Art of Egypt – The Middle Kingdom
Artistic brilliance, innovation, and ingenuity are some of the many ways to describe the splendor of Egyptian art. The art of Egypt goes a long way in reaffirming the religious faith of civilization and its firm belief in life after death. The ‘Middle Kingdom’ reigned between the period of 2040 B.C. C. and 1640 a. C., and marked the beginning of the Eleventh Dynasty and the end of the Fourteenth.
The Art of Egypt in the Middle Kingdom featured meticulously painted works that focused on portraying wholeness, rather than concentrating on beauty. These paintings were in a standard format to represent humans and their natural environment. This style was followed continuously through the various Egyptian dynasties. Egypt was deeply influenced by its gods, goddesses, and pharaohs. Most of the paintings depicted some form of physical activity, such as bow hunting, musicians playing music, or a simple painting of the queen in her mansion.
One of the major discoveries that sheds some light on ‘Middle Kingdom’ art is the ‘Book of the Dead’. This book consists of paintings, illustrating a funeral, representing Anubis (the god of embalming), the coffin containing the body of the deceased, and the mourning women. This painting tries to underline the concept of life after death and the meaning of spirituality after death. Hieroglyphs were another innovative form of art from Egypt. Here, combinations of symbols were used to represent the meanings of a sentence. Each of the symbols represented a different meaning, such as that the Sky God (Horus) was represented by a Falcon Head; the God of Funerals (Anubis) was represented by a jackal, and so on. The use of hieroglyphics is evidence of the significant place that art occupied in the daily life of the Egyptians.
The coffins of the dead also carried the symbolic delineation of life after death. Most of the paintings in the Royal Tombs depicted a woman adorned with a falcon emblem facing west, since the west direction was considered the passage to the other world after death. At the foot of the coffin, the god of funerals, Anubis, was depicted in the form of two black jackals.
Egyptian Art of the Middle Kingdom still captivates audiences with its sheer mystery and artistic brilliance. Middle Kingdom art focused primarily on the portrait sculptures of pharaohs, tomb structures, and reliefs painted on them. Some of the most famous works from those times were Slaves Feeding Oryxes and Cat Stalking Prey in the Tomb of Khnemu-hetep. The sculptures, tombs and carvings, as they stand today, are treated as priceless treasures from the glorious past of Egyptian civilization.
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