Who Were Artists in Ancient Egypt and What Audiences Did They Address? - John Baines

good afternoon ladies and gentlemen i'm peter Godard director of the Institute for Advanced Study and it's my pleasure to welcome you here this afternoon to this lecture in the series art and its audiences which is this series being organized this year by eval Anwar of our school of historical studies and Bridget Alves off of the department of art and archaeology at Princeton University this series seeks to reflect on arts relationship to its individual and collective audiences examining the ways in which art has historically addressed activated condition or excluded its viewers today's lecture will be given by John Baines John Baines is professor of Egyptology in the University of Oxford and a fellow of the Queens College this year he is a member in our school of historical studies where he is working on elite self representation in ancient Egypt professor Baines took his bachelor's degree in ancient Egyptian from the University of Oxford in 1967 and his doctorate there in 1976 the same year that he was elected professor of Egyptology in that university the age of 30 but he had ventured out of Oxford before that having been a lecturer in Egyptology in the University of Durham from 1970 to 1975 professor Baines is the recipient of many awards to numerous to list but including a Mellon distinguished Achievement Award in 2004 they his subject will be who were artists in ancient Egypt and what audiences did they address the respondent to lecture will be Debra Bishop postdoctoral fellow and lecturer in the Department of art and archaeology at Princeton University and the program will end with an opportunity for questions from the audience followed by a reception to which you're all invited in the food hall common room and now let's welcome professor Baines so much can you hear me it's on so last year I was asked to talk about artists in Egypt actually I was asked to talk about painting but I ended up talking about artists and this year I was asked to talk about audiences and I what I'm going to talk about is somewhere between those two I think we might say and there is a there is a basic problem with pre Western and pre-modern traditions of art that the artist is not somebody who has an individual identity most of the time and so we have to think about who the artist is in order also to think about who the audience might be and that affects any period and context and any art form and so I'm afraid that I shall be ranging very widely roughly I'll go in chronological order and I want to suggest that there are ways of thinking about this sort of problem by bringing it down into little bits and thinking about it in terms of the those component bits which I'll try to address one by one we can state the basic problem that a great deal of ancient Egyptian art is very small and over lot isn't as people probably know and it's also it was placed in antiquity in places where nobody could dog could go so it's not a matter of having a simple type of audience so in thinking about this I thought it would be useful to break the group of people involved down into people such as the executive time starting the middle there the person who actually makes the object or them organizes the event or whatever it might be that person the executive is perhaps responsible to a patron so the patron is the person who decides that this will happen and it be created and provide the resources and that sort of thing between those two people you can have the diviner perhaps the designer is someone who will say what it is that should be done having been given the initial one idea or the initial stimulus by the patron and then once the work is created people can see it they can see it while it's being created so you have an audience during the execution and then when it is complete you can look at it except for the point that I just made that not many people do however we have to remember that Egyptian society it doesn't consist only of people so even if we were to have a sofa hierarchy so we have the King be elite the rest of the population very broadly speaking that I've left out to further components who are extremely important and they are the dead and the gods and one must assume that the dead and the gods are part of the audience and by making that basic assumption we can then explain a little bit of why works that nobody could ever see would be just as perfect and expressed in the same idiom as works that people could see but I don't know how many people do home decoration themselves but I'm willing to bet that those who do probably move the furniture aside before painting a wall and then they put the furniture back in position and then their beautiful painting work can't be seen anymore and so you can say that this is a general human impulse to create something that is perfect and I think that there's a lot of cross cultural relevance in these issues of who the audience is and whether there are the fundamental audience in a sense is the human aesthetic sense well those are just preparatory remarks let's say and I'll now move first to show you where we are in Egypt and the red arrows that point to the very site from which the material I'm going to show you comes as you will see the vast majority comes from the southern part of Egypt which was a deeply provincial area for much of antiquity but it's the area where things survived best I shan't linger on that and now I move back into late prehistory to consider that you have to have right at the beginning of Egyptian art or not at the beginning art at the beginning of what I shall consider you'll have extraordinarily beautifully executed works of great elaboration which require the existence of a separate group of people who require the expertise to do this and a vast expenditure is involved now unfortunately that screen is very big fortunately for people the back it is and so you can't easily tell that that object is about that size bear that in mind for plenty of what we see now I actually once held a class with that object which is in there's modern Museum and you you notice how the stone can laminate easily and then you think well somebody must have designed this and then somebody carved it and those are singular people I'm invoking but they could have been several in both cases and they could have spent weeks or months doing this and then one falls below of whatever tool they were using could have shattered it and they've had to start again and so one has to remember the enormous expenditure and the enormous wastage that is likely to go into creating objects like this you can also see the extreme complexity of the design there I shan't go into that there isn't time but that object is about 200 years older than this one and this one you will find in any book on ancient Egyptian art it has the characteristic on the right there the characteristic icon showing the King about to smite an enemy and that is about the most public piece of ancient Egyptian art one can point to it is something that was put on outside walls of and in places like that that object is about the same size of the last one that's a little bit bigger and it was dedicated in a temple at least if not in a temple in terms of a shrine and so was not for public consumption it seems that would have been used but the really important thing about it is in a sense neither of those points it's that it embodies all the developed conventions that we find in later Egyptian art and so there has been an enormous transformation in those approximately two centuries between those two works and that this is something which must have been invested in by the rulers and by those they commissioned to create the new forms and conventions of what was then going to be standard for Egyptian art there are other huge changes notably that this is the latest such object known they stopped making this type of material from then on I think if we perhaps we will do this for a second you go back I think the actual quality of the carving on the older object is finer and you notice the older object had been broken and mended at the top and it comes actually from the same side as the other one so you could imagine that whoever designed that one knew the older one and so you have a discourse there between the artists of different dates and those who commissioned and those who received so we can talk about reception theory in a sense here this second object I think was probably not a unique object it would have been a number of examples of it would have been made and it would then have been distributed among major places throughout the country but I obviously well I can't prove that but I think it's a reasonable supposition so we don't have significant architecture from prehistoric Egypt but the moment that dynastic period comes we do and we can start with that little area there those are ground plans of mortuary enclosures created over a period about 300 years out of idols and they you read them roughly from top left to bottom right in chronological terms not exactly and the top left one smallest is the one that's archaeologically best known it was excavated just a few years ago and it turned out that it was built it's sorry that I am misleading there are three enclosures there one big one larger into some pretty small ones they build a mud brick and it can be shown ideologically that they were destroyed very soon after construction so this was a temporary form of architecture presumably after the king had died then the next king transfers the mortar occult or whatever it may be to the next building these are very large structures as they developed and then the