 Hi everyone and welcome to your daily Barnes takeout. I'm Karl Walsh. I'm a postdoctoral fellow here at the Department of Research, Interpretation and Education. And today I want to take you up to room 15 here at the Barnes, which has this wonderful cabinet full of objects from around the ancient world. And if we just zoom in and have a look at this, this is on the North War ensemble in this room. You can see that the cabinet's full of geometric and classical Greek pottery and figurines, some lovely bone inlays from late antique Mediterranean, a couple of Egyptian stone reliefs, and some really nice examples of turquoise and silver jewelry from the Pueblo and Navajo peoples in the southwestern America. And today I want to focus on this stone relief, which is right in the middle of the bottom shelf of this cabinet. And this is one of the most interesting Egyptian objects in the collection because we know quite a lot about where this relief has come from. It was found in modern Luxor, ancient Thebes. And we know quite a lot about the individual who is actually depicted and mentioned in this relief as well. So looking at the relief, you can see that we have a top part of an image of a man. And you can see as well, because we only have part of it, that this is actually a fragment of a larger scene. It originally come from probably a wall of a tomb chapel. And this is just a cut off portion of it. We have the image of a man carved in sunk relief. And sunk relief is basically where you carve out a section of the stone, and then you carve in low relief the details within that, but you don't actually raise it above the level of the stone in any way. And it creates these really interesting shadows and plays of light on the surface, particularly if it's in on a exterior monument or the exterior part of a building as well. And you can see that this man has a nice shaved head. And if you remember from the last takeout that I did where I looked at an Egyptian statue head, a shaved head like this is usually meant to represent a priest. Although in this case, this individual is actually playing the role of a priest rather than being a priest himself. But he has this nice shaved head, and then he has this lovely elaborate collar, which is part of a big linen dress that he's wearing that is also kind of priestly in nature. And he's got an upraised hand in front of his face. And then his other hand is actually missing. And that's because he's holding an incense burner in front of him. And we can see part of the burner here. There's a little dish. And then we've got some little cones of incense which are burning on it. So he's probably holding this in his other hand. Now, the rest of the scene is missing. But the text on the relief is actually really helpful in helping to reconstruct what else is going on in this scene. And this text is divided into six different columns, which are read from top to bottom. And then it's actually subdivided into two different sections as well. And to figure out how you read an Egyptian text, the easiest thing you can do is try to find one of these little hieroglyphic signs of an animal or a person and see which way that they're facing. And you always read into the direction that they're facing. So if we look at this little snake hieroglyph sign here, you can see that we're reading from right to left. But if we look at this little column here, you can see that there's an arm here. And so this is giving us another direction to read the text. So we're reading here from left to right. And the reason for that I'll go into in a minute. And this text here, it reads Lord of the Two Lands, Juzer Qare, and then given life like, I'm missing part here, but it originally probably said Ra, the Egyptian sun god. And then we have another part of a name here. And we know it's a name because royal names are always held in this little coiled rope motif, which we call a cartouche. And there's a little part of a sign here, which is part of a name which reads Amenhotep. So we know that this individual being named here is a dead king who has become a god by this period called Amenhotep the first. And I'll come back to him in a second. Now the rest of the text is orientated in different directions. So it's being read from right to left. And this text reads, making incense for the car by the hand of the royal scribe, Mayor, the vizier of the north and south, K, and that's his name. And he has a little determinative sign here to show that he's a person, which is a little seated figure who's holding a little flail. And then true of voice, rest in peace, which is basically kind of a little funerary title to show that he is dead, his little funerary epiphyte. So this inscription is really interesting because it gives us the name of the individual. We know he's named K, and it's also given us the titles of who he is. So we know how he fits into the Egyptian state system. Particularly this title of vizier of the north and south is really important because that makes him basically the head of the Egyptian state underneath the king. So he reports directly to the king and he's responsible for the day-to-day running of the state. He's kind of like a vice president or a prime minister. He's kind of one of the most important people in Egypt at this time. And because of his name and his titles matching other monuments and statues that we have in Egypt, we also know which king he served. And he actually serves Ramses II, or sometimes called Ramses the Great, who is one of the most important, well important but so much as famous because he built so many temples and monuments in Egypt during the New Kingdom