Nebamun's painted chamber

The Guardian (Richard Parkinson)

Richard Parkinson is a curator in the Department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan, at the British Museum. Later this month he'll be opening a major new permanent gallery, one that will display the famous wall paintings from the tomb-chapel of Nebamun in a splendid new environment. Conserving and researching the paintings, and deciding on their display, has been the work of more than a decade.

You might think that after 10 years just focused on these paintings from his funerary chapel, I'd feel very close to Nebamun. But in fact we still know very little about him. We know his title – he was an accountant, a middle-ranking bureaucrat, in the temple of Amun at Karnak, a very big, old, wealthy institution by the time Nebamun died in about 1350BC. We know his eldest son's name was Netjermose and his wife's name was Hatshepsut. And we know how he wanted his life to be, as is shown in the paintings – although actually he could have been a fat old incompetent, nothing like the scene that has him as a rather hunky athlete hunting in the marshes. We just don't know.

How he had himself depicted represents a lifestyle within the grasp of only a very small elite in Egypt, but this was also the dream of the whole of Egyptian culture – the "vogue living" dream of being Egyptian. The reality of life for almost everyone is glimpsed only occasionally here in the rows of workers and farmers in the paintings, but for me this reality can be sensed in the work of the painting itself – the incredibly skilled artistic labour that made these scenes. The sheer artistic quality of them is beyond description, phenomenal.

So it is the painters that I feel closest to – and particularly the master draftsman – after spending nearly a quarter of my working life with his work. Oddly, this is a period of ancient Egypt that I have no personal sympathy for: it was an age of empire, of conspicuous consumption, very baroque-style. But I can’t resist the sheer artistry here. All of the butterflies have their wings in different positions; all of the fruits in the garden scene are at different degrees of ripeness. There are standard motifs here, but the artists are always playing with them, creating variety, having fun with them. And now that we've got the paintings redisplayed at their proper heights, it is clear that all of the really spectacular parts are at eye-level, such as the famous dancing girls, or the flock of geese.

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