After Narmer’s unification of the Two Lands around 3100 BCE set the visual rules for royal display, those canons filtered into private sculpture. By the early reign of Snefru, c. 2600 BCE, craftsmen at Meidum carved limestone pairs for Prince Rahotep and his wife Nofret. Each figure was meant for a single front view, the pose locked into the straight-backed seat, the skin tones following the long-standing gender code—reddish brown for an active man, pale yellow for a domestic woman. Rahotep’s clenched fists and neatly painted moustache echo earlier royal images; Nofret’s snug dress and wig frame the florid collar and diadem that mark her closeness to court. Both stare out with inlaid rock-crystal eyes that once caught light inside the mastaba and kept the couple’s spirits alert for eternity.Half a century later sculptors re-used the same formal grammar for Menkaure’s schist triads at Giza, showing how firmly the Old Kingdom valued frontal symmetry and ideal youth. Yet Rahotep and Nofret preserve an intimacy absent from those state monuments: hieroglyphs on the throne backs name family ties, and Rahotep’s heart amulet hints at personal hopes for judgment day.Mariette’s workmen uncovered the statues in 1871, still bright with pigment under mastaba rubble. Today they sit side by side in Cairo’s Egyptian Museum, their preserved colours and glassy gazes offering a vivid glimpse of how Egypt’s elite imagined themselves when eternity was young.