The Egyptian blue faience hippopotami are mostly from Dynasty XII.  Every respectable Egyptian collection has one.  The Metropolitan Museum in NYC made a children's book about their "Willie".  This one is just as fetching.

The Middle Bronze Age

In Mesopotamia continuity had been interrupted by the Dynasty of Akkad, which was a Semitic-language dynasty, and after Ur Nammu's Third Dynasty of Ur the Sumerians people would never again be politically powerful in Mesopotamia, although their art (and culture in general) remained basic to subsequent Mesopotamian art.  After the end of the hegemony of the Third Dynasty of Ur, for a century or more, the cities of Isin and Larsa contended for supremacy in southern Mesopotamia, before a new NW Semitic dynasty assumed power in Mesopotamia under Hammurabi of Babylon, who founded the Old Babylonian Kingdom in the 18th century B.C.; this dynasty lasted until about 1600 B.C.
But in Egypt, always more uniform and isolated, the disruption of the First Intermediate period (about 2250-2050 B.C.) only involved the growing power of regional princes and the country's falling apart into two halves, upper and lower Egypt; this period was brought to an end in the middle of Dynasty XI, at about 2050 B.C., by Mentuhotep, king of upper Egypt, who reunified the nation under his sole rule, thus founding the Middle Kingdom.  The power of Dynasty XI and Dynasty XII, the Middle Kingdom, was never as uncontested as that of the Old Kingdom pharaohs and ended about 1786 B.C. with the end of Dynasty XII.  Note that unified power recommences in Mesopotamia at about the same date as it falls apart again in Egypt: in the eighteenth century B.C.  In Egypt the succeeding, competing dynasties, XIII-XVII, never ruled the whole of Egypt, and the north (lower Egypt) was taken over by tribesmen who came down from the Levant (Palestine, later) called the Hyksos; this period is called the Second Intermediate Period, which, like the First, is marked by relative poverty, lasting until the sixteenth century B.C (c. 1570).
In Asia Minor, some of the ancestors of the Hittites arrived during this period, and in NW Asia Minor, at Troy, new people arrived and built the largest settlement ever there, Troy VI (compare on MAP 7 [see last box] with size of Troy II).
In the Aegean basin, the first Greeks arrived in the Greek peninsula, the culture of the Cyclades changed radically, while on the large island of Crete, by c. 2000 B.C., we see the first palaces and the luxury art that goes with palaces.  Already the Aegean is distinct from the Near and Middle Eastern civilizations, obviously giving life in this world priority over tomb art or temples; this is not to say that they were not religious, but that they allotted their material resources differently.  We cannot overemphasize the importance of being able to read the written documents of a civilization; the Middle Minoan Cretans wrote, but the surviving documents are very brief, and we cannot read them.  Therefore, despite obvious connections with SW Asia Minor, we do not know what kind of language they spoke, and we know practically nothing of their political institutions or beliefs.  Here the art must speak for itself, and we must be very cautious in trying to interpret it.  From the distribution of fragments of their beautiful pottery, which was exported, we do know that they had taken to their ships in order to enhance their economy and so had come in touch with the Levant and Egypt.

Egypt: Middle Kingdom (Dynasties XI-XII) followed, after c. 1786 B.C., by the Second Intermediate Period (Dynasties XIII-XVII), with Hyksos domination in the north.
Mesopotamia: Isin-Larsa Period; the Old Babylonian Kingdom (dynasty of Hammurabi)
NW Asia Minor: Troy VI
Aegean: Middle Cycladic, Middle Helladic, Middle Minoan (First Palaces of Crete, destroyed by earthquake c. 1750, the date being established by Egyptian imports, the latest of which bear the names of the last kings of Dynasty XII)

MIDDLE BRONZE AGE EGYPT

As I pointed out to you before, Ur-nammu of Ur came to the throne about the same time as Mentuhotep, who was king of Upper Egypt, reconquered Lower Egypt and reunified the country, thus founding the Middle Kingdom.  So Mentuhotep is the beginning of a new age and thus is taught here.  (I would never ask on a test whether a monument at a borderline is "really" one period or the other; I might ask, however, at which borderline it stands).  Periodization is our creation, to help us organize history.

