51 Scene of a sculptors’ workshop, from the tomb chapel of the vizier Rekhmira, showing men polishing and painting a standing statue, a seated statue and a sphinx. West Thebes. Plastered and painted limestone. 18th Dynasty.
‘A Gateway to the Far Side of the Sky’: The Principles of Art |
It is worth taking a moment to recap some of the principles of ancient Egyptian art we have already encountered. For example, how the artist puts more stock in explaining the interaction between recognizable characters than in creating representations of the world as it appears to the eye (see p. 12). To that end, gods are often given forms consistent with the king’s human body, and are shown to interact with him in human terms, though they may also have strange heads consistent with their divine characteristics to mark them as ‘not-human’. Likewise, a scene is usually composed using distinct areas of information, and in particular baselines divide scenes into registers, and even into sub-registers within registers (see p. 118). The effect of these and other principles could be summarized by concluding that ancient Egyptian art is intended to seem clear, familiar and human, and in that sense both accessible and attractive. At the same time, it is resolutely abstract and, though this may create unfamiliar and off-putting outcomes, these are rarely allowed to intrude on our initial viewing. The fundamental value of abstract ideas is clearly not confined to pictorial art. For example, the recurring practice of burying full-size boats round royal tomb complexes only makes sense as abstract thinking or symbolism. The symbolism of the Risen Earth and the burial tumulus, whether a mastaba or a pyramid, became the basis for a whole genre of architecture expressed through another abstract idea – perfect geometric forms, which do not occur in nature. To put this another way, ancient Egyptian art is bound to be configured in accordance with the abstract meaning of a composition expressed in many different ways, whether in iconography (such as standard forms and typical poses, stock clothes and regalia), in the relative sizes of figures, in texts (such as speeches and captions), or whatever means are available.
51 Scene of a sculptors’ workshop, from the tomb chapel of the vizier Rekhmira, showing men polishing and painting a standing statue, a seated statue and a sphinx. West Thebes. Plastered and painted limestone. 18th Dynasty.
Registers show how skilfully the artist may manipulate the two key ideas, namely that the art should be both accessible and abstract. For example, in the artists’ studio depicted in the tomb of Rekhmira, men are shown working round two statues as though on scaffolding, one row above another [51]. However, in the space between the statues, men working on smaller objects are arranged in the same way, and we appreciate they are not going to be on scaffolding. Instead, we are being shown depth in the studio – the far scene shown above the near scene (or vice versa) – but in such a way that there is no obscuring or cluttering the view with perspective. The tall statues on either side frame the registers, so the sub-registers work attractively and efficiently within the same frame, and the treatment of each element of the scene is consistent. Once again, people are not scaled naturalistically but are shown interacting face to face, so subjects crouching have ‘real-world’ heights greater than those shown standing, but this is apparent only when the matter is consciously analysed. At first glance, everything seems natural.
We have already noted the implication of narrative in depicting a ritual at the White Chapel (see p. 28) or on Hmaka’s label for king Den (see pp. 41–42). More straightforwardly, in a scene of grape-treading in the tomb of Pahery a gang of men and women (distinguished from each other by dress and skin colour) may simply pick the grapes but, as a consequence, an undulating, unbroken line is formed, which leads the eye to the wine-press (see [27]). This flow of activity is sufficient to illustrate the complexity of a process or the passage of time. A vintner collecting the juice in a ‘real-world’ sense seems to be hovering in the air. Of course, in artistic terms he has simply been removed from ‘behind’ the wine-press, where he would be invisible, and the artist has cleverly used a horizontal strut in the press as the baseline for the jars in the vintner’s sub-register. Every composition in ancient Egyptian art is likely to disclose such artistic conceits and break down what would be complex for the eye into ‘parcels’ of clear and distinct visual information, to which may be added abstract information invisible to the eye. Of course, the cleverest aspect of this conceit is that it does not blatantly intrude into our viewing.
