Sacred Art: Legacy and the Individual in Egyptian Art

For many artists, the most challenging subject to master is the human face. The fault lies not in any intrinsic element of our features themselves – though our foreheads, eyes, cheeks, noses, mouths, chins, jaws, necks, and skulls contain a far more complex map of convex and concave geometry than you might expect. Faces are difficult because our brains recognize them so quickly and so well. Any slight deviation, sometimes little farther than a pencil line or an offhand flick of a brush’s bristles, can throw off the illusion of life entirely. It is one of our most important and underappreciated skills as a social species – so important that individuals with prosopagnosia, or “face blindness,” can find their quality of life significantly impacted without proper support and coping mechanisms. Being able to recognize someone at a glance is necessary to survive in a world marred by conflict, as prehistoric times generally were and as our own times are still too wont to be. It is equally essential to maintaining one’s standing in one’s community.

It is poetic, then, that our earliest, most intimate identifier has also long been the most elusive for us to capture in paint or stone. It takes a determined society to attempt to do so, over and over again, with increasingly precise and nuanced attention to form and value that produces an ever more lifelike – or at least convincing – effect. And few cultures have been so consistently and profoundly motivated to capture the human likeness in all its detail as that of Ancient Egypt. From the earliest days of Predynastic Egypt, so far in the past that they would have seemed to even the very oldest dynasties as distant as Cleopatra’s Egypt is to us today, we see a preoccupation with human faces that spans across myths, rituals, and, perhaps most striking of all, individuals. 

One of the oldest names we know, for example, comes from the Narmer Palette, carved over 5,000 years ago and featuring the exploits and glory of the man thought to have founded Ancient Egypt. Faithful (albeit flattering) depictions of Egypt’s pharaohs are a consistent trend across the dynastic millennia. Still, they are far from its most striking implementation of the craft. 

Narmer Palette, c. 3100 BC

For centuries before Narmer, predynastic Egyptian cultures had been carving humans. We have examples of human sculpture in the Nile region from as far back as the Merimde culture, a Neolithic society that survived on basic agriculture and hunting from around 4800 to 4300 BC of rudimentary efforts to express the human form in clay. The Badarian culture, which survived until around 4000 BC, went further. Many graves from their society contain examples of female mortuary figures that would accompany the dead, perhaps prefiguring the religious rituals that would come to dominate our understanding of later ancient Egyptian art and culture. The Amratian culture that followed the Badarian would continue to expand upon these expressions of the human form with a variety of bearded figurines and other clay figures, which seemed to have ritual significance and reflected a profound meditation on the cycle of birth and death.

Ancient Badarian mortuary figurine of a woman (photo by Nic McPhee, CC BY-SA 2.0)

Over time, the Egyptian dynasties we are most familiar with began to take form, and the anonymous yet lovingly prepared graves of earlier societies gave way to the monolithic, impossibly grand tombs reserved for pharaohs and other important political figures. But as ancient Egyptian history trends towards increasing disparity in wealth and quality of life, we can also see the nascent questions of the peoples who came before coming into sharper relief. 

Clay figure, Egypt Naqada I period, c. 4000 BC (photo by rob koopman, CC BY-SA 2.0)

It is common for large-scale societies to rely on political propaganda to maintain order and keep stable existing regimes – and Egypt was far from alone in the ancient world in its theocratic tendencies. But with several millennia’s worth of artwork attesting to the Egyptians’ careful observation and curation of every aspect of their pharaoh’s lives, one starts to see a preoccupation with historical legacy, both on a collective level and, perhaps even more striking, on an individual one. Though the pursuit of memorial immortality was limited to the highest echelons of leadership, with untold hordes of less fortunate people left to the unspoken corners of history, ancient Egyptians were, at least in this sense, asking remarkably similar questions to the ones we do today regarding the individual’s place in the infinitely large tapestry of space and time.

