The Painted Tomb-Chapel of Nebamun

Description

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’.