Solving the "Blue" Mystery - New Kingdom Pottery

Originally published March 17, 2010 | Washington University in St. Louis | by Diana Lutz | An excerpt:

What was she doing in the tunnel?

The answer: seeking an uncontaminated sample of a mineral that might have been the key ingredient in the blue used to decorate "blue painted pottery" popular among the Egyptian elite during the New Kingdom (1550-1079 BC).

Colleague Colin A. Hope, PhD, an expert in blue painted pottery, had asked if she wouldn’t help him pin down the source of the blue pigment by sampling and analyzing material from the mine.

Hope and Smith, together with Paul Kucera, a doctoral student at Monash University in Australia who first identified the mines, describe the pottery, the mines and the mineral in a chapter of Beyond the Horizon, a festschrift for the Egyptologist Barry A. Kemp

Centamin Follows the Ancients in Big Quest for Egyptian Gold

Originally published August 15, 2009 | The West Australian

Below is a preview of an article at the West Australian which tells of an explorers means of discovering a gold mine in Egypt by using one of the oldest papyri found as a resource. The topic is a bit off-topic, but still interesting (and hey, it mentions a discovery that came as a result of using ancient artifacts; it's like piecing together a real map and finding real pirate treasure!).

The popular mythology behind Centamin Egypt goes that it was WA geologist Sami El-Raghy who came across the ancient papyrus map dating back to 1200BC hanging in an Egyptian museum.

That map, believed to be the oldest of its kind, included the location of 1300 historic gold mines and inspired Mr El-Raghy to hunt for some treasure of his own.

The tale is probably apocryphal.