Scribes Of Ancient Egypt: The Art Of Egyptian Hieroglyphs (Full Documentary) | Perspective

hello this is valdemar nuschak art critic producer and presenter of documentaries thanks for watching perspective youtube's home for classical art [Music] almost 5 000 years ago at the dawn of recorded history an extraordinary civilization was born in egypt on the banks of the nile the monumental ruins that have come down to us still inspire both tremendous admiration and innumerable questions preserved in our museums the incredible wealth of artifacts attest to what degree for three thousand years this pharaonic civilization indulged in the production of works of art [Music] behind this immense creative output lies an essential figure the man who with a simple sharpened reed or brush gives birth to all egyptian art engraved on estelle found in abidos one of these men appears seated next to his wife and for anyone who knows how to read the hieroglyphs engraved on the stone he himself describes his qualifications i know how to estimate dimensions recut and fit until an element is in place i know the posture of the male statue and the appearance of the female the attitude of the eleven birds of prey the arm movements of a hippopotamus hunter and the leg movements of a running man i know how to make pigments and products that melt without fire burning them and that moreover are insoluble in water [Music] nobody will know of this except me and my eldest son the god having ordered that he become an initiate [Music] for almost 3 000 years the egypt of the pharaohs endured in a world which even though no longer ours still remains recognizable a unique landscape whose frontiers seem sculpted by nature thanks to its regular flooding the life-sustaining nile river a fertile green band between two deserts was ideal for agriculture on its banks the necropolises were built [Music] of this world among the vestiges which continue to be discovered thanks to archaeological excavations there is scarcely an object or pillar that doesn't bear the trace of a drawing or inscription [Music] drawing is the first of all the arts the cradle of all the arts that's to say whether it's a work of architecture a low relief wall or a statue it all starts with a drawing for the ancient egyptians a monument without images is a monument that does not work there have to be images on temple walls on tomb walls so that they may perform their magic in the afterlife or in the world of the gods [Music] the necropolis of the ancient kingdom and the graves of its highest ranking officials is located in the region of sakura in northern egypt near the pyramid of the pharaoh jose it is largely thanks to the discovery of the funeral chapels and tombs of the nobility that we first came in contact with egyptian art the egyptian mastaba is an ensemble consisting first of a funerary chapel dedicated to the deceased and often containing several rooms underneath this chapel a deep shaft was dug that led to a burial chamber in which replaced the sarcophagus and the mummy of the deceased the shaft was then walled up on every level of this funerary structure and regardless of the nature of the surface drawings bar reliefs and inscriptions succeeded one another according to precise graphic rules this is the visible part of his tomb where the funeral ceremony took place according to the writing on the buttresses that separate the statues we know that it identifies the deceased [Music] it dates back to around 2500 bc in front of this false door replaced the offering tables on which food was left daily to sustain the deceased in the afterlife so here are his principal titles he was a wab priest he was chief butcher in the royal palace and he's favored with the title by the great god and this is his name the image had to be accompanied by a text otherwise it was inactive for example you would never find a statue of a person that didn't bear his name a statue without inscription was one that served no purpose to an egyptian sculpture it was considered dead the image must be accompanied by an inscription whether it appears in about relief painting or sculpture and relief without it the image is a nerd [Music] these images are meant to show who he was in life he was chief butcher in the royal palace but their purpose is also to present all of the elements that allow the deceased to continue to exist they represent everything necessary to nourish the deceased and that will allow him to survive in the afterlife [Music] from the 10th dynasty we begin to see representations of funerary meals and little by little the designs become more complex beyond the daily offering we also begin to see how these offerings were produced which leads to entire scenes based on agriculture crafts and fishing one thing that is very striking in egyptian art is that they were great observers of nature it's true that they were always very skilled in their representation of animals you see it very well with these birds the images are obviously very stylized but at the same time there's an attempt at naturalism and you can always precisely identify the species represented [Music] the idea is that the egyptian representations once again the magical aspect of the drawings or to use the more correct expression although perhaps a bit more complicated let's say is the performative aspect in that the designs actually perform the magic of bringing to life what is depicted for example perhaps you've seen pictures