Egyptian art and architecture, the ancient architectural monuments, sculptures, paintings, and applied crafts produced mainly during the dynastic periods of the first three millennia BCE in the Nile valley regions of Egypt and Nubia. The course of art in Egypt paralleled to a large extent the country's political history, but it depended as well on the entrenched belief in the permanence of the natural, divinely ordained order. Artistic achievement in both architecture and representational art aimed at the preservation of forms and conventions that were held to reflect the perfection of the world at the primordial moment of creation and to embody the correct relationship between humankind, the king, and the pantheon of the gods. For this reason, Egyptian art appears outwardly resistant to development and the exercise of individual artistic judgment, but Egyptian artisans of every historical period found different solutions for the conceptual challenges posed to them.
Upper Egypt, Arabic Qiblī Miṣr, also called Al-Ṣaʿīd ("The Upland"), geographic and cultural division of Egypt, generally consisting of the Nile River valley south of the delta and the 30th parallel N. It thus consists of the entire Nile River valley from Cairo south to Lake Nasser (formed by the Aswan High Dam). This division also includes what some scholars term Middle Egypt (from Lisht to Panopolis).
In late predynastic times, Upper Egypt constituted a political entity separate from Lower Egypt (the delta region). But Menes (fl. 2900 BCE) joined Upper and Lower Egypt, and each Egyptian king thenceforth had as one of his royal titles "King of Upper and Lower Egypt" (or "He of the Sut-Plant and the Bee"), thus signifying that he was the deified representation of those divisions' unification.