bottom left sorry the bottom right example is now is now on the list of the world's most endangered monuments I think and there it is and you can see how colossal it is and the best photographs are seeing detail here is this one because you can see that it was originally plastered and painted white it must have dominated the landscape it is about 200 meters long and about just none 100 meters wide so it is truly colossal the detailed execution of this pattern in the brick is something that was extremely important ideologically in this period the only reason why that monument survives is almost certainly because it's the latest of the group and so then the Kings burials were moved to another place so the next king didn't come along to tear this one done and so we then actually will move in a minute but not straight away to to its successor but elsewhere in the country they were constructing similar structures and these were tombs the previous ones are not too enclosures for ritual performance and there you have an example of one of these and here you can think about also with what I'll show in a second about how you do actually imply all sorts of further ideas in creating these buildings so this is a tool that's the superstructure reconstructed and as you can see it's highly decorated on the outside it also has these low shapes around the side and those are sacrificed retainers and so the funeral would have been something where huge numbers of people would have been present and there will be this grisly business of burying the sacrifice people at the same time I think that in in a period when performance art it's very much what people think about we should say that the sacrifice of retainers is a form of performance art it's maybe not one that we would love but that's not all that and david waingrow has suggested that the actual detail of the decoration implies some sort of permeability to this structure so it would be painted as if it had cloth all around it and the offerings could kind of waft through the walls and then we can see in a little bit more detail there one of these tombs as this set of Ukranian muddled on a on a bench that runs all around more than 300 sets of horns or cattle and so a huge a huge amount must have been deposited or enacted around this - when it was put into action for the royal tombs the conventions were different but we shouldn't assume any less action and if 300 cattle were sacrificed in order to feed the people at the funeral then there would have been thousands of people present but we can't actually make that assumption although it's it's possible this isn't the only way in which you have a performance aspect of these tombs so bottom right there you see a step structure which is actually inside one of these tools so this was built first and so in some sense of depth structure must have a symbolic value that we don't know about and this addresses an audience of perhaps the personal Commission of the tune the person who is planning it for his death or his descendants who actually create the tool and then it is buried within the tomb itself so the actual announcement of the creation of the tomb is an enactment or at bottom-left I've just got an image of the burial chamber at the base of one of these tombs showing you how the the expenditure involved in all this goes underground as well as above-ground and just to indicate that they were talking about them at the widespread practice we go about a thousand miles to the south that small caravan Sudan and you see this tumulus which has stones or pebble structure circular defining it with a tomb shaft at the top right and then you've got this trench in which are hundreds of cattle horns so it's the same idea as you saw at saqqara to date perhaps five hundred years later about sort of difference in time we have to assume which is part of the way that elites treat their riches in terms of cattle throughout North East Africa effectively in this sort of period and if you think that that's an impressive wastage of cattle you can think again because here is a slightly later tomb where it's being counted there were 3,000 of these and not just three hungry the three thousand I think gets you beyond the point where you could imagine that this could be down to the funeral and so we therefore have to think that you actually have a whole life of the tomb owner which is probably measured out in the number of cattle that he receives as preview tour something like this the skulls are then saved and then they are used in the burial and so in terms of the enactment of what is going to create the work of art that is the team then this is something which affects the whole lifespan of the owner of the tomb or rather the whole lifespan probably after he became a leader that that's a very different sort of culture in certain ways but I thought the parallel was still useful so going back to the period of those tombs that in Egypt that we just saw we can think that you should not be narrow in how you understand what is a worker art and so I've been talking about performances which certainly can and need to involve large numbers of people and probably be seen by still larger numbers of people here you have the ultimate in elite art for a very small audience these are perfectly formed stone vessels that dates are the first two dynasties in Egypt and bottom right you just have a group which is of different shapes most of those shapes can be paralleled in ceramic but the lowest one in particular is a characteristic ceramic form but the one on the left is a much more interesting thing in some ways that imitates something you may it made out of weeds and you can see that the reed pattern is that is done on the underside as well as the top and that's not the end of the cleverness that goes into this because you have their narrative which is written on one end of the edge and that paragraph is the Egyptian word for build so you can either think it's be able to say what that means but it implies that this is part of a culture in which gold is the most valuable thing which I'm sure it was and either the object is for keeping gold in it it's a jewelry tray let's say or alternatively you should imagine that this object which is made of types of certain Tyner soft stone should be engaged as being really made of gold and so this work like this is operating on many levels and the gold hieroglyphs can only address people who can read which would might not include the person who commissioned it who can say so the patron is somebody we should give a little distance to them and these stone vessels then in all sorts of forms so on the left you have a couple amount of leaves which are just amazingly beautifully executed and on the right you have something which you're going to see in the Metropolitan Museum it's only about this size and it consists of two hieroglyphs put together which spell out the idea of car which is a vital force in Egyptian tombs and the idea of life at the same time there is a well-known person from this period who have was called um scar who had those two items formed into his name it might have been a name vows for this person but it's a libation vows at the same time you can see how it's hollowed out so that it can be used for pouring a liquid and it is quite astonishingly virtuosa in its execution unfortunately it's an art market piece so we don't know where it comes from so quite a few of these stone vessels from slightly later deposits have inscriptions on them and these inscriptions some of them demonstrate fairly well that the vessels were kept in use for some generations and they were used by special groups of people who would have been performing rituals so although they are objects which come from tombs they do testify to the use of such material in life and therefore to an audience but they're the last gasp the last wonderful gasp of a technique which disappears because the stone vessel lost its prestige to vessels made of metal as you can see in these is it this one is another double play of a different sort that the washing set which agencies made of gold but the form of the pouring vessel is that of the stone vessel I showed you to the two images back that the lower one and the stone vessel is imitates a ceramic form so symbolically this queen who had this as part of her mortuary gear was saying I'm just a simple girl I have ceramic vessels only because I'm not very poor they're made in gold and so in that in this sense you're getting you're getting an elite audience which is making it extraordinary elaborate play with these vessel forms but metal is unfortunately for us it's extremely easy to recycle and so we don't have anything like the record of metal from this period or from any period really that we have stone statue including that sort sorry I should have pressed that earlier and here you have a parallel which may not seem so obvious this is somebody who who has a Stevo which is outside is too although we have a severe problem of audience would be steely the reason why it's so beautifully preserved is because it was walled up soon after it was put in position on the Tooting and so the paint gets preserved very few people ever saw this it might even have been walled up maybe at the time of the funeral maybe with it some change in plan for the tomb or something we don't know but what I want to draw your attention to is that group there which shows it has at this hand with water on it which is a hardly is writing to wash and then underneath you have a stanch set of a copper libation vessel with that sort of libation vessel you might just say it's a picture and then a recipient it's the same idea as you had with that