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Researchers at the University of Cambridge discovered a full handprint on a clay “soul house” used in a burial setting.
The 4,000-year-old Egyptian handprint is considered “rare” and will be part of a new fall display at the university’s Fitzwilliam Museum.
Ancient Egyptian potters did not get to enjoy high status within their society.
Roughly 4,000 years ago, when an ancient Egyptian potter left a handprint on the bottom of a “soul house” used in a burial, the mark likely wouldn’t have been noticed. Today, however, that handprint is being put on display at a Cambridge museum.
“We’ve spotted traces of fingerprints left in wet varnish or on a coffin in the decoration, but it is rare and exciting to find a complete handprint underneath this soul house,” Helen Strudwick, curator of the Made in Ancient Egypt exhibit and senior Egyptologist at The Fitzwilliam Museum, said in a statement provided by the University of Cambridge. “This was left by the maker who touched it before the clay dried.”
The 4,000-year-old handprint was discovered on the underside of a ‘soul house’—a structure shaped like a building with an open courtyard, which was used to hold food offerings in tombs. The soul house was a symbolic offering site and resting place, and their installation was a common practice in ancient Egypt.
The clay soul house is dated to between 2055 and 1650 B.C. by researchers at Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum, and the handprint on the underside was likely made when the potter moved the house to dry prior to placing it in the firing kiln.
“I have never seen such a complete handprint on an Egyptian object before,” Strudwick said. “You can just imagine the person who made this, picking it up to move it out of the workshop to dry before firing.”
Researchers at the museum believe the soul house was first made with wooden sticks and then coated with clay to make a two-story building supported by pillars. Staircases were formed by pinching wet clay. The potter then would have fired the clay, which would have burnt away the wooden framework and left empty spaces in its place.
Clay and ceramics were common in ancient Egypt, and were used as both functional and decorative objects (though the functional sort were more plentiful). Clay was considered such a common material—either deposited by the Nile as silt or found as shale—that the potters were not afforded status in society, with some texts comparing them to pigs wallowing in the mud, according to the BBC.
More information is known about the ceramic and clay artifacts created by the craftspeople than the potters themselves, and the Fitzwilliam Museum’s October opening of the Made in Ancient Egypt exhibit aims to begin rectifying that disparity by telling the stories of artifact makers. The museum hopes to “create a vivid picture of these workers as individuals” using work orders, receipts, delivery notes, and unfinished objects.
This handprint gives it all a personal touch. “This takes you directly to the moment when the object was made,” Strudwick said, “and to the person who made it.”
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