Egyptian black-topped pots

The first civilisations of the Nile valley date from around 6000BC, with people coming from the drying Sahara and settling in the green valley. The descriptively named black-topped pots first made in the Predynastic Period by the Badarian culture around 4000BC. This was the mysterious period before the pharaohs during which the elemted of Egyptian culture were developing; the Badarian culture transitioning into the Naqada periods, which ended with the unification of upper and lower Egypt under the first pharaoh Narmer, and the first of about 33 dynasties, ending with the Ptolemys.[1] They have been found in Nubian archaeological sites of southern Egypt and Sudan, including Elephantine, an island on the Nile River, Nabta Playa in the Nubian Desert, and Kerma in present-day Sudan. They are vaguely egg-shaped with smooth red bodies and black-shining tops and interiors, like they’ve been burned. The pottery is extremely fine, probably refined by flotation to separate the clay from the grit, and a liquid slip of even finer clay made to smooth and colour the surface.

The Ashmolean museum has a fine display:

Black-topped pottery is found in cemeteries and ritual deposits, where they were perhaps used for liquid offerings in funerary rites. This seems to be supported by visual evidence from slab stelae, painted limestone panels from elite tombs in the Giza Necropolis portraying the marvellous nourishment of the deceased. In the slab stela of Wepemnofret (4th Dynasty, 2613–2494 BC), a black-topped jar appears on a table of offerings before the mustachioed prince—linen, bread, beer, and legs of beef. On the slab stela of the leopard-gowned Princess Nefertiabet, a black-topped libation vase is seen, also surrounded by imagery related to food offerings.

The techniques used to achieve this beautiful black-top effect have been widely debated, but it seems to be the result of reduction and carbon trapping, possibly achieved by removing the red-hot pot from the kiln and placing it mouth-down in sawdust, similar to a raku firing. This black burning happens to reduce the porosity of the pots, perhaps indicating a functional choice in the production rather than—or as well as—a purely stylistic one. Indeed, the black-top pottery made from red Nile clay began to wane with the introduction of higher quality creamy-white marl clay from the desert edges, which could be fired at higher temperatures, resulting in greater vitrification of the clay body and lower porosity.

The black-top pottery is so striking, it can be hard to see it as purely functional and not also beautiful. Karin Sowada sees a symbolic power in the red and the black, a deliberate representation of the duality of life and death, where in Egyptian art, “red is the color of chaos and death and black is the color of fertile land of Egypt and resurrection”—with the liquid libation representing the Nile and its renewal process of flooding and fertilization.[2] I guess this is a neat thought, though perhaps maybe a little too neat? Maybe it's fine for things to just be well made and beautiful, and for them to reflect the materials to hand.

[1] “The Scorpion God” by William Golding (1971) is set in the moment before unification of the country under Narmer—with a pressing sense of strangeness, and of things coming together, the pregnant moment before the burst into something new. The critic Leighton Hodson described it as a “taxing” work characterized by “highly wrought spareness of expression”. But it’s certainly memorable, in an odd, spare sort of way. [2] Karin N. Sowada (1999) Black-Topped Ware in Early Dynastic Contexts. The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 85: 85-102. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3822428