Temporal and Spatial Structure of Tomb Images of Egypt

Temporal and Spatial Structure of Tomb Images

The images in the tombs of the Old Kingdom set out to portray the existence of the deceased in the hereafter and their content is ordered accordingly. Because the afterlife was conceived in more or less the same way for all non-royal persons, the range of images found in the tombs of viziers, high state officials, court singers, royal hairdressers, and tradesmen does not differ greatly. The most important difference lay in their execution, which took into account the size of the tomb and the availability of the wall surfaces; this depended ultimately on the financial means of the deceased.

The wall surfaces of an Old Kingdom chapel intended for a planned series of images were composed down to the last detail. The wall was organized into sections and these sections linked with one another. The most important element for ordering the entire structure of the wall was the horizontal register. A wall area had several registers, generally of the same height. The horizontal registers were framed at the side by a long rectangular field, the height of the entire wall. This contains the enormous image of the deceased that bracketed the registers oriented toward it. The registers show individual scenes that can be arranged into groups or series. Depending on the availability of space to be decorated the depiction could be either detailed or brief:
The scenes could be portrayed in abridged form or long narrative sequences.

While the image of the deceased does not occupy any definable time frame, the time sequence of registers is so arranged that the earlier event is at the top while the later one is in a lower register. Good examples of temporal ordering are to be found in images of agricultural labor. The scenes are linked in the same order as the seasons; plowing, sowing, stamping in of the seed, harvesting, threshing, filling of the storehouses, and calculating the yield of the harvest are all depicted one after the other. The sequence concludes with images showing the further processing of grain into bread and beer. A similar temporal order can be seen in images of cattle-rearing where one continuous chain of events is portrayed in a single register: a bull mounts a co a calf is born, the cow is milked and calves are raised. A somewhat shorter series can be seen for the production of wine where individual events extend from harvesting to the wine-pressing through to the filling of wine barrels.

Most image sequences express the spatial as well as the temporal dimension. In images of farming, depictions of labor in the fields are followed by those of work in barns or storehouses. Similar relationships can be found where fishing and fowling with a throwing net are depicted; rural scenes are combined with those occurring in other contexts.

Occasionally the temporal and spatial dimensions overlap. In depictions of hunting in the desert, the prey is sometimes desert animals and sometimes that of the steppes. These animals are shown copulating and then giving birth. Similar displacements of time and space occur in boat journeys. In images of a river boat journey, the deceased appears as the passenger of a sailing ship in the same frame and at the same time as he is shown as the passenger of a galley.