Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead Contains 3,000-Year-Old Wite-Out

Even ancient dogs aren’t safe from a little Photoshop, and Egyptologists at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, UK, have discovered that an illustration of a jackal appears to have been altered to appear slimmer.

The correction appears in a 3,000-year-old Book of the Dead belonging to a high official named Ramose, who lived during the New Kingdom in the 13th century BCE and worked as a senior royal scribe. According to the Fitzwilliam Museum, the funerary text contained spells and instructions intended to help Ramose pass safely into the afterlife.

While preparing the manuscript for a new exhibition, Helen Strudwick, curator of the Made in Ancient Egypt exhibition and senior Egyptologist at the Fitzwilliam Museum, discovered some unusual markings. A little research suggests that the white pigment could be the ancient Egyptian version of modern Tipp-Ex or Wite-Out.

Learn more: Discovery of a 52-foot-long ancient Egyptian papyrus

Ancient Egypt

The modification appears on a decorative vignette – or illustration – linked to spell 117, which depicts Ramose in a long white robe alongside a jackal-headed god believed to be Wepwawet.

The dog, painted black, is represented with two white pigmented bands, one on each side of its body. Recent examinations show that the pigment may have been added to make the jackal thinner.

“I think the original way it was painted was consistent with the depiction of a domestic dog, rather than a jackal, which is a desert scavenger and often rather skinny,” Strudwick said. Discover.

Infrared photography allowed the team to peel back the layers of the papyrus to see what was beneath the pigment. The images show white paint covering part of the jackal’s body.

“It’s as if someone saw the original way the jackal was painted and said, ‘he’s too fat, make him thinner,’ so the artist created a sort of ancient Egyptian ‘tippex’ – also known as ‘Wite-out’ or ‘Liquid Paper’ – to fix it,” Strudwick said in a press release.

The team determined the composition of the pigment and discovered that it was a combination of huntite and calcite. On the other hand, the white paint used for Ramose’s dress contains only huntite.

The addition of calcite would have thickened the paste, perhaps making it easier to cover the jackal’s black pigment.

The mixture also contains flecks of yellow orpiment, an arsenic mineral used as a pigment in the ancient world. According to Strudwick, this would have allowed the pigment to blend into the papyrus, which would have been a pale cream color at the time.

Strudwick explains that it is not yet possible to say when the changes took place.

“It could be that there was a verification process by a master scribe or artist before a papyrus like this was passed to the person who commissioned it, or it could be that Ramose himself (who was a senior royal scribe) looked at it and said it needed to be altered. But that’s just speculation,” she said. Discover.

Stephen Quirke, professor of Egyptian archeology at University College London, UK, said the use of white paint as a setting device was “very intriguing”.

“The Ramose papyrus is a remarkable survival,” said Quirke, who was not involved in the discovery. Discover. “There are numerous Book of the Dead papyri dating from the New Kingdom period, but relatively few survive from the burials of high officials, and few have been found outside the cemeteries of the major royal cities, Thebes and Memphis. »

Quirke explained that the papyrus came from a cemetery near Henennesut (present-day Ihnasya), a strategic regional town.

Learn more: Depictions of the sky goddess show that the ancient Egyptians knew about the Milky Way

Other Examples of “Wite-Out” in Ancient Egypt

Ramose’s Book of the Dead may not be the only example of an ancient “tippex” being used to correct an error. Strudwick encountered other examples. This includes the Nakht Book of the Dead, which features white pigment next to the face of the god Osiris and the goddess behind him. In the Yuya papyrus, a ba bird (a bird with a human head) is depicted with a white stripe along its back.

“When I pointed them out to conservatives, they were amazed,” Strudwick said in a press release.

Article sources

Our Discovermagazine.com editors use peer-reviewed research and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review the articles for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. See the sources used below for this article: