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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 on internet I found this photo of a stele in the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen. I had no news of it and the style is really […]

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. The Uniformity of the Moon and the Sun. The lunar phases: quarter waning, new moon, crescent quarter and full moon; formed a vital cycle of life, […]

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 perception is different. Evolution in European Art Greek art, for example, goes through different stages in its history, each with its own style in the plastic manifestations. Thus […]

Artists and theologist of Ancient Egypt worked together in the emergence of iconographies and they combined different planes of meaning: images and words. That is why reading the Egyptian art requires an iconographic and textual analysis. The Egyptian art: a language of signs. The Egyptian art is a language of signs and just like the Egyptian language, […]

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 strong enough for granting the king’s regeneration. Both, the scenes and its emplacement had a sense. Orientation of the Tutankhamun iconography. The ancient Egyptian artists selected for this king a […]

The tomb of Tutankhamun needs to be seen as an historical document. Nowadays everyone knows about Tutankhamun. His mummy, his funeral mask, his golden sarcophagus, his jewels, his spectacular furniture … are familiar to anyone.  But this familiarity towards the figure of Tutankhamun and his tomb does not always mean true knowledge. The Tomb of […]

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 depicted. The death of Meketaten was lamented by the royal family, that is Akhenaten, Nefertiti and the three sisters, Meritaton, Ankhesenpaaton and Neferferuaton-ta-sherit, but also by a group of mourners. These scenes of lament […]

In Ancient Egypt the afterlife and the eternity were concepts very inserted into belief. The funerary art granted food, drink, furniture, religious cult…The mourning rite depicted was also crucial for the dead’s resurrection. During the reign of Akhenaten, iconography coming from tombs of Amarna show mainly scenes of the “living ones”: Sculptors in the workshop, worship […]

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 for a piece of art: Artificiality. An observer. Communication. Authenticity. Individuality. The problem in Ancient Egypt is that the only property we find in its figurative production […]

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 remains need also to be interpreted. For instance, why was the mummy buried sometimes with small female figurines? Any text says a clear explanation, but we can assume that […]

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 place where it is produced. Ancient Egypt was not an exception. The big question also for us is, can we speak about artwork in Ancient Egypt? Or must […]

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 were praying to the gods the return of the dead. Some times their hands appear over their heads as beating them in an evident show of despair. The ancient Egyptian […]

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. Before getting into the art of a moment of the history, we should mention some theoretical matters about art and history. Because any artistic expression needs to […]

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 applied over this new surfaces a decoration took from the general corpus of images they had. One of the most common scenes in those papyrus was […]

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 from the scalp was, joint with nudity, an iconographical resource applied mainly to boys. Many familiar statues from the Memphite cemetery show how the male was the […]

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 both ends of the coffin, during the Opening of the Mouth Ceremony or, from the New Kingdom, kneeling and offering two globular vases nw at the end of […]

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 Isis and Nephthys were accompanying the dead until the tomb at both ends of the mummy. The hieroglyphs of the wooden coffins from the Middle […]

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, became an essential part of some solar iconography, so both from the New Kingdom were depicted flanking the solar disk in its daily rebirth. It also […]

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 sky god needed to be reconciled in religious scenes and from the New Kingdom artist worked in creating new depictions of this mixed conception of ancient Egyptian religion. […]

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 observer is an important element when the artists paints or draw something. In Egyptian art the artists had to represent reality, not how it was seen, but how it was.  The Egyptian artisan did not think about depth or […]

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 ancient Assyria or in Archaic Greece. I recently wrote a short text about mourning in Ancient Egypt for www.mexicolore.co.uk, an on-line platform for the diffusion of Aztec […]

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 was also a very important divinity in the Egyptian pantheon. She had a great healing power and for that reason she was invoked in ancient Egyptian remedies against scorpion bites.   […]

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 interesting post about how the concept of a woman’s beauty is closely related to hair. He mentioned a passage of The Metamorphoses of Lucius Apuleius, in which he falls in […]

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 drawing the professional mourners, was applied to the masculine figures in a respectful attitude. The front lock of hair forwards helped the Egyptian artist to represent the respectful bow in […]

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 related in Ancient Egyptian belief to some attitudes, hair was also used for expressing those attitudes. We are referring concretly to “respect”. The gesture of bending the body forwards was […]

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 Middle Kingdom. Distorsion and sprain characterises dynamic scenes (dancing, acrobaces, games…) in those periods of Egyptian history. However, from the New Kingdom dynamism appears in Ancient Egypt decoration […]

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 funerary ceremony of Ancient Egypt. Especially base on Egyptian art and religious texts. At the beginning the posts were about the progessions on the research and the final […]