Pottery, Glass and Craft Work in the Parthian World

Under the Arsacid dynasty, which ruled from about 247 BCE to 224 CE, craft production included potters in Iran and Mesopotamia making everyday vessels from local clays. These cooking, storage and serving vessels were among the objects used in homes. Potters shaped jars and bowls, then used slips, paint, burnishing or glaze to finish their surfaces. Regional pottery shows different choices of form and decoration, while a study of sherds from Ain Sinu in northern Iraq suggests that some potters reused Roman glass in glaze.

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From clay to fired vessel

A potter worked clay into a workable mass, shaped it by hand or on a wheel, and let the vessel dry before firing. Drying removed moisture so the vessel could be fired without the wet body cracking or changing shape; heat hardened the clay into ceramic. The clay itself affected a vessel’s color and texture. At Susa in southwestern Iran, common wares include light yellow, buff (light tan) and orange-pink clay bodies.

A surviving Parthian vase from Warka, ancient Uruk in present-day Iraq, shows one way this work proceeded. The British Museum describes it as wheel-thrown, meaning shaped on a rotating wheel, from yellow clay with a blue glaze. A fused mark on its underside records contact with a tripod support in the kiln, or firing oven, which held the vase upright during firing. For construction materials and their structural use, see Parthian Architecture and Building.

Potters could also change the surface before firing. A slip is a thin coating of liquid clay that can give a vessel a more even color. Painting added designs. Burnishing means rubbing the clay surface smooth and polished, often before it is fired. A glaze fused into a glassy outer layer during firing. In Sistan, a region spanning eastern Iran and southwestern Afghanistan, potters covered finer vessels with dark red slip and rubbed them in circular bands; storage jars could instead have ribbed walls or incised decoration.

Regional pottery and local workshops

Pottery traditions varied across the Arsacid lands. Northern wares often had burnished surfaces, while pottery from southern and central regions more often carried painted decoration. Sistan adds its own recognizable forms: red, ring-burnished bowls and stemmed goblets alongside ribbed storage jars. These objects served different tasks, from serving food or drink to keeping supplies.

At Susa, excavators identified a small local workshop making “clinky ware,” a hard-fired pottery named for the ringing sound it makes when tapped. This link between a distinctive clay body and a workshop gives a rare view of production. Much other pottery is known from its use in settlements or graves, and its shape and decoration can be compared with wares from other regions. Most pottery from Parthian Persia, however, belonged to local traditions.

Glaze and recycled glass

Glaze used silica, the main substance in sand, to make a glassy coating on clay. Mesopotamian glazes commonly combined silica with plant ash and heat. A 2020 study by Jonathan Wood and Yi-Ting Hsu examined eight glazed pottery sherds from Ain Sinu, a northern Iraqi frontier outpost occupied by Roman forces in the early third century CE. Three sherds had chemical compositions resembling Roman glass made with natron, a naturally occurring sodium carbonate used in glassmaking.

The authors propose that potters crushed glass into a powder, mixed it with clay or mud to make a paste, applied it to the vessel and fired it. Their explanation links recycled glass to the glaze on this particular group of pottery and to the wider movement of imported material. The exact workshop where the Ain Sinu sherds were made remains unknown.

Glass vessels and manufacture

Glassblowing allowed workers to form hollow vessels from molten glass. A glassworker gathered the hot material on a hollow blowpipe and inflated it with air; while the glass remained soft, the worker turned and shaped the bubble into a bottle. The technique was developed in the Syro-Palestinian region in the mid-first century BCE and probably reached Mesopotamia in the first century CE.

Small free-blown bottles appear at late Parthian sites in Mesopotamia and Iran. “Free-blown” means that the worker shaped the bubble by blowing and handling it rather than inflating it inside a mold. Many examples come from graves and were probably used to hold oil or perfume. Specialists have difficulty distinguishing locally made Arsacid vessels from imports, so the origin of individual bottles remains uncertain.