Today I'm covering an overview of Ancient Egyptian Art and its characteristics. Ancient Egyptian Art spans close to 2800 years of history, beginning with the unification of Egypt in the year 3100 BCE and concluding when Alexander the great conquers Egypt in 332 BCE. That span of time is more than ten times the age of the United States. To put this in a little bit more perspective, we are closer to the age of Cleopatra's rule than she was to the building of the Pyramids, it's nut. In this video, I'll cover three things. The main periods of the Ancient Egyptian timeline, some of my favorite artworks that come from this time period that are taught in a lot of art history classes, as well as characteristics of Egyptian art that make it so unique and fascinating to learn about. Before I dive in though, I'm Mrs. Alder an art history lover and teacher. Please make sure you subscribe to my channel and hit the bell icon so that you can receive new notifications each time I publish a new video. The five periods of Ancient Egyptian Art that I'm going to cover are as follows. First, the early dynastic time period. Then, we'll dive into the old kingdom, middle kingdom, new kingdom, and end with the late period. Just be aware that learning about Ancient Egyptian history, there's actually a lot more time periods than these five. But for the sake of today's video, we're going to focus on just these five. Before I dive into each period, I'm want to go over some characteristics of Egyptian Art, as well as some themes that cover all of these time periods. The Ancient Egyptians were really into the idea that images meant something more. They go beyond what you see. And so they decided that how you depict things in your art should really be established in a correct order. They saw this as a balance and a correctness to the divine order that fit in with their mythology. So this brings us to three themes that you'll notice throughout all of Ancient Egyptian art. And they all happen to start with the letter "T" so it's easy to remember. First tombs, then temples, then timelessness. And a lot of this is connected to their mythology, their religion. So in Ancient Egyptian culture, they were polytheistic which meant they believed in a lot of gods, but they have some commonalities in today's religions. They have a creation myth, they have an afterlife that they believe in, and they also believe in this idea of resurrection or living again. Now, because of this mythology, their art is tied heavily to it. A lot of the art that we have discovered is found in tombs. So that's the first theme that you'll notice. Most of the art is related to tombs. They were buried in tombs, they were painted on tomb walls, but it is because of this obsession with the afterlife that the Egyptians had that they were going to focus on this. Temples are the second thing where a lot of the art comes from and a lot of the style that we see in Ancient Egyptian culture. So temples were really important for them as a place to worship, as a place to learn, and as a place to give divine things to their gods. So you'll see a lot of the art in temples. And then the final one is timelessness. This idea that their culture lasts forever, their style and characteristics last for a long time, but also this idea that like them as a people last through death. So tombs, temples, timelessness. This is where we see art. And this can explain one of the reasons why their art remains so static. Is because they held on to this firm believe that this wasn't going to change. And that if style changed, then religion changed, and decorum changed, and that was something that just didn't make sense to them. So they believe that these images would carry on with you to the next life and you needed to remain consistent through that, so that you would be successful in your journeys into the afterlife. We'll get more into this specifically when we look at some actually images. Alright, early dynastic time period. This time period is marked at the beginning of the unification of Egypt. So up until this point, Egypt was a bunch of city states or different groups of people kind of working together. But once the Early Dynastic time period starts, that's when they become a unified state. The upper and lower parts of Egypt are brought under one kingship, one rulership. And this is where we start to see the ideas of kingship, order in the cosmic universe, and in the mythology are kind of established. So really quickly, this time period, gods and kings were seen as synonymous. A king was a god in the human form left here on earth. This is the time period when the canon was established. Now, when I say canon, these are the characteristics that were setting the standard for what Egyptian art needed to look like. To begin, the canon was excepted by both artists and patrons. So people creating the art and people buying the art agreed that this is what the high art looked like. Here are some of the characteristics. First and for most was the proportion of these figures. They used mathematical equations to figure out how to ideally depict the human form and each time the human form was shown, whether it was a god or a king or whatever, they needed to be shown in these mathematical proportions where the legs were lengthened, the torso a little shortened, um you also have composite views. Which means you are connecting the side view of a person mixed with the frontal view. So we all can see this mostly in the Egyptian's depiction of their faces where their heads are actually turned profile but their eyes are frontal, you can see the whole eye, you don't just see a part of the eye. So this means composite view. You can also see this in their legs, where their legs are seen in profile but their torsos