Representation and Reality in Private Tombs of the Late Eighteenth Dynasty, Egypt

The meaning of an image from the past is in the eye of the beholder, one individual situated in a particular time and place gazing at the work of another. But meaning, however various and relative, emerges through the physical act of perception within the material environment of the artwork. Using images depicting social situations in paintings from the tombs of high status commoners of the Egyptian eighteenth dynasty, I will briefly examine how meaning takes shape, through the eyes and hands of the artists, and suggest ways that the material and social aspects of representations may be analysed, using quantitative and qualitative methods, to gain information about the society that made them.