Many different kinds of specialist communities under the supervision of temples in ancient Egypt are known to us, from priests to pig-farmers. However, most prominent among them is the village of the artists and masons who built and decorated the tombs in the Valley of the Kings at Thebes. During the New Kingdom, the Valley replaced the earlier royal pyramid complexes, and the men who worked there along with their families had their own exclusive village at Deir el-Medina, which lay on the desert edge because of the nature of their work [45]. Far from being isolated, however, the village was ideally located between a line of busy mortuary temples along the edge of the Nile floodplain and the men’s workplace in the Valley. Like the villagers at the Heit el-Ghurob, the good folk of Deir el-Medina could grow nothing of their own so the pharaoh supplied all their food and textile needs from the stores of the nearby temples and equally watched over their security via palace officials. During the 13th century BC there were up to eighty households in the village, with dozens more in the near vicinity. Compared with most Egyptians of their day, they lived in houses which we could classify as nice or very nice, even though they are not the extensive villas of the grandest Egyptians. Some of the men’s names are still painted on the front-door frames, and the first room in each house had a shrine for making offerings to the family’s ancestors, which could perhaps be screened off to accommodate the birth of the next generation. However, the village was abandoned when the Valley of the Kings was closed down about 1070 BC and, lacking farmland, was never fully reoccupied. Consequently the houses of the villagers survive to this day, and the documents they left behind add so much detail to the archaeology that this village of artists is the best-understood community in the whole of the ancient world.
Under normal circumstances, the men of Deir el-Medina were expected to do no more than their principal task: build and decorate what they simply called ‘the Tomb’. In this sense there was no ‘art for art’s sake’ in the village, at least on the part of the individual artists. The commitment to art was on the part of the pharaoh through his temple-building, his tomb and the tombs of his officials. The villagers were employed as workers in an industry of art, part of the project to build what the German art historian Hans Gerhard Evers memorably described as ‘a nation built out of stone’. Nonetheless, many of them were genuine artists in any sense of the word, and occasionally their little sketches bring to life the men at work – ancients who, to these artists, were simply neighbours [46]. Other compelling traces of the villagers have survived, including half-finished work in the Valley of the Kings, the administrative records of their business (including even records of absence), archives of family letters and, of course, their own tombs, which stand right next to the village in the shadow of the Theban hills (see pp. 102–104). Perhaps the most unexpected glimpse of their work is a detailed and annotated ground-plan of the subterranean tomb of king Ramesses IV (c. 1156–c. 1150 BC).
Deir el-Medina is an extraordinary community but still far from being the only place that allows us a meaningful glimpse of the artists at work. For example, from the 12th Dynasty a lively scene in the tomb of the governor Thuthotep shows a colossal statue being dragged by sledge from the calcite/alabaster quarries at Hatnub, in the Middle Egyptian desert, some 16 kilometres (10 miles) from the Nile [47]. The statue is said to be 13 cubits high (about 7 metres, or 23 feet) and ‘the road on which it came was more difficult than anything’. Four groups of forty-two men each haul a rope, paired up so we understand they are standing on either side of the statue to pull, with a single overseer making calls at the head of the line. Captions tell us there are gangs of ‘youths’ from each bank of the Nile hauling on the outside ropes ‘rejoicing in the perfect monument’, while inside is a gang of ‘recruits’ and a gang of ‘priests’. In spite of the hard work and desert conditions, men are running at top, waving branches, ‘excited as they see what favour you [i.e. Thuthotep] have before the king’. Beside the sledge more men carry a large, serrated board to help with traction when it threatens to get stuck, and others constantly bring water to wet the vehicle as it slides. Interestingly, the text confirms what we might have expected: that the stone was quarried as a block and transported to the town of Ashmunein in the same condition, though the scene seems to show a finished statue in transit. Once again the artist has illustrated what we know to be the case (the transport of a statue), not what we would have seen had we been there on the day.
