Cataloguing the Blue-painted Pottery at the Egypt Centre

This blog post has been written by Katie Morton, a third-year Egyptology student at Swansea University. Katie is currently undertaking dissertation research on the blue-painted sherds based at the Egypt Centre. Her key area of interest is ancient Egyptian pottery and its production. Once she graduates, Katie will pursue an MA in conservation at Cardiff University and hopes to get more hands-on with different types of pottery from around the world.

Whilst deciding what I wanted to do for my undergraduate dissertation, I knew I wanted to do some physical research and get hands-on with the items held at the Egypt Centre. I was first introduced to blue-painted pottery during my second year when I completed CLE214: Introduction to Egyptian Archaeology, taught by Dr Christian Knoblauch. During this module, we were able to select an item for study. As my key area of interest is the Amarna Period, I chose W1029, a complete blue painted jar (fig. 1). This sparked a love for this type of pottery, and I was lucky enough to help with measuring the pieces on display at the Egypt Centre for the Swansea University Pottery Project (SUPP). This is where I found out that the Egypt Centre holds a large collection of blue-painted sherds, excavated by the EES at Amarna.

Fig. 1: Blue-painted jar

Blue-painted pottery was made for roughly 500 years during the New Kingdom, from the mid-Eighteenth to the Twentieth Dynasty (Hope 1991, 13). This type of pottery is named as such for its use of blue pigment, alongside black and red, in order to create a wide variety of motifs. Whilst blue-painted pottery has been found in New Kingdom sites over Egypt, there are two key places where the majority of vessels and sherds have been found: Malkata and Amarna. This limited production period and the use of colour is what really drew me into wanting to research these items further (fig. 2). Research and publications on blue-painted pottery are largely dominated by three academics: Colin Hope, Pamela Rose, and David Aston. These authors have extensively written about blue-painted vessels found across Egypt. It was through the work of Colin Hope that I was inspired to write my dissertation on blue-painted pottery. In his article Blue-painted and polychrome decorated pottery from Amarna: a preliminary corpus, Hope states that the sherds based at the Egypt Centre had not been researched or included in his corpus. From this, I decided I wanted to research the pieces in the collection.

Fig. 2: Closely inspecting W1029

My dissertation will be a catalogue of the sherds and vessels based at the Egypt Centre, continuing on from the work of Colin Hope and following a similar format for continuity. In addition, I will be analysing my results and comparing them to the work of Hope, Rose, and Aston, and commenting on any similarities or differences I have found. This is important and valuable research as the more data available on blue-painted vessels, the more we can learn about the decorative motifs and production methods. For the whole of the first term of the 2022–23 academic year, I have been doing the physical research for my dissertation. It has been a lot of work but thanks to the help from Dr Ken Griffin and Dr Meg Gundlach I was able to do my research much faster than expected. After all my research was completed, Ken, Meg, Dr Olga Zapletniuk (a current Egyptology PhD student), and I were able to bring all the sherds out into one room to see if we could make any further matches in addition to the ones I had already made (fig. 3). This was a really valuable experience and one that not all museums would be able to facilitate, so I am extremely thankful to Ken and Meg for allowing me to do this.

Fig. 3: Laying out all the blue-painted pottery from Amarna

I am excited to write up my dissertation and tell people what I have discovered through doing this research. I hope this research will be useful to the Egypt Centre as well as to the continuing knowledge of blue-painted pottery. I am especially thankful that Christian and Swansea University for having the faith in me to complete this research, something that is not always possible to undertake as an undergraduate student!

Fig. 4: Sometimes teamwork is essential!

Bibliography:

Aston, David A. 2011. Blue-painted pottery of the late Eighteenth Dynasty: the material from the tomb of Maya and Merit at Saqqara. Cahiers de la céramique égyptienne 9, 1–35. 

Hope, Colin A. 1991. Blue-painted and polychrome decorated pottery from Amarna: a preliminary corpus. Cahiers de la céramique égyptienne 2, 17–92.

Rose, Pamela J. 2007. The Eighteenth Dynasty pottery corpus from Amarna. Egypt Exploration Society, Excavation Memoir 83. London: Egypt Exploration Society.