Egyptian Art

By now, it will be clear that the wonderful artworks seen on a tour of the ‘Ancient Egypt’ galleries of distinguished museums come from tombs or temples. However, other ostensibly mundane artefacts – items of the everyday perhaps – such as furniture, toiletries or a young woman’s jewelry, may also catch the visitor’s eye. Part 1 discussed how little – not just relatively speaking, but in actual quantity – has survived from domestic contexts, so it is worth considering that even these ‘everyday’ items may, on closer inspection, also turn out to be funerary products. Of course, funerary objects were not produced in a cultural vacuum, and analogous or comparable items of furniture, jewelry and so on do occasionally come to us in urban archaeological contexts, at places such as Deir el-Medina, el-Amarna or Malqata. However, those artefacts we may classify as the ‘minor’ arts of ancient Egypt tend to be funerary objects not just by chance of survival but by intention – that is, they were often first manufactured for the tomb. Every one of these minor arts requires a study more detailed than is possible here, but a brief discussion may illustrate the point.

Furniture may be the most obvious example. The oldest surviving furniture dates from as far back as the 1st Dynasty and comes from burials in Tarkhan. From that moment on, certain technical features are common to furniture in any context. For example, Egypt’s indigenous woods, such as tamarisk, acacia, persea, sidder (Christ’s thorn) and sycomore fig, tend to produce timber that is restricted in size, and often twisted and knotty. Such timber may be suitable for smaller objects, such as head-rests [211], while superior foreign timbers, such as ash, beech, cedar and ebony could be imported by those with the wherewithal. However, more practical solutions were generally needed for much of the furniture in the tomb or home. So, for example, veneers and plywoods have been discovered in tombs as ancient as the Old Kingdom, and at all periods misshapen timbers were often pegged or bound together to create longer planks. Simple butt joints, box-and-frame joints or various types of mitres were developed for constructing the frames. Plaster and paint disguised the underlying inconsistency of the timber, while inlays or marquetry could create the impression of something more sophisticated, and inlays of luxury materials, such as ivory, provide decorative features. However, at the other end of the scale, in homes and workplaces doubtless plainer materials such as reeds and rushes were more typically used for simple pieces of furniture, such as boxes.

The furniture from Tarkhan includes bed frames, with details such as feet formed as bulls’ hooves. Similarly, lions’ feet characterize the magnificent 4th Dynasty furniture collection from the reburial of Khufu’s mother Hetepheres. The collection was designed to sit under a gilded wooden canopy that had copper-reinforced joints so it could be taken apart for ease of carriage. The queen’s wooden bed has a gilded head-rest and a wooden footboard inlaid with faience, and obviously is very far from being ordinary household furniture. Two gilded chairs have high, openwork sides formed as intertwined lotuses in one case and Horus-falcons in the other, while another chair has gilded carrying poles also shaped as lotus-flowers. A common feature of the bed and all the chairs is the use of low legs [212], which may suggest the high-sided chairs were designed for squatting or crouching, though this is far from certain, and such low chairs probably can be used comfortably in a sitting position. During the New Kingdom, the type of seat most typically deposited in burials was a latticework stool with three or four (longer) legs supporting a bowl-shaped seat, perhaps made of rushes or leather but often simply of wood. Nonetheless, the short legs serve to remind us that many depictions of people in domestic or professional environments show them squatting on the floor, while in art those who are seated typically have that position because they have superior status, whether in life or in terms of the composition (see p. 150). Hence we may question whether individual chairs – which we today take for granted – were truly everyday furniture.