of horned vipers in the pyramid texts so they are depicted with a knife planted in their head to prevent them from doing harm in the afterlife so this says a lot about the performative aspect of ancient egyptian art [Music] we immediately recognize an egyptian image simply because it is based on a series of conventions that never changed at all over three thousand years it's a system to which we sometimes refer to as aspects because it aims at combining the most characteristic elements of a composition in the core of what is represented if it represents a human face you will see the face in profile because a face represented in profile the nose the mouth the chin and the contour of the face and profile is much more expressive than a full face portrait at least according to the egyptians but on these faces in profile you will always see a frontal eye because it is far more expressive than an iron profile which is limited to a small triangle that is barely visible and so this system is applied to all egyptian images so there's a rotation of planes there's a way a means of simplifying the art bringing things to the frontal plane and rotating for example shoulders and hips and so on so that everything is readable in other words if the person is shown in perspective one leg might cover the other leg therefore it doesn't exist but if you extend the far leg then it is seen by the viewer and so both legs exist so there's no doubt as to the man as to the figure having two legs two arms and so on there is no room for ambiguity and that is why the egyptian image is always a static image you'll have a figure that is represented seated on a chair in a static pose or standing and about to take a step but not in the action of walking this kind of stasis is specifically aimed at never representing movement because movement was considered to be ephemeral of happening and thus finite while a static image is a source of all potential possibilities so this is pretty much the base of the egyptian system and it applies to both writing and image everything is in the most permanent way possible the least ephemeral possible the least volatile possible it always aims for permanence for continuity meters underneath this chapel lies the tomb of meruka vizier to the sixth dynasty pharaoh tati some 23 centuries before christ appears the proof that images magically substituted for reality after the burial of meruruka the room was sealed off so that people couldn't physically enter with offerings the images that decorate the walls are there to magically replace them on one wall the only one that has been partly painted are vases and large receptacles in various sizes and shapes two lines of text frame these images they describe the list of offerings a thousand round loaves of bread a thousand jars of beer two thousand gazelles and many other dishes to feed the deceased in the afterlife as of about 2000 bc the sarcophagus was made of wood and continued to be entirely covered with drawings and magic formulas finally the mummified body of the deceased was placed inside where it would continue to defy time [Music] in certain tombs beside the mummy or slipped into its bandages were found rolls of papyrus these manuscripts were known as the book of the dead literally translated as the book of coming forth into the day proving the egyptians believed in life after death they could contain up to 165 chapters the louvre museum displays one that is more than 20 meters long the book of the dead is a religious anthology that is a sort of guide to the afterlife a kind of manual on how to travel through the afterlife to reach the kingdom of osiris the kingdom of the dead this book is composed of texts and images that complement each other in a regular manner but quite different from how texts and images traditionally correspond to each other in the tombs and temples because here they are like separate elements of an illustrated book illustrations are not integrated as part of the text they merely accompany the text there is very little interpenetration between images and texts contrary to what you find on the walls of the tombs and temples every image serves as a written sign so here you have ducks jackals a vulture a stream a mouse of these are hieroglyphic signs but they are also images since i can very rapidly decipher them and identify which element of the countryside or the egyptian floor and fauna that they refer to so from the moment one needed to write one also had to learn to draw you can write a word in 36 different ways you can stretch it by multiplying the signs you can condense it by economizing on signs and so it's an extremely adaptable system which also allows you to improve the visual appearance of the text when you look at an egyptian text it is always beautifully laid out on the page the columns are absolutely straight the length of the lines doesn't vary and simply because the scribe who perfectly masters this play of images and writing signs manages to lengthen or shorten the words depending upon the space that's available to him [Music] the egyptians use the same term for to write and to draw this is the verb sesh which can be more generally translated as to trace this common root confirms the interpretation of writing and drawing in ancient egypt [Music] the designer in ancient egypt was the contour scribe so this is a scribe someone who writes but specializes in designing the contours of images that is the egyptian designer