#  The Harvard Gazette | An archaeological record that doubles as art 

 





February 06, 2025

 

 

The Department of Anthropology at Harvard University is pleased to share a new story from *The Harvard Gazette* which covers artwork by artist Joseph Lindon Smith recently acquired by the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East. [Peter Manuelian](https://anthropology.fas.harvard.edu/people/peter-der-manuelian), Barbara Bell Professor of Egyptology and Director of the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East, shares more about this art and its background.

> “When artist Joseph Lindon Smith arrived in Giza a century ago, it was on the heels of an exciting discovery: a tomb chapel for a high-ranking Egyptian official named Idu dating to 2390–2361 B.C.E.  
>   
> Color photography had not yet advanced enough to be of use to archaeologists in 1925, so the Harvard University-Boston Museum of Fine Arts Expedition had enlisted Smith, a former portrait artist trained in Boston, to document finds inside the Tomb of Idu. Such brightly colored renderings of archaeological sites remain valuable to scholars today.  
>   
> In fact, the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East recently acquired “The Royal Scribe, Idu” — one of the roughly five paintings Smith made over two months at work in the tomb — now on view in a second-floor exhibition.”

[**Read more.**](https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2025/02/an-archaeological-record-that-doubles-as-art/)



 

 

 



 

 

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