Describe the unique features of Egyptian art and literature.

Although ancient Egypt did not produce any literary masterpieces, texts survive on tomb and temple walls, papyrus rolls that show prayers and songs, royal decrees and letters, prose tales, and texts that served to educate the young. From the New Kingdom came a very personal genre of poetry that would come to be called lyric poetry, because the poems were accompanied by a lyre.
Egyptian visual arts comes almost exclusively from tombs and temples. In representations of everyday life, figures are usually sized according to a strict hierarchy, or graded order: upper-class individuals are shown larger than lower-class ones, and males usually outsize females and servants. Artists developed a canon (or set of rules) by which to represent the human form. The proportions of the human body were determined according to a module (or standard of measurement) represented by the width of the clenched fist. More generally, Egyptian artists, in depicting the human figure, showed the upper torso from the front, while the lower from the side; the head is depicted in profile, while the eye and eyebrow are frontal. This method of representation is conceptualthat is, based on ideasrather than perceptualthat is, based on visual evidence.