Interesting Facts About Ancient Egyptian Art: How to Read It and Where to See It

The most interesting fact about ancient Egyptian art is that the Egyptians had no word for "art" at all. Statues, paintings and reliefs were made to work: to keep the dead alive, to feed the gods and to hold the world in order. That purpose explains why the style stayed so stable for about 3,000 years, from the Narmer Palette around 3100 BCE to the Roman period, with figures drawn on a fixed grid, important people shown larger and colours chosen for their meaning.

Our Egyptologist guides teach travellers to read these rules in the first temple of a trip, and after that every tomb and museum makes more sense. Below are the facts that matter most, how the art changed over time, how it was made and where to see the best examples in Egypt.

1. There was no word for "art". The ancient Egyptian language had none. An image was believed to make its subject real and permanent, so a painted meal in a tomb could feed the owner forever.
2. Figures were drawn on a grid. Artists laid out human figures with a standard measure: 18 "fists" from the ground to the hairline of a standing figure. A later canon used a finer grid. You can still see red grid lines in unfinished tombs.
3. Bodies are a composite of views. The head is in profile but the eye is drawn from the front; the shoulders face you, the hips and legs are in profile. The aim was to show each part in its most recognisable form, not to imitate what the eye sees.
4. Size means rank. The king or the tomb owner is the largest figure, his wife smaller, servants and children smaller still. Egyptologists call it hierarchical scale.
5. Colours had meanings. Black, the colour of the fertile Nile silt, meant regeneration and was linked to Osiris; green and blue meant vegetation, water and new life; gold was "the flesh of the gods"; red could mean energy or danger.
6. Egyptian blue is one of the first synthetic pigments. It was made by heating quartz, lime, an alkali and copper, and is first attested in the 4th Dynasty, the age of the Giza pyramids.
7. Most artists are anonymous. Egyptian artists rarely signed their work, and most pieces were made by teams: one drew the outline, another carved, another painted. A rare exception is the workshop of the sculptor Thutmose at Amarna, where the bust of Nefertiti was found.
8. Men are usually darker than women. Men were traditionally painted reddish brown and women a paler yellow, a convention about outdoor and indoor life rather than a portrait of real skin.
9. Statues step forward with the left foot. Standing male statues almost always have the left foot forward; women usually stand with their feet together.
10. Sunk relief was made for sunlight. On outside walls carvers cut the figures into the stone (sunk relief), which throws strong shadows in the Egyptian sun; inside, where the light was soft, they often carved raised relief.
11. One king broke all the rules. Under Akhenaten (14th century BCE) art showed movement and family life, with the royal family touched by the rays of the sun disc and the king with a long face, full lips and a soft body. After his death, his monuments were defaced and the old style returned.
12. Faience means "dazzling". The bright blue-green glazed ceramic used for amulets and the small servant figures called ushabtis was called tjehenet, "dazzling", and was a cheaper substitute for turquoise and lapis lazuli.

When you stand in front of a wall, our guides suggest five quick steps:

1. Find the biggest figure. That is the king, the god or the tomb owner, and the scene is about him or her.
2. Follow the direction of the faces. Hieroglyphs face the start of the text, and the figures usually face the same way; read toward the faces.
3. Read the registers. Scenes are arranged in horizontal bands, like a comic strip: harvest, then threshing, then storing grain.
4. Look for the offering table. Piles of bread, meat, fruit and flowers mean the scene is about feeding the dead or the gods for eternity.
5. Spot the symbols: the ankh (life), the was sceptre (power), the djed pillar (stability), the eye of Horus (protection) and the scarab (rebirth). Our article on the symbol of the ankh explains the best known of them.

In Egypt there was no clear line between writing and picture. Hieroglyphs are small images, carved and painted with the same care as the scenes around them, and in a temple or tomb the text and the image are one composition. Classic Middle Egyptian used around 750 signs; some stand for sounds, others for whole words or ideas. The signs could run from right to left, left to right or in columns, which let artists balance a wall symmetrically, for example around a doorway.

Writing also gave power to an image. A statue or a painted figure needed a name beside it to belong to that person, which is why later kings sometimes recarved an older statue with their own name, and why enemies of a person hacked out his name. Hieroglyphs fell out of use under the Romans, and they could not be read again until Jean-François Champollion deciphered them in 1822 with the help of the Rosetta Stone.

• Tombs were private and meant for eternity. Their paintings show the owner feasting, hunting in the marshes, harvesting and meeting the gods, an ideal life to be lived again after death. Colours are often fresh because the tombs were sealed.
• Temples were the house of the gods and a statement of royal power. Their outer walls show the king smiting enemies and winning battles; the inner rooms show him making offerings to the gods, getting closer to the sanctuary room by room.

