The Early Bronze Age (part one)

Paris, Louvre.  The Seated Scribe, whose name was Kay, of Dynasty V was available to show  the painting of  a limestone or wood statue.  The Louvre is not only friendly to study but has placed the statue so that its ancient rock-crystal eyes reflect the windows opposite him.  For the whole statue, see below.

THE EARLY BRONZE AGE: THE FIRST MAJOR URBAN

 CIVILIZATIONS

In the parts of the world that we can cover in this course, the Early Bronze Age corresponds chronologically almost exactly to the third millennium B.C.; a couple of hundred years after 3,000 B.C., Old Kingdom (Dynasties III-VI) begins in Egypt, and at the same time the Early Dynastic period in Sumer.  Shortly before 2,000 B.C., in these and other areas, changes occur that mark the beginning of the Middle Bronze Age.
Early Bronze Age art belongs to societies that had unprecedented wealth and power concentrated at the disposal of their rulers.  Rule was inextricable from state religion: the Egyptian king was identified with the gods, and the Sumerian steward of the city state was regarded as the caretaker of the city, the city as belonging to the god.  In some Sumerian city states by the middle of the second millennium, the steward was just as powerful as if he had been called king.  At Troy, in NW Asia Minor, also, the ruler had a fine, large residence on the citadel.  In the Aegean basin, however, there is generally less evidence of absolute power, although the "House of the Tiles" at Lerna in Greece is comparable in grandeur to Troy.
These political facts are important to our assessment of the meaning of the art, because absolute centralized power meant that the art was not merely produced exclusively for the "upper classes" (as we should say) but largely for the quasi-divine requirements of the ruling families alone.  The difference between Egypt and Mesopotamia, in that connection, is that in Mesopotamia the temples of the gods of each city state commanded more resources than the rulers' tombs, while the reverse was true in Old Kingdom Egypt.  Owing also to this concentration of resources and (apparently) still unquestioned absolute power, Early Bronze art is extremely splendid, breathtakingly fine, but in its purposes seems to us splendidly barbaric.  The word, "barbaric", is Greek, and by the standards of the later Greeks, as by ours, the Early Bronze Age is indeed barbaric.  The structure of the society and economy seems to have been extremely simple, with, on the one hand, the ruling families and priesthood, and, on the other, everybody else, but, towards the later part of the third millennium B.C., it appears that greater wealth had also led to a slightly broader distribution of wealth, and thus of power, and thus, also, to access to art products by a larger, but still small, part of the populations.  We are still a long way from a society that views, and uses, art as we do.
This is the age of the great pyramids in Egypt, of the Royal Cemetery at Ur, succeeded by the Dynasty of Akkad and the Neo-Sumerian revival in Mesopotamia, of Troy II, of obscure but prosperous peoples in the interior of Asia Minor, and of three distinct cultures in the Aegean basin.

Egypt: Old Kingdom (Dynasties III-VI) and First Intermediate Period (a time of disorganization and comparative poverty)
Mesopotamia: Early Dynastic (at Khafaje, Tell Asmar, Ur and Mari); the Dynasty of Akkad (2340-2180 B.C.); Neo-Sumerian (Gudea of Lagash, Ur Nammu of Ur)
Asia Minor: Early Bronze Alaca Hüyük; Troy II
Aegean: Early Cycladic; Early Helladic(peninsular Greece); Early Minoan (Crete)

