Ancient Greek Pottery Essay

From cups and bowls to dishes and priceless vases, pottery comes in all different shapes and sizes. Now, can you remember the last time you held a piece of pottery? You probably thought to yourself that you needed to be extra careful, because if you dropped it the pottery would shatter and be gone forever. So why is pottery one of the most widely surviving relics? Shouldn’t something more durable like a golden crown or an iron sword be able to survive after hundreds of years?

The problem is that all of those years allowed for the more durable materials to be to melted down and recycled into other objects. Meanwhile, pottery cannot be recycled – after it has been created, that’s all it will ever be used for. Whether it finds its way into a landfill

By examining the images on ancient Greek pottery, archaeologists have been able to learn about their myths, traditions, stories and about everyday life in ancient Greece.

Most Greek vases were painted in a black figure style (where the figures depicted are black), and a red figure style coming along later. In the black figure style, the artists would paint the figures with a slip, or a mixture of clay and black pigment. After that had dried, the artist would go back and add detailed lines with different colored slips. The lines help detail muscles, eyes and the figures themselves.

Today’s pottery is made using the same processes that the ancient Greeks perfected. Made out of muddy clay, the artist would shape a vase or pot, and when they had made something they were proud of, they would place it in an oven to dry. These ovens are known as kilns and reach temperature of over 3000 degrees Fahrenheit. In order for the clay to set-up properly, the pottery needs to bake for a few hours. At these extreme temperatures, the clay thickens up from its muddy past and becomes hard and brittle, preserving the artist’s