Scribes Of Ancient Egypt: The Art Of Egyptian Hieroglyphs (Full Documentary)

Hello, this is Valdemar Januszczak, art critic, producer and presenter of documentaries. Thanks for watching Perspective, YouTube's home for classical art. Almost 5,000 years ago, at the dawn of recorded history, an extraordinary civilization was born in Egypt on the banks of the Nile. The monumental ruins that have come down to us still inspire both tremendous admiration and innumerable questions. Preserved in our museums, the incredible wealth of artifacts attest to what degree for 3,000 years this pharaonic civilization indulged in the production of works of art. Behind this immense creative output lies an essential figure, the man who with a simple sharpened reed or brush gives birth to all Egyptian art. Engraved on a stele found in Abydos, one of these men appears seated next to his wife, and for anyone who knows how to read the hieroglyphs engraved on the stone, he himself describes his qualifications. I know how to estimate dimensions, recut and fit until an element is in place. I know the posture of the male statue and the appearance of the female, the attitude of the 11 birds of prey, the arm movements of a hippopotamus hunter, and the leg movements of a running man. I know how to make pigments and products that melt without fire burning them, and that moreover are insoluble in water. Nobody will know of this except me and my eldest son, the God having ordered that he become an initiate. For almost 3,000 years, the Egypt of the pharaohs endured in a world which, even though no longer ours, still remains recognizable. A unique landscape whose frontiers seem sculpted by nature. Thanks to its regular flooding, the life-sustaining Nile River, a fertile green band between two deserts, was ideal for agriculture. On its banks, the necropolises were built. Of this world, among the vestiges which continue to be discovered thanks to archaeological excavations, there is scarcely an object or pillar that doesn't bear the trace of a drawing or an inscription. Drawing is the first of all the arts, the cradle of all the arts. That's to say, whether it's a work of architecture, a low relief wall, or a statue, it all starts with a drawing. For the ancient Egyptians, a monument without images is a monument that does not work. There have to be images on temple walls, on tomb walls, so that they may perform their magic in the The necropolis of the ancient kingdom and the graves of its highest ranking officials is located in the region of Saqqara in northern Egypt, near the pyramid of the pharaoh Josiah. It is largely thanks to the discovery of the funeral chapels and tombs of the nobility that we first came in contact with Egyptian art. The Egyptian mastaba is an ensemble consisting first of a funerary chapel dedicated to the deceased and often containing several rooms. Underneath this chapel, a deep shaft was dug that led to a burial chamber in which were placed the sarcophagus and the mummy of the deceased. The shaft was then walled up. On every level of this funerary structure, and regardless of the nature of the surface, drawings, bas-reliefs, and inscriptions succeeded one another according to precise graphic rules. We're in the chapel of a figure named Eruqapta. This is the visible part of his tomb where the funeral ceremony took place. According to the writing on the buttresses that separate the statues, we know that it identifies the deceased. It dates back to around 2500 BC. In front of this false door were placed the offering tables, on which food was left daily, to sustain the deceased in the afterlife. So here are his principal titles. He was a wab priest, he was chief butcher in the royal palace, and he's favored with the title Imaru, by the great god, and this is his name, Eruqapta. The image had to be accompanied by a text, otherwise it was inactive. For example, you would never find a statue of a person that didn't bear his name. A statue without inscription was one that served no purpose. To an Egyptian sculptor, it was considered dead. The image must be accompanied by an inscription. Whether it appears in bas-relief, painting, or sculpture-in-relief, without it, the image is inert. These images are meant to show who he was in life. He was chief butcher in the royal palace, but their purpose is also to present all of the elements that allow the deceased to continue to exist. They represent everything necessary to nourish the deceased, and that will allow him to survive in the afterlife. From the 10th dynasty, we begin to see representations of funerary meals, and little by little, the designs become more complex. Beyond the daily offering, we also begin to see how these offerings were produced, which leads to entire scenes based on agriculture, crafts, and fishing. One thing that is very striking in Egyptian art is that they were great observers of nature. It's true that they were always very skilled in their representation of animals. You see it very well with these birds. The images are obviously very stylized, but at the same time, there's an attempt at naturalism, and you can always precisely identify the species represented. The idea is that the Egyptian representations of paradise should surround him, in his chapel. Once again, the magical aspect of the drawings, or to use the more correct expression, although perhaps a bit more complicated, let's say is the performative aspect, in that the designs actually perform the magic of bringing to life what is