EARLY BRONZE AGE EGYPT

  The most famous king comes near the end of that third dynasty: Zoser.  He ruled for a long time; he had a Jubilee.  This is his limestone portrait, found in tghe serdab beside his tomb.  His tomb is the earliest Egyptian pyramid.  His, too, began as a flat-topped tomb.  His portrait, furthermore, has all the of the fundamental characteristics of the royal seated portraits of the centuries to come: royal wig, false beard, white linen headcloth over his wig.  His long white garment is exceptional, but it is what the king wore for his Jubilee, so he wears it.  The statue is carved out of a single block, with the hieroglyphic labels carved on the front of it, and it is absolutely frontal.  When you quarry limestone (or marble) you drill a row of holes, drive wet wooden pegs (which will swell when they dry) into them, and the block of stone breaks away along natural bed lines that the row of holes has followed.  The sculptor of stone thus starts with a four-sided, approximately rectangular block.  This sculptor did, so did Michelangelo.  The Egyptian sculptor, using grid lines to keep it registered, drew the front view of the statue on the front, side views on both sides (not the back; he would leave a slab there).  Then he started removing stone.  No wonder the statue retains a strongly four-sided form.  (Later, the Greeks and the Renaissance sculptors had to struggle to free themselves from the inherent blockiness of hewn stone sculpture, which art traditions that begin with clay and metal are less subject to, or even free of).  But, also, this statue form shows the divine king not in a momentary or accidental (snapshot) pose but timelessly, typically, for eternity, and thus divinely.  It was meant as an alternative dwelling for the king's imperishable personal life spirit, his ka, in case anything should happen to his embalmed corpse.  Thus, too, it must be a real likeness for his ka.  Eventually this provision of an alternative body for the ka spread to the nobility, then to much of the rest of the population.  The statue was coated with gesso (plaster of Paris and glue) and painted (there still are abundant traces of color), but, sometime, someone has gouged out the eyes, which were inset, probably with quartz for the iris (it looks very lifelike, and in the next dynasty we have examples preserved).  Many people all over the world feel "spooked" by eyes (even docents doing plantation house tours have to tell you how that portrait's eyes follow you around!).  Zoser's reign was an epochal moment in Egyptian history.  New wealth.  This powerful, even harsh image expresses the moment.  It is virtually a first attempt at stone sculpture this big.

[MAP 12] [M 164] The Old Kingdom, and Dynasty III, begins, perhaps, around 2,800 B.C., depending on whose calendar calculations you use.

[MG 152] [MG 153] When king Zoser came to the throne, he immediately had his tomb in his funerary complex at Saqqara begun.  But this is an unprecedented funerary monument, although the tomb itself began as a mastaba.  That the tomb ended up being the first pyramid is only one, and perhaps the least important of the "firsts" represented here.  So famous that in Dyn. XXVI, ca. 600 B.C., the Egyptians completely repaired it and regarded it as a model, more than 2,000 years later.  No one ever built one like it again.
1. First pyramid, although it is a stepped pyramid, and built differently from the Giza pyramids.  At the foot of the pyramid was the serdab in which the portrait statue was found.
2. First architect, Imhotep, known to us by name
3. First ashlar stone architecture in the world: stone, cut in equal rectangular blocks and laid in courses.  No mortar.  No dowels.  Just tight fit and sheer inertia.  The pyramid was sheathed in white limestone.  Its brightness thus recalls the sun's rays breaking through, which it represents.
4. First columnar orders.

Besides the pyramid and the temple at the foot of the pyramid, the rest of the buildings are dummy buildings, dummy because they are solid; the finely made ashlar exterior is a stone translation of the forms of the reed and clay and mud brick traditional buildings that they so permanently represent.  Permanence is the idea, but these designs later inspired architects to develop stone architecture as a form.  They underlie Greek, Roman, Gothic, . . ., because in the sixth century B.C. Greeks saw Egyptian architecture and were inspired by it, as we shall see in that part if the course.  The idea of dry stone, of ashlar, of fluting, excited the Greeks, so this monument changed all of our architecture.

The plan shows its size, and there is the only one real gate.  Note how its design is like that we saw in the serekh.  The row of buildings is the dummy shrines of the regional gods of Egypt, and these two large ones represent the North Palace and the South Palace, doubtless inspired by building forms traditional in Lower and Upper Egypt, respectively.  The North Palace has applied columns with papyrus capitals.  The outer wall and gate has stone work derived from recessed panelling in brick (cf. serekh, also the Dynasty I tombs at Saqqara).  The astonishing thing is how similar it is to recessed panelling at Uruk in Mesopotamia--whether independent natural development from the intrinsic properties of mud brick, or because of some contacts between them.

[MG 154]  A beautiful photo showing the importance of the play of light in the architecture of the papyrus wall of the North Palace in Zoser's funerary monument, also a monument to the genius of the architect, Imhotep (who, in Dyn. XXVI, was regarded as a wizard and demi-god, just as King Arthur's Merlin came to be; legend almost always sloughs the real "meat" of human accomplishment--consider Washington's cherry tree and Lincoln's rail-splitting).  We do not yet get freestanding columns.  The important thing is that this is a columnar order.  A design system, all the parts of which go together, designed to make sense, visually, of a building.  Here it is based on plant forms (as most later orders also will be).

