Three Faience Rosette Discs in the Museo Egizio in Turin: The Early Ramesside Pharaohs in the Eastern Delta, and Their Glittering Palaces

Three small faience rosette discs now in the Museo Egizio of Turin, one of which has a given provenance from Heliopolis, while another bears the inscription ‘Tel el-Yahoudeh’, form an intriguing introduction to a certain type of Egyptian palace architectural decoration. They also trace the sorry story of the pillage of Ramesside sites in the Delta. Not only was it possible for near contemporary Pharaonic activity to transport and relocate the majority of the stone monuments of a whole city (Qantir-Piramesses to Tanis), to the extreme puzzlement of Egyptologists, but the smallest elements of certain ritual buildings also proved irresistible, since for the sebakhin they were highly portable and saleable. The renewed commercial opportunities offered by European travellers in the nineteenth century sounded the death knell for buildings decorated with these attractive decorative elements. Here I shall take a detailed look at the rosette tiles, their possible sources, and the light they throw on techniques of faience manufacture.
ملخص البحث:
ترتكز الدراسة فى هذا المقال على دراسة ثلاثة أقراص صغيرة من الفاينس الوردى موجودة حاليا بالمتحف المصرى بتورينو، إحداهما وفقا للسجل فهى من هليوبوليس، فى حين أن آخرى من تل اليهودية، حيث تشكل هذه القطع الثلاث مقدمة مثيرة للإهتمام لنوع معين من الزخارف المعمارية في القصر المصري. كما أنها تتبع القصة المؤسفة لنهب مواقع الرعامسة فى الدلتا. على جانب واحد كان من الممكن للنشاط الفرعونى المعاصر نقل معظم المعالم الحجرية لمدينة بأكملها (على سبيل المثال قنطير-بررمسيس إلى تانيس)، مما أدى إلى حيرة علماء المصريات، ليس لهذا السبب فقط بل أيضا عن كيفية نقل العناصر الصغيرة للغاية من زخرفة بعض المبانى الطقسية، فى الواقع هذا قد يكون راجعا للسباخين الذين كانو قادرين على حملها وبيعها. وقد أتاحت الفرص التجارية المتجددة التى ظهرت للمسافرون الأوربيون فى القرن التاسع عشر بداية النهاية للمبانى المزخرفة بهذة العناصر الزخرفية الجذابة. هنا ومن خلال البحث سوف يلقى المؤلف نظرة مفصلة على البلاط الوردى، مصادرة المحتملة، وعلى ضوء معرفة تقنيات تصنيع الفاينس.

Three small faience rosette discs now in the Museo Egizio of Turin, one of which has a given provenance from Heliopolis, while another bears the inscription 'Tel el-Yahoudeh', form an intriguing introduction to a certain type of Egyptian palace architectural decoration. They also trace the sorry story of the pillage of Ramesside sites in the Delta. Not only was it possible for near contemporary Pharaonic activity to transport and relocate the majority of the stone monuments of a whole city (Qantir-Piramesses to Tanis), to the extreme puzzlement of Egyptologists, but the smallest elements of certain ritual buildings also proved irresistible, since for the sebakhin they were highly portable and saleable. The renewed commercial opportunities offered by European travellers in the nineteenth century sounded the death knell for buildings decorated with these attractive decorative elements. Here I shall take a detailed look at the rosette tiles, their possible sources, and the light they throw on techniques of faience manufacture.     This suggests that the piece has a history that might possibly be traced, and that it came to the Museum via another route. I shall discuss this below.
No. 2  in the Eastern Delta, which has indeed yielded many of these rosette tiles. 22 An early example of the dismemberment of the building may be the rosette disc with pierced central hole, found in an Early Geometric burial in Rhodes (early 9th century BC). 23 The history of the site, and the fate of the building, which was decorated with "enamel tiles", is succinctly given by Naville in his introduction to his excavations there. 24 The monticule of Tell el-Yahudiyeh ("The Mound of the Jew") was an early focus for European savants and was given much attention because of its name and supposed association with the Bible story of the Exile of the Jews in Egypt. Carsten Niebuhr mentions seeing it, but from a distance of two leagues, and opined that it was the site of the city of Onias, and not (as previously believed) Heliopolis. 25 According to Maspero,26 it had been pillaged since the beginning of the nineteenth century, and ever since the time of Champollion the Louvre has possessed figures of prisoners.
Linant had visited the site (possibly in 1825) 27 and seen the process of destruction in full swing. 28  So what are we to make of a single rosette in the Mu-  At the moment, the fact that it is identical to the Tell el-Yahudiyeh example still poses a problem -if not a "plant" from Tell el-Yahudiyeh, then the workshop making it at Heliopolis must have been contemporary and run on identical lines to that at Tell el-Yahudiyeh, with close contacts between the two sites.
Even more likely is that both these seemingly identical discs tiles come from a common workshop, set up to supply both building projects. (See the discussion above, and the two small moulds for rosettes.)

The third rosette
The third rosette in the Museo Egizio, Cat. 7385  differs markedly. It is also true that the rosette has a distorted outline, and is less carefully delineated with secondary glaze colour. It has ten petals of va- The other large collection is in the Cairo Museum.
More recent excavations have discovered more waste material from the factory debris. 53 Here we find rosette discs with ten petals, and with a very strong use of blue, which appear to be much more similar to our piece No. 3. A selection are published by Hayes. 54 (See below for a Table of comparative sizes and Fig.   7 for a selection of types and their colour range.) at Tell el-Yahudiyeh seems to be paralleled by the throne daises at Qantir which were reconstructed by

Qantir -the site of a Temple and Palace of Ramesses II
Hayes. 64 Hayes established the positioning of these tiles in the scheme of the palace decoration, identified the nationalities depicted, and in particular re-  constructed the complete throne daises, with their shallow steps and supporting walls decorated with the subject races, and a large animal (lion) seated at the base of the steps, consuming an apparently Asiatic enemy. 65 Fig. 7, Fig. 10 and Table 1). (I restrict this list to rosette disc tiles with a central knob or pierced hole.
Hayes illustrates a selection.) 68 Although the three large discs have ten petals (not   Design A - (Fig. 10) Ten-petalled precursors of the eight-petalled flat-surfaced rosettes. Design C (Fig. 7,    Lastly, we do not know where our tiles were actually placed, and we will probably never know, unless by some stroke of good fortune a similar building is found with its decoration intact! 81

Manufacturing Techniques
How were our tiles made?
Of great interest to us are moulds of terracotta, par-ticularly the ones found at Qantir. Hamza collected more than ten thousand, which included about 800 varieties. 82 There were moulds for fruits and flowers, 83 for grape vine bunches, and for rosettes.
We can compare the grape bunches with actual finds  29536) (Fig. 15) -shows clearly that after the petals themselves had been formed with a moulded template -which also stamped out the shape of the tile itself -the lines in between the petals were deeply grooved into the body material of the core with a sharp instrument; this must have been done after the cream petal material had been inserted into the moulded cells. Finally, the buff brown glaze material of the inter-petal divisions, rim and the upper part of the side was run into place in the grooves, and then wiped off smooth, leaving the surface completely flush. 88