Egyptian Art
A profile face, but the eye faces forward. The shoulders face forward too. Egyptian painting does not draw things as they appear. It combines the angles from which each part is best understood. What mattered was not how something looked, but that it endured unchanged. What is startling is what follows: this convention barely changed for roughly three thousand years. Most of the styles on this map shifted within a few decades, so the scale here is not even close. An art that kept choosing, again and again, not to change, truly existed. There was one exception in three thousand years. From about 1353 to 1336 BC, under a king called Akhenaten, who switched the country to the worship of the sun disc Aten alone, the rules of painting and sculpture changed with the religion. Bodies were stretched long, faces were given expression, and the king was carved playing with his wife and children. Something that had not moved for millennia moved distinctly, for about twenty years. Then the king died, and by Tutankhamun's reign it had been put back. An art that chose not to change had exactly one deviation, and it lasted twenty years. And it happened because the religion changed. Change what people believe and the shape of a human body changes with it. Near the very beginning of this map, that was tried once.