Egyptian Art Vocabulary

Amarna style

art created during the reign of Akhenaten, which features a more relaxed figure style than in Old and Middle Kingdom art

Ankh

an Egyptian symbol of life

Axial plan

a building with an elongated ground plan

Clerestory

a roof that rises above lower roofs and thus has window space beneath

Engaged column

a column that is not freestanding but attached to a wall

Ground line

a baseline upon which figures stand

Hierarchy of scale

a system of representation that expresses a person’s importance by the size of his or her representation in a work of art

Hieroglyphics

Egyptian writing using symbols or pictures as characters

Hypostyle

a hall that has a roof supported by a dense thicket of columns

In situ

a Latin expression that means that something is in its original location

Ka

the soul, or spiritual essence, of a human being that either ascends to heaven or can live in an Egyptian statue itself

Mastaba

Arabic for “bench”, a low, flat-roofed Egyptian tomb with sides sloping down to the ground

Necropolis

literally, a “city of the dead”, a large burial area

Papyrus

a tall aquatic plant whose fiber is used as a writing surface in ancient Egypt

Peristyle

a colonnade surrounding a building or enclosing a courtyard

Pharaoh

a king of ancient Egypt

Pylon

a monumental gateway to an Egyptian temple marked by two flat, sloping walls between which is a smaller entrance

Register

a horizontal band, often on top of another, that tells a narrative story

Relief sculpture

sculpture that projects from a flat background. A very shallow relief is called a bas-relief

Reserve column

a column that is cut away from rock but has no support function

Sarcophagus

a stone coffin

Stylized

a schematic, nonrealistic manner of representing the visible world and its contents, abstracted from the way that they appear in nature

Sunken relief

a carving in which the outlines of figures are deeply carved into a surface so that the figures seem to project forward