what we call a contour scribe and this makes us realize the ambiguity surrounding the status of the scribes and the designer whose professions were not strictly separated from each other the scribe designed and the designer wrote we realized this when we look at the documents from the site of der el medina for example which was a village of phibian craftsmen who decorated the royal tombs in the valley of the kings and the tombs of the great dignitaries of the new kingdom we found an enormous amount of drawings in this village and they established that professional designers also mastered and even played with writing they combined images and writing with great dexterity so i had to be quite literate they were people who could also write so there was no clear distinction between the two professions between scribe and designer this brings up the question of the hierarchy between the scribe and the designer we now understand by looking slightly differently at designs that interest us that there did exist in fact a real hierarchy as there also did in europe later on [Music] for example in the middle ages designers didn't necessarily know how to write we realize in looking at a number of egyptian monuments that certain designers decorated the walls of a tomb and then were expected to write the hieroglyphic dedication and since we are familiar with egyptian grammar thanks to champagne and his successes we notice that there are huge mistakes not only in spelling but in grammar so it's obvious that certain designers designed they didn't know how to write very well they had the rudiments of graphic text but they were better designers than scribes all the literary texts that we have written by scribes show to what degree the mission of the scribe was not only to help the government collect taxes but also there was a whole category of scribes who devoted themselves to the transmission of literary and moral texts these are what we call texts wisdom texts that from generation to generation define the duties and moral precepts that governed egyptian society and these particular scribes were undoubtedly the elite of scribes so we can assume with certainly a few exceptions that the scribes who wrote were the elites and those who designed came slightly below them in that they were not necessarily expected to know how to run the period of the new kingdom the site for new royal necropolises was moved south to thebes between 1500 and 1000 bc egypt enjoyed the most glorious and prosperous period in all egyptian history during three dynasties lasting nearly five centuries the mountains on the west side of the nile across from thebes became the valley of the kings and like sakura the elite of the kingdom were buried near their sovereigns [Music] it's here in this theban necropolis under the reign of ammon hotep ii monarch of the 18th dynasty that the cup-bearer of the king whose name was sunyat chose to be buried his mastaba close to the public today allows us to grasp some of the trade secrets of these artists responsible for the decoration of chapels and tombs [Music] [Music] hey ah [Music] here we have an exceptional tomb and since it was never finished it reveals how the work was accomplished in different stages it also shows that there were several different artists at work because they did not necessarily use identical techniques on certain walls they set up grids that are scaled to the sizes of the people to be depicted the future occupant of the tomb its owner is represented as a very large figure and the figures that he is observing it's difficult to say exactly at what moment the paint was applied because it looks like each scribe had his own special way of working some would complete the drawing first others would do a simple sketch first then apply the paint and last do a very precise contour line along the painted edges the pigments most often used were mineral pigments which the egyptians could easily obtain close by that would have been all the ochres all of the copper-based elements found in nature obviously the most stable colors were the ochres and also the reds and greens black for example was obtained from smoke and was much less stable sometimes it could be erased by just brushing your hand against it and that's why often it is not as well concerned the styles changed according to period when you enter a tomb you can know immediately whether it's 18th or 19th dynasty artistically i think the 18th dynasty was the greatest period i mean the work was of the highest quality always beautifully finished the drawings done with such precision the colors so finely applied the dazzling polychromy such as exists in the tomb of horum head for example is overwhelming a very interesting thing about this tomb is that some portions of the drawings and sculptures are only partially completed whereas others are totally finished this is really one of the most beautiful [Music] the last pharaoh of the 18th dynasty whose tomb is located in the heart of the valley of the kings [Music] what it reveals to us is unrivaled by comparison with the tombs of other pharaohs even if this is one that remained unfinished due to the sovereign's premature death the artists couldn't complete their work [Music] [Music] thanks to documentation that has come to light concerning the valley of the kings and dear el medine we have learned that the workforce assigned to the valley of the kings was already divided into two groups there was left