370 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1946 
These idols represent a new technique in pottery manufacture. It 
is the press-mold type of work. The older plaque idol was made by 
impressing a lean wet clay upon an intagho mold of the goddess. 
When the clay had dried sufficiently to shrink away from the mold, the 
plaque was set aside to dry thoroughly, after which it was fired like 
any other piece of pottery. The snow-man type was a two-piece 
job; the head was made in a press-mold and the body was modeled 
freehand; the two were then joined while leather-hard. Other pottery 
cult objects used in the worship of the Canaanite fertility goddess 
were bulls, doves, and small stylized trees with a lamp in the branches. 
The snake is another member of her cultic family and often appears 
as decoration on the vessels used in her worship. Two-story pottery 
shrines have been found as well as a multiple-storied incense altar 
where lion stands upon lion. 
OTHER USES OF POTTERY 
Pottery objects were used from the cradle to the grave. At one 
extreme of life they furnished toys for the children, such as war 
horses for the boys and dolls and tiny cooking pots for the girls. 
Pottery even furnished the feeding bottle and the rattle for the 
baby’s entertainment. At the other end of life pottery caskets were 
sometimes used for the dead. 
Industry made use of pottery tools, such as the loom weights of the 
weaver. In Israelite times these were always doughnut-shaped but 
came in many sizes. If the siege of a city lasted too long and the army 
ran out of sling stones, they would bake clay balls of similar size and 
use them as substitutes. The soldier carried a pottery canteen which 
was so made that it kept the drinking water cool. 
Both the businessman and the diplomat in patriarchal times wrote 
with a stylus on clay tablets. If the documents were especially valu- 
able they would be fired in a kiln and thus become imperishable pottery 
whose contents could never be tampered with. Even maps were drawn 
on clay long before Abraham’s time. 
Pottery was used as illustrative material by the prophets and preach- 
ers of Bible times. Some of the more important passages are: Psalms 
2:9, Isaiah 45: 9, 64: 8, Jeremiah 18: 1-5, 19: 1-18, Zechariah 11: 13, 
Matthew 27 : 7-10, Romans 9 : 20-24. 
Cheap jewelry and gaming pieces were sometimes made of clay as 
were the buttons and spindle whorls of the poor. In the days of Jesus 
even theater tickets were pottery pieces. It was the pottery lamp that 
gave light to the house at night and the pottery brazier that warmed it 
in the winter. The lamp often went to the cemetery and was buried 
with the dead. 
Even broken dishes have their work to do. Larger fragments served 
