323 BOEKBESPREKINGEN — FARAONISCH EGYPTE 324 KILLEN, G. — Ancient Egyptian Furniture. Volume I:
4000–1300 BC. (2nd edition). (Ancient Egyptian Furni- ture, 1). Oxbow Books, Oxford, 2017. (30 cm, XIV, 164). ISBN 978-1-7857-0481-9. £ 45.00.
KILLEN, G. — Ancient Egyptian Furniture. Volume II:
Boxes, Chests and Footstools. (2nd edition). (Ancient Egyptian Furniture, 2). Oxbow Books, Oxford, 2017.
(30 cm, XV, 143). ISBN 978-1-78570-485-7. £ 45.00.
KILLEN, G. — Ancient Egyptian Furniture. Volume III:
Ramesside Furniture. (Ancient Egyptian Furniture, 3), Oxbow Books, Oxford, 2017. (30 cm, XVI, 158). ISBN 978-1-78570-489-5. £ 45.00.
The book under review presents Geoffrey Killen’s third volume on Ancient Egyptian wooden furniture, now focusing exclusively on material dated to the Ramesside period.
Volume III is published alongside the revised second editions of volumes I and II.1 All three volumes are now presented in uniform layout and printed in quality binding hardcover.
The new cover design and text layout are certainly an improvement to volumes I and II. The contents of these volumes have not changed in any significant way: an opportunity missed to also update the revised second edition.
Archaeological research in the years following the publication of volumes I and II have yielded exciting new material for study. Yet some obvious examples of wooden furniture are neither included nor referred to. The mummy “bed” found in KV 63,2) for example, would have fitted well to supplement the material presented and discussed in Volume I, chapter 3:
Bedframes (pp. 33-57).
Volume III is divided into four chapters. The book starts with a List of Figures (vii-viii), List of Plates (ix-xii), Acknowledgements (xiii-xiv) and Abbreviations and Sigla (xv-xvi); and concludes with a section of endnotes (sorted by chapter, pp. 99-102), Appendices (pp. 103-44), Catalogue of (furniture in) Museum Collections (pp. 145-53) and Bibliography (pp. 155-8). The appendices list: A, Ramesside Furniture Types; B, Furniture Types Illustrated in Rames- side Theban Tombs; C, Furniture Types Illustrated in Ramesside Memphite Tombs; D, Distribution of Stool Types by Gender as Illustrated in Private Ramesside Theban Tombs; E, Distribution List of Replica Wooded Products Manufactured by the Author and Preserved in Museums and Private Collections. The book contains 39 illustrations (mainly technical drawings of furniture), 89 plates of b/w photographs and a separate section of colour photos supplementing Appendix E (pls. 81-9) and selected objects and tomb paintings.
Chapter 1: Deir el-Medina - A community of Entrepre- neurs? (pp. 1-29)
This chapter sketches the social context of the carpenters responsible for the production of (a selection of) furniture presented in this volume. The author focuses exclusively on the workmen’s community at Deir el-Medina. An
1) Killen, G.P. 1980. Ancient Egyptian Furniture, Volume I: 4000- 1300 BC. Warminster: Aris and Phillips; Killen, G.P. 1994. Ancient Egyp- tian Furniture, II: Boxed, Chests and Footstools. Warminster: Aris and Phillips.
2) Ertman, E.L. 2009. A unique “bed” with lion-headed terminals (KV 63 update). KMT 20/2: 44-7.
understandable point of departure, as this village produced a rich corpus of textual documents to illustrate the carpenters’
day-to-day businesses. This book does not, however, focus exclusively on furniture produced by this specific community.
Specimens found in the necropolises of Gurob and Memphis, and selected items from Nubia are also included. The structure of the respective workmen’s communities and their working conditions may not have been identical to those attached to the royal Theban necropolis. One may also note that workmen connected to Theban temples or palaces were employed to service a non-royal clientele (i.e. their superiors).3)
Killen introduces the workmen’s community at Deir el-Medina by referring to dated literature, incl. Černy 1973, A Community of Workmen at Thebes in the Ramesside Period, and Janssen 1975, Commodity Prices from the Ramesside Period. The two examples are still important reference works, but one would expect also references to more recent literature on the subject. The need for updated literature is perhaps most poignant when citing (on p. 34) the 1949 and 1954 publications of Emery, Great Tombs of the First Dynasty Vols. I and II, when referring to the “royal cenotaph tombs” at Saqqara.
