I hope there’s an afterlife so that whoever made this pot 2,000 years ago can brag that their cookware is so good it’s still usable literally millennia later. Something about this object being lost for centuries and then rediscovered, and being put (successfully) to its original purpose again is so pleasing to me.
Some Uzbek digging a canal: “Oh fuck yes a free pot. This rules.”
This is like how you hear about how the reason why most of the Egyptian pyramids now resemble piles of rubble is that locals over the course of the last 4,500 years have been quarrying them for stone to build their houses (the Great Pyramid is no exception, it’s just so absurdly big that they’ve barely scratched the surface, and struggle to reach the polished stone at the top. Little remains of most smaller pyramids), or why we don’t have a lot of “common place” metal artifacts from medieval Europe is because people would melt them down to recycle the metal (even those fancier pieces no one could bring themselves to destroy have largely been defaced by Renaissance people who got a kick out of over-polishing suits of armor).
Most people, especially in times and places without museums, don’t immediately tend to think something is worth preserving. This was just at some old tarnished pot no one was using. It’s actually kind of normal to not immediately assume something ridiculous, like it predating Christendom. And even if one does, who cares?
Your banged up Kirkland brand Teflon frying pan might be incredibly valuable 2,000 years from now, if it survives. It’s made of blued stainless steel and coated in toxic plastic, so there’s a good chance it will.
Some of the iron in it was first mined from billions years old banded iron formations to make a scythe in the late iron age, then it was straightened out to make a peasant’s spear. That war ended, kings sought to disarm the peasantry, so it was melted down to make a plow head. Centuries later that dull old plow was pulled out of some old barn and melted down to make tanks in WWII. That tank hull went on the surplus market and eventually got recycled into dishware.
Wary of health effects of Teflon, you throw it into a landfill and get one of those new dotclad things. Said landfill gets mined by a post apocalyptic society thousands of years from now after all the Earth’s resources are depleted, forcing them to mine old 21st century landfills. They scrape off the rust and rotting Teflon and use your old frying pan to cook chickenosaurus eggs. It’s durable and heats evenly, and becomes an heirloom for generations. It eventually rusts away, the iron oxide irons scattered into red soil.
