Session 6 - Late Bronze Age Part II

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. In this session of the Late Bronze Age, we want to discuss a little bit about the strange Egyptian compound used for glazing called faience. But we're going to combine that with also the use of bronze in the making of, you could say, cultic material. Cultic meaning for religious purposes. First of all, let's look at the faience. Faience is fun and it's very colorful. Once again, the faience cup. I'm going to just rotate this around a little bit so you can take a look at the type and the style of this little faience cup. You can see the hieroglyph on one side, and I can rotate it around, and you can see the different colors. Now, some people say, how come we got different color appearance or tone on this faience cup? It was probably laying face down in the soil. You could say this particular style or side of the cup was facing up. Maybe that's the reason. But since it's got dirt, if you can look very carefully, it's got dirt right here that seems to be heavily encrusted. It could be that it was actually faced like this. And this part of it, which was once the top, was now facing the bottom. The lighter color was in the soil, and the soil absorbed some of the color of the faience. And the top part right here, which luckily has the hieroglyphs, was preserved by, you could say, staying out of the soil. Maybe that's the reason. I can see the little dirt on the top right here. So to me, that seems like a good hypothesis, the faience on the little cup. Now, the second type of faience that we find a lot of is on Ushabtis. Ushabtis were little servant figures. They seemed to develop in their purpose and meaning throughout the different dynasties and periods throughout Egypt. It used to be very early in Egyptian history that these little guys were only for the elitist. However, somebody got smart and thought, guess what? If we make these faience little Ushabtis and make it possible so everybody can have one, well, guess what? We can sell it to everybody instead of just the elite. Not only that, instead of having just a few in your tomb, they recommended that you have one for each day of the year, 365 of these little servant figures. And to make sure in the afterlife that they didn't get out of control, you had to have a bigger one, which was the overseer and taskmaster over the smaller Ushabtis. How about that? Usually on the surface of the Ushabti, there's a little chapter from the Book of the Dead, chapter six of the Book of the Dead. Now, don't think, ooh, it's all scary. It's just telling the deceased, or it's a prayer, so that the Ushabti would be obedient in the afterlife. And the Ushabti was supposed to answer the master, here I am. This is where the word Ushabti comes from. It means to answer. So I'm going to rotate this so you can see a very beautiful Ushabti, maybe a Ushabti of a very young, noble male. You can see the side lock of hair right here on the side. And the Ushabtis are found in tombs made, once again, of faience. Now, notice the side lock of hair because I'm going to switch to another type of idol made of bronze, and this is called harpocrates. Harpocrates is a term used for the young God Horus. So you might see Isis nursing harpocrates on her knee is called Isis lactates. And you can see right here, he's a young man. How can you tell? First of all, look, the side lock of hair, the side lock of hair. Okay. Another thing that we read about in the biblical text is how, when the people of Israel were disobedient, that God, excuse me, that Moses made a bronze serpent. Here's a little bronze serpent. And it's called Noshustan, Noshustah. You have women in the Bible, there's no one for sure, it's called Noshustah, means the serpent. When we read about Moses, how he was in the land of Midianites, archeology actually tells us that they are in the Northwestern corner of the Arabian desert. And they are actually mining copper in the, you could say, in the Sinai area as well. So they were, you could say, blacksmiths. And remember that Moses married Jethro's daughter, who is called Zipporah. So Moses married into a clan of people that knew how to make items from copper and tin, bronze. And what did Moses make? He made a bronze serpent, and he put it on a pole. Right place, right time, right location with the right people. Puts us in the 13th century. It seems the Midianites were in that location, the 13th and 12th century. And this is where scholars tend to place the Exodus under the Pharaoh Ramses II in the late Bronze Age.