LIGHTING THE TOMBS

Some Hieroglyphs...
but not the ones in the Valley of the Kings

Deep inside the tombs of the Pharoahs in ancient Egypt, the artisan craftsmen toiled away creating the most beautiful and colourful artwork to accompany the Pharoah himself in his journey through the afterlife. First the walls were prepared to a smooth, plaster-like finish, then the drawings were marked out using writing sticks. After that, each figure and hieroglyph was painstakingly carved out in relief work and finally each was painted with the brightest of colours before the whole chamber was hidden, supposedly forever, never to be seen again by human eyes at least.

We can only gaze in awe and wonder at the magnificent and ultimately thankless work of these ancient artists and wonder about them as they slaved away at these masterpieces that they believed would only be remembered by them in their lifetimes and never seen by other human eyes. How and why they did it remains the topic of much debate in archaeological academia, but you can’t help but admire the commitment and the craftsmanship.

But there is something more fundamental to this for me as a some-time artist and it’s about light. Creating a drawing or painting is not only about the light falling upon the subject that you’re trying to recreate, but also about the light that you need to see what it is that you’re doing. The fact that many of our treasured relatively modern masterpieces of art and literature were created in dark rooms where the main sources of artificial light were candles or oil lamps once the sun went down is sometimes astonishing to me, especially as I’ve occasionally struggled myself in my less than brightly lit home, but when I start to think about the work done in creating the artwork in those tombs, my mind is, quite frankly, boggled.

The decorated tunnels that lead to the main burial chambers are covered from floor to ceiling and indeed on the ceiling by beautiful artistic creations, and those tunnels are buried deep beneath the baking desert and are hundreds of metres long. Whilst modern day tourists are allowed to venture into the Valley of the Kings and can descend into these tombs and look at these images from so long ago, they are not permitted to take photographs as it would damage these fragile images. Whilst cameras were actually confiscated at the gates at the time of my visit a couple of years ago, I’m not sure whether these days they also have to confiscate all manner of other devices as they proliferate.

As to the artistic decorations themselves, the fact that we can see them at all when we descend into the tombs themselves, is mainly because we have modern electric lighting and generators to illuminate the darkness. The people actually creating them had no such advantages, so the question remains, just how did they provide enough light for them to do this particularly intricate artwork?

Some might think that all of the work was done outside in the blazing sunshine and then transported into the darkness for their eternal and very private art installation, but the tombs themselves tell us a different story. Like a series of diagrams in a Haynes manual or any other “how to” book (“Tomb Decoration for Dummies…?”) one or two of the tombs had to be completed with a certain amount of haste when the current “Living God” dropped dead unexpectedly, and so we can see them now in the form of a “work in progress” and work out, in so far as we can work out anything with any absolute certainty when it comes to long-lost civilisations, that most of this work – perhaps not the preliminary sketches - was done in situ and, more significantly, in the dark, and using the kind of equipment a modern day artist would consider somewhat rudimentary.

Nowadays we can grab a tube of whatever colour we need off the shelf, or mix other colours from them, but back in those times, any colour you needed had to be created from scratch. Likewise, the simple act of marking out a wall requires something resembling a pencil and a certain amount of precision measuring equipment, all of which people like me can get from our local art shop. A pencil, despite what you might think, is a fascinatingly complex piece of equipment.

Compared to the difficulties of knocking together a DVD player - and its internal laser beam - from its component parts and then being able to knock them out at Asda for twenty quid or so, you may think that a pencil is a relatively simple thing, but just think about what you would have to do to make one from scratch yourself and then think again. Centuries of innovation went into making the simple pencil something that we can all now take for granted. Yet, despite the fact of all my art school training and years of using such things, I can still struggle to draw something adequate with something as accessible as a pencil on a piece of paper if I am in a dark room on a cloudy day. 

