Online Activities: Ancient Egypt
Tomb with a View: A Short Epigraphic Season in Thebes
By Roberta L. Shaw & Lyla Pinch-Brock
The tomb's exterior face has been dressed with mud-brick covered with mud-plaster and large slices of limestone, then finished with a skim of gypsum plaster. The wall is slightly battered and the rocky ledge above the tomb contains a recessed panel, probably for a stele (tombstone). Two buttressing side walls made of large flat slabs of limestone covered with a thin layer of plaster extend several metres into the courtyard. These, in ancient times, would have been extended to form a gated enclosure for the courtyard where remembrance ceremonies would have been conducted by the family for their deceased members. No tomb shaft is visible.
The Decoration
All of the walls of the tomb were decorated in antiquity. Scenes include a banquet, funeral rites, the god Osiris and several goddesses, a cooking scene (the product is uncertain), foreign tribute, two splendid horses and chariots, and two royal portraits. The present state of preservation varies. Most of the wall surface of the outer chamber has gaps where the painted plaster has either fallen off (nothing remains on the floor) or has been hacked away (probably in antiquity).
Most of the decoration on the west end of this room has crackled due to the heat from cooking fires when the tomb was inhabited (by the quick, rather than the dead), during Coptic or Medieval times. In several instances, the image of the tomb owner has been carefully removed, a feature common to many tombs, especially those of this date, and not yet fully understood. We don't know if the implications are religious or political.
The hand of at least two, and perhaps three, different artists is evident. The paintings in the outer room are certainly competent but exhibit a flat, plodding regularity that contrasts sharply with the lively, fluid depictions contained in the east half of the inner chamber. There is a small butchering scene to the right of the doorway which seems in a class by itself. The paintings appear to be in various stages of completion, again, a feature common to most Egyptian tombs.
Work Completed
Roberta Shaw made a complete photographic record of the walls of the tomb, using the tiling method. Some 450 slides were shot. The ceiling decoration, which is almost entirely gone, proved to be problematic, and time did not allow for a complete recording.
Butcher at work.
Roberta Shaw preparing for photographic work.