gold pair of us all the moment ago but what it implies is that you have rules of hospitality and of purity where when you take a meal you have to wash your hands but you can't wash your hands ourselves because somebody has to pour the liquid water of your hand so it is also there's a social message involved in this particular form of which many examples are actually preserved if this was obviously a very widespread ritual which was then enacted also when tombs were constructed and 20 of these are found on top of tombs or in tombs so this is the sort of conspicuous consumption which again is part of creating an audience for your aesthetic products so they'll go back in time about a century now but we diverge through medieval Italy first the facade of the doorman in modern iron Italy and this is because this is one of the oldest buildings that I have to know of which has inscriptions on it which say something about who is the architect and things like that so we have this inscription here which my laddie is not great but as you can see it is about the architect LAN Frank who was the master who designed the cathedral at the same time we have there a little red square we have this sculpted plaque on the front of the cathedral and that has a large scale inscription with a little one at the bottom the little one at the bottom names the sculptor and says how he is the greatest at least not the greatest of all sculptures but he easily he is the best among sculptors at least in modern art then and but then if you look at those human scale was so conveniently walking past based Walmart you will see that you could not read that from the ground so one has to unless people have much better eyesight in villages a native now who's wearing glasses the that this has actually part of some sort of social process which actually spreads quite widely knowledge about who is the designer LAN Frank and the sculptor because people will come up to the to the the facade and say well what's that plaque there and somebody will then tell them what it is and so it involves a wider audience than one would one might think and one can then think about this in Egyptian context coming back to the first image I used I think it was quite good for me sitting down there before I began because that you've got the right angle on this picture you're looking at it from the ground and it's a very famous object because of what's on the left there which gives you the titles and name of Imhotep M Jota is as it were the Egyptian culture hero who is known from much later periods and was deified in the first millennium BC now the problem is how do we reconstruct that that's broken as you can see and Imhotep is you can click this out Imhotep I always kill these objects it's that group there so it's it's the third line down roughly so two reconstructions that were proposed by the person who actually first published this there is one of them and so they're the the crucial bit in many ways is the bottom line which says over Co sculptors and so people then assumed that Imhotep who is in any popular book on Egypt he said to be the architect of this pyramid complex that he he was said to be the sculptor but was the architect as if those modern distinctions need to apply Michelangelo I believe was both but that may be wrong so we look at another reconstruction there that's less full but that suggests and I think it's more likely to be right that this actually named to people so emotive was named as the most important person and the sculptor was named underneath and so we don't we can't reconstruct the name of the sculptor not what that matters I don't think but no other statue that any of us know about from ancient Egypt of a king has a an inscription relating to somebody else on it and if you were to think about anything pre pretty modern times of course statuary and things like this is not inscribed with the name of the person who made it it tracks from the object and so this is an extraordinarily exceptional thing so I don't think we can have any doubt that Imhotep was a person of the highest importance just after the king the object itself is pretty important too there it is from the various bits and pieces of it that have been found and so it was it's the earliest surviving colossal statue in Egypt from the dynastic period there are pre historic ones no and it has a very elaborate iconography and so on and then there are other we might as well set it in context here you have the the external approach to the step pyramid complex so this is one of the most revolutionary works in the history of architecture it is a creation in stone of the same basic types as you've seen reviews encoder walls in brick up to that date but the interior is altogether more elaborate the in interior has the Step Pyramid the famous thing which I shows a picture at its centerpiece and then it has this colonnade of entrance the this statue base comes from somewhere in the colonnade but the precise location is probably not meaningful that it was so modified in later times but those columns are imitations not halls break and he's not directly of brick but they imitate flimsy materials so evoke the idea that you would actually have enormous performances where spaces would be created for funerals and mortuary cult out of flimsy materials organic materials of various sorts and then as we saw with the first brick enclosure they would then be torn down again and so you would have an enormous participation quite apart from the huge size of this monument and the amount of work that's involved that's the other end of this colonnade the roof the concrete roof is modern of course and I'm not totally convinced by the reconstruction of the columns and the foreground but I would like to point out here these this element of the ceiling which has been remounted in position there which shows you that this idea that you are imitating organic forms is taken a very long way and so it speaks to much wider additions and conventions which would exist in the society as a whole at the same time you have other very subtle effects being graded there so that this is this is a reconstruction at this point but you see that the there is tremendous thought goes into how light plays in the structure and we all know that architects think tremendously about the use of and play of light they fact that you have these recessed tunnels all around these structures is probably in cars a response to the fact that a plain brick wall is one of those boring things to look at in the world and so and then that was moved into stone as a design element I think that I've been cheating you a little bit probably these structures actually reproduced brick originals rather than taking the organic ones directly but I can't sell now there is a graffito which is on the included wall of the Joseph's successor of an unfinished pyramid which is nearby and that enclosure wall was built during this person during the first few years of his king's reign and then was buried because the design was changed and this Inc graffito is there with the name Imhotep on it so Imhotep actually we have two contemporary sources it shows that he was a person of enormous importance both from the statue and that's the only graffito we have of a person named on a wall and on the more of a royal tomb not just anywhere which we have from this period with thousands of other graffiti on blocks and things but nothing like that apparent so we can very probably say that Imhotep is the mastermind he could be the architect perhaps that he might not have been he might just have been in charge of the whole thing and then that you had somebody else who is celebrated as the sculptor now at this point of course particularly any Egyptology book you read tends to say well it is now that artists had no individuality they worked as groups and of course most artists works of workers groups anyway and so you therefore can't talk about individual who does this it seems very unlikely that it would be wrong to talk about any individual for this monument because it is this prankster ordinary revolutionary production which must have had someone who thought it up and there is a rather imaginative reconstruction of how it might have looked from Memphis below which was done by the architect the archeological architects who worked on the site now that that's a very ephemeral creation in one sense the Step Pyramid was succeeded by two or three reigns meant Kings didn't produced great monuments not one that survived and then the the other style of pyramid came along but let's just stop go into statuary for a second so that is a statue which was found in the Step Pyramid area in the 1920s in the Cairo Museum and here is a detail of the head this statue is actually unique in type and it's not completely unique there five months of a similar one so this is the only one that survives to any great extent it was put inside a chamber where which would have made it difficult to see but we have to assume that people did see it in antiquity because we have this piece here which some British Museum and was found came into this museum conveniently seventy-five years before the other one was found so we can certainly say that no modern fakir created it and it has exactly the same iconography but in style it belongs to about 300 BC and so one has to assume that people were actually going back to this complex as late as more than two thousand years later in order to seek the inspiration from it and there's plenty of other evidence which I can't go into it shows that at other junctures in between 2600 and 300 this complex was a source of inspiration and that probably gives you a sense of why Imhotep