Using some traditional and nanomaterials in the cleaning of ancient Egyptian pottery artifacts (jar and shallow plate) from Athribis

摘要

The study applies mechanical, wet, and chemical cleaning to remove any undesired materials from artistic/historical pottery surfaces. It aims to evaluate the effects and efficiency of three types of cleansers: One in the nano form and two in the traditional form. These three cleansers are Triton-based microemulsion, Na(2)EDTA, and EDTA. They were applied as poultices to clean some ancient Egyptian pottery shreds. Euromex Netherland stereo microscope (SM), ESEM Quanta 250 FEG (SEM), and atomic absorption spectroscopy (AAS) were adopted for investigating and analyzing the cleaned pottery sherds and the cleaning of extracted water to evaluate the efficiency of the aforementioned three poultices. The results showed that the Triton-based microemulsion poultice was ranked first, followed by Na(2)EDTA and finally EDTA with respect to the time of application and the target achievement. Thus, Triton-based microemulsion poultice was employed in the cleaning of two case studies excavated from Athribis (jar and plate). In conclusion, this poultice managed to remove all the accumulated deposits from the surfaces of the two pottery objects after 2 h, in addition to preventing the composition of light surface encrustations.