According to IRAN DAILY, one wonders whether the equating of pottery with human mortality may well have colored society’s attitude toward potters as a group. However, potters were not shackled to their trade, and some left for more lucrative or more satisfying occupations.
Potters worked in groups because the making of pottery required a large number of specialized tasks: The gathering of raw materials, the processing of the materials to create the ceramic body, forming the vessels, turning the leather-hard vessel to form the base, decorating, loading and unloading one or more kilns and firing the kiln to the appropriate temperature.
References to pottery production centers in the Safavid Period (1501-1736 CE) come from both Persian and European sources, the latter being more detailed and extensive.
The European sources from the middle of the 17th century cite the following as production centers: Kerman, Zarand, Mashhad, Shiraz, Yazd and Isfahan.
While archeological evidence indicates that pottery was produced in the heart of the city of Kerman, the pottery said to be from Isfahan, the capital of Safavid Dynasty, was probably produced outside the city.
References to Yazd as a pottery center are also problematic, as there is no archeological or petrographic evidence for identifying Yazd pottery. Some of the smaller satellite towns around Yazd may have sold their wares as Yazd pottery. One of these, Maybod, became a production site in the 20th century but could have had earlier roots. In Safavid Isfahan, there was a caravanserai selling the pottery of Abarkuh, also a town near Yazd. Nevertheless, no group has been petrographically distinguishable as Yazd region pottery. However, if the Yazd potters used the same quartz source as the potters of another workshop, such as Kerman, the two would be indistinguishable.
Pottery from diverse centers was sold in the same depots, which may have confused some visitors. Pottery from all over Iran could be obtained in Isfahan, and that the wares of Mashhad, Kerman, and Abarkuh were all available there in the same caravanserai. Thus, we need to be cautious when considering the references to production centers from European sources.
In the Persian sources only Kerman is mentioned as a production center. All of the above references concern the production of glazed pottery.
All of these references speak of places, that is, towns, known for their production of pottery. It is not clear how many ateliers for pottery existed in each center, but archeological and ethnographic evidence suggests that a single town might have a dozen or more ateliers. The potters’ village of Qumisheh in Isfahan Province had at least 13, and within Kerman, wasters (discarded pieces of defective pottery) were recovered from at least three different sites. Within a single atelier, the craftsmen tend to be related, and within a single center the various ateliers may be run by members of an extended family. The factor of kinship binds the potters of a single center and probably contributed to the sharing of technology and artistic ideas, as was the case in the 12th and 13th centuries in the city of Kashan in Isfahan Province.
The above is a lightly edited version of a chapter of ‘Persian Pottery in the First Global Age’ written by Lisa Golombek, Robert B. Mason, Patricia Proctor and Eileen Reilly and published by BRILL in 2013.
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