Mechanical reproduction in the age of the artwork? Faience and 5000 moulds from 14th-century BC Egypt

The excavations in the ancient city of Akhetaten at Tell El-Amarna in Egypt produced countless artefacts and fragments of brightly coloured material, known in Egyptology as 'faience', in addition to thousands of terracotta moulds for their production. These moulds provide direct evidence for technologies of mechanical reproduction in visual arts of the Late Bronze Age. The experimental recreation of moulds, as well as faience objects created from them, offers a significant advance in understanding perhaps the most crucial issue in faience production: the archetype behind the prototype. Despite the huge number of surviving moulds and faience products, there is no archaeological evidence that shows which material was used for the 'master' - the archetype required for the making of a mould. This article discusses faience production and its potential for reconsidering the specific trajectories of archetype to prototype and the distribution of the prototype.