Glazed lining tile


Accession Number
W234b
Current Location
House of Life (first floor), Faience and glass case
Object Type
Architecture, Architectural decoration, Tile
Period
Old Kingdom
Dynasty
Third Dynasty
Djoser
Material
Faience
Provenance
Egypt, Saqqara
Number of Elements
1

This image may be used under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license. For uses not covered under the Creative Commons license, or to license images for commercial uses, please contact the Egypt Centre.
Description

A blue glazed lining tile from a chamber in the Djoser Step Pyramid at Saqqara. Two of these were donated with a note written by Henry Wallis dated 8th September 1895. The note states that they were taken to Berlin by Lepsius and presented to Henry Wallis by the Berlin Museum. They are included in Maspero's 'Egyptian Art and Archaeology'. The Djoser step pyramid (c.2700 BCE) uses some 36,000 blue-green glazed tiles measuring. The tiles were threaded on copper wires and set in rows in plaster to form a panelling imitating hangings of reed mat.

Bibliography

Davidovits and Davidovits, Why Djoser's blue Egyptian faience tiles are not blue? Manufacturing Djoser's faience tiles at temperatures as low as 250 degrees C?, In J.-C. Goyon, C. Gardin, (eds.), Proceedings of the Ninth International Congress of Egyptologists – Actes du Neuvième Congrès International des Ègyptologues. Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta, 373-378.