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The word ceramic comes from the Ancient Greek word κεραμικός (keramikós), meaning "of or for pottery" [4] (from κέραμος (kéramos) 'potter's clay, tile, pottery'). [5] The earliest known mention of the root ceram- is the Mycenaean Greek ke-ra-me-we , workers of ceramic, written in Linear B syllabic script. [ 6 ]
Most traditional ceramic products were made from clay (or clay mixed with other materials), shaped and subjected to heat, and tableware and decorative ceramics are generally still made this way. In modern ceramic engineering usage, ceramics is the art and science of making objects from inorganic, non-metallic materials by the action of heat.
Moche portrait vessel, Musée du quai Branly, ca. 100—700 CE, 16 x 29 x 22 cm Jane Osti (Cherokee Nation), with her award-winning pottery, 2006. Ceramics of Indigenous peoples of the Americas is an art form with at least a 7500-year history in the Americas. [1] Pottery is fired ceramics with clay as a component.
Prehistoric humans discovered the useful properties of clay and used it for making pottery. Some of the earliest pottery shards have been dated to around 14,000 BCE, [7] and clay tablets were the first known writing medium. [8] Clay is used in many modern industrial processes, such as paper making, cement production, and chemical filtering ...
The clay is then kneaded by the potter and placed on a wheel. Once the clay is on the wheel the potter can shape it into any of the many shapes shown below, or anything else he desires. Wheel-made pottery dates back to roughly 2500 BC. Before this, the coil method of building the walls of the pot was employed.
Clay tempered with sand, grit, crushed shell or crushed pottery were often used to make bonfire-fired ceramics because they provided an open-body texture that allowed water and volatile components of the clay to escape freely. The coarser particles in the clay also acted to restrain shrinkage during drying, and hence reduce the risk of cracking.
Earthenware comprises "most building bricks, nearly all European pottery up to the seventeenth century, most of the wares of Egypt, Persia and the near East; Greek, Roman and Mediterranean, and some of the Chinese; and the fine earthenware which forms the greater part of our tableware today" ("today" being 1962). [4]
Specialists in ancient Egyptian pottery draw a fundamental distinction between ceramics made of Nile clay and those made of marl clay, based on chemical and mineralogical composition and ceramic properties. Nile clay is the result of eroded material in the Ethiopian mountains, which was transported