Cosmetic palette

A cosmetic palette is a surface, generally of stone, used to grind pigments for the preparation of cosmetics. Palettes are particularly characteristic of Predynastic Egypt, where they were made chiefly from grey-green stone quarried in the Wadi Hammamat and took both geometric and zoomorphic forms. During Naqada III, large relief-carved examples conventionally described as ceremonial palettes appeared and are associated in archaeological literature with the development of royal ideology; examples include the Narmer Palette, the Two Dogs Palette, the Hunters Palette and the Battlefield Palette. The use of both ordinary and ceremonial Predynastic palettes declined at the beginning of the First Dynasty, and the characteristic flat, shaped grey-stone palettes had disappeared as a category by the middle of the dynasty.

The term is also used for artefacts from other regions: in the southern Levant it is applied to small concave vessels of the Iron Age, although their use for cosmetics has not been directly demonstrated, while in Gandhara it denotes small concave stone dishes found mainly in north-western Pakistan.