Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
I think it’s very important that you pointed out the difference in environment for the Egyptians and Mesopotamians, and how that would influence their art and religion. The resources on hand to create statues and scenes were different, I think the Egyptians had a bit of an advantage in having stuff to make paper with. It’s also worth pointing out that the two cultures traded with each other, bouncing ideas back and forth and putting their own unique shine on them. Egypt and Mesopotamia influenced each other as soon as they could trade together.
I’m not sure they had any real idea of what happens after death, but their religion did motivate and control a large enough civilization to build some impressive stuff. Their adherence to tradition may have held them back though, too much conservatism is as detrimental to stable growth as too much liberalism. They were fairly smart, and the fact scribes were an upper class shows that rulers appreciated intelligence. Have you seen the Aeoliphile? It’s an early steam engine that was used in ancient Egypt to wow temple-goers by powering automatic doors. No need for trains when you still use slaves.
Egyptians used the same poses and symbols over and over the course of thousands of years. Their rituals and behavior ensured that the gods would continue to provide them with a predictable life. This belief system was tied into the regular flooding of the Nile river. There must have been years that the flooding wasn’t adequate, and then the ruler is blamed for the misfortune of all of his subjects.
Egyptian rulers needed to be seen as tightly tied to the gods, worshiping and doing their bidding — not just their own. Public opinion needed to be in their favor, so they needed to appear devout and on the side of keeping everything working. Much Egyptian art depicts rulers making offerings and performing rituals to the gods. They also built impressive temples and tombs, ones that needed to be looked up at, even from far away, to remind their people of the connection between King and god.
Egyptians had an obsessive need for belief in permanence, which makes sense if you live between a flooding cycle and shifting sands that threaten to engulf everything you’ve built. Their tombs at Beni Hasan look like homes for the dead. They are buried with their possessions, and provisions for a permanent afterlife. Whole lives were dedicated to their afterlife.
Egyptians depicted foods, slaves, and tools on their tomb walls that the dead would use in the afterlife. They created a bridge between humans and their gods using representative symbols — which seems like the bridge between our head and our hand when bringing ideas into the physical world. The Egyptians needed to bring divine ideas into physical reality to have a functioning society, and it makes sense the bridge would go both ways — taking what lives in our world into the next.
It was very interesting to see the chapel doorway that was carved with the life story of Tahshepsis, which said that his king let him kiss the foot instead of kissing the ground. This showed how direct contact with the king was close to direct contact with a god, and not available to everyone.
Both Mesopotamia and Egypt worshiped their gods through service to the king and his dynasty. He was their earthly connection to their gods. Both cultures produced carved scenes of their kings performing rituals and giving offerings to the gods. They both also used size to depict the importance of rulers and gods, as in the Palette of King Narmer and the Stele of Naram-sin. They also share some mythology — the serpopards on the Palette also show up on a Mesopotamian cylinder seal, but not in such nice detail.
Although both cultures came up with a writing system, the Egyptian written language was more elaborately decorative. Mesopotamians came up with clay tablets, and Egyptians created paper that could be carried and stored more easily. Beauty seemed to be more important to Egyptians when it came to visual communication, so even the Hieratic script they developed was full of curls and flourishes. Cuniform was more limited, but so was the ability to make paper in Mesopotamia.
Egyptian kings would donate art and ritual objects to the temples, but Mesopotamian rulers would have votives of themselves made to stand in supplication in their temples while still alive. Egyptians would have statues of their dead ancestors standing in their family temples. I also noticed that images of people in tombs or temples are barefoot in both Egypt and Mesopotamia, showing that they are on holy ground.
Both cultures had the idea that the statues and scenes of their rulers had an impact far after the death of the person being depicted. Egyptian and Mesopotamian art was vandalized specifically to remove the eyes or ears of the rulers, to take away their power after death.
Mesopotamians and Egyptians both came up with pottery, with decorative scenes of animals and repetitious symbols. Their pottery started out rough, then became delicate as they developed the pottery wheel. I assume their pottery decoration became finer from the wheel as well, in being able to paint lines for registers swift and even.
Just like the Mesopotamians, Egyptians depicted their rulers as ideals of godly beauty rather than in realistic portraiture. For example, Queen Nefertiti’s bust looks like a Prada model, but digital mapping and 3D reconstruction of her mummy’s face show someone we wouldn’t recognize as the queen of the Nile. Statues of rulers were almost completely symmetrical, strongly facing forward with stiffly posed limbs to impart a sense of mastery. Interesting that later rulers had themselves portrayed as wise and older.
