AP Art History - Ancient Egypt (Part 2 of 2)

where we left off last time in the old kingdom at this point in time we are going to transition to the middle and new kingdoms um the majority of artworks in in the next part of this lecture will be from the new kingdom so one of the things that is happening around this time is that we're seeing some power shifts um and a little bit of discord and disorganization in ancient egypt um before we see this ultimate transition into the zenith of ancient egypt as we know which is the new kingdom so one of the

major things that is happening um at the beginning of the new kingdom is the transition of the capital from lower egypt to upper egypt so this is where we see a lot of things from the old kingdom is in lower egypt in saqqara and giza remember that lower egypt is in the north and upper egypt is in the south because of the direction of the nile and then we're starting to see more monuments and important things popping up in thieves luxor and amarna um including the valley of the kings so whenever you see like images

of tutankhamen whatever and there's like pyramids in the background that is not accurate because the pyramids are over here and two tacoma is down here so um at this point in time the um ancient egypt is added zenith this is its height of power it's expanded its borders to the farthest that they're going to go all the way to the euphrates river in the northeast and to nubia in the south of course at this height of power the ancient egyptian pharaohs are going to be constructing these massive monuments to commemorate their wealth and their power

as well as the kind this eternal ever presence of their gods so this temple is associated to is associated with almond raw um and it is around a fifth of a mile long it is quite massive it was added to over um several hundred years by furious pharaohs um and it follows what we call an art history in axial plans so kind of think of like the planet earth how there's a central axis that runs from the north pole to the south pole and there's symmetry relatively speaking that goes around this axis so think of

an axis kind of going down the center of this plan right here dividing it into two roughly symmetrical halves so we see axial symmetry which is what this is we see kind of like one side mirror and the other and lots of organisms including humans so we have like a central axis running from the top of our heads to the bottoms of our feet um you can think of your your human body as an axial plan as well there's also something called a central plan which we'll be talking about in a couple of days so

the temple of amanra was the principal religious center dedicated to amun ra and other gods so this was basically intended to be like a god vacation resort a place where the gods could come down from the heavens to be in the mortal plane so there's also lots of these fixtures within the temple that were intended to serve the gods there were lots of altars that the uh priests would regularly supply with offerings for the gods there was also a sacred lake that resembled kind of like this primeval water that um the ancient egyptians believed existed

before creation so the building of this complex started during the middle kingdom and several successive pharaohs added on to it over the centuries until it became what we currently understand today so we've seen this term before hypostel hall when we looked at ancient persia so on high pastel hall to kind of give you a refresher is basically this this complex where you have a lot of these columns that are really close together and they're held together by these stone lentils so arches do not exist yet the arches um that we typically see in architecture today

those were invented by the romans so that's a couple of thousand years into the future from here so post and lentil all the way around typically especially when you're using stone your lentils can only be so wide before they crack under their own weight which is why the columns are so closely packed together so it's really the invention of arches with the ancient romans that were starting to see these larger and more open interior spaces but for now if we have a roof then the columns are going to be very close together so there's a

couple of complications that arise when you have these very tightly packed columns in an area and that is that you're it's going to be very dark because you have all these columns that are tightly arranged together and you have a roof so one of the innovations that architects developed was something called the clara story window so the way that this is achieved is that you have these differing heights of columns here so you had some tall ones in the middle and some relatively shorter ones flanking the sides and you let these areas between the roofs

open so that light can enter the space this is called a clara story window we're going to be seeing this again when we talk about churches in a couple of thousand years what's super amazing about these columns is that a lot of them are in quite remarkable condition particularly the ones that are closest to the lentils on the very top these are the ones that have escaped a lot of the impact of the elements including things like solar radiation and sandstorms so there's actually some remnants of paint on these sections of the building that give

us a hint as to what this complex might have looked like fully painted so the tall columns have these capitals or column toppers that are in the shape of papyrus which you'll recall is this very important plants to the ancient egyptians it's used to create the papyrus paper it grows in the nile and then we um see lotus bud motifs on the shorter capitals here so you can see the lotus motif here so the entrance of this temple was marked by this massive pylon gateway again it's really difficult to convey scale when you look at

this image but this wall is around 40 feet tall and these are like average sized palm trees to give you a sense of the scale so these gateways are extremely tall i try to include images too that have people in them to give you a sense of the scale here these pylons were intended to basically narrow the entrance as much as possible you'll notice that it's extremely narrow in comparison to the size of the entire monument itself and they were also intended to create a division between the world of chaos and the world of of