are seen from the front view. You see the broad shoulder and the narrow waist, but then you see the side of the legs. So they're shown in this composite view, which is actually pretty awkward to stand in if you wanted to try it. Another characteristic in the canon is this idea of geometric shapes. You can see in the body that there is a triangular um shape in the torso. The very broad shoulders, bringing out the base of the triangle and you narrow down to the tip of the triangle as you go towards the waist. So very geometric in design, a little bit more simplistic. Another important characteristic of the canon was idealism. You wanted to depict these people as the perfect versions of themselves. They look athletic, muscular, they're youthful, they are strong and brave. No matter what the age was of the actual person you were depicting, you wanted to show them in an idealized, almost immortal like form. Finally, you have a lot of symbols of power within how these people are dressed. You can see it in their clothing, in um the regalia that they have on their head, the staffs that they wear, there's a lot of symbolism um tied into this so that you can identify gods, you can identify kings, but basically the idea is all of this canon was so that you can set apart and identify who the important people were - the gods and the kings. The most famous art piece that comes from this time period is the Palette of Narmer. This is to represent a makeup palette, although its much larger than an actual makeup palette you would use. If you look at the sauropod-type serpent lion, you can see the necks form a circle. That's where the makeup would go. It's not actually going to be used as a makeup palette though. This is more of a commemorative piece that shows the unification of upper and lower Egypt. So we'll start on one side of the palette and we'll go to the other. But I mostly want you to focus on these themes of you know tombs temples timelessness as well as the canon as we kind of dive in here. So let's start with the side where the circle is, where that makeup would go. It's broken into registers and the top register you have an ox-like creature. This could be the goddess of Hawthore and in the middle you have some hieroglyphs as well. So we've got already some religious icons that we're looking at. In the center register though, this is where's it's most important as a commemorative piece. So here you have the spoils of war basically. On the left side you have a king, a pharaoh of some sort. You can see he's wearing a pharaonic hat. The people off to the side of him are much smaller. These are not to represent children, but it's hierarchy of scale. The most important person is going to be the biggest. And then you've got maybe some servants next to them and then maybe some standard bearers. But they're looking over this scene of destruction that you can see off to the right. Where if you zoom in and look closely you can actually see that it's figures of deceased and decapitated people. They're heads are located in between their legs and actually if you zoom in even more, you can see they've been castrated as well to show dehumanization to show spoils of war to show the power of that larger uh victor off to the left. Uh surrounding this you also have more hieroglyphics that tell you events, time periods, and uh people that are engaged in this unification process. Then at the bottom register with those mythological creatures and those servants off to the side, you can also see just the mythology the religion that's really seeped into this culture. Now jumping back to that uh really tall figure, this is where you see that canon. So this is where you can really see the composite view, this combination of profile and frontal view. So again looking at the shoulders you can see you can see both shoulders that are facing towards you as the audience, but you can see the legs are in profile. The face is in profile which gives you one ear, one eye, the side of the nose, the sides of the mouth and chin. But if you look at that eye you can see that it' it's not a profile eye. It looks directly at you. Again that's the composite view. You also get this geometric vibe right? The broad shoulders going to the skinny waist gives us a feeling of a triangle. You've got a cylinder feeling in the the uh legs. This comes from almost it looks Samarian to me. But you can see the symbols of power in the hat, in the staff he carries and also in that hierarchy of scale. So let's go back to the other side of the palette where you can see this massively in scale. So, it's very easy to see who the main character is in the scene. So the hat he wears in here kind of looks like a bowling pin to me. It is the hat of upper Egypt and it's typically white and then the one that looks like a chair is the lower Egypt and then when you put the two um hats together that represents the unification of Egypt. So, in this image again I want you to look for the canon. You can see the composite view, you can see the geometric shapes really well, you can see those symbols of power in the hierarchy of scale, in the hat, in the beard, in the clothing, and also in the actual action that he is depicting here. It's a power stance. He's got a weapon of some sort raised above his head. He's clutching the hair of a victim. It almost looks as if this is the moment where he's going to do the decapitation. So there's a lot of power here. But now I want us to focus in on that idealism. Look at the perfection of the figure. In fact, this is like really cool. If you start looking at his legs you can see individual muscles being formed and different tendons. And then look at his knee caps I mean you can tell there is structure there. There are bones, there are muscles. You