The work
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Among the most exploited places in ancient times there were the mines in Wadi Maghara, in Sinai, already active under the pharaoh Djoser (III Dynasty). To reach them it was necessary to cross the Oriental Desert and follow the caost of the Red Sea; copper and malachite were extracted and the region was sacred to the goddess Hathor, in fact called “Lady of malachite”. In the most southern area of the Egyptian territory there were instead the quarries of diorite ( a dark kind similar to granite) exploited since Cheope’s epoch, the builder of the Great Pyramid. The transport of this material was along the course of the Nile, at least up to the first cataract, and others, thanks to the canals excavated by the pharaohs since the IV dynasty. Quarries of alabaster are in El-Amarna, the basalt came from Fayum, the granite from Assuan, the limestone from Tura, the quartzite from the area of Eliopoli, the gold instead, was extracted from the mines in the Oriental Desert (Wadi Hammamat) and from Nubian. |
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The carpenters never used nails but small wood pegs and the pieces fit so precisely one into the other that glue was rarely necessary. The block of wood was roughly cast with a hatchet or cut with a saw, then finished with a plane; the more complicated shaping were, instead, made with a drill and a small arch. The finished object was then smoothed with an abrasive dust and finally plastered. On the wall paintings it’s possible to see those who melt, sitting around the fucina, while they blow with tubes on the coal to obtain the right level of heat necessary to melt the metals. The bellows in fact were introduced only in the New Reign. |
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The Egyptians discovered that, mixing sand rich of quartz and pure silicio acid in crystalline form with sodium (that they obtained from the ashes of alga) and the limestone alkali, and heating it all at the temperature of eight-hundred degrees, it was possible to obtain a paste of glass (faiace). This paste, viscose and of quick hardening, could be shaped in little pearls, in small bottles (above a nucleus of clay) or also in elegantly shaped containers. The melted glass could also be poured in a parallelepiped mould and, once cooled, could be shaped as a stone block, or shaped in the desired shape with the system of the lost wax. In the second half of the II millennium the technique of the mosaic was already used, while in the late epoch the so-called “thousand-flower glasses” became famous. These were obtained by little bars or glass canes of various colors, put in the shape of a flower, thinned and cut in pieces, and that once heated in a mould to be joined, were smoothed when they were cold. |
