Home, Crafts and Hobbies Atlas

How Hands Make A Home
Sign In
Text size
100%
Theme

Switch Atlas

Tools and Equipment

Potter's Wheel

Also Known As Potter's Lathe
Ceramics and Pottery Tools

The rotating platform on which clay is centered and thrown into round vessels. One of the earliest machines to exploit rotary motion, it turned pottery from a coiled handcraft into a fast, precise trade, and centering clay on a spinning wheel head remains the defining skill every new potter must win. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Facts
Introduced When (Circa)
In use in Mesopotamia by the fourth millennium BC, with slower turntables earlier 1
Origin
The oldest known potter's wheel, from the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture in western Ukraine, has been dated to the middle of the 5th millennium BC. 1
Introduced era (class)
Classical Antiquity 1
Connections

Used In

Pottery, Crafts
Source Potter's Wheel (Wikipedia)
In the Other Atlases

Era Of Origin

Classical Antiquity

Also in History Atlas: the era this subject comes from.

Sources
1. Potter's Wheel (Wikipedia)
Wikimedia Foundation
  • History section
    A potter's wheel in western Ukraine, from the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture, has been dated to the middle of the 5th millennium BC, and is the oldest ever found
  • Lead section
    A potter's wheel may occasionally be referred to as a 'potter's lathe'
View the Source
Dictionary.com: potters-wheel definition
Dictionary.comIn Group: Potters Wheels and Throwing Aids, Definition entry
Quote, In Group: Potters Wheels and Throwing Aids, Definition entry
a device with a rotating horizontal disk upon which clay is molded by a potter.
View the Source
Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.
Reader Challenges (0)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.