Ancient Egyptian Art

Ancient Egyptian culture and art has fascinated many people throughout history. From the great pyramids to the Ramesseum, Egyptian art has affected the world and has coaxed people into studying it as a full time job. What people know today about Egypt is primarily from artifacts, tomb paintings, and monuments. From this historians have deducted that Egyptian history is divided into three parts: the Old Kingdom, Middle Kingdom, and the New Kingdom. It is well known that throughout these periods art was used to deify the pharaohs who lived during these eras. Most art from these periods has stayed constant because of a set of rules about depicting pharaohs or people of royal status. Pharaohs were primarily depicted as stiff figures with facial …show more content…
Art from ancient Egypt had “Visual representations such as, monuments sculpture, and reliefs [that] were used to persuade the public to follow the king and that the king had the divine right to rule”. Because art played such an important role in Egyptian culture Hatshepsut needed to represent herself in a different way from the ways Pharaohs before her were depicted. She needed to change how she showed her likeness in art because she was a woman, and because she was not the actual Pharaoh. The way Hatshepsut came to power was that when her father died her step-son and nephew, Tuthmosis III, was too young to rule, so Hatshepsut stepped in as a temporary monarch. Because Hatshepsut was not the actual Pharaoh in order to gain the Egyptian people 's’ approval she “had to defy the typical feminine visual representations used by queens before her in order to establish herself as king”. This explains why that in some sculptures, reliefs and monuments, Hatshepsut 's representations took on a more masculine appearance. The goal of this artwork was to affirm her hold on the throne. Another way Hatshepsut implemented her new image was by rejecting the idea of “symbolizing the role of the royal couple as the mother and father of Egypt” and instead “Hatshepsut was predominantly depicted alone”. Hatshepsut was usually portrayed …show more content…
His kingdom utterly changed almost every aspect of religion, and depiction of royalty in art up to that point. Akhenatens reign had such a profound effect on Egyptians that after his death efforts were made to erase his reign from history. The change that occurred during Akhenaten 's ruling was the change in the belief structure; Akhenaten changed Egyptian culture entirely “by substituting a new faith for the multiplicity of beliefs”. Akhenaten changed the beliefs system from serving multiple gods to serving just one, Aten. The god Aten is the physical representation of the sun, and in artwork Aten is represented as a disc with rays extending from it. Along with the dramatic shift in religion how you connected with gods changed as well; instead of priests emphasis was put on “the king as a ruler and sole prophet of the new god Aten”. The change from believing in many gods to focusing only on one caused many priests, of the other Egyptian gods, to reject the idea of monotheism; they went out of their way to ensure that Akhenaten would not be able to practice his religion in Thebes, the center of Egyptian life and culture. This active rejection of the practicing of Akhenaten 's new belief system caused him to move out of Thebes, and build a new city entirely devoted to Aten located somewhere in central Egypt. The shift in religion is obvious by looking