A History of Art for Beginners and Students: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture

How it begins

No one can speak with exactness as to the time when sculpture was first practised by the Egyptians; we only know that it was a very long time ago. But we do know that in the time of the twelfth dynasty, which dates from 2466 B.C., sculpture had reached a stage of excellence such as could only have resulted from the experience of many years of training and practice in this art. In the Egyptian collection of the Louvre, at Paris, there is the memorial stone of an old Egyptian sculptor which has an inscription that reads as if he had written it himself; this was the way by which Egyptians made these inscriptions sound as if the dead themselves spoke to those who were still alive.