At the edge of the main Predynastic town the house and workshop of a potter who made cooking pots and other domestic wares for his neighborhood clientele was discovered in 1978. This discovery proved the important contribution to be made by excavating in the desert portion of Hierakonpolis. Dwellings from the Predynastic era are rare, but this semi-subterranean rectangular house can be reconstructed due to a fortunate (for us) industrial accident. It would seem that the potter worked just a little to close to where he lived and the evidence suggests that one day, a shift in the wind caused the flames from his pottery kiln, located just over 5m away, to spread to the house and burn it to the ground. The fire reddened and hardened the soil and mud bricks that formed the lower portion of the house and reduced the posts and mats of its walls to charcoal and ash, found by the archaeologists just as they had fallen 5000 years earlier. Today it is the oldest house still preserved in Egypt.

From these burnt remains, the house and workshop can be reconstructed with accuracy. The lower portion of the house, which measured 4 x 3.5m was dug about 50cm into the earth. Mud mortar and some of Egypt's earliest mud bricks formed the base for the 8 wooden posts that held up the wattle and daub roof and walls. Based on the preserved height of the charred posts, the structure was about 1.45m high. Inside the house was a cooking oven or hearth set on a mud platform, while in the opposite corner a storage pot was found sunk into the floor. A series of post-holes to one side suggest an additional enclosure or porch on the leeward side of the building. The remnants of trenches that once held the post or reed walls of additional buildings and animal pens surround the complex.

To the east was his kiln. Although badly disturbed, the kiln was originally a roughly circular platform of earth about 6x5m in extent with 8 to 10 shallow basins about 50-80cm in diameter and 5-15cm deep. In three of the basins some of the original dog-biscuit shaped kiln bricks remained in place. Their arrangement in one basin suggested that these triangular fired clay bars supported large jars in which smaller vessels were fired. Opening to the north to take advantage of the prevailing wind was the stoke hole for the fire. The kiln may have been surrounded by a low wall and covered during the firing with a make-shift roof of potsherds and mud to contain the heat.

This potter made only straw tempered Rough wares from clays he mined near by. He specialized in medium sized jars or cooking pots on which are often found light impressions made by the potter's finger in the form of an upright crescent that may even be his signature. Five thousand years later, fragments of his pots, some 300,000 of them, still covered the ground where the potter worked. The distribution of pot fragments suggests that many of his products may have been on display for sale, while the recovery of donkey bones from the animal pens indicates that he may have been a mobile pot salesman on occasion.

The corrected C14 date for this establishment is 3590+/-117BC, placing it in the early Nagada II period.


For more information see:

M.A Hoffman 1980 "An Amratian House from Hierakonpolis and Its Significance for Predynastic Research", Journal of Near Eastern Studies 39: 119-137.

M. A. Hoffman 1982.The Predynastic of Hierakonpolis - An Interim Report. Egyptian Studies Association Publication 1. Cairo University Herbarium, Cairo, Egypt and Western Illinois University, Macomb Illinois: 7-14; 66-92.

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