[M 169]  Mentuhotep's statue shows him in a white gown, wearing both the red and the white crowns, and he is painted blue-black.  Natural black skin color is warm black; no one alive is blue-black; it is the color of a well-aged corpse; blue-black is death, no matter what your living pigmentation was.  Funerary portrait; now they think of immortality (note crossed arms) in terms of the god Osiris, who died with the onset of the drought season and was reborn in the green season of the Nile floods.  Resurrected with growing things.  Rather than Khufu's boat of the sun god, Ra.  Metaphors of the hope of rebirth.  Hence the blue-black color.  Not a pretty statue; clunky; but it shows that after several centuries of disorganization the tradition is alive and well.

Older reconstructions of Mentuhotep's funerary temple usually show it with a pyramid on top.

[M 61]  We cannot study much from Dynasty XI, but one thing in which they excelled was these models of everyday life, placed in tombs, made of painted wood.  Served the same purpose as the painted reliefs on the walls of 5th-dynasty mastabas, surrogates of the production of wealth for the owner of the tomb.  Here is the most wonderful one of all, a whole cattle market.  Note the east African cattle, similar to present-day breeds there.  Note the columns in the shape of bundled reeds with lotus-bud capitals; in this course, we shall not see that Order of columns in stone until Dynasty XVIII, in the New Kingdom, but here and among the house models of Dynasty XII we have proof of its being fully developed much earlier, but in light, perishable materials and painted.  This reminds us that when we have to base our ideas only on materials that survive (and must never "make up" history to fill the gaps), we must always remember that most of what once existed is gone--and be grateful when things like these models inform us.  One of the most beautiful Dyn. XI tomb figures is this servant girl (in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC), eloquent testimony to high fashion in women's clothing; recreated, it would be elegant for evening wear even today.  There are hundreds of wooden model boats in many museums.  Similar is the figure in Cairo, shown here.

[M 64]  Dynasty XII is the principal dynasty of the Middle Kingdom.  That it ended, probably, in 1,786 B.C., is our first pretty firm really exact date.  So it's a key date, on which we'll hang other things.  One of the kings was Amenemhet III (kings named Amenemhet and Sesostris/Senusret alternated in Dyn. XII).  A magnificent portrait of him as a Sphinx; the amusing thing is that the artist is at pains to show that it is a portrait of a man with the lion's skin (minus the muzzle) framing his face--not the actual merging of man and lion.  That's what I had in mind when I spoke earlier of the Egyptians as not making true monsters, as Mesopotamian artists did.  Logical Egyptians (pay no attention to Rosicrucians).  The kings of this Dynasty have a natural family physiognomy that is very distinctive, with high cheekbones, etc., that almost remind us of some of the photographs of 19th-century Native Americans.  Egyptians do not all look alike.  The portraits tend to look melancholy, partly because of this physiognomy, but it must be admitted that in the Middle Kingdom royal power was never so absolute as it had been in the Early Bronze Old Kingdom, and the literature also evinces interest in individual persons and how they feel (we actually possess a piece of real literary fiction from Dyn. XII) quite different from the Pyramid Age.  One exciting thing about studying antiquity is watching this evolution of human awarenesses.

[M 170]  The Lady Sennuwy, in the Boston Museum, is in the same pose as one of the kings.  Wife of a governor in a province way up the river, in the south, over the modern border into modern Sudan, a long way from Thebes or Memphis.  And done in granite, much harder to work than the limestone of Lower Egypt.  Yet somehow the sculptor of the Lady Sennuwy has produced a sculptural masterpiece of the highest order, one of the towering accomplishments of Middle Kingdom art, both clear and simple and personal and charming, both majestic and feminine.

