Egyptian faience

Common card · No. 251027

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...

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