depicted. For example, perhaps you've seen pictures of horned vipers in the pyramid texts. These vipers are deadly, and since drawing them makes them real, they of course are extremely dangerous. They must be killed, so they are depicted with a knife planted in their head to prevent them from doing harm in the afterlife. So this says a lot about the performative aspect of ancient Egyptian art. We immediately recognize an Egyptian image simply because it is based on a series of conventions that never changed at all over 3,000 years. It's a system to which we sometimes refer to as aspective, because it aims at combining the most characteristic elements of a composition in the core of what is represented. For example, if it represents a human face, you will see the face in profile. Because a face represented in profile, the nose, the mouth, the chin, and the contour of the face in profile is much more expressive than a full-face portrait, at least according to the Egyptians. But on these faces in profile, you will always see a frontal eye, because it is far more expressive than an eye in profile, which is limited to a small triangle that is barely visible. And so this system is applied to all Egyptian images. So there's a rotation of planes. There's a way, a means of simplifying the art, bringing things to the frontal plane and rotating, for example, shoulders and hips and so on, so that everything is readable. In other words, if the person is shown in perspective, one leg might cover the other leg, therefore it doesn't exist. But if you extend the far leg, then it is seen by the viewer, and so both legs exist. So there's no doubt as to the figure having two legs, two arms, and so on. There is no room for ambiguity, and that is why the Egyptian image is always a static image. You'll have a figure that is represented seated on a chair in a static pose, or standing and about to take a step, but not in the action of walking yet. This kind of stasis is specifically aimed at never representing movement, because movement was considered to be ephemeral in the process of passing, of happening, and thus finite, while a static image is a source of all potential possibilities. So this is pretty much the base of the Egyptian system, and it applies to both writing and image. Everything is represented in the most permanent way possible, the least ephemeral possible, the least volatile possible. It always aims for permanence, for continuity. Fifteen meters underneath this chapel lies the tomb of Mereruka, vizier to the 6th dynasty pharaoh, Teti. Some 23 centuries before Christ appears the proof that images magically substituted for reality. After the burial of Mereruka, the room was sealed off so that people couldn't physically enter with offerings. The images that decorate the walls are there to magically replace them. On one wall, the only one that has been partly painted are vases and large receptacles in various sizes and shapes. Two lines of text frame these images. They describe the list of offerings, a thousand round loaves of bread, a thousand jars of beer, two thousand gazelles, and many other dishes to feed the deceased in the afterlife. As of about 2000 BC, the sarcophagus was made of wood and continued to be entirely covered with drawings and magic formulas. Finally, the mummified body of the deceased was placed inside, where it would continue to defy time. In certain tombs, beside the mummy or slipped into its bandages, were found rolls of papyrus. These manuscripts were known as the Book of the Dead, literally translated as the book of coming forth into the day, proving the Egyptians believed in life after death. They could contain up to 165 chapters. The Louvre Museum displays one that is more than 20 meters long. The Book of the Dead is a religious anthology that is a sort of guide to the afterlife, a kind of manual on how to travel through the afterlife to reach the kingdom of Osiris, the kingdom of the dead. This book is composed of texts and images that complement each other in a regular manner, but quite different from how texts and images traditionally correspond to each other in the tombs and temples, because here they are like separate elements of an illustrated book. The illustrations are not integrated as part of the text, they merely accompany the text. There is very little interpenetration between images and texts, contrary to what you find on the walls of the tombs and temples. Every image serves as a written sign. So here you have ducks, jackals, a vulture, a stream, a mouth. All of these are hieroglyphic signs, but they are also images, since I can very rapidly decipher them and identify which element of the countryside or the Egyptian floor and fauna that they refer to. So from the moment one needed to write, one also had to learn to draw. You can write a word in 36 different ways. You can stretch it by multiplying the signs, you can condense it by economizing on signs, and so it's an extremely adaptable system, which also allows you to improve the visual appearance of the text. When you look at an Egyptian text, it is always beautifully laid out on the page. The columns are absolutely straight, the length of the lines doesn't vary, and simply because the scribe, who perfectly masters this play of images and writing signs, manages to lengthen or shorten the words depending upon the space that's available to him. The Egyptians used the same term for to write and to draw. This is the verb sesh, which can be more generally translated