วัสดุเฟยองซ์ (ควอตซ์เคลือบอียิปต์)Faiencetjehenet

Faience is a counterfeit that outlived what it counterfeited. From its first appearance in the Egyptian record the glaze colours sit in a narrow band of blue-green, and Egyptologists read that as deliberate: the material stands in for turquoise out of Sinai and lapis lazuli out of Afghanistan. The archaeologist David Frederick Grose puts the same logic behind early glass — the quest to imitate precious stones "explains why most all early glasses are opaque and brilliantly colored", with the deep blue of lapis the most sought after. Quennou's funerary papyrus names his office as overseer of faience-making using the word that strictly means lapis lazuli; by the New Kingdom the word for the stone also meant the substitute.

It has been called the first high-technology ceramic, an artificial medium made to function as a precious stone. Three glazing methods are known — slurry applied by brush or dip, efflorescence where soluble salts mixed into the body migrate out and crystallise on the surface, and cementation, where the object is fired buried in a glazing powder. The last was recognised only after the same method was observed in use at Qom in Iran in the 1960s.

Scale is the point. Moulding came in during the Middle Kingdom: press a model into wet clay, fire the clay, and the mould will give you the object again and again. Several thousand small open-face earthenware moulds were excavated at Tell el-Amarna. That is what an amulet industry looks like from the floor of the workshop.

Inference — faience is the reason a museum tray of Egyptian amulets looks the way it does. It was cheap to mould, buried by the thousand, and made of something that does not rot, corrode or burn. The cloth, dough, reed and papyrus charms that stood beside it are simply gone. A drawer of faience is a record of what survives, not a census of what was worn.

Modelled by hand, or pressed into a fired clay mould, or ground to shape cold, then glazed and fired. The paste is thixotropic and short — it slumps when wet and cracks if worked too hard — so detail comes from the mould and from abrasion afterwards, not from the modelling. From the Middle Kingdom, different coloured pastes were worked together for striped bodies, and inlay and incising followed.

Not made in Egypt as tjehenet any more. The technology carried on eastward as Islamic stonepaste, or fritware, which adds clay to the same quartz body. Museums hold the ancient material in quantity: the Victoria and Albert Museum in London has a faience sceptre 215.9 cm long dated 1427-1400 BC, at the far edge of what the material will do.