A fully illustrated 2025 catalog titled Made in Ancient Egypt shifts attention from pharaohs and dynastic power struggles to the artisans and laborers who actually produced Ancient Egypt's material and visual culture. The volume accompanies an exhibition of the same name at the University of Cambridge's Fitzwilliam Museum.

The book's central claim is methodological. No Egyptian theoretical or aesthetic treatise survives, and the ancient Egyptian language contained no word for "art" as we define it today. Any single theory, the authors argue, therefore cannot account for the characteristics of Ancient Egyptian art and objects. The best available route to understanding the work runs instead through the science of its materials and the skill sets of its makers.

Curator and Egyptologist Helen Strudwick and Exhibition Assistant Thomas Clarke, who reinterpret the artifacts in the book, position the "makers" within a systemic professional and social hierarchy. The catalog fills a gap the authors identify in most literature about Ancient Egypt — and in popular culture — which has favored glamorous depictions of treasures and political intrigue while leaving the craftspeople absent or relegated to the margins.

The structure of the book makes the argument visible. It abandons the familiar Old Kingdom–New Kingdom chronology in favor of a material-based organization. Chapters proceed by medium — clay, stone and papyri — and then by trade, moving into coffin makers, metalworkers and woodworkers.

Scientific analysis supplies the book's most concrete revelations. A micro-CT scan reveals the application of gold leaf on a linen cartonnage dated 380–30 BCE, an object produced for the wrappings of mummified bodies. The makers, Strudwick and Clarke show, were tech- and record-savvy: they worked with measurable systems including faience firing and temperature controls, tool constructions and inventories of materials.

Carpentry receives particularly close attention. Studies led by independent researcher Geoffrey Killen, including scans of Ancient Egyptian carpentry, demonstrate how a dexterous carpenter created tight joints in a wooden mummy coffin in 680 BCE.

The catalog's approach reorients the reader toward objects that have long sat in museum collections — among them seven faience and gold frog amulets from 1410–1310 BCE and a limestone sketch of a stonemason at work from 1295–1186 BCE, both reproduced in the volume. Such pieces, reanalyzed with current scientific methods, document working practice rather than royal spectacle.

By scientifically reexamining existing and lesser-known objects, Made in Ancient Egypt proposes a replicable model for how museums might study their own holdings of one of the longest-surviving ancient civilizations — measuring, scanning and reconstructing the hands that made them, rather than only the rulers who commissioned them.