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Two musicians sit in heavy braided wigs and gold disk earrings, with a cone of scented fat on each wig. The one on the right blows the double pipes and turns her face full to the front. Egyptian painters held people to strict profile for 3,000 years, and these two do not.

Nebamun counted grain for the temple of Amun, and to look at his tomb walls you would think he did nothing but throw parties. He was a scribe, an accountant of the harvest brought to the god, a middling official who could afford a painted tomb-chapel across the river from Thebes around 1350 BC. On its walls the feast runs forever. Guests sit in rows in white linen with cones of scented fat balanced on their wigs, meant to melt through the evening and leave the hair perfumed. Servants pour wine. Two naked girls dance while women play for them, and the whole scene is stocked with everything the dead man wanted to keep having: food, drink, music, company, the good life on repeat. One thing in the painting breaks every rule Egyptian artists kept. They drew people in profile, always, the eye and shoulders turned flat to the viewer, a convention held for 3,000 years. But two of the seated musicians here are painted full-face, staring straight out of the wall at whoever is looking, and one of them holds the double pipes to her mouth with both hands. They are lower-class women, drawn with a looseness the stiff aristocrats never get, and their frontal faces give them a liveliness that reads across 34 centuries. Above them a line of hieroglyphs carries the words of their song: the earth god has caused his beauty to grow in every body. The channels are filled with water anew, and the land is flooded with love of him. The paint is real Egyptian tomb painting, not a European guess at one, which makes it rarer than any Salon canvas. It was cut off the wall in fragments and sold. A Greek collector named Giovanni d’Athanasi, digging for the British consul Henry Salt, found the chapel around 1820 and hacked out the best scenes; they reached the British Museum in 1821. What he did to the rest, and exactly where the tomb stood, he never clearly said, and the chapel has never been found again. The location died with him. So the fragments in London are all that is left of the room, and they are enough to date a lost building and name a dead accountant. The dancers turn, the pipes play, the wine keeps coming. A hired painter working for a grain clerk somewhere in the hills at Thebes gave two servant girls a straight look out of the wall. That was 34 centuries before anyone thought to call it a rule broken.