Ancient Egyptian art for beginners

How to read the labels Historical what the old sources say. Later tradition what later writers added. Modern modern practice and my own notes.

Egyptian art has a remarkably stable style across nearly three thousand years, and that stability was deliberate. Art was meant to show things in their ideal, eternal form, and much of it was made to work for the dead. Once you learn its few rules, you can read an Egyptian wall almost like a page.

Egypt is also the place Western esotericism has dreamed about most. On this page I keep the real Egypt and the imagined Egypt apart, because both are fascinating.

Three layers

Historical What objects and texts show. Later tradition What Greeks, Romans and Renaissance Europeans believed about Egypt. Modern How people use Egyptian gods and symbols today.

The rules of the picture

Historical In Egyptian two-dimensional art, a person is shown in a composite view: head in profile, eye from the front, shoulders from the front, waist and legs in profile. No one stands like that. The aim was to show each part in its most complete, recognizable form. Figures are arranged in bands called registers, and important people are larger. The Narmer Palette, about 3100 BCE, already uses all these rules at the very start of the Egyptian state.

Artists drew grids on walls before painting, and unfinished tombs still show them. The Egyptologist Gay Robins explains in Proportion and Style in Ancient Egyptian Art (1994) that in the Old and Middle Kingdoms a standing figure was laid out on eighteen squares from the soles of the feet to the hairline. The grid is why Egyptian figures look so consistent across centuries.

Pyramids and tombs

Historical The pyramids of Giza were built around 2550 BCE. Excavations of the workers’ villages in the 1990s showed that the builders were organized, fed and housed laborers, not slaves as legend says.

Much of what survives comes from tombs, because tombs were built to last and the dry climate preserved them. A tomb statue could be a home for the ka, part of a person’s life force. The paintings provided food, servants and protection forever. When we see them in a museum, we see them in a way their makers never intended.

Hatshepsut and the image of a king

Seated Statue of Hatshepsut, about 1473 to 1458 BCE. The Metropolitan Museum of Art (29.3.2). Image: Open Access, public domain (CC0).

Historical Hatshepsut ruled as pharaoh from about 1479 to 1458 BCE, one of the few women to do so. She was usually shown with the regalia of a male king, including the false beard. This seated statue at the Met, from her temple at Deir el-Bahri, gives her a slimmer, more feminine body than many later images. After her death many of her statues were smashed, and the Met’s pieces were reassembled from fragments in the twentieth century.

Amarna: a brief revolution

Historical Akhenaten, who ruled roughly 1353 to 1336 BCE, promoted worship of the Aten, a sun disk whose rays end in hands, and moved the capital to a new city now called Amarna. Art of his reign shows long faces, full hips and tender scenes of the royal family with their children. The painted bust of Queen Nefertiti, found at Amarna in 1912, is in the Egyptian Museum in Berlin. After Akhenaten, the old style returned.

The Book of the Dead

Historical The Book of the Dead was a collection of spells written and illustrated on papyrus to guide the dead through the underworld. Its best-known scene shows the heart weighed against the feather of Maat, goddess of truth and order. If the heart was heavy with wrongdoing, a creature waited to devour it. It is one of the oldest pictures of moral judgment.

The esoteric angle

Later tradition Egypt has long been imagined as a land of secret wisdom. The Greek texts attributed to “Hermes Trismegistus”, which Renaissance thinkers believed were ancient Egyptian, were written in the Roman period, roughly the first to third centuries CE. In 1614 the scholar Isaac Casaubon showed they were not as old as people thought. In 1781 Antoine Court de Gébelin claimed that tarot was an Egyptian “Book of Thoth”, a claim with no evidence that I explain on my art history of tarot page.

Modern Many people today work with Egyptian gods such as Isis, Thoth or Bastet. Egyptian religious texts are real and moving; I suggest reading them in good translation so that your practice rests on the sources and not on Victorian fantasy.

Try it yourself

Find an Egyptian relief in an online collection; the Met’s Mastaba of Perneb is a good choice. Pick one standing figure. Is the head in profile or frontal? The eye? The shoulders? The feet? Stand up and try the pose. Then write one sentence on why an artist might choose clarity over realism.

Before and after

Before this: Ancient Near Eastern art.

After this: Ancient Greek art.

See every movement in order on the art movements timeline, or learn to look step by step in the free Art History for Beginners course.