as to trace. This common root confirms the interpretation of writing and drawing in ancient Egypt. The designer in ancient Egypt was the contour scribe. So this is a scribe, someone who writes, but specializes in designing the contours of images. That is the Egyptian designer, what we call a contour scribe. This makes us realize the ambiguity surrounding the status of the scribe and the designer, whose professions were not strictly separated from each other. The scribe designed and the designer wrote. We realize this when we look at the documents from the site of Deir el-Bedina, for example, which was a village of Thebian craftsmen who decorated the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings and the tombs of the great dignitaries of the New Kingdom. We found an enormous amount of drawings in this village, and they established that professional designers also mastered and even played with writing. They combined images and writing with great dexterity, so had to be quite literate. They were people who could also write, so there was no clear distinction between the two professions, between scribe and designer. This brings up the question of the hierarchy between the scribe and the designer. We now understand, by looking slightly differently at designs that interest us, that there did exist in fact a real hierarchy, as there also did in Europe later on. For example, in the Middle Ages, designers didn't necessarily know how to write. We realize in looking at a number of Egyptian monuments that certain designers decorated the walls of a tomb and then were expected to write the hieroglyphic dedication. And since we are familiar with Egyptian grammar, thanks to Champollion and his successors, we notice that there are huge mistakes, not only in spelling but in grammar. So it's obvious that certain designers designed, but didn't know how to write very well. They had the rudiments of graphic text, but they were better designers than scribes. All the literary texts that we have written by scribes show to what degree the mission of the scribe was not only to help the government collect taxes, but also there was a whole category of scribes who devoted themselves to the transmission of literary and moral texts. These are what we call sapiential texts, wisdom texts that from generation to generation defined the duties and moral precepts that governed Egyptian society. And these particular scribes were undoubtedly the elite of scribes, so we can assume with certainly a few exceptions that the scribes who wrote were the elite, and those who designed came slightly below them, in that they were not necessarily expected to know how to write. During the period of the New Kingdom, the site for new royal necropolises was moved south to Thebes. Between 1500 and 1000 BC, Egypt enjoyed the most glorious and prosperous period in all Egyptian history. During three dynasties lasting nearly five centuries, the mountains on the west side of the Nile across from Thebes became the Valley of the Kings. And like Saqqara, the elite of the kingdom were buried near their sovereigns. It's here, in this Theban necropolis, under the reign of Amenhotep II, monarch of the 18th dynasty, that the cupbearer of the king, whose name was Sumyat, chose to be buried. His mastaba, closed to the public today, allows us to grasp some of the trade secrets of these artists, responsible for the decoration of chapels and tombs. Here we have an exceptional tomb, and since it was never finished, it reveals how the work was accomplished in different stages. It also shows that there were several different artists at work, because they did not necessarily use identical techniques. On certain walls, they set up grids that are scaled to the sizes of the people to be depicted. The future occupant of the tomb, its owner, is represented as a very large figure, and the figures that he is observing are smaller. Thus, we have squares that correspond to the size of the figures. It's difficult to say exactly at what moment the paint was applied, because it looks like each scribe had his own special way of working. Some would complete the drawing first, others would do a simple sketch first, then apply the paint, and last do a very precise contour line along the painted edges. So I doubt there were any rules. The pigments most often used were mineral pigments, which the Egyptians could easily obtain close by. That would have been all the ochres, all of the copper-based elements found in nature. Obviously, the most stable colors were the ochres, and also the reds and greens. Black, for example, was obtained from smoke, and was much less stable. Sometimes it could be erased by just brushing your hand against it, and that's why often it is not as well conserved. The styles changed according to period. When you enter a tomb, you can know immediately whether it's 18th or 19th dynasty. Artistically, I think the 18th dynasty was the greatest period. I mean, the work was of the highest quality, always beautifully finished, the drawings done with such precision, the colors so finely applied. The dazzling polychromy, such as exists in the tomb of Horemheb, for example, is overwhelming. A very interesting thing about this tomb is that some portions of the drawings and sculptures are only partially completed, whereas others are totally finished. This is really one of the most beautiful. Horemheb, the last pharaoh of the 18th dynasty, whose tomb is located in the heart of the Valley of the Kings. What it reveals to