All sorts of combs, tweezers, pins and sticks offer the same conundrum as razors – how to distinguish essentially funerary displays from the ordinary toilet of living Egyptians. For example, mirrors whose handles are shaped as the face of Hathor are common in art, presumably ‘marking’ women for beauty (see p. 185) [216]. Accordingly, a form of polished metal mirror typically found in tombs, which has a handle with back-to-back faces of Hathor, may be a case of life imitating art or vice versa. However, a mirror’s handle may be a blooming lotus flower instead, and the combination of the lotus flower handle and the owner’s reflected face obviously compares to the carving of Tutankhamun’s head flowering out of a lotus (see p. 162). Moreover, the image of the deceased’s head in a blooming lotus appears in Spell 81A of the compilation of specifically funerary spells or speeches that we today call the Egyptian Book of the Dead, though their ancient name is ‘Speeches for Coming Out in the Daylight’. These compilations, first set down on papyrus scrolls during the 16th century BC, were based on more ancient texts traceable directly from the Pyramid Texts (see p. 57). Typically the scrolls were placed in coffins or burial chambers. The finest were illustrated, and extracts were also used as part of the decoration of coffins and other funerary artefacts from the New Kingdom and throughout the 1st millennium BC, as we shall see. Spell 81A begins, ‘I am a pure lotus, which has come out in the daylight’, thereby locating this image – and presumably, therefore, certain mirrors – at the heart of the Book of the Dead.

The plain, unglazed ceramics of pharaonic Egypt typical in domestic use, even in palaces, usually carry little decoration other than a pottery slip or a pigment wash. The same plain vessels also appear in great quantities in tombs, where they will have been used for bringing offerings from the living. On the other hand, brightly glazed stones were used in pre-dynastic graves to imitate turquoise and lapis lazuli in beads and suchlike, and the glazed composite faience was used to create small decorative objects, amulets and tiles, whether modelled by hand or using cores or moulds. Subsequently faience was used throughout the dynastic period to manufacture brightly decorated vessels, as were similar glazed media, such as frit, ‘Egyptian Blue’ and, later, glass. (An old axiom in Egyptology insisted that glass was brought to Egypt during the 18th Dynasty in the reign of Thutmose III, but glass objects appear already in Middle Kingdom burials and possibly even earlier.) For example, decorative animal motifs, such as the ‘gaping’ fish, are humorous and attractive as well as ideal for glazed flasks and suchlike, bright vessels which seem to find their natural home in the tomb [219]. The green faience dish with a flaring base and slightly flaring sides may imitate an open lotus and the outside is decorated with flowers [218]. In any event, the inner surface shows three interlocking fish nibbling the marsh plants, on top of which birds are standing. Again, marshes and birds are familiar enough in funerary art and this fish, known locally as būlti, or tilapia in English, is associated in mythology with Hathor and female fertility, perhaps because it seems to swallow its eggs and give birth by regurgitating its progeny. The tilapia also symbolizes the daily circuit of the Sun, and dishes decorated with fish may be shaped as the cartouche, which was used to enclose the king’s name in writing and called in Ancient Egyptian the ‘great circuit’ (shen wer). Generally, as we shall see, images of fish are extremely common on small grave goods.

A characteristic of glazes and faience of the New Kingdom is black-painted design on a distinctive deep blue colour made from a natural mix of cobalt and alum. In this example, the woman playing a lute is naked but for her wig, collar and girdle [220]. She is shown next to a pool or perhaps on a mound, beneath a shelter of blossoms or fruit, recalling the tomb of Sennedjem or the pool of Irynefer (see pp. 102–105, 190). The flowering lotuses are a funerary image too, and frame the scene as though bounding a sacred place with the columns of a temple (see pp. 202–203). Finally, a monkey plays at her girdle, and may represent mischief or perhaps some mythological allusion to her sexuality. Is the young lady a carefree companion ‘on the shore of intoxication’, the goddess Hathor even, or maybe a play-time prostitute? By contrast, the faience hippopotamus, of which some fifty are known today, is bursting with simple charm [221]. However, a second glance indicates he is covered with marsh plants, like the faience dishes. Perhaps we should see in the hippopotamus a ‘marshy’ horse – not quite a land creature nor a river creature. In this sense, he would be like the marshes themselves – at the boundaries of form. More to the point, perhaps, the hippopotamus in art and mythology is associated with the god Seth, and may be shown harpooned by Horus during his triumph over rebellion and lawlessness (see p. 285), just as the tomb owners typically harpoon fish (see p. 101). So, the happy hippo of the decoration is burgeoning with religious symbolism, whereas the faience vessel itself has no obvious practical value for tomb or home.

