The ancient Egyptian word hemut is translated as 'art' in some contexts, 'craft' in others.

The hemutyu 'people employed in hemut' are always men, in surviving written and pictorial sources.

There are few explicit divisions of hemutyu into different groups, but we find two possible clues towards the definition of hemut.:

The Middle Kingdom composition known in Egyptology as the Satire of Trades records the hardships suffered by manual workers. However, though it includes craftsmen such as basket-weavers and potters as well as sculptors and jewellers, it refers to professions (using the word iat) rather than hemut. So it does not prove that the ancient Egyptian literate elite considered pottery or weaving as 'art'.

The following nineteen professions are included in the Satire of Trades:

The late Middle Kingdom witnessed an exceptionally precise style of designating the official positions held by individuals (again using, in some contexts at least, the word iat). Several of these tightly expressed designations incorporate the word waret 'section',on the model 'overseer of the section of goldsmiths'. The surviving and published sources include nine such sections, all referring to a group of workers entrusted with commodities of high material value - metal (tools) and, in one instance, cloth (linen production being one of the principal industries of ancient Egypt). In eight of the nine cases, these workers are craftsmen. These offer a preliminary guide to the ancient Egyptian administration of art, and so, though only indirectly, to an implicit definition of art by the ancient Egyptian literate elite: note though that the surviving record is extremely broken.

The sections (Egyptian waret) for whom overseers are attested in late Middle Kingdom sources:

The first of these sections underpins most if not all of the rest: the draughtsman is necessary for creating outlines of figures and other compositional elements according to the correct proportions (see the page on guidelines and grids for the variations in proportions across the three thousand years in which ancient Egyptian formal art was in use). The basic tool of the draughtsman is the reed brush; unfinished compositions indicate that his main pigments are red ochre, for the first outline, and carbon black, for the revised or corrected version.

Leaving aside the laundrymen (who would have needed to be controlled because they were handling valuable cloth), the other sections have perhaps one principal shared element: a tool with pointed metal blade. This tool may have been used more in the finishing of a work: for example, a faience figure might be made with a mould, but a fine point would be used application of details before firing. These sections involve craftsmen whose work might have included figurative depictions; although there is no evidence from the late Middle Kingdom, even the sandalmakers might have had to add figures, in the case of production of shoes for the king, as New Kingdom (about 1550-1069 BC) examples include images of foreigners

This would agree with the Satire of Trades, section 5, where hemuu 'craftsman' seems to be defined in a qualifying phrase in the combination hemuu neb tjay anet 'any craftsman who wields a blade'.

The sections along with that of draughtsmen, offer an implicit definition of figurative formal art by the criterion of their tools: art, or at least Egyptian hemut, may be defined as the terrain of draughtsman's brush and craftsman's chisel.