us is unrivaled by comparison with the tombs of other pharaohs, even if this is one that remained unfinished. Due to the sovereign's premature death, the artists couldn't complete their work. Thanks to documentation that has come to light concerning the Valley of the Kings and Deir el Medin, we have learned that the workforce assigned to the Valley of the Kings was already divided into two groups. There was left and right. This is a well-known fact. And it's evident that there was even a sort of rivalry between the foremen, left and right. There were the workers who did the basic tasks, the quarrymen, let's say, who dug into the mountain and then excavated the corridor which would eventually lead to the tomb, which would also have to be excavated. Apparently, during the 20th dynasty, there were teams of 120 men that make 60 on each side. And then there were the foremen and also the scribes, who checked attendance each morning, took note of it, and also kept a record of the work's progress. We actually have the papyruses that give us a day-by-day account. In due time, there would most likely have been a visit from the vizier or from the pharaoh for the purpose of establishing the iconographic plan to be executed on the walls. And that would be done along with the foremen. This particular plan for the royal tomb is essentially constituted of illustrations of funerary books, which were books of that period. The Book of the Dead, the Book of the Caverns, a certain number of funerary books generally comprised of 12 chapters, which corresponded to the 12 hours of night. The pharaoh is depicted being confronted by endless difficulties, which he eventually overcomes and thereby arrives in the kingdom of Osiris. All of this is strictly realized according to a code and to the norms of that time. It's at this point, once the iconographic plan has been decided, that the artists can begin. And there we see on both right and left sides that several hands are at work. It's quite obvious. Clearly the beginner's work, then a more skilled hand, and finally the master's touch. We see that the first stroke is done in red, and that then the master has corrected it in black. We have the impression, at least that's what I imagine, that in the Valley of the Kings, artists are also scribes. Because it's often clear that the hand that did the writing is also the same that did the drawing. Then comes the sculptor's turn. And with extraordinary talent, he will shape the figures of the pharaoh, of the gods, and sometimes even engrave the hieroglyphs. And then the painter fills in the colors. We may also wonder if there was a painter who specialized in black, another in red, mauve, blue, etc. That's a question we can't answer since it's not mentioned in the texts. But we can imagine that perhaps, to speed things up, there could have been painters who specialized in certain colors. It's obviously the case for that final black and white. A very exceptional tomb is the Tomb of Ramses, located in the Theban necropolis. What is so lovely here is the simple drawing with the barrel-leaf sculpture. Only the eyes have been enhanced in black, with no other colors added. To build and later decorate the tombs of the pharaohs, all the artisans were grouped together and were housed near the Valley of the Kings in Deir el-Medin. The village was surrounded by a wall and accessed through a single gate that was guarded day and night. These ruins show that under Ramses, it was composed of 68 houses. When occupancy was at its peak, it contained 120 families. This was a relatively privileged community, as can be seen by examining the documentation of the village. For example, this community lived according to a series of social rules and received its provisions from the governing powers. So it really was a somewhat privileged community. Its inhabitants were literate, and though they may not have belonged to the Egyptian ruling elite, they certainly were highly regarded throughout the region of Thebes. One can't really separate the scribes from the architects, the designers and the painters. Most likely they all belong in an identical creative context, and sometimes certain scribes were obviously both painters and architects. On the hillside by Deir el-Medin, these artists built and decorated their own tombs. One of them, discovered in the early 20th century by Ernesto Schiaparelli, attests to the dazzling rise of a contour scribe who became an architect. The extraordinary contents of the unviolated tomb of Ka are still visible today in the Egyptian Museum of Turin. Among the multitude of artifacts found inside the tomb is the sculpted standing figure of the architect Ka. Ka was certainly started life or started his career as a scribe. He could not have made the career ladder he did without a scribal training. And we have some of his walking sticks that name him Ka the scribe. So there's no question that he was a scribe. And he rose through the ranks and became an architect or an overseer of the king's works. I think he was an operative kind of man. Because there are tools in the in the tomb, but these tools were tools that had use and were inscribed not once but twice. Once, for example, hammered into the metal was his name. And once after his death, when they were placed in the Ka and dedicated to his soul. He was a very important man. He was the royal architect. It is clearly stated on his cubit ruler. It also states that it's a magic ruler. Of course, he never used it. It's made of gold. So