients were highly-glazed pieces of Oriental, 



1 Even under the Han, the potter's craft, which in that period had without any 

 doubt developed into an art, possessed no more than purely local significance, and 

 merely catered to the home consumption of the small community for whose benefit 

 the produce was turned out. It seems certain that no inland trade in pottery was 

 then developed, still less was there an exportation of the article. It is notable 

 that Se-ma Ts'ien, in his famous dissertation on the "Balance of Trade" (Shi ki, 

 Ch. 30, translated by Chavannes, Memoires historiques de Se-ma Ts'ien, Vol. Ill, 

 pp. 538-604), describing the remarkable efforts of the Han in the second century 

 B.C. toward a regulation of the factors of wealth and commerce, does not make 

 any allusion to potters or pottery as an article of trade. Neither do we meet, in 

 the historical documents of the Han bearing on foreign relations, any mention of 

 such export-ware. The incidental mention by Se-ma Ts'ien of "a thousand jars 

 (kang) filled with pickles and sauces," adverted to also in the T'ao shuo (Bushell, 

 Description of Chinese Pottery, p. 93), is without significance. 



