Reception and Survival of Antiquity

**29**

storage [1, 2].

**Chapter 3**

*André Patrício*

**Abstract**

**1. Introduction**

The Immutability of the Core

Construction of a Chair: The

Egypt to Contemporaneity

structures built three and a half millennia later, in our current days.

**Keywords:** ancient Egypt, chair, *Hetepheres*, *Tutankhamun*, contemporaneity

Each civilization follows a path according to its own rhythm. This evolution may be defined by the choice of its main location, internal and external political situation, growth and economic prosperity but mainly the internal cultural differentiation. The appearance of an artistic mind is paramount to allow a growth from the satisfaction of basic needs to allow the emergence of more complex ones, a phenomenon that in ancient Egypt, seems to have happened in the so-called elite in a very early moment in time but not as evident in the majority of the population [1]. Based on what is now know of ancient Egyptian practices and customs of daily life, mainly known through iconography and what reached our moment in time, although rough pieces of furniture seem to be transversal to the civilization, most of the Egyptians did sit or squat and slept on the floors [1]. In our days, such behavior would be considered very disconformable on a day to day living basis. In Egypt, some of those who lived in poorer conditions did have some basic stools, chests or baskets, used primarily for minimal comfort, food conservation or simple

Building Techniques from Ancient

Since the discovery of the now well-known and preserved examples of furniture found in several *per-djet* of ancient Egypt's Old Kingdom (c. 2686–2160 BCE) and New Kingdom (c. 1550–1069 BCE) it was possible to analyze in detail each object uncovered, revealing how it was built, the composing materials, the techniques that maintained it together and other elements present in its composition. The most interesting fact for this study is that, upon analysis, there seems to be interesting similarities between construction techniques used to assemble both ancient furniture and the ones used nowadays for the same purposes. To test the hypothesis, this paper is focused in three particular objects, the Solid Ebony Chair of *Tutankhamun* JE 62033, from KV62, and the Chairs of *Hetepheres* MFA 38.957 and *JE 53263*, from G7000X, -a much older chair- and analyses its structures, the materials and techniques used to assemble them, the similarities and dissimilarities, if any, between these two examples and to see if the is any correlations with them and their analog

### **Chapter 3**
