Ancient Egyptian art features many carefully observed depictions of wild animals and birds. A famous example is the late Eighteenth Dynasty (fourteenth-century BC) wall paintings of the Green Room in the North Palace at Amarna, where naturalistic depictions of birds feature prominently. Their taxonomic identity, however, is not resolved in all cases. Here, the authors revisit the facsimiles produced in the 1920s by Nina de Garis Davies. Mindful of previous works, taphonomy and the interplay between naturalistic observation and artistic licence, they employ ornithological resources to conduct a qualitative assessment and propose a parsimonious scheme of identifications, relating the results to long-standing questions concerning ecological and stylistic aspects in the artwork.

Images of ancient Egyptians wearing distinctive, cone-shaped objects on their heads have, in the absence of physical examples, long elicited scholarly debate. Did people wear these cones, or were they a purely iconographic device? What was their function and meaning? Recent excavations at the Amarna cemeteries now provide the first material examples of head cones. Spectroscopic analyses indicate that their primary constituent is a biological wax, and not fat or incense, as sometimes speculated. The authors tentatively suggest that the Amarna cones were symbols meant to enhance the rebirth or personal fertility of the deceased in the afterlife.

Three wine jars in Tutankhamun's fabulously preserved burial chamber had been opened and placed east, west and south of the sarcophagus. By means of inscriptions, endorsed by residue analysis, the author distinguishes the contents as red wine, white wine and a high quality fortified wine, and goes on to argue for specific symbolic meanings for these choices in the context of religious change after Akhenaten.