The jar is gone !

Posted on March 24, 2014 by lauragalicier

Example of an Egyptian jar, complete (XVIIIth Dynasty).

After making some fills on the Egyptian demotic jar, two other steps remained to complete the treatment.

First: painting the fills. The goal is to tone the fills with a color matching the general shade of the ceramic, so as it doesn’t catch your eye when you’re looking at it from a few feet away. It has to be clearly distinguishable if you get a closer look.

Here is the result:

Let’s have a closer view:

View of the 4 areas of the jar that were filled and toned.

Second step: making a storage box. The basic rules about storage-making are quite simple. The materials used to make the storage must be chemically neutral towards the object and their ageing must not threaten its condition. For example, some materials can deteriorate in a short-term time period and cause chemical reactions with the artifact they are supposed to protect, causing alterations. That’s why conservators use materials that were approved by testing them, like submitting them to specific temperature or humidity settings. More details about storage materials can be found following this link.

To prevent this situation from happening, acid-free paper and cardboard, polyethylene foam and fabric, and other well-known conditioning materials are preferred.

Then, each object being different, the storage needs to be adapted to its needs (size, weight, material sensitivity…) but also to the room available in the storeroom itself ! Concerning the jar, it was about allowing its safe and easy handling and preventing it from rolling. According to its weight, the cardboard used had to be quite strong.

Left: the box has a front side that opens and a small compartment (on the right) to store fragments that couldn't be glued to the jar. On the right: The box with the front side closed.

Left: the box has a front side that opens and a small compartment (on the right) to store fragments that couldn’t be glued to the jar.
Right: The box with the front side closed.

The mount, so as the jar can safely be pulled out of the box.

Left: the jar in its new storage box…
Right: …ready to go back to the Egyptian storeroom.

Here ends the conservation treatment of the jar; it was brought back to the storerooms last week. But we still have new projects in the Lab !

Cleaning the jar

Posted on January 27, 2014 by lauragalicier

A previous post introduced you to this demotic jar, currently on view in the Lab. The first step in its treatment was to clean the surface, which was very black due to dust.

It was necessary to make some tests on the ceramic to determine which way to clean was the best, meaning the safest for the object. Indeed, the black inscription on the jar is fragile and water sensitive. The first rule was to choose a non -aqueous method, that’s why I first thought about…erasers !

Image showing cleaning tests on a fragment of the jar.

Test 1 : Sanford Magic Rub Eraser. Test 2: Staedtler stick eraser.Test 3 : Latex eraser.

Test 4: Ethanol

Test 5: Wishab eraser.

As you can see on the picture, the erasers seem to be the best choice, especially the n.2. Indeed, it can be applied with different levels of strength according to the amount of dust to remove.

Ethanol was also to be tried, being a “light” solvent; but the issue with a solvent is that you can’t control how it penetrates in the material, especially with a porous ceramic. So the best choice seemed to be the Staedler eraser.

It was then time to test this cleaning method on the inscription.

Cleaning test with the eraser on an inscribed fragment.

The eraser appeared to work well, removing only the black grime and not the inscription. Of course, one has to be careful with this method, and not to press the eraser too hard or the black ink could disappear as well !

So I went on and cleaned all the other fragments.

Fragment before cleaning.

The same fragment after cleaning.

In a general way, cleaning an object is very rewarding for a conservator, because the result can be seen at once. And pictures taken before and after are often impressive.

However, some things could not be improved; many demotic signs are lost due to water damage that occurred in the burial environment so the text isn’t complete. Moreover, a few fragments didn’t change after being cleaned, and still look dusty even if they aren’t.

Here is the general result, after all the fragments were cleaned.

General view of the fragments before cleaning.

General view of the fragments after cleaning.

Next step: de-gluing the fragments !

A demotic jar

Posted on December 17, 2013 by lauragalicier

A pottery workshop (from LICHTHEIM Miriam, Ancient Egyptian literature, 1973)

Among the objects that an archaeological conservator treats, a very important one regarding the quantity is ceramic. Ceramic artifacts are widespread on time and many very different places; a lot of (if not all) civilizations on Earth made ceramics, so if you haven’t met one of those yet in a museum, it’s only a matter of time!