is so important only one aspect colleague well since we had a statue we move to another statue this is I put there him you know architect of the Great Pyramid question mark him you know is had the titles of vizier that's to say the highest official in the land and he also had the title of overseer of the Kings works he was a contemporary of Khufu the builder of the Great Pyramid now if you were over here of all the king's works you can safely say that the major king's work in that period was the pyramid it must have absorbed a huge proportion of the product of Egypt and it's not just that so of course just to remind you if the one in the background in that picture it is well it was said to be the largest structure in mass standing on earth before the first aswan dam was built in the 1890s but it depends on how you count the Great Wall of China I guess and there is the plan of the site which has the two later pyramids also shown but it is clear that the planning is not just for the pyramid but it is also for the whole site so the the natural slope of the side was in was exploited but exactly how we can't say because the site was changed in the process of building and the people of very highest status were on the right now and then the Queen's were in those smaller pyramids and on the left you have people are very high but slightly lower status including immuno Institute is there we got one of the largest ones as you can see so you can say that the hit'em you know at the same time has the oldest statue we know of this particular type which shows a fat and prosperous man not only that but it's completely plain and you can think of that Stila I showed you which is largely hard list very little pictorial material and that too is contemporary brought very broadly contemporary go through a period of extraordinary rapid change in which there is an ascetic of plainness which you can say is most characteristically visible in the Great Pyramid itself and even more so in the second pyramid because the structures all around the second pyramid it's true all these vacations of plant forms and things like that there would they looked a little bit like see the dining over here or something that's not just like that so if we move down the social scale not very far down the scale of course people constructed tombs thousands of them in this period people who belong to the elite and we have this rather fine work by on Jonker which deals with this and quite often you have people represented in the earth who we can say are artists and so in one sense or another so there you have the perfect sculptor ie there he is and he is sitting in a scene of music and dance so there is a performance going on around him and that is done in honor of the tool owner he is a fevered member of the Turner's household and yonkers essential argument was that this was characteristic in particular of sculptors sculptors can be seen in many traditions as having a higher status and other sorts of visual artists that's a purely it's a it's a matter of taste there's no absolute to any of that but you don't actually confine yourself to subscribers you have here the outline draftsman who is there and he is in this case the front figure in a group of people carrying offerings and so these these artists in this case are people who either are loaned to the tomb owner by the king so if you have a whole group of the whole social group involved or alternatively there are people who actually belong to a massive household which is maintained by people the highest status I think that both are possible and both could have existed at the same time and we then move down a couple hundred years perhaps and we have this tomb here which is in the provinces and this is one of just two or three cases where we can see two things one is that somebody can be identified as the person who designs more than one the decoration of the two we don't know about the structure this is a rock-cut tomb but here we have the line-drawing of it just expanded from the figure Emilia behind the king and there it says you see that I've put in quotes the word root the word footer right under paint in Egyptian is the same and so he identifies himself immediately behind the two Mona and he's wearing this sash across his shoulder and she implies that he has some sort of priestly privileges so he's a person of very high status in context and he's also got an extraordinarily distinctive style which can be seen in this tomb and the other one he created now quite often you read in books that these artists slip themselves into these contexts but I don't believe that this works I believe that if you were a two-member you would surely as patron you are the first also the first channel of reception of the work the designer will show you what he's planning to do and he'll say and I'm going to put myself there and the two men are has to approve I'm sure otherwise with desire that the designer painter would lose his job and so one has to assume that there is some acceptance of artistic personalities by members of the elite Mayor since this person had this extraordinary distinctive style he may very well have been somebody you didn't you didn't try to argue with very much I don't know well the long way to go so we skipped 600 years and we get to a more marginal case but still I think worth looking at we have this inscription very long inscription which is an extraordinary original piece of writing about the campaign's of King comers and as you will see bottom left you have this man depicted and he's identified by title and name and there are other examples of this sort of thing but they're not common and that this is the only one I think I know where you've got something which is so emphatically royal 98% of the surface is for the king where the other person is slipped in there you have to assume I think that this person is the person who in some way organized the creation of the stealer he may actually have been the author of the text and that you say well I'm wandering away from there's a lot here but you can also think that these things form part of performances that these texts would have been read out and used the celebration of the kings of the Kings deeds so it's not simply a visual product as a piece of text it's also a performance now the same place on an example of Karnak you have evidence for some dissemination of works of art in other ways so there is an imaginative reconstruction of the temple complex you've got this enormous wall that surrounds it only certain people can go inside the roots by which you normally went we'll see in a second entrance probably better this is the southernmost end of the whole complex which is there as another complex to the right and outside it there are groups of statuary including colossal statues of the King so people could come up to here and they could then probably do religious things there they would ask for Oracle's they would place votive offerings or something that sort it what we might know about this from archeology we don't because all of this was cleared for tourism in the nineteenth century and then within the temple thousands of statues built up and there you have top right in about 1905 they found in this court here huge pitch which had a hundreds and hundreds of statues in it and so in some time in about the third century BCE it must have been decided that there was too much clutter in the temple and it was all buried and we have to remember only hard stone statues come out of there you can see that they got down to the water table in that excavation and then they gave up there is probably still more statuary in that pit and so the hard stone statue survived the limestone ones probably don't and the wooden ones certainly don't so we're being chosen from thousands of statues throughout the Temple of Karnak and we can tell archaeologically that they were everywhere but though still people could only go a little way into people being normal people not priests or maybe maybe high-ranking people on special occasions otherwise this enormous complex is essentially there for the gods it's not for you and me in fact when you go to Karnak now on one day you might see more people there than you would have seen in a hundred years integrity and so here you have unhooded son of hapu famous Egyptian who in a later period was also deified like a motive let's just show you for a second but the location where that statue was found corresponds to the left of those of those rings there it's the right hand ones that group it was in front of this pylon that's the furthest into the temple that anyone could go we know that lots of people saw that statue and admired it and respected it for two reasons one is the inscription around the base invites you to present offerings to it so that he will then transmit them inside the temple at the same time with the lab you can't see that is been is very worn where thousands of people scraped it over the years it's made of a very hard stone but we also can say that it has another form of reception but that would be a religious reception here we have an artistic reception from this statue here also from Karnak and there are two features which show that the the central on the right must derive its its inspiration from the statue on the left you've got that group of hieroglyphs on the front of the first statue and you have an identical group on the front of the second statue and then the first statue it's unique so you couldn't have used another statue to inspire him with that because the writing is displaced to the left in order to allow it to run the whole way around the statue the same is done on the other statute where it