Wooden or ceramic models of servants embody many of the themes of reliefs and paintings. However, they are often part of the actual burial, placed either in niches in the burial chamber or with the coffins. In some cases, this may be because they belong to smaller, simpler tombs for which a decorated offering chapel was not practical. On the other hand, perhaps they are intended to bring a (literally) fuller presence than two dimensions do. In any event, models probably constitute a different medium for essentially the same funerary art, their use partly dictated by regional differences or the preferred practices of different workshops (see Chapter 10).

The serving-girl model from the reign of Amenhotep III, reportedly found in the tomb of a high priest Meryptah, is made of boxwood, and also stands about 15 centimetres (6 inches) without the (modern) stand [225]. She is not so plump as the previous servant and has barely developed breasts, but she too is unabashedly sexual – naked but for a gold girdle and a charm in the form of a bes, she wears facial cosmetics and an earplug, and the artist has painted her pubic hair. The sockets on the sides of her head indicate that she wore a heavy wig, which in pharaonic literature was often an invitation to sex. (The wig is now lost but would have covered her ‘missing’ ear.) The jar, carved out of the same original piece of wood, is positioned on her left hip and she is bent away to compensate for the weight. Therefore, her centre-line has left the vertical in a manner which recalls the ‘sexy’ musicians in Nebamun’s tomb, or the ostracon with the gymnast, or, of course, Rekhmira’s serving girl (see pp. 121, 122, 256).

The ceramic flask shaped as a heavy man is a different matter, though again it is roughly the same height [226]. Unlike the serving girls, the man himself is the container, and the spout an integral feature of his head. He wears a kilt on which he has unrolled a scroll as though to write, while his right leg is raised and the left foot trapped behind it, so superficially the composition may recall the statue of Harwa (see p. 245). However, this fellow is leaning away from the vertical without the influence of any heavy weight except perhaps his own extraordinary bulk, and he brings none of the dignity of Harwa, seeming instead to be unusually relaxed or awkward. We may even suppose he is the worse for alcohol – an impression heightened by his wry smile – and wonder whether this is an indication of the intended contents of the flask. Perhaps the flask is about intoxication, perhaps about literacy, perhaps good humour, and these are all familiar themes in the art of pharaonic tombs.

Since this discussion of the minor arts keeps leading back to the tomb, we must not overlook the fact that coffins too may be a rich source of figurative art from ancient Egypt [233]. In a peculiar sense, there may be little in one’s life more personal than the coffin in which one is laid forever, and likewise nothing could be more specifically funerary. The earliest, dating back to the dawn of the pharaonic era, are simple boxes decorated as shrines to hold the contracted body after the fashion of the gods’ statues, which seems consistent with ‘adoration’ and the beliefs discussed in Chapter 9. During the late Old Kingdom, mummies tended to be embalmed first and so were buried in extended postures, while coffins grew longer and were decorated with texts requesting the usual funerary offerings and invoking the mythology of Osiris. By this time painted wadjet-eyes were added, human eyes combined with the external markings of a falcon’s eyes, which might have let the corpse, laid on its left side, look out to the sunrise.

From the early Middle Kingdom, Osiris-shaped coffins begin to appear as an extra container inside these rectangular coffins [234, 235]. At Thebes, in the late Middle Kingdom, these coffins developed a style of decoration that showed the deceased smothered in the elaborately feathered wings of a kite, a decorative style known in Egyptology by the Arabic word r- ishi or ‘feathered’. In temple scenes at Abydos the kite represents Isis simultaneously protecting the dead Osiris and conceiving his child (see p. 38). This ‘feathering’ remained the decorative tradition for royal coffins in the Valley of the Kings but, from the reign of Amenhotep III, so-called ‘yellow coffins’ became typical elsewhere and remained in use for more than half a millennium. This was a lavishly coloured style, employing a background of vivid yellow or more properly gold, often enhanced by resin varnish (see pp. 102–105). The identification with Osiris was usually emphasized by adding a king’s arms crossed over an elaborate collar. The decoration of ‘yellow coffins’ usually incorporates scenes analogous to contemporary tomb paintings, including the mythology of Osiris and the voyage of the Sun through the night sky. As a rule the number of these scenes increased through time, until coffins underwent another transformation in decoration in the 10th century BC, when the background colour reverted to white and the density of the decoration was drastically reduced. None the less, the symbolism of Osiris remains explicit in the overall form of the coffin and the now-standard depiction of Ptah-Sokar-Osiris on the inside (see pp. 212–15).

