ABSTRACT
Re-creating the ancient Egyptian landscape is quite difficult: ancient Egypt may have looked very much like rural Egypt today or as it does in the ‘orientalist’ paintings of the nineteenth century, but that is difficult to prove. There are very few ‘landscape scenes’ in tombs or temples, and the depictions of agricultural life and the desert are schematic and dictated by the function of the scene. The annual deposits of silt and the constant cultivation of the land conceal from us many ancient features, such as irrigation canals, dykes and small settlements.