A monumental block such as Thuthotep’s was isolated in the quarry by channelling through the living rock to form crawl-ways for the quarrymen. Once the required size and shape had been isolated, slots were cut under the block and used to split the stone away with levers, or sometimes perhaps wooden wedges forced in tightly and wetted until they swelled. Creating channels and slots involved a lot of labour, even in the relatively soft limestone and sandstone that predominate in Egypt; but in hard-stone areas such as the Aswan granite quarries, the work – simply using pounders of even harder stone – must have been a grim, exhausting business at times. A block that cracked was liable to crack even more, if attempts were made to scavenge smaller blocks out of it. A successfully detached block then had to be hauled or rolled down a slope onto a sledge, which might have been the most problematic moment of the operation: a large block that missed its sledge would possibly be immovable after it hit the quarry floor.
Plentiful labour, however, was one thing the pharaonic system of organization could provide. Occasionally criminals were punished by being sent to work in the desert quarries, but much more often an expedition to the desert was organized, provisioned and dispatched under the leadership of senior officials, who were personally accountable for getting the important work done and, just as importantly, getting everyone safely home (see p. 252). In the reign of Pepy I of the 6th Dynasty, the courtier Weni was appointed to lead the expedition to quarry the king’s sarcophagus and the capstone for his pyramid because he had successfully led five armies abroad on campaign. Another time, the king:
sent me to Hatnub to bring a great altar of Hatnub-stone, and I brought this altar to him in seventeen days, cut from Hatnub. I had it sail downstream in this barge – I cut for it a barge of acacia of sixty cubits [about 30 metres, or 100 feet] in its length and thirty cubits in its width.
Weni notes with pride that he was able to move this mighty barge in the dry season, without waiting for the Inundation.
Blessed with plentiful labour, the artists and builders of ancient Egypt kept most of their tools and techniques simple and straightforward. For example, to begin building a pyramid they would simply excavate a T-shaped pit, whose ‘leg’ would become an access ramp, while the ‘cross-bar’ would become the basis for the suite of subterranean chambers. This initial layout has now been exposed in the royal tombs at Abydos, whose superstructures have been eradicated by time [15, 23]. In this way, the artists would be able to complete most of the decoration and masons set the king’s stone sarcophagus in place before two lines of stone slabs were set at opposed angles to form a Λ-shaped roof over the chambers. The decorated rock-cut elements were then buried beneath the solid mass of the tumulus. The surface of the surrounding site need not be especially flat because the bottom of the tumulus could be ‘fluked’ using foundation layers of stones shaped or piled up to adapt to the rough-cut surface. Occasionally an uneven desert surface might even be cut into rough steps, then incorporated into the structure of the tumulus. Temples nearer the floodplain were built on foundations of rough-cut heavy blocks laid directly in the ground on a layer of sand, which may seem dangerously precarious to us but the finished walls could be expected to hold together through sheer dead weight.
Then the walls were laid with courses of rough-cut rectangular blocks, dressed smooth only on the bottom, before the masons moved them into place using levers and a layer of mortar, or maybe using rollers for the initial blocks that needed to be positioned exactly. Adjoining faces of blocks would be dressed as the masons moved along the course, the top surfaces not needing to be dressed until the entire course was complete. An obelisk, a monolithic column or a colossal statue could be erected simply by hauling the rough-cut block base-first up a mud-brick ramp until it eventually pivoted down into a hollow formed above the intended plinth. As it pivoted, the massive block would be pulled upright and straightened using ropes, occasionally relying on a pre-cut slot in the plinth to keep the block square while guiding it into the final position. Likewise, different configurations of mud-brick ramps were used to haul blocks and stones to the required point in, say, a temple wall, and the bulk of the resultant scaffolding helped support and protect the partially built architecture [48]. Eventually the masons would bring the scaffolding down, and the artists gradually dressed and decorated the surfaces as they did so, but ancient scaffolding can still be seen conspicuously in situ in unfinished areas of Karnak and other temples.
