The Puzzle of Egyptian Art. Dismembering an Iconography to Understand it.
As we have seen in a previous post, the iconography of this coffin contains traditional images of Egyptian art to guarantee the resurrection of the deceased. In...
As we have seen in a previous post, the iconography of this coffin contains traditional images of Egyptian art to guarantee the resurrection of the deceased. In...
Images in Egyptian art were much more than just designs, specially in funerary sphere. They were a tool for achieving a goal and their effectiveness was out of ...
Coffins in Ancient Egypt were not made just in wood, but also in ceramic. Although these kind of coffins are much more common in the Middle East, there are some...
Thanks to the numerous documents that has come down to us from Ancient Egypt, almost all related to their religious beliefs, we know about their gods, the cerem...
Keep safe and protect the others with your actions.
Colour is a very important element in aesthetics, because by itself it provokes immediate emotions. A colour can determine a state of mind, predispose us to som...
I would like to focus on an exceptional coffin located in the National Museum of Scotland. Because it contains a depiction of Isis and Nephthys, that well deser...
In this post I would like to focus on two wooden sculptures of Isis and Nephthys. They are nowadays in two different museums; one is in the Art and History Muse...
The artist in Ancient Egypt was part of the elite and worked very close to the Court. But his importance did not come from his proximity to the Royal House. Let...
How many great works of art in Ancient Egypt do we know? thousands!!! and yet … how many names of Egyptian artists (sculptors, draftsmen, painters …) do we know...
In Ancient Egypt there were many practices in the funerary rite to grant the dead’s resurrection. The most represented, but also very unkown, was the Open...
The artists in ancient Egypt used the bending hair for drawing body movements. The Egyptian artists in Amarna could also depict hair in a more plastic and less ...
There are lots of artifacts from ancient Egypt all around the world. Many of them are still unknown and despite that they are important documents. Just surfing ...
In Ancient Egypt many verbal and artistic expressions were used to refer to the entrance of the deceased into the Hereafter with goddess Hathor as mentor.
There are in museums small pieces from ancient Egypt, which are hardly paid attention. And usually they are very valuable. Sometimes because they offer relevant...
Egyptian coffin was a good surface for decoration. And usually this decoration was quite standard. For example, goddess Nut was depicted on the chest of the mum...
Official or private, formal or informal, the art of ancient Egypt had some characteristics in its production. These features formed a common denominator and hel...
Ancient Egyptian archaeology is plenty of small remains which are big in information. For instance the ushabti of Pay and Repit is a small artifact, which goes ...
The Senet game of Ancient Egypt was a board game for leisure in common life, which also had its funerary side. It was present in the wall decoration and was par...
The Senet game in the funerary sphere was a path to eternity. The deceased played alone this “countdown” to the eternal life. To arrive to the last ...
The senet in Ancient Egypt was an enterteinment board game, but in the funerary sphere it was also a way of reaching the eternity.
Recently we posted about the decoration on the upper register of the funerary mask of Artemidora. In it, we could differentiate two main elements: to the mourni...
We know how important was the decoration on the corpse in Ancient Egypt. The egyptian artist selected the most effective iconography for the benefit of the dece...
The both sides of the mummy was a good place for strategical iconography. At first sight, it seems that the Egyptian artist did not spend many sources in the de...
Isis and Nephthys are the most preeminent figures on the decoration over the mummy of Artemidora. Over the wrappings of the feet, two appliqués of gold depicted...
Looking carefully at the decoration on the mummy of Artemidora we can discover the intentions of the artist.
To understand the figure of the Egyptian artist it is convenient to differentiate art and craft in ancient Egyptian art. Ancient Egyptians just had the word hem...
The idea of duality referred to good and evil confronted and linked. And it also meant two halves, which formed a unity. Duality is Egypt. Egypt itself evoked a...
In the ideological thinking of Ancient Egypt, duality played a crucial role. The equilibrium principle could not exist without the imbalance; and in front of th...
The uniformity of Egyptian Art had also political basis. Pharaoh and Uniformity in Egyptian Art. In the state sphere, the Egyptian society required a balance, w...
