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METAL ANALYSIS OF EGYPTIAN BRONZES

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From the Egyptian Museums at Berlin, Munchen, Hannover and Hildesheim 980 bronze statuettes have been analyzed quantitatively by atomic absorption spectrometry. Apart from some objects from the diddle Kingdom, all belong to the late Kingdom, especially the period from 700-300 BC, some of them may also belong to the roman period. Most of the objects were acquired from private collections so that little relyable information exists about the place where they were excavated. But for the beginning of this extensive study on egyptian bronze metallurgy it was sufficient to study on a very large number of objects the variation of the various main and trace elements and to find out if the bronze statuettes are made from a homogeneous or a hetereogenous type of bronze.

As analytical technic atomic absorption spectrometry was chosen after the results on a comparison of about 12 analytical techniques for bronze analysis, where this technique proved to be very acurate by a not to high amount of costs and time. Analysis was done on samples of 0.01 gr, which were drilled out of the object. The following elements were determined by analysis: Sn, Pb, Zn, Ag, Fe, Ni, As, Sb. Cu was calculated from the difference to 100 %.

To illustrate the whole variety of the three main elements copper, tin and lead the results were plotted into a triangular diagram, which shows that most of the objects lay in a well defined field with copper values from 65 to 100 %, tin values from 0 to 15 % and lead values from 0 to 30 %.

The variation of the other elements are shown on concentration diagrams. Silver is found in amounts of 0 to 0.1 %y while values over 0.2 % up to

0.7 are rare exceptions. Iron is present in concentrations from 0 to 0.1 %. Objects with iron from 0.1 to 0.5 % are less frequent and objects with more than 1 % of iron are exceptions, which may go up to