The Life Of Ancient Egyptians

12 Pages 3111 Words

Ancient Egypt has bequeathed us an enormous testimony to the skill and genius of its artists -- draughtsman, painters, relief-carvers and sculptors. The coming pages testify to their creations, but here we shall focus on the men themselves, their working techniques and conditions, and the place they occupied in society. It must be stressed at the outset that in their working tools, technical procedures and way of life the artists of ancient Egypt did not greatly differ from the artisans. Woodcarvers shared the tools and techniques of carpenters and joiners; sculptors in stone drew on the skills of stone masons and stone vessel makers, artists who worked with metal learned from the experience of metal-beaters. We often see an artist at work in the craft shop specializing in his chosen medium. The work of the draughtsman and the painter, on the other hand, had a close affinity to that of the scribe. Works of art, again, did not spring from the hands of single individuals; they were invariably the product of collective effort by a number of men. The contribution of one artist linked up with that of another, a painting or a relief being based on another man's drawing while a sculpture was passed on to the painters to be colored. It is only for descriptive convenience, then that we shall be dealing with the various specializations in terms of present-day classification.
We may well start with the sculptors, as it is they whose working methods are most fully documented. In most cases we are shown a sculptor standing in front of a finished work, normally a life-size male or female figure, standing or seated, less often the lying figure of an animal. Whatever the medium, any such figure is regularly referred to in captions as Tut. Often we are shown several figures being sculpted side by side in the same workshop; in the 5th-dynasty tomb of Ty at Saqqara, for instance, there are eight in various stages of completion. The early stages, by cont...