At a celestial level, the cycles of the moon and the sun also had a strong influence in Egyptian Art. This influencie was in uniformity and also in iconography....
Plastic manifestations in Egyptian art remain almost unchanged for more than three millennia. Why? Art is something intimately linked with human feeling, with i...
Egyptian art shows an apparent uniformity, which makes us to refer to a unique Egyptian style. However, if we pay attention to other cultures of antiquity this ...
Artists and theologist of Ancient Egypt worked together in the emergence of iconographies and they combined different planes of meaning: images and words. ...
Egyptian art had a magical-functional purpose and did not take into consideration the figure of the spectator. For that reason, we cannot consider Egyptian art ...
The image in Ancient Egypt had a power in itself. Why? Because in addition to evoking a reality, they made it arise. In Ancient Egypt everything that was depict...
It is necessary to know the physical space in which an ancient Egyptian plastic production is located in order to analyse it. Reliefs, paintings and statues of ...
The king in Ancient Egypt, despite his solar nature, was also a human being. After dying, the pharaoh became also a corpse, so a mummy. Therefore it was i...
Isis, Nephthys and later on also Serket and Neith were essential in the regeneration sphere. They, as women/goddessees, played a crucial role in the process of ...
Let’s start with that: women were crucial in Ancient Egypt for the dead’s resurrection. The rite of the professional mourning ritual in ancient Egyptian funeral...
In Ancient Egypt the iconography on the walls of the tombs were crucial for the dead’s resurrection. The iconography in the tomb of Tutankhamun was ...
The tomb of Tutankhamun needs to be seen as an historical document. Nowadays everyone knows about Tutankhamun. His mummy, his funeral mask, his golden sarcophag...
The tomb of Tutankhmun is more than a mask, a mummy, Howard Carter… It is an historical document with lots of useful information about the funerary belief...
Iconography proofs the existence of a mourning practice in Amarna. Specially relevant is the Royal Tomb, where the funeral of Meketaten, the royal daughter, was...
In Ancient Egypt the afterlife and the eternity were concepts very inserted into belief. The funerary art granted food, drink, furniture, religious cult…T...
During the reign of Akhenaten many things changed in Ancient Egypt. The new Pharaoh modified the artistic canon, his residence, the religion, the cult…but what ...
I have already written about the consideration of the Art of Ancient Egypt as an artwork or a craftwork. In that post some elements were enumerated as necessary...
Thanks to the many artifacts of Ancient Egypt found mainly in tombs, we know many aspects of the habits of ancient Egyptian people. However, the archaeological ...
We have been lately writing about the artwork in general. The artwork is a human production conditioned by the author’s skills, by the historical moment and the...
In Ancient Egypt common mourners taking part in funerary cortege were depicted making many different gestures. These women could raise their arms as if they wer...
The art of Ancient Egypt has a very big interest from the esthetical point of view. But its composition, its scenes, its colors… have always a specific meaning....
The artists of Ancient Egypt had a particular conception of perspective, which affected in the way they depicted groups of living beings and amounts of things. ...
During the New Kingdom the dead was buried with rolls of papyrus containing passages of “The Book of the Dead”. That meant that the artist of the Ancient Egypt ...
In Ancient Egypt groups of common mourners walked during funerary processions making many gestures of lament: raising arms, beating their arms…One of the most t...
In Ancient Egypt the lateral lock of hair was a distinctive of childhood. For the ancient Egyptian artist of the Old Kingdom, the lateral lock of hair pending f...
In Ancient Egypt a couple of two professional women in the role of Isis and Nephthys were actively involved in the dead’s resurrection. They appear usually at b...
The iconography in Ancient Egypt was not gratuitous. Every image had a reason to be, but also every space. From the Old Kingdom the two mourners in the role of ...
In Ancient Egypt the Legend of Osiris was so important that it was integrated into the solar theology. As a result Isis and Nephthys, the two mourners of Osiris...
Cartonnages in Ancient Egypt were used over the wrapped mummy mainly for mummy masks and some important parts of the body. The cartonnage of Irtirutja in the Me...
It seems that in Ancient Egypt there were a relationship between the hair element and some rites of Heliopolis. The funerary texts show that the hair, the lock ...
