Archaeometallurgical Study of Bronze Age Egyptian and Nubian Copper Alloy Artefacts from the Egyptian Museum of Leipzig University: A Concise Report
Abstrakt
The article is a concise report on the results of the study of ancient Egyptian and Nubian objects, now in the collection of the Egyptian Museum of Leipzig University. A range of currently available archaeometallurgical methods was used to obtain detailed information on the assemblage.
Arsenical copper was more frequent in the 3rd millennium BC, while by second half of the 2nd millennium BC tin bronzes are ubiquitous. The hardness of artefacts was intentionally achieved by mechanical hardening rather than using the alloying effect of arsenic.
The production techniques of casting, alloying, annealing, hot or cold hammering, and surface finishing were in our corpus used from the Early Dynastic Period. The largest part of the analysed artefacts was made of rich sulphide copper ores.