Style combination · Pairs well

Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic × Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art

In 2012 Luxor-trained muralists such as Alaa Awad recast tomb painting on Cairo's Mohamed Mahmoud Street: profile processions of mourning women, registers, a sarcophagus and the weighing of the heart, brushed in acrylic around the faces of the martyrs. Look there for a living Egyptian use of the register and the procession, credited to its painters, rather than Egyptomania décor.

From the research on Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic & Register Composition

Mix them and make something Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic, their arrangement from Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic, the finish from Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art. Not a real work, and not an image of either style.

What each style brings

Each part of the design comes from the style with the stronger say in it, and each style gives at least two.

Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic & Register Composition Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art (Mohamed Mahmoud Murals)

Type from Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art: Hand-lettering
Colour from Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic: Flat fields
Earth & mineral
Form from Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic: Pictogram
Stylised figuration
Composition from Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic: Framed panels
Column grid
Surface from Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art: Painterly brushwork

The type

Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.

Display · Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art

Halo

Permanent Marker, standing in for Freehand Arabic slogans in spray paint and marker, sometimes with English lines, scrawled beside and over the pictures

Text · Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic

The visual system of pharaonic Egypt, in which writing is made of pictures and pictures are ruled like writing. Scenes stand in horizontal registers; figures are drawn in composite view, sized by rank rather than distance and laid out to a canon of proportions, in flat mineral colour without depth. Hieroglyphs run in columns or rows, packed into square groups facing the start of the line, and fill the spaces around figures as captions. Book of the Dead papyri add black text with red rubrics and framed vignettes; royal names stand in cartouches.

Inter; Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic used Monumental hieroglyphs, carved in raised or sunk relief and usually painted, grouped in square blocks (quadrats) in columns or rows and Cursive hieroglyphs (hieroglyphic book hand), written with a reed brush in black and red ink on papyrus, wood or leather, usually in columns, for religious texts such as the Book of the Dead and the Coffin Texts

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic, with a counter-accent from Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic & Register Composition Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art (Mohamed Mahmoud Murals)

#e8dcb5 ground · 36%
#1c1a17 ink · 14%
#d4a03a accent · 18%
#c8102e accent · 14%
#a63d24 accent · 10%
#1f5c9e accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #e8dcb5;
  --ink: #1c1a17;
  --accent-1: #d4a03a;
  --accent-2: #c8102e;
  --accent-3: #a63d24;
  --accent-4: #1f5c9e;
  --font-display: "Permanent Marker", cursive;
  --font-text: "Inter", sans-serif;
}

Use it with care

Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic & Register Composition: Hieroglyphs were 'the words of the gods', and most surviving pages and walls are funerary and temple texts written for named people, spells for the afterlife and royal names that carried sacred power: do not use them as random texture, invent pseudo-hieroglyphs, or put an ordinary name in a cartouche as if it were ancient practice, since cartouches enclosed royal names; nor scatter the ankh, djed, wedjat eye, scarab or winged sun disc as décor, since the first four were protective amulets and the winged disc was the emblem of Behdety, Horus of Edfu, protector of the pharaoh. Image models cannot write hieroglyphs and make up signs, so leave text areas blank in generated images, have any real text composed or checked by an Egyptologist from Gardiner's sign list, and never present a generated image as an ancient work. Many key works left Egypt in contested ways: the Papyrus of Ani was found in 1888 by Egyptians trading in illegal antiquities and obtained by E. A. Wallis Budge for the British Museum, by his own account smuggled out after the police had sealed the dealers' houses (locals tunnelled in while he kept the guards busy with a meal), for which the Treasury later paid him a £150 'gratuity'; the Nebamun paintings were hacked from the tomb walls around 1820 and sold by Henry Salt; and the Egyptologist Zahi Hawass, formerly in charge of Egypt's antiquities, has repeatedly called for the Rosetta Stone's return as the 'icon of our Egyptian identity'. Credit objects with their findspots and holding institutions, treat pharaonic heritage as part of modern Egypt's identity rather than as exotic 'Egyptomania' décor, and avoid casting the ancient Egyptians to fit modern racial claims.

Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art (Mohamed Mahmoud Murals): These walls commemorate real people killed or maimed in 2011–13, whose families are alive, alongside images of women assaulted by security forces, Qur'anic verses and Coptic and Islamic sacred imagery; do not reuse martyr portraits, eye patches or the 'blue bra' as edgy protest styling for a brand, have every Arabic line read by a fluent reader, and credit the artists and photographers by name. The walls were also religiously contested: Awad painted some of his Pharaonic women nude as a stand against the Wahhabi style of Islam, and Salafists erased some martyr portraits and put Qur'anic verses in their place, so do not pair those figures with Qur'anic verses for effect. After July 2013 the interim government built its own martyrs' memorial in Tahrir, which protesters wrecked, and the Muslim Brotherhood staked its own claim to the revolution's dead, so check whose dead a reused martyr motif would seem to mourn. Political street art remains dangerous in Egypt: Ganzeer was detained in 2011, four graffiti artists were detained for 12 hours in May 2015 after painting a mural, and 400 copies of Walls of Freedom were confiscated in Alexandria for allegedly 'inciting violence', so never put Egyptian artists or collaborators at risk with work attributed to them.

The two styles

c. 0–394 · Middle East & North Africa Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic & Register Composition The visual system of pharaonic Egypt, in which writing is made of pictures and pictures are ruled like writing. Scenes stand in horizontal registers; figures are drawn in composite view, sized by rank rather than distance and laid out to a canon of proportions, in flat mineral colour without depth. Hieroglyphs run in columns or rows, packed into square groups facing the start of the line, and fill the spaces around figures as captions. Book of the Dead papyri add black text with red rubrics and framed vignettes; royal names stand in cartouches.

A distressed, Egyptian-inspired illustrated poster centres on a young man with an eye bandage, a red halo and outspread multicoloured wings beneath the words “STILL HERE.” Military portraits, riot police, a funeral procession, Egyptian deities, flowers and birds fill the surrounding ochre, red, blue and black composition.

2011–2014 · Middle East & North Africa Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art (Mohamed Mahmoud Murals) The street art of Egypt's 2011 revolution and the years after it, when Cairo's walls, above all around Tahrir and Mohamed Mahmoud Street, became what Ammar Abo Bakr called a newspaper. Three idioms share them: portraits of martyrs with wings and eye patches; neo-Pharaonic friezes of mourning and marching women by Luxor-trained muralists; and sardonic caricatures, stencils and Arabic slogans against the army, Mubarak and later Morsi. Whitewashed again and again, the walls were repainted in reply.

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