Faience Necklace This Necklace Was Found in

¶ … Faience Necklace This necklace was found in the Egyptian tomb. Wealthy Egyptians who died were buried with many of their most precious and/or sentimental life's possession that they wished to take with them to another world (the Afterlife). This necklace was found in one ancient Egyptian tomb and evidently manifested value despite its cheap nature. (Faience was a relatively cheap material) (Andrews, 1981) The beads are various scintillating colors representing various values of the Afterlife.

They were wrapped around the mummy's neck in order to restore breath through the symbolism of these colors. The blue, green, and black are water, sky, vegetation and youth. The White, yellow and red beads meanwhile signify sun, light, fire, and blood. The blue and green beads in this broad collar are supposed to be turquoise and lapis lazuli beads. The Faience is made from the crushed quarts. The necklace dates to 332-30 BC.

The beads are arranged in a beautiful arc, the whole perfectly designed so as to fit in equal length to one another. The various shades of blue peeking into sky dark blue, melting into lilac blue and then into white, are merged into one another and converged so that one's eye integrates the different shades into one peaceful while. Each cluster is strung of various vertical beads, constituting approximately an inch in length.

Each is tied and clumped at the bottom with a tidy clump of small beads that include white, yellow, and red. These resemble a flower. The same range of beads run through the chain at the top looping the clusters at the top too. The entire chain exudes a dazzling, peaceful impression. Some of these beads may be made of shell.

There was another Faience necklace discovered in the same period in another Egyptian tomb which was described by its excavator as containing 'small blue and black glazed disc, shell disc, blue glazed cylinder, flattened crumb (Petrie, 26). This has a similar description. As mentioned, Faience is relatively cheap material but the great amount and diversity of colour and shades that tare seen in this beautiful broad chain was likely achieved by the fact that different minerals were added to the basic mixture before it was fired.

In this way, the faience sometimes deliberately imitated semi-=precious stones as was in this case here where the beads represented turquoise and lapis lazuli beads. These were quarried and shaped and tehfor4e relatively expensive. The small crumbs and beads at the bottom of the chain that were clustered into peonies or posies and that contrasted each other with White, yellow and red were given the textured finish by adding the small crumbs tot the beads before they were heated. The chain is strung in two points with these.