Egyptian porcelains were also finely executed. These were enameled, stained, and decorated in numerous ways. The colors, glazes, and art mediums employed by the artists in pottery and porcelain necessitated a wide chemical knowledge. Some of the pigments employed both in glass and porcelain ornamentation were made from metals. Their use required a knowledge of metallurgy. Metals like lead, nickel, manganese required fluxing and refining before they could be secured in a state sufficiently pure to be used as bases for colors. Not only did the artists know the value of many metallic oxides, but they understood how to secure the tints resulting from blending different oxides, and by acting upon metals with acids, just as they acted upon vegetable and metallic dyes with acids to get rare tones in linen dyeing.
Mordants were employed in dyeing cloths and these were acted upon by acids and alkalies to produce various colors. We are dependent upon the relics which have been preserved for our knowledge of the chemical and physical learning of the Egyptians. No chemical books of theirs have come down to us, and inferences must be drawn from the results seen.
In carrying out metallurgical operations, the Egyptians employed small blast furnaces and melting pots. Air was compressed by bellows and conducted into molten substances by pipes.
The methods of metal working, melting, rolling, forging, soldering, annealing, and chasing were similar to common methods in use in modern times.
The Egyptians were a practical people. They made wonderful progress in the industrial arts and learned enough of scientific principles to enable them to deal with much success with the mechanical, agricultural, astronomical, medicinal, and chemical problems encountered. But, like the Babylonians, Assyrians and other Oriental peoples, the Egyptians did not systematize their sciences. Their investigations were always carried out with practical objects in view, and when the objects were attained the experiments ceased. They never discovered a true scientific method. That was left to be done by another people who were long students of Egyptian science and who, taking all the learning of Egypt, worked out from it, as a basis, the principal sciences as we have them to-day. The Greeks took the torch of scientific progress from the Egyptians, organized learning, and passed it on to the Romans and other peoples in sound, effective and augmented forms.
The Greeks idealized and systematized scientific principles, whereas the Egyptians and earlier peoples rested content with the results they could obtain by their practical efforts. We will find that, throughout the history of science, progress has always been made by similar reactions between peoples possessing the one a practical, the other a philosophical genius.