Abstract
From its very beginnings, and despite the very clear opinion of its inventor, Jean-François Champollion, Egyptology seems always to have had difficulty in recognizing Egyptian art as genuine or worthy of this qualification. Rather than tracing the historiography of the discipline's complex relationship with one of the three fundamental sources of its knowledge—alongside textual productions and archaeological remains—this first introductory lecture will address the criteria that have been invoked to deny the existence of a fully-fledged art and, corollary to this, of artists worthy of the name in ancient Egypt. By taking into account the specificities of Pharaonic culture, we can indeed show that the criteria that are usually used to define art and the artist in the modern Western (or Westernized) world are all indeed present in ancient Egypt, but in a form particular to that culture. Rather than focusing on points of opposition that would enable us to rank modern Western artists in relation to others, the presentation will invite us to consider the contribution of the Egyptian case to the study of what art and artists are in general, beyond the context of the modern West.