controlled peace inside of the temple it's very much like how a church has this kind of like more enclosed space um that tends to be more controlled and more kind of like intentional in terms of what is being presented to you the entrance to the temple is flanked by several sphinx-like figures right here and of course these sphinxes are oftentimes associated with protection we saw these similar kinds of human animal hybrid figures guarding the entrances to citadels in ancient mesopotamia as well you might recall the little masu so again here is an aerial view right

here of the temple of amenra and hypostel hall again here are some human figures to give you a sense of scale and there right is the remains of the artificial sacred lake so many of these columns were covered in these reliefs um that were several thousand years ago covered in paintings many of which had narratives documenting the achievements of the pharaohs that commissioned them as well as narratives associated with the gods our next piece is the mortuary temple of queen hot chipset so luxor is relatively close to carnacs this temple was carved remarkably directly out

of the side of a massive sandstone cliff so think of this structure as a massive subtractive sculpture so when you look at it from an aerial view you get a sense of the scale of it again these are human figures to give you a sense of how large it is and it was basically this thing that was subtracted out of this cliffside a lot of our historians mention this repeated motif of these long horizontal bars interrupted by these like shorter vertical lines um in the cliff side that we're seeing like this natural motif and how

the artist might have intended to reflect that same motif in the arrangement of these terraces right here and the columns that are supporting them so there's three terraces that are connected by two ramps so these terraces were originally planted with these beautiful gardens with exotic trees and fruits it was supposed to be this very green space uh and the temple itself um as are many temples that are commissioned by pharaohs were decorated with extensive reliefs that were basically narrating their achievements and telling everybody how cool they were so chepset is the first woman recorded in

art history in terms of like being a person with significant achievements so she was a pharaoh queen basically she was married to tutemos and he died uh relatively early in his reign and his son with a another woman typically pharaohs were um polygamous they had several wives so he had a wife with a son that was like seven or eight years old he was not old enough to rule so um hot chipset who was his principal wife ruled in his place um and she ended up ruling for about 20 years so she took her role

very seriously she oftentimes commissioned portraits of herself in these elements that are associated with pharaohs including this false beard and the nemi's headdress um interestingly as well she oftentimes um has herself depicted with these more male or androgynous attributes oftentimes too in the inscriptions she is referred to as his highness so to knows the three the third um who was her nephew um actually like sometime later in his reign had a lot of her statues destroyed so you'll notice in this particular statue right here of hot chips so that it's been heavily damaged um this

was actually pieced together um from a bunch of rubble that an art that a bunch of archaeologists then had to piece together so it is very likely likely that hot chips statues were victims of iconoclasm which is again this deliberate destruction or misshapening of statues typically to insult the person or the ideas that they're depicting in this particular image here we see hot chipset kneeling with these offering jars so pharaohs never knelt to mortals they only knelt to gods so it we can infer based on that information that that she is offering something to the

gods so there were several of these red granite statues or remains of them that were found throughout the temple complex there were also several statues of hot chops as like basically almost like cosplaying other gods so there's one of her representing osiris for example there's another one of her representing i think horus so basically she is imposing her image upon many of these important figures in the temple which is further exemplifying her power there's also an interesting obelisk over in the temple of almond raw which is the ap artwork that we just covered an obelisk

is basically a giant rectangular prism that is topped with a pyramid we see them a lot in ancient egyptian architecture and this is the top of that what what is now filled obelisk and it depicts hot sepsis kneeling before ammon um and she is basically like some archaeologists have interpreted her as being like coronated or crowned by him our next piece is from the amarna period which is kind of like the a deviation period um that is pretty unusual within ancient egyptian art so akhenaten was a bit of an oddball he basically said you know

what everybody thinks that there's like many gods but actually there's only one god his name is otton and he only talks to me so the priesthood was completely like sanitized like he got rid of all of the the people that were associated with this pantheon of gods that the ancient egyptians had followed for thousands of years it caused this massive uproar um and after his death the the the older traditions were eventually reinstated but during this brief period when akhenaten was pharaoh relatively brief within the span of ancient egyptian history he basically created what we

now refer to as the amarna style so he he briefly moved the capital of ancient egypt from thieves to amarna which is why this time is called the amarna period and a lot of the artwork from this time is distinctly different from the figurative work especially that we're seeing in other periods of ancient egyptian history for one thing the figures are a lot more slender um they're almost alien in their depictions they usually have very large heads and and thin limbs they also have these these epicene kind of like sex ambiguous bodies these heavily loaded

