Echoes of Eternal Egyptian Art: Masters of Form and Finesse—Part I

The ancient Egyptians were pioneers of various forms of art and architecture. Down the millennia, the world has been left awestruck by the design and purpose of their grandiose monuments, their lavishly decorated tombs; and the landscape filled with paintings and sculptures that are rich in symbolism. This glorious civilization was without doubt in the front-rank of creating enduring and unmatched art. However, the context and content of the extraordinary body of work produced by the Egyptians cannot be categorized merely as art for art’s sake; because their ultimate aim was to bind heaven and earth as one.

Decorated jar depicting ungulates and boats with human figures. The images on this vessel represent important social or religious events. In the areas surrounding the boat are mountains, birds that may represent flamingos, plants, and water. Predynastic, Late Naqada II, ca. 3500–3300 B.C. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. ( Public Domain )

Age-old Elements and Appeal 

The ancient Egyptians did not have a single word that corresponded with our abstract use of the word ‘art’. But they understood the import of representations in various media and linked their creations to serve religious and magical purposes. Its symbols and functions reveal the Egyptians’ beliefs about this world and the next. In their social and religious context, works of art played a practical role, whose straightforward physicality is not easy for the modern viewer to realize. For example, the reliefs on temple walls depicting the king making offerings to the gods and smiting Egypt’s enemies not only communicated the idea that the king was fulfilling his duty to maintain order in the universe (concept of Ma’at); but such scenes were open to multiple interpretations.

Wall painting from the tomb of Nebamun – a middle-ranking official, “scribe and grain accountant” during the New Kingdom – at Thebes shows him with his family fowling in the marshes. Note the artistic convention of other participants in a scene being smaller than the prime focus figure. His name was translated as “My Lord is Amun”. British Museum. ( Public Domain )

“By the Early Dynastic period hieroglyphic characters inscribed on the surfaces of stone bowls had assumed a form which was to be little altered over the centuries. Written signs and pictorial images came to be essential complements of one another. On an ivory label of King Den from Abydos (c. 2900 BC) the monarch is shown as a mighty ruler defeating the enemy. This important event in his reign is identified by the inscriptions as ‘Year of the first time of smiting the East’. This great king of Dynasty I, at the outset of Egyptian art, is shown in a pose which becomes the standard for representations of the victorious monarch,” observe William H. Peck and John G. Ross.

Ebony label EA 32650 from Den’s tomb. The upper right register depicts king Den twice: at the left he is sitting in his Heb Sed pavilion, at the right he is running a symbolic race around D-shaped markings. 1st Dynasty. (Photo: CaptMondo) British Museum. ( CC BY-SA 3.0 )

The Egyptians also believed that images, through their very existence, were instrumental in making the Cosmic Order that they conceptualized to be a reality. So the statues they placed in their tombs and temples served as physical repositories for the spirit and material representatives of important and venerable persons. Through the Opening of the Mouth ceremony, each statue and mummy was made an actual living being able to receive offerings and prayers. The fundamental difference between an ordinary living being and a statue was that the “work of art” was destined to live eternally.

Detail of an exquisitely crafted New Kingdom death mask of an unknown man. Plastered and painted wood, fabrics and glass paste. Late 18th Dynasty.  Musée du Cinquantenaire – Jubelpark, Brussels, Belgium.

Vibrant Illustrations for God and Man

“Egyptian art, though funerary, is rarely funereal; it has neither skeletons nor corpses,” noted Andrè Malraux, the famed novelist and art historian. Today, Egyptologists have an embarass de richesse of artworks spanning the entire course of this wondrous civilization. For over three thousand years, Egyptian art was defined by two-dimensional representations of the rigid kind; such as profile views in tomb paintings. Three-dimensional depictions display “frontality” unlike the sense of motion and fluidity classical Greek statuary convey. The reason was the context in which they were placed or displayed.

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