But these ancient artists had nothing like pencils to work with. Their marks had to be made using much more simple tools. They couldn’t just pop down to “Staples” (other stationers are available) and get themselves another one like we can, and merely marking out their artwork in the pitch darkness was only the beginning of their problems.

So how did they illuminate their workspaces? Some might suggest that they used flaming torches, but the orange flickering light is really not very good light to create artwork to, and anyway there is no evidence of soot accumulation on the friezes or the ceilings. There is the possibility, I suppose that gangs of men were scrubbing down the walls and ceilings after the artwork was completed, but there’s little evidence to suggest they did, and that would surely have destroyed the very artwork that had been created.

Granted, more modern eyes might have said “So what? No one’s ever going to know…” and gone ahead with the scrubbing anyway but these were craftsmen culturally committed to painting for eternity, not Bob the Decorator and his dodgy assistants, and, despite the fact that their creations were supposed to be hidden for all time, they obviously took an astonishing amount of pride in what they were creating.

Much the same argument with regards to the torches tends to rule out tallow candlelight too, or tinderboxes, or even oil lamps. They too, with their sticky residues, bring up the same issues of the deposits they would have left behind them, not to mention the horrific fumes that you would have to be attempting to do your work in. Despite this, of course, I am willing to believe that, in the end, it is most probably oil lamps that are the most likely options in explaining how these things were done.

Others of a more fanciful nature have suggested a complex series of mirrors bouncing the sunlight down into the depths, but again, from a practical point of view, it seems unlikely to be a solution. Just think about how you struggle to change a spark plug on a dark night if someone doesn’t hold the lamp steady and imagine the difficulties your own shadow can cause you when you’re trying to do any kind of simple task in a dark or ill-lit place.

I heard Raafat, our guide to the sights and temples of Egypt a couple of years ago, chatting to another tourist about his belief that the ancients must have had some kind of knowledge of electric lighting, even if it was only in the form of rudimentary batteries and filaments of some sort, and, after watching a few documentaries on the discovery and development of electricity recently, I’m becoming inclined to believe that he might very well be on to something there. After all, we are merely scratching the surface when it comes to our knowledge about this ancient civilisation, but if you think about it for a moment, from a purely practical point of view, he may very well really have had a point.

After all, is it truly impossible that the principle of, for example Carbon Arc lamps, is not just a recent rediscovery of knowledge known to the ancients and forgotten about as civilisations crumbled and the great experimenters were no longer able to practice their arts? Charging up water using static electricity drums and metal wires doesn’t necessarily have to have been only a modern sequence of thought when you consider just how much experimentation the ancient necromancers and alchemists did when it came to chemicals and minerals. Such things really could have been well-known principles that we just lost the knowledge about somewhere in the intervening centuries when other priorities made for a less enquiring culture. After all, fragile materials do vanish given a few centuries and just because we’ve decided something is a “pot” or an “oil lamp” doesn’t mean that’s what it actually was. All it ever proves is that we can never be absolutely sure about anything and that all of our guesses about that day-to-day life was actually like for the average ancient Egyptian can never be anything much more than that - educated guesswork, and anyone who doubts the levels of technological sophistication of the old world should examine the “2000 Year Old Computer” or the so-called Antikythera Device which appears to blow a lot of our ideas about ancient Greek culture into very tiny pieces. (http://www.antikythera-mechanism.com/)

In about four thousand years, I suspect whoever is living on this planet then will struggle to understand much of what we get up to, either. Whatever photographs that survive that long might show us all sitting around staring at a screen in the corner, or walking around with strange wires clamped to our ears which the archaeologists of the future will assume to be house temples or some sort of decoration, because those silly primitives of the 21st century simply couldn’t have lived the kind of full and sophisticated lives that they do, could they?

It might seem very unlikely to us with our “enlightened” minds to imagine that our so-called “primitive” ancestors might have had knowledge that we think that only our culture was intelligent enough to have thought of, but then they managed to build some structures that have lasted over four thousand years, and there’s precious little of our modern world that we can really claim will last that long, is there...?