is no longer meaningful the other point is that the first statue was clearly damaged in the course of its manufacture and they had to bevel the corner and that beveling of the corner I think is the inspiration for the curve on the other statue on the front because Egyptian statues don't have curved fronts this is I doubt it's unique but it's certainly very rare but of course the later person you know this is in a period of artistic revival around 650 clearly does not use the old statue as something to copy this is something which is where particular features of the old statue are inspiration for the later one which then does something entirely different so whoever creates that statue whoever Commission's it and creates it has a huge repertory of their of knowledge of the past which is got from looking at many ancient works and at this point when I've been talking about how things are restricted at the same time they're not so very restricted because of course monuments fall into disuse and people in later periods went to old monuments they threw copy grids of the surfaces to copy them and very often these monuments were completely decayed and you could get into areas as modern tourists can where you couldn't have done you know when the monument was created so you have a an artistic reuse of the past which goes far beyond any of the wounds that might have applied to these works when they were created and in fact probably any tomb would actually have a currency just two or three generations after that it's an ancient where you can go look at it if you want but it doesn't have the same sort of restrictions applying to it so contemporary with the statue on the right is this one on the left from an alga Egypt in Delta which as you can see uses the same basic pose in fact in quite some detail but is completely different in artistic style and so again you have to assume where two opposite points really one is that these people are using a huge range of older works to create these later ones and the second is that they use a very diverse range of models and I think if I were asked I would say that the statue on the left is really very original in its conception the one on the right a bit less and but I can I can be fairly confident that the facial type of the statue on the left looks back to the early second millennium whereas the basic bodily form is something that goes back to the third millennium so these are works which combined all sorts of inspirations of course you know dismiss anything like this if you want to be nasty about works of art you say well it's eclectic so it's not worth anything but I don't think that's a reasonable way to approach it so we can we can look at another very briefly just one image here here is a ball in a temple which was incompletely executed what they did was they painted this entire temple in a reduced range of colors and that was a temporary step until they got had the time to carve it under the next room they went came back and began to carve it but didn't finish as you can see so you'll have a design which was executed in paint and then if you had the carving completed you wouldn't know that this had been executed because the paint will be completely effaced and then you know ideal case replaced by another layer of paint but in more detail we can then think about what this implies so they did figure of the king and he's his top half has been carved to some extent and extraordinarily that vert execution goes on here the original painted form as you can see very beautifully executed and then it's worth pointing out his artificial table which was done with a single stroke of the brush so whoever did this who was a member of a team without really saying was a virtuoso painter whose work was temporary but then when we come to the Kings face there's another aspect of this but so probably this carving is not the work of only one person I would think that whoever did the line of the back probably roughed it out cruelly then somebody else comes along smoothly because you will have people at different stages of expertise whoever did the hand did a beautiful job but the face is left out entirely and that is presumably because this is the Kings face and the Kings face has to be done by the boss and so one should think therefore that there is actually a whole hierarchy of people involved you can also think that inside a temple probably people observe certain rules of purity and things like that in order to be doing this in the first place and maybe whoever carved the Kings face had to be of a certain status there are certain titles or there it might be I pointed out a pre term an artist who has a priestly sash and that could be part of the refinement of all of this well the last group of things we have used to hear is from Gregor Roman period temples so we've skipped down another eight nine hundred years or something like that and here we are in the court of the temple of edfu and that the type of heads who was built over appeared about 180 years from something like to 30 to 70 BCE and yet it seems to have a single plan so there was an extraordinary elaboration in the design that happened before anything was done now that applies to the architectural form whether all the sea that who work done that way I would very much doubt I imagine that they were developed and indeed we can show that certain aspects of the way the the decoration was designed evolved during this period but there is the temple now we can very safely say that very few people went beyond that broken little doorway in the middle because if you went in as a priest you didn't go in that way you went in at once ah he's because the inscriptions that show that and maybe people came in for the festivals but again we're talking about something which is dedicated essentially to the gods now I was going to mention two books which one might think about you nobody can sign that book unfortunately that was a privately published birthday present of the author two people but in there he he writes a piece of fiction about how the designer of the Templar who had a problem he didn't know how to fill these acres of war with suitable stuff so he went to a relative he had in seed and got some inspiration from him and it's a work of fiction but it is based on on details which show that the slightly earlier earlier decoration of things and seeds it's very close to what you had at ed foo and you have also a name that you can identify with the person who's involved in the decoration seems so that's why you can write a little word of fiction about it but you should also think that Ed foo is the back of beyond in ancient Egypt although it's a pretty remarkable temple because the where people really who mattered were was in the Delta where all the temples have been spread as a line on the fields so we don't have them the other works that I'm going to more detail this one is by Carradine Yanni and it's about the architecture of the temple of dendera the other great surviving temple of the period later temple this is the only extensive architectural survey that's been done awhile these temples we have to be grateful to the French government for it and so we'll look at dandera verities and you can see that we can date the front to a precise in here and it's worth picking out certain features of the front so the template dendera is very unusual but not unique among Egyptian temples in having these system capitals onto the columns which are for the goddess Hathor and the many features also take that up just about visible on that enlargement is the lower level has the head assistant head which evokes the idea of how tall and that motif implies that the Sun shines on the temple it it means the temple at the same time we'll come back in a moment to that one and the temple has extraordinary features of design notably this use of multiple different stones so that lintel more broken lintel blocks there is made of granite diorite whereas all the rest of the temple but bottom part is made of sandstone there must be some underlying idea to that it's extremely rare to find this mixed use of stone and every single square inch of the temple is decorated all with meaningful materials and many of them have designs that you don't see in earlier periods that's just giving you this notion see that barely but this idea that the Sun caused it through the temple is evoked here and here where you have a Sun disc to bring that to mind but in many ways the most remarkable feature so it's just arrowing industry we are is the thickness of the top of the facade because there is three an inscription on there in three lines of Greek which says that it was commissioned by the emperor tiberius and by the prefect of Egypt whose name I can't remember and the Epis traitor goes the next highest official whose name I also don't remember that both Roman names and then the Strategos the local high official who is a Greek name so you get a lot a chain of commissioning right up to the Rome Emperor but even the Roman Emperor is not powerful enough to get an inscription placed on the temple of Dendera which is visible obviously you cannot see that but hi it's about 25 meters up or something like that and that you could only be seen very early in the morning because of some moves away from the facade anyway so the gods I suppose knew about this but the Egyptian the indigenous Egyptian culture of the greco-roman period was so amazingly powerful that it was able to maintain this this world of the temples which is there for the gods and you can say you could say for the elite but actually by this state even the indigenous elite was in severe retreat and the Hellenistic world was