A good way to feel the difference is to see a Valley of the Kings tomb and Karnak on the same day.

Period	Dates (approx.)	What to notice
Early Dynastic	3100 to 2686 BCE	The rules appear: the Narmer Palette already uses scale, registers and the composite figure
Old Kingdom	2686 to 2181 BCE	Calm, idealised royal statues (Khafre, Menkaure) and lively daily-life reliefs in the tombs of Saqqara
Middle Kingdom	2055 to 1650 BCE	Royal workshops, and royal faces that look tired and careworn, as in the statues of Senusret III
New Kingdom	1550 to 1069 BCE	Painted tombs in the Valley of the Kings and the Valley of the Nobles, colossal temples, the Amarna break and Tutankhamun's treasure
Late and Ptolemaic	664 to 30 BCE	Revival of Old Kingdom models; Greek kings shown as pharaohs on the walls of Edfu, Dendera and Philae
Roman	after 30 BCE	Painted mummy portraits from the Fayoum mix Egyptian burial with Greco-Roman portrait painting

For the full timeline of the periods, see our guide to the Egyptian Empire time period.

• Stone: soft limestone for reliefs and tomb walls; sandstone for the great temples of the south; hard granite, diorite, greywacke and quartzite for royal statues and obelisks.
• Pigments: ochres for red and yellow, carbon for black, gypsum or chalk for white, copper minerals and Egyptian blue for greens and blues, mixed with plant gum and applied on dry plaster.
• Precious materials: gold from the Eastern Desert and Nubia, turquoise mined mainly in Sinai, lapis lazuli imported from what is now north-eastern Afghanistan.
• The process: a draughtsman sketched the scene in red, a master corrected it in black, the carvers cut it, and the painters coloured it. Unfinished tombs show every stage at once.

The artisans who decorated the royal tombs lived in their own village at Luxor; read our guide to Deir el-Medina and to what craftsmen did in ancient Egypt.

Work	Date	Where to see it
Narmer Palette (greywacke, 63 cm)	about 3100 BCE	Egyptian Museum, Tahrir, Cairo
Seated statue of Khafre (diorite-gneiss)	4th Dynasty	Egyptian Museum, Tahrir
Triads of Menkaure	4th Dynasty	Egyptian Museum, Tahrir (and Boston)
Treasure of Tutankhamun, including the gold mask	14th century BCE	Grand Egyptian Museum, Giza
Bust of Nefertiti (limestone and plaster, 48 cm)	about 1345 BCE	Neues Museum, Berlin
Tomb paintings of Sennedjem	19th Dynasty	Deir el-Medina, Luxor
Reliefs of the Hypostyle Hall	19th Dynasty	Karnak Temple, Luxor

• The Grand Egyptian Museum, Giza: the complete treasure of Tutankhamun and the Grand Staircase of statues. Read our guide to GEM ticket prices and planning.
• The Egyptian Museum in Tahrir: the Narmer Palette, Khafre, the Menkaure triads and the treasures of Tanis.
• Saqqara: the finest Old Kingdom daily-life reliefs, in the mastaba tombs of officials.
• Luxor West Bank: royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings, the colourful tombs of the Nobles and the artisans' tombs of Deir el-Medina.
• Karnak and Luxor temples: monumental sunk and raised reliefs, obelisks and colossal statues.
• Edfu, Kom Ombo, Dendera and Philae: the best-preserved temple reliefs of the Ptolemaic period.

Our tip: carry a small torch for the tombs, never use flash on painted walls, and ask your guide to show you an unfinished tomb, where you can see the red grid and the sketches under the paint.

Egyptian forms were copied by the Greeks and Romans, brought back to Europe as obelisks and souvenirs, and revived in architecture and design after Napoleon's expedition and again after the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922, which shaped the Art Deco style. The pyramid, the obelisk, the sphinx and the eye of Horus remain some of the most recognised images in the world.

To see the masterpieces with an Egyptologist, book our Grand Egyptian Museum tour in Giza and our Luxor West Bank tour for the painted tombs. The Egypt classic tours combine both with a Nile cruise.

What are the main characteristics of ancient Egyptian art?

A grid-based canon of proportions, the composite view of the body, hierarchical scale (important people larger), symbolic colours and a strong religious purpose.

Why did ancient Egyptians make art?

To make things permanent: images in tombs fed and protected the dead, temple reliefs served the gods and kept order, and royal statues expressed the king's divine role.

How long did Egyptian art last?

About 3,000 years, from around 3100 BCE to the Roman period, with the same basic rules throughout, apart from the short Amarna period under Akhenaten.

What colours did the Egyptians use?

Mineral pigments: ochres for red and yellow, carbon for black, gypsum for white, copper minerals for green and the synthetic Egyptian blue.