Ancient Egypt: Art, Architecture, and Culture
Egypt: An Oasis of Culture
Egypt is an immense oasis along the Nile valley, located between two deserts, cultivated only in a strip about 10 miles wide. It is divided into two parts: the Delta (Fayum or Lower Egypt) and the Valley (Upper Egypt). Egypt has created a culture dependent on the river, and ideological predispositions developed specific art forms. The river provides fertile desert land. That constant struggle predisposes men to a way of thinking about life as a perpetual special restart. Its terrain and weather conditions: boxed between two mountain ranges, dry weather, blue skies, and the overwhelming sun favor the development of a special optical sensation and specific way of thinking. Its agricultural lifestyle contributes to maintaining a bias towards geometric and straight lines. His familiarity with nature also creates a new world theme. The production of subsurface features art materials: various rocks, such as porphyry, granite, and diorite, among others.
Architectural Features
Key Features: Lintel; monuments built with blocks (stone carved geometric shape), colossal dimensions. The materials most used are:
- Adobe: A brick-shaped piece, made of mud and straw dried in air. With this material, village houses were built.
- Stone: In Egyptian structures, this material is used in the form of blocks and rectilinear profiles (using chisel, pot, and square Nivelet mason). This creates a lintel architecture based on horizontal and vertical lines.
Mainly Funeral Creations
Mastabas: They are truncated pyramids, clad in stone and brick. In the basement, there are excavated the burial chamber, the funeral chapel, and a house to house the statue of the deceased.
Pyramids: There are two types: the classic, four-sided in the form of an isosceles triangle, and the staggered, overlapping square in decreasing order. They are part of an ensemble consisting of real funerary temples of worship, leaning against a wall with a monumental lobby and a covered avenue linking the river and the temple. Building a pyramid was done through successive stepping stones to the apex, and then a coating of limestone or granite slabs was put down to the ground.
Hypogea: These tombs, whose construction took place in the corresponding periods of the Middle and New Kingdom Empires, were private and were typical of princes and senior officials.
Temples are usually preceded by avenues of sphinxes, statues of animals, and human heads. They are of different types: Funeral, solar, and thanksgiving. The temple used to have three parts:
- The outer surrounding the temple, with “lakes” for the representations of the mysteries of Osiris and “gardens” with kiosks templates, dependencies for priests, artisans, and guardians.
- The open, which consists of:
- An avenue lined with sphinxes and rams.
- An entry postmarked by obelisks and pylons with two statues in rhythm.
- A courtyard surrounded by columns, such as walls, were often carved with reliefs referring to the “saving actions” of God; the people had access here.
- The pillared hall or place of receipt of the god’s statue was built at a higher level; the central nave was supported by columns, and the two aisles were of lesser height. The outside, or hÃpetra room, includes units to house the statue of the god laptop; their access was limited to the pharaoh and, failing that, the priests delegated by him.
Civil Architecture
Palaces: The purpose was to provide a residence for a certain pharaoh, his family, and their servants and rarely passed from father to son. Hence its transitory nature.
Paintings
Features
Essentially muralist, covers hypogea, palaces, and tombs. Also used to illustrate papyri.
Techniques
Pure colors (white, black, brown, ocher, blue, and green) obtained from natural substances and mixed with water, resin, egg white, or beeswax.
Sculpture
Features
Figures front. Hieratic, almond eyes, expressionless face, stiffness, tense look. Reliefs in temples and tombs. Stresses the Scribe seated.