Literal meanings and abstract meanings
So, what is the relationship between the literal meaning and the abstract meaning of a scene? Let us take as an example the painted goose-count from the offering chapel of Nebamun, and consider what it tells us [52]. In truth, there seem to be innumerable ways to interpret such a deceptively simple scene – more or less literally, more or less symbolically.
First, we may assume Nebamun is wealthy to have so much at his disposal, though this assumption in turn speaks about his success in a hierarchical society where people supposedly benefit in proportion to their authority and responsibilities, and the king’s favour likewise is spelled out in rewards (see [174]).
52 Scene showing a count of geese, from the tomb chapel of Nebamun. West Thebes. Painted plaster. 0.71m (2 ft 4 in.) high. 18th Dynasty.
Of course, in a place of death the scene may speak about life and fertility and the seasons, which is perhaps the preferred antidote to death. More specifically, this is a scene of beautiful things and happiness. After all, what is more relaxing and nostalgic than a farm (if you are not working there), more handsome than a bird’s plumage, or more charming than a gaggle of geese? What more poignantly removes the sting of death? As the poet Rupert Brooke asks, ‘Say, is there Beauty yet to find? / And Certainty? and Quiet kind?’
Next, there are specific cultural references that an ancient Egyptian audience would surely recognize. For example, funerary art regularly employs marshland and water-fowl as a symbolic boundary – a liminal zone, neither water nor land, hence symbolically neither life nor death (see pp. 124–27).
Fourthly, and quite specifically, water-fowl are an epitome of the offerings asked for in funerary prayers, while offerings for the dead are a counterpart to offerings made to the king and the gods. In other words, on the decorated walls of a tomb, geese are bound to evoke offerings, and offerings are a reminder that we too may pass into the next life and enter the condition of ‘Adoration’, like the gods (see p. 38).
There seems to be at least one more line of interpretation. The ‘tax man’ at left, tallying the geese as they are counted in baskets, is tall enough to frame both registers behind him, while his two assistants are sufficiently tall to ‘intrude’ through the baseline of the upper scene. Hence we are encouraged not to treat the registers as separate scenes; the men at top and geese below somehow belong together. Now, the geese are a tax and the men kiss the ground or salute, so perhaps the scenes are two sides of the same coin: both tax and homage acknowledge authority, which is a cultural attitude; both fowl and adoration are aspects of offerings and the ‘Adoration’ due to the deceased, which is a religious belief.
Each of these interpretations seems to expand out of another, and each suggests that a picture of Nebamun’s estate may speak about his situation in different senses – his success, his good conduct, his place in death and so on. A bucolic scene may illustrate his authority or his funerary offerings, or may be the model for his pleasant garden in the eternal hereafter (‘paradise’, as we say in our own culture). Obviously the interplay between literal interpretation and symbolic interpretation guides an audience towards understanding that Nebamun’s goose-count is not a simple depiction of one episode from life. The meaning – or truth – of the artwork is developed in different directions, ostensibly by ‘reading between the lines’. In fact, this method of understanding art was perfectly familiar in the ancient world. Classical philosophers, such as Xenophanes (c. 565–c. 475 BC) and Anaxagoras (c. 500–c. 430 BC), used this method to analyse Homer’s poems, and the Egyptian scholars Philo (who died after AD 40) and Origen (c. AD 185–253) relied on it to make sense of the Old Testament. According to this method we recognize what is impossible in the composition when taken literally because this points us to other aspects of meaning, which ancient scholars believed would express the spiritual authority of the artwork. Of course, we should anticipate that there is spiritual authority in the art that concerns us in this book because, as we know, ancient Egyptian art is essentially religious (see p. 20).
