Before Comics: Egyptian Wrestlers
The ancient Egyptian cemetery Beni Hassan contains thirty-nine tombs built primarily between the 21st to 17th centuries BCE. The fifteenth tomb, built for Baqet III, an official during the 21st century BCE, contains many paintings. Probably the most notable is the one on the eastern wall depicting wrestlers.
What is significant about this painting for our purposes is that it shows successive movements in a wrestling match. Is this a depiction of a single match or is it an explanation of wrestling techniques? That is unclear, but what we have is another example of ancient Egyptian sequential art.
The original figures were painted in red. Yet one figure is dark red and the other orange to differentiate them (in drawings made from the painting, the darker figure is depicted black – see below). Still, this subtle stylistic choice makes it possible to trace the movements of each figure through the series, even as the two wrestlers change positions. No panel borders demark space, yet we understand the succession by the repetition of the figures and their consistent colors.
The artist has also chosen to keep the height of the figures consistent throughout the series. This lets the movements stand out since they represent the only changes throughout the series.
What strikes me about this is how much it looks like other martial arts illustrations, even ones you find today. When we first started practicing Aikido, my spouse and I purchased Aikido and The Dynamic Sphere on the recommendation of one of our teachers. You can see one of the illustrations from it below.
And so we can deduce some of the advantages of sequential art. In a drawing, an artist can strip away detail to the bare essentials. Elements like background and facial expressions are not necessary to convey body movement and may even be distracting. And in drawing, it is easy to create size consistency and to break down the movement as needed, accentuating certain details, the move of an arm say, that may be too subtle in a photograph or video (not that the ancient Egyptians had these). Also, sequential art allows us to see the entire sequence at once. I have done some learning from videos and while seeing movement is of course educational, it gets annoying having to scrub back and forth in order to get the sequence of a technique. Sequential art doesn’t require this and lets us move back and forth through a sequence with our eyes. We are in control of time and so can look as long as we like at a single moment. These things are as true today as they were four thousand years ago.
Sources
Adan, Mamerto. “Wrestling in Ancient Egypt.” Hub Pages, 28 Jan. 2020. https://discover.hubpages.com/education/Wrestling-in-Ancient-Egypt
“Baqet III.” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baqet_III
“Beni Hasan.” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beni_Hasan
“The Earliest Representation of an Organized Fighting System.” Jeremey Norman’s HistporyofInformation.com. https://historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=4122