Egyptian faience

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Egyptian faience is an extension of the term faience. Faience describes Islamic and European tin-glazed earthenware, and has been extended to describe the ceramic faience of pre-Dynastic and Pharaonic Egypt, Crete and sites in the Indus Valley civilization. Some faience formulations did not include clay, using primarily quartz instead. These types of faience beads are also known from prehistoric sites^[1] in Ireland. Whether they were imported or manufactured there is unknown at present (Waddell, 1998). Blue faience was manufactured by grinding quartz into a fine powder then fusing by heat with a glaze of malachite, blue azurite and powdered talc. This may have been manufactured as a substitute for mineral turquoise.

John E. Dayton, in Minerals, Metals, Glazing and Man, observes that this early faience, compounded of quartz sand with potash (potassium oxide) or natron (hydrous sodium carbonate), had a self-glazing property; raw faience was a "sandy mass" that bonded together "by the incipient glass around each grain of sand," and also acquired a surface glaze through the same process. Thus, Dayton defines early faience as "a self-glazing paste of sand" or "self-glazing quartz paste." This self-glazing property would likely have been critical in the ancients' discovery and development of glazing their pottery (see ceramic glaze).

Faience, like other ceramic materials, but unlike glass or metals, is unsuitable for recycling—even the earliest faience objects like simple beads can survive millennia intact. Ancient faience, like ancient glasses, ceramics, pigments, and glazes, often had a dozen components or more, making analyses difficult and descriptions only approximate. Faience was popularly known as tjehnet to the Ancient Egyptians--the same word employed for lapis lazuli--and was thought "to glisten with a light symbolic of life, rebirth and immortality" to these ancient peoples^[2]