AKHENATEN/TUTANKHAMUN

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Color in Hieroglyphics




Hieroglyphics illustrate the dual use of color, one, where objects are given the same hue they have in nature, and two, where objects are assigned colors to which they are symbolically linked. Each glyph had its own color or combination, which was faithfully kept whenever multiple colors were used. Sometimes difference in color was used to distinguish between two otherwise identical signs. Color was omitted in everyday writing, in order to save time or expense, but it was nevertheless viewed as a very real part of a complete sign.

Where the signs were not painted black or red, each sign received its own basic color or combination of colors. The colors assigned to the various signs are in most cases simply the colors of the objects themselves. So signs for leg, arm, hand, mouth, or other body parts, were usually in red, whereas reeds and other plants were green, water was blue, etc. Other objects had more symbolic coloration, for example, metal butcher knife was red, the sickle was green, and the bread loaf was blue.

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The Painter’s Work






The paintings extant in the beautiful tomb of Nefertari are excellent examples of the symbolic and practical uses of color. After the outlines of the scenes were completed, color was applied with coarse brushes made from bundles of palm fibers, or pieces of fibrous wood chewed or beaten at one end.

Dry pigments were prepared by crushing various substances in a mortar or on a grinding palette with a stone pestle. These were then mixed with a water-soluble gum or egg white to bind them. Intermediate shades were derived by laying one pigment over another.
                                   
Many of the reliefs seen today in museums and even on the temple and tomb walls in Egypt itself have little of the tints originally placed upon them. But conservation is underway, and hopefully, as with Nefertari’s tomb, the vibrancy of the Artist’s craft, part of the soul of ancient Egypt, will return.







Sources:

From Symbol and Magic in Egyptian Art by Richard Wilkinson
 
From Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt



Marie Parsons is an ardent student of Egyptian archaeology, ancient history and its religion. To learn about the earliest civilization is to learn about ourselves. Marie welcomes comments to marieparsons@prodigy.net.

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GOLD PANEL FROM THE SHRINE PICTURED BELOW

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Zahi Hawass , Egypt's antiquities
chief, with fragments found in
the tomb, says his studies at
Penn
"changed my life."





                                       T U T   S T I L L   R E V E A L I N G   S E C R E T S



                                       
Former Penn student returns to tell more.



By Tom Avril
Inquirer Staff Writer
 
Egypt's top antiquities official was down in the fabled tomb of Tutankhamun a few weeks ago - doing a television interview, of all things - when he noticed something curious he had never seen before.

In a back room closed to public view, Zahi Hawass spotted a cluster of reed boxes crammed with plaster fragments and limestone seals used to stamp hieroglyphs. Intrigued, the scholar took a closer look and saw that both were marked with a trio of icons - sun, scarab and basket - whose meaning he recognized instantly:

Neb-kheperu-re, the throne name of the boy pharaoh.

Eighty-five years after his tomb was discovered, and after his treasures have been ogled by millions of museumgoers, King Tut is still revealing surprises.

In addition to the seals, apparently left behind by the original excavators in the early 1920s, Egyptian workers recently found 20 sealed jars with the pharaoh's name in an old storage facility nearby. Neither group of items is part of the official Tut inventory at the Egyptian antiquities museum in Cairo, Hawass said in a phone interview.

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On Thursday, he comes to Philadelphia to speak about these surprises and another: For the first time, Tut's mummified body will go on public display, protected in a climate-controlled case in his tomb in Egypt's Valley of the Kings.

The lecture will be a homecoming of sorts for Hawass, whose trip coincides with the waning days of the blockbuster Tut exhibit at the Franklin Institute.

He got his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and lived in a one-bedroom apartment at 43d and Walnut Streets from 1980 to 1987. He said his studies here "changed my life," enabling him to serve his country.

The "new" seals and jars, meanwhile, will not be added to the exhibit, Hawass said. Though they are not the sort of gilded wonders that have drawn the museum crowds, they are of interest to archaeologists and historians, for whom much of the pharaoh's brief life remains a mystery.

Egyptologists were excited to hear of the rediscovered items.

"My God," David O'Connor, a professor of ancient Egyptian art at NYU's Institute of Fine Arts, said upon hearing from a reporter about the finds.

O'Connor, former head of the Egyptian collection at Penn's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, said he could easily see how the jars would have been forgotten. They were found a month ago when workers were transferring artifacts from a variety of past excavations to a modern storage facility.

Egypt is overflowing with antiquities, and the original finders of Tut's tomb may have thought some of the less spectacular objects were not worth taking to the Cairo museum, O'Connor said. More surprising is that the boxes of seals in the tomb itself were somehow overlooked, he said.

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Silverman said further analysis of the seals and plaster fragments was needed. But both he and James Allen, a Brown University Egyptologist, said they might well be the very seals that the ancients used to mark the king's name when they closed the tomb doors more than 3,300 years ago.

Silverman said he would be even more interested to learn the contents of the jars, which he speculated contain wine for the king to drink in the afterlife, or perhaps oils or unguents.

"It's nice that some of the mysteries remain," Silverman said, "because it spurs us on to do more research."

Hawass, who studied under Silverman at Penn, said he planned to open the jars after returning to his native Egypt following Thursday's lecture. The public talk will be 7 p.m. at Penn's Irvine Auditorium. Tickets are $15.

Opening the jars is just one of many projects on the agenda for Hawass, who in addition to his scholarly expertise has a flair for promotion. (Replicas of his trademark wide-brimmed hat are on sale for $45 at the Tut gift shop at the Franklin Institute, whose exhibit closes Sept. 30.)

