The EEF has had a thread on representations of potters in Old Kingdom Egypt and someone sent around this photo from Flickr.
That’s one of the nice things about Egyptian mythology, because the dead needed the same things in the afterworld that they needed in life, we get representations like this. The Middle and New Kingdoms were better for this with regards to settlement archaeology, especially the former with the numerous house models. I suppose it can be a bit dangerous to base assumptions of what life was actually like on these representations; I’ve certainly argued that tomb graphics can represent more idealized than actual activities and that telling the difference can be tricky. Certainly when you have archaeological examples of similar items it strengthens the analogy.
