The Legacy Of Egypt

96 Egyptian Art
of the workmen, their homely jokes and even the catchwords oi
the period. The wonder of the modern spectator is increased
when he realizes that these scenes were first traced by draughts-
men, and then completed by engravers, all of them artists oi
incomparable skill, which they owed to their training in tradi-
tional methods.
§ vi. The Common Folk
We can perhaps reconstruct, in a roughly chronological
sequence, the evolution which, starting from the human sacri-
fice of the slaves at their lord's funeral, developed into the
making of groups of tiny figures representing the 'household'
of the dead man, to give him their service and company in the
next world.
The burial-places of the Heracleopolitan period and of the early
Middle Kingdom have given us, in this respect, an almost in-
credible profusion of evidence, in the shape of what are known
as 'models' (Fig. 6). Thus we find a house, or rather its front
part, that is to say, the garden and the colonnade which form
the entrance to the reception-rooms. Then there are scenes oi
various occupations—storehouses with their staffs of clerks,
butchers, bakers, and brewers at work, furniture-makers, and
weavers engaged on their tasks. Occasionally we find the mode]
of a vineyard, or scenes of entertainment. But in most cases the
principal subject represented is the boat, and these models
have given us valuable material for the reconstruction of ancient
boat-building technique. There are the boats used in funeral
processions, for conveying the mummy or the ritual statue, and
boats for travel on the Nile, of two distinct types, the noble-
man's dahabiyah and the barge for the servants with the cooking
utensils. One example has been found of a skiff designed foi
fishing and trap-laying, and we have models also of light craft,
made of papyrus, manned by fishermen with drag-nets. In
every case the boats found in the tombs were correctly orientated