ââåno Limit May Be Set to Art Neither Is There Any Craftsman That Is Fully Master of His Craftã¢ââ
Is there an ancient Egyptian definition of fine art?
The ancient Egyptian word hemut is translated as 'art' in some contexts, 'craft' in others.
The hemutyu 'people employed in hemut' are ever men, in surviving written and pictorial sources.
In that location are few explicit divisions of hemutyu into different groups, but we find two possible clues towards the definition of hemut.:
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professions in the Satire of Trades
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'sections' of artists/craftsmen in late Middle Kingdom (about 2025-1700 BC) assistants
The Heart Kingdom composition known in Egyptology every bit the Satire of Trades records the hardships suffered by manual workers. Notwithstanding, though it includes craftsmen such as handbasket-weavers and potters too as sculptors and jewellers, information technology refers to professions (using the give-and-take iat) rather than hemut. So information technology does not testify that the ancient Egyptian literate elite considered pottery or weaving every bit 'art'.
The post-obit nineteen professions are included in the Satire of Trades:
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These are assorted with the profession of 'writer' (usually rendered 'scribe' in Egyptology). The significant of 'writer' every bit profession is non defined. The profession may denote primarily those who worked in the national (regal) assistants every bit writers. It is possible, though, that information technology included the 'draughtsman', as that championship is in Egyptian the compound phrase 'author of outlines' - the same verb (sS) is used in Egyptian for 'to write' and 'to pigment'. The primal purpose of the Satire of Trades is to emphasise that the 'writer' has a life of luxury relative to the transmission professions.
'Sections' of artists/craftsmen in late Middle Kingdom assistants
The belatedly Middle Kingdom witnessed an exceptionally precise style of designating the official positions held by individuals (again using, in some contexts at least, the give-and-take iat). Several of these tightly expressed designations contain the word waret 'section',on the model 'overseer of the section of goldsmiths'. The surviving and published sources include 9 such sections, all referring to a group of workers entrusted with commodities of high cloth value - metal (tools) and, in one example, cloth (linen production being ane of the chief industries of ancient Egypt). In 8 of the nine cases, these workers are craftsmen. These offer a preliminary guide to the ancient Egyptian administration of art, and so, though just indirectly, to an implicit definition of art by the aboriginal Egyptian literate elite: note though that the surviving record is extremely broken.
The sections (Egyptian waret) for whom overseers are attested in belatedly Center Kingdom sources:
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The first of these sections underpins most if not all of the rest: the draughtsman is necessary for creating outlines of figures and other compositional elements according to the right proportions (see the page on guidelines and grids for the variations in proportions across the three thousand years in which ancient Egyptian formal art was in employ). The bones tool of the draughtsman is the reed brush; unfinished compositions indicate that his main pigments are red ochre, for the get-go outline, and carbon blackness, for the revised or corrected version.
Leaving aside the laundrymen (who would have needed to be controlled because they were handling valuable cloth), the other sections have perchance one principal shared element: a tool with pointed metal bract. This tool may have been used more in the finishing of a work: for instance, a faience figure might be fabricated with a mould, only a fine indicate would be used application of details earlier firing. These sections involve craftsmen whose work might have included figurative depictions; although there is no evidence from the tardily Center Kingdom, fifty-fifty the sandalmakers might have had to add figures, in the example of production of shoes for the king, as New Kingdom (about 1550-1069 BC) examples include images of foreigners
This would agree with the Satire of Trades, section 5, where hemuu 'craftsman' seems to be defined in a qualifying phrase in the combination hemuu neb tjay anet 'any craftsman who wields a blade'.
The sections along with that of draughtsmen, offering an implicit definition of figurative formal art by the benchmark of their tools: fine art, or at least Egyptian hemut, may be defined as the terrain of draughtsman'south castor and craftsman'due south chisel.
How does the division of draughtsman from other artists operate in practice?
Of the sections of craftsmen in late Eye Kingdom administration, whose products are known to have included figurative depictions in that period (so leaving aside the sandalmakers and the laundrymen), five are found in the Satire of the Trades. The 2 absent are the glaze worker and the draughtsman (the article of furniture-maker is not explicitly present in the Satire of Trades, merely is probably covered by the inclusion there of the carpenter):
- The absence of the 'coat worker' is maybe to be explained by changes in glazing applied science or its social impact in the period immediately following the Satire of the Trades (the limerick is not securely dated, only may be an early 12th Dynasty, so early Middle Kingdom, production).
- The absence of draughtsman cannot be explained by difference in date: the title is well attested in the early Middle Kingdom. Its absence from the Satire of Trades seems to signal that the Egyptians considered the draughtsman as dissimilar: as creator of the line, and user of the same tool and materials as the writer, he may exist above the level of the crafts.
Nonetheless, there are applied problems with this separation of the person decision-making the idea from the person transforming it into a fabric product - whether the separation is a modernistic construct or does correspond to aboriginal categories.
Consider examples of the figurative products of each arts and crafts, with two questions in mind:
- Could the producer reach the end result without knowledge of the proportions underlying the lines of the draughtsman?
- If the producer had such knowledge, was at that place whatever need for the draughtsman to exist there at the kickoff?
| finished | unfinished | |||
| Article of furniture carvers (ane): wood | Instance: UC 16678 |  | Example: UC 30569 |  |
| Furniture carvers (2): bone and ivory | Instance: UC 16069 |  | ||
| Jewellers (semi-precious stones) | Example: UC 2496 |  | Case: UC 16617 |  |
| Glaze workers (faience, glazed steatite, from the New Kingdom also glass) | Example: UC 16315 |  | Example: UC 16315 (unfinished scarabs) |  |
| Goldsmiths (precious metals) | Example: UC 28052 |  | ||
| Coppersmiths (base metals) | Example: UC 30135 |  | ||
| Sculptors (i): soft stones (mainly limestone, sandstone) | Example: UC 34503 |  | Example: UC 16619 |  |
| Sculptors (two): hard stones (e.g. basalt, granite, quartzite) | Example: UC 16657 |  | Example: UC 16332 |  |
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Source: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/museums-static/digitalegypt/art/art3.html