Synopses & Reviews
The paintings from Nebamun's tomb chapel are among the greatest and most famous of the British Museum's treasures. Yet much about them remains mysterious, and this book is concerned with the detective work undertaken to help us to understand and see them properly before they are displayed in a new permanent gallery in 2008. For this the paintings are being conserved and remounted in the Museum's specialist laboratories, a process that is revealing radical new information about painting techniques in ancient Egypt. This, together with archival work, is helping us to solve the problem of the tomb-chapel's location at Thebes, last seen in the 1820s when the paintings were removed. Richard Parkinson discusses each painting fully, with reconstructions and translations of the hieroglyphic texts, a discussion of the other known fragments (now in Berlin and Avignon) and a reconstruction of the whole tomb chapel. Every fragment is fully illustrated in colour, doing full justice to an artist who has been described as 'antiquity's equivalent of Michelangelo'.
Synopsis
Oxbow says: Among the finest treasures of the British Museum are eleven fragments of paintings from the tomb-chapel of the Egyptian official Nebamun, c.1350BC. Since 1997, a programme of conservation and research has focused on these paintings, making possible their publication in this superbly illustrated book. Richard Parkinson includes all the known background history to the paintings, from Luxor to London, along with detailed descriptions of the paintings accompanied by stunning colour photographs. Some of the scenes include funerary offerings, a banquet, Nebamun viewing the produce of the estate, agricultural scenes, fishing and fowling in the marshes and Nebamun's garden, providing insights not just into the life of an Egyptian official, but also more generally into Egyptian culture and society.