King Pepi I before restoration.
Provenance: Thebes?

     The above series of photographs was taken from the releifs at the Cleveland Musuem of Art. The orientation of the photos have been altered in order to fascilitate comparision.  
   The photos are interesting because they begin to shed light on some of the highly developed ideas regarding the "individual" in the Old Kingdom sculptural traditions. Here we can quickly see that according to the Nubian-Egypt aesthetic and artistic cannon each man is given a unique and individual treatment.
    This small collections of images also shows the diversity of the African population in Egypt during the Old Kingdom epoch. We see some straight "Hamitic/Mediteranean/East African" profiles, some with sub-nasal prognathism, and other with a depressed nasion who are looking like Bantus, and so on. All the men were originally painted dark-redish brown and have facial characteristics still found in our modern African societies.