eyes and slack jaws and these kinds of drooping bellies interestingly too we see this this very unusual scene here and that is this this very intimate scene between akhenaten his wife nepertiti and their three daughters you might recall previously in our curriculum we saw this image of kingman cowery and queen and there's some gestures and indications of affection here but you're not really seeing these figures look at each other they're still very separate from one another they're they're not interacting in a way that we would in like the modern western world associate with intimacy but

when we look at this image here of akhenaten nefertiti and the three daughters like the these figures are interacting with their children we see akhenaten like placing a kiss on his daughter's face so this is extremely different from images that we've previously seen in ancient egyptian heart artwork this this degree of domesticity that we typically don't see in the ancient world so the god autumn was typically represented by a sun with a memes cobra and then these rays that were coming out from it that had hands on them and then there's also this motif of

the ankh so the ankh um is a symbol that the ancient egyptians used pretty frequently in their artwork we're going to see another art piece that uses the ankh shortly the ankh is oftentimes associated with life and vitality it's also a pretty common ionic symbol so it's associated with female genitalia so we have this ankh pointing towards nefertiti right here and then we also have one pointing towards akhenaten right here oftentimes when mummies were embalmed they had an ankh placed in their wrappings it was oftentimes associated with life and then this ancient egyptian belief that

like when you died then you're then your soul would come back to life so you've probably all heard of king tutankhamen aka king tut so historically speaking most archaeologists don't believe that king tutankhamun was particularly significant he became king when he was around nine years old and died about 10 years later most archaeologists think that he had a broken leg that eventually got infected what was particularly remarkable about king tutankhamun was the fact that his tomb was found very intact so basically all tombs of pharaohs that we know of were looted at some point you

can understand why a lot of these pharaohs were buried with hundreds if not thousands of pounds of gold and fans and precious metals there was a pretty big motivation for for tomb robbers to come in and steal stuff even despite these harsh punishments that were instilled upon grave robbers that were eventually found out so this team was really remarkable that it had been relatively untouched and that it was basically in a state where archaeologists could assume more or less that this is the way that things were intended to be when they were buried oftentimes when

tomb sites are excavated things have been moved around because the grave robbers basically went through and took all the valuable things and then destroyed the things that were not important to them so there were several coffins that were surrounding tutankhamun's body there is a diagram right here so there were several of these larger coffin cases or caskets rather coffins are the more body shaped ones so there were several caskets that were kind of nested in one in inside the other like matrushka dolls and then there were three of these more like coffin shaped like body

shaped items here and then the innermost coffin was made of around 500 pounds of solid gold one of my students did a calculation as to how much this is worth and it was in the millions of dollars so the innermost coffin is six and a half feet long and there's this winged vulture motif that is surrounding the torso right here um these are representing protective goddesses that are protecting common's body as he travels to the afterlife there's also two more goddesses that are shown here with wings they're a little bit difficult to see that are

flanking each other on the lid one of the most common motifs associated with pharaohs is the crook and flail these are oftentimes like the equivalent of like a sector they represent the divine right to rule and of course we're seeing the false beard nemi's headdress and cobra motifs that we oftentimes see associated with pharaohs so there was even like another mask that was on top of two to commons body that was this one right here this is the death mask so it only has the head and shoulders portion so this death mask was also solid

gold it was placed directly over the body inside the innermost coffin so there was this beautiful lapis lazuli turquoise and carnelian um that was used to inlay what we see as the color on this death mask here the craftsmanship is just absolutely astounding which is interesting because tutankhamun's body was not preserved particularly well these are a couple of reconstructions of what king tutankhamun might have looked like in life you could understand that like because he is so famous and this discovery around 100 years ago was so significant that there's been a lot of international intrigue

around like the mysteries of tooting common and the things that have been found inside of his tomb so there's been a lot of remarkable things that have been found inside this tomb among them almost 130 walking sticks so forensic evidence shows that tutankhamun had either a congenital defect or an injury that resulted in a chronic illness that required him to use a cane there's also some images inside of the tomb that suggested that tutankhamun shot arrows while he was sitting which is unusual there are also two caskets found inside of tutankhamun's tomb that contained the

fetuses of what many archaeologists suspect were his children so like many other hereditary rulers in ancient egypt tutankhamun was likely the result of incest and there's some evidence that he had these two ill-fated fetuses with his half-sister so um dna evidence is still emerging regarding these lineages of ancient pharaohs um we are able like remarkably to get dna samples from these remains because the bodies are still so well preserved after thousands of years so that's the next step that archaeologists and like forensic experts have been working on is figuring out like who is who's mom

