PALESTINIAN POTTERY IN BIBLE TIMES? 
By J. L. Kiso 
Pittsburgh-Xenia Theological Seminary 
and 
J. PALIN THORLEY 
East Liverpool, Ohio 
[With 8 plates] 
We live in a day of synthetics—synthetic rubber, synthetic gasoline, 
synthetic perfumes, and countless others. The first synthetic to be 
discovered by mankind was pottery, an artificial stone produced by 
firing clay shapes to a temperature sufficiently high to change the 
physical and chemical properties of the original clay into a new sub- 
stance with many of the characteristics of stone. Some of the earliest 
known pottery in the world comes from Palestine, where it was known 
and used as early as 5000 B.C. A study of this pottery proves that the 
early Palestinian potters made striking progress in mastering the 
numerous technical problems involved in the various types of clays, in 
fashioning techniques, in decorative styles, and in firing methods. 
It is the stonelike property of pottery which makes it so invaluable 
to the archeologist for, even if a jar is broken into pieces, the fragments 
are imperishable. The fires which destroyed so many ancient cities did 
not affect them; the rains of the centuries and the chemicals in the soil 
did not change them. Glue the broken pieces together and you have 
the very vessel itself which the ancients used! This imperishable 
nature of pottery makes it the most common find in any excavation, and 
it usually outranks in quantity all other finds put together. 
The ancient world was style-conscious about its pottery, and thus new 
shapes were constantly replacing old ones just as they do today in 
modern tableware. It is by a patient, painstaking study of these 
ancient pottery styles that the archeologist has learned at what date a 
new style arrived and at what date it went off the market. Some styles 
were rather persistent in long life cycles, but others changed more 
rapidly. It is these latter which furnish the archeologist his most 
important calendar for ancient Palestine. 
1 Reprinted by permission from The Biblical Archaeologist, vol. 8, No. 4, December 1945. 
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