He plans to continue DNA analysis of various mummies to sort out their tangled lineage. Scholars are not in agreement, for example, on the identity of Tut's father.

The antiquities chief also plans a search for the tomb of Ramses VIII, and he wants to further explore an unusual tunnel in the tomb of Sety I. Hawass said he had traveled more than 200 feet down the tunnel by rope recently, and he hopes a secret burial chamber lies at its end.

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Zahi Hawass , Egypt's antiquities
chief, with fragments found in the
tomb, says his studies at Penn
"changed my life."









As he knows well, however, it is the treasures of Tutankhamun that have most captivated the public imagination.

Tut, who assumed the throne at age 8 or 9 and died about a decade later, is sometimes described as a minor pharaoh who became famous in modern times merely because so many of his treasures were recovered. But that undercuts his historical importance, said Penn's Silverman.

Under his leadership, Egypt's capital returned to the city of Thebes - now Luxor - and his subjects resumed official worship of their traditional gods after a brief period of monotheism.

Yet, more remains to be learned. Who were Tut's parents? What role did he play in actually running the kingdom?

Hawass vows to remain on the case.

"The mystery of Tutankhamun, in my opinion," said the antiquities minister, "will never end."


http://www.philly.com/inquirer/health_science/daily/20070901_Tut_still_revealing_secrets.html

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OBJECTS IN THE TOMB OF TUTANKHAMUN THAT ARE LINKED TO AKHENATEN AND THE AMARNA PERIOD






1. Ivory Clappers with the names of Queen Tiye and Meritaten.


These were found on the floor of the Annexe, these are arm shaped clappers that measure just under 16cm in length. The holes at the end of each clapper were intended for the insertion of a cord linking the two together in the same way as castanets, though any noise would of been produced by shaking. Each arm is inscribed on its polished surface with an elongated cartouche with both the names of Queen Tiye and her granddaughter, Meritaten: ‘The Great Royal Wife Tiye, may she live; the King’s daughter Meritaten’. Why Meritaten and Queen Tiye should have had their names linked together in this way is uncertain, similarly why these clappers are in the tomb of Tutankhamun at all is unknown.

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2. A Small Box inlaid with a picture of Nefernefrure.


 

A small box lid found in the Antechamber which is inlaid with both the name and image of Nefernefrure, the fifth daughter ofAkhenaten. Although the box itself was not found, the evidence suggests that this lid was originally part of Smenkhkare’s burial treasure. (length 10cm).

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3. A Dismantled Box.




An inscribed strip from the lid of a dismantled box found at the tomb entrance, carries the cartouched names of Akhenaten and his co-regent Nefernefruaten and that of the great royal wife Meritaten. The contents of the box were mostly found to be various items of linen. An hieratic docket from this white painted wooden box was found in the tomb also.




4. The Ivory Palette of Merytaten.

Length 21.9 cm, Width 2.5 cm, Depth 0. 7 cm.

Two inscriptions in the lower part of this palette show that it was made for the 'Princess Merytaten, daughter of the Great Royal Wife Nefertiti'.


On this palette Merytaten bears the title 'Princess', but due to the fact that her name is not written in a cartouche, this implies that she had not married Akhenaten nor Smenkhkare at the time when this palette was made. If Merytaten was still alive when Tutankhamun died she must of been a widow and if so chosing a gift of a scribe’s palette for him seems a little strange. As this palette was not just a scribe’s ordinary palette but with the six cavities for paint this palette was a painter’s. This was found in the Treasury between the paws of the jackal mounted on a shrine (see below), there is no evidence to show that this position had any special meaning.

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5. The Scarf tied around the shoulders of the Anubis dog.





The Treasury was dominated by a large sled-based pylon made from gilded wood upon which lay a life-sized statue of the black Anubis dog (guardian of the Burial Chamber and of the King’s canopic equipment). Around the dog’s shoulders was wrapped a delicate linen shawl, between the dog’s paws was found the ivory palette inscribed for Meritaten and then covering everything was wrapped a linen shirt on which was found an ink inscription with a docket dated to Akhenaten’s Year 7.

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Ink docket from the linen shirt which was found wrapped around the shoulders of the Anubis figure:

“Year 7 of the Lord of the Two Lands, Nefer (Kheprurewaenre), who gives life every day”

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EVIDENCE OF A CO-REGENCY? Two calcite jars found in Tutankhamun’s tomb originally had two sets of cartouches next to each other - these were very faint, but Carter believed the traces of these cartouches to conceal the names of Amenhotep III and Akhenaten which would then prove that there was a co-regency between these two pharaohs (names of two kings written this way was done when a co-regency existed).

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Twenty Six wine vessels found in the tomb carried ink-written hieratic dockets which (in most cases) specified the date of the vintage, beverage type, vineyard and the name of the vintner. From these dockets Howard Carter was able to deduce that 68% of Tutankhamun’s wines came from the ‘Domain of the Aten’, just 5% came from the Amun temples and 27% from Tutankhamun’s own vineyards. Also the length of Tutankhamun’s reign can be verified - no wine is found which is produced later than Year 9.

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                                                      The Canopic Shrine.




As with several items of Tutankhamun’s tomb equipment, many items were probably re-used from the burial of his brother Smenkhkare.In the case of the canopic lids it has been suggested that the lids do not match (very closely) the face of Tutankhamun and therefore must be from his brother’s tomb once more.









The canopic chest made from calcite and then mounted on a wooden sledge, the sealed cords which originally held the lid in position can still be seen.