My favorite similarity between the two cultures is that they weren’t shy to scavenge brick from the building projects of previous kings. It’s a pain to the kings in the afterlife, and it’s a pain to modern anthropologists who are trying to piece history back together. First rate jerkery!
That’s a fantastic point! Humans seem to have a ‘thing’ about removing the eyes on images of people we don’t like. If images of rulers had wide eyes to show that they were always watching, and always taking in god’s will, their enemies would destroy the eyes to break their connection to god and stop them from looking at the earth. We get creeped out by pictures where the eyes seem to follow you, I wonder if Mesopotamians did too?
Great commentary on the Vessel of Uruk! The literal stratifying lines on the vessel separate the different classes of life by their importance in the society. Your most interesting point was about the separation between king and servant being similar to the separation between servant and animal/plant. I noticed on the vessel that there is more visual order to the servant and animal scenes, that they are like little marching armies in comparison to the top scene. I wonder if this is the order the rulers wish to impose on the lower classes?
In the Stele of Hammurabi, punishments were different depending on what class you were. Punishments for elites involved paying fines, and punishments for lower class people involved physical violence and death. Rules were different for women, reflecting expected obedience to their husband but also men’s responsibility to financially care for women. It is interesting that the stele seems to be a record of legal precident, rather than actual solid laws. And that it was placed in a public place so that people would gain comfort in the defined order that their king brought to their lives — even if some of the rulings sucked.
Cylinder seals were used like we use our ID and signature today. The level of artistry of one’s seal could tell people how high or low in class you were. Rich people could afford to hire the best artists, so their seals were beautiful and highly detailed. Rough or simple seals showed that you were low class. This makes me think of the business card scene in American Psycho, but set in Mesopotamia.
Size mattered in carved scenes, showing that the higher class were shown as much larger than the “little people.’ Rulers were shown as nearly the size of gods, and it seems like society was built around worship of the gods through the living rulers.
Most of the scenes that showed regular people depicted them as slaves, servants, and soldiers in service to their royalty. All attention is payed to the central royal figure, all movement is in supplication to them. This would suggest that the lower class only existed to serve royalty, but it could also mean that the people who had money and time were the ones to chisel the history scenes. I have to assume that the lower classes still knew how to party, they just weren’t recorded.
The statues of mesopotamian rulers were usually idealized, with intent to make them look as god-like and attractive as possible. The images were meant to embody their ruling power long after death. Campaign ads were carved to show the rulers defeating nature and their enemies and bringing fertility to the land they ruled. The rulers also contracted large temples to be built, to inspire awe in their subjects and associate themselves with the gods. Amazing feats of architecture were used to dazzle subjects and visitors, such as arches and gates that people pass through to get near the ruler or enter the ruler’s city.
In the Stele of Naram-sin, the ruler is depicted as much larger than his army men or his enemies, to show how he’s much more important. All the eyes of the small people are focused on Naram-sin, to draw the viewer’s eyes toward him.
Nebuchadnezzar associated himself with Marduk, and gentrified his city by having the Ishtar gateway built for it. It was coated in Lapis colored glass that shown in the desert, and covered in regularly arranged lions, cattle, and a type of dragon that looked like a primitive memory of cat/snake. The gateway was made of several parts, one of which 100 feet tall.
Gudea showed that the land was prosperous during his rule by holding a vase overflowing with the Tigris and the Euphrates in one statue. He marketed himself as pious and virtuous, showing concern for his subjects and building temples to various gods. Most statues of him were small, but made from the hardest stone so that they would last. It is also interesting that his statues show him wearing a shepherd’s hat instead of a crown. Gudea was one of the first kings to have a realistic bust of himself carved. This may have been a mental change within himself from immersion in group identity to recognition of individual identity, connected to his concern for his subjects.
In modern times, ancient Mesopotamian art has been either rebuilt by rulers to reclaim the power of ancient gods, or torn down in an effort to erase any previous civilization.
During Operation Desert Storm, Saddam Hussein thought that American troops would not risk damaging the Ziggurat of Ur, so he parked his fighter jets next to it. Turns out he was wrong. Saddam also had a small version of the Ishtar Gate built for his own museum.
ISIS practiced cultural cleansing by destroying temples, artifacts, shrines, and art, in an effort to wipe out polytheism and leave nothing but Islam behind. Ironically though, they also stole artifacts to sell on the black market to fund their military actions.