[G 4] These are Middle Kingdom, Dyn. XII, tombs cut in the living rock (in that respect like the tombs in the Valley of the Kings at Thebes in the New Kingdom) at Beni Hasan, in Middle Egypt.  Their design is unique at this place.  Since the artist had no control over the texture of the stone surface of the living rock in the interiors, it is not surprising that these are gessoed and painted, not carved in low relief and painted.  The one in this string of tombs that has the most interesting paintings is the Tomb of Khnumhotep.  What is also interesting is that we have here architectural Orders cut out of the living rock, to look like built architecture.  Representation of bevelled (fluted inside the tombs) shafts with block capitals, a half-round molding above and a curved overhang abstracted from palm fronds.  Rendered, carved from the living stone, also we see the protruding ends of round poles such as would support the roofing.

[G 5]  Inside the Tomb of Khnumhotep, four columns (fluted) "hold up the roof", and there's a shrine niche at the back of the chamber.  Fluting is hollowed bevelling, so to speak; it leaves sharp ridges (arrises) between the flutes.  It first occurred at Zoser's monument and, of course, is best known later in the Greek Doric Order.  The tombs are designed to recall dwellings; they are everlasting dwellings.

[M 72] [M 71] [M73]  As before, in the paintings in tombs, in the Tomb of Khnumhotep we have (a) banquet scene, (b) industrial (and related) scenes, (c) hunting scenes.  Here is Khnumhotep fowling and netting fish and spearing hippopotamus, just as Ti did six centuries earlier.  Note the detail of an acacia tree full of east African birds.  Beside it Khnumhotep holds the strings of a net trap to pull in the birds that fly into it.  The scene is drawn (remember?) conceptually--not what the net looks like but how it works.  Excellent for information.  Birds are almost Audubon-worthy.  Likewise fruit of Acacia.  In tomb of a rural noble at Beni Hasan, we have the range of subject matter we saw in courtiers' and princes' tombs in the Old Kingdom; wealth was less narrowly concentrated now.  Khnumhotep must have engaged in long-range trade; here from his tomb are men bringing desert oryxes and force-fed geese, and here are goats led by Levantines wearing fringed garments, people from the direction of Sinai (think of the Joseph stories in the Bible, which refer to this period).  Fine drawing, if a little less delicate and less skillfully foreshortened than in earlier Tomb of Ti.
 The Second Intermediate period is, again, a falling apart, and people named "Hyksos" in the later Egyptian histories that were written in Greek actually ruled part of northern Egypt.

MIDDLE BRONZE AGE MESOPOTAMIA
In Mesopotamia, the 20th and 19th centuries B.C. are a very complicated period.  No "top dog".  Isin and Larsa vied for hegemony in the south, in Sumer.  In this region, it's the Isin-Larsa period.  Way up the Tigris, in NE Iraq, around Mosul, the Assyrians formed into a nation-state; they aren't very powerful yet, but in a thousand years they will be.

From a lost UPrint: scanned from its source.

[MG 210] One really splendid temple is at Ishchali, dedicated to a local version of the love goddess Ishtar, called Ishtar-kititum.  Compare the temple oval at Khafafe about 700 years earlier; the same kind of temple and organization of spaces and gates (two towers with arched opening between to mark entrances).  But it's rectangular (normal) and more sophisticated and worked-out in its design, yet in exactly the same architectural tradition as the Temple Oval and earlier temples.

[As a cross reference: Biblical scholars tend to place Abraham's migration from Ur, through Syria, down into Palestine, in the 19th century B.C., thus in the Isin-Larsa period.]