can see them really focusing in on the human form and thinking what makes this perfect, what makes this ideal, and really wanting to depict that. The figure is slim, its toned, its muscular, its youthful. When you look at his face you can see he has full cheeks. A very thin, long, straight nose. All of these are symbols of this beauty. This idealism that we can see. The figures surrounding again are all connected to mythology, to their gods, to their religion, and to their history. But here this palette again its a commemorative piece showing the beginnings of pharaoh, showing the beginnings of a unified Egypt, the beginnings of a cosmic order, as well as an establishment of that canon. Let's jump into the old kingdom. Now this was a time period of social and political stability. Things were running smoothly and when things run smoothly, wealth happens. And I mean like an abundance of wealth. These people started getting so rich and so wealthy that they needed to do something with this money, but they actually decided on something that meant a lot to them. This was a time period of enormous and elaborate tomb buildings. I'm sure you've heard of them. They're called the pyramids. So you have three generations of pharaohs building pyramids as a final resting place for their bodies. This is an incredible place to see how their religion, how their canon works together to really solidify some of those beliefs they had of the afterlife and the continuation of life. I'm not going to focus in on those pyramids, you'll have to wait for another video for that. But I just want you to know this is the time period we're working in. I mostly want to focus on this canon to show you how stable and static it is. We've gone over a thousand years now and uh we remain the same. So I want to show you this image, it's called Kafre Entrhoned. Now Kafre is the owner of one of the pyramids, which is really cool. And this piece was found buried in what's called a mortuary temple right outside of his pyramid. A mortuary temple is a place that's um patrons can come and worship Kafre after he had died. So this is one of the symbols or items that was buried here in this mortuary temple. What we're looking at here is a carved stone statue, it's five feet six inches high, so it's quite large. It's made out of diorite, which is this incredibly durable stone that turns this deep midnight blue in the sunlight, it's really quite lovely. And uh the Neo-Samarians used this a lot so you can see there was trade, there was a lot of wealth going on. Something else about this this stone that its carved out of, you can see there's no empty spaces. Mostly you'll notice this in between his arms. The arms are still attached to his torso through the stone. It's very symmetrical, there's no empty spaces and it gives this feeling of eternal stillness, which I think is a beautiful idea especially if this was a mortuary symbol of, it's just eternal and it's gonna be very difficult to destroy, it's gonna last again timelessness, a long time. So the purpose of an image or statue like this, especially when connected to a mortuary temple or a tomb of some sort is what is called a ca statue. Now a ca statue is so important to the Ancient Egyptian culture. They believe so much in the afterlife, that you will be resurrected that you will continue to live again. But after you die your spirit needs some place to reside, which is why we have mummies and the mummification process. They wanted to extend the life of the body so that the spirit or the soul or the ca had a place to live. Now Egyptians were quite wise in knowing how how fragile the human body is, so they took more than enough precautions to make sure that the ca, that soul, had somewhere to reside. So they buried their mummies in multiple sarcophagi, they put up defenses within their tombs. But another thing they did to reassure that their ca would have some place to live is they made these ca statues. So they made these statues to resemble the figure enough so that if the mummy was destroyed the ca could reside in these statues, which I think is a beautiful idea of preserving life for as long as they possibly can. So here we have this image of Kafre. Now one thing I do want you to notice and remember is the idolized form. This is probably not what he actually looked like especially at the time of his death. But we have this incredibly youthful, flat-stomached, broad-shoulder, muscular image of uh the pharaoh. But I do want you to notice the difference and kind of the progression of this image compared to the palette of King narmer. We now can see more naturalism happening here. What I mean by the word naturalism, is you can see these muscles are actually starting to look like muscles instead of just like the ten, uh the sinewy, tendon kind of form we saw with Narmer. So you'll notice the detail is starting to um appear but at its core, the idealism is the same. He looks very youthful, he looks very strong, stoic, brave. Now the interesting thing about sculpture is one of the canon things is this you know composite view and with sculpture you absolutely get that because as you walk around the sculpture, you get the frontal view and you also get the side view so it feels composite as well. And then finally you have those uh symbolic elements of of the headdress and the beard and the clothing. Now you can see his hands are in interesting shapes. One is laying flat on his leg and the other is kind of in a fist. Perhaps this statue originally held some sort of staff or other pharaonic symbol to help us identify who it is. But there's some also really cool identifiable pieces, especially if you look at the profile of the picture. The first thing that should draw your attention is there's a little uh hawk at