page_title: Faience
section_title: Ancient frit wares called "faience"
hierarchical_section_title: Faience / History of faience pottery / Ancient frit wares called "faience"
caption_attribution_description: English: This pendant shows the head of a lion on one side, and the head of a bull with a sun disk on the other side. It may have been a variation of amulets which displays two combined lions who represents the horizon. This variation adds the idea of the holy Apis bull who was particularly worshipped in the Late and Greco-Roman Periods.
context_page_description: Faience or faïence is the conventional name in English for fine tin-glazed pottery, at least when there is no more usual English name for the type concerned. The invention of a white pottery glaze suitable for painted decoration, by the addition of an oxide of tin to the slip of a lead glaze, was a major advance in the history of pottery. The invention seems to have been made in Iran or the Middle East before the ninth century. A kiln capable of producing temperatures exceeding 1,000 °C was required to achieve this result, the result of millennia of refined pottery-making traditions. The term is now used for a wide variety of pottery from several parts of the world, including many types of European painted wares, often produced as cheaper versions of porcelain styles.
  English generally uses various other terms for well-known sub-types of faience. Italian tin-glazed earthenware, at least the early forms, is called maiolica in English, Dutch wares are called Delftware, and their English equivalents English delftware, leaving "faience" as the normal term in English for French, German, Spanish, Portuguese wares and those of other countries not mentioned.
context_section_description: The term faience broadly encompassed finely glazed ceramic beads, figures and other small objects found in Egypt as early as 4000 BC, as well as in the Ancient Near East, the Indus Valley Civilisation and Europe. However, this material is not pottery at all, containing no clay, but a vitreous frit, either self-glazing or glazed. The Metropolitan Museum of Art displays a piece known as "William the Faience Hippopotamus" from Meir, Egypt, dated to the Twelfth Dynasty of Egypt, c. 1981–1885 BC.  Examples of ancient faience are also found in Minoan Crete, which was likely influenced by Egyptian culture. Faience material, for instance, has been recovered from the Knossos archaeological site.
caption: Egyptian pendant of lions or Apis Bull.[9] The Walters Art Museum.
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