The Immutability of the Core Construction of a Chair: The Building Techniques from Ancient Egypt to Contemporaneity

Abstract

Since the discovery of the now well-known and preserved examples of furniture found in several per-djet of ancient Egypt’s Old Kingdom (c. 2686–2160 BCE) and New Kingdom (c. 1550–1069 BCE) it was possible to analyze in detail each object uncovered, revealing how it was built, the composing materials, the techniques that maintained it together and other elements present in its composition. The most interesting fact for this study is that, upon analysis, there seems to be interesting similarities between construction techniques used to assemble both ancient furniture and the ones used nowadays for the same purposes. To test the hypothesis, this paper is focused in three particular objects, the Solid Ebony Chair of Tutankhamun JE 62033, from KV62, and the Chairs of Hetepheres MFA 38.957 and JE 53263 , from G7000X, -a much older chair- and analyses its structures, the materials and techniques used to assemble them, the similarities and dissimilarities, if any, between these two examples and to see if the is any correlations with them and their analog structures built three and a half millennia later, in our current days.