Covenant murals

The Covenant kept a series of murals in High Charity which depicted important social, cultural, and religious events that occurred in the hegemony's thousands-year history. The murals would have been likely destroyed after the fall of High Charity in 2552. Sometime after the Human-Covenant War, a Sangheili Shipmaster seeking asylum provided useful intel to the UNSC and replicated the murals for them in hand-drawn sketches.

Production notes
"We have this fantastic story arc that we're trying to get across and we have all this back story that we're trying to get across. And there comes a point where we look at the amount of time we have left to finish this game and we realize that we're just crazy and we're not going to be able to do all of this. So we pick our battles with what we can cut out..."

- CJ Cowan

In the deleted scenes on the Halo 2 Limited Collector's Edition DVD, Joseph Staten displays an unfinished cut cinematic of the Covenant murals which depict the seven different types of "ages" of Covenant history.

Trivia

 * There are seven murals; this is probably yet another one of Bungie's seven references.
 * Se7en created re-renders of the murals on the Bungie forums, and Bungie acknowledges them as correct. They may be viewed here.
 * Reimaginings of the iconography used in the cut Halo 2 murals can be found in the ancient Sangheili ruins in Nuusra in the Sanghelios levels of Halo 5: Guardians.

List of appearances

 * Halo: Broken Circle
 * Halo: Envoy