Today we routinely employ imitations of rocks and minerals in our costume jewellery, ceramic floor and wall tiles, and laminate countertops. The tradition of substituting less expensive materials of similar appearance for costlier ones extends back into antiquity. The ancient Egyptians were familiar with the practice, and by the beginning of the New Kingdom had developed it to the point where they were producing realistic-looking, polychrome faux stones. These included coloured faience and glass to replace the gemstones in jewellery and amulets, and painted patterns on ceramics, limestone, and wood to replace the ornamental stones used for funerary vessels. Other objects associated with tombs – false doors and statues carved from limestone, and coffins and storage chests made with wood – were also sometimes painted to look like stone (or a different kind of stone in the case of limestone). It was, however, with funerary vessels that the art of stone imitation reached its zenith in ancient Egypt.
Funerary goods of Yuya and Thuya: wood vessels painted to imitate stone. Image: Alain Guilleux/Alamy
Funerary vessels
From the late Predynastic Period onward, offerings in royal and elite private tombs included vessels carved from a large variety of ornamental stones. Some of these contained oil- and fat-based fragrances and emollients for the deceased to use in the afterlife, while others (the canopic jars) held the deceased’s internal organs. Stone funerary vessels were costly objects of limited availability and, consequently, they were sometimes imitated with painted ceramic and, less often, limestone vessels, as well as ‘dummy’ (or ‘pseudo’ or ‘false’) vessels carved from wood. The latter have the outward form of a vessel, but were not hollowed out. Whereas the otherwise functional faux-stone vessels presumably contained oils and ointments, the Egyptians believed the contents of the dummy vessels could be magically created by a spoken or written offering spell. The best-known examples of dummy wood vessels, which imitated both stone and glass, are the 27 found in the Eighteenth Dynasty tomb of Yuya and Thuya (KV46) in the Valley of the Kings, now in Cairo’s Egyptian Museum.
Types of faux stone
The great majority of the New Kingdom’s faux-stone funerary vessels appear to imitate just five varieties of ornamental stone. These include, in order of decreasing frequency: travertine (calcite alabaster and Egyptian alabaster) from several quarries in Middle Egypt; red- and-white limestone breccia, from Middle Egyptian sources that have not been identified, but probably include a destroyed quarry at el-Issawiya Sharq; granodiorite (black or grey granite) from Aswan; serpentinite from the Wadi Umm Esh quarry and probably other sources in the Eastern Desert; and granite (pink or red), also from the Aswan quarry. Only three of these (travertine, limestone breccia, and serpentinite) were actually used for vessels during the New Kingdom, and, although the other two rock types (granite and granodiorite) were apparently not employed in this way, they were nevertheless popular ornamental stones at the time. A small portion of the faux-stone vessels represent other rock types that cannot be identified with certainty.
