Archaeologists Armed With Analyzer Change Paradigm of Ancient Egyptian Art

Aug 06, 2023

Artifact analysis is usually done in labs, leaving tomb art sadly short of scientific scrutiny. Now, archaeologists have brought the tech to the tombs and are changing our thinking on how pharaonic wall art was made

"No, no, no. His arm is in the wrong place," the master of artwork in a tomb in the Theban Necropolis about 3,300 years ago rebuked some miserable underling.

Or maybe the master kindly said nothing and personally handled the fix. Or maybe the master made the mistake – we can only speculate. But in any case, the position of a high official's arm in the painted tomb chapel of Menna by the Nile was painted, and then changed forever more.

Not by much, but it was – which flies in the face of assumptions about the rigidly structured process of creating ancient Egyptian wall art, according to research published Wednesday in PLOS ONE. The study was conducted by Philippe Martinez of the Sorbonne University in Paris and colleagues at the University of Liège, who analyzed the tomb art with the help of a mobile chemical imaging device.

Actually, the repositioning of Menna's arm is visible to the naked eye if one is observant. The final arms are colored brick red, while the errant one was whited out like a typo.

The change may not have been noticeable back in the day, but it is now, thousands of years later, possibly due to chemical changes in the paints they used. The correction of the arm's position was, however, proved by a groundbreaking technological development: bringing portable chemical imaging technology to the necropolis to view the walls in situ.

Generally, ancient wall paintings are analyzed, insofar as they are, at museums or academic labs. After all, one does not typically lug advanced machinery to the field. So they hardly ever are, leaving the art "somewhat estranged from this primary physical understanding," as Martinez and the authors put it. Throughout, this was one of the most amusing papers this author has ever read.

In this case, the technology was brought to the art, enabling on-site analysis of paint composition, layering, and the chemical composition of pigments. It also permitted the researchers to identify alterations in the two sites the team chose to check, both tombs from the Ramessesan II period.

"The Pharaonic Civilization offers the most extended cultural continuity of the ancient world. Its highly formalized painting style is easily recognized," the authors write, adding that the consistency over centuries has been assumed to stem from an organized, regulated – in a word, rigid – workflow.

The system was thought to have worked like this: Sketch on the smooth plaster wall in ocher, maybe on a grid; apply background; then add color, layers, and a final outline. Cover up any colors that spill beyond the outlines with white.

But archaeologists have previously found examples of post hoc alterations, prompting the suspicion that apprentices, mistakes, and alterations were part of the Egyptian artistic process after all. The tomb of the female Pharaoh Hatshepsut bears 200 almost-identical engravings of variable quality.

Presumably, they should have been identical, indicating a range in the skillsets of the artisans. Analysis also noticed retraced chisel lines, indicating fixes there too.

But this may have happened more frequently than thought; in fact, with their mobile machine, Martinez and the team identified additional substantial artistic alterations in the tomb of Nakhtamun, chief of the altar under Pharaoh Ramesses II, about 3,100 years ago.

The thing is that until now, Egyptian art has been studied almost entirely by visual observation. Now the team could dig deeper without moving a molecule for the first time, permitting speculation as to why the fixes were made. They also write that the alterations found to date could be the "tip of the iceberg."

Menna's extra arm

Menna wasn't a pharaoh or even a royal. He was a scribe and an official in the 18th Dynasty of Ancient Egypt, unusually serving dual religious and administrative roles. He was buried in an elegant tomb in the Necropolis of Thebes.

The multiple rooms leading to the burial chamber were sumptuously decorated, using themes from his professional life and depictions of his anticipated transition from powerful official to influencer in the afterlife. His tomb was found in 1888.

The altered arm position appears in a scene showing Menna and his wife, the noblewoman Henuttaw, adoring the god Osiris. It shows Menna raising his hands (all three, really) before his face. The third arm, presumably drawn earlier, was whited out. But it positively blazes with fluorescence under the device's ultraviolet light, while the final arms look black, the archaeologists found using their mobile chemical imager.

Why the concealed arm fluoresces is chemically unclear. It’s possible that the paint contained a specific ingredient or degradation product that reacted to the rays.

In any case, the archaeologists confess that they have no idea why the correction was made. That conundrum remains "frustratingly puzzling because the factual reasoning behind this alteration remains difficult to define precisely." The change is very slight, they point out, and it doesn't seem to change Menna's stance, but there it is.

The team qualifies that they can't say when the alteration was made – whether during the initial painting process or later – let alone who was dissatisfied with the initial arm position. Based on the cohesion between the white overlay and the background, the indication is that the correction was done during the initial stage of decoration.

There's a snag in that theory, though: the pigments aren't the same. But conclusions must remain elusive for the nonce. Chemicals in the lower layer could have reacted with chemicals in the upper one, the authors point out. Tomb decoration would involve many people; the modifications may indicate that it was built and decorated over quite some time.

They also point out the conclusion of separate work: that the paintings in Menna's tomb were split between masters and less-skilled artisans. In the case of Hatshepsut's tomb décor, there, too, the teams suspect that apprentices handled some of the figures and did the kind of job that apprentices do, requiring repairs.

The pharaoh's scepter

We move to the burial of Nakhtamun, whose tomb features a portrait of Ramesses II. The archaeologists explain that they were particularly intrigued by the fact that Ramesses' portrait shows a protrusive Adam's apple, unique in the known annals of Egyptian art. This prompted them to seek other weirdness.

Analysis of pigment layers and chemical signals shows the pharaoh's scepter began its career much broader than it wound up; initially, it would have touched or almost touched the figure's chin. The pharaonic crown also seems to have been changed, and mainly, his necklace appears to have been replaced outright.

The visible neckwear is the famed wesekh type of necklace – a flat collar, common during the 19th dynasty. But analysis of arsenic distribution in the paint layers indicates, possibly, the initial illustration of a shebyu necklace consisting of chains of gold beads, typical of the earlier period of Amenhotep III (whose reign began 3,390 years ago) and Amenhotep IV, but not in the reign of Ramesses II (which began 3,279 years ago).

The team elaborates on what the hypothetical shebyu might indicate, including speculatively, "when the anachronistic or symbolically problematic nature of this piece of jewelry was recognized, the original composition was adjusted and simply repainted, in a fashion that made the former shebyu necklace completely invisible to the naked eye." But not invisible to their mobile chemical imaging device.

At the end of the day, Martinez and the team do not purport to have a clue why the pharaoh's portrait was retouched; maybe there is deep significance, or perhaps it was due to lousy initial composition.

So what have we? The ancient Egyptians were thought to have worked on their art in a rigid fashion that is being repudiated, most recently by bringing advanced technology to their tombs, in a huge step forward for – well, still not understanding.

"One can also note that seemingly meaningless corrections recently revealed on sculpted decoration at the Ramesseum, in places that are rather inaccessible even to the naked eye, show that we remain clearly ignorant of what was really important and significant for the ancient Egyptian eye and mind," the team clarifies. But the technology has proven its worth.