we imagine that he wouldn't have used it. It was a gift from the Pharaoh to thank him for certain work that he did in the vicinity of Luxor. But we don't know exactly where. He was buried with the object that was his trademark, which characterizes him as a high ranking public official under the reign of Thutmose IV. Ka's tomb is very impressive. There's no question about it, because there are over 500 objects in it. And it tells us about how he lived. For example, there are numbers of coffers, wooden coffers that have pedimental lids, a very simple thing. But you have to have a large house in order to store all these. You can't stack them because of the type of roof on the lids. And they're all full of underwear, for example, which is monogrammed. The fact that his underwear is monogrammed suggests that he used a laundry service. And he wanted his laundry to come back to him. What we don't know, of course, is how he died, what his wife died of. We don't know where they lived. He might have lived at the village at Medina while he was working on site. But certainly, those pokey little houses could not have accommodated all that material, all that furniture that was in his tomb. I mean, it's a very well furnished tomb, which means that he came from a large, spacious home. Under the auspices of another pyramid, far from the banks of the Nile and its necropolises, the crouching scribe continues to grace the galleries of the Musée de l'Ouvre with his enigmatic presence. It is this vanished world in which art played such an important part that Guillaumet-Andre Lanouet continues to explore. She's preparing an exhibit on the contour scribes and the role of drawing in ancient Egypt. And it is within the framework of this exhibit that the laboratories of the Center of Research and Restoration of French Museums are busily restoring the bits of stone covered with drawings. These ostraca, found in great numbers in a well near the village of Artisans, Der El Medin, constitute an unprecedented and complex new source of information. For Egyptologists, they raise questions concerning the personality of these designers and about their environment. What is most revealing and completely unique in this category of objects is that, for once, they express the scribes' individual inspiration and how they chose to trace the contours that gave free reign to their imagination. Not on paper, since there was no paper, but on stone chips or pot shards. We don't have the impression that they are illustrations of fables such as Aesop's or La Fontaine's. Perhaps this is evidence of an oral culture that has escaped us and that we will never know about. Personally, I think they reflect spontaneous creative moments, the way any talented artisans or artists might do satirical drawings for their own enjoyment and relaxation. One must remember they were under a lot of pressure due to the strict moral codes. The reason for ostraca drawings was simply because papyrus was relatively expensive and not very easy to acquire. So it was simpler to write on stones that served as a kind of notepad. The ostraca illustrations were much the same as sketches, done on paper. But we don't at all know if there was some specific purpose they may have served. The more we advance, the less we know. You immediately notice the formidable precision and use of colours that certainly wasn't done in two minutes. It's obvious that these works were made using a highly accomplished technique. Yes, and the polychromy is applied with extreme subtlety. It's never done clumsily. You can see that the dogs aren't all the same breed, and the hairs are rendered in such detail. Now this one isn't the same thing at all. It's quite an amusing ostraca. It's an order for a window. So a carpenter has received this order, and on it there is also a drawing of the window with all the specific dimensions. And it says, do it really fast. By tomorrow. I think some are actually drafts, yes. They're working on maybe a contour that they want to get right. But the dancer doing the backbend is certainly something else. It's done for the delectation of the man. These are men, after all. These aren't women. These are men who are drawing for their own pleasure and their own delectation when they're not actually working on serious doodles or serious sketches. So I think this is what men do. A man who has a good hand, a good pen, will often turn to something that is slightly semi-erotic. And that's what it is. It so happens that the Egyptians, particularly in Upper Egypt, regularly did a dance with a baton. In Southern Egypt, it was usually done during parties that celebrated the completion of a building project. And there were always a few workers who started to sing. And here we imagine that there is about to be a sort of contest. Perhaps it's a sword fight. What's curious is the way they are dressed. At the same time, there's this bald man with hair hanging down his neck. He's what might be called a ruffian, a man of the people. He's not very stylish. It would seem that when the Egyptian elite wanted to be entertained with scenes of everyday life or especially satirical scenes, they had no desire to have these enacted by members of their own rank. They prefer to watch these rustics given to brawling and cavorting of all sorts. This medium was used to satisfy their fantasies. And all these men are represented on the erotic papyrus of Turin. A member of the elite is never depicted. They're all pot-bellied and bald. The erotic papyrus of