Examining the Symbolic Meaning of Colors in Ancient Egyptian Painting Art and Their Origin in Environment

Throughout history, human beings have used different ways including arts to express their feelings and thoughts. Painting art has served different purposes. It has been used a medium to portray sacred things or to spend leisure time. Paintings can carry real and symbolic meanings. Sometimes they depict the reality in the environment, and sometimes they present unrealistic events or have a symbolic meaning. Color as the most important elements of the painting used in different ways to present a variety of concepts such as death, immortality. Ancient Egypt is one of the greatest and first civilizations of mankind from which many archaeological works and artworks have remained.
Previous research has analyzed the symbolic meaning of colors in the ancient Egyptian paintings based on linguistics. So far no research has analyzed the symbolic meanings of colors and traced its origin in the real environment. This paper is an attempt to analyze symbolic meanings of colors in ancient Egyptian painting works.
MethodologyDue to the presence of the gods in the ancient Egyptian paintings throughout history, we have analyzed the colors in the image of the gods of ancient Egypt. To this purpose, after selecting the images of the gods, the most important recurring elements (objects) and the main colors in the paintings were examined. The meaning each of colors and their manifestation in the ancient Egyptian environment were analyzed. Finally, to support our analysis, we searched for the evidence to show how concepts are presented in the colors available in the paintings. As the death concept has received much attention from the ancient Egyptian people, the paintings portraying the mummification rituals, mourning and judgment were analyzed.