Isaac Asimov's Worlds of Science Fiction. Book 9: Robots

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Robots are not a modern concept. They are as old as pottery at the very least.

Once human beings learned to fashion objects out of clay and bake them hard-especially objects that looked like human beings-it was an easy conceptual leap to suppose that human beings themselves had been fashioned out of clay. Whereas ordinary lifeless statues and figurines needed nothing more than a human potter, the more miraculous human body, living and thinking, required a divine potter.

Thus, in the Bible, God is described as forming the first man, potter-wise, out of clay. "And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul." (Genesis 2:7)

In the Greek myths, it was Prometheus who fashioned the first human beings out of clay and water and Athena breathed life into them. No doubt one could go through the myths of many nations and find gods busily making little statues that became human beings.

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