The ‘Keeper of the Balance’ is a reference to a final judgment, in which the deceased would be asked to give an account of his or her conduct before Osiris in the so-called ‘weighing of the heart’ ceremony, famously illustrated in the Book of the Dead [236]. The deceased (in this instance, a king’s scribe named Any) stands before the first gods of Creation, his heart weighed on the Balance against a feather, which is the hieroglyph that writes the word ‘Truth’ (see pp. 16, 242). Horus presents the deceased to Osiris with the words, ‘I have come before you, O, Wenennefer, bringing you the deceased Any because his will, which has come through the Balance, is true.’ Then Horus asks that the deceased receive the wherewithal of an offering cult, saying, ‘Let the bread and beer that are distributed in the presence of Osiris be given to him. He now exists like those who follow Horus for all time’. The deceased also speaks up, saying to Osiris, ‘There is no wrongdoing in my belly. I do not knowingly lie. No, no! Let me exist like the praised ones who are following you.’ At last Thoth, god of wisdom, pronounces the judgment: ‘His soul is standing as witness to him, and his moment on the Great Balance is true.’ Thus eternity may hinge on the sentiment of the simple ‘scarab spell’: let your heart be in accord with Creation and all will be well, even in death.

Masterpiece
Crown of Khnumet

237 Gold crown of the king’s daughter Khnumet. Dahshur. 12th Dynasty.

In February 1895, at Dahshur in the ruinous pyramid complex of Amenemhat II, Jacques de Morgan set to work. In his previous season of excavation, the French-born Director of Antiquities for the Egyptian government had found boxes of personal treasures in the burials of two women, Sathathor and Meret, laid to rest beside the pyramid of Senwosret III. The princesses’ dazzling jewelry was characterized by gold openwork frames inlaid with semi-precious stones to create brilliant polychrome effects. Now, in his second season, de Morgan had exposed the burials of Amenemhat’s daughters, Khnumet and Ita, in a single tomb built within a vast rock-cut gallery alongside his pyramid. He was able to make a brief final sketch of the women’s mortal remains, still – barely – preserved inside granite sarcophagi.

Collected in a small side-chamber beside her sarcophagus, Khnumet’s treasures included collars, pectorals, rings, several bead necklaces, and numerous pendants. The Frenchman declared the jeweler responsible ‘incomparable’ in any age. A gold crown was formed in a pattern of stylized lotuses, inlaid with lapis lazuli, carnelian and turquoise, topped by a gold falcon and a slender ‘reed’ draped with delicate leaves. Khnumet had another crown too, so delicate that de Morgan supposed the slightest breath might snap it, though ironically Jaromír Málek describes the delicacy as ‘breathtaking’. A network of interlaced gold wires entangles nearly 200 tiny flowers, each with a carnelian eye and five turquoise-inlaid petals, recalling the hieroglyphic stars that write the word ‘adoration’ (see p. 149). The wires are anchored to three pins on either side of five inlaid ‘Maltese crosses’, which are actually clusters of lotus blossoms – the ubiquitous image of rebirth in a funerary context – and terminate at a pair of rings on the back of a sixth ‘cross’. The curator W. Stevenson Smith noted that ‘the airy lightness of the goldwork must have allowed … the flowers to appear as though scattered through the hair of the wearer’, while the art historian Arielle Kozloff goes so far as to suggest ‘it conjures up the image of a lovely young girl as she pads barefoot through the palace or dances in the Audience-Hall with the wreath jingling and rustling on her head’. However, for the moment we may wonder whether Khnumet ever once put it on – or whether we are discussing something specifically funerary. More recently, the Egyptologist Wolfram Grajetzki has suggested that elements in the treasure hoards of the 12th Dynasty princesses correspond to elements in the funeral rites of Osiris himself, as described in the ancient Pyramid Texts.