What Outdoor Recreation Looked Like in Ancient Egypt

Sometime in 1820, a Greco-Syrian merchant, diplomat and antiquities hunter named Giovanni Anastasi brought workmen with crowbars to a secret site in the desert opposite the ancient Egyptian city of Thebes (Waset), within the boundaries of present-day Luxor. There, he had them pry sections of thick plaster from the walls of an ancient tomb chapel carved into the limestone hills during the 18th Dynasty, before 1350 B.C.

Anastasi then sold the 11 plaster fragments, containing portions of eight painted scenes, to the British consul general, Henry Salt, who included them in an antiquities collection he eventually unloaded at a loss to the British Museum for what he called the “miserable sum” of £2,000.

Today, those sheets of plaster, which have been displayed nearly continuously in the museum since 1835, are considered one of the high points of Egyptian artistic history, capturing ancient Egyptian views of life and the afterlife in vivid detail.

The frescoes Anastasi removed and sold came from the tomb of Nebamun, “the scribe and grain accountant of Amun,” who held an administrative position at the nearby Temple of Amun in the Karnak temple complex. Not quite royalty, Nebamun appears to have been a prosperous middle manager. The scenes in his tomb chapel—designed to be appreciated by visitors to his grave—show the life, and desired afterlife, of an influential and successful man who also knew how to have a good time.

The surviving frescoes depict Nebamun assessing crops, inspecting geese and cattle (and the employees who tended them) and enjoying a high-class banquet with his peers, replete with sumptuous food and dancing girls. But the standout scene shows Nebamun and his wife and daughter interacting with the natural world as only a wealthy Egyptian could: dressed to the nines and hunting waterfowl in the lotus marshes along the Nile, “enjoying himself and seeing beauty,” according to the hieroglyphic caption.

The fresco’s composition teems with wildlife in the air, on the ground and underwater. The black-wigged Nebamun dominates the scene, a snake-headed throwing stick in one hand, a trio of decoy herons in the other. A half-dozen types of waterfowl are shown in various stages of flight, while fish swim below the family’s boat.

Nebamun’s wife Hatshepsut (not to be confused with the earlier female pharaoh of the same name) stands behind, holding a fan of lotus flowers. Their daughter kneels beneath, grabbing her father’s leg as she pulls more lotuses out of the water. The butterflies that flit about are painted with enough detail to identify the species (Danaus chrysippus). The star of the show, though, might well be the family’s tawny cat, captured mid-leap with its teeth and claws on no fewer than three different birds.

The painting depicts skillfully rendered natural details that have caught eyes for centuries, but recent findings underscore the deeper symbolic interpretations of the scene. During a careful restoration of the frescoes in the early 2000s, archivists discovered fragments of gold leaf in the cat’s eyes, the only known example of gilding in Theban tomb chapel paintings. This suggests the cat might represent a family pet while also alluding to the sun-god Amun hunting the enemies of light.

The fragments from Nebamun’s tomb also bear witness to a seismic Egyptian cultural change that occurred not long after it was built, when Pharaoh Akhenaten (the husband of Nefertiti and likely father of Tutankhamun) abandoned traditional Egyptian religion for the monotheistic worship of Aten. References to gods like Amun—including the second half of Nebamun’s name—were chiseled out of the tomb’s inscriptions.

Nearly all of what we know about Nebamun’s life and afterlife comes from the hieroglyphic captions attached to the frescos. No other conclusive references to Nebamun the chief accountant have been found—Nebamun being a common name. And Giovanni Anastasi took the secret of the tomb’s exact location to his own grave in 1860.