Tha artist in Ancient Egypt followed the rule of depicting children with the side lock of hair. However, this archetype so common in the Old and Middle Kingdom,...
Ancient Egypt gives us again a good document. The tomb of Amenhotep, the Gater’s keeper of god Amun, has been discovered in Gourna. Although it is still t...
The most evident proof of the importance in Ancient Egypt of Isis and Nephthys in a rebirth process is in the Books of the Day and Night, which describe the jou...
The religion of Ancient Egypt developed during the New Kingdom sophisticated religious texts, which combined the solar theology with the Myth of Osiris. As a co...
It was a fact, that the ancient Egyptian corpus of images needed an iconography for expressing the union of Re and Osiris. And little by little in this iconogra...
The union of Re and Osiris supposed a challenge to the Ancient Egyptian Art, since new iconography was needed for decorating the tomb walls and the papyri. From...
The union of Re and Osiris in ancient Egyptian culture produced as a result new decorative motives in the ancient Egyptian iconography. The earth god and the sk...
One of the main challenges for priests and artists in Ancient Egypt were to combine the osirian and solar cosmogonies in the funerary literature and iconography...
In Ancient Egypt, virility was an essential faculty for granting the dead’s resurrection. All along my work I have been showing that, among the many pract...
There is always news about artifacts of Ancient Egypt. Now it is the turn of the coffin of “Denit-Ast”. It dates from the Persian Period and it is i...
Isis and Osiris were in the religion of Ancient Egypt the perfect couple. Despite the murder of Osiris, they could go on, Isis could revive her husband and both...
In the last post it was considered the role of Nephthys in the religion of Ancient Egypt. It is a fact that Nephtys was a very important goddess in the ancient ...
There is a scene of the Book of the Dead from the tomb of Ay, in which are depicted on the solar boat the gods of the Heliopolitan cosmogony and the Myth of Osi...
Among the Ancient Egypt gods, Isis and Nephtys occupied a very important role. It is an ancient Egypt fact, that the two professional mourners in the role of Is...
In ancient Egypt the dead needed many faculties for restarting his new life in the Hereafter: breathing, seeing, walking…and virility. Sex was an essentia...
Egyptian art can hide very important information in small pieces. That is the case of the stele of Sebekaa in British Museum. This piece of ancient Egyptian art...
We have been writing about the ancient Egyptian expression “The Hand in the Mouth” (Djat Ra) as a way in Egyptian language of referring to the gesture made by t...
The assiduousness of the icon in the icnongraphy of Ancient Eypt of the mother bringing closer her breast with the aid of her hand to her baby’s mouth seems to ...
Let’s make a reflection about the expression “Djat Ra” belonging to the Opening of the Mouth ceremony of Ancient Egypt and that we saw in a p...
Perspective in Egyptian art was special. For us, perspective is the representation on a flat surface of reality how it is seen by human eye. That means that obs...
Mourning is a extended practice in funerals of many cultures all over the world. Not just in Ancient Egypt, but also in some other African cultures, in the anci...
The goddess Serket was associated in Ancient Egypt to the scorpion and to the waterscorpion. Scholars have usually cosidered the ancient Egyptian goddess Serket...
We know why the ancient Egyptian goddess Neith was part of that team of four goddesses-mourners (Isis, Nephtys, Neith and Serket) protecting the dead. Serket wa...
In Ancient Egypt Isis, Nephtys, Neith and Serket formed a team of four goddesses, who protected the caponic jars containing the organs of the dead. For that rea...
Hair has been from ancient times an important element for preserving a good- looking. Recently in the blog Studia Humanitatis it was published a very interestin...
Egyptian artisans of the New Kingdom used hair in their drawings for expressing body movements (dance, body bow…). This technique, adopted from the way of...
Hair became in Ancient Egypt a resource for expressing things. The bending hair was used in Ancient Egypt art for drawing body movements. As some movements were...
Due to the estrict rules of the Egyptian art, artists in Ancient Egypt needed to find unnatural ways of expressing some movements, especially during the Old and...
The blog “Hair and Death in Ancient Egypt“ started in May 2013 as a way of transmiting the results of my research about the mourning rite in the fun...