The one we have in the Artifact Lab is an Egyptian jar, from one of the past Penn Museum’s excavations on this site. Jars were used to contain fluids and are covered inside with a mixture of water and clay, to make it waterproof.

Here is a picture of the fragments before any intervention:

The jar before treatment.

This ceramic is covered with inscriptions painted in black ink (most likely a carbon ink) and the writing appears to be demotic. The Egyptian writing knew three different forms: hieroglyphic, which is the one you’re used to see on monuments; hieratic, which is a simplification of hieroglyphs, allowing the scribes to write faster for their administrative work on papyrus or pottery and rock fragments; and the demotic is a simplification of the hieratic, used from the VIIth century B.C. It is one of the writing that you can see on the Rosetta Stone.

Demotic writing on the Rosetta Stone.

Detail of the black inscription covering the jar.

This black ink is water soluble, meaning that water is highly prohibited to clean the inscribed areas !

Concerning its condition, the main problem of course is that the jar is broken into about 50 fragments. It was restored in the past so it still bears remains of an old adhesive on the edges and many fragments are still glued together. Moreover, the surface and the inscription are covered with dust and need to be cleaned.

Example of a particularly dirty fragment. The inscription is barely visible.

The next step will be to remove the old adhesive and to put the fragments together again. Eventually, we may have to fill some gaps in the ceramic, so as its handling could be easier and safer.

Those steps will be more detailed in several blogposts to come !

An introduction to our child mummy Tanwa

Posted on May 3, 2013 by mollygleeson

In my recent post about the Philadelphia Science Festival, I put in a little teaser photograph of one of our child mummies currently in the lab:

Now, all of our mummies are special, but this child mummy has several qualities that make her particularly endearing. One of the things that we really love is that her name is written on her wrappings, near her feet.

Her name is actually written in both Greek and Demotic – Demotic is the language/script that developed in later periods in Egypt (and is one of the languages inscribed on the Rosetta Stone, along with Greek and hieroglyphic Egyptian). In Greek, this inscription reads: “Tanous (daughter of) Hermodorus”. In Demotic her name reads as “Tanwa”.

So, based on this inscription, we know that she dates to the Ptolemaic Period, and that she is a girl. According to our Egyptologists, what is interesting about the names is that they give a good indication of the multi-cultural nature of this time period. Not only in the fact that 2 languages are represented, but that the girl’s name incorporates the name of an Egyptian goddess, Iwnyt, while her father’s name includes the name of a Greek god, Hermes.

Tanwa has been CT-scanned, which has confirmed the fact that she is a girl, and was likely right around the age of 5 when she died.

Here is a still from the CT scan showing a detail of Tanus' skull. Based on her teeth it has been estimated that she was right around 5 years old when she died.

Here is a still from the CT scan showing a detail of Tanwa’s skull. Based on her teeth it has been estimated that she was about 5 years old when she died. That pin you can see near the top of her skull is modern and not actually in her skull-it was used to secure the outermost layers of linen in that area.

One of my favorite things that CT scanning has shown is that she is wearing 2 bracelets on her left wrist. We are guessing that these might be gold.

Two bangle bracelets on the left wrist show up clearly on the CT scan.

She also has a small metal ball included in her wrappings just over her right tibia. Exactly what this is and why it was placed there is a bit of a mystery.

A detail shot of the metal ball near her right tibia.

There is a lot more we can learn from these CT scans, which I will describe in a future post.

Fortunately, Tanwa is in fairly good condition; one of the main issues that we need to address here in the conservation lab is that many of the narrow linen bands wrapped around her body are fragile, torn and partially detaching. I am currently more than halfway through the conservation treatment, and I will provide a thorough report on what we are doing to stabilize her wrappings next. Stay tuned!

In the Artifact Lab

Tag Archives: Demotic

The jar is gone !

Cleaning the jar

A demotic jar

An introduction to our child mummy Tanwa