Egyptian: Art as Interior Inspiration

I recently returned from a trip to Egypt, and I came away with an enormous appreciation for the art, culture, and history of this ancient civilization. I don’t think we focussed enough on this in American schooling when I was growing up, but we should take a moment to recognize the industry, innovation, and foreign relations of ancient Egypt.

Aside from their incredible architecture that still stands today in the form of pyramids and temples as proof of their design prowess, they also invented paper, ink, math, astronomy, breath mints, medicine, makeup!

When the Greeks and Egyptians became trading partners, the Greeks embraced much of what the Egyptians had known for centuries. I found an interesting article about that here.

Wallpaper and Mural

But what I was most impressed with were the painting on the tomb walls in the “Valley of the Kings,” outside of Luxor, known as Thebes in ancient times. Oh my gosh, I think the designs are beautiful in color, but also pattern and scale. There are a mix of larger scenes, which dominate one portion of the wall, then smaller scenes and even smaller hieroglyphs, resulting in a perfect composition of larger and smaller elements. Let me show you what I’m talking about:

Isn’t this incredible? It’s a lot like mural wallpapers we are using today. Refer to my post on that here. I find that there is so much interest here, yet it is balanced in colors and scale.

There are a few other patterns I’d like to show you, that I think would make incredible wallpaper:

This was on the ceiling of a tomb, so they decorated their ceilings in ancient times too. Can’t you imagine this in other colorways? This one was my favorite, but there are others:

I was looking for recreations of art like this in the bazaar in Cairo, but they had nothing quite like these. And I love to use art and souvenirs from my travels to decorate my home, like I spoke about here.

Since I couldn’t find the art I wanted I am having one of my images printed on canvas. This is easy to do with companies like Canvaspop. I’ll let you know how mine turns out, but in the meantime, I will show you a few more amazing tomb paintings.