[M 33] One of the viziers of Zoser was a Prince named Hesy-ra (or Hesire--we don't really know how to vocalize Egyptian).  Because Egypt is so dry, we have from his mastaba tomb at Saqqara the wooden (which would have perished elsewhere) false doors to the tomb chamber.  He was surveyor, architect, scribe (one man then was all of those) and is so represented on the doors.  The best preserved one even has a bit of paint left.  In this work of Dyn. III, there is a sensitive delicacy in the treatment of details of the soft parts, a subtlety (not mere detail), that we won't see again until Dyn. XVIII, and never again so fresh as this first time.  Perhaps it is so delicate, because it is wood carving.  The hieroglyphs, even, are perfect little works of art; here, for the last time, the picture writing is real, little pictures.  The distinction of writing from pictures will strengthen and widen from now on.

[M 41] At the beginning of Dynasty IV, in the reign of Khufu (Greek Cheops--you can use either name), the first great pyramid at Giza, his tomb.  I must recommend the architect David McCauley's books, Pyramid, City, Cathedral, though they were written for Middle School children--for adults we have nothing so good, and the videos made from the books are not so good as the books themselves.  While Khufu was building his, the biggest, pyramid, a prince, Rahotep, and his wife, Nofret (the name is common, and means "beautiful"), were having these statues made for their tomb--just one generation, more or less, after Zoser.  Early Dyn. IV.  Still sturdy.  Limestone, gessoed, painted.  Even without inscriptions, the lady's wig would date it to this reign: we have reached a time when women's fashions, in the upper socioeconomic classes, change.  Rahotep wears kilt and an amulet and no wig, Nofret a long white linen dress and a pectoral (chest necklace), headband; eye make-up (what you use slate palettes for).  A little more detailed modelling than in Zoser.  They are the best preserved for color, and the inset eyes are preserved; her left eye is perfectly so, and it does look like a living eye.  The Egyptians reveal the shape of the female body, but not female nudity, and they show male nudity only in agricultural laborers and small boy children (little girls wear a beaded G-string, similar to those that little Zulu girls wore until fairly recently).  Rahotep is red-brown as a male who hunts and leads his men in the army outdoors; Nofret is pale, to show that she's a lady, not a farmer's wife, and stays indoors so does not get tanned.  Most modern Egyptians, too, tan very well if they're in the sun but have a pale olive complexion if they have an office job, for example.  But the coloring is a gender-role indicator, and we shall see the Aegean peoples of the Bronze Age, then the Greeks and Etruscans adopt it for this purpose.

[G 12] [G 13] Here (in the slide used in lecture) is a famous antique glass-plate photograph of the pyramids, about 100 years old, taken from across the river Nile, so framed by palms.  Now the outskirts of Cairo extend to Giza.  In this photo you can see how the pyramids are spaced (telescoped in the Prints photo) and that Khufu's is indeed the biggest, then Khafre's (Chephren's) nearly as large, and it is the one that has the sphinx and preserves its valley temple, then Menkaure's (Mycerinus's), the third, is much smaller.  The relatively tiny pyramids may be for their wives.  The sphinx is the guardian of the pyramid, also a portrait of Khafre.  The word "sphinx" is a Greek form of an Egyptian word that they didn't hear quite accurately.  In Greek, "sphinx" reminds one of the verb sphingo, which means "squeeze" (> the sphincter muscle), and it has the form of words that are of the feminine gender, grammatically, so the Greeks made female sphinxes, and theirs are enigmatic and untrustworthy.  It cannot be overemphasized that the Greek and Egyptian ideas of a "sphinx" have nothing in common.  There is nothing enigmatic or mysterious about an Egyptian sphinx.  It is the divine king with a lion's body.  Note that the sphinx at Giza has Khafre's face and wears the king's royal headcloth.  And all Egyptian sphinxes are male, except when Queen Hatshepsut, the only female ruler, has her portrait done as a sphinx.