Killen begins the chapter by introducing the textual evidence for carpenters and their business dealings. The main sources include textual and non-textual ostraca and texts on papyri. Killen also claims to support this chapter with artefacts excavated at Deir el-Medina and other Egyptian towns. However, the furniture items cited in this chapter were found in tomb-contexts.
Topics touched upon in the first section also include the internal market for furniture, private commissions, state employed carpenters, and workforce mobility.
In the section on ‘Official and Semi-official Carpenters’
(pp. 2-4), Killen discusses the ‘carpenters’ entrepreneurship’
while working under ‘patronage of the state.’4)
In the same section, Killen refers to O. Glasgow D. 1925.68, verso. He notes that carpenters can take two different roles: either as workmen working under the conditions of service determined by the state, and as carpenters. He claims that in this case there is no evidence as to whether the carpenters were paid for their work. It was undertaken during the time they were released from the gang (tꜢ ἰs.t), but worked as part of their state duties. Killen continues: ‘[n]aturally, this arrangement would not have been financially beneficial but may have acted as a good marketing tool for other private commissions’. Leaving aside the rather modern-day perceptions of financial gain and marketing (as on p. 27 when writing of “nepotism” in relation to O. Cairo 25800), one wonders why Killen does not dig further into the issue of private patronage. The example of Amenhotep Sise of TT 75 makes a strong case for high-level officials “borrowing” the artists (ḥmw.w) that were entrusted under their supervision for their own benefit.
In Amenhotep Sise’s case a painter was evidently released from his work in the temple of Amun to decorate the tomb
3) Hartwig, M. 2004. Tomb Painting and Identity in Ancient Thebes, 1419-1372 BCE, 22-36 Monumenta Aegyptiaca X. Turnhout.
4) On this topic, see also: Muhs, B.P. 2016. The Ancient Egyptian Econ- omy, 300-30 BCE, 137-40 (Private Entrepreneurial Activities). Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
325 BIBLIOTHECA ORIENTALIS LXXV N° 3-4, mei-augustus 2018 326 of his superior, the Second High Priest of Amun.5) Following
Cooney,6) Killen argues that the Informal Workshop must be seen as a semi-professional ‘state recognised organisation’
(without further defining “state” in this context) that was integral to the ability of the community to undertake private commissions.
— In the section on ‘Working Drawings and Sketches used by Carpenters’ (p. 4), Killen briefly discusses the so-called workmen’s “funny signs”, citing Haring in GM 178: 45-58. The reader may now be referred to:
Haring, B.J.J. 2018. From Single Sign to Pseudo-Script:
An Ancient Egyptian System of Workmen’s Identity Marks. Culture and History of the Ancient Near East 93.
Leiden: Brill.
— The section ‘Furniture Ostraca’ (pp. 4-26) would have fitted better at the end of the chapter. It now interrupts the narrative on the workmen’s community. Ten ostraca depicting assorted items of furniture are presented. To these can be added another eight ostraca that all date to the first half of the 20th Dynasty:7)
– Turin N. 57523: incl. chests, chair, table;
– Cairo SR 11303: incl. one item of furniture: stool with two handles (?);
– ONL 6670: incl. nine items of furniture, incl. chests, tables, chairs;
– ONL 6644: incl. chests, a chair (?);
– BTdK 352: incl. construction elements of furniture (?), the end of a bed (?), a stool, chests, decorated foots of a chair (?), a head rest decorated with a Bes- figure;
– BTdK 589: incl. chests, stools;
– BTdK 590: incl. beds, a stool, a chest (?);
– IFAO C 7586: incl. a bed, a table (?)
To return to the issue of the Informal Workshop, Soliman (2015: 367) argues that ‘[a] priori it is not certain if these ostraca are evidence of activities performed in the context of a semi-formal workshop. The ostraca are hardly informative (…).’
— On p. 28, in the section on ‘the marking of wooden funerary material, Killen mentions a boomerang. Unless a link can be established between the maker of this item and the Australian Aboriginals, the term throw-stick should be preferred.
— The author writes Egyptian personal names in translitera- tion followed by the English spelling in brackets, also
5) Laboury, D. 2015. On the Master Painter of the Tomb of Amenhotep Sise, Second High Priest of Amun under the Reign of Thutmose IV (TT 75). In Joyful in Thebes: Egyptological Studies in Honor of Betsy M. Bryan.
R. Jasnow and K.M. Cooney (eds), 327-37. Atlanta. For recent studies on the patronage system in Ancient Egypt, see e.g. Campagno, M. 2014.