period. And we know that K served as vizier roughly between the dates of 1278 to 1213 BC. So this text and relief is really interesting as well because it gives us this historical information, but it's also a really good example of how texts and images interplay with each other. They have this kind of symbiotic relationship in that they work together to communicate information and kind of evoke experiences and things as well. So looking at this text, you can actually see that the text was carved after the image was carved because it contours around the figure and the aspects of the scene as well. And also that we have some kind of planning by the artisans to kind of correlate things with the images. So K's name is actually right above his figure. And you can also see that the orientation of the text is actually so that it's facing the same direction that K is as well. So it kind of is working almost like a kind of cartoon caption. It's giving you an idea of who is saying what and what part of the text is associated with who in the scene as well. So using this, we can kind of reconstruct another part of the scene as well, which is now lost, but because we have this different orientation of text on the right and the name of this dead king, Arman Hotep I, we know that there were probably originally a seated or standing figure of this god king to the right, which is now lost. And this is probably a representation of him as a statue, but it could also be a literal representation of him as a god. And so this kind of fills out the rest of the scene. So we have K who is offering and burning incense before the image of this god king. And the reason that K is being depicted as a kind of a priest here becomes clear because he's interacting with a god. And he's particularly playing a role of a priest here and performing something that would have been a daily ritual in temples and shrines, where priests would come in, particularly in the morning and kind of wake the god up and open up their shrine and kind of wash them and then purify the space within the room by burning incense as well. So K is performing these kind of like priestly roles to show his kind of piety and to help him kind of pass into the afterlife as well, because this would be originally probably placed on a tomb. But it's also kind of evoking the kind of the atmosphere and the smell and sense that would happen inside of a shrine or temple room where the god's image was held. And it's kind of evoking this sacred space as well and an experience as well. So it's very multi-sensory. And the important of incense here is really key too, because incense is made from exotic materials that are imported from Arabia, from sub-Saharan Africa. But the word incense itself is also very much kind of intertwined with gods and the divine as well. And gods were actually described as having a natural musk, which is basically the smell of incense, just as they were supposed to have kind of skin of gold and eye and hair of lapis and things as well. And the word incense itself, which is in the inscription, so this is the word for incense, it's senetcher. So it's these groups of signs here. And then here we have two little, you can just, they look just like circles, but what they are is actual little pots. And these would be used to hold incense. So these are called determinative signs. They basically kind of clarify what the word means. And the word senetcher means incense, but it can also mean kind of to become divine. And it actually incorporates the word for god as well, which is netcher, this sign here, which is a little flag, which would originally be in a temple courtyard or in a temple pylon. So incense and kind of gods go kind of hand in hand, because they're really kind of entwined with each other. And really with the context of where incense is used as well, like in temples and shrines and things as well. And so this is seen as supposed to be trying to kind of evoke the actual space where incense would be burned, which is usually kind of in a temple space, but it can also be in like a funerary chapel as well. And this is probably actually where this relief comes from is from Kay's tomb. And most probably from the chapel that was above his tomb, where members of his family and priests could come and perform funerary rituals to help sustain him in the afterlife. And these are also places where incense would be burned. So the actual context of where this relief would have originally been is kind of actually also referencing the actual practices that would be happening where this art is located as well. So it's a kind of clever self-reflection and self-reference on what people are doing in the space that this art is in, as well as helping to kind of magically keep him sustained in the afterlife, and also to gain the favor of the God that he is shown offering to as well. So I hope this has given you an interesting lesson on how to both read Egyptian art, but also to think about the kind of the multi-sensory aspects of Egyptian art as well, and how they're not just trying to give you information through written words and just through the visuality of images, but they're also trying to kind of draw on human experience to help further communicate and evoke the messages they're trying to give through art as well. So I hope you enjoyed this. The next time that you are in Room 15, please do have a look at Kay's relief and spend a little time looking it over. If you haven't already, please subscribe to our takeout and to our YouTube channel and leave a comment. We really enjoy reading these at the end as well. So I hope you enjoyed that and thanks for watching.