The visual perception of fatigue and sleep in bas-relief from the Old Kingdom to the end of the New Kingdom
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Sleep is often viewed as one of the most intimate and private activities that we carry out. Therefore, it is not surprising that the motif of a fatigued or sleeping person is not common in Egyptian artwork. Compared to the written sources, the number of visual representations is considerably reduced. It is a challenge to identify sleeping or fatigued persons in art and to distinguish between these stages. A person lying in a bed does not necessarily have to be asleep, but the bed as a place can hint at other aspects such as procreation, birth, or death.
There are several sign codes in modern perception, which can help to recognise whether a person is asleep or tired. In Western culture, yawning, for example, is a typical visual marker of tiredness, but in ancient Egypt, this does not seem to exist. This paper briefly examines the primary markers that visually indicate sleep or fatigue in bas-relief in ancient Egypt.
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Proceedings of the Twelfth International Congress of Egyptologists : ICE XII : 3rd-8th November 2019, Cairo, Egypt, El-Aguizy, Ola, Kasparian, Burt, Institut français d’archéologie orientale, Cairo, 2023