Egypt

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The ancient Greek historian Herodotus depicts the land of the pharaohs as “Egypt is the gift of the Nile”. The Nile is the major route for transportation, communication for Egypt and it is the longest river in the world. More significantly, the Nile left rich deposits of alluvial soil along its banks each spring, giving the Egyptians fertile land to plant their corps.

Egypt, was protected from her enemies by thousands of miles of desert, developed in secure isolation. There was a sense of durability and order in this land of hot sun, and this sense is display in the art of the ancient Egyptians.

The Egyptian nation begins about 5000 years ago when King Menes (also called Narmer) began the first of Egypt’s 31 dynasties (ruling families). King Menes did this by uniting its many small kingdoms under his own powerful rule. This significant event is recorded on his palette, a ceremonial plate used for mixing eye makeup (the Egyptians painted their eyes to protect them from the glare of the sun).

The back of the palette (below) represents the victorious king wearing the tall crown of Upper Egypt. He prepares to kill his fallen enemy, while two other captives sprawl at his feet. To the right of the king, a hawk (who represents the god Horus) perches on a clump of papyrus (symbolizing Lower Egypt), and holds an enemy’s head by a rope. This pictogram is another symbol of Menes’s take-over of Lower Egypt. At the top of the palette, the king’s name is written in hieroglyphics between two images of Hathor, the cow goddess.

On the other side of the palette, the situation is reversed and Menes, now wearing the crown of Lower Egypt, conquers the Upper Kingdom. The Narmer palette thus symbolizes the union of the country, and from this time forward, all pharaohs wore double crowns and called themselves “kings of Upper and Lower Egypt.”

The Palette Of Narmer (left), Egypt, created c 3000 B.C., displays the ancient king Menes about to kill an enemy solider.

The palette is significant both as a work of art and as a historical document. The palette set a new standard for all future paintings and sculptures of important events in Egyptian history. The king’s shoulders and eyes are shown from the front, but his head, waist, and legs are viewed from the side. The Egypt artist adopted this style because he could show the most important parts of the body, as he knew them to be, not just as he saw them in a brief glance. As an effect, the art work has a peculiar, but permanent, look about him.

The concern with permanence can be link back to the Egyptians’ view of afterlife. The Egyptian believed when a person pass away, their soul would go on to live as long as the body was preserved. This is why the Egyptians made mummies because the belief of life in the next world was to be a happier existence. To insure this, the Egyptians filled their tombs with all manner of goods including art, furniture, clothing, games, and even food. They also painted the tomb walls with stunning and realistic pictures of the dead person’s land, family, and slaves. The most lavish appointed tombs were those of the pharaohs, or kings.

The Egyptians believed that their pharaoh or king was a living god. They also believed that everything, from the rising of the sun to the flooding of the Nile, depended on divine favor from the god. Therefore, they took great actions to guarantee that the pharaoh’s spirit would be satisfied.

The Egyptians would pour their nation’s wealth into the structure of tombs for their kings. These great royal tombs structures went through a long period of evolution. It probably began as great mounds of earth and slowly grew into the standard form of mastaba (the Arabic word for “bench”). A mastaba is a rectangular flat-topped monument with sloping sides and a deep shaft leading to the subterranean burial chamber.

Approximately 2750 B.C. when King Zoser constructed his eternal dwelling at Saqqara. King Zoser’s resting place was built by Imhotep, the first known architect in human history. The tomb was done by stacking six mastabas on top of one another, with the largest on the bottom and the smallest at the top, Imhotep created a “stepped pyramid”: which they believe to be a staircase to heaven 195 feet high.

The pyramid was still only one piece of the most impressive architectural structure the world had ever seen. Imhotep surrounded the pyramid with duplicates of the temples, chambers, and courtyards that King Zoser had used throughout his life. Now their purpose was for his afterlife. Many of the buildings were stone dummies and were completely fill with earth and debris. The enormous walls that enclose the structure, for example, has 14 massive gates, but only one of them is real. The others serve the spirit by magic.

Imhotep built his one of a kind architectural structure, the first colossal stone buildings in the world. The strength of stone was ideally suitable to the eternal safeguarding of Zoser’s body, and that became the standard structure material for all future tombs. Stone was never use for houses of the living. At Saqqara, Imhotep combined the past, the present, and the afterlife. His achievement was considered so great that the Egyptians came to consider him as a god.

About a century after Saqqara, geometric purity was achieved during the Fourth Dynasty by smoothing out the sides of a stepped pyramid. That resulted in the Great Pyramid of Cheops, the first and largest of the three pyramids of Giza near present-day Cairo. Unlike King Zoser, who built his stepped tomb in the center of his magical palace, Cheops set great gateways and temples in front of the pyramid where he was to purify his soul before its journey to the next world.

The sheer size and perfection of the pyramid give us some idea of the genius of the Egyptian for design and engineering. More than 2,300,000 limestone blocks were cut from nearby quarries, floated across the Nile during high tide, and then dragged by slaves to the building site. Most of the stones weigh about two and a half tons. Some reach the staggering weight of almost 50 tons.

