Egyptology: Artisans Lecture with Dr. Serena Love
Brisbane has some interesting stuff in its museums. Recently, the Dutch Museum of National Antiquities (Rijksmueum van Oudheden) partnered with Queensland Museum Kurilpa to showcase Ancient Egyptian Artifacts from Pre-History to the Roman Period. The exhibit is open up to the 17th of August and oh holy hell, I wanted to go so bad!
A ticket costs $30 per person to see the exhibit. I checked the website to see if there were any talks and yes, there were. For 4 Saturdays from the 2nd to the 23rd. I missed the one that was done in the second which was about the mummification and funerary practices, so I booked one for the 9th which was about artisans and brickmakers. Perfect! I learned about some ancient Egyptian art during my art history semester and I wanted to enrich myself with more knowledge. I sent $15 for the lecture (different from the collection ticket) and listened to how ancient artisans did their trade through a PowerPoint presentation while Dr. Serena Love explained each picture, slide, and her own experiences in encountering them.
The lecture started at 10:30am and lasted for an hour. I saw people of all ages come to see what's up. Some of them brought their laptops, the others brought pens and paper, others like lazy little me, just brought an old phone.
Dr. Love started the lecture about The Satire of the Trades from the Ancient Egyptian scribe Kheti to his son Pepi. Kheti just wanted his son to follow his footsteps as a scribe, so he described how the laborers and other artisans and tradesmen smelled like fish excrement, always tired, and suffered from violent beatings. But if you're a scribe, you'll be fine because "there is no scribe lacking sustenance". I guess secretaries were well fed at the time.
She started with the coppersmith, what their life was like and how important the whole copper industry was to their civilization. She went onto detail bout copper is pretty much what they used to do a lot of labour from stone cutting (cutting off limestone) to making mirrors. And as people know, that metal is soft. The copper tools get blunt easily so the coppersmiths work tirelessly day and night for centuries before moving onto bronze. Then she showed some pictures of artifacts that were also in the exhibit of some copper and bronze artifacts and their uses.
Did they seriously use copper chisels and shit to cut off granite?!!! Egyptologists think so. They recreated the technique using a copper tool and a small bit of limestone to see if it could be done. Yes. It could. It would take about 20 strikes for a copper tool to cut a chunk of limestone. Imagine doing that to make the pyramids. You will needs millions of slaves to cut all of those limestone with subpar tools. The scale of it was astounding if you think about it. Poor slaves.
The copper industry was also closely related to Egyptian faience. Faience was also related to jewelry making as it was an early attempt to imitate stones, particularly the Lapis Lazuli.
Dr. Love talked about the famous hippo statue "William", how it was so cute and that they all had copies of it as paperweights in their office.
We moved on to the bricklayer. Our boy Kheti also bashed the bricklayers to Pepi. Don't do it son, they work naked, they knead shit and they only wash once a day. To put it into perspective, clothes were expensive in Ancient Egypt and since the brickmakers put straw and dung in the clay they make. It makes sense, you have something expensive so you gotta protect it. Off with the clothes! Practicality is king.
Dr. Love didn't have any brick artifacts, so she showed us some pictures of the Pyramid of Amenemhat III.
The vintner was next. Kheti told his son to not make wine because they make deliveries and they die on the way more often than any profession. There were no artifacts of these as well, but Dr. Love told us about some grapes that have existed for thousands of years and there's wine from it. yeah right, she didn't want to believe it so she texted a colleague to confirm it and colleague said "yeah that's true". And now she has a bottle of it. She then talked about how some hieratic script came to life and that is because they had to label wine. Ooh... (checks hieratic) Vintage 4200 BC, delicious.
Kheti hated the weavers too. He told his son don't become one, it's a woman's job. They are not allowed to leave the weaver's den and if they want to go out to see sunlight, they have to bribe the guards with food. Going back to the brickmaker, we learned that ancient clothes were expensive and you are rich if you have full body and translucent clothing. The weavers mostly worked with linen and there were weaving tools and techniques that are still used today.
They were not restricted to making clothes. Linen was also used to make cartonnage which is linen or papyrus strips stuck together with plaster or resin, kind of like an old timey papier mache. As we know, this is utterly important.
Here's what inside a cartonnage looks like.
Leathermakers were also dissed. Kheti said the were gross and they chewed their material.
Can you imagine chewing on leather day in and out to create sandals? My jaw hurts just thinking about it.
But the leatherworkers came up with this beauty: King Tut's infamous sandals. There were figures there that represented his enemies so King Tut can symbolically step on them every day. I aspire to be that level of petty.
Then there is the scribe. So Kheti told Pepi, "I have placed you on the path of God... Honor your father and mother who have placed you on the path of the living." In short, since time immemorial, parents have pushed their kids to follow in their footsteps. Dr. Serena Love explained that being a scribe in ancient times was a trade that was passed down through scribe families and that only about 5% of the population were functionally literate.
There were scribes who were called copyists. They only copied what they saw and was given to them by the functional literates. Dr. Love also talked about the two types of writing the Ancient Egyptians had: hieroglyphics and hieratic. Hieroglyphics were used for religious text and hieratic was used for everyday things. The process of making the papyrus was also shown with some artifacts to show us what they look like. Unfortunately, because of time, decay, and the material itself, some papyrus writings have been destroyed, broken, are in bits but some of them were also well preserved because of the arid conditions in the desert.
Papyrus artworks are still available today with current artists making their works based on ancient artworks.
What Kheti didn't talk about was glassmaking. This was after his time and according to Dr. Love, the glassmaking industry virtually appeared overnight in Ancient Egypt because of the artisans who were captured by Thutmose II. The artifacts she showed us looked so big in the presentation, like your average vase big, but in actuality they were so small. They looked like they can only hold about 15ml of perfume. The way that they did it in ancient times with subpar tools is again, amazing, but I pity the poor artisans and their hard labor.
Because of the love that was given to making glass, it was considered as an artificial semi-precious stone and were given as presents by the rich to the rich. Interesting to note is the patterns on the glass which were made by dragging a thin stick on bands of color vertically up or down in an alternating pattern, a technique that chocolatiers still use today.
It has enriched my knowledge of what I know about Ancient Egyptian artisans from my art history class. My old college class focused on the patterns, their significance, the types of furniture and the rooms that can be found in a theoretical Egyptian palace. We did not know anything about artisans and what their life was like. The lecture definitely put things into perspective and I learned to empathise with the ancient artisans. I know how hard traditional art can be while using subpar tools as a challenge. It must have been so terrible doing those grand things every day and get beaten for it if the quality of your work was not up to standards.
At the end of the lecture, I was able to learn 2 old timey words: "ba" meaning soul and "ka" meaning spirit. I also became familiar with the hieroglyph for scribe.
