So I was standing in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, crying over a red clay pot.
It was a lovely pot, though not as lovely as the one without the dent. Both were pale red Nile clay in that beautiful vase shape, wide round shoulders tapering symmetrically to a flat bottom.
In the exhibition, called “The Dawn of Egyptian Art,” there were quite a few vessels of a variety of shapes and purpose. Some, like these two pots, were thickly decorated with drawings in a pigment the color of brick dust, while others had designs scratched into the clay or picked out in charcoal or white. The designs were varied. Stylized humans: stick men with spears; and women with heart-shaped torsos and bell-shaped skirts, their arms raised heavenward like Evita Peron on her balcony. Boats were represented by a shape like a centipede, a curved line bristling with oars. There were hippos and fishes and crocodiles, some kind of antelope, long-legged birds and a recognizable dog. And ears and ears of wheat.
Then there were the carvings. A large spotted-basalt frog, ready to jump. Palettes carved with hunting and battle scenes in delicate bas relief. The ivory figure about the size of my thumb, so old and dry that it looked like splintered wood, was a mother with her child hanging on her back, her cloak covering his body. Her face had been worn away, but his little nose was still clearly poking over her shoulder. I thought he was looking back at me.
Someone made these things. You don’t always think about this when looking at artifacts in a museum. Things that survive the ages are often so perfect that you forget about the hands that made them. But I thought about it now.
People made these. With what tools? According to the case, some of these pieces were circa 3800-3400 BC. Knives of soft metal and hard stone? Reed brushes, or animal hair tied to twigs? Imagine. It must have taken hours and hours of laboring, and in stolen daylight time because you can’t do this kind of work by firelight.
Someone did this fine carving and that meticulous painting. Why? Sure they needed the pots, but did they need them painted with stories? Not really. But someone—a god by way of a priest, a noble looking to show rank, a lover trying to express a sense of precious elevation—someone thought beauty was important enough to cause someone else to not only want to create this art but to have or find the time to do it and to learn to do it. They saw a value in art, at a time when providing food and shelter took most waking hours.
I looked at the pot with the dent. A dent as if the heel of someone’s hand had slipped before the pot had been put to harden in the fire. On the other side of the glass case, the heel of my own hand angled in sympathy and I could touch that first hand, nearly 6000 years away from mine. How do you not cry?