3 Produce and offerings
In this section you will look at several fragments. These include the three fragments of ‘Viewing the produce of the estates’, as well as ‘Agricultural scenes’ and the ‘Offering bringers’.
Although the locations of their depicted activities cannot be decided absolutely, the fragments we have looked at, ‘The offering table’ and ‘The banquet’, would probably have been in one way or another, indoor scenes. For the next group of paintings, the scene moves outdoors (Figure 12).
The banquet was a scene of leisure. The next group of pictures are about work. The figures represented in the banquet were wealthy men and women from the Egyptian elite, attended by domestic servants and entertainers. In the next group the figures are scribes and agricultural workers engaged in harvesting the crops and in animal husbandry (Figure 13). They represent the other side of Nebamun’s life, the source of his wealth and status as Grain-accountant in the Temple of Amun at Thebes, without which he would not have been able to entertain important friends, and indeed would not have been able to afford a tomb-chapel to decorate in the first place.
