Pottery is an art in which special clay is used to make vessels and various other items. This traditional craft has been known and widely practiced among Tajiks since ancient times. Pottery clay has long been considered the most accessible and readily available raw material.
During the rule of the Samanid dynasty, this ancestral art reached the height of its development. In the National Museum, this art of pottery is preserved and safeguarded.
Pottery is an art whose materials are produced by firing clay and its mixtures, along with added mineral salts, metal oxides, and other inorganic compounds. As is well known, soil and ceramics hold a special place in human life. Soil, above all, is one of the essential elements in the emergence of life on Earth. Clay, which forms the basis of pottery, is also the first natural material ever utilized by humans, and later became widely used. Humans applied clay in almost every aspect of daily life.
The history of humanity’s use of clay begins with the clay tablets of Mesopotamia, which were used for writing cuneiform script. History also shows that in certain regions clay was even used as food. For example, people in the East consumed “earth butter,” a type of white clay; they mixed it with deer’s milk or added it to meat broth.
In ancient times, fragrant soaps did not exist. People in villages filled a pot with water, added several handfuls of flower petals and some clay from the ground. After hours of boiling, the mixture of water, clay, and flowers produced a kind of cleansing substance, which people of that era used for washing.