the back of uh Kafre's head. This is my favorite part of this statue, I think this hawk is like adorable. He's got you know the animal likeness at the top but he's got two little like human legs and I think that's so cute, but this is Horess and he is a god and he's literally supporting the neck and the head of pharaoh, again to just solidify that connection between god and pharaoh and how pharaoh is god. At the bottom you can also see in his throne some intertwining papyrus and lotus leaves. This is to symbolize unification, peace, unity, all of that stuff and then as well he's on a lion throne which represents his power. So all of these symbols help us to identify who he is but you can see this idea of timelessness really going throughout this piece. It's timeless in the sense of that it uses the canon, timeless in the sense of how it uh utilizes the the gods. And timelessness in how this piece in how this piece was meant to last forever. Now the other piece from this time period is so cool. It's called The Seated Scribe and I wanted to just compare these two really quickly. The canon is reserved for royalty and for gods. Kings and gods, the important people. And now we have this image of what's called The Seated Scribe. He is seated on the floor, so no throne whatsoever. This is made out of painted limestone and it's much smaller. It's only about a foot nine inches tall. So limestone is not as durable as diorite. But I mean you do get this beautiful painting on top. Um, but this man is clearly not a pharaoh. He probably worked in the the high court. He was probably a very honorable man which is why he has a ca statue. He also was found in a tomb called a mastaba so it's not quite as grand as the pyramids but its its still a tomb. You didn't have to be a pharaoh to have a tomb or a ca statue, which is what this is representing. But I do want you to notice how the elements of the canon are not here. So he's very natural seated on the floor, he's got saggy muscles. You can see that in his stomach mostly his pectoral muscles. He's got a little bit of a pooch there. His face doesn't look as as perfect as pharaohs. You can see there's some age there. His shoulders aren't as broad and square, he's not as muscular, although there are some details uh the belly button you can see um you can see also some bone structure in his calves or his shin. I just wanted to compare these two so you can kind of see the difference between the idealized canon that's strictly reserved for royalty. So we'll shift into the middle kingdom next. Now this is a time period where there is a little bit more of political turmoil happening in Egypt and it was broken up into upper and lower Egypt again. But there was one pharaoh by the name of Mentuhotep who unites the country once again under a single ruler. Now the canon remains the same throughout this time period as well with just one little change. The artists are starting to bring a feel of realism into the piece. So with canons, usually there's idealistic creations right, but with the middle kingdom we see some humanistic aspects depicted in the faces of pharaoh. The most notorious one is Senusret III. If you look at his portraits, you can see that his face shows emotion, just a tiny bit. You still have the canon there, it's there. But you can see he kind of looks a little pessimistic, a little nervous. He's got heavily lidded eyes, he's not stoic necessarily, but he's got a little droopiness in his cheeks. This is to show a representation of the political climate of the time period. It wasn't as stable as it had been in the past and unification and peace and those are hard to maintain. So you can see kind of the weariness and the uh the carefulness of the pharaoh in these in these portraits of him. Alright the new kingdom, my favorite kingdom and the one that we all kind of know and recognize and love. The pharaohs from this time period's are some you should recognize. Hatshepsut, King Tut, Akhenaten, Ramses, you know Moses let my people go. This is the new kingdom, this is the Ancient Egypt that we know and love and appreciate. Now first I'm gonna blow your minds by telling you this is about 1500 years after our early dynastic time period with the palette of narmer. We've gone 1500ish years down the line and we still have our same canon. So these pharaohs whose names we recognize are maintaining this canonical order. Except for one. And his name is Akhenaten so I'm gonna focus more on him and how he breaks the standards, he breaks the tradition of Egyptian art. It is beautiful to behold. Now his reign was only 17 years long and in those 17 years he drastically changes the social, political, and religious climate of Egypt. All of it. So first politically speaking he moves the capital further north away from thieves and calls it Akhenaten after himself. Second, he changes uh the cultural life and the artistic style by drastically changing conventions things started start looking more stylized, there's distortions in the uh uh figures. And third and probably most importantly is he changes the religion. He changes it from this polytheistic to a monotheistic religion. Meaning from multiple gods to one god. He changes the name of the god to Aten. He no longer represents man but is depicted as a sun disk type thing who has no gender, no sex, no orientation, it's just this being. He renames himself Akhenaten and it means one who is in the service of Aten. So he changes the religion and directly ties himself to it. Which isn't far off from what other pharaohs were doing but he just does it in a way that that's very radical, very sudden. So he changes everything. Why? I'm not a politician, but I could imagine it's a it's a sign of power. Now what's very interesting about this style is