I’m wondering about your comment on how the only things we could consider abstract are the ones we can’t understand or explain. That’s a good point, some on these things may be abstract, but what if some of the unexplained images are of things that people from that time period would be able to immediately recognize and name? I’m thinking of that video out there where children are shown telephones from the 70’s, and have no idea what they are.
I don’t think that’s entirely right, I don’t think we were capable of that yet. Prehistoric art was definitely trying to represent reality outside of the artist, but relied heavily on exaggerating important features.
In the cave wall art, the animals all have large, rectangular masses for bodies, and twiggy limbs by comparison. I believe the meat of the animal was most important, so the middle mass was exaggerated. A woman’s butt was attractive because we used to be quadrupeds, so they exaggerated the booty (and we still do). Large breasts and a rounded stomach indicated a woman was fertile/pregnant, so the artist made em big.
Prehistoric artists were like modern cartoon artists, exaggerating the important parts that were universally recognizable and important, and downplayed the bits we didn’t want to eat or mate with. Feet and hands weren’t too important.
If prehistoric art were abstract, we wouldn’t be able to walk into one of those caves and immediately recognize the animals, and immediately feel emotionally bowled over by the experience.
I agree with your idea that the early carvings of female figures may have been pornography. All of the most womany features are exaggerated, like in modern anime porn, or girls who get implants to appear more attractive in liveaction porn. I do find something confusing though. In the article about the Turkish civilization that buried their dead under their plaster homes, there was a white stone carving of a woman. The article described her as possibly representative of a wealthy older woman who was esteemed, ‘older’ because her round figure indicated that she no longer had to do physical labor. Was the Venus of Willendorf an old lady? Or did the culture who carved it have a standard of beauty that held being round in high regard – possibly because your husband was a good hunter?
Wild adult animals don’t have a lot of time for play, but domesticated animals keep playing far past their infancy. Humans developed larger brains as they relied on socializing to survive cooperatively, and developed the ability to conceive of a ‘future’ to stay prepared for. I think cooperation and the related surge in brain size gave us free time and imagination, that maybe part of the development of art was the domestication of the wild human – we could play far past infancy. Religion naturally developed along with our ability to imagine connections and spontaneously create symbols.
I also wonder if prehistoric people were like us in that it’s not everyone who can create great art. Were the artists of the tribe seen as special like shamans? Were they fed and housed by their patron tribe, with understanding that what they did was as important as going out to hunt?
Seeing the Venus of Willendorf reminded me of an idea I’d run across years ago, by Professor Leroy McDermott that the fertility carvings were actually self portraits by women. There’s a few photosets out there that show how forshortening works when a woman is looking down at her own body. Here’s a link to one article about it:
The article also points out some reasons why this idea may be wrong – but when asked to answer why these sculptures were made, I thought of modern selfies. The Venus carvings make me think of how men are very visually stimulated, and tend to ask girls to ‘send them nudes.’ If these sculptures were self portraits, I imagine they’d be gifts to hot boys.
The images on the cave walls were all of the most important food-source to the artists during the ice age. Except for earlier art in Africa, plants wouldn’t be depicted until after the adoption of agriculture. Here’s a link to the African plant art:
https://africanrockart.org/news/trees-rock-art/
People made permanent art of fluctuating food sources. I imagine a prehistoric person would get a lot of comfort from visiting the cave during a ritual, if he could see a reminder that the seasonal animals were coming back. It makes sense that early religion would involve visiting a pair of perpetually mating bison in a womb-like cave, to know that the animals would breed to create more food for you and the baby you’re trying to conceive. Consuming the blood and body of Christ makes sense in this way, if Jesus is the cyclical resurrection god.
God forming Adam from clay came to mind when reading about the sculptor that visited the cave of the two bison.
That’s so cool that you work at LARS and get to use your artistic talent on the job! When do the caribou have babies and will you be sharing pictures?
Hi Gabe,
great video, interesting to meet someone else interested in art therapy and Jung. From your description of your deceased teacher of the favorite class I’m guessing you’d like the lectures of Dr. Jordan Peterson. He does some videos on Youtube that go into religious art while he explains biblical stories from an evolutionary perspective. I believe Greek and Roman art is very descriptive of all the unconscious stuff that happens in the background of our daily lives.
Here it is:
I used this assignment to become familiar with Adobe Premiere, so I can make more videos in the future. Thanks for getting me to finally do that!