[MG 151] Around Khufu's pyramid are the mastaba tombs of all the nobility who wanted to be buried in the shadow of the colossal sun symbol, the pyramid.  Beside it is a great Nile boat, buried in its own trench, more sun god (Ra, Horus) symbolism, because the sun god, sinking in the evening below the western rim of the firmament sailed overnight on the waters below the firmament so as to rise again (a most powerful symbol of immortality through rebirth) at dawn in the east (like the Hebrews, the Egyptians thought that the earth, the firmament, was a disk, with waters above, below, and all around it).

[G 14] Khafre's has its pyramid temple (remember the one at the base of Zoser's), its covered causeway, and its valley temple (the sphinx sits beside the latter).  The Valley Temple is built of huge rectangular blocks of hard stone, very tightly fitted, with an equally solid stone floor.  Here we have no columnar orders and mouldings, in this hard stone, such as we had at Zoser's monument, but the severe solidity and proportions of the Valley Temple are awesome in their own right.

[M 167] [M 38] Now we are in the 26th century B.C., approximately, and here is Khafre's seated statue.  It is made of diorite, which is very hard.  It was never painted; gesso and paint do not adhere to such stone, but its hardness, hence durability, recommended it for a royal funerary portrait.  With early bronze tools, they must have used heat to calcine the surface of the stone in order to carve it.  They heated brands in a fire, applied them to the surface of the stone, thus turning it to powder (answering the question, how does a stone church, for example, burn down?  Burnt limestone > lime).  Huge work, but this is for a divine king.  He sits on a lion throne (like the cat goddess at Çatal Hüyük), which is a divine attribute.  Of course, divinity in ancient societies is not like divinity in St. Thomas Aquinas.  The hawk Horus embraces the king's head--a very vivid image of divine protection.  It is unique; no other royal portrait has Horus's wings wrapped around the head.

It is hard for us to imagine masterpieces like this being put away never to be seen by human beings.  It is a measure of the cultural gulf between even the most brilliant early societies and even the, perhaps, least brilliant modern ones.  Of course, the sculptor, as an artist, had his own agenda, which, perhaps, the king knew nothing of and would not have understood.  The sculptor has expended great love and ingenuity in combining the hawk with the head.  Down the centuries artists have sustained their own morale and quietly pursued, as it were, their own kind of divinity and immortality; certainly, they have always surpassed themselves in ways that they didn't have to just to please the patron, who typically wants something that others will admire for its workmanship (lots of detail) and size and expense.  But the Egyptian king wanted divine immortality.

[M 168] In the reign of the builder of the last Giza pyramid, Menkaure (Greek: Mykerinos, or Mycerinus) we have perfectly splendid portraiture.  Here is Menkaure and his Queen, from the chapel at the foot of his pyramid, again of very hard stone, so left plain.  In this case, the queen is the same size as her husband; usually, the woman is at a smaller scale than her husband in Egyptian art.  A great deal of speculation has arisen around these statues; two in the Cairo Museum, in the same style and technique, may provide an answer.  In them Menkaure is embraced, in each of them, by two goddesses.  Here the Queen embraces him in the same way.  So this is not a statue about connubial affection, not a humanizing of the royal portrait, but the opposite.  Here in the Boston double portrait, Menkaure's queen is identified with Egypt's goddesses just as he is identified with some of the gods; that probably means that she is of the same family rank as he, just as royal; sometimes, to ensure truly divine children (they knew nothing of recessive genes!), the king married his sister or half-sister; perhaps Menkaure's queen is his sister.  Anyway, she is represented in just the same relationship to him as the goddesses are in the sculptures in the Cairo Museum.  Notice the further development in the modelling especially of the face but also of the torso and knees and ankles and feet.  The sculpture of the next Dynasty takes off directly from here.  Notice that, as usual, it has a back slab, so is technically a high relief.  They worried about the slender legs, and it was much more work to do it in the round, and you would have to balance the masses of weight around a plumb line.  So in stone they kept the back slab, but in wood and metal they worked in the round and made the statue fully freestanding.

