The emergence of pottery was an important turning point in human civilization
——Bai Guangyue 2022.2.6
Bai Guangyue is a member of the Chinese Cuisine Association, the Shandong Artists Association, and the Jinan Writers Association.
There are also many myths and legends about the origin of pottery. Some people say that it was invented by the Shennong clan, some people say that it was the Fu Ren clan, and some people record that Yu Shun made pottery on the riverside, but obviously the historical facts are much earlier than these.
Red pottery mane – author's collection
The birth of pottery should be due to the discovery and utilization of the mystery of the collision between fire and earth, and the invention of drilling wood for fire can be traced back to 700,000 years ago. The use of fire symbolizes the beginning of the primitive ancestors' march toward civilization. From fire to pottery, they have gone a very long way.
In ancient times, the ancestors began to make some pottery. The invention of pottery is an important process of human civilization, and it is the first time that human beings have used natural objects to create a brand new thing according to their own will.
Judging from the pottery pieces of late Paleolithic pottery found in the Nihewan area of Yangyuan County, Hebei Province in 1972, the production of pottery in China has a long history of more than 11,700 years.
In the beginning, pottery was only made by people kneading from clay and then burning it.
Our ancestors also lived in caves in the deep mountains and forests, and lived a life of hunting and harvesting fruits. However, the prey and wild fruits on the mountain increasingly could not meet their needs, and they slowly walked out of the mountain.
There was a tribal leader named Tao, who led the people to graze and live by water and grass, and came to the Yellow River. The climate here is mild, the rainfall is abundant, and the Loess Plateau and the Alluvial Plain of the Yellow River are loose and fertile. People began to grow millet here, so they created a primitive farming civilization.
Millet needs to be dried after autumn harvest, and it needs to be stored. Tao took advantage of the unique advantages of the Yellow River here, using the unique local viscous loess, kneading a storage vessel made of mud to dry and then use it.
Once the storage devices made of mud were burned, But Tao found that these burned storage devices were much harder than the original, and they were not easy to break, and they were crisp and pleasant to knock, especially if they were burned in the hole.
So Tao led the people to dig caves and build kilns to burn this hard storage device. This kind of storage is very practical, not only can store millet, people also use it to save water, later, in order to commemorate the merits of pottery, people called this kind of utensils pottery.
The predecessor of the mane is a pointed bottom for taking water and developed, the tip and water is easy, it is difficult to place on the ground, just use several pointed bottoms and rely on each other, so that the water is not easy to outflow, but when it is taken, it will still fall down the water outflow, the ancestors invented the three pointed bottoms and put together, three feet standing, so that it will not fall, the water will not flow out, the prototype of the mane will appear.
The combination of mane and fire, burning the fire below, simple boiling water, boiling rice and other cooking, since then the human diet has undergone qualitative changes and development, ending a single barbecue diet. Later use found that when boiling, the rice in the three feet of the mane is easy to paste, and gradually the three feet of the mane are thinned and heightened, forming the pheasant shape of the ding, and later there is a three-legged ding, a four-legged ding.
With the invention of the gui, the use of kettles, increased cooking, stewing, steaming, etc. The diversification of cooking methods has promoted the evolution and development of human beings.
Today's pottery only has its use value, not appreciation value. But later, with the development of the pottery industry, the pottery technology progressed from clay strip plate construction to roulette blanking,
From ordinary pottery to painted pottery, the road of human exploration is very arduous, each step is an unprecedented transcendence of themselves, looking for pigments, the choice of smearing tools, patterns from points, lines, circles, to geometric figures, development to pictographic patterns, all show human ingenuity.
The firing form has also been greatly improved, by the simple structure of the horizontal cave kiln and vertical cave kiln has replaced the backward flat ground firing, the temperature of the kiln, the control of the atmosphere has achieved some experience, when the highest firing temperature has reached more than a thousand degrees, has been close to the "critical" temperature of pottery and porcelain. At that time, some of the pottery that appeared was solemn in shape and exquisitely decorated, which can be called a fine art. This process has taken thousands of years.
Judging from the archaeological materials known so far, the fine works in the pottery include gray pottery dating back more than 10,000 years in the late Paleolithic period, red pottery of the Magnetic Mountain culture more than 8,000 years ago, faience pottery of Yangshao culture of more than 7,000 years, "eggshell black pottery" of Dawenkou for more than 6,000 years, white pottery of the Shang Dynasty for more than 4,000 years, hard pottery for the Western Zhou Dynasty for more than 3,000 years, terracotta warriors of the Qin Dynasty, glazed pottery of the Han Dynasty, and Tang Sancai of the Tang Dynasty.
The charm of pottery lies not only in its great influence on human real life, which meets the needs of people's daily diet and life, and becomes an important living tool for human beings, but also provides a carrier for the origin of various forms of culture and art for human beings.
Pottery is an important cultural creation of the ancestors, and is the concentrated embodiment of the most important poetic chapters and aesthetic emotions in human civilization.
All the ornamentation of faience pottery has been freehand and abstract, and has gradually become a unique art form, giving birth to elements of Chinese painting.
Pottery gives people a clumsy and rugged beauty with its unique earthy atmosphere, heavy texture and simple patterns. The calm color of the earth, the earthy charm contained in it, and the power of being down-to-earth.
Pottery from ancient fashion grain, water, wine, cooking, to the present carries history and years, each era of laborers have put their simple seeing, hearing, thinking, thinking, their wisdom and dreams are left on the pottery one by one, is another carrier after the petroglyph, spread to this day, pottery with the classic symbols of the nation into the Chinese culture.
In the Tang and Song dynasties, the production of porcelain developed rapidly, and the pottery industry tended to decline, but some special pottery varieties still had unique charms, such as Tang, Song, Liao Sancai ware and Ming, Qing and so far purple sand pots, glass, etc., are unique and much appreciated.