Ancient Egyptian faience

Magazine Antiques, Sept, 1998 by Florence Dunn Friedman

It is important to remember that everything we call Egyptian art today originally functioned in some protective or other capacity and that aesthetic quality was irrelevant in this regard. The exquisite objects in the present exhibition were no more or less efficacious than poorly made objects in protecting the body (see PI. XI) or warding off harmful forces (see Pl. XVI). Magical or spiritual effectiveness in this world and the next was the result of a clearly fashioned type of object of a symbolic color that could be inscribed or decorated to impart the greatest power to the user. Beauty was no more a factor than a beautiful wedding ring makes one more effectively married than a cheap one. Nevertheless, those who could afford it sought the finest quality, then as now.

The finest work was produced by the craftsmen attached to the Egyptian royal workshops. One can only guess that creative direction came from those who commissioned the work and the chief designers. Carpenters and faience workers must have cooperated on complex objects such as the wig shown in Plate XII. Craftsmen skilled in cutting soft materials such as steatite and ivory may have done the final tooling on some faience. In the workshop complex at Tel el-Amarna, glass, pottery, and faience craftsmen may all have been working in the same area, which must have been hot, dusty, and occasionally dangerous because of the fires and kilns.

One of the Egyptians' most exquisite achievements was to inlay faience objects with faience of another color (see Pls. XIV, XVIII). Both objects illustrated are decorated with tiny inlays and only cursory areas of freehand-painted glaze. The replication of the technique by Mimi Leveque, the conservator at the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, suggests that the technique was, in principle, not difficult. It involves pressing the colorants in powder, paste, or slurry form, into the channels cut for the inlays, and then firing the piece only once. However, the precision, clarity, and beauty of these ancient products are at present impossible to replicate.

Like the majority of ancient art, most faience objects are anonymous. However, we know even less about faience workers and their shop organization than we do about other Egyptian craftsmen. A scene painted on the Twenty-sixth Dynasty (664-525 B.C.) tomb of Ibi (Aba) at Thebes(2) may show the mixing of the paste and crafting of a faience object. If so, it is the only known representation of faience production - in stark contrast to the many tomb depictions of furniture making, the production of stone sculpture, and the step-by-step production of clay vessels. Possibly the fact that faience was deemed a magical substance prevented its manufacture from being depicted. Similarly, only a handful of names and titles of faience workers are known. One of them is Rekha-mun whose Nineteenth Dynasty faience stela proclaims him the "Maker of faience for [the god] Amun."

Middle-class people such as Rekhamun used faience, but it was first and foremost a luxury product for royalty and the elite, and it is at this level that we see its associations with magic. Amenhotep III, for example, could have commissioned a kohl jar for his wife of more costly stone or of gold, but he chose faience, assuredly for its association with rebirth (Pl. XVII). Some of the finest inlaid, polychrome faience objects were produced under Amenhotep III, including the magnificent shabti that was probably the gift of Amenhotep to one Lady Sati (Pl. XIII). After the New Kingdom (1550-1070 B.C.), faience workers experimented less with inlays and more with glazes and shapes. This produced the velvety even surfaces found on some works of the Third Intermediate Period (see Pl. XV) and the Ptolemaic Period (332-30 B.C.; see Pls. XIX, XX). In the later period and into the Roman era, clay was sometimes added to faience vessels so that they could be thrown on the wheel (see Pl. XXI).