[M 42] Here is Ka-aper, the statue nicknamed by the workmen at the excavation "sheik el beled", village headman, because that's just what he looks like.  Ka-aper was an important estate overseer.  As with Hesy-ra's doors, Egypt's dry climate has fully preserved this wooden statue; though it has lost almost all its paint (which, of course, was applied over gesso as a preparatory coat), it preserves its bright inset eyes (the knobby staff in his hand is modern; the original staff may have been straight and smooth).  A wonderful characterization and a wonderful piece of sculpture; the art is not at all inferior, only the material is less expensive.  In fact, wood is easier to work beautifully.

[M 166] This is a bust in Boston, of Prince Ankh-haf, of limestone.  Either the ears were added in plaster, or the head was made to put a wig on.  Late Dyn. IV or early V, at the acme of Old Kingdom portrait work, portraiture from the inside out, based on structure, not just on surface marks.  Also in conveying his character, it is portraiture in depth, beginning with his unique cranial bone structure.

[M 44] One of the best portraits is that of Ra-nofer.  Standard standing pose (we'll bring back this statue to compare with Greek ones).  Unique, intelligent, fully characterized human face, a satisfactory habitation for his eternal Ka.  What is in his hand?  Nothing really; it was just too difficult, and pointless, to bore out the stone inside his fist.  Realistic as it is, with soft flesh in the torso, they have not done much analytical dissection, and they don't get the pronation of the palm, involving crossing the forearm bones, the ulna and radius, and they, so to speak, hang the arms on the "corners" of the triangular torso, rather than thinking rib cage, collar bone, trapezius and deltoid muscles, and thus incorporating the arms--so the statues are very wide-shouldered.  Astonishing combination of portraiture and detail with conceptual over-all structure of the body.  They never go beyond this--at least, not until Egypt becomes a Hellenistic kingdom, then part of the Roman Empire, but then it isn't purely Egyptian any more.

[M 45] You've seen the seated royal statue, the standing statue which is used for a variety of people.  There is another type--the scribe--there are a large number of these in existence; this is just the very best one, but there's another one, full-sized, made of limestone and painted, also of Dynasty V, in the Cairo museum of a younger scribe wearing a long wig--this one is bare-headed.  He is seated on the ground which may make you think he's a humble person, but he's not because humble persons didn't learn to read and write--learning to read and write Egyptian hieroglyphics required full-time leisure and it was a very limited skill.  We don't know who this man was.  This comes from his tomb at Saqqara, where most of the nobility was buried in the fourth and fifth dynasties.  He's in the Louvre in Paris, and he's an older man as you can see from the slack muscles on his abdomen--a perfect masterpiece.  The Egyptian sculptor about now in the late fourth and the fifth Dynasty learned to organize the cylinder of the upper arm and the flat surface of the inside of the forearm, and how it makes a kind of triangular shape when you turn over the arm and the ulna and radius bones criss-cross each other, and learned how to form the hand into this nice form that works right for holding the stylus, and to simplify the crossed legs so that they made this wonderful sculptural shape.  They didn't try to make it more naturalistic, because it was absolutely satisfactory as it was.  Once again, it is of limestone coated with gesso and painted, and in this case the quartz eyes, as well as the metal rim to express eye makeup around the eyes and the ivory whites of the eyes, are perfectly preserved.  You see what a very bright-eyed look this gives the man.  He looks exceedingly intelligent, but that's not just because of his inlaid eyes; it's partly because of the way the mouth is drawn tense instead of relaxed at the corners, and even the angular shape of his enormous ears make him look very bright and perky--incidentally, this particular individual, though I have seen people on the streets of modern Cairo who look like him, is atypical then and would be somewhat atypical now for an Egyptian.  Egyptians don't usually have quite such angular jaws or quite such thin lips or quite such a long nose as this individual has, but, as I told you, they were a thoroughly integrated population and this man simply expresses more of the minority genes, whatever those may have been.

[M39] We're not really interested in the statue of the female--this is simply slides made off of your print--but we are interested in this portrait of a prince called Ti.  Here you have his statue against a backslab, a very handsome man, a very typical Egyptian: very large wide-set eyes, full mouth, even features, a very nice statue, but it's not for his statue that Ti is famous.

