Pigment

Mounted on two sheets of card are nineteen 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. These are the crude red colours haematite and clays. Burning produces no change if pure mixtures as in clays suffer a change on roasting. FCJ Spurrell”. On the back of one card sheet is an ink annotation, "Colours - Tel El Amarna. Crude Reds". 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.