Exploring the Fascinating Craftsmanship of Ancient Egypt

Numerous research academics have contributed to this highly cogent show celebrating the craftspeople of Ancient Egypt. My pre-teen companion, though a big fan of Egypt, was still slightly hesitant about whether this would be the most interesting angle. It began with a 4,000-year-old stele, or tombstone, on loan from the Louvre, praising the sculptural and painterly skills of an artisan called Irtysen, about whom, of course, nothing more is known. The perennial problem. General information, however, came thick and fast. We learned that a cooperative of skilled workers was a hemut, and a singular skilled worker a hemu. We came face-to-face with a cubit (a measuring stick six palms in length), a plumb line, several levelling rods, and the by-products of a crank drill (round cores of stone). We studied wall-paintings showing workers sitting, according to their superiority, either on stools or mud benches. We inspected several lumpy, unfinished works of sculpture emerging from a sketched grid system, as well as designs using the same grid system, proving that everyone was chiselling from the same hymnsheet, so to speak. Art was inseparably bound up with religion and the state – with architecture, ritual, and inscription.