During that period the wheel had not yet been invented, so massive number of laborers were forced to drag these heavy stones by man power up temporary ramps and to lay them one on top of the other. As each stone block were in place one by one, the entire pyramid was faced with gleaming white limestone, so delicately finished that one can barely detect the joints between the stones.

Following many long years of hard physical work by thousands of slaves, the pyramid was completed. The pyramid was a man-made mountain measuring 755 feet on a side, and with perfect orientation that each of its corners was exactly align with one of the four cardinal points (north, south, east, and west). The towering mass of the pyramid, so simple and so pure, measured almost 500 feet high and absolutely dominated the surrounding desert. It symbolized the ultimate power of the pharaoh who lay buried in the center of the enormous tomb.

Cheops’s construction activities continued and it even surpass by his successor Chephren, who built the second pyramid at Giza. Chephren also constructed the celebrated 240-foot-long sphinx. This colossal stone figure, with the body of a lion and the head of a king (probably Chephren himself ), was carved from a rocky bluff near the tomb. However, what is the meaning of these great buildings? The answer is most likely to be found in an ancient Egyptian myth that tells of a vicious lion who guarded the gates of the underworld. Chephren adopted the body of the king of beasts in order to keep an eternal guard at his own tomb.

Regardless of all of their safety measures, the Egyptians were not always victorious in defending the pharaoh’s body, and in many cases, the pyramids were broken into almost right after they were sealed. This destroyed the whole reason of the pyramids. The enormous size of the pyramid was theoretically guard the pharaoh’s body. However, they told thieves and grave robbers exactly where the royal treasures were buried. Near the end of the Fourth Dynasty, fewer pyramids were being built, and these were generally smaller and much less conspicuous than those at Giza.

The plan for Zoser’s pyramid with its surrounding temples and courtyards, c 2750 B.C. (left), a 19th-century view of the Sphinx and the great pyramids at Giza, c 2615-2500 B.C. The largest of the pyramids covers an area equal to 19 football fields and is nearly fifty stories high.

The last and third great pyramids at Giza was built by Mycerinus with his wife Kha-merernebty. The king and queen take a new step forward, but they are held captive in the stone block from which they were carved. Stone even fills in the spaces that we might normally expect to be open (like those between the pharaoh’s arm and body). This “extra” stone strengthened the statue and protected it against breakage. Today we can value how effective this measure was because the statue is still in one piece for more than 4000 years.

The rigid and motionless formality of the king and queen expresses the Egyptian ideal of royal majesty. All imperfections like scars or wrinkles on the king and queen have been removed to portray the couple as perfect. This was only fitting for an Egyptian pharaoh, who was a god and are consider perfect.

Around 2300 B.C. the Egypt pharaohs lost their power of absolute power. Many high-ranking officials fought for power of the government and Egypt went into a dark age. Throughout these dark years the Hyksos, an Asiatic people, attacked and subdued the country. It was the beginning of warfare with horses, chariots, and new weapons.

About 1570 B.C. the Egyptians drove away the Asiatic invaders and started their New Kingdom. It was a period characterized by great geographic growth for Egypt and unmatched brilliance in the arts.

In circa 1370 B.C., Amenhotep IV became pharaoh of Egypt. In a revolutionary signal, he forbade the worshiping of hundreds of Egyptian gods except for one god. That was the sun god Aten.

The pharaoh Amenhotep IV closed all old temples and built a brand new city (near the present Tel el-Amarna) to exclusively worship of the sun god.

Pharaohs (left): portrait statues of Mycerinus and his wife (c 2575 B.C.) and of Amenhotep (c 1350 B.C.). Mycerinus is idealized, but Amenhotep is shown as he really looked.

One of the effects of this spiritual revolution was a new interest in life in this world and there was a consequential change in the art. There was an big immediate change when we compare the portrait of Amenhotep with the earlier one of Mycerinus and his queen. Until that time, the pharaoh was depicted as a divine king, god like and perfect body. However, Amenhotep was depicted as in reality: strangely shaped, with full hips, flabby belly, and a dreamy expression on his egg-shaped face. He was an unfriendly and no longer a perfect king. A man with imperfections now possessed the flail and scepter, symbols of royalty. The pharaoh was portrayed with real emotions and his own individual personality. Realism had taken the place of idealism.

Following the death of Amenhotep, the naturalistic era in Egyptian art steadily end, and artists went back to the traditional styles of stiff and god like depiction.

After 1100 B.C., the Egyptian nation fell into decline, and Egypt was divided into different ground of rival states. The next 2000 years, the country was often under control by different foreign powers by the Assyrians, the Persians, the armies of Alexander the Great, and the Romans. Following the fall of Rome, Egypt became a part of the Byzantine Empire and in 642 A.D., it fell to the Arabs and slowly became a part of the Islamic world.

A small number of the conquerors of Egypt were left untouched by its heritage of art. In all the centuries of foreign power, the beauty of Egypt’s art was prized throughout the Western world, and its ideals influenced the art of many other nations.