[M 204] [M 13] The 18th century B.C, when Dyn. XII in Egypt fell apart (and Crete suffered a terrible earthquake), saw in Mesopotamia the arrival of an Amurru (Amorite) king, a NW Semite invading from the Syrian desert: Hammurabi.  He adopted whole the culture of the land he conquered, and his dynasty ruled Mesopotamia down to about 1,600.  His language was the dialect of the Akkadian language that we call Babylonian, because Hammurabi founded Babylon, and his dynasty was our "Old Babylonian Period".  (Not the Babylon of the blue Ishtar Gate and the Hanging Gardens--we'll study Neo-Babylonian later).  Hammurabi's famous Stele illustrates his full adoption of Sumerian civilization.  Sumerians had been the first to promulgate a written, public code of law.  Hammurabi's Code elaborated Sumerian codes, and his Stele is fully preserved, with all the laws on it (many of them are almost identical to laws in torah).  The laws here, too, are pretty stiff, but fair.  The head, in diorite, appears to be Hammurabi, and he is wearing the fleece hat, which he also wears on his Law Code stele, which Gudea wore: king is shepherd, people are sheep (cf. Psalm 23 and Christ as Good Shepherd), but he is bearded like the king of Akkad.  Hand before mouth on the Stele is a gesture of reverent awe, not to breathe onto the god.  The god is Shamash, the sun god; light rays come from his shoulder.  Sun god here because light reveals that which shouldn't be done; you can't hide from the light of day.  Hence justice and truth; Shamash invests Hammurabi with power to mete out justice (compare Stele of Ur-nammu), hence measuring tools for investiture.  As for style, a more sophisticated, softer, more delicate and refined form of Neo-Sumerian style, taken over and developed for Hammurabi.

[M 207] In the 19th and 18th centuries at the site of Mari, up the Euphrates River, which you already know from the Early Dynastic Period as the site where the statues of Ibibhil and Ur-nanshe were found, a city independent in the 19th century (conquered by Hammurabi in the 18th), we have a 19th-century palace (excavated by the French) with preserved wall paintings.  Of the plan, notice that it is a large palace informally arranged around squarish courtyards of varying sizes, without any strong axes.  We shall compare and contrast other palaces later.  In this painting from one of the walls of a royal reception room, you see vases of flowing water, and the same kind of investiture scene, with the god handing the ruler the rod and reel, as we saw on the steles.  But notice the god's foot resting on an animal.

MIDDLE BRONZE AGE ASIA MINOR AND THE AEGEAN
In Asia Minor, the ancestors of the Hittites arrived.  New people also arrived in Troy; they built a much greater fortification than that of Troy II, as you can see by comparing them on the general plan of Troy [MAP 7].  The palace (or whatever) on the top of the mound will never be known, owing to the Greeks' (with their sense of history!) having levelled off the mound, about 300 B.C., to honor it with a temple--anyway, it proves that the ancient Greeks agreed with Heinrich Schliemann as to where Troy really was.  We only have the buildings on the perimeter of Troy VI, just inside the fortification walls; they are somewhat megaron-like in character.  The walls are very handsome, a major city, founded in the 19th or 18th century, in the time of Mari and Hammurabi (without any major calamity, this same city will endure until the late 13th century, past the middle of the Late Bronze Age); the people who built it arrived in the 19th century.

 I see no reason to doubt that the grey (reduction fired) and yellow (oxidation fired) are less expensive versions of silver and gold.  

The name means matt-painted; that is, it is not a semi-gloss glaze-paint, and the fabric also is dull.  It  also is devoid of representation, but it is a mistake to suppose that just because you can apply the same adjective, "geometric", to these patterns and those of the 9th and 8th century BC does not make it correct to assume any historical connection.

[Illus. of "Minyan" pottery and "Mattmalerei"].   In Greece, those who came in the 21st century brought a new kind of pottery, Grey and Yellow "Minyan"; this kind of pottery also occurs at Troy.  In both places the newcomers also brought horses.  They may be related, but not necessarily linguistically, since similarities in material culture need not be tied to language groups.  In Greece, the newcomers built houses that were half-round at one end, open at the other (round-ended houses do not occur in Troy VI).  The grey and yellow of the pottery evidently imitate metal, and so do the shapes (we have examples in metal); the color is fired all the way through (not painted on) and the clay surface is very smooth, even "soapy" to touch.  This ware is called "Minyan" after the legendary king of Orchomenos in Boeotia [MAP 2].  In Greece, the newcomers brought the Greek language, too (they are culturally continuous into the Mycenaean Age, as we shall see, and the Mycenaeans have left us written Greek).  We have no writing for Troy VI, so we can't know whether they were linguistically akin (it won't do to take seriously the ease with which Achaeans and Trojans converse in the Iliad!)  Mattmalerei so different in fabric and decoration (and in its uses, as large storage containers) is that we have to remind ourselves that there were reasons for the difference, since the two are often found in the same period at the same site.