and it's evident that there was even a sort of rivalry between the foremen left and right there were the workers who did the basic tasks the quarrymen let's say who dug into the mountain and then excavated the corridor which would eventually lead to the tomb which would also have to be excavated apparently during the 20th dynasty there were teams of 120 men that make 60 on each side and then there were the foremen and also the scribes who checked attendance each morning took note of it and also kept a record of the works progress we actually have the paparazzis that give us a day by day account in due time there would most likely have been a visit from the vizier or from the pharaoh for the purpose of establishing the iconographic plan to be executed on the walls and that would be done along with the foremen this particular plan for the royal tomb is essentially constituted of illustrations of funerary books which were books of that period [Music] the book of the dead the book of the caverns a certain number of funerary books generally comprised of 12 chapters which corresponded to the 12 hours of night the pharaoh is depicted being confronted by endless difficulties which he eventually overcomes and thereby arrives in the kingdom of osiris all of this is strictly realized according to a code and to the norms of that time it's at this point once the iconographic plan has been decided that the artists can begin and then we see on both right and left sides that several hands are at work it's quite obvious clearly the beginner's work then a more skilled hand and finally the master's touch we see that the first stroke is done in red and that then the master has corrected it in black [Music] [Music] we have the impression at least that's what i imagine that in the valley of the kings artists are also scribes because it's often clear that the hand that did the writing is also the same that did the drawing then comes the sculptor's turn and with extraordinary talent he will shape the figures of the pharaoh of the gods and sometimes even engrave their hieroglyphs [Music] so [Music] [Music] and then the painter fills in the colors [Music] we may also wonder if there was a painter who specialized in black another in red move blue etc that's a question we can't answer since it's not mentioned in the texts but we can imagine that perhaps to speed things up they could have been painters who specialized in certain colors it's obviously the case for that final black stroke a very exceptional tomb is the tomb of ramses located in the theba necropolis what is so lovely here is the simple drawing with the relief sculpture only the eyes have been enhanced in black with no other colours added [Music] um [Music] uh [Music] so [Music] [Applause] hmm to build and later decorate the tombs of the pharaohs all the artisans were grouped together and were housed near the valley of the kings in dear el medine the village was surrounded by a wall and accessed through a single gate that was guarded day and night these ruins show that under ramsis it was composed of 68 houses when occupancy was at its peak it contained 120 families this was a relatively privileged community as can be seen by examining the documentation of the village for example this community lived according to a series of social rules and received its provisions from the governing powers so it really was a somewhat privileged community its inhabitants were literate and though they may not have belonged to the egyptian ruling elite they certainly were highly regarded throughout the region of thieves one can't really separate the scribes from the architects the designers and the painters most likely they all belong in an identical creative context and sometimes certain scribes were obviously both painters and architects [Music] on the hillside by dear elmedin these artists built and decorated their own tombs one of them discovered in the early 20th century by ernesto schiaparelli attests to the dazzling rise of a contour scribe who became an architect the extraordinary contents of the unviolated tomb of ka are still visible today in the egyptian museum of turin among the multitude of artifacts found inside the tomb is the sculpted standing figure of the architect carl was certainly started life or started his career as a scribe he could not have made the career letter he did without a scribal training and we have some of his walking sticks that name him car the scribe so there's no question that he was a scribe and he rose through the ranks and and became um an architect or an overseer of the king's works i think he was an operative kind of man because there are tools in the in the tomb but these tools were tools that had use and were inscribed not once but twice once for example hammered into the metal was his name and once after his death when they were placed in the car and um dedicated to his his soul he was a very important man he was the royal architect of course he never used it it's made of gold so we imagine that he wouldn't have used it it was a gift from the pharaoh to thank him for certain work that he did in the vicinity of luxor but we don't know exactly where he was buried with the object that was his trademark which characterizes him as a high-ranking public official under the reign of thutmosis iv um cos tomb is very impressive there's no question about it because um there are over 500 objects in it and it tells us about how he lived for example there