Para 1
In ancient Egypt from about 3,300 B.C. to about 330 B.C., art had the power to transport you from life to death and back again. Ancient Egyptians believed in eternal life after death. For the journey to this new world, a dead body was dried and wrapped in layers of cloth to make a mummy. The mummy was then placed in a decorated coffin. Artists painted portraits on the wooden coffin covers. Murals, which are paintings done directly on a wall or ceiling, covered the burial tombs of rich and powerful rules called pharaohs.
Para 2
Stand up Straight
Egyptian artists were big on rules. All the people they drew were stiff. They often combined a forward–facing body with a face in side-view, or profile. Artists used a strict grid-like system--- sort of like graph paper --- to make sure the bodies were painted in the right proportion. With proportion, the sizes of objects make sense in relation to one another, so a leg is larger than a nose, a man is larger than a baby, a tree is larger than an apple. They also make sure that everything was symmetrical, meaning one side was exactly the same as the other.
Para 3
Way Big
The Egyptians liked to carve super-enormous statues. The Great Sphinx of Giza, which is approximately 65 feet (20 meters) high and 260 feet (57 meters) long, is one of the biggest statues ever carved from a single piece of stone.
Para 4
Picture Writing
Ancient Egyptian picture writing is known as hieroglyphics ([,haɪərə'ɡlɪfɪks]象形文字), which means “sacred writing.” There are more than 1,000 hieroglyphs, or symbols, which can represent an idea or a sound. Hieroglyphics was a total mystery until 1799, when the Rosetta Stone was discovered in Egypt. This stone tablet had text written in hieroglyphics, Greek, and another type of Egyptian writing. The different languages allowed scholars to decode the hieroglyphics.
Further Reading
1. Introduction
Ancient Egyptian art is the painting, sculpture, architecture and other arts produced by the civilization of ancient Egypt in the lower Nile Valley from about 3000 BC to 30 AD. It included paintings, sculpture in wood (now rarely surviving), stone and ceramics, drawings on papyrus, faience, jewelry, ivories, and other art media. It displays an extraordinarily vivid representation of the ancient Egyptian's socioeconomic status and belief systems.
2. Not changing
Ancient Egyptian art reached a high level in painting and sculpture, and was both highly stylized and symbolic. It was famously conservative, and Egyptian styles changed remarkably little over more than three thousand years.
3. Art for eternity
Much of the surviving art comes from tombs and monuments and thus there is an emphasis on life after death. When archeologists began discovering ancient Egyptian paintings, they were found in tombs and burial places. This is important, as the paintings were never meant to be seen by human eyes after the tombs were closed. The Egyptians painted the walls and ceilings in the belief that the one who had passed would be able to take all of the images of their life with them and only the deceased and the Egyptian gods would ever see the paintings.
4. Big on rules
l l Ancient Egyptian artists used vertical and horizontal reference lines in order to maintain the correct proportions in their work.
l l For the main figures in both relief and painting: with parted legs (where not seated) and head shown as seen from the side, but the torso seen as from the front.
l l A standard set of proportions making up the figure: using 18 "fists" to go from the ground to the hair-line on the forehead, but there as elsewhere the convention is not used for minor figures shown engaged in some activity, such as the captives and corpses
l l Statues of males were darker than female ones.
l l Egyptian art uses hierarchical proportion, where the size of figures indicates their relative importance. The gods or the divine pharaoh are usually larger than other figures and the figures of high officials or the tomb owner are usually smaller, and at the smallest scale any servants and entertainers, animals, trees, and architectural details.
5. Painting:
Egyptian painting was used in a number of ways, including painting directly on the surface. Another method was to create a ‘relief’, which is a raised image above the background and then carefully painting the details of the image. There is a second type of relief which was carved out and is referred to as ‘sunk relief’, and the images were painted with a raised background surrounding them.
The paint that the Egyptians used was colored or dyed using minerals that were naturally found in their area and some that they imported. The colors and all of the objects found in tombs were preserved due to the cool dry environment and that’s why we can see them today with such bright tones. Artists would grind the minerals into a fine dust and then mix them with a kind of ‘glue’ made from animals or plants. It was important to make just the right mixture because the paint had to not only stick to the walls, but was designed to last forever.
l Anubis: Anubis is one of the most iconic gods of ancient Egypt as a guardian and protector of the dead. Anubis was a funerary god. Over time, his task became holding the scales of judgment. Anubis held the scales that weighed the heart. If the heart was lighter than a feather, the dead would be led by Anubis to Osiris. If heavier, the soul would be destroyed.
l Appearance of Anubis: Anubis is the jackal-headed god of Egypt. His head may actually be a mixture of dog and jackal, either one of which could have been found at the edge of deserts by the cemeteries. His fur was generally black (not the brown associated with real jackals) because black was associated with fertility, and was closely linked to rebirth in the afterlife.
6. Sculpture:
l The monumental sculpture of ancient Egypt's temples and tombs is world-famous, but refined and delicate small works exist in much greater numbers. The Egyptians used the distinctive technique of sunk relief, which is well suited to very bright sunlight.
l Of the materials used by the Egyptian sculptors - clay, wood, metal, ivory, and stone, stone was the most plentiful and permanent, available in a wide variety of colors and hardness. Sculpture was often painted in vivid hues as well.
l Egyptian sculpture has two qualities that are distinctive; it can be characterized as cubic and frontal. It nearly always echoes in its form the shape of the stone cube or block from which it was fashioned, partly because it was an image conceived from four viewpoints. The front of almost every statue is the most important part and the figure sits or stands facing strictly to the front.
l The ancient art of Egyptian sculpture evolved to represent the ancient Egyptian gods, and Pharaohs, the divine kings and queens, in physical form. Massive and magnificent statues were built to represent gods and famous kings and queens. These statues were intended to give eternal life to the gods, kings and queens, as also to enable the subjects to see them in physical forms.
l Very strict conventions were followed while crafting statues: male statues were darker than the female ones; in seated statues, hands were required to be placed on knees and specific rules governed appearance of every Egyptian god. For example, the sky god (Horus) was essentially to be represented with a falcon head, the god of funeral rites (Anubis) was to be always shown with a jackal head. Artistic works were ranked according to exact compliance with all the conventions, and the conventions were followed so strictly that over three thousand years, very little changed in the appearance of statutes.
7. Architecture:
In general, Egyptian architectural designs were monumental but not architecturally complex: they used posts and lintels, not arches, although Egyptian stone masons had a strong influence on later Greek sculpture and architecture.
l Pyramid: The most famous surviving examples of monumental architecture in Egypt are the pyramids.
l Temples: The most famous temple architecture of Ancient Egypt are Karnak Temple Complex and Luxor Temple Complex.
l Obelisk: a tall, four-sided, narrow tapering monument which ends in a pyramid-like shape at the top. Ancient obelisks are monolithic; that is, they consist of a single stone. Apart from its shape, this is the major identifying characteristic of an obelisk. Most modern obelisks are made of several stones; some, like the Washington Monument, are buildings. Technically, these are not real obelisks, but rather obelisk-shaped monuments.
8. Papyri:
The word paper is derived from "papyrus", a plant which was cultivated in the Nile delta. Papyrus sheets were derived after processing the papyrus plant. Some rolls of papyrus discovered are lengthy, up to 10 meters. The technique for crafting papyrus was lost over time, but was rediscovered by an Egyptologist in the 1940s.
Papyrus texts illustrate all dimensions of ancient Egyptian life and include literary, religious, historical and administrative documents. The pictorial script used in these texts ultimately provided the model for two most common alphabets in the world, the Roman and the Arabic.
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