Fake faience amulets

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These pages are not meant to be any organised overview of the subject but merely snippits of illustrated incformation and comment.

If YOU have something to say about these or something NEW to offer for here, please do contact me!

Here is one on sale on eBay right now ( 14th April 05) from a seller of supposed ancient atifacts who seems to specialise in supposed Amarna faience pieces ...all of which are dreadful fakes.

Here is their offering of the triad, Horus flanked by Iisis and Nephthys.

This is clearly fake for two reasons; this is not real faience and the iconography is incorrect.

First the iconography.

Compare this one with the one below on the left, which is from my own collection and the one on the right, from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Note the types of headdress.

Horus is correctly shown but his sisters are wearing most strange headgear!

Compare with thier usual forms and as shown correctly on the examples above from my collection and from Boston.

The other point, which applies equally to shabtis, is the so called faience.

This is good emaple of what is now called "peppermint" fake faience, a great deal of which has recently come onto the market.

I will do a separate section on "peppermint" faience

From Mitch

9th Dec 07

I was searching around for triads on the web and came across your page:

Although the fake triad is not faience, it represents a triad other than Osirian.

King Menkaure from the 4^th Dynasty.

Menkaure wearing the white crown of Upper Egypt, with Hathor to his right and a feminine figure to his left personifying the 17th nome of Upper Egypt.

Here, Hathor, goddess of music and love, is represented associated with the king as guarantor of fertility, while products are presented by the various nomes (provinces) for the royal cult.

By Indynickycat

20th april 2005

From the Yaho group

Goodevening everyone,

first off all I would like to express my sincere thanks to brondavid for including the link to this list in his ebay-aution. If only I found it sooner.... by reading the usefull comments and warnings it looks i've become the proud owner of some authentic fakes.

Well, what's done is done, I've learned my lesson and will try not to get my sudden Egyptomania get the better of me :-)

I do have two "iffy's" I would like to get this lists' opinion on, so if anyone would humour me?

http://cgi.ebay.nl/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&rd=1&item=7313581182&ssPageName=STRK:MEWN:IT faience Sekhmet

http://cgi.ebay.nl/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&rd=1&item=7313745886&ssPageName=STRK:MEWN:IT scarab

By checking the payment out I noticed that the payment was listed to Soledad Imports, also behind nyct_pref, although I dealt with entirely different names/email-addresses.

Kind regards,

Ingeborg, the Netherlands

The first piece you mention is this one:

Estimated at $700

Made from Faience

Excellent preservation

Culture : Egypt, Circa. Late Period I (1069-517)XXIIIdynasty style

dimensions :height 1 15/16"{4 7cm}, width 1/2 "{1.3cm},depth 1 1/8"{2.8cm}

Ancient Authenticity guaranteed or your money back.

I understand why you held out hope that this was genuine.
It is "better" as a fake than most one sees on eBay at least......
as far as one can see, (all that sandy gumf which has been put on it to prevent your closer scrutiny!) is not all that far away from the real thing.
The surface of the material is odd. It's not easy to see, but it's all rather too smooth. True, ancient faience can be very smooth, but....
Would the seller of a genuine amulet of this sort not brush the sand off it to show it in it's full glory? I sure would!
Then look at the context; the other pieces on sale here. Oh my goodness, this seller's standards for fakes has fallen off! And the ushabti described as "Armana"...oh dear, oh dear... (See the fake ushabti section in due course)
Lastly, why private feedback?