A scene from the 5th Dynasty tomb of Kaemrehu at Saqqara shows artists at work in a studio [49]. A millennium later, the 18th Dynasty tomb of Rekhmira at Thebes shows artists in a studio that is recognizably the same in terms of organization, working practices and technology [51]. The tools they use while collaborating on a statue are a wooden mallet, a copper chisel and an adze, and such simple tools were sufficient for most of pharaonic history. Many examples have survived in the archaeological record, and Egyptian artists and masons seem to have been immune to the supposed ‘advantages’ of iron tools or mechanized equipment for many centuries after they were introduced to them. Various copper saws, a set-square with a plumb bob, a level for checking plane surfaces, along with different sizes of drills – used with copper drill-bits and an abrasive slurry of sand and water – more or less complete the principal toolkit in use throughout pharaonic times. A stone mortar and pestle would be on hand to grind charcoal, gypsum and minerals such as malachite and orpiment to produce a basic palette of colours: black, white, yellow, various reds and browns, and various blues and greens. (Such minerals are not chemically inert, and in many instances have changed colour markedly since ancient times.) The pigments were applied using a brush made of reeds or palm fibres – doubled over, lashed together, then chewed at one end – and a suitable medium, which might have been a soluble plant gum or even egg white, typically laid on top of a dry plaster wash (secco). In a studio such as the one illustrated in the tomb of Kaemrehu, many folk other than the artists would have been on hand in order to fetch water, sharpen tools, replace drill-bits and so on.
Masonry marks and other graffiti of the time reveal that the artists and masons who, for example, built the Great Pyramid at Giza were organized into gangs each named after a key area of a boat, namely prow, stern, port-side, starboard-side and cabin. A millennium later the men from Deir el-Medina working in the tombs in the Valley of the Kings were still organized into gangs labelled ‘port’ and ‘starboard’. Hence, as in so many areas of life in ancient Egypt, the imagery of the work-gangs is based on that of boats making steady progress along the Nile, and the different groups of artists and masons belong together literally as ‘a crew’. In the next chapter, we are going to see that forming a crew is only one of various practices intended to allow the artists and the workers round them to collaborate in sufficient numbers to build and decorate monuments as quickly as possible on whatever scale was required. In the meantime, the practice recalls a story from the Greek historian Diodorus of Sicily, writing in the 1st century BC. Two Egyptian artists, he says, were commissioned by Greeks to sculpt a monumental statue, whereupon one set to work on the island of Samos and the other in the city of Ephesus. Each completed one half ‘and when the two parts were brought together they fitted so well that the whole work looked like it had been made by a single man’. Of course, the story may be apocryphal but it speaks volumes nevertheless about the reputed ability of Egyptian artists to work not as individuals, but as part of ‘a crew’.
Masterpiece
Life-size statues of Rahotep and Nofret
This pair of life-size statues came from a 4th Dynasty mastaba, on the same scale as Ptahshepses’ mastaba, built within sight of Snofru’s pyramid at Meidum (see p. 56). Their eerie naturalism, evoked by well-preserved colouring and lifelike eyes inlaid with quartz and rock crystal, quite frightened the workers who uncovered them in 1871. Yet, oddly, their excellent preservation is largely attributable to the fact that they were found in a sealed chamber, hidden behind the niched outer façade of the mastaba; so they were no longer available to receive offerings, once the tomb had been completed.
