“It feels really amazing that the techniques that I use to carve stone are just the same that have been used for thousands of years,” sculptor and stone carver Miriam Johnson shares in this video for the Victoria and Albert Museum.

While Johnson traces a simple cartouche, an oval frame, for the pharaoh Khufu, she describes some of what she’s doing, but much of the video is intentionally quiet.

With mallets and chisels, she demonstrates two methods of carving hieroglyphs in stone: sunken relief carving, where characters are defined by crisp, V-shaped grooves cut deep into the surface, and raised relief, where the surrounding background is chipped away.

“So one of the benefits of carving sunken relief is that you see more of the shadows… One of the benefits of carving raised relief is that you’ve got more opportunity of putting more texture into the characters.”