are numbers of coffers wooden coffers that have pedimental lids a very simple thing but you have to have a large house in order to store all these you can't stack them because of the the type of roof on the on the lids and they're all full of underwear for example which is monogrammed the fact that his underwear is monograph monogram suggests that he used a laundry service um and he wanted his laundry to come back to him what we don't know of course is how he died why what his wife died of we don't know where they lived he might have lived at the village at derral medina while he was working on site but certainly those pokey little houses could not have accommodated all that material all that furniture that was in his tomb i mean it was it's a very well furnished tomb which means that he came from a large spacious home [Music] [Music] under the auspices of another pyramid far from the banks of the nile and its necropolises the crouching scribe continues to grace the galleries of the musee de louvre with his enigmatic presence it is this vanished world in which art played such an important part that guillaume met la noe continues to explore she's preparing an exhibit on the contour scribes and the role of drawing in ancient egypt and it is within the framework of this exhibit that the laboratories of the center of research and restoration of french museums are busily restoring the bits of stone covered with drawings these ostracca found in great numbers in a well near the village of artisans der el medin constitute an unprecedented and complex new source of information for egyptologists they raise questions concerning the personality of these designers and about their environment [Music] so [Music] [Music] what is most revealing and completely unique in this category of objects is that for once they express the scribes individual inspiration and how they chose to trace the contours that gave free reign to their imagination not on paper since there was no paper but on stone ships or pot shards we don't have the impression that they are illustrations of fables such as esop perhaps this is evidence of an oral culture that has escaped us and that we will never know about personally i think they reflect spontaneous creative moments the way any talented artisans or artists might do satirical drawings for their own enjoyment and relaxation one must remember they were under a lot of pressure due to the strict moral codes the reason for our structure drawings was simply because papyrus was relatively expensive and not very easy to acquire so it was simpler to write on stones that served as a kind of notepad [Music] the ostrich illustrations were much the same as sketches down on paper but we don't at all know if there was some specific purpose they may have served the more we advance the less we know you immediately notice the formidable precision and use of colors that certainly wasn't done in two minutes it's obvious that these works were made using a highly accomplished technique yes and the polychromy is applied with extreme subtlety it's never done clumsily [Music] you can see that the dogs aren't all the same breed and the hairs are rendered in such detail now this one isn't the same thing at all it's quite an amusing obstacle it's an order for a window so a carpenter has received this order and on it there is also a drawing of the window with all the specific dimensions and it says do it really fast um i think some are actually drafts yes um they're working on maybe um a contour that they want to get right but the um the dancer the the dancer doing the back bend is certainly something else it's done for the delectation of the man um these are men after all these aren't women these are men who are drawing for their own pleasure and their own delectation when they're not actually working on serious doodles or serious sketches so um i think this is what men do they a man who has a good hand a good good pen will often turn to something that is slightly semi-erotic and that's what it is it so happens that the egyptians particularly in upper egypt regularly did a dance with a baton in southern egypt it was usually done during parties that celebrated the completion of a building project and there were always a few workers who started to sing and here we imagine that there is about to be a sort of contest perhaps it's a sword fight what's curious is the way they are dressed at the same time there's this bald man with hair hanging down his neck he's what might be called a ruffian a man this medium was used to satisfy their fantasies and all these men are represented on the erotic papyrus of turin a member of the elite is never depicted they're all pot-bellied and bald the erotic papyrus of turin is now in very bad condition but that wasn't the case in 1825 when champollion discovered it it's undoubtedly to his friend rossolini that we owe two copies on vellum paper one of these copies recently found in the musee du louvro and subsequently restored allows us to see the papyrus in its entirety the erotic papyrus is interesting i think once again we're talking about artists who live in the desert who live and work in the desert um and a piece of expensive papyrus has fallen off the back of a lorry and they put it to good use for the delectation of each other um and they make this erotic papyrus it might have it might have importance political importance it might be about the priests or what the priests and the