I am delighted to say the Ancient Egyptian dolls have arrived in the shop.
Each doll will come with a scroll, giving basic information and a photograph of a 5,000 year old Ancient Egyptian model house, if you fancy giving them a home, and some pointers to information.
Ordinary Ancient Egyptians did not have much furniture, there was not a lot of wood up and down the Nile. They were clever at using palm trees and bundles of various plants to hold up ceilings. It is these that we still see in the stone columns that support the roofs of the temples, which were carved to look like plants.
What they did have, and which a miniaturist could reproduce easily, was a lot of mats. Miniature hat straw would be good here. The houses were made of mud bricks. These, although they were only made of mud and straw and baked in the sun, have proved very durable. We don’t just have house models from tombs, the village that the workers in the valley of the Kings built for themselves out of mud bricks is still, mostly, there.
They were great potters and had vases, jugs and bowls for every purpose you can imagine. They had discovered the potter’s wheel and were skilled decorators of pottery, walls, textiles by embroidery and papyri.
What is more, as I told everyone who looked at the dolls at Miniatura, this was a civilization in which you could have been paid by the government to be a miniaturist and do all the miniature stuff you do now, with a pension at the end of it.
That really is my kind of civilization – one that values artists of all kinds and is on record as advising children to work hard and be a scribe because it is a nice clean job indoors, sitting down.
I am so pleased with the way the dolls turned out. They are very delicate with their turning hands and feet. I have even given them separate big toes so they can wear sandals.
If you made a miniature Ancient Egyptian house and filled it with dolls, you could be in Ancient Egypt five thousand years ago and doing exactly the same thing. The only difference would be that you would be a high status individual and people would say, as you walked past – there they go, the miniaturist, all hail the miniaturist! May Ptah the father of creativity bring his blessings upon the revered miniaturist!
Yes, they even had a god of creativity.
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