At the Origin of Artists’ Self-Representations: The Old Kingdom Art Producers

Since the Predynastic period, royalty and elites commissioned artworks that sustained their claim to power. At first, these objects were eponymous only (to quote Jan Assmann), i.e., bearing the name of their dedicators/commissioners. As the first Old Kingdom dynasties passed and after centuries of art being restricted to elite self-display, the producers of these artefacts were finally given the opportunity to add their named representations to elite tombs’ walls and, progressively, to commission their own commemorative objects. The corpus of their depictions is two-fold: artisans could appear in workshop scenes depicted on private tomb walls or on funerary objects they owned. This paper will gather knowledge on the social status of Old Kingdom artisans and artists using their 147 named representations and 61 workshop scenes (respectively out of 744 and 130 attestations recorded for Pharaonic Egypt) as potent vehicles of their social identities. Who could be represented? Where and when? How can we explain artists-artisans’ sudden appearance in the visual documentation of the period? This paper offers some thoughts on the matter by looking more closely at the occurrences of sculptors of statues (and marginally of stelae) who were arguably key to the social rise of Old Kingdom Egyptian craftspeople.