The Primitive Manufacture of Clay Pots: An Exposition of the Psychology of Pot-Making

Not all primitive tribes of men have pottery; in fact, far more manufacture baskets than pots. The discovery of the art of firing pots to indurate them seems only rarely to be hit upon. Then too, baskets can be highly ornamented, and can be thrown about, while clay pots are seldom handsome, and are quite fragile. Ethnographers or missionaries every now and then discover that some tribe's basketry- or pot-making is hemmed around with superstitious observances to keep the pots, for instance, from warping, cracking or shattering to bits.

The ancient Egyptians associated the making of clay pots with the making of human infants, as if they were both turned up on the wheel of the Potter-god. The Moon-goddess Heqet was active in this creative work of the Potter-god. A certain hieroglyphic drawing shows this goddess in frog-form. Seemingly she is associated with the swamp where the potter found his clay. One is led to suspect that the infants were created in pots, as it were. Such “pots” would be swampy places, apparently, and the thought leads one to believe that the uterus is the physiological water-filled “pot” in which infants are created by the Potter-god. Yet all clay is not found in swamps, but frequently along river banks. By analogy, then, that earthy material that a woman furnishes for the making of an abdominal pot and the infant inside it, could be said to have been taken from the clay bank of a uterine river. Such rivers are characterized periodically by a Nile-flood which restores as much physiological “clay” as it takes each year to make the pots and the infants.

The ideas of the ancient Egyptians must have travelled far and wide, and must have been accepted by many backward tribes throughout Africa, especially those up the Nile. One such tribe is the Baganda at the head-waters of that great river. Their pot-making observances quite probably have been handed down from very ancient