The accompanying volume to a 1999 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (the exhibit also appeared in Toronto and Paris, but presumably they got their own books). Egyptian exhibit catalogs are something of a mixed bag; this one is pretty good. Interestingly enough, author and eminent Egyptologists Dorothea Arnold mostly eschews the usual background information – there’s a short introduction to the Old Kingdom, but Arnold realizes interested parties are probably better served by a full-fledged history – and concentrates on the artworks.

I’ve seen most of these before in pictures and museums, but Arnold definitely adds to my understanding. The classic Old Kingdom pair portrait statue has the man on the viewer’s left, and the woman on the right. The man almost always has his left foot advanced; his wife usually has her feet parallel; in the example here she gets to have her left foot a little forward too – a mark of particular respect or maybe just personal taste of the sculptor. A mystery – what’s the guy holding in his clenched fists? Almost every Old Kingdom male statue (and now and then a woman) is shown holding a cylindrical object, but nobody has a clue what they are. Rolls of papyrus? Hand grenades? Nobody knows.

For me, the most impressive object in the catalog was a stone bowl. This thing isn’t ceramic – it’s stone (diorite according to the catalog; I might dispute that based on technical composition – based on the picture it’s got a lot of some light-colored mineral and might this be quartz diorite or tonalite or granodiorite, but diorite is good enough for an art exhibit).

Now then, diorite – regardless of compositional details – is very hard. So, assuming it’s 2500 BCE or so and all you have is copper and sand, how do you go about making this thing? (I haven’t been able to find a picture with a scale, but it doesn’t matter too much). My best guess is brace the thing in position and use a copper tube drill with sand as the cutting agent to hollow out the center, then turn the thing on its side and use tube drills again to undercut the rim (note that if the thing was square or hexagonal, you could run the tube drill in one side and out the other – but because it’s pentagonal you have to stop before getting to the opposite side), then grind away the bumps. We know the Egyptians had tube drills, and used them to hollow things out, since there are lots of cases where the tool marks were not completely polished out and a few cases when the tube drill was left hopelessly jammed in the work piece. I note that making a hollow copper tube sufficiently strong to use as a drill is also a pretty interesting task with 2500 BCE technology. The original is in the Phoebe Hearst Museum in Berkeley; I’ll have to check it out if I ever get that way.

Pretty pictures of statues, wall reliefs, and miscellaneous art in a nice coffee table format. Got it cheap from the remainder bin. ( )

This lovely book is the catalogue of an exhibit on Old Kingdom Egypt held at the Metropolitan Museum Of Art. It's lovely: gorgeously printed full-color illustrations on high-quality glossy paper and an amazingly concise yet detailed text on the time period, its rules, its culture, and how all of the above relates to the exhibit pieces with meticulously detailed descriptions of what makes said pieces both unique to and representative of their time period. This is the rare artbook that not only describes its subjects but also explains what to look for, why it is significant, and how the individual pieces relate to one another. The captions list only the names of the exhibit pieces and their respective institutions, with such details as materials and provenance noted in a special appendix: an unusual touch which goes a long way towards tidying up the main text.