Thanks to the many artifacts of Ancient Egypt found mainly in tombs, we know many aspects of the habits of ancient Egyptian people.

However, the archaeological remains need also to be interpreted.

For instance, why was the mummy buried sometimes with small female figurines? Any text says a clear explanation, but we can assume that they had a regeneration goal, so we consider them as ancient Egyptian fertility statuettes.

The mummy of Djedptahiufankh, Fourth Prophet of Amoun, dates from XXI dynasty and was discovered by Gaston Maspero, among many other ancient Egyptian mummies, in the cache DB 320 of Deir el-Bahari.

Mummy of Djedptahiufankh from DB 320.XXI Dynasty. Photo: www,wikipedia.org

Maspero found the corpse intact and he partially unwrapped it. He found some amulets typical of the Ancient Egyptian burial custom: a lotus flower, a heart scarab, a figure of a hawk made of silver… According to the sources, he also found the figure of two serpents made of some unspecified material on the neck of the mummy.

The snake was a very common symbol in Ancient Egypt, but why had Djedptahiufankh a pair and on his neck? No inscription, no text…so we have to look at what we know about the funerary ritual in Ancient Egypt and the coincidences we can find when thinking of it.

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We have been lately writing about the artwork in general. The artwork is a human production conditioned by the author’s skills, by the historical moment and the place where it is produced. Ancient Egypt was not an exception.

The Avenue of the Sphinxes in Karnak. Is every sphinx an artwork? Photo: www.dailymail.co.uk

The big question also for us is, can we speak about artwork in Ancient Egypt? Or must we talk about craftwork?

According to the experts, an artistic creation needs the following five properties which mark its nature:

• Artificiality. It has to be the result of an intentioned human activity, not something spontaneous.
• It has to have an intentioned esthetic, thought to be contemplated and perceived through he senses, the emotions. It has to have the intention of transmitting something to an observer.

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In Ancient Egypt common mourners taking part in funerary cortege were depicted making many different gestures.

These women could raise their arms as if they were praying to the gods the return of the dead.

Some times their hands appear over their heads as beating them in an evident show of despair.

Common mourners from the tomb of Ameneminet. XIX Dynasty. Photo http://www.osirisnet.net

The ancient Egyptian mourners also put their hands in front of their eyes, maybe in an intention of showing the human reflect of covering the eyes (and also the face) when crying.

The artist of Ancient Egypt found also the way of depicting the sadness movements of those women by drawing their hands holding their back of the neck, crossing their arms on their chests, kneeling and/or bending their bodies forwards.

The wife is kneeling and crying, Isis stands on the left and Nephtys on the right. Painting from the tomb of Samut in Assassif. XIX Dynasty. Photo: http://www.osirisnet.net

But those gestures were usual in common mourners. What about the two professional mourners in the role of Isis and Nephthys?

These two women shared with the formers ones many of these gestures, but not all of them.

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The art of Ancient Egypt has a very big interest from the esthetical point of view. But its composition, its scenes, its colors… have always a specific meaning.

Before getting into the art of a moment of the history, we should mention some theoretical matters about art and history. Because any artistic expression needs to be understood in space and in time. Ancient Egypt is not an exception.

Pyramid of Meidum. Photo: Mª Rosa Valdesogo

In every artistic production there are two main components: esthetic (the appearance the artist wants to give to the work) and the technique (the work procedures). But the art is closely united to the human feeling, his conception of the world, his religious and/or spiritual beliefs. At the same time the artwork is integrated into a country, a region, a city…

Marx and Engels. Berlin. Photo: Mª Rosa Valdesogo.

Many statues spread in our nowadays cities are a good proof of it. For instance, the monument of Marx and Engels in Berlin is a result of some techniques, but there is also in it an intention of political propaganda. This artwork of the sculptor Ludwig Engelhart would not have existed out of the Marxist historical moment.

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During the New Kingdom the dead was buried with rolls of papyrus containing passages of “The Book of the Dead”. That meant that the artist of the Ancient Egypt applied over this new surfaces a decoration took from the general corpus of images they had.

Book of the Dead of Djed-Hor. Roman Period.Photo: Djedhor. Hildesheim Museum

One of the most common scenes in those papyrus was the one with Osiris resurrected over his throne and followed by the images of Isis and Nephthys. Our focus is on how these two professional mourners were depicted.

The artists of Ancient Egypt drew on papyrus with the same techniques they used in other surfaces. Very usual were the superposition and the juxtaposition for depicting pairs, groups (of people, animals…), and amounts of things…. The first one consisted in drawing every single image just besides to another, this way we can see clearly all shapes; the second one consisted in making every image one over another, so just the one on first sight is completely drawn while the artist made just some contours of the rest.

Relief with superposition from the tomb of Kagemni. Photo: http://www.osirisnet.net

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In Ancient Egypt the lateral lock of hair was a distinctive of childhood.

Family group from Saqqara. Brooklyn Museum

For the ancient Egyptian artist of the Old Kingdom, the lateral lock of hair pending from the scalp was, joint with nudity, an iconographical resource applied mainly to boys. Many familiar statues from the Memphite cemetery show how the male was the one with that hairstyle.

Also the two dimensional art presents many images of young boys with the side lock of hair, as for instance in the reliefs from the tomb of Ptahhotep.

But, was this ancient Egyptian rule always like that? No.

Daughter of Nikare. Ancient Egypt. Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York

The group statue of Nikare with his wife and his daughter is one good exception. This statue comes from Saqqara (?) and is dated in the V Dynasty. Nikare’s daughter is represented in an unusual way for the rules of Ancient Egypt.

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