Ancient Egypt has bequeathed us an enormous testimony to the skill and genius of its artists -- draughtsmen, painters, relief-carvers and sculptors. The coming pages testify to their creations, but here we shall focus on the men themselves, their working techniques and conditions, and the place they occupied in society.

    It must be stressed at the outset that in their working tools, technical procedures and way of life the artists of ancient Egypt did not greatly differ from the artisans. Woodcarvers shared the tools and techniques of carpenters and joiners, sculptors in stone drew on the skills of stone masons and stone vessel makers, artists who worked with metal learned from the experience of metal-beaters. We often see an artist at work in the craftshop specializing in his chosen medium.

    The work of the draughtsman and the painter, on the other hand, had a close affinity to that of the scribe.

    Works of art, again, did not spring from the hands of single individuals; they were invariably the product of collective effort by a number of men. The contribution of one artist linked up with that of another, a painting or a relief being based on another man's drawing while a sculpture was passed on to the painters to be colored. It is only for descriptive convenience, then, that we shall be dealing with the various specialisations in terms of present-day classification.

    We may well start with the sculptors, as it is they whose working methods are most fully documented. In most cases we are shown a sculptor standing in front of a finished work, normally a life-size male or female figure, standing or seated, less often the lying figure of an animal. Whatever the medium, any such figure is regularly referred to in captions as tut. Often we are shown several figures being sculpted side by side in the same workshop; in the 5th-dynasty tomb of Ty at Saqqara, for instance, there are eight in various stages of completion.

    The early stages, by contrast, are seldom depicted. There is one example in the f 12th-dynasty tomb of Khnumhotep at Beni Hasan where a sculptor is hacking stone from a block with his long-handled axe to approximate the shape of a statue. And in Ty's tomb we see two men chipping at the surface of an emerging statue with oval stone hammerheads wedged into forked wooden shafts.

    Sometimes a monumental stone statue would be roughly shaped even while being quarried, like that of Osiris that still lies in the granite quarry where it originated, near Shellal south of Aswan. The finer work on a sculpture was done with chisel and mallet, the latter club-shaped during the Old Kingdom and subsequently either club-shaped or round-headed. This method made it easier to determine the force of a blow and, by adjusting the angle of the chisel, to alter the thickness of the flakes removed. To achieve a smooth finish the sculptor used an adze, familiar from our description of woodworking, followed by grinding and polishing with the oval stone or with silicate powder, leather and water. The work would then be passed to the painters for polychrome treatment.

    It is difficult from extant illustrations to determine the kind of material being used in any given scene. Only occasionally is there a dappled texture indicating granite. Sometimes we can draw conclusions from the juxtaposition of other scenes. Sculptors shown alongside stone vessel makers were probably using stone too, and the linkage is reinforced by the general predominance of stone statues in archaeological finds. Again, the use of carpenters' and joiners' tools will suggest that a soft stone such as limestone was being employed. And this is consistent with the prevalence of limestone, as against the harder granite, diorite, breccia etc., in statues occurring in tombs and temples. If, however, we are shown sculptors actually working alongside the carpenters and joiners themselves, we can infer that it was wood they were working in. True, far fewer wood than stone statues have been excavated, but this may simply be because a much higher proportion have succumbed to the ravages of time. Only rarely have metal statues been found. The figure of King Pepy I exhibited in the Egyptian Museum, Cairo, is made of copper plates beaten and riveted together and was made in a metal-beater's shop. Not till the New Kingdom do we find depictions of bronze figures being made.

    There are Old and Middle Kingdom reliefs showing statues of commoners being made - the owners of the tombs and their families - but none showing a statue of royalty. In the New Kingdom, by contrast, the bulk of sculpture work shifted to temple studios where numerous figures of kings were turned out both for the temples themselves and for royal tombs.

    It was the sculptor's aim in ancient Egypt to reproduce the subject's appearance as faithfully as possible. He did not however have in mind a portrait in the modern sense, exhibiting a particular person at a particular moment in his life, but the presentation of salient features at an ideal age, usually in youth or in full maturity.