<HTML>> Please note that Egyptian Faience is significantly different than regular faience. It is made without clay, and as such, requires a lower firing temperature.
Excuse me, but Nicholson writes ONLY about Egyptian Fayence. The other, Italian Fayence, has been renamed to "majolica", therefore "fayence" always means "Egyptian Fayence" in modern literature.
>Davidovits claims to have produced Egyptian faience using a simple campfire.
Sure, you can reach the lowest glazing temperatures there. But it would have been no nice piece of art because you get the real flux only above 950°C
> IF it were produced the way YOU have stated, then you would be correct. As Dr. Davidovits has produced it in the way HE has stated, I'm afraid it loan CIRCUMSTANTIAL evidence to his case that the AE's had the capacity to do low temperature recreations of sandstone.
No because Fayence and Sandstone are two complete different things (and I cannot think that any keen examiner would not see the difference). Sandy argues with results made in the beginning of Egyptology ä quite a source :-)
> Now, we ALL know that it is not sandstone... but it was close enough to fool people for many years.
I found no wevidence for this. Not a single word, neither in Nicholson/Shaw, nor in Lucas/Harris. not even in "Egyptiasn Fauence and glass" by Nicholson (Shire 1993) I could find the smllest hint that Fayence ever was misinterpreted as natural stone.
> It wasn't UNTIL it could be microscopically inspected that it was shown to be anything BUT sandstone.
Not according to Nicholson. Fayence was a well known material in Europe, produced around the italian town Faence since the middle ages. The similarity to this now Majola named pottery was so striking that it was believed to be the same material. Only later it was found out that it was made without clay as binder but with ash, and that tze glazing was not tin based.
Sorry, I am unable to find a word about a confusion with sand stone. The only thing I could find were some remarks, that the cores of dark brown objects would have pulverized sand ston as basic material whereas white cores came from pulverized quarz crystals or pebbles (Lucas/Harris p. 158).
I can't summarize all pages I have read about hte topic in the last days, but the general conclusion is: There was never a confusion between sand stone and fayence. Sorry. Not in for Egyptology relevant times.
> All we're doing is setting the stage here, Frank. This is STRICTLY circumstantial evidence... nothing more. Liken it to a murder suspect. You find in his file that he had shot a gun when he was 12 years old. It certainly doesn't mean he pulled a trigger when he was 35... it just means he had the capacity to USE a gun.
No, not even this. It is as if you take a photo of a person from the year 1963 and say, that this is the evidence that in 2003 one of the persons living with this guy in the same town will shoot someone... :-)
>It just means he USED a gun before.
No, only that somebody living in a 25 km radius MAY use a gun fourty years later...
FD :-)</HTML>
