(…) The silhouettes on the walls are painted in yellow-ochre on a white background, while the use of black and red identify restricted representations, internal details of figures and objects and the delimitation of hieroglyphic inscriptions... [Bernard Bruyère, 1952]

The necropolis above Deir el-Medina is a three-dimensional labyrinth of tombs entangled to each other. In this village enclosed by a wall resided for life the highly qualified craftsmen authors of the objects and decorations of the royal tombs of Thebes. Each tomb was organized like a scale model of a royal tomb with an entrance followed by a staircase and two small rooms - one for meditation and the other for the sarcophagus.

Specifically in the monochrome TT219 Nebenmaat and TT335 Nakhtamon _⁽¹⁾ tombs, I was struck by the great mastery and balance of the whole, the economy of means and the reliability of the patterns and the line, painted in one action usually without retouching. This makes the work more alive, more present, and somehow more understandable for our educated eye to contemporary art than that of the royal tombs. 

The principle which is present in these tombs of partitioned drawings enclosing a balanced set of figures and signs painted with a free hand can be found in a certain way a few millennia later in several pictorial movements of the XXth century, in particular the expressionist movement (Die Brücke, Berlin, 1910-1920) and neo-expressionist movement (A.R. Penk, Germany, Jean-Michel Basquiat, NYC, 1970-1980).

TT1 Sennedjem tomb is a polychrome on a strong yellow ochre base - the solar light -, achieved with six fundamental colors: white chalk, black soot, red and yellow ochre, lapis lazuli and turquoise blue. One hypothesis is that the craftsmen who worked on this tomb could be the same as those who worked on the tomb of Queen Nefertari.

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⁽¹⁾ TT335 tomb of the sculptor Nakhtamon was discovered in 1925 by the renowned French archaeologist Bernard Bruyère