Invention of the potter's wheel in Mesopotamia
- Date
- c. 3500 BCE
- Category
- Science, technology & invention
- Region
- Southern Mesopotamia (Iraq)
- Era
- Prehistory
- Significance
By around 3500 BCE potters in southern Mesopotamia were using a true, continuously rotating potter's wheel, an advance over the slow hand-turned turntables (tournettes) in use since the sixth millennium.
The fast wheel let craftworkers throw symmetrical vessels rapidly and in large quantities, fostering standardised mass production of pottery and the rise of dedicated artisan specialists within the emerging urban economy. The same principle of a heavy disc rotating on an axle is closely tied to one of history's most consequential mechanical ideas. Within a few centuries the rotary motion pioneered for ceramics was adapted to transport, producing wheeled carts and wagons. The potter's wheel thus stands both as a major economic technology in its own right and as a conceptual precursor to vehicular wheels.
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Related science, technology & invention events
- Invention of cuneiform writing at Urukc. 3300–3100 BCE
- Invention of the wheel and wheeled vehiclesc. 3500 BCE
- Earliest Egyptian Hieroglyphs at Abydos (Tomb U-j)c. 3250 BCE
- Ötzi the Iceman, a Copper Age life preserved in icec. 3300 BCE
- Earliest wheeled vehicles in Mesopotamiac. 3300–3000 BCE
- Early horse domestication on the Eurasian steppec. 3500 BCE
Further reading
The wider story
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