The Humble Skeptic

The Humble Skeptic

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John Bauman's avatar
John Bauman
Dec 14Edited

Pottery continues to be a crucial part of dashing modern man's mistaken notions of history. Ancient pottery is so often "ahead of its time" in design and execution, and shows a level of complexity and understanding of materials that, though modern materials can match or exceed, nevertheless profoundly puts the lie to concepts of "primitive man".

But as pottery has always been so integral to civilization, it is so often the best story teller of our actual history. And just as we look at potters differently when we see what they were able to do with none of our technological advancement, pottery also gives us a window into the rest of a civilization's level of advancement that we might misunderstand, looking back from the arrogant assumptions we make from a culture developed around specialization.

The photo of the first century inkwell is as simple as pottery can be. But holding it in your hand comes a sudden dawning....

....hmmm. I thought this was an illiterate civilization? But a "simple" fisherman had an inkwell? What did he use if for if he was illiterate?

A comment made about fishermen relative to class or caste struck home. I made a living for 43 years in a particularly anachronistic pursuit -- pottery. And as a 20th-21st century potter I was particularly aware that our culture has a very distorted view of which caste or class a potter might have fit into over the past millennia. It's an easy mistake to make -- to assume that the way we currently view things is the way they were always viewed.

But potters were NOT always anachronistic as they are in our current age of Tupperware. Potters were a necessary part of a functioning society. And, as such, the class they inhabited was usually relatively quite high in their respective communities. Today potters survive on the whims and vacillating tastes of a culture. We are no longer functionally necessary, and our incomes and our respective class level is much lower as a result. ( Exceptionally, potters as artists often reside in a class above our income level because of the romantic notions of the classes above us. Still, as a group, we're not thought of as being in the professional class).

Back when I was in college there was a professor and a couple of students who made very good money fish-spotting in Alaska. Fishing as a business doesn't suffer the same anachronistic misunderstanding as pottery ...IF... we grasp that man's need for fish has never changed over the centuries. Still, for some reason I suspect we mistake the "dirty work" of fishing for somehow being low class. It isn't. And it never has been. And there's nothing about fishing for a living -- now OR then -- that would imply one's level of education.

Should it be surprising that a fisherman would be one of the literate ones of the first century?

Thanks for continuing to do the hard (and obviously thankless) work of digging up this information and sharing it. Thanks for not giving up on the material realities of our belief.

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Hans Stein's avatar
Hans Stein
Dec 15

Interesting to hear your insights. Yes, it is annoying how the things and thoughts and events of the past are being so misrepresented still. Especially in regard to these scriptures and their world and time and protagonists.

Religion has made less than folklore and legend of them, and filled it with wrong sentiments.

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