It is easy to think of the ancient world in monochrome. We stand amid the ruins of the great Temple at Karnak in Egypt, for example, and imagine Pharaohs and priests walking through its soaring sand-coloured columns. But Ancient Egypt, and indeed most of the civilisations of antiquity, were a kaleidoscope of riotous – even garish – colour. The statues, sarcophagi and wall-reliefs of Egypt, from gods and Pharaohs down to commoners, were painted to look like their subjects. With the addition of other materials, the result could be mesmerizingly lifelike. For example, the statues of Prince Rahotep and his wife Nofret, excavated at their mastaba tomb near the Pyramid of Sneferu at Medium (Egyptian Museum, Cairo CG 3 and CG 4), were so lifelike in the dark and gloom of the tomb that they frightened the workers of Auguste Mariette’s expedition in AD 1871. No doubt much of this reaction was to do with the eyes of the statues: inlays of rock crystal which sparkled like the real thing in the flickering torchlight of the archaeologists.

For the Egyptians, the eyes were hugely important. Eyes were a source of great power: Sekhmet, the vengeful daughter of the sun-god Ra, was considered her father’s eye, while the eye of Horus – which had been plucked out by his uncle and rival Seth – was one of the most widely-revered and most potent of the apotropaic amulets used by the Egyptians. Another meaning of the phrase ‘Eye of Ra’ (irt-Ra), besides being a reference to Sekhmet, was the sun disc itself, the source of all life on Earth. But for the Egyptians, as with most ancient peoples. Even mortal eyes were considered magical. Eyes were thought to be the primary organ of perception, and were the main link between the inner self and the outside world. They were, to co-opt a modern phrase, the ‘windows to the soul’. The importance of the eyes was reflected in their function in figurative images. It was believed that statues and sarcophagi were hosts for the soul (ba) of the individual represented. In certain tomb images, statues could even act as a surrogate body for the ba to inhabit. While it was not possible for these images – especially for sarcophagi – to be fully-functioning replicas of the human body, it was important to the Egyptians that they should be as close to the real thing as possible.

For the eyes to simulate the real thing, the colours needed to be right, and they needed to sparkle and be sufficiently reflective. As a result, eyes were inlaid with carefully-chosen materials. These beautiful eye inlays show these choices to great effect. The whites of the eyes (sclera) are made of thick shell – most likely taken from ostrich eggs, a valuable exotic import to Egypt – which result in a lifelike milky-white appearance. Anchored in a cavity in the front of the shell, glued in place with resin, are pupils made from obsidian. Obsidian is a relatively rare material in Egyptian art; where it is used, it features in small inlays like these. There is no natural Egyptian source of obsidian, with the exception of rare outcrops in the inhospitable Western Desert. The nearest reliable sources are in Ethiopia and the Aegean. Obsidian can have different qualities depending on where in the lava flow it cools. At the edge of the stream, it cools quicker, resulting in a shiny smooth affect which shatters easily, and it is from this valuable and fragile material that these pupils are carved. The rarity and exoticism of the materials of these eye inlays indicates the value that Egyptians put on making their statues and sarcophagi lifelike. These inlays would have been placed within sockets outlined in blue or black kohl lines, made in most cases from copper, but in others from valuable materials like lapis lazuli or blue glass paste, as in the famed mask of Tutankhamun (Egyptian Museum, Cairo JE 60672).