[M 51] [M 52] He too has one of those nobles' tombs at Saqqara, but from the tomb of Ti come the best painted reliefs, in my opinion, in the entire history of Egyptian art.  Back in Dynasty I, the Egyptians put all of the courtiers, ladies-in-waiting, and grooms and agricultural foremen--everyone who worked for the king--to death and buried them with him to serve him in the afterlife.  The Egyptians quit doing that in Dynasty I (they were not the only people to do it--the Sumerians did it, the Chinese did it in the Bronze Age, and way down in the 7th century after Christ, it's represented at the end of the poem Beowulf in western Europe; northern and western Europe, having a very short summer, a colder, harder-to-cope-with environment, became civilized a good deal later than the warmer parts of the world).  Now the Egyptians instead put figurines in the tomb or they carved or painted the walls of the tomb with people carrying out everything that was done for the person in his lifetime--serving him food at table, going with him on a hippopotamus hunt in the papyrus marshes (look how they used that corrugated pattern for the standing papyrus reeds at the edge of the river), and men herding his cattle for him, and a servant carrying a newborn calf that wasn't big enough to ford the river by itself--notice how they do river water with zig-zagging lines for the ripples, but notice, too, how they just use paint alone to show how you can see their legs through the water; if the paint were missing, we wouldn't have that.  Once again this is limestone, the natural building blocks, gessoed and painted, and this is all part of the standard decoration of a tomb.  In a tomb, you have three kinds of scenes:  you have banqueting scenes, because you've got to eat forever, you have hunting scenes, and you have agricultural and/or industrial scenes--how the man earned his wealth in his earthly life.  Notice that Ti himself is standing, "stoned like a statue"  In fact, he looks like a picture of a statue, because this is his tomb, and his image is the way he is in eternity, not like a snapshot but as he is essentially, and they expressed that by making him just like his statue.  But the Egyptian artist is absolutely capable of doing all kinds of representations--of drawing the shoulder foreshortened in 3/4 views and all kinds of action poses.  The people who are actually spearing the hippopotamuses--the naked servants in the next boat--have been represented with absolute mastery of the human body in action.  The reason the artist doesn't use it on Prince Ti is that it wouldn't be appropriate.  If he made Ti like them, then the representation wouldn't be Ti's essence for eternity.  That's as well as I can explain it; after all, I'm not an Egyptian.  That's evidently how they felt, and there's another side to this, too: servants are represented perfectly realistically and naturally, like the animals.  The Egyptian artists absolutely surpassed themselves in animals in action.  These cattle are masterpieces, and so is the person who's carrying the baby calf, who is interesting anthropologically, also.  In the first place, though he's very small, he's an old man and his smallness probably comes from bad nutrition, because he is balding and he has no black paint on his hair, so it shows off his white hair.  Also, he has the features of a purely east African, genuinely black person, not a mixed person, and he is, like this other man, represented naked; unlike the brown naked man, the blacker man carrying the calf is circumcised.  This is the first knowledge we have of the medical art or religious rite, whichever way you want to look at it, of circumcision in the world.  It's 1,000 years earlier than the oldest book in the Bible and, likewise, than the story of Isaac, which is the foundation stone of the rite of circumcision in Jewish history.  In Africa, in the upper Nile, these things are practiced for two reasons.  One is tribal marking--one group may make scarification on their cheeks or chest but another group may alter the foreskin--but also it could be that it's cleaner.  The Nile Valley, with the Nile River, is not a great source of cleanliness--it's a hot climate, it's humid, and diseases can spread pretty rapidly, so any part of the body that tends to harbor infection might be gotten rid of.

[M 40] Dynasty VI is really the beginning of trouble, but there's one statue (really ugly) from Dynasty VI (actually two statues but they belong together) which is very important in the history of the technology of art.  This is the badly damaged statue of a king named Pepy I and his son.  The part that's lost was probably made out of some other material of a different color, because it would be the royal kilt, and also missing is the royal wig and hair.  Here you have a lifesize bronze (or really, impure copper) statue.  It seems to have been made partly by hollow casting (see below, [M 203]) and largely by hammering the bronze out, over a core (the Greeks call this technique sphyrelaton)  The date here is about 2,300 B.C., and that is very close to the date that we will see the first hollow-cast bronze statue in Mesopotamia.  Even though King Pepy isn't very pretty, he's very important.