slash uncle slash whatever these family trees are depressingly tangled this is our last piece in the egypt unit it's called the last judgment of hugh nefair so this particular narrative right here was one of many that was in a book of the dead so a book of the dead was a common provision that was buried with important people as a sort of like how to guide to successfully get into the afterlife so the ancient egyptians believed again that when a person died then their soul would go on this journey and then reinhabit the body and

then would be able to live out in eternal bliss in the afterlife the only problem though is that to get there you have to go through several trials um many of which were basically assessments of the person's character in life to basically say like only good people can go into the afterlife so this little how-to book um in this particular instance shows a a particularly famous part of the narrative and that is when the person to be judged is brought to a court by anubis who is this god of embalming he has a body of

a man and the head of the jackal you'll notice that he's carrying an ankh right here and he basically brings the person to be judged too in this case is hugh nefer right here to these scales so on one side of the scales is the feather of truth or mutt on one side and then the person's heart is placed on the other side of the scale so foth who is the god of writing he has the head of in ibis is basically writing down stuff as it happens so if the heart is heavier than the

feather of mott then the person is thought to have sinned in their lifetime their heart is heavy with sin and and wrong doing so in that case it's game over the chimeric god emit will eat your heart and you are not able to go into the afterlife however if your heart is lighter than the feather of truth then you pass the test you are led by horus to osiris who is the king of the gods and the king of the underworld he is oftentimes shown with his bowling pen hat and this green or black skin

and he's sitting here on his throne over here so a couple of things about this narrative is that we see figures more than once in the same image so we have anubis right here the jackal-headed god shown here and then there's also a smaller version of him shown here so this is not to suggest that there are like two anubises and that one is like slightly smaller than the other is to show that like this is one part of the narrative right here and then this is another part of the narrative right here and that

this is another part of the narrative here so we also see hewn affair shown more than once we have them shown here and then over here so this is called a continuous narrative it's when we see the same figures appearing multiple times in the same image so we also saw this potentially in the standard ver in the mesopotamia unit the figures are also in twisted perspective which is fairly typical of ancient egyptian artwork we have the body twisted in such a way that you're communicating a composite image of the human figure even if the arrangement

is not something that we would see in nature so here is the last judgment in full these little dudes up here are basically gods that are presiding over the events and then these are hieroglyphs that are narrating what is happening so this is an interesting video on tutankhamen and some like contextual evidence of his tomb that suggests that it was rushed oftentimes pharaohs would spend their entire lives preparing for their deaths like as soon as they ascended to the throne they started figuring out their burial plans so that they had a contingency plan for getting

into the afterlife successfully um in this video the uh the narrator explores the concept of tutankhamen dying long before people thought he would so they basically took the tomb this is what they theorized they took a tomb of what was supposed to be like a minor queen and like really quickly modified it to accommodate tutankhamun and his body so there's lots of evidence of shortcuts so we don't really talk about the first millennium in ancient egypt which is kind of a shame because there's so much interesting stuff that is happening for one thing dynasties are

persisting um in the first millennium after the new kingdom but they're not exercising nearly as much power as what we saw the new kingdom we're also seeing this layering of civilizations um that we saw in mesopotamia we see lots of people coming into egypt again like you've heard about the nile delta and all that awesome land people are going to want that they're going to want to access that so we see the nubians come in from the south so the nubians are kind of like these uh people that were like more central african in nature

whereas the ancient egyptians were kind of a mixture between sub-saharan africans and people that were living in the mediterranean so what's interesting is that when you see narrative images from the times that the nubians are occupying ancient egypt you can see physical differences between the figures particularly in skin color we also have the assyrians occupying ancient egypt for a time and then of course the greeks and romans so if anybody here has ever been to the getty you have probably seen these portrait images these are remarkable finds we do not have that much painting from

ancient rome because they were painted on wooden surfaces and wood tends to rot in a mediterranean climate which is very unfortunate however there were a significant number of romans that occupied ancient egypt and there were a lot of people in ancient egypt that were of mixed roman and egyptian descent and we can see those linea kind of like the results of these lineages pretty clearly in the portraits and the variety of people that we're seeing we're also seeing this hybridization of burial practices so a lot of romans chose to be buried in a very egyptian

way um but instead of having this idealized portrait on the surfaces of their um of their sarcophagi um they had these portraits that were painted to be very lifelike and like resemble what the person looked like in life so there's kind of like this this interesting hybridization of cultural norms that we're seeing when romans are occupying ancient egypt and i wish we could talk more about it in the curriculum because it's fascinating