25 f REVIEWS — HISTORY OF ANCIENT POTTERY. 



age is indebted for a detailed history of the Assyrian monarchy ; whilst the 

 decades of Livy, the plays of Menander, and the lays of Anacreon, confided to a 

 more perishable material, have either -wholly or partly disappeared amidst the 

 wreck of empires." 



The certainty which attaches to every recorded name or word, 

 apart from all reasoning or induction, gives a peculiar importance to 

 such records ; and hence even the potters' stamps on the fine red 

 Samian ware, or the ruder initials on the handle of bhe old Eoman 

 amphora, have a significance and a value ; while the stamp of the 

 broken tile or brick supplies a fragment of history, more unques- 

 tionable than Herodotus, and far more trust-worthy than Livy. 

 And yet these are, for the most part, the rudest and least studied 

 works of the old fictile artificer. 



It thus becomes a subject of unwonted interest to follow down-^ 

 not in mere imagination, but by investigation and inductive reason- 

 ing, — the successive stages of the first workers in clay ; the making 

 of the rude sun-dried bricks by the presumptuous builders on the 

 plain of Shinar, or by the oppressed Israelites in their Egyptian 

 Groshen ; the invention of the brick-kiln, and the grand conversion pf 

 the destructive element of fire into the most conservative of powers. 

 Next comes the construction of the rude domestic, or sepulchral 

 urn ; the introduction of decorative arts in varying form ,• the aj/pli- 

 cation of indented patterns on the plastic clay ; or, finally, the 

 discovery of pigments, from the fictile employment of which grew 

 at length the art of an Apelles, as in the higher skill of the ^astic 

 modeller we may trace the germ of Phidian art, and all the teauty 

 which genius has perpetuated in marble and enduring brass. 



The use of clay as the first plastic vehicle of the moielier's 

 thoughts, from which, by means of moulds, his art could be multi- 

 plied and modified by numerous combinations of parts ; and, agait, 

 the invention of the potter's wheel : each mark progressive stag^ 

 in the development of human intellect ; though doubtless such ii. 

 ventions were independently made in many separate centres i 

 isolated and immature civilization. 



A well-known Egyptian sculpture, on the walls of the Temple (' 

 Philse, represents the ram-headed Phtah holding a rounded object o. 

 a potter's wheel, which he turns with his foot, and, as the inscrip 

 tion implies, as " the Eather of Creation, sets in motion the egg c 

 the sun and moon." The same inscription is diiferently rendere 

 by Gliddon, in his "Ancient Egypt;" but there is little rooi 

 for questioning the interpretation of the sculpture, in so far 



