Earth and water

When digging a well for water in 1974, Chinese peasants made a fantastic discovery: a life-size clay man in a whole warrior outfit. It was the first of 8000 terracotta figures -“earth baked” in a kiln – that the Chinese state has been digging over the years. It is the clay army of soldiers with perfectly individualized faces, molded from their desks masks, 600 horses, and 100 carts, of the first emperor of China’s Qi dynasty, around 247 BC. It is now World Heritage Property.

Mud and man have been together down the long road of history since the beginning. The mixture of earth and water is the most accessible element to be found to make all kinds of objects: vessels to store and transport water and food, shelters built with bricks when mixed with straw, statuettes to represent gods, people, or animals, and ornaments to adorn your body. However, the use of clay is not only utilitarian or artistic. Since immemorial times we have used clay to heal the skin of its many healing properties.

Call it clay or mud and, once fired, terracotta or ceramic, its fundamental composition is water and earth, sometimes with sediment from eroded rocks, in the case of clay.  Ceramics results from firing at a temperature of more than 600 degrees Celsius. 

Ceramic objects, whether from Japan, England, Italy, or Mexico, which have always brought warmth and utility to our homes, link us to people of all ages. Despite its fragile appearance, it has been an invaluable resource as a testimony of civilizations through the centuries. We know much of our history precisely thanks to the ceramic fragments found in archaeological excavations. We learned what life, rituals, economy, and customs were like at each historical moment. 

The clay tablets of Sumer and Mesopotamia, written in various languages of that time, reveal 3000 years of history: their laws and the administration of their governments; the scribes used them to keep accounts, write poems or magic spells, and as correspondence between high personages. We know what was eaten and drunk throughout the Mediterranean thanks to the amphorae of the Phoenicians and Greeks and where their trade routes moved to; with the pre-Columbian pieces, we reconstruct their funeral rites, their musical instruments, their cooking instruments, and even their fauna (a type of dog that existed in America before the arrival of the Spaniards). 

Without forgetting, of course, that the gods of the Jewish and Christian religions – the Bible tells us -, the Mayan creators, the Greek divinities, or the Chinese goddess Nüwa plunged their sacred hands into the simple clay to make their main creation: man, according to the founding myths of each of these cultures.