That is not to say they came to the same answers we do – that would be a shock, given the stark differences in nearly every element of our conceptions of social and political life. While our modern understanding of a person’s individual mark on history tends to lean more on the strength and visibility of their contributions to society, leaving the public response largely an open question, the Egyptian elite had a much wider variety of tools at their disposal to manipulate the course of history itself. 

For example, during one brief yet notable episode in Egyptian history during around 1350 BC, the pharaoh Akhenaten instituted sweeping changes in Egyptian society, including moving the capital to a different city, now known as Tel el-Amarna, establishing Atenism as a new religion, and fostering the development of a new art style known today as Amarna art after the archeological site at which it has been found. The famous bust of Nefertiti is an example of this kind of art, which marked a departure from traditional ritual forms in favor of a more naturalistic, human approach.

The Nefertiti Bust, 1352–1332 BC (photo by Philip Pikart, CC BY-SA 3.0)

That said, we have relatively few examples now of Amarna art. Beyond the ravages of time, later Egyptian rulers made a concerted effort to stamp out the new wave of religious and artistic expression, returning to the traditions that had already kept their culture stable for almost two thousand years. Did the threat to the previous pharaohs’ cultural “immortality” weigh heavily on their minds? It likely was not as imminent a concern as maintaining short-term peace and stability during a turbulent time. But ancient Egypt’s quick– and lasting – return to the status quo during what is generally considered one of its most violent periods of upheaval indicates their strong understanding of tradition as the backbone of society. Their commitment to passing on the legacy of those who came before was, in a sense, a form of immortality in which the collective could participate – and in which a few “divine” individuals might even hope to see their names passed down through the ages.

Over one thousand years later, Egypt was contending with the Roman Empire on all fronts, political and cultural. Out of the interplay between these two great powers’ artistic traditions, we find perhaps the most poignant expression of the ancient Egyptians’ fascination with individual legacy in the Fayum mummy portraits. Panel portraits were a highly prized medium in the Classical world, and upper-class Egyptians used the tradition to try to immortalize their faces for future generations. The paintings are strikingly naturalistic for the time, presenting us all these centuries later with an image of a person we might expect to encounter on our walk down the street. For those who could afford it, these portraits provided an opportunity to reflect on what would happen to their memory when they were gone, and perhaps even to hope for what would become of them in the afterlife once they had passed from this world to the next.

Portrait of a young woman in red, c. 90–120

I will be forgiven for jumping ahead again almost two thousand years; while it may seem an exceptionally long time, in reality, it’s far shorter than many of the periods we glossed over at the beginning of this article. With the ancient Egyptian dynasties long since passed into history, such that it is only in the last few hundred years that we have truly begun to uncover their full scope and grandeur once again, it is worth acknowledging for a moment how modern Egypt has, in some small ways, carried on the tradition of reflecting on the fate of the individual against the unstoppable forces of time. 

Inji Efflatoun, Portrait of a Fellaha, 1955

Among many modern artists whose work focuses on the individual experience, Inji Efflatoun’s stands out in its unshrinking exploration of the lives of the anonymous Egyptian peasants who still worked the land all those thousands of years later – the same ones whose ancestors had been denied the opportunity for historical immortality in favor of their leaders and elites. Most of her portraits are also anonymous, but their intrinsic personalities and emotions shine through nevertheless. In a sense, Efflatoun is doing the work that Egyptian artists have carried on since before we have written record of it: the careful craft of observing people and capturing their likeness so that, in some small way, they may achieve immortality on earth.

What can we learn, in the end, from one of the longest-lasting and most famously theocratic societies to have ever existed? Beyond the countless priceless historical insights, the record of ancient Egypt also offers us an opportunity to examine our individual roles in society and the intrinsic value we hold as people. While ancient Egyptians did not necessarily have the most nuanced and balanced perspective on the dignity of the human person, in their art, we see their consistent search for a lasting place in history. It gestures towards the good and healthy human desire for life: to live well and to continue living, whether in the afterlife or at least in the minds of those who know and love us. Life may imitate art, but only if art reflects the truths of lives that we might otherwise forget.

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