Egyptian Alabaster
Alabaster is a natural, exotic, luxurious, stone that has been treasured and admired since the ancient civilizations of the world.
It is a soft stone, making it lighter and easy to carve and can give you all the qualities you enjoy from other types of stone in one amazing piece:
The beautiful lines, swirls, and smooth touch of marble; the crystal veins and luminescence of quartz; and the utility of granite. But arguably its ultimate appeal is its relaxing and breathtaking translucence.
The ancient Egyptians crafted Alabaster into many items with purposes ranging from decorative, functional, and religious.
Its uses included bowls for food, jars to hold oils or perfumes, statues, vases and a multitude of other beautiful artifacts.
Alabaster was also believed to be holy, used in the burial and mummification for the royals and nobles. The Pharaoh Seti I, (father of Ramses the Great), had his sarcophagus carved from a single block of Alabaster that can still be viewed in London today. Many more alabaster treasures from the tombs of Tutankhamen and Ramses are now housed in The Egyptian Museum collections at Cairo. (Though planned to be moved to the new Grand Egyptian Museum upon it's completion)
Alabasters attractive, natural lines and layers are formed over millions of years. Thus, it is a limited resource and tightly controlled by the Egyptian government lending to its increasing value. Its natural color is a beautiful range of ivory and amber shades, but it can be transformed into other colors with a dye, namely: blue, red, and gray.
Top row - Examples of the variety of colors and lines in natural Alabaster.
Bottom row - Red Blue and Gray dyed Alabaster
Histories very first mention of the color blue was in Egypt where it was discovered how to create permanent pigments for use in the paintings of temples and tombs. Blue dyed Alabaster products are our second most popular color of our customers and friends after natural.
Egyptian Onyx
Onyx items have their own unique, bold style, qualities and natural color.
More rare than Egyptian Alabaster, quarried blocks of Onyx are not available as often to the craftsmen. Because of its scarcity it is common to see only smaller, higher-priced objects made from onyx.
Quarries from the different regions of Egypt produce the different range of colors and varied striation patterns. If a quarry is no longer allowed by the government to operate, or mined out than the stone from that quarry becomes rarer and more valuable.
The rock is cut from the quarries into large blocks where it is then taken and sold to the craftsmen. The artists select the blocks to shape and make into the desired piece. With the exception of mosaic style items that are cut and pieced back together, each product is sculpted from a single alabaster block. The stones final lines and patterns are unknown even to the craftsman what it will look like until it is completed.
Every individual piece is shaped and polished by hand, not molded or stamped, meaning no two items created from it will ever be identical. This makes each item twice unique as no block of stone or its crafting could ever be exactly duplicated.
Today in Egypt despite the thousands of years that have passed you can continue to find these beautiful works, of which many are still handcrafted without modern tools.
All the stone for our products was mined out of the earth in Egypt including from those same quarries once reserved for only the Pharaoh and ancient nobility.
If this were not impressive enough, many of the families of our craftsmen can trace their lineage back generations all the way to the ancient artists and tomb builders of the Pharaohs.