Brickmaking Scene in Tomb of Rekhmire

Brickmaking Scene in Tomb of Rekhmire is a painted scene in the rock-cut tomb chapel of Rekhmire (TT100), vizier under Thutmose III and Amenhotep II, at Sheikh Abd el-Qurna on the west bank of the Nile at Thebes. In it Egyptian, Nubian and Syrian laborers make mud bricks under Egyptian overseers. It is one of the best-known ancient pictures of Egyptian brickmaking, the work Exodus describes Israel doing under Egyptian taskmasters (Exodus 1:11-14; 5:6-19).

Brick and straw in Exodus

The Egyptians set taskmasters over the Israelites "to oppress them with forced labor," and Israel built Pithom and Rameses as store cities for Pharaoh (Exodus 1:11). They "made their lives bitter with hard labor in brick and mortar" (Exodus 1:14). Later Pharaoh told the taskmasters and foremen to stop giving the people straw for the bricks, yet to demand "the same quota of bricks as before" (Exodus 5:6-8). The people scattered through Egypt gathering stubble for straw, and when the bricks fell short, the Israelite foremen were beaten (Exodus 5:12-14). When the foremen appealed, Pharaoh answered that they would get no straw and must still "deliver the full quota of bricks" (Exodus 5:15-18). Egyptian mud brick was made of silt, clay and sand, tempered and bound with chopped straw or dung; without temper, bricks rich in clay could crack and lose their shape.

What the painting shows

The scene follows the work stage by stage: men draw water from a pool, mix it into the earth, carry it in round baskets out to the brick field, strike bricks in molds, and take the finished bricks to a ramp under construction. Other men carry off dried bricks on yokes, while one measures off a pile of bricks with his hoe. Egyptian overseers holding rods sit or stand among the workers. One caption calls the workers captives brought by the king, Thutmose III, "for the work of the temple of his father"; another describes them striking bricks for new workshop-stores at Karnak. In the tomb, the brickmaking belongs to a series of scenes showing statues being made and set up, along with other building work. Norman de Garis Davies published the tomb as "The Tomb of Rekh-mi-re at Thebes" for the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Egyptian Expedition (1943).

The painting and the Exodus account

K. A. Kitchen, in a 1976 article in the Tyndale Bulletin on Egyptian brickfields, pointed to the scene's foreign workers from the Levant, "like the Hebrews," as the feature that has drawn attention to it. He also noted that the scene is set not in the Delta but hundreds of miles to the south, in the temple precinct of Amun at Karnak. Kitchen likened the 40 stablemasters who oversaw brick production in the Louvre Leather Roll, each with a target of 2,000 bricks, to the taskmasters over Israel (Exodus 5:6, 10, 13-14). Gary A. Byers, writing in the Associates for Biblical Research's journal Bible and Spade in 2004, calls the scene "reminiscent of Exodus 1:14" while cautioning that "it should not be assumed that the scene depicts Israelites." Rekhmire's kings reigned from 1504 to 1450 BC (Thutmose III) and from 1453 to 1419 BC (Amenhotep II); the Exodus is dated to 1446 BC, though some place it about 1250 BC (Dating the Exodus).