CAIRO: Colorful pottery has come to represent ancient Egyptian culture, but recent discoveries and new information have revealed the truth: it wasn't always so. According to new archaeological finds in Egypt, only during the New Kingdom was pottery a variety of colors, including the pale blue come to be synonymous with ancient Egypt. Although major films, such as the popular The Mummy series, portrays ancient Egypt full of splendor and color, these discoveries across Egypt, the Middle East and Sudan, have shown this to be more than false. Most likely, the bluish tint incorporated into ancient Egyptian pottery was only found in major artisans or royal residences. According to an The Epoch Times report, archaeologists were forced to squeeze their way through a narrow tunnel carved into the rocks of Egypt in order to gaze on how the pottery was made, and survived until the present age. “Copper-based pigments must be applied in thick layers and were added after firing, so they tended to flake off when an object was handled. Instead of copper, the colorant used on most of the blue painted pottery is cobalt, which was fired onto the pots,†said Colin Hope, associate professor and director of the Center for Archaeology and Ancient History at Monash University in Australia, in a press release. Many of the blue pottery was predated with other, less vivid colors from a combination of ground copper and ground quartz. The pale blue pottery is believed to have employed cobalt as the coloring agent. Hope and other archaeologists discovered cobalt as the main ingredient, but also uncovered trace amounts of zinc, nickel and manganese – a mixture of elements distinct to the point they serve as a chemical fingerprint – on the pottery they studied. Pottery is one of the few artifacts that remain readily accessible to archaeologists, with new finds occurring almost annually across the former ancient empire of the Pharaohs. For now, the likes of Hope and others continue to search for more clues to the ancient civilization, which yearly has a renewed sense that more and more discoveries are on the horizon. BM
