Palestinian Pottery: Hebron's Kilns, the Gaza Jar, and the Jerusalem Tile Workshops

A cooking pot made in a village outside Ramallah in the 1960s and a cooking pot excavated from an Iron Age layer nearby are close enough in clay, shape and finish that the difference is a matter of centuries rather than craft. In Arabic the word is fakhkhar (فخار), the fired clay, and the vessels it names have kept their form longer than almost anything else made in Palestine.

Textiles wear out. Buildings get rebuilt. Clay survives in shards, which is why Palestinian pottery is one of the longest continuous records of daily life in the country, and why the same geometric marks that run across Palestinian heritage clothing also run across the shoulder of a water jar.

TL;DR

Palestinian pottery is a living craft, not only an archaeological category. Two traditions ran in parallel and are traceable to at least Mamluk rule (1250 to 1517): women built cooking pots and water jars by hand at home, without a wheel; men worked in workshops on a foot-powered wheel using a forming technique specific to Palestine called tajlis. The ethnographic survey carried out by John Landgraf and Owen Rye in the 1970s found Hebron and Gaza City held the most workshops, with production also at Ramallah, Jaba', 'Irtah, Nazareth, Haifa and Akka. Cooking pots needed calcite temper, quarried at the village of al-Jib. The Gaza jar, made for shipping Gaza wine, was produced from the first century until at least the early seventh. In Jerusalem a separate tile tradition began in 1919, when survivors of the Armenian genocide from Kütahya were brought in to replace the missing tiles of the Dome of the Rock. The women's tradition has effectively ended. The workshops have not.

What Is Palestinian Pottery?

Palestinian pottery is the fired clay ware produced in Palestine across every period of its history, and it is unusual among ancient crafts in that it never stopped. Modern pots, bowls, jugs and cups match their ancient equivalents closely in shape, clay body and decoration.

Winifred Needler, then deputy keeper of the Near Eastern department at the Royal Ontario Museum, wrote in Palestine: Ancient and Modern in 1949 that the resemblance showed "how persistently the potter's craft clung to tradition through the centuries". The archaeologist R. A. Stewart Macalister, writing in The Excavation of Gezer in 1912, put the same point as a warning to his own profession: dividing Palestinian pottery into periods was "to some extent a necessary evil", because each period "shades almost imperceptibly into the next".

That continuity is the argument of the craft. A potter in Hebron today is not reviving something. He is continuing it.

The Women's Tradition: Household Vessels Made Without a Wheel

Two distinct traditions ran alongside each other, divided by gender, place of work and purpose.

Women worked at home and without a wheel, building vessels by hand for the household: cooking pots, storage jars, and the jarra, the water vessel carried to and from the well or cistern. Production was seasonal, fitted into the gap between the spring and the fall harvests, and the clientele was other women.

The technical knowledge was specific. Cooking pots had to survive direct heat, so they were tempered with calcite quarried at the village of al-Jib. Water vessels, which never went near a fire, used grog and straw instead, both of which were available anywhere.

These were working objects, and they were still decorated. Ramallah-area ware was thick-walled and pinkish, painted with simple geometric and plant designs in red that read as close cousins of the motifs worked in thread across the same district. Anyone who has looked closely at the stitched grammar of Palestinian embroidery will recognise the vocabulary on a water jar from the hill villages around Ramallah. The same women were making both.

The Men's Workshops: Tajlis, the Foot Wheel and the Tabun Kiln

The men's tradition was broader in output and industrial in setting. It used an indigenously built foot-powered wheel and a tall tabun-style kiln, and it produced a far wider range of goods than a household needed.

It also used a forming technique that appears to be specific to Palestine. Tajlis means throwing the pot inverted onto the wheel to work the base, letting that base dry, then setting the vessel upright to form the top. It is a two-stage method for pieces too large or too complex to raise in one pass.

The large water jars called zīr came out of this tradition. Flat-based and bulbous, they were coil-built in the body with a narrower wheel-thrown neck attached, and the interior was waterproofed with bitumen. They held water, olive oil and dibs, the grape molasses, and their construction barely changed for centuries.

