The Late Bronze Age (part one)

ART OF THE LATE BRONZE AGE

Lonfon, BM  Cat and Butterfly from Dyn 18 Tomb of Nebamun at Thebes

With the understanding that all such statements are relative, we can say that the Late Bronze Age is the first really cosmopolitan period in human history.  All of the civilizations of the Mediterranean and the Near and Middle East are regularly in touch with each other.  The total wealth of these civilizations was greater than it ever had been before, and regional assets (such as Egyptian gold, from Nubia [modern Sudan],and Aegean wine and olive oil) were widely traded.  We have already mentioned that the still fundamentally Neolithic societies of the British Isles, for example, in this period did have a few imported metal tools from the Mediterranean.
There were two great empires in the Late Bronze Age: the Egyptian and the Hittite.  The Hittites' language has been deciphered and is of mixed Indo-European and non-Indo-European character; the Hittites became an urban kingdom and literate in the sixteenth century B.C., an empire about 1400 B.C.; their empire lasted until about 1200 B.C.  In Egypt, the New Kingdom begins with the reunification of the country about 1570 B.C., at the beginning of Dynasty XVIII; soon they controlled Nubia in the south and the Levant up to a line in modern Syria, thus reaching the farthest extent of the Hittite Empire.  A large archive of diplomatic correspondence found at Tell el Amarna (see below) in Egypt and at the Hittite capital, Hattusas (modern Boghazköy), sheds light on their activities.  The Egyptian empire reached its greatest extent in the fifteenth century B.C. under Amenhotep III; his son, who took the name Akhenaten, changed the state religion for the duration of his lifetime and moved the capital of Egypt from Thebes to a new city at the modern Tell el Amarna, which he called Akhetaten; his religion was henotheistic, honoring only the Sun in the form of the disk, the Aten.  Dynasty XVIII ended with Tutankhamen, back at Thebes, and an interregnum when Horemheb, not a member of the dynasty, ruled Egypt (to 1314 B.C.).  Most of the kings of Dynasties XIX and XX were named Ramesses, of whom the greatest, longest ruling, was Ramesses II.  Dynasty XX ended in 1085 B.C.; we may use this date for the end of the Late Bronze Age throughout the whole ancient world; the Egyptian empire lasted longest, and by the eleventh century B.C. every Bronze Age palace civilization had fallen.  Far to the east, the Indus Valley civilization (in modern Pakistan) had been terminated by the Aryan invasions by about 1500 B.C..  In the Yellow River (Huang Ho) basin in China, the Late Bronze Age Shang Dynasty gave way to the Chou (Zhou) about 1100 B.C.  By the same date, in Mesopotamia, the Kassites, a foreign dynasty ruling around modern Baghdad, had fallen, as had the Mitanni, who had ruled in what is today NW Iraq and part of Syria, and the Elamites in what is today southern Iran, and the Middle Assyrian kingdom in NE Mesopotamia (modern NE Iraq, around Mosul).  Also, in the west, the second palaces of Crete were destroyed, evidently by the huge eruption of the island of Thera in the Cyclades, in the fifteenth century, which effectively ended both Late Minoan and Late Cycladic high civilization and trade, leaving the Mycenaeans in Late Helladic Greece alone to prosper in the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean, since, whether the Iliad contains a kernel of history or not, Troy VI had fallen towards the end of the thirteenth century B.C. and its successor city, Troy VIIA, by the beginning of the eleventh.  Indeed, by the time that Egypt's Dynasty XX fell, Mycenae itself was the victim of the inroads of new tribes of Greeks from the north and, probably, other threats as well.  Of all its centers, Athens suffered least, except for the colonies in SW Asia Minor, along the coast, the future Ionia.  It is strange that all over the ancient world an entire way of life should collapse everywhere almost simultaneously, even in far distant areas like China.  Many of the reasons doubtless will never be known, since our information is scanty and partly the matter of legend.  The upheavals that initiated the Iron Age world themselves helped to destroy records.  Several of the Bronze Age systems of writing were lost, when no new scribes were trained to write them, because, from the royal point of view, there was no longer much worth writing.  The greatest continuity, as before, was maintained in Egypt.
These brief historical notes should help you to correlate the arts of the second half of the second millennium B.C., the Late Bronze Age.