confined to outside the enclosure this is just to show you other aspects of this this is important I think because of thinking about this aspect of architectural design you can see on this side view that you've got a vertical in line running up the structure and that that should say contradicts normals practices in masonry and there are there is also a joint between the right hand part which is the earlier and the higher front part and that joint has actually opened out a little bit and erm Yanni uses parallels to show that this is done in order to take account of settlement and possible earthquake damage so in engineering terms this is an extraordinarily sophisticated structure and you can then see the amazing level of detail that is executed everywhere there is this frieze element which is frieze elements of varied wooden to run inside and out and so on and with greater inventiveness and you see elsewhere and then there is a very large scale figure of the king and he has his wearing garment which shows him smiting his enemies and his pet lion choosing them and so that brings to life an image of the king now the king isn't when I call him the king it is the king of Egypt it's some Roman Emperor account number who that particular relief is named for we can safely say the Roman Emperor had nothing direct to do with this this is the great local monument which has with the elite but I've given you all these providers maybe they couldn't actually come in much to see it you see the grooving on the surface here and that is a mark of people coming along and using the temple of a magical resource but it's too high up to reach from the ground and so it's probably early medieval in date but there is some grooving which is a base level and moving at base level somebody's written a book about the temple suggests shows you that you would can bribe the priests to come along and get you a little bit of this precious substance and they would everyone would know what was involved because the areas of the most heavily grooved the ones nearest the sanctuary so the temple shows also extraordinary precision in design in its interior so you have these lines here which are drawn to show you that at least the inner part of the temple has an absolutely consistent approach to how the doorways are structured and that is done both in plan and in elevation the use of light go back to what I was saying about the step pyramid here the light is very sparse in the temple but it is extraordinarily precisely tangled by these windows which are looked partly into the roof partly into the joint between roof and wall and and in some other places and then there is an example where the resurrecting of god Osiris is set in a funnel roof funnel window mostly these windows are sun'll shaped so they get as much light as a very small opening can produce the resurrecting a cyrus is directly in the window and underneath you have the winged disc which signifies the passage of the Sun and here you have a room in the temple and the angle of the window shown on these drawings so that bears the window and there is how at different times of year it will penetrate in different ways and but at its maximum so not as is maximum at its minimum it will at certain angles fill the room and so this has to be extremely precisely calculated with knowledge of the passage of the psalm and things like this which you can also think about in relation to the fact that the measurement of the circumference of the earth in the 3rd century BC in Alexandria is thought to be commemorated in a hard lift that was created in elephantine ale at the other end of Egypt so that these people are actually involved in the geometric and other culture of their period although they're not using the Hellenistic artistic style that's just a detail showing you how this even goes into the staircase which we'll see another moment there is the light as he's actually photographed it moving into the staircase so that is all the result of extraordinarily precise calculation and implies that whoever designed the temple is a member of a much wider elite which is involved probably with Alexandrian culture as well as with indigenous Egyptian culture but what about the local people who were in charge so these are a couple of objects which were dedicated in the temple by members of the local elite a little bit earlier probably about 50 BCE a silver and a bronze object and some of these people were actually ethnically or culturally as perhaps a better way to put it culturally Greek or Hellenic and here is somebody who is a little bit mixed in culture and he was as it says on the caption he was one of the leading officials of his of the period in the whole of Upper Egypt but his statue seems to come from dendara and so he you would say is somebody who probably was involved in the commissioning of the temple but it's such an enormous project that I can't believe that it stopped there we might think it stopped with someone like him in other words that the king in Alexandria would be involved he probably wouldn't know much about what the symbol meant or anything like that but the people who did the design were part of this wider culture we can also think about him because Augustus as he later became the Conqueror Roman conqueror of Egypt for his reign it's possible to show that very detailed features of the execution of temple reliefs reflected changes in his teacher II in the first few years of his reign so there's an extraordinary level of involvement right up to the top of society I don't think all gustas himself said I want that title there but we have to assume that there is a matter ASIS which goes to the very top and since I was really talking about temples let's go back to the temple and think about the way in which you can celebrate things in the temple in paradoxical senses so the temple is characterized by having these rooms in the thickness and also staircases and the thickness you start with that staircase there you go up onto the roof where there's a further suite of rooms for the god Osiris you saw an example and then you come down by another staircase once a year all the statues in the temple are taken onto the roof in order to to revive in the sunlight of New Year and they do it in this kiosk here now the kiosk as you can see from the elevation is invisible from the outside world so that is there for the gods but that doesn't stop it from being a deadly work of architecture in itself and it is entirely decorated it must have had temporary a temporary roof put on it you can see from this groove in the lintels and so at a point like this these things were being celebrated for the gods the gods are the most important audience but in practice the gods and the priests who make these celebrations other celebrations which we can't document which go out into the countryside and the people of commission this are forming the wider audience and this is a culture that manages to maintain itself even though the number of people who actually could really live this material must have been vanishingly small and some of the most difficult of all Egyptian inscriptions are on the temple of because the writing of hieroglyphs was divorced from other forms of writing and so became something which was only for the initiate and this is ultimately bring the seeds of the disappearance of Egyptian culture but not for some hundreds of years after this so we will stop with that thank you okay thanks can you hear me okay with this mic no it's so weird cuz it's down and then you look out and it doesn't meaning it's not better yes okay unlike professor Baines I am going to speak some text okay in his exploration of the roles and identities of artists and audiences in ancient Egypt professor Baines has touched on a wide range of material and topics in my response to his talk I would like to focus on just a couple of themes that underlie this work and that have broader implications for our understanding of Egyptian visual culture essential to this talk is the centralizing of aesthetics or perhaps more neutrally the centralizing a form and visual experience it's an ironic thing about the study of ancient Egyptian art here's a civilization that left behind an incredibly rich body of visual and material culture that is surely one of the most visually distinctive in the history of art in the world and yet the topic of aesthetics or form has long proven to be especially difficult for Egyptologists to interrogate with the result being a rather burdensome guy in the scholarship some contributing factors to this dilemma may be found in early art historical work when inquiries into the nature and significance of form or style specifically took as their source material art from the Western tradition a tradition that chose classical Greece as its seminal moment building a philosophical framework on a largely European foundation situated within this framework which is unavoidably exterior to Egypt analyses of Egyptian styles were inevitably inhibited by the ultimately futile project of measuring the achievements of ancient Egyptians against the desires of Greeks and Romans or Wolfson and GaN brick in addition early choices to isolate evolutions of visual traditions as the true course of our historical concern meant that the overarching and enduring stylistic consistency of Egyptian two and three-dimensional art rendered that visual culture almost absent somehow from the history of art yet professor Baines makes clear both in this talk and a lot of other work that he's done that the style of Egyptian visual culture is not about the absence of artistic concern the maintenance of such a distinctive visual tradition over thousands