that he reigns again for 17 17 years and that's as long as this style lasts. That's it. His son by the name of Tut becomes king after him and changes everything back to how it normally was. So we've got this 17 year blip in uh in Ancient Egyptian history called the Amarna style. Okay so let's look at this image. First of all, it's huge it's like 13 16 feet tall. It's massive. So it's overwhelmingly in your face. But it also solidly depicts this Amarna style that's completely different from our typical canon. So first the really interesting thing about this is it shows both male and female characteristics, it's very endogenous, which you can see the connection between that and the god of Aten who also is not bound by gender. So you'll see that there are some very feminine aspects and very masculine aspects to this figure. We've got very broad shoulders but they're very thin and delicate, you can see his collar bone there. Looking at his face, he's got a very thin face, it comes to a pointed chin, the eyes are heavily lidded, the nose is slender and we've got these big, full lips right that are finely shaped and are more feminine. Then when you look at the stomach area and the chest area, it is not idealized in the way that the canon is used to depicting pharaohs, in fact its a lot softer, smoother and more fleshy. The stomach is bulging, which you normally see depicted in more female figures. The hips are curvy, the waist is slender, you can see this combination of male and female characteristics happening here. You can also see the deviation from the that canon that standard. It's completely different. It's softer. Other things that are interesting about this is everything is more curvy right. You look at the pharaonic hat that he is wearing or this headdress and you can see it feels more has more of a curve shape as opposed to a geometric sharp angles. The shoulders are curvier, the hips are curvier, the stomach is curvier, it just gives us this feel of kind of softness to it instead of this harshness, powerful depiction. But you also still have those symbols that he is a powerful person. First and foremost, it's a massive statue, so you've got hierarchy of scale there. But you also have you know the headdress and the clothing that represents that he is in charge, he is pharaoh. You can also see his arms are crossed and in his hands he would have held a shepherd's crook and a flail. A flail is what you use to you know beat wheat and then the shepherd's crook. These are traditional symbols of pharaoh's super human sovereignty, his power. So he still has those symbols attached to it. But I just want you to imagine being a part of this culture at this time period when you have this new pharaoh and he changes everything and he does it you know politically and socially but he also makes it very well known the change in his art. Now the art style is not only seen just in figures uh statues but it's also seen in pictorial reliefs like you can see here in Akhenaten, Nefertiti and his daughters images. We have more of a sunken relief so it feels like its carved into uh the structure. But again you can see the curviness that's added to this piece and it gives it a feel of more lifelike, it's more realistic, it's less ideal and more this is what humans look like. But again it doesn't last long. Quickly go back to uh this style with with king tut and it continues on for another thousand years. This brings us to our last Ancient Egyptian period. It's called the late period. Now this time period is a period in which the country was in the hands of foreigners. The Nubians first conquered Egypt and then you have the Persians the Macedonians the Greeks and the Romans and they all come in and kind of take over Egypt. But because we're focusing on these themes of timelessness of of the canon of how these characteristics didn't change much, I kind of wanna show you where art goes after Egypt is taken over. So when the Romans come into Egypt, you have this emperor Constantine from Rome who's been converted to Christianity. So you start beginning to see a lot of Christian art happening and spreading throughout the Roman empire into Egypt. But what's really cool about this is you can see this synthesis of two cultures coming together. So because the Christians and the Egyptians both believe in the afterlife and the idea of resurrection you can see kind of the cultures and their art merge together. Where Christians now believe in a resurrection so they want to preserve the human figure, and so they start using mummies. And you can see here this is called a mummy portrait where we've got some of this Roman painting style, some Byzantine style, some Christian style, merging together to depict portraits of the person who's been mummified so there's an identification piece. And you can see that coming from the Egyptian culture. You also have catacombs that are being created which are very similar to the rock cut tombs in Ancient Egypt. And these catacombs are meant to house bodies. So while their culture was kind of slipping away due to the fact that they were under other people's rule, you can see that their art actually continues on and it doesn't go anywhere. So yeah maybe they lost the canon and maybe they stopped building great pyramids but you can see that it didn't go very far and that a lot of culture was influenced by the Egyptian art. So that wraps it up. We've gone through almost 3000 of art and how it hasn't changed much over the time of the Ancient Egyptians. If you would like you can download my Western art history timeline and see where the Ancient Egyptians fit into the whole scheme of things. Please don't forget to subscribe to my channel and I'll see you guys next time where the art just keeps getting better.