Turin is now in very bad condition, but that wasn't the case in 1825 when Champollion discovered it. It's undoubtedly to his friend Rossellini that we owe two copies on vellum paper. One of these copies, recently found in the Musée du Louvre and subsequently restored, allows us to see the papyrus in its entirety. The erotic papyrus is interesting. I think, once again, we're talking about artists who live in the desert, who live and work in the desert, and a piece of expensive papyrus has fallen off the back of a lorry and they put it to good use for the delectation of each other and they make this erotic papyrus. It might have political importance. It might be about the priests or what the priests in the temples get up to. Who knows? We don't know. But what's more interesting is the fact that the erotic papyrus is one part erotic and one part satiric. Now, what I would like to know is whether the satiric part was shown to the family, rolled up, and the erotic part was only shown among the men and not the women folk and the children. It's the juxtaposition of the two themes that interests me. Why, in one papyrus, do you have something that is a story about mice doing human things and the other part of the papyrus is outrageously erotic? Several European museums, one of which is the Royal Museum of Arts and History in Brussels, have collaborated to present an exhibition on the contour art of ancient Egypt. And thus certain works must be sent to Paris and the Musée de Louvain. But one can't have 3,000-year-old limestone flakes travel in any ordinary way. Here's something interesting. These two objects are both made out of wood. There are these beautifully traced lines. So even though it's just a wooden base, the veins of wood stand out. So it's really the design that creates and expresses more of a feeling than an idea. I thought that if by some magic you couldn't manage to fit them in together, there might be some other way to do it. It's a tight fit, but by moving things around a bit, we'll manage. That's also very lovely. This is obviously one of the stars in the Louvre collection, who is depicted on this extraordinary ostracon of shiny limestone. We're almost certain that it represents Ramses VI. The cheek actually has a glow. It's extraordinary. What is also very striking is that the artist seems to have used the natural relief of the stone for the mouth, so as to suggest a bit more volume. And there is also the aspect of the cheek, which is heightened by the pinkish shade, as if he'd put on a touch of makeup. Here we also see this magnificent ear with the dangling earring. No, this type of art is really stunning. The Egyptian graphic system is a system that adds images or writing signs. During its history, remember that we are talking about 3,000 years of history, so during those 3,000 years, the language was evolving. There were new graphic symbols that found their place alongside the Egyptian images as time went on, that didn't exist at the very beginning, but were added through the centuries. But at the same time, the system itself basically remained the same. It's a system that kept adding on to itself, but eliminated very little. So finally, from the earliest era of Egyptian history in 3,000 BC, and all the way through to the Greco-Roman period, there were no important modifications to how the system functioned, just as there were also very few modifications in the Egyptian political and belief systems. All the fundamental principles that existed from the time ancient Pharaonic civilization began, with the first dynasties, continue to be applied all the way through to the Greco-Roman era. And despite foreign powers which would finally dominate Egypt, and the pharaohs becoming Assyrians or Persians, and later Greeks or Roman emperors, all those foreign cultures, those foreign powers, would adapt themselves to the basic structure of Egyptian civilization. Thus, the writing and graphic systems, which constitute the very backbone of the mode of expression of both the religious and political systems, would vary little in the course of time. A civilization based on representational art, ancient Egypt has handed down a number of remarkable images to us. However, the word art didn't precisely exist in ancient Egypt. The notion of art for art's sake appears to be absent from the Egyptian mentality, in which the work of contour scribes, painters, sculptors, goldsmiths, or even architects, had only the one essential aim of rendering eternal, all that was real, of immortalizing life. I believe nevertheless that we're also human beings, and what we're dealing with is human creativity. That to be so obsessed by the representation of an ideal paradise, where there are no fatiguing chores, no disastrous floods, where there is no sickness, all this certainly means there was a tremendous anxiety. I am almost convinced that these systematic representations of the ideal and absolute, reveal a profound fear of what Egyptians might expect to find in the hereafter. In chapter 109 of the Book of the Dead, The Fields of Offerings, that great hereafter which the Egyptians hoped to reach after death is described as a place of delights. Here begin the spells for one's coming forth by day, for entering and coming forth from the world of the dead, reaching the fields of reeds, finding oneself in the field of offerings, the great place rich in winds, and there to be powerful, happy, to labor, to reap, to eat, to drink, to make love, to do all that one does on earth.