of years is the result of a persevering intense and painstaking efforts continuously performed within a complex dynamic environment of knowledge and communication the stylistic consistency does not suggest on the part of the ancient Egyptians a disinterest in material form rather it expresses the opposite they were indeed aware of and highly invested in the powerful impact of the form of images and objects it is in part because the stylistic consistency served the interest of a collective that is the elite of ancient Egypt that the place of the artist as we define him in that academic discourse is obscured professor Baynes underlying concern for aesthetics sets a path toward constructing a clearer picture of the role of artistic production in ancient Egypt professor Baynes considered a very wide spatio-temporal range of diverse objects and monuments but he identified architecture as the premiere aesthetic form and most importantly aesthetic context this issue of context is fundamental Egyptian objects and images were not designed to stand alone but rather were created for a broader context an architectural monuments such as the many that were discussed in this talk provided the arenas for the formal elements of these objects of art interact there was the architectural structure itself the solid element of the building the shaping of the space with the plan the manipulation of light and dark they saw a lot about the walls the columns the ceilings all the surfaces covered with painted or relief carved images and texts that were organized purposely throughout the space of the building and statuary distributed equally purposely throughout the interior and exterior spaces of a building but Egyptian architecture is not only about spatial context all of these formal elements work together to construct an environment charged with religious and social significance and one that was fully aestheticized lifting the space up from the secular beauty of their natural environment into a sort of supernatural space that was an appropriate context for the conducting of ritual at several points professor Baines noted the important role of ritual and performance to the meaning of the monuments left behind us any furthermore noted our understanding that these rituals themselves were fully aestheticized from the clothing and the accoutrement of the participants to the use of flowers and incense and perfume the sounds of prayers and music the orchestration of movement all of this together with the carefully crafted objects and constructed environment noting the complexity inherent in such performance and given a strong aesthetic character of all the constituent elements professor Baines suggests that our concept of artistic production in ancient Egypt should rightly include the rituals themselves not only their execution but their organization their design as well the orchestration of people in monuments as artistic enterprise this theme of orchestration and context can be linked back to the question of artists identities professor Baines discussed the role of Architects citing for one example heme you knew and elite officials who held the title overseer of works during the reign as Khufu as Professor Baines noted the title does not specify Hemme unions artistic vision in the design of the pyramid yet this lack of specificity is no doubt intended professor Baines also noted that the pyramid was only one element in a much larger project involving not only royal temples but the planning and construction of the surrounding is a cemetery we may suppose that as overseer of works with such works going on that Hemi and his responsibilities exceeded mere design for example orchestrating the activities of likely many designers planners and executives or builders and that the general nature of overseer of works purposefully refers to the import of such a broad range of responsibilities linking them together functionally as well as in terms of status and contribution to the state administration thus we may see a parallel perhaps in the orchestration of the production of these large architectural complexes to the orchestration of the rituals conducted within with both projects involving a variety of kinds of work including significant aesthetic choices and execution of the means to produce them on the one hand just diversifying of aesthetic responsibilities may hint at why it is so difficult for us to identify individuals responsible for the form of specific projects but it also has that for me another aspect of this inquiry that has to do with how the Egyptians perceived the relationship between the artist and the object or the monument he produced so despite even this expanded definition of artistic production a gap remains in our knowledge about artists and their work we know that ancient Egyptians valued aesthetics and artistic skills the festive aims made that clear in his talk and it's obvious to us in the material that survived we also know that the Egyptians valued artists as Professor Baines pointed out artists were often depicted and identified in elite tomb programs which in Egypt is a marker of status and in fact a number of artists had tombs of their own which indicates an even higher level of status the simple existence of titles that relate to artistic activity is indicator enough titles belong to the elite the small percentage of citizens that were part of the administration so with these depictions tombs and titles do come names we do in fact know the names of numerous artists from ancient surely only very very very tiny percentage but we do have information about specific people who were artists in ancient Egypt thus it is not that we lack the identities of any artists in ancient Egypt rather the larger gap occurs in our knowledge about which artists produced which object or monument we lack the connection between the artist and the work he produced it is clear from the material that has survived that the ancient Egyptians did not prioritize this aspect of artistic work while they valued the artists and they valued the object they did not express either of these things by linking the two together by anchoring the object to the artist and I suggest that this perspective for the ancient Egyptians was linked to their larger worldview one in which theoretically each citizen from Pharaoh to farmer had a specific role to play and if all played the role to which they were born Egypt would succeed in thrive the community is emphasized over the individual and the individuals importance is his active and specific contribution to community for artists this means it was the act of producing the objects and monuments so essential to elite culture that was the focal point of their value that gave them their status in their lives rather than claiming works of art that were perceived after all to exist in an eternal realm distinct from that of any thermal individual I would argue that this view while pervasive was likely an ideal in the way that the world view was an ideal it's not coincidental that the place we do see artists depicted and identified is not in royal monuments but rather in elite ones ones that existed on a much smaller scale with reference to a narrower community and less central to the functioning of the state to underline this point I'd like to briefly return to the team of cohab the one that had the inscription of sunny in it that was mentioned previously by Professor Baines the inscription of sunny is indeed extremely unusual among ancient Egyptian monuments but it is not only they're not not the only distinctive quality of this tomb program and I think the Serbians mentioned this site well as well the tomb program has a distinctive style it is subtle to be sure it's based primarily on the artist alternating color patterns but it's visually distinctive and it's easily perceived it's significant that the distinctive style and the unusual inscription occur together and that they occur in a provincial rather than a man site or capital city tune even further outside the mainstream world of idealized monuments sunny takes a rare opportunity afforded him in this provincial site to assert his status via his signature of sorts but he also displays his particular artistic skill vision even which means it is something that he clearly perceives to be valuable and part of his identity a sense he would likely only have if it were one shared by his wider community in archaeology we look for patterns but it is often the variation from those patterns that can be most telling in this case sunny does something that is not typical elevating his individuality in a space meant to communicate membership and belonging but the choices he makes hint at the ideas and beliefs of his society that artistic ability form and aesthetics were valued by the audience's of ancient Egypt this example I think reaffirms professor Bane's centralizing of aesthetics and it also suggests potentially fruitful paths a further investigation looking for artists and question of aesthetics along the boundaries of the ideals I'd like to conclude with just one last note about the significance of Professor Baines talk and his work and a sort of larger scale as I touched on at the beginning that remains a divide between the discipline of our history in the study of ancient Egyptian art and this is I think ultimately detrimental to both I think a large part of the problem has been historically the frameworks that are referred to and especially even the language used words like portraiture landscape or aesthetics or even art and artists come with meanings that are difficult to apply to Egyptian material I think too many people in both fields have decided the