The problem of the audience
There is another point to raise here regarding interpretation, which can be put like this: the problem of meaning in ancient Egyptian art is not necessarily a problem for an audience. Consider a celebrated statue of king Khafra [53]: statues are always frontally posed to face the priest or officiant in an offering chapel, so clearly the falcon embracing Khafra’s neck is covered by his wig and not at all visible to anyone who approaches from the front. Whatever information the falcon conveys (about the king’s authority, or his divine protection, or his condition as the deceased) was simply not available to an observer – at least, not in the manner it is nowadays, while the statue is on display in a museum. Indeed the statue might well have been kept in darkness originally, so may be understood to ‘embody’ something essential but not for the benefit of an audience. Similarly, the statues of Rahotep and Nofret were bricked in when their mastaba was completed so, whether or not the chapel was ever in use, they were eventually put out of sight but not disposed of. Likewise many of the great temple scenes or even the grand inscriptions of the pharaohs were displayed in blackness – in high, windowless corridors and chambers, often with limited space to step away from a wall so that even a lamp could illuminate only a snatch of a face or an isolated phrase in writing. It seems as though the meaning is to be found in the making of such art, not in the viewing – a celebration of saying, not seeing. As in a modern diary perhaps – but on a monumental scale – considerable time and attention has been spent in realizing ideas that may never be seen except by a few persons already in the know.
53 Seated statue of king Khafra, from the Valley Temple of the king’s pyramid complex at Giza. Iridescent diorite or gneiss. 1.68 m (5 ft 6 in.) high. 4th Dynasty.
54 Granite statue of king Senwosret III, making a gesture of greeting. From the mortuary temple of his forebear Montuhotep II and presumably associated with offerings for the dead king. Deir el-Bahri, West Thebes. 1.22 m (4 ft) high. 12th Dynasty.
Appreciating the notable absence of an audience allows us to make sense of other characteristics of ancient Egyptian art, such as the absence of emotions in most subjects. Of course, ancient people had the same feelings as any man, woman or child in any age, and emotions may be shown as such [199]. However, a king such as Senwosret III (c. 1840–c. 1805 BC) is presented as a religious subject, and consequently the sculptor is concerned with spiritual qualities such as authority, eminence, dignity and even perfection, as we shall see later (see pp. 157–60) [54]. Consequently, emotions, which are specific distortions of the subject based on a moment in time, have no relevance. Perspective, likewise, reduces the subject to a particular viewpoint at a given moment, and confuses our view of the ‘real’ subject. Hence perspective is rarely shown, as was apparent in Rekhmira’s painting of a studio, where clarity was preferred to any particular viewpoint (see p. 90).
Of course, the lack of an audience would tend to temper any ambition on the part of an artist to innovate or display individual skills. In their biographies, men such as Ptahshepses and Amenhotep, son of Hapu, claim success in terms of fulfilling to the best of their abilities what was expected of them, rather than realizing their own artistic visions. There might have been no-one for the artists to impress, beguile or entertain other than perhaps the king. In the modern world, we are so accustomed to discussing artefacts by reference to context, evolution, progress and change that we may be startled by the apparently limited and unchanging repertoire of the artists in ancient Egypt, where familiar forms and stock scenes get repeated over and over again for two, three thousand years. Consequently, a modern, critical analysis may pay too much attention to specific details and concentrate on matters that do change in preference to the preponderance of unchanging forms valued by the ancient artists themselves. For a modern audience, the details often become the epitome of the time and place in which the artwork was created; hence Senwosret’s oversized ears, which are not present in statues of Old Kingdom pharaohs, have recently become both the essence of the statue and the Middle Kingdom zeitgeist (but see also p. 132). Modern scholars have gone so far as to interpret Senwosret’s ears in terms of governmental reforms – or even the reinvention of kingship – during the reign of ‘the listening king’ par excellence. This may be true, of course, but ancient Egyptian art is not a primitive form of photography, nor a depiction of events the ancients lived through: such historical information must be sought elsewhere. Rather, ancient Egyptian art embodies the constancy of the professional and spiritual values that artists maintained throughout the entirety of pharaonic rule. So, when we compare the statues of Khafra and Senwosret III, we do well to recognize first of all what has not changed during the course of half a millennium between those kings before we turn our attention to whichever details happen to look different. After all, constancy may be a sign of confident understanding rather than the inability to develop: Johnny Cash’s guitarist, Luther Perkins, when asked why he stuck so assiduously to one simple style of playing, is said to have replied, perhaps apocryphally, ‘what everybody’s looking for I already found’.