The oldest named product of all is the Gaza jar, a shipping vessel developed to move Gaza wine across the Mediterranean. It was in production from the first century until at least the early seventh, which makes the export trade of Gaza and its ancient port visible today in the debris of shipwrecks and warehouse floors across the region.

Where Was Palestinian Pottery Made?

The in-depth ethnographic study of Palestinian pottery production carried out by John Landgraf and Owen Rye in the 1970s found the men's craft still practised across most of historic Palestine. Hebron in the West Bank and Gaza City held the largest concentrations of workshops. The study also recorded production at Ramallah, 'Irtah and Jaba', and at Nazareth, Haifa and Akka, where Palestinians who remained after 1948 and became citizens of Israel carried the craft on inside the Green Line.

Hebron is the clearest surviving case. The Natsheh family opened a glass factory in the old city more than two hundred years ago and added a ceramics factory in 1962. It closed during the years after the First Intifada and reopened in the mid-2000s. The scale is worth stating plainly: Khalid al-Natsheh told Al Jazeera in 2015 that between fifty and sixty people in Hebron still knew how to make the ware. Not fifty thousand. Fifty. The same old city that carries Hebron's glassblowing tradition carries its kilns, and both rest on a similar number of hands.

The Jerusalem Tile Workshops of 1919

Jerusalem's painted ceramic tiles come from a different line, and the date it starts is precise.

David Ohannessian (1884 to 1953) had established a pottery in Kütahya, in western Anatolia, in 1907, and built a reputation restoring tilework on historic monuments. In 1911 he was commissioned to design and execute Kütahya tile revetments for Mark Sykes's home in Yorkshire. In late 1915, during the Armenian genocide, he was arrested and imprisoned in Kütahya, falsely accused, as many Armenian notables were, of plotting against the state. In early 1916 he and his family were deported by rail and forced march. They found refuge in Aleppo for nearly two years.

What brought him to Jerusalem was the Dome of the Rock. Its tiles were broken and missing, the building neglected, and Sykes suggested Ohannessian might be able to replicate them. He arrived in 1919. In the autumn of that year he returned briefly to Kütahya for kaolin clay and other minerals, and brought back with him the Karakashian painters and the Balian potters. The Dome of the Rock commission was cut short in 1922. The workshops were not: the Balian family has been making ceramics in Jerusalem continuously since that year.

The tiles went on to mark the Rockefeller Museum, the American Colony Hotel and the Armenian Quarter's own institutions, and the style fed back into Palestinian Arab production: the brightly painted floral and arabesque ware now sold as Hebron pottery draws on it directly. Two refugee crafts, one from 1915 and one from 1948, ended up decorating the same city.

What the Nakba and Mass Production Took

The women's tradition is the one that has effectively ended, and it was not ended by taste.

It ended because the villages where it was practised were emptied or cut off in 1948, and because cheap manufactured pots, plastic containers and piped water removed the need that had sustained it. A craft that existed to meet a household need does not survive the disappearance of the household need. By the 1970s it was already dying; today it survives mainly in collections.

The Palestinian Association for Cultural Exchange has assembled traditional pottery from historic villages including al-Jib (Gibeon), Beitin (Bethel) and Senjel, still hand-built and still fired in open charcoal-fuelled kilns. The Ramallah artist Vera Tamari has worked shards from ancient pieces directly into her sculpture. Her explanation of why, given to Mother Jones in May 2005, is the plainest statement of what this craft actually is: "You find shards of pottery everywhere because Palestine has had so many thousand of years of history that you walk on a hill and you just find these little pieces of pottery that are evidence of life that was there."

Evidence of life that was there. That is the whole argument for keeping the workshops open.

Frequently Asked Questions

At FALASTIN, we aim to keep that craft alive through our Symbols of Palestine collection, built on the same motifs that Palestinian hands have been putting onto clay, cloth and glass for centuries. For further reading, the survey of the craft and its history, Al Jazeera's report from the Hebron factory and the Balian workshop's own account all document what is described here.

100% of profits from FALASTIN are donated to the United Palestinian Appeal.