In pharaonic art, pairing a man and woman (other than kings and gods) usually indicates that they are married, and the mastaba in this case had shafts for two burials, so the pair seem to have been interred alongside one another. However, the only relationships stated in the hieroglyphic texts are with the king: the woman is said to be ‘the king’s acquaintance, Nofret’; the man is Rahotep, ‘a king’s son of his body’ as well as the chief priest of Ra-Horakhty at Heliopolis. Among his other titles he was ‘the elder among artists’, ‘expedition leader’ and ‘overseer of haulage’, as well as ‘the carpenter of the royal sceptre (?)’ and ‘controller of the tent’ (for the king’s travels, see p. 30). So, Rahotep might have been a son of Snofru, beside whose pyramid he was buried, but perhaps he is the son of the previous king, Huni. Certainly his titles suggest that much of his career might have been spent overseeing the building and decoration of the Meidum pyramid complex, in which case Snofru would have been his contemporary and so his brother.
Both statues are cut with a simple plinth and back pillar, thereby retaining the original outline of the parent stone block as it was quarried. Nothing of the figures protrudes outside the matrix of the original blocks, though this simplicity need not be for lack of expertise [97, 100]. First, although each ‘seat’ and back pillar is no more than a plain rectangle of stone, as an artistic conceit they do allow the sitters the apparent dignity of a throne. Secondly, the statues were set against the far wall of what was, at some point, an offering chapel, so they adopt the usual frontal pose and have no need to be released from the stone. Moreover, the white-painted back pillars are an effective background against which to display their faces clearly, as well as a useful base for the hieroglyphic texts, which identify exactly who the two people are.
Rahotep’s chair is wider than Nofret’s, which, almost imperceptibly, allows a modicum of extra weight to him and, by contrast, greater elegance to her. Typically, the man’s authority is expressed graphically in mostly physical terms, though the pendant painted round his neck is the king’s seal. Otherwise he is clothed in no more than a brief white kilt, and his powerful body is modelled in just a few bold lines. In fact, particular attention to his knees – at the front of the statue – and his eyes creates the impression that there is more detail generally in the sculpture than there really is. His right arm, folded across his chest, evokes both strength and the authority of an official salute, though this is also a gesture of greeting at the approach of an offering-bearer. His left hand, at his side, is tightly gripped, which also evokes a dynamic tension, but this (quite typical) grip also implies the presence of something in his hand, perhaps an official’s staff or sceptre, which could not otherwise be modelled without creating a dangerously fragile length of stone. Rahotep’s moustache is characteristic of many officials during the middle part of the Old Kingdom, especially the 3rd and 4th Dynasties.
Because of the painting, it is apparent that Nofret is wearing a dress, whose straps are visible, under her wrap or cloak. Despite these layers her tightly wrapped limbs are still visible, and the prominent nipples draw attention to her breasts. In other words, once again her sexuality is made obvious, especially when juxtaposed with her partner’s naked torso. However, it is also apparent that a skin colour was applied over her limbs before the brilliant white garments were layered on top, and the effect is to evoke the translucent quality of the finest linen (see p. 125), which, in tandem with her heavy wig and necklace of multi-coloured beads and blue-green pendants, says as much about fashionable beauty and affluence as it does about her physicality. Her pretty floral headband may be another conceit, imposing a false white background to highlight an elegant diadem, which was actually spun from metal wires (see p. 278).
The stark distinction in the skin colour of the two is an early instance of what will become another template in pharaonic art. Male figures tend to be painted with brown skin, while female figures are noticeably paler. Of course, the relative merits of tanned and pale skin are entangled in notions of beauty for many cultures, including our own. Arguably, in ancient Egyptian art, there is also an association between tanned skin and physical activity (in keeping with Rahotep’s powerful torso), and between pale skin and domestic activity, including raising children. However, these ideas are not spelled out in writing by the ancients, and the two skin colours are not always applied rigorously on the basis of gender. Nofret’s face is fuller and more rotund, and her eyes conspicuously narrower, than those of Rahotep, so perhaps there is a hint of corpulence to add to her affluent style and pale skin. These aspects together may paint a picture of a woman whose circumstances are of the most indulgent, and some men of that ilk will be encountered below. However, the imponderable question at this point is, how much of her appearance is simply an artistic device and how much is taken from life (see pp. 157–65)?