For three weeks, a team of researchers reported day by day on their scientific expedition to Egypt with a series of articles published daily on the Sciences et Avenir website. . Here are the "Notebooks of Egypt"...
Inside a Theban tomb, Egypt.
It was a first:for three weeks, from November 19 to December 6, 2018, Philippe Walter, director of the Molecular and Structural Archeology Laboratory (LAMS) at Sorbonne University, in Paris, and Philippe Martinez, Egyptologist, told us at day by day their exploration of a necropolis of Theban tombs of officials of Ramses II exclusively for Sciences et Avenir . Every day, from the Valley of the Nobles, in Egypt, where important figures from the Pharaoh's entourage were buried, the two specialists reported on this scientific experiment like a field notebook (the list of episodes is to (re)discover in the box below).
Notebooks of Egypt, 1st episode:how did the painters of ancient Egypt work?
Notebooks from Egypt, 2nd episode:Discovering the funeral chapel of Nakhtamon.
Notebooks from Egypt, 3rd episode:The pigments of Egyptian painting.
Notebooks from Egypt, 4th episode:The modern documentation of painted walls.
Notebooks from Egypt, 5th episode:Rediscovering the monuments of eternity of Ramses II.
Notebooks from Egypt, 6th episode:Revealing pigments with light:the visible and the invisible.
Notebooks from Egypt, 7th episode:Experiencing research through images.
Notebooks of Egypt, 8th episode:Beginning of the study of the paintings of the tomb of Nebamon and Ipouky.
Notebooks from Egypt, 9th episode:A tomb shared by two artists under Amenhotep III.
Notebooks from Egypt, 10th episode:What the tomb of Amenouahsou, an artist from ancient Egypt, reveals.
Notebooks from Egypt, 11th episode:Strange uses that have been made of Egyptian mummies.
Notebooks from Egypt, 12th episode:"Why don't all the artists come here?"
Notebooks of Egypt, 13th episode:Why did the Egyptians draw the characters in profile?
Notebooks from Egypt, 14th episode:Observing craft practices in Egyptian tombs.
Notebooks from Egypt, 15th episode:About Egyptian perfumes.
Notebooks from Egypt, 16th episode:The colors of the Egyptian palette.
Notebooks of Egypt, 17th episode:The Egyptian language does not know a word to designate "art".
Notebooks of Egypt, 18th episode:The day of a scientific mission in Egypt.
Understanding how the painters of ancient Egypt worked The objective of their research program is to better understand how the painters of ancient Egypt worked.
Also find Philippe Walter and Philippe Martinez in The Scientific Method broadcast on December 20, 2018 on France Culture, a program hosted by Olivier Lascar, with Carole Chatelain, editor-in-chief of the monthly Sciences et Avenir.
Their method is not purely Egyptological, as it also aims to define the materiality of monuments and decorations through the application of a series of non-invasive techniques of chemical analysis and digitization, grouped together in a mobile laboratory. X-ray fluorescence, hyperspectral imaging, photogrammetry…
The images of the notebooks of Egypt
They explained how these miniaturized devices transported inside the tombs are changing the approach to research in Egyptology:composition of the pigments used thousands of years ago, symbolism of the paintings, understanding of artistic techniques, the way of depicting nature or religious scenes. This is the first time that we have studied, with the same methods of chemical analysis and 3D digitization, about fifteen funerary chapels of tombs dated from the New Kingdom (between the 16th and 11th centuries before our era).