A Companion to Ancient Egyptian Art, a volume of essays on a wide range of topics related to the study of Egyptian art, is part of Blackwell’s series “Companions to the Ancient World.” The book as a whole is impressive in its scope and theoretical sophistication, helpful to students of both Egyptology and art history, and vital as a snapshot of the current state of Egyptian art history. Its editor, Melinda Hartwig, is to be thanked for the thought and effort involved in producing such a volume, particularly in assembling the impressive list of contributors. The collection is organized thematically rather than chronologically; this immediately sets it apart from most overviews of Egyptian art and gives it a different and welcome role in the field. Its most important function is as a reference and a guide; some parts of it will be useful in the classroom, where its chapters will serve best if assigned alongside staples such as Gay Robins’s The Art of Ancient Egypt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).

At the start of the book is a thought-provoking essay by John Baines addressing the very definition of Egyptian art and the contexts for aestheticized behavior in ancient Egypt. Following this, “Part I: Methodological Approaches,” includes nine chapters: “Historiography of Ancient Egyptian Art,” “Style,” “Connoisseurship,” “Iconography and Symbolism,” “Semiotics and Hermeneutics,” “Gender and Sexuality,” “Reception and Perception,” “Representing the Other: Non-Egyptians in Pharaonic Iconography,” and “Interpreting Ancient Egyptian Material Culture.” Some of the chapters in this section adroitly explain theoretical approaches and then connect them to Egyptian art. Alexandra Verbovsek’s contribution, “Reception and Perception,” is notable in this regard, and is accessible while being far from simplistic. I will assign it, and Valérie Angenot’s “Semiotics and Hermeneutics,” in Egyptology graduate seminars. This section will be the most useful to students of Egyptology who, particularly in the Anglophone world, are rarely well versed in the theories and methods of art history.

“Part II: Materials and Mediums” includes five chapters: “Sculpture”; “Relief”; “Painting”; “Coffins, Cartonnage, and Sarcophagi”; and “Luxury Arts.” Occasionally these chapters try to do too much, providing a chronological overview of the development of the medium under discussion in insufficient space. However, these are some of the most important media for Egyptian art (even if the distinctions between them are perhaps not as clear-cut as the division into chapters would suggest—for instance, between relief and painting), and in many cases the authors do a commendable job extracting and summarizing. For instance Alexandra Woods, in discussing relief, makes important points about context and function that pick up themes of iconography, semiotics, and reception from the opening section.

“Part III: Concepts in Art” consists of five chapters: “Ideology and Propaganda,” “Religion and Ritual,” “Narrative,” “The Ordering of the Figure,” and “Portraiture.” I found this to be the most consistently strong of the sections, and these chapters will be especially useful to students of art history already familiar with theoretical approaches but seeking exposure to particularly Egyptian case studies. William M. Peck’s “The Ordering of the Figure” and Emily Teeter’s “Religion and Ritual” are worth noting. Teeter, in her discussion of festivals, picks up one of the most exciting lines of thought in Baines’s opening essay—the relationship between visual art and performance in Egypt. By focusing on a few different types of ritual she is able to demonstrate some of the fundamental reasons for the creation of Egyptian art and its changes over time. Also in this section, Nadja S. Braun’s treatment of “narrative” and its pictorial depiction provides an important perspective, given both the static, timeless quality of much Egyptian art and its rather paradoxical inclusion of what seem to be details of specific episodes. This tension between generic and specific is fundamental to Egyptian art, as well as to the relationship between art and text in Egypt, and a focus on narrative is a useful way of examining it. Braun’s discussion is also a reminder of how much intellectual context is missing when attempting to interpret Egyptian art. What is the story that resulted in a picture of a bird climbing a ladder to the upper branches of a fig tree, where a hippopotamus with a basket stands amid the leaves, plucking fruit (355)?

“Part IV: Interconnections with the Larger World” contains three chapters: “Greece and Rome,” “Ancient Near East,” and “The Art and Architecture of Kushite Nubia.” The authors of these chapters use a range of different approaches to their subjects, sometimes within one essay. The latter two chapters are quite focused, one discussing channels of communication between the Ancient Near East and Egypt that led to the near simultaneous emergence of writing as well as some shared artistic motifs, the other on a period in which kings from Nubia (modern Sudan) ruled Egypt and developed a hybrid style of art. The chapter on Greece and Rome, by Barbara Mendoza, tries to do too much. It starts by listing nearly all Bronze Age evidence of contact, before moving to a discussion of Classical interactions as evident in everything from pottery, to painting, to architecture, to the slight smile on the face of kouroi. Collectively these chapters show how daunting and enormous the topic of interaction is rather than providing a solid overview of the range of influences on Egyptian art, the range of things Egyptian art influenced, or how art was a medium for negotiating interaction more broadly. This would be an impossible task to accomplish in three chapters.

“Part V: Reception of Ancient Egyptian Art in the Modern World” consists of a single chapter on Egyptomania. Certainly there are additional topics that could be addressed in such a section, including the role of museums in shaping our definition and understanding of Egyptian art, and the ethics of collecting antiquities. This last in particular should be paramount in a comprehensive work on Egyptian art at a time when both the looting of archaeological sites and the importance of cultural patrimony are under discussion.

The final section brings together three chapters under the heading of “Technology and Interpretation.” These are “Interpretation” (which would be better titled “Epigraphy”), “Technology,” and “Conservation,” of which the last is a particularly helpful overview. Some underlying issues are not resolved or defined—does technology mean ancient technologies used to make art, or the modern technologies we use to study it? While the issues raised are interesting, the section as a whole lacks the coherence of some others.

The organization by section is helpful for moving away from a chronological or genre-based approach to Egyptian art, but also presents challenges, some of which are perhaps unavoidable in an edited volume. What is most obviously lacking is synthesis, either within each section or across the volume as a whole. This can be demonstrated by the frequent repetition of certain theoretical approaches (iconography and semiotics, to name just two) and particular themes (fishing and fowling in the marshes, or the funerary banquet, for instance), with no way for the reader to synthesize the many and related points made by different contributions. Introductory essays at the head of each part might be a way to bridge the gap, but this is not standard in the Blackwell “Companions” series. Without this, more consistent references in chapters to one another, and a better index, would have helped.

The other chief problem with the book lies in the number and quality of its illustrations. There is almost no chapter that would not have benefited from more and clearer illustrations. While one of the chapters, Nigel Strudwick’s “Interpretation,” makes a strong case for publishing Egyptian art on flat surfaces as line drawings, nearly all of the figures in the book are photographs. These are very often reproduced at small scale and with little contrast, which is especially troubling in an expensive book about art. Only ten illustrations are in color, and three of these reproduce facsimiles rather than originals.

Despite the caveats mentioned above, the value of this book is immense. No other work comes close to providing such an introduction to the ideas and bibliography of Egyptian art history; many of its chapters stand alone as thought-provoking essays of particular use to students; and in documenting the state of Egyptian art history it points to several productive paths forward. In particular, the theoretical holes made clear in the first section are stark; Maya Müller, for instance, notes that “the term ‘iconography’ went almost unused in Egyptology before the late 1960s” (82). Müller’s essay, “Iconography and Symbolism,” read together with those by Angenot, Verbovsek, and Braun, comes close to providing a blueprint for an exciting new orientation for Egyptian art history. A Companion to Ancient Egyptian Art thus serves not only as an introduction to art-historical theory for Egyptologists but also as a call to arms for the field. We should answer.