- Pottery
As applies to all early inventions, we do not know the name of the man of woman no invented pottery. No first potter carved his or her name or initials in the base of a pot to claim first prize. However, it has long been assumed that whoever the creative person was, he or she would have lived somewhere in the Near East of Asia. It was therefore something of an archeological shock when, in the 1960s, pots dating to around 10,000 B.C.E were discovered on the Far Eastern side of Asia, thousands of miles away at Nasunahara on the island of Kyusu in Japan. These pots, found in caves, were made by nomadic hunter-gatherers, rather than settled farmers or urban dwellers. Just as important, the pots were made by firing or heating the clay to harden it, suggesting that these people had knowledge of advanced technologies.
The significance of the first Japanese pots is that they predate the first pots made in the Near East by around 1,000 years. Those pots, found in Iran, were made by drying the clay in the sun in order to harden it, a far more primitive technology than firing the clay. The Japanese pots have a round base and widen gently to a ridged top and a rounded, incised rim. They are known as incipient Jomon, because they are the forerunners of the jomon or "cord-marked" vessels developed in Japan around 9000 B.C.E. These later pots had pointed bases and were made by building up coils of clay into the desired shape. The patterns of the cord-marked pots were often quite complex, suggesting that they were intended for ritual or funerary use rather than for such everyday uses as cooking and storage.
SEE ALSO: CONTROLLED FIRE, OVEN, GRANARY, DRIED BRICK, FIRED BRICK, BLAST FURNACE
- Pulley
A pulley is one of the simplest machines, essentially a circular lever in the form of a wheel or fixed curved block, with a groove around it to accommodate a rope or belt. The earliest evidence for the existence of the pulley comes from Assyria in the eighth century B.C.E.; a painting of a battle scene shows a warrior using a simple pulley to lift a bucket over a wall.
Pulleys are mainly used to move or lift a load. A single fixed pulley can be used to change the direction in which a force is applied, as it may be easier to pull on a rope than to drag or push the load. When the rope is fixed at one end and another pulley is added, the system effectively halves the required force, as each part of the rope carries an equal share of the load. This does not reduce the mechanical work required: work is the multiple of force and distance and the rope-now doubled in length-will need to be pulled twice as far. More pulleys can be added to make a “compound pulley” system, further multiplying the effectiveness of the force applied.
Pulleys have been in use throughout the world for many centuries. Although the earliest hard evidence of their use dates from the eighth century B.C.E., it is highly likely that the principle was in use long before that. Early humans most likely created pulleys by throwing a rope or a fibrous vine over the branch of a tree to hoist up a heavy weight.
It is highly probable that pulleys were used by the builders of early massive constructions, such as the ziggurats of Mesopotamia (built as early as the fourth millennium B.C.E.), Stonehenge (built in 2200 B.C.E), and the pyramids of Egypt (third millennium B.C.E).
SEE ALSO: BRAIDED ROPE, WHEEL AND AXLE, WINCH, CRANE, LEVER, COMPOUND PULLEY