The oldest ceramics in the world are small prehistoric
sculptures dug up at an archeological site in the modern Czech Republic. The
most famous piece is a four-and-a-half-inch high abstract female nude known as
the Venus of Dolni that was discovered in 1925 and was created between
29,000-25,000 bce, in other words, up to 31,000 years ago. The Venus figure was
made out of clay and thrown into a fi re where it became hard and burned black.
People have found other prehistoric figures sculpted from
clay and preserved because they were placed in caves, but before the Venus of
Dolni and the related Czech finds it seems no one had ever thought of making
the clay hard by firing it. But why did this prehistoric sculptor think of
throwing the figure into the fire in the first place? No one can know for sure,
but one theory that some archeologists propose is that throwing the figure into
the fire was a type of divination. Perhaps, the artist wanted to see how the figure
would react in the flames and different reactions would have had different
meanings, something like the Chinese method of divination in which they threw
bones into a fire and interpreted the cracks that formed. Balls of clay might
have been used first and then the figures were used to get a clearer message
from or about that particular figure. If this is true, then these prehistoric
figures are not only the oldest known ceramics but also the results of the
oldest known divinatory practice and a type of interpretive divination.
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