In an interview on Ancient Egypt

Tell me about the John Baines book.

He’s a professor here at Oxford so he’s a colleague of mine, but also one of the most influential Egyptologists of the past 20 years. His work has been enormously significant. This book collects a number of his essays and presents them as a coherent whole and commentary on central Egyptian cultural institutions. He integrates different aspects of material culture - visual and textual - from tiny carved ivory tags to massive stone temples, emphasising the importance of context in analysis as well as comparative, anthropological perspectives. He explains how visual and written domains, two sides of the same coin, are complementary and mutually transforming and sustaining. These essays are a snapshot of his career over time, and what I find most inspiring is the way he can take a little detail and, through his reassessment of it, completely change your perspective on a whole topic.

Can you think of an example?

Well, he talks about approaches to Egyptian two-dimensional art and its ‘lack’ of perspective, which makes it look strange to us; we are trained in perspective as a representational tool from very early on. He argues that we shouldn’t see this as a deficiency; it wasn’t lack of ability, but rather that art had a different aim. Egyptian artists made play with the flat surface, using its potential and quite often having fun with it. When you start to think about the flexibility and potential of flat surfaces and the possibility to represent multiple viewpoints, you start to see the incredible complexity and freedom of Egyptian art, as well as its relationship to particular ways of seeing and understanding the world.