Predynastic Pottery

These exhibits are a part of the first 'Ancient Worlds' gallery, 'Discovering Archaeology'. This gallery is about our relationship with the past, how we know about it through a wide range of archaeological techniques, and how our understanding is coloured by the world today.

These are part of a Predynastic Egyptian Pot Collection that is displayed in order to delineate Petrie's seriation or 'sequence dating' technique.

William Flinders Petrie realised that shape and decoration of objects changed slowly over time. He arranged pots and other objects from lots of different burials according to their shape, decoration and how often they appeared in the graves. He didn't know the date of each grave but he could arrange the objects found there in a sequence or series according to the decoration of the pots, or the presence and absence of other objects. In this way Petrie arranged the groups of objects in a sequence showing which ones were earlier and which ones were later. If one of the graves contained a datable object, such as a coin or an inscription, then it gave Petrie a fixed point in the sequence and helped date the other groups of objects. This is known as 'seriation' or 'sequence dating'

Left: Pottery Bowl with rounded base (Acc. 3137)

The bowl is hand made from Nile fabric (Nile A) and has a burnished red surface decorated with white lines. It has been categorised as Petrie's C-ware. And its origin has been designated as Predynastic; Naqada I (Upper Egypt); The iconographic pattern is very characteristic of other bowls found in Naqada.

Right: Black Topped Redware Vessel (acc. 3130)

This is a pottery vase, narrowing to a flat base, with red burnished surface and black burnished top. It has been designated as Petrie's 'B ware'. It is Predynastic and its origin is Naqada (Ia), in Upper Egypt.