THE HELIX OF HISTORY 25 



At some period between 10,000 and 5000 B.C., we find that 

 the people of the new stone age were appearing in Egypt 

 and Mesopotamia with their improved tools and also ^vith 

 other inventions— pottery and agriculture. Besides tools and 

 weapons, primitive man needed cooking utensils and still 

 more, perhaps, he needed jars in which he could carry and 

 keep water. Baskets were made very early. Stone jars also 

 were made, but they required much labor when made by 

 primitive tools. It was not a great step, though it was a very 

 important invention, to think of daubing the baskets with 

 mud and making them more or less w^aterproof. Probably 

 the discovery that the mud became much more waterproof 

 if it were baked in the fire was made accidentally. There 

 were plenty of open hearths in which a mud-daubed basket 

 might be left. At any rate, the earliest pots seem to have 

 had the mud-smeared basket as their ancestor. Later pots 

 could be made without the basketwork by baking the mud 

 itself, molded to shape, but those earliest pots still bear the 

 marks of their origin in the tracings of basketlike lines with 

 w^hich they are decorated. 



And at that point, art entered the everyday world. The 

 pots could be decorated with mud of different colors and 

 with designs of intricate fancy. These patterns and working 

 methods were so stable that by means of them the cultures of 

 the neolithic and early bronze ages can be classified. We see 

 the steady improvement in the skill and fancy with which 

 the pots were formed, so that instead of depending upon the 

 classification of the flint tools, we can introduce approximate 

 datings for given periods from the potsherds with which 

 every ancient city is necessarily covered, pots being what 

 they are and children what they have always been. 



A good example of the use of pottery in constructing a 

 time scale for material revealed by excavation is given by 

 Petrie in his dating of the remains of prehistoric Egypt. In 

 this work, he selected a thousand graves with at least five 

 forms of pottery in each. Then a card slip was used for each 

 grave with the content specified, and every occurrence of a 



