Paintings and hieroglyphics

by Kate
(Leeds)

Ever since I was little I've been fascinated by the Ancient Egyptians, especially the hieroglyphics and tomb paintings.

What always interested me the most was the peculiar perspective that they used to show people.

The feet face to one side, as though the person is walking along. Then when you get to the waist it does a 90 degree twist and turns towards you. The shoulders and arms follow this twist and look as though they belong to someone facing you. But then the head of the person is looking to the side and you see their profile.

It's always struck me as weird that you can have such an odd drawing and yet it looks perfectly normal. How does that work?

The colours of the paintings always appealed to me too. Even though they're thousands of years old they are still fresh and vivid. I love the way that they show all sorts of people working in the fields, baking, playing music, making offerings to their gods and all sorts of other everyday activities.

As a child I spent hours looking through a well thumbed book of the history of Ancient Egypt. I still have that book and now and again I pull it out and look at those well loved pictures.

This book has a hieroglyphic alphabet, so I used to make drawings of the various letters that made up the names of my friends and give them out as "presents". My sister and I used to write code messages in hieroglyphics too, something that gave us hours of entertainment.