The first step in making this relief would have been quarrying the stone on which it is carved, which chemical analyses have revealed to be sandstone, a soft, sedimentary rock commonly found in the eastern Sahara, northeast Africa and the Arabian peninsula. The next step would have been to transport the stone from the quarry to a workshop, probably on a roller or wooden sledge. To create accurate and detailed designs, artists would snap a string onto a wall and coat it in red pigment dust, delineating the surface of the block with gridded guidelines. The grid technique was adopted by Nubian craftsmen from the tradition of Egyptian artists, who painted or carved grids to help proportion figures and lay out scenes in both paintings and reliefs. We can see what this grid system would have looked like in unfinished works such as Drawing Board, which has exposed gridding. Upon completing the underlying grid, the artist would then carve designs into the stone with a mallet-driven pointed chisel to create a raised relief. Once carved, the relief was probably painted. However, the pink striations visible on the surface are natural to the stone, not traces of pigment as they are often mistaken to be.  

Sophie Sundaram, Class of 2026, College of the Holy Cross