Most potter's wheels spin counterclockwise, except in Japan, and there may be an ancient reason
Walk into almost any pottery studio and the wheel turns counterclockwise, with the right hand shaping the outside of the pot. Japanese potters traditionally do the reverse. One theory traces the common direction to ancient Egypt, where a potter kicked the flywheel, then pulled it with the left hand.
Early pots were built by coiling: rolling clay into long ropes, stacking and smoothing them. Potters often worked on a mat or large leaf, and prints of these survive on ancient pot bases, showing they turned the vessel rather than walking around it. The slow wheel, or tournette, grew from that habit. By around 3500 BC in the Near East, potters were rotating one by hand or foot while coiling, though only a narrow range of vessels was made this way.
The real leap came in the mid to late 3rd millennium BC with the fast wheel, a heavy stone disc that stored energy like a flywheel once kicked or pushed with a stick. It made throwing possible: centring a lump of clay, opening a hole, and raising walls as it spins. Thrown pots are thinner, more varied in shape, and carry telltale rings inside, so archaeologists can tell them from handmade ware. Output per hour jumped, an early step toward mass production.
Where it all began is unsettled. A stone wheel from Ur has been dated to about 3129 BC, and many scholars credit the Sumerians. Yet one found in western Ukraine, from the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture, dates to the middle of the 5th millennium BC, centuries earlier. Egypt has its champions too, and Egyptian myth even had the god Khnum shaping the first humans on a wheel. Oddly, the wheel never reached the pre-Columbian Americas, where potters kept coiling and beating clay by hand.
Iron Age potters raised the working surface about a metre off the floor on an axle above a kick wheel, freeing both hands. Japan adopted the wheel between 552 and 710 CE. Today motors do most of the spinning and can run either way, though some studio potters still prefer kicking. In Jingdezhen, China, three or more potters sometimes throw a single giant pot together.
Source: Potter's wheel
