The term faience comes from a kind of brightly-colored glazed earthenware developed during the Renaissance in France and Italy. The word is derived from Faenza, a town in Italy, where factories making the tin-glazed earthenware called majolica (also spelled maiolica) were prevalent. Majolica itself derived from North African Islamic tradition ceramics, and is thought to have developed, oddly enough, from the region of Mesopotamia in the 9th century AD.
Faience-glazed tiles decorate many buildings of the middle ages, including those of the Islamic civilization, such as the Bibi Jawindi tomb in Pakistan, built in the 15th century AD, shown in the illustration.
Ancient Faience
Ancient faience, on the other hand, is a completely manufactured material created perhaps to imitate the bright colors and gloss of hard-to-get gems and precious stones. It was used in jewelry throughout Egypt and the Near East beginning about 5500 years ago. Forms of faience are found throughout the Bronze Age Mediterranean, and faience objects have been recovered from archaeological sites of the Indus, Mesopotamian, Minoan, and Egyptian civilizations.
Evidence for the 4th millennium BC production of faience has been found at the Mesopotamian sites of Hamoukar and Tell Brak. Faience objects have also been discovered at predynastic Badarian sites in Egypt. Scholars appear divided as to where the material was invented, but it seems to have been no later than the 4th millennium BC.
Faience was an important trade item during the Bronze Age; the Uluburun shipwreck of 1300 BC had over 75,000 faience beads in its cargo. Faience continued as a production method throughout the Roman period into the first century BC.
Ancient Faience Manufacturing Practices
Ancient faience was made by grinding quartz or sand crystals and mixing them with various levels of sodium, potassium, calcium, magnesium, and/or copper oxide. This mixture was formed into shapes such as beads or amulets, and then the shapes were exposed to heat. During heating, the formed shapes created their own glazes, essentially a thin hard layer of various bright colors, depending on the particular recipe. Types of objects formed out of ancient faience include amulets, beads, rings, scarabs, and even some bowls.
Recent investigations of Egyptian faience technology indicate that recipes changed over time and from place to place. Some of the changes involved using soda-rich plant ashes as flux additives--flux helps the materials fuse together at high temperature heating. Basically, component materials in glass melt at different temperatures, and to get faience to hang together you need to moderate the melting points.
However, Rehren has argued that the differences in glasses (including but not limited to faience) may have to do more with the specific mechanical processes used to create them, rather than varying specific admixture of plant products.
The original colors of faience were created by adding copper (to get a turquoise color) or manganese (to get black). Around the beginning of glass production, about 1500 BC, additional colors were created including cobalt blue, manganese purple and lead antimonate yellow.
Sources
Michael S. Tite and Andrew J. Shortland have done some really interesting experimental studies with faience of late.
Olin, Jacqueline S., M. J. Blackman, Jared E. Mitchem, and Gregory A. Waselkov 2002 Compositional Analysis of Glazed Earthenwares from Eighteenth-Century Sites on the Northern Gulf Coast. Historical Archaeology 36(1):79-96.
Rehren, Th. 2008 A review of factors affecting the composition of early Egyptian glasses and faience: alkali and alkali earth oxides. Journal of Archaeological Science 35(5):1345-1354.
Tite, M. S., P. Manti, and A. J. Shortland 2007 A technological study of ancient faience from Egypt. Journal of Archaeological Science 34:1568-1583.
Tite, M. S., et al. 2006 The composition of the soda-rich and mixed alkali plant ashes used in the production of glass. Journal of Archaeological Science 331284-1292.
Walthall, John A. 1991 Faience in French colonial Illinois. Historical Archaeology 25(1):80-105. May be obtained from the Society for Historical Archaeology website for free.
Waselkov, Gregory A. and John A. Walthall 2002 Faience Styles in French Colonial North America: A Revised Classification. Historical Archaeology 36(1):62-78.
This glossary entry is part of the Dictionary of Archaeology. Any mistakes are the responsibility of Kris Hirst.
