Clay jars and public fountains

This lesson asks you to take information about daily life in an early society from what people used and built, and to describe some of that daily life, such as how water was kept and drunk. The curriculum asks for a few societies, including a First Nation and an Inuit society; the museum offers one medieval Islamic example, an Iranian city's clay jars and the public fountains called sabils, so your class must bring the other societies and their visual evidence. ¹

Look at the expectations: they ask you to read daily life from visual evidence and to describe it. For each object or building, ask what it was for, who used it every day, and what it cannot show.

In early Nishapur, Wilkinson writes, every house had large pitchers that held water and small ones to drink from, and the pitchers kept the water cool by evaporation in a hot, dry land ². A sabil was a charitable building endowed to give people fresh water every day all year round ³. Al-Haddad says sabils received great care in their siting, building and decoration, and in the many endowments that kept them working ³.

Each house had its own water pitchers, and a town could also have a sabil that gave water to people. Why might a town want a sabil for everyone, even though houses had their own pitchers?

• The sabil: how it was built, where its water came from, and the endowments that kept it working.
• Unglazed earthenware: the jars and pitchers in which households stored their water.

Read the records on unglazed earthenware and on the sabil. Draw one day in a household that has to store and fetch its water, and label each thing the household uses.