Materials of Interest: Faience

There are a couple of interesting articles in the Journal of Archaeological Science on the technical aspects of that artificial jewelry the Egyptians made called faience. It's such interesting stuff, and the word has such a strange history, that it compelled me to write about it. (And ach! did I have trouble spelling that consistently.)

There's a bunch of other things like this--I mean, cool materials created or manipulated by our predecessors on this planet, with great names like wootz steel and Maya blue and Chinese purple, that I didn't realize before I did some poking around. So, I think I'll start a Sunday series on them with faience today.

So today: faience (not usually spelled faenz or fiancee or finance). Sadly, I don't have a photograph of some of the ancient faience to show you--this photograph of the 15th century Bibi Jawindi tomb in Pakistan illustrates medieval faience tiles, a different kind of process altogether. But, even thought it isn't Egyptian faience, the Bibi Jawindi has the sort of beautiful decoration that inspired archaeologists of the 19th century to call the mysterious substance they discovered in Egyptian tombs 'faience'. I found a couple of places with some photos, though--listed below there is an article on TourEgypt by Marie Parsons and one Bead Site, so be sure to drop in on them too.

• Faience, more on this elusively fascinating stuff
• Egyptian Faience on TourEgypt
• Egyptian Faience on the Bead Site
• Egyptian Timeline
• Mesopotamian Timeline