Egypt: The New Kingdom, or Empire (Dynasties XVIII-XX)
Mesopotamia: The Kassite kingdom, the Kingdom of Mitanni, the Middle Assyrian kingdom
Iran: The Elamite kingdom (around Susa)
Asia Minor: The Hittite Kingdom and Empire; Troy VI-VIIA
Aegean: Late Cycladic (on Thera), Late Minoan (Second Palaces), Late Helladic=Mycenaean (centered in the Peloponnesos of the Greek peninsula)
Indus Valley: Mohenjo-daro
China: Shang Dynasty

 PART ONE: EGYPT

[MAP 11] [MAP 12] [MAP 2] When I call Late Bronze "cosmopolitan", of course it is relative, but with the constant increase of trade and technology and competition and population, people were trading widely: from the Levant, from the Aegean, to and from Egypt.  Abundant evidence of their all knowing about each other: pictures of Minoans in 15th century Egyptian tombs, of Mycenaean Greeks in 14th century ones.  A house in the Cyclades has a wall painting showing several different port cities, one of them probably Egyptian.  The Aegean people probably traded wine and olive oil; the Egyptians of the New Kingdom had gold from the mines of Nubia.  The pottery of the Aegean is found all over the place.  In Egypt itself, civilization is so well established that you don't see a real foreign influence on their art, you see more sophistication, more urbanity.  Not better than Old Kingdom, nothing could be, but it is a new and different art, very refined and elegant (we call Old Kingdom art "powerful", and the like).

[M 172] The style of the portraiture of Dyn. XVIII was influenced by that of the third ruler of the dynasty: Hatshepsut was Egypt's only female ruler (her husband died when her son was a small boy), not counting Cleopatra, who was really a Hellenistic Greek queen; Hatshepsut's slender, graceful portraits leave their mark on the taste of the whole dynasty, down to Tutankhamen.  She ruled at the beginning of the 15th century B.C., through all the years of her son's minority, and more!  As divine king of Egypt her portraits show her in the masculine regalia: headcloth, kilt, sometimes the false beard, too.  Thus she is barebreasted, like a male, but they compromise at the breasts; they can't show her breasts like a dancing girl's!  A small waist and delicate frame convey her femininity.  The "White Hatshepsut" of pale stone is in the Met. Mus. in NYC; by now sculptors have bronze tools that can carve this stone.  Maybe the family of the dynasty were gracile people like modern Somalis, whom they resemble; the gracile art style is built on that.  [Note that Africans do not all look alike; these people of east Africa don't look at all like Nigerians, for example].

[M 81] She didn't exactly rule alone.  She had her vizier (who also was her architect), Senmut.  Here is his portrait (type invented in Dyn. XII; playing on the obvious cubical character of the Egyptian traditional statue by pushing the cube to the extreme), holding the tiny princess, Nefrure, in his lap; only her head protrudes, with the single lock of hair of a young child.

[G 7] [G 6] The royal tombs are in the cliffs opposite the city of Thebes.  Here is the Deir-el-Bahari site.  You see the greatest architectural monument since Zoser, the funerary temple of Hatshepsut (the tomb itself is cut into the living rock).  Designed by Senmut (her son Thutmosis erased her name from it!), beautifully related to the cliffs.  Notice the smaller, earlier tomb beside it: Mentuhotep's tomb, Dyn. XI, the prototype for Hatshepsut's.  The elegance of hers is due to the broad, gently rising terraces, with their rows of pillars and columns; it is the proportions that make it lovely.  Ramps lead up the center.  At the upper level were pillars with addorsed portraits of Hatshepsut in the guise of Osiris.  On either side are shrines of Hathor and Anubis.  We look across the façade of the Anubis shrine and see in real building the same Order of architecture that we saw cut out of living rock at Beni Hasan (Dyn. XII): the bevelled column with block capital, the half round, the simplified overhanging palm fronds.  Traces of palm leaf patterns in color remain.

[G 23] G 21] Now we have Egyptian temples well enough preserved to be studied.  Those at Karnak are too complicated for this course, so we study the most beautiful: the Temple of Amon, Mut, and Khons at Luxor (the name of the modern city near ancient Thebes).  The Egyptian Empire (=New Kingdom) reached its greatest extent under Amenhotep III, a century after Hatshepsut; his architect, who designed this temple, had the same given name (it means "son of Amen", the sky god), so we specify: Amenhotep, son of Hapu.  In the reconstruction you see what an Egyptian temple looked like when it was whole; from the exterior, you see solid walls, revealing nothing of the courts and numerous rooms inside.  Before every court was a gate (pylon).  Before the main gate the twin pillars tipped with pyramids (not by accident resembling the Washington Monument in D.C., which is inspired by them); the pyramid refers to the sun, as before.  [Real Egyptian obelisks (the Greek name for them: "needles") can be seen in Rome, Paris, and New York, in Central Park]  The parallelogram-shaped forecourt was added by Rameses II in Dyn. XIX.  If you just take the original temple, designed about 1,390 B.C., you have a typical Egyptian temple: at the back the holy of holies and rooms for preparation, etc., the hypostyle hall (a forest of columns with a slightly wider passage through the center), and the forecourt (open to the sky with a covered colonnade around it.

