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Using some traditional and nanomaterials in the cleaning of ancient Egyptian pottery artifacts (jar and shallow plate) from Athribis

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Abstract

The study applies mechanical, wet, and chemical cleaning to remove any undesired materials from artistic/historical pottery surfaces. It aims to evaluate the effects and efficiency of three types of cleansers: One in the nano form and two in the traditional form. These three cleansers are Triton-based microemulsion, Na2EDTA, and EDTA. They were applied as poultices to clean some ancient Egyptian pottery shreds. Euromex Netherland stereo microscope (SM), ESEM Quanta 250 FEG (SEM), and atomic absorption spectroscopy (AAS) were adopted for investigating and analyzing the cleaned pottery sherds and the cleaning of extracted water to evaluate the efficiency of the aforementioned three poultices. The results showed that the Triton-based microemulsion poultice was ranked first, followed by Na2EDTA and finally EDTA with respect to the time of application and the target achievement. Thus, Triton-based microemulsion poultice was employed in the cleaning of two case studies excavated from Athribis (jar and plate). In conclusion, this poultice managed to remove all the accumulated deposits from the surfaces of the two pottery objects after 2 h, in addition to preventing the composition of light surface encrustations.

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The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study may be made available from the authors on reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Dr. Ehab Al-Emam (Conservation dept., Faculty of Archaeology, Sohag Univ., Egypt - AXES research group, Faculty of Science, Antwerp Univ., Belgium) for his helpful collaboration and proof reading of this article.

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  1. Conservation Department, Sohag University, Sohag, 82524, Egypt

    Mohamed El-Gohary & Mohammed Saad

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  1. Mohamed El-Gohary
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El-Gohary designed, directed, and carried out this study, in addition to the analyzing of the results and wrote the paper. Saad prepared the samples and helped the 1st author during defining their characteristics.

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Correspondence to Mohamed El-Gohary.

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El-Gohary, M., Saad, M. Using some traditional and nanomaterials in the cleaning of ancient Egyptian pottery artifacts (jar and shallow plate) from Athribis. Archaeol Anthropol Sci 12, 277 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12520-020-01235-7

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