Decorated ceramic wares from Asyut

In the interests of the nineteenth century, Egyptian things had to be both beautiful and genuine. This also applies to the ceramic wares from Asyut, which have already been displayed since 1851 at the international World's Fairs, and whose design, apparently inspired by ancient Egyptian ceramics, fascinated the public.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, a cruise along the Nile belonged to one of the highlights of a trip to Egypt for prosperous Europeans. In Asyut, located en route from Cairo to Aswan on the west bank of the Nile, tourists stock up with the typical products of the pottery metropolis. In hundreds of houses the potter's wheel spins, creating wares for local demand, for tourism, and for export: bottles for keeping drinking water fresh, incense vessels which replace those of silver in the poorer mosques of Asyut, flower vases, flacons for rose water, tea and coffee services, containers for tobacco, bathing tubs, or rasps in the form of crocodiles for foot callouses. Many potters mark their products using small round stamps with their name. Some of them supplement these with stamps based on those of European silver manufacturers, as if they wished to additionally emphasise the genuine nature of their products. Until recently vases from ancient Egypt have influenced the form and decoration of silver and porcelain wares. Now, in contrast, as Gaston Maspero, head of the Egypt Antiquities Administration, writes in Egypt: Ancient Sites and Modern Scenes (London 1910), European silverware from France and Vienna serve as models for the potters in Asyut. In the wake of tourism and transnational trade, a mixture of local pottery art and European expectations was created: sufficiently "Egyptian" to appear exotic, yet trusted and inexpensive enough at the same time to be brought back home as a "typical" souvenir.

The First World War causes a temporary cessation of the cruises in the land of the pharaohs. In Asyut, the ceramic production comes to a halt. Today nobody there remembers the once flourishing pottery industry.