"It's as if someone saw the original way the jackal was painted and said: 'It's too fat; make it thinner'. So the artist has made a kind of ancient Egyptian 'tippex' - also known as 'Wite-out' or 'Liquid Paper' - to fix it."
"On either side of the jackal's body and on the front of the thighs of the back legs, there are thick white lines. These white lines were painted deliberately over parts of the black body and back legs, changing the way the jackal appears."
"That suggests that the white pigment wasn't an original part of the illustration, but rather something added later to tidy up the scribe's error."
Researchers at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge discovered that Ancient Egyptians employed white pigment as a correction method on papyrus documents, predating modern white-out by millennia. The evidence comes from a Book of the Dead manuscript created for royal scribe Ramose in 1278 BC. Examination of a painted jackal figure revealed thick white stripes deliberately applied over the original black paint to make the animal appear thinner. Using infrared photography, researchers identified these corrections as intentional amendments made after the initial painting was completed. This discovery demonstrates that scribal errors and the need for corrections are not modern phenomena, but rather a persistent challenge throughout human history.
#ancient-egypt #papyrus-correction-techniques #archaeological-discovery #book-of-the-dead #conservation-analysis
Read at Mail Online
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