Per Mesut - for younger readers

A little while ago, when I was showing some slides of the relief carvings from Hatshepsut’s temple at Deir el-Bahri, one of my students suddenly said, “Oh, look, a ladder. I didn’t realise the Egyptians had such things.” What she had noticed was a short ladder at the entrance to one of the domed houses on stilts shown in the scenes of Hatshepsut’s expedition to the incense land of Punt (see below). Of course, strictly speaking, that ladder was not Egyptian, but it started a discussion about how things were done in the past and how we tend to overlook the obvious human solutions to everyday practical problems.

I remembered that ladders were mentioned in the Pyramid Texts as one explanation for how the dead king reached the sky to be united with the sun god Khepri.

The description, in Utterance 688, gives us a good idea of how ladders were made in ancient Egypt.

These four gods, friends of the King, the Sons of Horus, they tie the rope ladder for this King, they make firm the wooden ladder for this King, they cause the King to mount up to Khepri when he appears in the eastern horizon. The ladder’s timbers have been hewn … the lashings which are on it have been drawn tight with sinews … the rungs have been fastened to its sides with leather.

You only have to look at the size of some Egyptian monuments to realise that the builders must have had a way of reaching the upper parts of the walls, first when they were under construction and then when they were decorated with carvings or paintings. A commonly quoted explanation is that ramps made of compacted rubble, earth and mudbrick were built against the walls to allow building stone to be raised. Behind the First Pylon at Karnak you can still see the remains of a mudbrick ramp, like solid scaffolding, dating from about two thousand five hundred years ago (see below). But building ramps, which had to grow at the same time as the walls, took much time and effort, and a lot of material.

In some confined spaces, for example within the Hypostyle Hall at Karnak, there was not room to build ramps. It has been suggested that in such cases, the whole room was filled with sand and rubble, packed around the bases of the columns and up to the walls to create a complete false floor. As courses of stones were added to the walls and as the columns rose, further layers of packing material were introduced so that the builders were always working at ‘ground level’. Once the chamber was finished, all the packing material would have to be removed, being dug out by hand.

This may have been the only way to build on the scale of Karnak, and we must admire the skill of the builders who were able to keep the columns vertical despite their bases being hidden in the infill, but it was a very labourintensive way of working and was not appropriate for all types of building. The gigantic mudbrick enclosures from the earliest Dynasties at Abydos and Hierakonpolis were built nearly five thousand years ago. Although mud bricks do not weigh as much as stone, huge quantities were involved and to raise them up to the top of the walls, sometimes as high as fifteen metres, must have required ladders or more probably scaffolding since building a mudbrick ramp to build a mudbrick wall would seem to be a waste of effort.

Evidence for the existence of ladders and scaffolding is found in tomb paintings and temple reliefs from all periods.

An early example is shown here (see above) where soldiers, armed with axes, are climbing a ladder to get into a walled town.

In the Fifth Dynasty tomb of Inti at Deshasha, Egyptian soldiers are shown using a long ladder to scale the walls of a Palestinian fortress, and at the Ramesseum, two princes, sons of Rameses II, can be seen climbing a similar ladder in the attack on the fortified town of Daipur (see above). The scale of these pictures is all wrong. The attackers are much bigger than the soldiers defending the ramparts and it is impossible to judge the real height of the walls. When the Egyptians built their huge fortresses in Nubia, such as Semna and Buhen, the outer walls were at least twelve metres high with a ditch in front, which effectively doubled the total height to be scaled by any attacker. A wooden ladder of this length is practically impossible to make so the pictures are either simplified or exaggerated.

In the Eleventh Dynasty tomb of Antef at Thebes there is another battle scene where the Egyptians are using a siege tower, a mobile scaffolding, to lift them up to the level of the battlements. This is one of the few depictions of a wheeled vehicle from Egypt other than a chariot.

Scaffolding towers of this sort, with or without wheels, may have been employed by builders and were almost certainly used by artists decorating the walls, just as Michelangelo used such scaffolding when he painted the walls and ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome.

In the tomb of Rekhmira at Thebes you can see painted scenes of many craftsmen at work. One shows sculptors finishing off a colossal royal statue, which is surrounded by wooden scaffolding, enabling the workmen to reach the head and crown of the seated figure (see below left). A fragment of painted plaster in Berlin shows carpenters at work, sitting on the lashed-together beams of what must be scaffolding (see below).

In the largest tombs in the Valley of the Kings, such as those of Sety I and Rameses VI, the burial chambers have very high ceilings, which are covered with detailed paintings.

These often represent the sky full of divine figures but the simplest ceiling design is a deep blue night sky full of stars. However elaborate the decoration, the artists would all have had the same problem in reaching the surfaces they were employed to paint. Ladders and scaffolding were the obvious solutions, giving the craftsmen access to their painted skies, truly a ‘stairway to heaven’.

Further Reading The battle scenes showing siege engines and scaling ladders, and pictures of some of the fortresses, can be seen in Egyptian Warfare and Weapons by Ian Shaw, and in Fighting Pharaohs by Robert Partridge.

Illustrations: RP.

Hilary Wilson