Explore the 3D animation of Nebamun’s tomb on the British Museum website (www.britishmuseum.org). Adapt the basic plan of this tomb for your cardboard model.
Look at paintings from Nebamun’s tomb on the Metropolitan Museum of Art website (www.metmuseum.org). Refer to these when you decorate the interior of your tomb.
Get two rectangular cardboard boxes of equal size. Remove the lids, but don’t discard them.
Place the boxes lengthwise, with the open sides facing you.
Glue one box over the other. This will become a cross-sectional view of a two-level tomb cut into a rock cliff.
Work on the upper box first. This will be the tomb chapel.
Mark the inside of the upper box with pencil to divide it into three sections: a courtyard, an outer room in the middle and an offering chamber at the end. Make the courtyard smaller than the other two sections, which will require more decoration.
Measure the interior height of the upper box and half the depth. Using these measurements, cut two room dividers from the box lids. Glue or tape the room dividers where you made the pencil marks.
Decorate the interior of the upper box. Sketch your idea in pencil and then fill in with paint. Paint a stone wall with ornamental molding on the back wall of the courtyard. Make the tomb look like it’s on a cliff by painting the sky on the top and at the end of the courtyard only.
Decorate the outer room and offering chamber. Base your wall and ceiling paintings on the ones in Nebamun’s tomb. As an alternative, print images from the museum websites to the scale of your model and glue them in the box. Don’t forget to decorate the room dividers.
Work on the lower box. This will be the burial chamber.
Paint the walls and ceiling of the lower box, or glue images printed from the museum websites.
Paint the floors to look like stone.
Paint the exterior of the boxes to look like a rock cliff.
Paint pictures or glue pictures printed from the museum websites on poster board. Make cutouts of the pictures, leaving about an inch of poster board below the picture that you can bend so they can stand on the floor of the tomb.
Make a cutout of the ka statue of the deceased. Put it in the offering chamber, facing the courtyard.
Make cutouts of food, wine and flowers. Put them in front of the ka statue in the offering chamber.
Make cutouts of the coffin, canopic jars and other objects the deceased will need in the afterlife. Chairs, jewelry, games, cosmetics jars and even mummified pets were often entombed with the deceased. Put them in the burial chamber.
Glue or tape your tomb objects in the box when you’re satisfied with their placement.