temples get up to who knows we don't know but what's more interesting is the fact that the erotic papyrus is one part erotic and one part satiric now what i would like to know is whether the satiric part was shown to the family rolled up and the the erotic uh part was only shown among the men and not the the women and the the women folk and the children um it's the juxtaposition of the two um the two themes that interests me why in one papyrus do you have something that is a story about mice um doing uh uh human things and and the other the other part of the papyrus is outrageously erotic [Music] several european museums one of which is the royal museum of arts and history in brussels have collaborated to present an exhibition on the contour art of ancient egypt and thus certain works must be sent to paris and the musee du louvo [Music] but one can't have three thousand-year-old limestone flakes travel in any ordinary way [Music] [Applause] oh [Music] these two objects are both made out of so even though it's just a wooden base the veins of wood stand out so it's really the design that creates and expresses more of a feeling than an idea i thought that if by some magic you couldn't manage to fit them in together there might be some other way to do it it's a tight fit but by moving things around a bit we'll manage that's also very lovely this is obviously one of the stars in the louisville collection who is depicted on this extraordinary ostrogone of shiny limestone we're almost certain that it represents ramsist vi the cheek actually has a glow it's extraordinary what is also very striking is that the artist seems to have used the natural relief of the stone for the mouth so as to suggest a bit more volume and there is also the aspect of the cheek which is heightened by the pinkish shade as if you'd put on a touch of makeup here we also see this magnificent ear with the dangling earring no this type of art is really stunning [Music] the egyptian graphic system is a system that adds images or writing signs during its history remember that we are talking about three thousand years of history so during those three thousand years the language was evolving there were new graphic symbols that found their place alongside the egyptian images as time went on that didn't exist at the very beginning but were added through the centuries but at the same time the system itself basically remained the same it's a system that kept adding on to itself but eliminated very little so finally from the earliest era of egyptian history in 3000 bc and all the way through to the greco-roman period there were no important modifications to how the system functioned just as there were also very few modifications in the egyptian political and belief systems all the fundamental principles that existed from the time ancient pharonic civilization began with the first dynasties continued to be applied all the way through to the greco-roman era despite foreign powers which would finally dominate egypt and the pharaohs becoming assyrians or persians and later greeks or roman emperors all those foreign cultures those foreign powers would adapt themselves to the basic structure of egyptian civilization thus the writing and graphic systems which constitute the very backbone of the mode of expression of both the religious and political systems would very little in the course of time a civilization based on representational art ancient egypt has handed down a number of remarkable images to us however the word art didn't precisely exist in ancient egypt the notion of art for art's sake appears to be absent from the egyptian mentality in which the work of contour scribes painters sculptors goldsmiths or even architects had only the one essential aim of rendering eternal all that was real of immortalizing life [Music] i believe nevertheless that we're also human beings and what we're dealing with is human creativity that to be so obsessed by the representation of an ideal paradise where there are no fatigue chores no disastrous floods where there is no sickness all this certainly means there was a tremendous anxiety i am almost convinced that these systematic representations of the ideal and absolute reveal a profound fear of what egyptians might expect to find in the hereafter in chapter 109 of the book of the dead the fields of offerings that great hereafter which the egyptians hope to reach after death is described as a place of delights here begin the spells for one's coming forth by day for entering and coming forth from the world of the dead reaching the fields of reeds finding oneself in the field of offerings the great place rich in wins and there to be powerful happy to labor to reap to eat to drink to make love to do all that one does on earth [Music] [Applause] [Music] hey [Music] [Music] ah [Music] there [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Perspective

Views: 387,096

Keywords: Full EPisode, Full documentary, documentary, performing arts, free documentary, full length documentary, full art documentary, art, art and culture documentary, scribes of ancient egypt documentary, egypt, ancient egypt, ancient, scribe, scribes, hieroglyphics, pyramids, history, egyptian, ancient egyptian scribes facts, egyptian facts, Egyptian Hieroglyphs, ancient egyptian art, ancient egyptian artifacts, ancient egyptian art they dont show

Id: lxYlky31Mvk

Length: 51min 35sec (3095 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 28 2022