CategoriesCultural and Religious Styles
Ancient Egypt
Art made along the Nile from about 3100 BC to Roman times: tomb paintings, temple reliefs, statues, jewellery and illustrated papyri.
No works indexed yet
No open-access works for Ancient Egypt are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.
About
For three thousand years Egyptian artists worked to conventions designed to make images last. A figure combines the most telling view of each part: head and legs in profile, eye and shoulders seen from the front. Scenes run in horizontal bands, important people are drawn larger, and a squared grid kept proportions steady across generations. Hieroglyphs and pictures share the same wall, and most of this art was made for tombs and temples, to sustain the dead and serve the gods.
Early landmarks include the Narmer Palette (about 3100 BC) and the pyramids at Giza. Under Akhenaten, in the 14th century BC, the rules loosened into softer, elongated bodies, seen in the painted limestone bust of Nefertiti. Craftsmen excelled at small things too: faience amulets, gold jewellery inlaid with coloured stones, and funerary papyri of the Book of the Dead. Greek and Roman rule brought hybrid forms, among them the painted mummy portraits of the Fayum.
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