Nebamun
The results are wonderful and the colours have retained their brilliance.
Once the tomb's stone walls had been erected, they were covered in straw and Nile mud mixed together into a squishy paste. Then, when this was dry, a thin layer of white plaster was added. As that started to dry, the artist and his team began to paint, using soot ochres for the reds, yellows and whites, and ground glass for blue and green. The painters would have worked by oillamp quickly before the plaster dried.
The tomb's exact location is a mystery, they were looted by a Greek grave robber Giovanni d'Athanasi known as Yanni somewhere in Thebes (Luxor) c1810. He was paid by the nefarious British consul in Egypt, Henry Salt. He argued with curators over his finder's fee and took his secret to the grave, dying a pauper a few minutes' walk from here.
A new gallery in the British Museum displays tomb paintings of Nebamun, a court official who lived almost 3,500 years ago, the greatest surviving paintings from ancient Egypt.
Gauguin took a postcard of the banqueting scene to Tahiti, but the best known shows Nebamun hunting in a marsh full of life. It was a happy afterlife he could look forward to - we have lost that.
Nebamun was a minor civil servant, a grain controller auditing the wheat stores in the temple of Amun; yet his art has become famous over the years.
The burial chamber with its paintings was sealed for eternity, but these painted walls are from rooms that the family would have visited to worship their ancestor’s memory; much later the grave robbers used crowbars to remove panels from a wall, you can see signs of the vandalism and resultant cracking.