Patronage and Other Logics of Social Organization in Ancient Egypt during the IIIrd Millennium BCE. Journal of Egyptian History 7: 1-33; Moreno Garcia, J.C. 2013. The “Other” Administration: Patronage System and Informal Networks of Power in Ancient Egypt. In Ancient Egyptian Admin- istration, 1029-1065. Handbuch der Orienalistik 104. Leiden.
6) Cooney, K.M. 2006. An Informal Workshop: Textual Evidence for Private Funerary Art Production in the Ramesside Period. In Living and Writing in Deir el-Medine. Socio-historical Embodiment of Deir el-Medine Texts. A. Dorn and T. Hofmann (eds), 43-55. Ægyptiaca Helvetica 19.
Basel.
7) See: Soliman, D. 2016. Of Marks and Men. The Functional and His- torical Context of the Workmen’s Marks of the Royal Theban Necropolis.
Unpublished PhD thesis, Leiden University. Section 4.3.3.3: ‘Depictions of furniture and other objects combined with marks’ (pp. 362-9). https://
openaccess.leidenuniv.nl/handle/ 1887/43078 (accessed on 06.02.2018).
when a name occurs for the second or third time. This is perhaps not very useful. One wonders why the author does not write titles of office in transliteration, e.g. Car- penter (ḥmw.w), which can also be translated as
‘Craftsman’ or ‘Artist’.
Chapter 2: An Analysis of Ramesside Furniture Used in Gurob and Memphis (pp. 31-42)
Chapter 2 focuses on Ramesside furniture produced out- side Thebes. Other than the title of this chapter suggests, the items of furniture are described rather than analysed. Two settlements in the north, Gurob and Memphis, are selected to provide an ‘insight into the range of wooden products that would have been used in a Ramesside town’ and provide
‘complementary evidence of the use of a single design canon used across Egypt when manufacturing furniture products’
(p. 31). However, the data presented by Killen derive pre- dominantly from the associated cemeteries.
On p. 31 Killen points to ‘close parallels between both settlements (i.e. Deir el-Medina and Gurob) by curiously arguing that ‘both have small temples which are similar in design, size and construction using both mud brick and rough-stone masonry and apparently date to the Ramesside Period.’ What do the temples tell us about the fundamental similarities between the two communities of workmen – in particular as far as carpentry is concerned?
The picture painted of the “harem” is somewhat biased.
Killen claims that the women of the harem carried on indus- tries such as weaving and that ‘[t]he surviving archaeological record shows that the types of wooden products excavated at Gurob indicate that the women of the town were indeed engaged in the manufacture of fine linen (…).’ Did the weav- ing centres connected to institutions of the ‘royal harem’ (ἰp.t nsw.t) employ women only? And how does the archaeologi- cal record reflect the gender-based division of labour?
In the short section on Memphis (pp. 34-6), carpentry workshops are discussed based on two representations in fragments of relief decoration. The way in which one of the scenes is reproduced is far from ideal. The scene on relief AP 40 in the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden is rather carelessly drawn based on a line drawing taken from Martin’s 1987 Corpus of Reliefs of the New Kingdom (pl. 25).
As a result, many of the details depicted, such as the tools used by the carpenters, are unrecognizable or have disap- peared altogether. A photograph or reproduction of the origi- nal line drawing should have been preferred. On a sidenote:
on stylistic grounds this relief can be dated to the late 18th Dynasty (not early Ramesside).
Chapter 3 Ramesside Furniture Forms (pp. 43-85) This chapter enumerates (all known?) Ramesside furniture forms. Each form is briefly introduced based on a survey of pictorial evidence, followed by descriptions of items held in museum collections studied by the author. The layout of this chapter is a bit confusing. Headings are variously printed in bold and bold italics, and it is often unclear which sub-head- ing belongs to which main heading, confusing furniture types, sub-types and examples of furniture items. The use of numbered headings would have solved the problem.
In this chapter Killen introduces his typology of Rames- side furniture: a typology built from representations in tomb wall paintings, reliefs, stelae and blocks (Appendix A). The types are here presented as a given: the author does not
327 BOEKBESPREKINGEN — GRIEKS-ROMEINS EGYPTE 328 explain the methodology he used to construct his typology.8)
This gives it the character of a haphazardly composed list of furniture forms. Use of classifiers is not always consistent either, e.g. in the use of ‘leonine’ and ‘feline’ when describ- ing chair leg forms; and folding stools fashioned with bird legs and those with animal legs (are bird not animals?).
