Job Creation

Abstract

On a visit to Boston during the late 1990s I was viewing an exhibition of mummy portraits from the Fayum area of Egypt, spanning the first three centuries AD. Three of the pictures were mounted together. They were each painted about a hundred years apart and appeared to show a steady progression of the skill of the artists, each one an improvement on the last. It was not until I examined the dates more closely, matching them to the pictures, that I realized the most accomplished portrait was the oldest and the most naive was the most recent. Rather than progression it appeared as if there had been some kind of regression in skills.¹

The life so short, the craft so long to learn.

(Hippocrates, 460–377 BC)