After the object’s final form was pinched to perfection, it was dried in the sun, polished smooth with a stone, and painted to endow it with features such as hair and clothing.
Khnum, the Egyptian deity of water and pottery, was believed to have created the first children using his potter’s wheel and clay from the banks of the Nile. This Egyptian statuette from ca. 3500–3400 B.C., in the Predynastic period, was not made with a potter’s wheel, however. In this era, Egyptians employed the pinching method to create remarkably thin-walled vessels and representational figures out of hollowed-out pieces of brownish-red clay also known as terracotta. After the object’s final form was pinched to perfection, it was dried in the sun, polished smooth with a stone, and painted to endow it with features such as hair and clothing. This female figure’s small, pointed head may be an exaggeration of the nose to symbolize “the source of the breath of life,” as described by the Brooklyn Museum, where the work resides.