Painted plaster in the tombs of New Kingdom Thebes. Figures stand on register lines in composite view: profile head, frontal eye, frontal shoulders, profile legs, both feet seen from the inside. The king is largest, then the elite, then everyone else. A column of hieroglyphs is part of the picture.
Each thing is shown from its most recognisable angle, because the painting had a job to do in the afterlife, not a view to record. Registers are a message too: a scene without a baseline meant chaos. Egyptian blue, the first synthetic pigment, joined the ochres around 2500 BC.
A plaster ground with soft blotches and grain. The figure is filled face by face in flat tones inside one union contour, with kohl strokes pulled out from the eye centres. The sun, the glyph columns and the painted border are drawn by small glyph functions on a cached layer.