 I hope you did your short reading and visited the British Museum website prior to watching this video. And if you haven't, this might be a good time to stop and go back and do that. What we're looking at here is one scene that was excavated from a new Kingdom Egyptian tomb called the Tomb of Nebemun. Unfortunately, we don't know the fine sight of this tomb and we don't know the exact arrangement, although a pretty convincing arrangement has been set up by the British Museum just based on the fact that a lot of the imagery from this tomb is similar to imagery from many other tombs in Egypt. What this is is the burial of a relatively wealthy man. You see him and his wife seated at the top right and here they have almost naked serving girls bringing them offerings of food and gifts and on the left you see representations of those food and that food and gifts. One of the things that the Egyptians did was they believed that their soul would live on after death in the form of the Ka, Ka, and that the Ka needed to have different things to do in the afterlife, that the Ka needed occupations, needed food, needed all sorts of things that we associate with daily life. They would provide imagery in tombs, models of things from real life in tombs, all of this in order to provide for the Ka in the afterlife. This banqueting scene should be seen in that light as something meant to entertain the Ka in the afterlife. Before we leave this slide I just want to point out the strange sort of conical things that appear on many of the heads of these female figures you see particularly in the bottom or lower register that we see here. Those are actually cones of perfumed wax that the Egyptians would wear on their heads and as things heated up in a party the wax would start to melt and so you'd have this sort of heavy sweet scented perfume trickling down into people's hair and onto their skin in a in a party like this. Thanks to their extensive writings and to the sheer wealth of archaeological finds from ancient Egypt we know a lot about how they made their works of art and what you're seeing in both images on this slide first are paint palettes. Egyptians used a fairly limited range of paint colors and they didn't tend to mix their colors they tended to sort of put them next to each other more than mixing them. They would use white, black, yellow, green and blue primarily and you see those shades represented in these paint palettes and also in the rocks and minerals that you see on the lower right and I want to call your attention particularly to the red and the yellow pieces because those of course are ochre. When building a tomb Egyptian laborers would first hollow out a space from inside a mountain or a cliff face generally after the pyramids Egyptian tombs tended to be cut into rock and so once you had a rough layout of several rooms that would include offering chambers and a chapel a treasury chamber and a burial chamber then the business would start of actually decorating the tomb and so what you're seeing here is a plaster cast of the rough surface of a tomb wall and this would actually the rough tomb wall would actually be plastered over first with a fairly rough plaster and then with a finer plaster and then that plaster would be drawn upon and then carved and finally painted. Here I'm showing you a couple of unfinished works of art these are both in the Petrie Museum in London in order to give you an idea of the artistic process. So I want you to notice on the left this is a stela or like a stone tablet that would have been decorated and it was first marked with a grid pattern because usually Egyptian artists would start with a smaller sketch and then enlarge it using a grid and this is probably something that you encountered in a high school art class or even earlier. Then they would rough out the general shapes and colors and you can see some of that here and then what you see on the right is some of the actual carvings so here the surface has been very very lightly engraved with all of the lines and then the artist starts to work in and create a little bit more of a relief surface. In relief carving basically you have areas that stand proud of the surface of the work and then you have the surface itself and so the relief is the part that sticks out and here we have low relief which doesn't project very much but it's also possible to have very very high relief. So now we're back to our banqueting scene. As you can see the wall itself consisted of first a fairly rough layer of money plaster down below and you can see fragments of that on the edges and then a much finer quality plaster that was the area that what ended up being painted. In the tomb of Nebemun we have fewer areas that are actually sculpted with relief it's mostly just painting but I wanted to walk you through that process so that you have that in mind when you look at other examples of Egyptian art. Now we're looking at a closer view of the feast scene that we saw in the previous slide and then a detail from another area with food offerings that's from the same tomb and I want you to notice the the different colors that we see here and the ways in which the artist treated them. So here you can see a really heavy dark outline of red ochre was used for almost everything in these scenes. It outlines the figure of the serving girl, it outlines many of the food offerings, the baskets, the fruits, the the fowl and the fish for example and then we have a slightly lighter and version of red ochre probably actually mixed with a little bit of white paint in order to get this skin tone and that's used in other areas. There's a really wonderful bright orange ochre that also appears particularly in the image on the right and then you can see the yellow ochre which is used in a slightly diluted or lighter form and then also in a slightly darker form to show off some of the fruits and the baskets and as you can see ochre is one of the dominant materials being used here you also see lots of that sort of malachite green. The blue was actually the world's first synthetic pigment. The ancient Egyptians and the Han dynasty in China almost simultaneously invented synthetic glass-based pigments and these are called Egyptian blue and Han blue. Egyptian blue is sort of a cobalt glass frit that would be ground and so the blue areas that you see for example on the jewelry of the serving girl or sort of in between the grapes in those bunches of grapes that's Egyptian blue. We're going to finish with a look at this wonderful painting also from the Tomb of Nebemun. This shows a scene in which Nebemun is hunting and I'm showing you a detail in which his cat is also helping to hunt and so you can see at the center here the cat is simultaneously capturing three different birds, two with its claws and one with its mouth and all around we see butterflies, we see lotuses, we see papyrus and then on the left you can just see the leg of Nebemun himself and part of his kilt as he comes into this scene. The cat is just an absolute masterpiece and a great example for us because it's painted almost entirely using earth pigments. There's red ochre probably combined with a little bit of black or possibly a brown which would be like a cooked version of iron oxide when you heat it up it gets darker and you get brown shades for that way and there's also shading in yellow ochre to give us some of the cat's stripes, lots and lots of marks of red and brown to indicate fur and just this marvelous attention to detail. You can also see the use of red ochre in the butterflies, in the leg of Nebemun and in some of the foliage around and then also you see that use of the red ochre, the deep red ochre for outlining. Here's a closer view just of the cat and the butterfly and a couple of the birds and it's really marvelous this work here. You can imagine that the artist who did this spent some time sketching and drawing cats and really observing the birds and other natural things that are depicted here. All of the textures are believable. The motion of the cat is very believable. I love the treatment of the claws. They look very much like this is someone who might have had cats at home and study the way that their paws work before undertaking this work. It truly is a masterpiece and it's a wonderful example of ochre being used. The last thing I want to mention as I close is that one of the great advantages of ochre is that it's a very strong color. It doesn't take very much to leave color on something. It blends very well and it's incredibly permanent and light fast. It's not surprising that so many of these surviving works that we have include ochre and in fact modern artists still use ochre extensively today and it's also used in a number of industrial applications as well.