[1] First and foremost, ceramics served as household wares for the storage, preparation, transport, and consumption of food, drink, and raw materials.

Such items include beer and wine mugs and water jugs, but also bread moulds, fire pits, lamps, and stands for holding round vessels, which were all commonly used in the Egyptian household.

Mineralogically, it is micacaeous, illite-rich sediment clay, containing many different sand and stone particles brought from the various contexts through which the Nile flows.

A depiction in the tomb of Rekhmire (TT100) shows workers in the process of building up pile of Nile mud with hoes in order to make mudbricks.

[13] Standard images show one or two men involved in preparing the clay, once they had softened it, by treading it with their feet in order to turn it into a malleable mass.

It was important that these not be too big or sharp, "excessively large temper can make the walls of pottery vessels unstable, since the clay will not be able to mesh together properly.

Sharp particles, like stones, could hurt the potter when kneading the clay and forming the vessels and prevent the creation of a smooth surface."

There were several different techniques for making pottery by hand: stacking a number of coils on a flat clay base, weaving, and free modelling.

[22] Eva Christiana Köhler [de] has subsequently argued that this should be corrected to a substantially earlier period, "the invention of the potter's wheel is a development which generally accompanied a certain form of mass-production.

[28] The vessel was left to dry in direct sunlight when the light was weak, in the shade when it was strong, or in a closed room when it was raining or cold.

Since the predynastic period, potters added decorative elements in the molding stage, creating unusual shapes or imitating other materials, like basketwork, metal, wood or stone.

[33] Even in the earliest Egyptian pottery, produced by an early phase of the Merimde culture, there are incised decorations like the herringbone pattern.

There are eight major types of painted pottery from ancient Egypt:[36] In Egyptology, the term 'pottery' is used to refer to all non-figural objects made from fired clay.

The majority of pottery vessels surely served as household wares and were used for the storage, preparation, transport and consumption of food and other raw materials.

[37][38] Evidence for the function of individual pottery types is given by depictions in tombs, textual descriptions, their shape and design, remains of their contents, and the archaeological context in which they are found.

Thus, Christiana Köhler in her study of the Early dynastic pottery from Buto was able to identify bottles or jugs with a white coating or light, large-grained marl clay, as water containers.

[39] The place of the ceramic industry in the wider social and economic context of ancient Egyptian society has been treated only cursorily in research to date.

He concludes that the economic situation in the Old Kingdom favoured a centralised, standardised, and specialised production in great quantities, using complicated procedures.

The organisational capacity of the state enabled focused production with high-quality pottery suitable for storage and transport in the context of the extensive distribution of goods by a centralised system.

[48] E. Christiana Köhler has shown that a non-industrial system of pottery production, based in individual households, developed in late predynastic Buto in particular, as a result of the unfavourable climatic conditions of the Nile delta.

This situation suggests that two different systems of manufacture already existed: a professional, specialised industry making funerary pottery and household production of rough wares.

"In the course of Naqada II, a society developed in Upper Egypt which placed significant value in their burials and the grave goods that they included in them, so that the demand for high-value pottery quickly increased."

The shared characteristics of Marl clay A are its compact and homogeneous fabric, the fine mineral components and very low proportion of organic substances.

Marl clay B was mainly used for large and mid-sized vessels and seems to be very restricted in space and time, to the Second Intermediate period and New Kingdom in Upper Egypt.

The shared feature of all three is the presence of numerous limestone particles, more or less ground down, which range from medium to large in size, and give the material a sparkly appearance.

[79] For the predynastic pottery from Buto and Helwan, which only has limited overlap with the Vienna system, E. Christiana Köhler developed a typological code.

For example, the shape of bread-molds changed drastically at the end of the Old Kingdom, but it is not clear whether this process resulted from social, economic or technological causes, or just fashion.

Through the study of pottery, along with other artifacts, it is possible to create a holistic narrative of Egyptian history, in which political developments are understood within the context of a long process of cultural change.

[92] There are some methodological issues with Petrie's classification:[93] The next person to undertake a relative chronology of the predynastic period was Werner Kaiser [de; arz].

[101] Toby Wilkinson undertook a seriation of eight predynastic and early dynastic necropoleis, based on 1420 types from Petrie's corpus (out of a total of 1542), which he arranged into 141 groups.