55 Hieroglyphic inscription laid out using a square grid in the tomb chapel of the marine commander Ahmose, son of Abana. El-Kab. Limestone relief. 18th Dynasty.
Hieroglyphs and language
For artists faced with the conundrum of adding abstract information to compositions that must also remain clear and accessible, hieroglyphs were an invaluable tool [55]. Like monumental art, the earliest writing in Egypt is associated with the first kings, though the oldest connected texts explaining their values and beliefs in detail actually come from the offering chapels of their high officials as late as the 4th Dynasty. Subsequently hieroglyphs remained in use, but only in sacred contexts, to the end of the pharaonic era. The forms of hieroglyphs as pictures were intrinsically attractive and often executed in as much detail as any other imagery the artists worked upon. However, hieroglyphs are not pictorial as such, and it is a common misconception to suppose that hieroglyphs are picture-writing. In fact, hieroglyphs are a device for writing the sounds of Ancient Egyptian to add linguistic information to a scene in a manner that enhances its visual attractiveness while clarifying its meaning. The interplay may remain simple, as when a god hands a king the sceptre which is not a ‘real’ sceptre but a composite of the hieroglyphs 
(see p. 21). Likewise the god provides ‘breath’ and, because the phrase for ‘breath’ in Egyptian is literally ‘life-wind’, we have already seen Sobk-Ra wafting the hieroglyph ‘life’ into the face of the king (see p. 12).
On the other hand, hieroglyphs add information to art so efficiently that, some scholars argue, whole compositions may be reduced to words and ‘read’ as though they were texts. In other words, we may analyse a composition by asking, what does the composition mean as a word (see pp. 93–94)? For example, the 6th Dynasty scene of Sabni fishing with a harpoon and catching birds with a throw-stick is typical of the decoration of a high official’s tomb at any period and, as ever, we are confronted with the problem of how to interpret the composition, literally and symbolically [56]. In a literal sense, we may conclude that the deceased is healthy and having fun, despite the funereal setting. On the other hand, boats and marshes are likely to have symbolic associations in tombs, evoking the transition to death. Likewise, various incongruities suggest we cannot simply take the scene at face value. For example, in the sub-registers well-dressed people (family, servants?) are waiting on Sabni in the marshes. So what do we make of this? If we were to ‘read’ the scenes instead, we may discern that there is a pun on the words ‘throw’ and ‘create’ (that is, the two words sound the same in Ancient Egyptian); likewise, there is a pun on ‘spear’ and ‘inseminate’. In either instance, we use the ‘reading’ of the scene to point us towards an interpretation that has more to do with procreation and new life than death and non-existence, an interpretation which may be appropriate to the tomb but is a long way from the actual activities of fishing and fowling. In an obvious sense, such an analysis seems too limited and reductionist because the vitality, dignity, happiness and contentment of Sabni as a man are apparent in the scene without having to reduce it to a couple of words. However, hieroglyphic texts are also integral to the composition, if only to specify what we are looking at and – crucially – who we are looking at, so we cannot simply dismiss this ‘extra step’ of specific language-based interpretation for being wholly far-fetched (see p. 126).
To take an example, the starry ceilings appearing in the royal pyramid complexes of the Old Kingdom become typical of the ceilings of all royal temples and tombs (see p. 51). As a hieroglyph a star writes the word ‘adore’, the very activity we associate with temples and tombs. So the starry ceiling of the tomb may well evoke eternity and heaven as an image and at the same time invoke ‘Adoration’, the very word that characterizes the eternal afterlife. If the possibility still seems far-fetched, then consider the following statement from the tomb biography of Ankhtyfy (whom we will see again in Chapter 10): Ankhtyfy describes his own tomb with the words, ‘I have made a gateway to the far side of the sky / and its roof is heaven, its belly the sky. / It is covered in stars.’
56 Fishing and fowling scene in the tomb chapel of the overseer of Upper Egypt Sabni. Qubbet el-Hawa, near Aswan. Plastered and painted sandstone. 6th Dynasty.
