After a very long day I am happy to say there are now children in Ancient Egypt. Here they are:
They are a little boy at two inches tall and a big sister at two and a quarter. Each of them, although really small, is still composed of fourteen hand-made pieces of porcelain, internally and invisibly strung. This is clever stuff which I could certainly not have done thirty two and a half years ago when I began making miniature porcelain dolls. In fact I doubt that there are many porcelain doll makers in the world who could do this. That’s why there are only four little boys and five big sisters. There’s a depressingly large tray of discarded leftovers, the smaller I go the bigger the wastage rate because the difference between a part fitting and being too big, distorted, having too small a hole to thread inside, or any other defect, is about half a millimetre. I cannot control what happens in the kiln. A tiny piece which is an inch nearer to the elements of the kiln than one in the middle of the shelf can vary in size by a millimetre easily. Wire stringing hooks can stick out of a hand or foot, bodies can have lumps inside and so on. But I think the results justify the difficulty.
They still have stringing elastic sticking out of the holes in their heads because my next job is to fit them all with pates, which cover the holes, then wig and dress them. There’s a week left so I must get on and stop chatting to you.
However, you may be wondering why the males are brown and the females are yellowy. There is a reason. What I have attempted to bring to life here are not the actual Ancient Egyptians. You couldn’t bring the actual Egyptians from mummy to come to mummy even if you tried. In the mummification process the brains were extracted from the skull through the nose with a special hook, and then…
chucked away.
Oh yes the organs of the abdomen were all carefully preserved in canopic jars so the mummy could came back to life and digest, and breathe and so on. The grey mush inside the skull (goodness knows what this junk is) was discarded like a bucketful of porcelain rejects. All those horror films with mummies lurching the land with their arms outstretched, shedding bandages faster than an over-nineties Zumba class, could never happen. Didn’t have the brains for it, you see.
What I have brought to life is not the Egyptians but their art. I love all the little people in the wall paintings. Did you know the civilisation was remarkable for having government paid artists? You could also be a government paid scribe. Children learning were advised to study well so they could be scribes, a nice, clean indoor job. Artists and scribes were both revered and considered very high status. Writing as a blogger, writer and doll making artist I naturally approve of this very enlightened view.
One of the results of art being controlled by the bureaucracy is that it didn’t change for thousands of years. The figures in the wall paintings are intended to help the mummy in the afterlife. Therefore what is recorded in paint is the essential nature of the subject. In a civilisation where everything is hand-made the importance of the hands is emphasised by their size.
Here are some ladies at a party. The size and shape of their hands is determined by their function. They are holding cups of wine, which were a feature of Ancient Egyptian parties. They also have cones of perfumed wax melting into their wigs. They are wearing a lot of jewellery and seem very happy. This wall painting is strong magic, it is a wish that these circumstances and the essential nature of parties will be enjoyed in the afterlife.
The colours of the wall figures also reflect their nature. Men are painted in red or brown, colours which embody their essential maleness. Women are yellow or very pale flesh tones, describing femininity. You may note that for the first time my dolls have gender specific anatomy because the wall paintings do. People are often depicted without clothing where it was more convenient to do so. For example, fisherman on the Nile shown in boat models are often in the buff. Children did not wear clothes until they were five or six years old. The clothing is linen, produced in weaving factories. Clothing is shown as white regardless of status of the wearer because the Ancient Egyptians never discovered colour fast dye. Clothes of high status wearers are finer linen and sometimes embroidered and often pleated but usually white. The knowledge of textiles extended to novel uses of the papyrus plant, such as beating layers of it flat to produce a thin surface on which to write and draw. From Egyptian papyrus comes our word: paper. They had libraries too. The books were scrolls and cats were employed in libraries to keep the paper-eating mouse population in check. The library at Alexandria was the most extensive in the ancient world. Princesses were taught to read and write in several languages.
In reality Ancient Egyptians had the variety of skin tones that are usual in North African races, but I am not depicting North Africans, I’m bringing ancient artwork to life. I am using my art, doll art of the twenty-first century to describe another type of two dimensional art. In the flat pictures the most characteristic representation is always chosen. The strength of the shoulders is immediately recognisable sideways and a nose in profile demonstrates what we understand most about a nose.
The art also emphasised the importance of the subject by size. This is why statues of the Pharoah are utterly massive. The Pharoah was the most important person in the kingdom. They were descended directly from the gods and it was their job to intercede with the gods and make sure that the Nile inundation, on which the prosperity of the kingdom depended, happened. The results of a poor inundation are even recorded in the Bible as the Fat years and the Lean years. The Egyptians were so keen on Maat, they turned her into a goddess. Maat is the basic principle of everything staying the same and the three seasons that comprised the year, all arranged around the agriculture using the thick, fertile mud, deposited in the flooding, happening in the right order and at the right time.
Given the general panic around global warming, I’d say the Ancient Egyptians knew a thing or two. We could do with a bit of Maat right now. Thanks to Maat the civilisation lasted over three thousand years.
If you are interested and fancy doing a twenty-fourth scale house for the dolls, the houses of ordinary people are not that complicated. They were made of mud bricks mixed with straw baked hard in the sun. We know what the houses of ordinary people looked like by ceramic models from tombs.
As you can see there were often two stories and the family slept on the roof to catch the breeze. The pillars and some rafters may have been made of wood, which was in short supply and used sparingly. The most common building material was mud from the Nile, which would have been used to make this model.
As well as being artists and writers the Ancient Egyptians were potters. They had kilns and made pottery dolls too.
They were also miniaturists. I recall seeing some wonderful model houses in the Ashmolean Museum. Yes, people were paid by the state to make miniature houses and fill them with artefacts. How enlightened is that!
If you do fancy doing a house, a cardboard box and some tubes from the inside of toilet rolls would not be a bad place to start. There was not a lot of furniture but lots of matting. Miniature hat straw could make baskets, chair seats, bed mattresses and floor coverings. And yes ordinary people had plastered walls with pictures on them.
I know you want to ask about toilets. Did they have them? Of course they did, this is a civilisation. They had glazed receptacles beneath wooden stools with an appropriately located hole. Potty in a box.
I think next month we are going to be inundated with everything Ancient Egypt because it will be the hundredth anniversary of the opening of Tutankhamun’s tomb. I think miniaturists will be captivated by the art.
If you would like to know more you could do worse than visit www.ancient-egypt-online.com
While you are online you could visit the Miniatura site to see if there are any tickets left www.miniatura.co.uk
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