If you go to an art museum that has a good collection of Egyptian art, ancient Egyptian art, you will probably see at least one vessel, like the ones you see here, made out of alabaster. The Egyptians used alabaster very frequently for vases, bowls, plates, and other types of containers for cosmetics, for conopic jars, which held parts of the body taken out during the mummification process, and they seem to have had a particular love of patterned alabaster, as we'll see. One of my favorite places to see these Egyptian vessels made of alabaster is the Metropolitan Museum of Art, because when they re-did their Egyptian collection several years ago, they decided to put spotlights on the alabaster bowls in their pre-dynastic collection. And so you can see the really amazing patterns in this banded alabaster, and really appreciate these objects for their incredible beauty. There are two views of the same bowl, and what I want you to notice here is how skillfully the artist has chosen the way that he or she worked with these materials to really take advantage of the most dramatic patterning in this alabaster. And you can see that we go from an area that is almost completely opaque with signs of oxidation in it and pitting and holes to the wonderful layers and bands and swirls that you see off to the right-hand side. And it really takes the artist to who is familiar with materials like these to really maximize the effect of different patterns within the stone. And when you have a fairly simple vessel like this tiny vase in the Petri Museum in London, you can see that the Egyptian artists working with these types of banded alabaster were really choosing their stones and choosing to work their stones in a way that would show the pattern to the greatest effect. So here we have the effect of stripes on this small vase, whereas on that previous bowl we had those wonderful dramatic swirling patterns. And this is something that is really part of the artistic process. The artist is having a conversation with his or her materials. And as the work progresses, the artist may come in with a particular plan, but as the work progresses, the artist also has to adapt to what the materials are telling them about the work and how the work is progressing on its own. We always have to keep in mind that there is sort of a give and take between artists and material. The Egyptians began to use alabaster for bowls, plates, and vessels as early as the pre-dynastic period, with the sort of the very earliest glimpses that we see of the ancient Egyptian civilization. They continued using it into the middle kingdom. We're seeing some middle kingdom examples here. These are canopic jars that were meant to hold organs like the heart, the lungs, the stomach, and liver from a deceased person. These were taken out as part of the mummification process. And these are from the tomb of a middle kingdom princess, Princess Sitthor unit. And we are very lucky that we have most of her grave goods pretty much intact from her tomb. Her tomb had been looted, but the thieves missed sort of a side room where most of her jewels were kept, the canopic jars that you see here. She also had a really impressive jewelry case that was mostly recovered when excavations were done in the modern period. And all of this could be seen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But once again, I think you can see how the artist has really taken advantage of the dramatic color range and patterning in the alabaster, particularly for the lower portion of these vessels. On the faces, it's really more sort of white alabaster without a whole lot of patterning, because what you want to be able to see on the faces is the faces themselves more than the patterns. But of course, on the vessels, the pattern can really sort of take over. So how are these made? Well, we are lucky enough to have some of the remnants of alabaster workshops in a couple of museums in the Petri Museum in London, which is University College London's Egyptian collection, and also at UC Berkeley. Now, I haven't yet seen the material at UC Berkeley, but I'm planning on getting there soon. But what you see here are some of the early stages in making alabaster vessels. At the top of this slide, you see a very roughed out, roughly cylindrical form that is slightly oval, so it kind of projects around the center. And on the bottom of this slide, I think you can see we have more sort of traditional base forms that kind of taper toward the foot and would have some sort of a neck on them, and possibly even handles or a handle near the neck. But you can see that the very first step in the overall process is roughing out the basic shape of the vessel. The next step in the process was to hollow out the interior of the vase. And as you can see in these examples, that would be done using a tubular drill. So what you see on the left is a pretty well finished outer form of a vessel. And the artist has only just started to begin working with the tubular drill. You can actually see kind of what looks like a pencil mark of a circle at the top. That's not actually a pencil mark. That's actually the area that has been ground away by the abrasive on the bottom of a tubular drill. And this would have been done just the way that Elis Morero described for rock crystal, only with alabaster being so much softer and easier a stone to work, it would be a much more rapid process. What you see on the right is a double vase that is made of limestone, also in the Petri Museum. And what I wanted you to notice about this is that the limestone vase, like an alabaster vase, was hollowed out. Here they appear to have started maybe with a tubular drill, but then use some sort of a drill that actually tapered to a bit of a point. So we have kind of a conical depression made in each of these. And it's unclear whether the artist would have gone back in and continued hollowing out more of the limestone, or if this sort of conical hollowed out portion was enough in this case. But from the circular patterning on the inside, you can I think clearly see and imagine how an abrasive bow-powered drill of some sort would have been used to make this opening in the vessel. I want to end with this fragment here. This is also in the Petri Museum in London. And it is the base of a vessel that was broken. And you can see here that the artist had cut out an initial core using a tubular drill. And that core went much deeper into the vase than most of the other hollowing out. And then other tools were used to grind out the interior. Or curved tools would have been inserted into that opening. And then again, used with abrasives, working probably again with a bow for power to go through and hollow out maybe sort of a pear shape inside of that vessel. And it is broken pieces like this that don't tend to look terribly sexy in museum cases and don't draw the crowds. But it's often these broken objects, these damaged and unfinished pieces that can tell us the most about how artists worked, particularly when we're talking about thousands and thousands of years ago.