Unlike the chairs and stools, the bedframes are not sorted according to form but (supposed) use: birth and women’s bedframes. The typology is neither relational nor chronologi- cal. Also the context (scene subject) in which the furniture items occur is not indicated. This all weakens its research potential and limits the possible application by other scholars.
In appendices B and C, Killen lists tombs with scenes that include furniture, indicated with type code. With only four tombs, the Memphite list is very short. Only the ‘recently’
excavated and still extant tombs of Iurudef, Khay, Pabes and Tia are on the list. This list could have been much longer if Killen had also surveyed the many blocks of Memphite tombs now held in worldwide museum collections. These may have yielded additional furniture types. Take for exam- ple the scene depicting a workshop in the (lost) tomb of Ky- iri, an early 19th Dynasty Chief Overseer of Craftsmen.9) The scene shows stools used by the workmen at work. As a start, Martin’s 1987 Corpus (indeed consulted by Killen) already provides some examples of scenes depicting furniture.
The furniture types discussed in this chapter are:
— Chairs (leonine forms)
— Stools (round legged stools; folding stools; folding stools fashioned with bird legs; folding stools fashioned with animal legs; lattice stools; three-legged stools; animal leg stools; shaped leg stools)
— Bedframes
— Boxes
— Tables, Stands, Offering tables, and Gaming tables
— In the section on bedframes (pp. 52-3), Killen refers to the two bed legs carved in the form of the god Bes held in the collection of the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden (F 1964/1.4 and F 1964/1.3.10) These are actu- ally part of a collection of four (originally six): BIE 45 (1963-1964), pls. 14-5 (Collection Michailidis). One bed leg is now in the California Museum of Ancient Art, Bev- erley Hills, loan no. CMAA027-E0007L); the other is in Leiden, inv. no. F 2011/2.1.11)
Chapter 4: Royal and Temple Furniture
In the final chapter Killen discusses selected representa- tions of assorted royal furniture depicted on temple walls and royal tombs. The kings selected include Ramesses II, III and VI. This brief survey is followed by one page dealing with temple furniture, more specifically offering tables from
8) As in the tradition of e.g. Adams, W.Y. and Adams E.W. 1991.
Archaeological Typology and Practical Reality: A Dialectical Approach to Artifact Classification and Sorting. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
9) Grajetzki, W. 2001-2. Das Grab des KII-IRI in Saqqara. JEOL 37:
111-25, fig. on p. 115; Quibell, J.E. 1912. Excavations at Saqqara (1908-9, 1909-10): The Monastery of Apa Jeremias, pl. 75.5. Cairo.
10) In the revised second edition of volume I (p. 164), these two legs are erroneously dated in the Roman period.
11) Raven, M.J. 2013. De dwerg onder het bed (oration, Leiden University).
Abydos and Beit el-Wali, further illustrated with the open- work panel from an actual offering table.
As a reviewer, one should not evaluate a publication for what it claims not to be. In that respect the question of how to evaluate the book under review is a difficult one. It is not clear to me what the author wishes to achieve or what audi- ence he has in mind. The book starts without a proper intro- duction in which the author could explain his motivations, aims, scope, layout, etc. It is also not clear what the selection of items included in this book was based on (assuming that these are not all known Ramesside furniture items). The four chapters are not neatly tied together and the order is random (why, for example, does Chapter 3, Ramesside Furniture Forms, precede Chapter 4, Royal and Temple Furniture?).
The problems with the typology (Appendix A) have already been commented on above. The reader is also left wondering about the purpose of the colour plates showing replicas of furniture items made by the author (some items, such as the replica coffin section, coffin parts and kohl pot are not the subject of this book and are nowhere referred to). On the back cover of the book Killen is introduced as someone who
‘has also led in the field of experimental archaeology where making and using replica woodworking tools and equipment has generated and tested archaeological hypotheses.’ A sec- tion describing the processes involved in making these rep- licas, and the insights thereby gained to undeerstand ancient methods and techniques, would have been welcome given the author’s expertise. This now feels like a missed opportunity.
To conclude the review on a positive note: the descrip- tions of the furniture items are clear, thorough and insightful.
To a non-specialist in Egyptian carpentry and furniture, the book is very well accessible. The book can be qualified as useful if we consider it as a reference work for New King- dom furniture. Especially Chapter 3 will be of interest to the scholar of Egyptian art and archaeology.
Leiden University12), Nico staRing
February 2018
12) Leiden University Institute for Area Studies, NWO Talent Scheme Veni research project The Walking Dead at Saqqara: The Making of a Cultural Geography, project no. 276-30-016.
