The quality of life for the rulers of Egypt in Sneferu’s time can be gauged by the extraordinarily sumptuous elegance of the furnishings found in the tomb of his consort, Queen Hetepheres, the mother of Khufu, Sneferu’s successor. Once more it is not only their richness of materials and precision of craftsmanship which amazes: it is, overwhelmingly, the certainty and restraint with which they are designed.
The hoard of objects from Hetepheres’ burial, a fraction of what originally it contained, are amongst the most splendid to survive from the Old Kingdom, or indeed from any period of Egyptian history.5 Hetepheres’ tomb was robbed, evidently soon after her death and burial; it appears that this desecration was discovered and what remained was hastily reburied in a deeply cut pit. The queen’s body however, seems not to have survived. What did survive however, was a magnificent alabaster sarcophagus, a carrying chair, exquisitely inlaid with gold, a gold-encased bed and gossamer-fine canopy, gold implements, and silver bracelets inlaid with butterflies.
Though only a few hundred years separate her time from that when Egypt was in a state of a preliterate and still experimental society the objects which were the companions of Hetepheres’ living days, are of an austere but sumptuous splendour, matched with a dignity, restraint, and perfection of design that is expressed in gold, silver, and rare inlays. The delicate gold cups, the razors also of gold, golden blades honed to a highly efficient cutting edge, pottery vases of extraordinary refinement, these, added to the more familiar furniture including what must surely be one of the most elegant chairs ever designed, take the breath away.
The products of Egyptian craftsmen at this time ask only to be taken on their own account; it doubtless did occur to those who made them that they also had to please a patron, but that patron was one who shared the ideals and collective understanding of the society from which they came. A portrait of the patron survives, an elegant and handsome lady, seated, holding a life-giving lotus to her fine-boned nose, which, by the accident of slight damage to the surface on which she is portrayed inhaling the scent of a lotus-flower, has a most engaging, retrousse tilt.6
The supreme royal substance, in Egypt as elsewhere, was gold and the use of the metal became one of the most frequently encountered witnesses of the sumptuousness and splendour in the Old Kingdom, as in the case of Het-epheres’ funerary equipment. It is extraordinary how across the world this yellow metal, which is not in itself so excessively rare (as witness the vast extraction of it over the past five thousand years) has always been associated with kings; they have, it must be said, generally been in a better position to acquire it than most people. In Egypt not even silver, which was considerably rarer than gold, could displace the supreme status which gold occupied in the estimation of ancient peoples: a position which indeed it has never lost, despite the competition of rarer metals and more precious stones.
The advanced standards which even the earliest periods reveal of the Egyptians’ technical capabilities is to be found in their mastery of materials, of stone for example, the sculptors and carvers of vessels producing shapes which even today defy easy explanation. Similarly they were exceptionally skilled in the handling of metals, producing fine copper vessels as early as the Second Dynasty. The excavation of an Old Kingdom miners’ camp by French archaeologists at Wadi Dara, in the desert east of Dendera,7 demonstrates the organization involved in the process of extraction and reduction of copperbearing ores. Five copper reduction ovens were excavated which showed that they had been built on the mountainside and positioned to take advantage of the prevailing winds to provide the draught required to achieve the high temperatures necessary for copper reduction. It would require considerable skill also to control the temperatures which would need to be sustained.
Copper and gold, a sumptuous combination by any standards, encapsulate the epoch much more precisely than bronze: but more immediately still the high culture of the third millennium is represented by the rich funerary cults and the elaborate monuments associated with them. These seem to have been seized on by the creative energies of the peoples of the time, so representing a vast absorption of the wealth of the nations and the labour of uncounted hordes of workers.
World History
