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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2018

To the understanding of the complex manufacturing of Egyptian yellow coffins by non-invasive techniques

Résumé

The 21st Egyptian Dynasty marks a big change in funeral practices. Decorations are not anymore on walls, but on the coffin itself which acts as an entire grave. Egyptian Yellow Coffins, reserved to priests and priestesses of the Amon temple, are characteristics to this period and are only found in the Theban area. A multispectral and multiscale methodological protocol have been developed at the Centre de Recherche et de Restauration des Musées de France in the way to analyzed the painting materials used for this particular Egyptian production. A dozen of funerary sets, complete or not, of Yellow Coffins from the Egyptian Antiquity Department of the Louvre Museum, have been studied and permit to highlight a global scheme of the painting protocol. The goal of this study, which is taking part of the Vatican Coffin Project, is to get material identification to determine manufacturing process, and to try in fine to identify specific workshops. First results show that the painting protocol is more complex than we thought and actually can depend on the part of the coffin studied. The classic painting scheme includes a Muna layer on the wood support, a beige preparation layer, a white preparation layer which will receive the polychromy, comprising the yellow background, the red underdrawings and the painting layers; the final part is the varnishing of the object. Generally, variations of this scheme is about thickness of layers and materials used. It have also been noticed that differences of background treatment appear between the inner and the outer part of the case and also the higher and lower part of mummy boards and lids. Those variations can be attributed to workshops, fad or maybe temporal evolutions. But, one of the more complex part is the understanding of the painting protocol put in place for the inner part of external coffins. The corpus comprise only two, and both revealed a very particular stratigraphy. The first one, which is an entire coffin have been sampled and results showed the presence of yellow background applied around motives (so after the underdrawings and letting white areas in reserve), a local double layer of white preparation and orpiment (yellow arsenic sulphide) in suspension in the varnish layer. Because of the object geometry, it is currently not possible to proceed to non-invasive techniques on the inner part of coffins. However, the study of a decorated fragment from the Louvre collection, attributed to the inner bottom of an external yellow coffin, permits to go beyond this geometry problem by its plane surface. This case of study enabled us to perform XRF-mapping, which is not possible on a complete coffin. This technique allows with computer-generated images the spatial distribution (x,y) of the different elements (As, Cu, Ca etc.), assigned to the corresponding pigments, easily identifiable. Those data are compared to the UV and VIL imaging, which respectively provide spatial distribution (x,y) of the varnish and of the Egyptian Blue. VIL imaging also discriminate the position of blue beside of green, because both are copper pigments. Those analysis give us precious answers at a more representative scale, and confirm the complex protocol used in this particular part of the funerary set, showing that the As distribution (orpiment – As2S3) does not match with the yellow background or neither the varnish application. Rutherford Backscattering Spectroscopy (RBS) tests have been done with AGLAE (Accélérateur Grand Louvre d’Analyse Elémentaire) on the panel and will be done on experiment samples which mimic the stratigraphy encountered. The RBS development methodology, never used with this kind of materials and problematic wants to determinate, in also a non-invasive way, the real position (z) of the arsenic in the stratigraphy, and understand this complex implementation. But for this purpose, it is necessary to corroborate non-invasive results with sample ones, the multiscale vision is essential.
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Dates et versions

hal-01715474 , version 1 (22-02-2018)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : hal-01715474 , version 1

Citer

Lucile Brunel-Duverger, Sandrine Pagès-Camagna, Nancy Brodie-Linder, Hélène Guichard, Patricia Rigault-Déon, et al.. To the understanding of the complex manufacturing of Egyptian yellow coffins by non-invasive techniques. InArt, Mar 2018, Parma, Italy. ⟨hal-01715474⟩
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