The Life Of Ancient Egyptians

12 Pages 3111 Words

rking in. True, far fewer woods than stone statues have been excavated, but this may simply are because a much higher proportion have succumbed to the ravages of time. Only rarely have metal statues been found. The figure of King Pepy I exhibited in the Egyptian Museum, Cairo, is made of copper plates beaten and riveted together and was made in a metal-beater's shop. Not till the New Kingdom do we find depictions of bronze figures being made. There are Old and Middle Kingdom relief’s showing statues of commoners being made - the owners of the tombs and their families - but none showing a statue of royalty. In the New Kingdom, by contrast, the bulk of sculpture work shifted to temple studios where numerous figures of kings were turned out both for the temples themselves and for royal tombs. It was the sculptor's aim in ancient Egypt to reproduce the subject's appearance as faithfully as possible. He did not however have in mind a portrait in the modern sense, exhibiting a particular person at a particular moment in his life, but the presentati...