In the end, the use of hieroglyphs in ancient Egyptian art is always informative, and it also obliges us to recognize that a definitive and final interpretation of any particular theme or composition is beyond our ken. To take an almost silly example, did the pharaohs actually wear bulls’ tails, given that they always do in art (see p. 22)? Quite possibly the tail is an artistic conceit but then, in an inscription from a temple of the god Montu, we read the following statement about Thutmose III: ‘He slew seven lions by archery in the space of a moment, having taken the hides of twelve bulls in a single hour. Breakfast-time came and their tails were at his backside.’ So did Thutmose really wear their tails? Is this a case of art imitating life or vice versa?
Masterpiece
Sennedjem’s burial chamber
In the matter of discerning symbolic interpretations of art, a masterful case in point is a dramatic painting at one end of the subterranean burial chamber of Sennedjem and his wife, Iyneferti, who died a little after 1300 BC during the reign of Sety I. Decorated burial chambers in non-royal tombs are exceptional outside the village of Deir el-Medina and western Thebes. Usually any decoration in the tomb is reserved for chapels above ground, but here we are in the local cemetery of the artists who built and decorated the tombs in the Valley of the Kings, where Sennedjem and his neighbours possessed the requisite skills to decorate anywhere they chose. So, though we can never be sure of the reason for choosing this unusual location, we may have here an exceptional insight into how a privileged artist would choose to decorate his own final resting place. On the other hand, miniature versions of the same scene are used to illuminate the traditional funerary scrolls Egyptologists call the Egyptian Book of the Dead (see p. 262), so this may in fact be the usual, expected imagery of a burial but copied by an artist on a grander scale than usual.
At first glance the composition is just another agricultural scene, which adds a note of quiet and beauty to an otherwise bleak and sombre location. Still, surely Sennedjem had no expectation that the burial chamber would be visited or the painting be seen, once he and his wife were finally interred. More to the point, Sennedjem never spent a moment like this in his life. As a man of Deir el-Medina, he worked for the palace and spent his living and working days in and about the desert. Indeed, nobody ever ploughed and reaped wheat alongside his wife, both in their finest, whitest, most fashionably pleated clothes. As for his bare shoulders, Sennedjem would be burnt red raw in no time beneath the unrelenting Egyptian sunshine. So, once again incongruities collect as clues to a conceit that points us away from the literal meaning of the scene towards the type of spiritual interpretation acknowledged by the ancients. For example, the cycle of ploughing and reaping the land is shown encircled by a fluid waterway, edged with marshes – again, a liminal image – and the new life of the plants emerges directly out of the fluid Potential (nun). At top, the falcon-headed Sun-god is sailing the waterway in a boat, describing the arc of the sky (and the burial chamber is arched too). A pair of baboons adore the Sun-god and even speak, briefly saying, ‘he is in the sky as life’. Between the register of the solar boat and the earth being cultivated below lies a distinct area defined by two activities: at one end ‘adoring’ the Sun-god, at the other end burial – while the interval between them is traversed in a papyrus boat like Sabni’s [56].
57 Painting at the west end of the burial chamber of the tomb of Sennedjem. Deir el-Medina, West Thebes. Plastered and painted limestone. 19th Dynasty.
The only point of contact between these activities and the register of the Sun-god is a remarkable band of black and white stripes. Hence the ploughing and reaping, life and death, night and day are presented as pairs of opposites bound up by the sailing of the Sun-god. Through the entire scene a brilliant gold – the colour of the wheat and the Sun – illuminates land and sky alike, recalling for us perhaps the radioactive sky and the swathe of corn in Vincent van Gogh’s The Sower [58]. In the Dutchman’s deep-set, viscous landscape, images of death among life – sowing corn ahead of the harvest, crows preying on seeds, the cloying, underlying blackness – are illuminated by the radiance of Creation, while the man standing on the earth rises up to the sky. Likewise, Sennedjem and Iyneferti, alone together, are the apogee of Creation, their feet on the sprouting soil of the Risen Earth, their lives (and deaths) bridging the apparent separation between the world and its Creator.
