Painting was used as a decorative medium in the Nile Valley perhaps as early as the Khartoum Mesolithic onward, when paintings of animals and humans were created on rock walls as early as 6000 B. C. Within Egypt the exploitation of mineral pigments for artistic renderings was well underway in the Naqada I era, most prominently for ceramic objects (Crowfoot Payne; 1993; Aksamit 1998), but few results have been published identifying pigments from Neolithic objects. For the Pharaonic era, however, numerous studies have been conducted to identify pigments and to study the application of paint (Blom-Bcier 1994; Lee and Quirke 2000). Likewise a number of publications have addressed the identification of paint binders, particularly on museum objects. (Newman and Serpico 2000; Newman and Halpine 2001). Glues from animals or fish have been found as a binder and adhesive, but gums, from plants or trees, have been identified more frequently. The analysis of these organic binders is more difficult than pigment identification, and often results must be reported as simply ‘‘animal glue’’ or ‘‘plant gum’’, without being able to specify further (Newman and Serpico 2000; McCarthy 2001). In general, the ancient palette consisted of black, white, red, yellow, green and blue, as the primary pairs of colors, along with a number of mixed paints such as brown, pink, orange, and grey. With the exception of black nearly all the pigments used in ancient Egypt were mineral in nature; black was consistently carbon-based, generally made from soot (Colinart 1998). Most of the mineral pigments were collected regionally throughout Egypt, but some were rarer and required importation, for example, orpiment and realgar. Orpiment in particular, a yellow arsenic sulfide, may have been collected in the Kharga Oasis or from an island in the Red Sea, but it was also imported from as far away as Turkey or Iran, and recent studies have shown that it was not uncommon for this expensive pigment to be mixed with the easily available ferrous oxide, yellow ocher (Colinart 2001; McCarthy 2001). Orpiment has a more luminous quality to it than does yellow ocher, and the mixture enhanced the golden appearance of the yellow pigment. Like orpiment, realgar is an arsenic sulfide and was used as an alternative for red and orange colors. Both of these pigments have been found more often on New Kingdom and later objects and paintings, but there is now good reason to think that they were used as early as the Old Kingdom. The same is true for the mineral huntite, a magnesium-based pigment, that is a very bright white (Lee and Quirke 2000; Heywood 2001). It alternates with calcium carbonate and calcium sulfate which were the most common white pigments used, but huntite was employed as early as the Old Kingdom, particularly to emphasize the whiteness of garments; it equally could underlay other colors to brighten them. Since huntite was used as early as the Old Kingdom, a source for it in Egypt may well have existed, but until now it has not been located.
The pigments that have been the most debated and discussed are the blues and greens (Blom-Boer 1994; LeFur 1994; Colinart 1998; Pages-Camagna 1998; Lee and Quirke 2000; Green 2001; Middleton 2001). Laboratory studies demonstrate that the vast majority of blue pigments are the synthetic material ‘‘Egyptian blue’’, ground from a vitreous frit-like substance, composed of sand, copper, calcite or gypsum, and an alkali such as natron. The sources of the copper have been debated and may have been various, including malachite and copper filings. Green pigment was generally also a frit-like substance, made, like Egyptian blue, in several stages, from similar ingredients. Doubt as to the existence of a separate green pigment before the New Kingdom was raised by one set of studies that concluded that early green color layers had been applied as a lighter blue and degraded to green, but more recently this has been shown to have been in error (Pages-Camagna 1998). A green frit existed as early as the Old Kingdom. Mixed colors, such as gray, combined carbon black and calcium carbonate or calcium sulfate, while pink paint in most periods of Ancient Egypt was a combination of red ocher with white. On objects of the Ptolemaic Period, however, vermilion and an organic pigment were identified as a pink color (Lee and Quirke 2000).
World History
