Fragment of a Painted Floor
Plaster, pigment
New Kingdom, reign of Akhenaten, ca. 1352-1336 B.C.
Tell el-Amarna
Gift of the Egypt Exploration Society, 1922
OIM 120

At Tell el-Amarna, the capital city of the Pharaoh Akhenaten and his wife Nefertiti, the floors of many buildings were brightly painted with naturalistic scenes. Atypical of what we perceive ancient Egyptian art to be, this unusual floor fragment is decorated with cornflowers that appear to sway in the breeze. This emphasis upon nature and movement is a hallmark of the art of Akhenaten's reign.

Art was used as a form of communication for those who could not read. It was also used to decorate and to document aspects of daily life for future generations or to create objects for funerary and religious rituals. Egyptian artisans were anonymous skilled workers employed by the government or by temples. Artisans worked in highly organized workshops or special communities, overseen by a supervisor.

Wall murals were a common form of decoration in ancient Egyptian buildings. They usually depicted scenes from Egyptian life or religious imagery. Large-scale paintings were the result of team work, with each person specializing in one aspect of the process. Illustration of the human figure remained uniform over thousands of years because artisans used a standardized grid to determine proportions. The rendering of the human body was highly stylized with the head shown in profile, the eyes and shoulders drawn from the front, the torso in a 3/4 view, and the rest of the body in profile from the waist down.