Ancient Egyptian Painting
The earliest art from northern Africa is carvings of giraffes and other animals on stones in the Sahara desert starting about 10,000 BC. At about the same time in West Asia, artists were also carving animals onto rock faces. By about 7500 BC, Egyptian artists were also carving on rocks, especially in Upper Egypt.
Tomb of Ti, who is watching a hippopotamus hunt
5th Dynasty Old Kingdom (ca. 2400 BC)
Around 3000 BC, Egyptian artists began to create their own rock walls to carve and paint, by building stone buildings. Most of the buildings we have left are mastabas, which were the burial places of rich people when they died. The pictures carved on the walls of these mastabas were supposed to help the dead person out when he or she reached the next world, where the Egyptians thought you lived after you died in this world. So the paintings showed all sorts of things that people did in their regular lives.
Tomb of Setnakht, New Kingdom (ca. 1500 BC)
There are big changes in style over the two thousand years that these tomb paintings were being painted. In the Old Kingdom, the carvers took great pains with the pictures, but in the Middle Kingdom, the carvers took a lot of shortcuts and did sloppier work, for instance. In the Old Kingdom, the pictures are almost always about daily life, but by the New Kingdom there are more temples being built, and on temples there are pictures about events that happened, reminding people about a big battle, for instance. Also in the New Kingdom, the Amarna period is one of great experimentation in Egyptian art as well as in religion and government.
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(a project)
Once the Persians
conquered Egypt, Egyptian art became a mixture of different
cultures: Egyptian-Persian art, then Egyptian-Greek
art, then Egyptian-Roman art, and Coptic
and finally Islamic art. Each of these
cultures mixed with Egyptian culture in a different way.
To find out more about Egyptian art, check out these books from Amazon.com or from your library:
Eyewitness: Ancient Egypt, by George Hart. For kids.
Ancient Egyptian Art, by Susie Hodge (1998). Shows kids how Egyptian art relates to Egyptian religion and culture.
Hands-On Ancient People, Volume 1: Art Activities about Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Islam, by Yvonne Merrill and Mary Simpson. Art projects for kids, though the directions are really aimed at teachers or parents.
The Art and Architecture of Ancient Egypt (Yale University Press Pelican History of Art), by William Stevenson Smith and William Kelly Simpson (revised edition 1999). The standard for college courses.
Egyptian Art, by Cyril Aldred (1985). Another standard.
Old Kingdom Egyptian Art
Middle Kingdom Egyptian Art
New Kingdom Egyptian Art
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