Pigment

Mounted on two sheets of card are sixteen 30 mm square swatches of colour painted on paper by Flaxman Spurrell with ancient pigment collected from the ancient city of Tell el-Amarna by William Flinders Petrie in 1892. Beside each swatch of colour are Spurrell’s annotations to indicate the source of the pigment and if the paint was prepared from raw (R) or burnt (B) pigment. Attached to one card sheet is a sheet of paper annotated in ink, “Colours from various buildings at Tel El Amarna XVIII Dynasty obtained by Mr. Petrie in 1892. Nearly each variety constitutes in this list one of a separate find. These are crude yellows (true ochres) lightly pulverised and mixed with gum arabic just sufficient to hold them. Marked R (raw). On the right side of each is a specimen roasted by me. B (burnt). FCJ Spurrell”. On the back of one card sheet is an ink annotation, "Colours - Tel El Amarna. Crude Ochres". This object is an example of the physical remains of Flaxman Spurrell’s experiments with ancient Egyptian colours which were published as an article, ‘Notes on Egyptian Colours’, in The Archaeological Journal 52 (1895), pages 222–39.