best response is to avoid the topics altogether which is clearly not ideal what professor Bane's talk here shows is that avoidance is less productive than engaging these questions and themes and trying to find ways to reconcile that divide in so doing this kind of work helps to open the dialogue with scholars of other fields of our history and to encourage those who deal with Egyptian art to expand their fields of inquiry ultimately hopefully this can lead to more productive work a more dynamic discourse and this I personally see as an especially significant aspect of this talk and professor Bane's work overall [Applause] so any questions from that work yeah so I have a mic for people with question professor Bane's will entertain okay is there some all right my question is about the pictorial regimes at this last temple that you showed dendara i should first say that my field of expertise is far away from this I work on China but there's a lot of I'd say common ground between ancient Chinese tombs and Egyptian in the sense that most of what remains that we can find today and in digged archaeologically was not meant to be seen there was a limited audience and that the makers are largely absent from the history so having said that I just wonder something about patterns pictorial patterns I noticed that there were many areas where you could say that the decor that the motifs were meant to be decorative that is very tight and sort of repetitive and then the the side view of the the large building where you showed sort of a colossal in inscribed large figure perhaps the King made me think that there were several different types of aesthetic regimes going on that the same kind of motifs are not appropriate for every place on the and these buildings on the outside in particular where one would imagine there would be a considerable audience even if it were limited that one would expect you could see it as opposed to you know being down inside in the tomb so wonder if you could talk about maybe how the artist went about sort of designing something like this in the sense of deciding what types of motifs would go where that it's a big question thank you so I'm just changing if the microphone is working yes well there's a whole range of issue is it much you say that undoubtedly you have various different areas which have different styles and meanings attached to them in the greco-roman period you've singled out this fact that you get some figures shown as a colossal scale on the outside and they are presumably there to speak to the largest audience that will get to see it very hard to say how many people they are but there was actually a particular interest in that case you've got very repetitive materials that go around the base and they are less important but they're separated from those more important larger reliefs by a line of inscription and that line of inscription has the most difficult in the paragraph ik composition on it of anywhere indeed people still can't understand some of these texts and one has to assume that this is a display element which is very important for the for the community that is involved in the design of the temple if the content of the inscription is about the building of the temple so there is a case where you've got something which in a sense is visually it's just a divider between two parts of the of the thing but at the same time it conveyed a lot of meaning and then is the further up you move basically you have the base which I think signifies the created world roughly speaking the middle area signifies the is the ideally ordered divine world in which only the king and the gods can participate and then the top signifies the sky that's a very obvious sort of way to split up but the top has many small scale repetitive elements which evokes things in specific cases which have to do with it with astronomy so the path of the Sun the constellations and things like this and indeed the temple of dendera has the only not the only so I want a very few Egyptian the zodiac so there's a sort of new piece of astronomy because it's a Babylonian concept which came to Egypt and so you've got these zones of meaning in the different in the different levels of decoration and as you move into the temple and the inner parts it's different from the outer parts so it's organized both for meaning and for visible effect there is extraordinary set of pictures that I discovered they recently cleaned the ceiling of the main area and you have to put up a lot of scaffolding to do this and that there is this fantastically beautiful execution of these freezes and decorative elements and also astronomical elements on the ceiling which again with the problem hardly anyone could see it because it was brightly colored you could see it better it would certainly give a wonderful visible impression even though it was pretty much too far away to see in any detail so again this mania together to complete everything which influences the design and takes it probably beyond anything that could good in all cases have a direct aesthetic effect other considerations are coming in there too I don't know if that answers you are told in the tomb of containing I think it was you suggested that that it was the artists idea to depict himself in a prominent position and that the patron sort of went along with that is it possible that that was the patrons idea and that the artist is somehow a notable or reputable enough so that the patron is proud of employing this particular artist it's quite possible either that's an equally good way of looking at it I think the only question I would wonder about is how much Liberty these artists have in other words suppose suppose of this artist that there he is he lives in this provincial place does he have a choice of working for another patron or something like that but so we don't know if there's any sort of sense of market of artists but some I think it would make good sense to think that that this person who clearly had produces exceptional style and composition could would was obviously valued because that's why that is there and it could indeed be that it's the opposite way around to what I said I just have this slight uncomfortableness thinking about how the artists would be commissioned and so on them I can't answer that as a modernist I knew absolutely nothing but I was very struck by one element I my ambition is to one thing to deceive you I think you say that at some point the the carvings decorative columns are contradicting the architect role it wasn't on the other side of the last temple you should go kind of like in conjunction with the octet for the geometry and and I was singing of that intense little delight to use of light which which is as you as you describe so crucial would the light be considered to be you or strictly on the order of the architects decision you know do we know if there was a kind of conjunction there because if some carving up flush with light they also kind of disappear in the octave so I just wonder what was a relationship between the scouter covers and the architects well it did they feel kind of competition or kind of do we know any of that well we know something about how sculptors and painters work together because they seem to work together not very well as a sense that you will have a painting which is the point of departure for something it's carved and then the sculptor comes along and he ignores the lines where I'm finish works you see a sort of thing and then that somebody should come back after that and paint the the sculpted relief and then beautifully detailed carving in in the stone is then covered with plaster and painted with entirely different motifs on the top that's why there may be a change in taste of course it may be that in the 30 years but but the basic point you make about how light blinds the sculpture that's taken care of by using centrally from it on exteriors sunk relief takes the light much better than rays for these jars and one or in one of them in one period they decided to reverse mention they have enormous figures that are embraced release on exteriors but never able to see but I don't I think we it would be rare that you would find that the design kind of contradicts the architectural form what you do find is that the rigid them squares into which the design is organized and things like that are then subvert it by the by the content that goes within so people are very conscious of playing with the potential of their forms okay I think we should do if we don't want the reception to be taxed before we go I think we should they all invite for reception food all [Music]

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John Baines Professor of Egyptology, University of Oxford; Member, School of Historical Studies, 2009-10 October 21, 2009 Ancient Egyptian artworks were typically made by people of unknown name, for extremely small audiences. The only form that had wide visibility was large-scale architecture, but it often presented a message of exclusion. The production of aesthetic artifacts, built spaces, and events, many requiring vast resources, was a major social preoccupation. How far can we capture and characterize the group responsible for commissioning and carrying out works? Can we trace chains of action among patrons, designers, executants, and audiences? How different is the Egyptian case from other traditions? In this lecture, John Baines, Professor of Egyptology at the University of Oxford, surveyed some of these issues through material of varying types and periods. The respondent for the lecture was Deborah Vischak, Lecturer in the Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University.