We shall actually study the palaces of Crete, particularly the Palace at Knossos, in their Late Bronze Age form.  Here it suffices to observe that the excavators found substantial traces of the First Palaces of Crete underneath the foundations of the Second Palaces.  Remember that Crete suffered a major earthquake in the 18th century; it was then that the First Palaces were destroyed (Note: this means that, as with Troy VI, palaces built in the middle of the Middle Bronze Age endure well into the Late Bronze Age without a break).  Enough of the First Palaces, built early in the second millennium B.C. (early in Middle Minoan), can be recovered to show clearly that they consisted of blocks of rooms arranged around a single rectangular central court, not around multiple squarish courts as at Mesopotamian Mari.

The use of the fast potter's wheel is nowhere more brilliantly illustrated than in this almost eggshell-thin cup.  Larger vases, of course, have heavier walls.

[M 219, left and center] In Middle Minoan II, just before the dreadful earthquake (dated by import objects with the cartouche of Egypt's Sesostris III, late in Dyn. XII, on them), Minoan Crete produced beautiful pottery made around the palace sites; not only did they use it themselves, they exported it; often its presence at foreign sites confirms the relative dating, and in Palestine Egyptian and Minoan fragments provide dating for pre-literate sites.  This beautiful pottery is called "Kamares Ware", because a century ago it was first found in sanctuary caves (kamares) in the mountains of Crete.  It is noteworthy that the Minoans did not spend huge resources on either temples or tombs, in general, and their places of worship seem to have been private shrines and places like these sacred caves.  The fine pottery was made on a fast-spinning potter's wheel; the tan clay was coated with black paint (manganese makes it black), then decorated with white and mineral red and yellow (and mixtures of red, white, and yellow).  The decorative repertory is derived from plant forms but is highly abstracted and often combined with spirals and S-curves.  It was made at Knossos, Phaistos, and in eastern Crete, but not after the earthquakes of ca. 1750, not after Middle Minoan II.

[M 143] [M 140] In the new palace at Knossos there was a shrine room that, as it happens, we don't know why, was used only for a few generations, then sealed off.  Among the finds from this Middle Minoan III shrine room were these two statuettes of priestesses or goddesses--if only we had any literary sources, for obviously the snakes, owls, and gestures refer to goddesses with stories and significant cult attributes.  The Middle Minoan Cretans wrote, but we can't read the writing and have no idea what language we're dealing with.  Unfortunately, it may be one related to pre-Hittite southwest Anatolian languages which also never got committed to writing.  The open-breasted costume of the goddesses or priestesses, however, is the court costume of Minoan ladies.  We don't even know her name, but she seems to be their most important deity.  The stuff that the statuettes are made of is a self-glazing glass paste that we habitually call "Egyptian faience"; the Minoans learned it from their many (by now long) contacts with Egypt.  It is easy to model and mould, but it doesn't take sharp detail.  Rather, it relies for effect on color.  On the whole, Minoan art relies on color and a general impression for its effect and in this respect is quite different from other Bronze Age arts.

In the Middle Bronze Age, Cycladic art is no longer so distinct from that of Crete, so we won't discuss it in an introductory course, but here is a very pretty jug:

Middle Bronze Age Cycladic jug.

Note: A course based on the University Prints had to exclude the excavation by Spyridon Marinatos of Thera and, subsequently, some other Cycladic and Minoan excavations.  The jug that I put here as a marker is just a teaching snapshot from my files.