To be invented once, an artefact only needs to tickle the imagination of a single person with the resources to create or describe it. But if invented multiple times and in multiple eras, an artefact starts to take on the cast of an item of necessity - an archetype even - made inevitable by the needs, desires and physiology of our very personhood.
The boats which bore the first humans to Australia 40,000 years ago were not the descendants of those used in the Aegean Sea some 90,000 years before, any more than they were the intellectual predecessors of the Pesse canoes, found in the Netherlands. Rather, this example of convergent evolution speaks to the common pursuit of humanity to travel the seas, go over the horizon and get nipped in the behind by sharks.
So too with the jadle....
Unfortunately, because the concatenation of the Egyptian hieroglyph for jar and simpulum or ladle in Latin was considered both unwritable and unpronounceable, it had the reverse effect, contributing to the sense that the East-West divide of the empire’s latter years was insuperable.
In another attempt, the handle was too far over to one side, making it impossible to get your hands covered in liquid whilst pouring however much you may want to. After months of trying and thousands of sketches, he became so frustrated with this object that he tried to shoot it with a crossbow - as can be seen in the image to the right.
All of which history and prehistory brings us to the most famous contemporary proponent of jadles. Still best-known for his shards, James McNicoll has focussed much of his pottiness on jadles. He believes that all his creations need to be multifunctional. “The shards have many distinct uses including delineating the boundaries of improvised backyard cricket tournaments and mildly inconveniencing wombats intent on raiding a carrot patch,” explained the long-time Oxford resident in a rare interview. Asked for comment about the presumed multiple functions of his jadles he declined to come to the phone, despite his wife’s best efforts to tackle him to the floor.