thatlittleegyptologist:

space-pirrate-watney:

thatlittleegyptologist:

space-pirrate-watney:

egypt-museum:

Funeral Procession of Ramose

Mural scene from a funeral procession of Ramose, detail of a wall painting from the Tomb Chapel of Ramose (TT55). Ramose was Vizier under both Amenhotep III and Akhenaten.

New Kingdom, 18th Dynasty, ca. 1550-1292 BC. Sheikh Abd el-Qurna, West Thebes.

NGL, third guy from the left supporting the head of the bed and third guy from the right with the scribe’s palate and the chair on his head look like they’re carrying tote bags. Obviously I have no what they actually holding, but it’s an amusing image: like, “Hey, the Field of Reeds recently banned plastic bags so here’s some reusable totes for when you need buy groceries or hit the farmer’s market.”

#i’m having a hard time finding resources that tell me how the hell ancient egyptians carried their shit when they had to go somewhere

Woven bags of linen, or reed. Carried in the hands, or on the head. You might find UCL’s page on textiles useful.

I did a quick google for ‘ancient egyptians carrying things’ as I know this is how most people will attempt to access the information. 

This article would be useful to you as it discusses extant examples of bags and baskets for carrying things.

Bags like this, from the tomb of Tutankhamun, full of Natron which could be carried in the hand: 

(Photo from the Met Museum)

Then all you have to do is look at wooden tomb models, which detail daily life better than looking at tomb paintings:

Carrying things on the head, which is still common practice in many countries across the world to this day:

On the shoulders using a pole and net bags.

On their backs

Baskets in the hand or simply just carrying something in the hand.

Failing that, just donkeys. Donkeys are not a rich people thing in Ancient Egypt, and most people who did agricultural work had them for carrying things. 

Also that ‘tote bag’ is some papyrus

DUCKIES!!! AAAHHH!!!

I love tomb models so much <3 They’ve got such a… human? vibe. Like, looking at them you can imagine people going about their lives. I imagine making them must have been a fun job - certainly it’s one I would have been happy to have were I around back then.

Thank you very much for the links! They definitely paint a much clearer picture :) And I’m sure you know this, but an issue with google search terms is that the same ones will return different things for different people >:( Like, when I was starting trying to find this out I looked up “how did Ancient Egyptians carry their stuff” and got a few uninformative popular archaeology sites that were loosely keyword matched and a lot of handbags with Ancient Egyptian patterns on them :P Even now “Ancient Egyptians carrying things” when I search it returns what I’ve pasted below. The last link is a bit useful, but it’s all large-scale stuff with basically nothing about small personal item transport. This isn’t a criticism of your methods or anything, it’s more me observing Yet Another Way in which the internet can conspire to keep people from good information (there’s a theme lol).

Yeah, I’m fully aware of that. In this case, though, my results are almost exactly the same as yours. What I did was to look at the pictures instead, which is how I got to the UCL page because they showed images of actual egyptian artefacts, as then you’ll be looking at actual images of the things you want rather than just random links. Then I changed ‘things’ to ‘bags/baskets’ and got even more results. I also know that Egyptians are shown carrying stuff in tomb models, so I googled them and went straight to pictures. You have to learn how to manipulate the algorithms to your advantage by switching up the wording to similar terms and not just looking at the first links page. There’s also Google Scholar that you can search through. Google may provide different results, usually the same things just in a different priority order based on location (i.e. you’ll get more US/Canada news results and I’ll get UK ones), but it’s not difficult to work around them to find what you need. It’s just a matter of learning how to sift through the information rather than saying ‘this tool is bad’ as learning how to use the tool is what research skills are. I used to never be able to get good results from google, but I eventually learned how to work my way around it’s flaws.