Dreyfus: Ancient Egyptian artists were renowned for their exceptional skill in carving wood.

Narrator: Curator in Charge of Ancient Art, Renee Dreyfus.

Dreyfus: It was a common practice to place small, beautifully carved images that represent the deceased, in the tombs. And the man's name is Seneb - an important person in the Pharaoh's entourage.

He's made out of nine pieces of wood so that the striated wood grain matches every curve in his body. And if you look carefully, his black eyes, his eyebrows, white fingernails, kilt, and the rectangular red base he's standing on are all painted - and amazingly, much of the color remains.

Major: It draws you in and it has its own power. That is why I love the piece, and I actually had to write to it because I felt like this was a person with a heart, with a spirit, with a mind, that was honored with this carving.

Narrator: That’s poet devorah major. Her poem about Seneb is written as if in his own voice:

Major: True of voice, they said of me. Years spent learning the curve of pottery, the smoothness of limestone, the caprice of papyrus, brush strokes quick and sure. 

Some scribes worked the fields, numbering cattle and counting crops. A place for the ordinary to scratch their livings out, tabulating taxes paid and owed. An accounting of wealth they could see, but never share. Others found a military calling, writing messages of death and conquest. 

But I was a scribe of the temples, carefully reiterating spells that assured my patron an afterlife of opulence, amidst prayer. For millennia, people have recited the truth of my script, which lifted the dead, and opened eternity's doors.