Let’s talk about 🏺 emoji

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This is the pottery emoji, but what actually is it?

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If you said Greek amphora, you would be right!!

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I think someone would see that emoji and think “generic ancient pottery” but 🏺 has a specific origin and significance.

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The Ancient Greeks were goated at pottery. They used it for trade and exported it around the world, as well as storage and rituals in Greece.

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Fun fact: Amphorae (plural of amphora) were so common in Athens that broken shards, called ostraka, were used for voting to exile politicians. And that is where the word ostracism comes from! Another way to say ostracize would be “I broken pottery shard you out of Athens!”

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Here is a brief overview from my research of pottery in the Golden Age of Athens (480-404 BCE):

1. What forms did people make?

Why?

• Storing oil, wine, or grains
• Mixing water and wine and symposiums (wine was always diluted)
• Drinking at feasts
• Funeral rituals
• Carrying water from fountains

2. How did they decorate surfaces?

• Intricate painted surfaces with scenes from life and myths
• Red and black: at first, figures were black and the background was red, then around 500 BCE it was reversed and figures were left red while the background was black

Why?

• Aesthetic beauty
• Storytelling
• Reverence for Gods and heroes, honoring Athenian values/culture
• More focus on people + culture, less on nature

3. Who made these pots?

• Skilled craftsmen from artisan families
• Lived in Kerameikos, the potters’ district, near the Eridanos river with lots of clay
• Small, busy quarters with family-based workshops, roles for everyone in the fam
• Usually the work was split up: some people prepared clay, others made forms, others decorated or fired the work
• Learned through apprenticeships
• Proud of their skill, pottery was both craft and an art prized and traded around the world (Italy, Egypt, Spain, Persia)
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Closing thoughts:

Artisans in Athens were integral to its identity and culture. As philosophers drank from wine goblets, paintings inside the goblets inspired conversations exploring the ideas love, truth, and virtue. Vessels showed how people thought and what stories they used to understand the world.

I respect how artisans treated surfaces like storybooks — showing gods, athletes, musicians, warriors, and daily life.

I was excited to learn about Kylix, wide shallow wine goblets used in symposia/philosophical discussions, but then I was annoyed upon learning that women weren’t included at these discussions. If y’all are so enlightened, how are you gonna exclude women? Anyway. I also started thinking about how if we recreated Ancient greek pottery it would be like: tech billionaires, influencers, athletes, Taylor Swift, people sitting at desks, driving in traffic, and that was kind of depressing but also motivating to do my best to create meaningful art!

Anyway I’ll leave it there, thank you for reading this, if you found it interesting or have any feedback let me know, I’m trying to get better at this 🫶

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All the besttttt,

Liliana

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