The use and distribution of Faience in the Ancient East and Prehistoric Europe

Twenty years have elapsed since H. C. Beck and the present writer published a preliminary paper on the origin of British faience beads with special reference to those of the segmented variety and, except for the discovery and recognition of many new specimens over much wider areas it may be said that nothing has emerged to alter materially the general conclusions there enunciated that an Egyptian origin was the most likely for a number of the beads and that their dissemination to the British Isles took place during the Eighteenth Dynasty around about 1400 B.C.At the time of writing we not unnaturally concentrated on British specimens, as European analogues appeared to be conspicuously absent, and confined our attention primarily to morphological characters. We had, however, projected a wider study to embrace faience objects in general and, if possible, to adduce spectrographic evidence as further proof of identity or otherwise. Unfortunately the sudden death of Mr Beck in 1939 and the intervention of the war years greatly retarded progress in this direction. But the rapid recognition of old finds and the accumulation of new ones, mostly in Europe, in post-war years, coupled with a number of spectrographic analyses that have since been carried out with the help of Mr L. C. Thomas, now renders it desirable to review such progress as has been made in this most difficult and complex subject.