Our knowledge of everyday life in ancient Egypt has been derived largely from depictions on the walls of tombs and other written records, including thousands of fragments of limestone (ostraka) from the New Kingdom which include letters, legal matters and student writing exercises. Here we look at some of the information gleaned from both these sources and artefacts.

FOOD PRODUCERS

Many Old Kingdom tombs at Saqqara depict scenes of activities such as hunting, fishing and cattle herding. Small sculptures from the Old Kingdom also depict various activities such as bread and beer making.
 

By the Middle Kingdom, some tombs contained wooden models of servants working in granaries, baking bread, ploughing fields and sailing boats. One major wooden model in the Cairo Museum shows a landowner seated under a canopy with his officials as his stock are paraded past him (at right).  Other models illustrate workers weaving and fishing with nets suspended between boats. In the New Kingdom tombs of officials and craftsmen, scenes often show fields being harvested, followed by the winnowing and threshing of grain.

Scribes are sometimes depicted in such scenes noting the quantities of grain for the purpose of taxation. In return, the administration oversaw the construction of irrigation canals and dykes to make best use of the annual flooding of the Nile.

Grape-picking is shown in some paintings and the tomb of Sennefer, an 18th-dynasty mayor of Thebes (modern Luxor), has a large part of its ceiling painted to depict vines and clusters of grapes. Grapes were eaten and also used for wine production, the best quality coming from the Delta region.

Many types of vegetables were included in the diet, some being onions, garlic, melons and peas. They also ate plenty of fish, ducks, pigeons, geese and quail.

Fishermen used nets and fishing hooks (at right) that would not look out of place in a modern fishing tackle shop. Fish were much more plentiful in the Nile than they are today.

CRAFTSMEN

Some of our present knowledge of the ancient crafts of boat building and sculpturing comes from wall paintings, as well as actual preserved examples of boats and partially completed statues.
 

Various tradesmen were required to meet the demand for manufacturing furniture and other items for both the home and the tomb, the house of eternity. While Egyptian houses were sparsely furnished, the standard of work seen in surviving furniture from wealthy tombs can be very high. Carpenters used saws, wooden mallets, chisels and a tool called an adze for carving wood, as seen at left in an ancient model of a workshop in the Cairo Museum. Egypt's craftsmen also produced statues, amulets and various other items from bronze. One preserved illustration shows the production of a stone statue of a pharaoh by men involved in polishing the stone, painting and carving hieroglyphs.

Superb gold and silver work has been found that has been worked to perfection by jewellers. They also made necklaces containing elements made of faience (a glazed material) that were molded to look like flowers, leaves and fruit.  Men and women often wore large decorative earrings.

Artists painted some beautiful scenes in tombs but, like sculptors, they were mainly anonymous craftsmen rather than artists producing art for art's sake. Very few names of artists survive, although the style of someone's work is sometimes recognisable to experts.

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Copyright © 2000-2006 Mark T. Rigby