Egyptian faience

Egyptian faience is a sintered-quartz ceramic material from Ancient Egypt. The sintering process "covered [the material] with a true vitreous coating" as the quartz underwent vitrification, creating a bright lustre of various colours "usually in a transparent blue or green isotropic glass". Its name in the Ancient Egyptian language was tjehenet, literally "the gleaming" or "the dazzling", and modern archeological terms for it include sintered quartz, glazed frit, and glazed composition. Tjehenet is distinct from the crystalline pigment Egyptian blue, for which it has sometimes incorrectly been used as a synonym.

It is not faience in the usual sense of tin-glazed pottery, and is different from the enormous range of clay-based Ancient Egyptian pottery, from which utilitarian vessels were made. It is similar to later Islamic stonepaste (or "fritware") from the Middle East, although that generally includes more clay.

Egyptian faience is considerably more porous than glass proper. It can be cast in molds to create small vessels, jewelry and decorative objects. Although it contains the major constituents of glass (silica, lime) and no clay until late periods, Egyptian faience is frequently discussed in surveys of ancient pottery, as in stylistic and art-historical terms, objects made of it are closer to pottery styles than ancient Egyptian glass.

Egyptian faience was very widely used for small objects, from beads to small statues, and is found in both elite and popular contexts. It was the most common material for scarabs and other forms of amulet and ushabti figures, and it was used in most forms of ancient Egyptian jewellery, as the glaze made it smooth against the skin. Larger applications included dishware, such as cups and bowls, and wall tiles, which were mostly used for temples. The well-known blue hippopotamus figurines, placed in the tombs of officials, can be up to 20 cm (7.9 in) long, approaching the maximum practical size for Egyptian faience, though the Victoria and Albert Museum in London has a 215.9-centimetre (85.0 in) sceptre, dated 1427–1400 BC.

It is called "Egyptian faience" to distinguish it from faience, the tin-glazed pottery whose name came from Faenza in northern Italy, a center of maiolica (one type of faience) production in the late Middle Ages. Egyptian faience was both exported widely in the ancient world and made locally in many places, and is found in Mesopotamia, around the Mediterranean and in northern Europe as far away as Scotland. The term is used for the material wherever it was made and modern scientific analyses are often the only way of establishing the provenance of simple objects such as the very common beads.

The term is therefore unsatisfactory in several respects, although clear in an Ancient Egyptian context, and is increasingly rejected in museum and archaeological usage. The British Museum now calls this material "glazed composition", with the following note in their online collection database:

The term is used for objects with a body made of finely powdered quartz grains fused together with small amounts of alkali and/or lime through partial heating. The bodies are usually colourless but natural impurities give them a brown or greyish tint. Colourants can also be added to give it an artificial colour. It can be modelled by hand, thrown or moulded, and hardens with firing. This material is used in the context of Islamic ceramics where it is described as stonepaste (or fritware). Glazed composition is related to glass, but glass is formed by completely fusing the ingredients in a liquid melted at high temperature. This material is also popularly called faience in the contexts of Ancient Egypt and Ancient Near East. However, this is a misnomer as these objects have no relationship to the glazed pottery vessels made in Faenza, from which the faience term derives. Other authors use the terms sintered quartz, glazed frit, frit, composition, Egyptian Blue, paste or (in the 19th century) even porcelain, although the last two terms are very inappropriate as they also describe imitation gems and a type of ceramic. Frit is technically a flux.

From the inception of faience in the archaeological record of Ancient Egypt, the elected colors of the glazes varied within an array of blue-green hues. Glazed in these colours, faience was perceived as substitute for blue-green materials such as turquoise, found in the Sinai Peninsula, and lapis lazuli from Afghanistan. According to the archaeologist David Frederick Grose, the quest to imitate precious stones "explains why most all early glasses are opaque and brilliantly colored" and that the deepest blue color imitating lapis lazuli was likely the most sought after. As early as the Predynastic graves at Naqada, Badar, el-Amrah, Matmar, Harageh, Avadiyedh and El-Gerzeh, glazed steatite and faience beads are found associated with these semi-precious stones. The association of faience with turquoise and lapis lazuli becomes even more conspicuous in Quennou's funerary papyrus, giving his title as the director of overseer of faience-making, using the word which strictly means lapis lazuli, which by the New Kingdom had also come to refer to the 'substitute', faience. The symbolism embedded in blue glazing could recall both the Nile, the waters of heaven and the home of the gods, whereas green could possibly evoke images of regeneration, rebirth and vegetation.