The ancient Egyptians used an early version of correction fluid to fix errors on artworks and documents, researchers have found. The news was first reported by the Times of London.
While readying a 3,300-year-old papyrus for the exhibition “Made in Ancient Egypt” at the Fitzwilliam Museum in England, museum staff noticed that a painted figure of a jackal had been altered to make it appear slimmer.
The jackal is part of a scene from a copy of the Book of the Dead—a scroll made to guide the deceased through the underworld—prepared for the tomb of the royal scribe Ramose. In the vignette, Ramose walks alongside the jackal, which likely symbolizes the jackal-headed god Wepwawet, a pathfinder for armies and guardian of the dead.
White lines can be seen along the top and bottom of the jackal’s body and down the fronts of its hind legs. “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 [Wite-Out] . . . to fix it,” said Helen Strudwick, senior Egyptologist at the museum and curator of the exhibition, in a statement.
“We have been using different analytical techniques to work out what this white paint is made of,” said Strudwick. “The results indicate that it is a mixture of [the minerals] huntite and calcite. Images made using a 3D digital microscope show there also are flecks of orpiment [a yellow pigment], probably to make it blend in better with the fresh papyrus, which would have originally been pale cream.”
Strudwick stated that she has since seen the same technique used on other Egyptian documents, including the Book of the Dead of Nakht in the British Museum and the Yuya papyrus at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. “When I’ve pointed it out to curators, they’ve been astonished,” she said. “It’s the kind of thing you don’t notice at first.”
The Book of the Dead of Ramose was discovered in 1922 in Sedment, Egypt. Sections of the scroll will be on view in “Made in Ancient Egypt,” on view at the Fitzwilliam Museum through April 12.