[G 20] When he died, Amenhotep was in the process of adding onto the temple; of this unfinished part we have the double row of huge columns with papyrus capitals (descendants of those at Zoser's monument).  What stands, as usual, is the parts that don't make good reusable building material; the ashlar wall blocks, very good for palaces, churches, mosques, have all been removed centuries ago.  The columnar blocks were less useful, so now we see the columns from the exterior as one didn't when the temple was complete.

[G 20, in distance] The original columns are the kind we saw first in miniature in the Middle Kingdom (Dyn. XI) model of a cattle market; so these lotus capital columns are a translation into stone of a long-familiar wooden column.  Later lotus columns are not so slender and fine as these.  Luxor is, so to speak, the Parthenon of Egyptian temples; the Ramessid addition is coarse and hasty work--Rameses built more and larger but not nearly so well as Amenhotep III did.

Cosmopolitan: Now there is, too, a genuine urban middle class; now there is luxury art for the living who can afford it, as well as funerary art for the kings and nobility.  Small objects from tombs are often adorably charming: an ivory gazelle in the Metropolitan Mus. in NYC, good for nothing but sheer delight, is an example; luxury art.  Commoner, but very pretty, are the cosmetic spoons whose handles are slender little servant girls (with short hair).

[M 85, left] This elderly lady in an ebony head in the Cairo Museum, from the hardest of all woods, shows Tiy, the principal wife of Amenhotep III, in her old age.  It was habitual for the king to marry a half sister, and Tiy was well born but only a governor's daughter from the south, but she was the principal wife, the mother of his heir.  She looks more "African" than anyone else we have seen in the Royal Family, and her actual mummy bears out the accuracy of the portraits.  The delicate bone structure with short, narrow nose, sharp chin, high cheekbones, slender neck.  The Egyptians, like many later people, could be snobbish about skin color (compare gradations of color in New Orleans), but this dynasty seems to be an exception in this regard.  This whole royal family looks strongly east African compared with others earlier and later.

In the tomb paintings we see the same urbanity and prosperity in the 15th and 14th centuries B.C.  More sophisticated kind of life than before is shown, though the basic subject matter (banqueting in perpetuity, sport, industry/agriculture) remains the same.

[M 107] [M 108] [1504] The Tomb of Nakht in the Valley of the Kings at Thebes will be our example.  The view of interior shows the formal banquet, but the freer scenes show a great artist [do not be misled into thinking that anonymity means "lesser"; we know the names of many Renaissance and modern hacks; that doesn't make them important].  What sets this artist apart, as with the Tomb of Ti, is the lovely little touches: a man pulling the drawstring on the fowling net looks backward at something; they seem actually to be pulling; plucking & gutting fowl and hanging on a rack, vividly perpetuated; Nakht hunting (the composition and his pose preserve conventions that go back to Old Kingdom).  As at Beni Hasan, the living rock is not consistently free of irregularities, not good for reliefs, so the surface is gessoed, and painting is preferred here even for a noble tomb.  Notice the tiny servant girl in a beaded G-string such as, until fairly recently, small Zulu girls wore in south Africa.  If you never get to visit Egypt, in NYC at the Metropolitan Museum you can see the accurate copies that the museum had an artist named Davies make of the tomb paintings; to get light into the chamber then they set up a sequence of mirrors at angles to reflect sunlight into the chamber; they are wonderful full-size copies.  Back to the Tomb of Nakht: the banquet scene has become much more than just the ritual meal; we see a party in session; perfume cones and fresh lotus buds that will open in the course of the evening (it will be an odorous party); ladies' crinkly linen dresses were height of fashion in Dyn. XVIII Egypt; the loveliest of all (perhaps in all of Egyptian art) in the banquet scene is the group of three young professional girl musicians, one playing a standing harp, one double flute, one a stringed instrument like a Japanese samisen or plucked string instruments still made in Africa.  The girl in the center wears only a G-string (age 12-13); she turns back to the girl behind her.  Without breaking conventions of Egyptian art, this lovely gesture; but notice the roundness of the belly and where the artist has placed the navel, so it's in 3/4 view--that's what gives it life.  Gifted Egyptian artists always can do such things--only not for the figure of the owner of the tomb, who has to be represented for eternity.  From the reign of Amenhotep III, when the empire reached its greatest extent and bordered, in Syria, on the Hittite Empire.  Another wonderful Theban tomb is that of Nebanum; part of it is the traditional subject, the Hippopotamus Hunt on the Nile, but the painter far surpassed the usual tomb painting, both in the detail of the cat and butterfly (see at top of this Post) and in the banquet scene, where he undertook to show heads in 3/4 view and the ladies' feet tucked under their legs (the latter widely available on line and in textbooks).

A crisis in the second quarter of the 14th century: the son and heir, Amenhotep IV, was a strongly religious person; we don't know whether a religious genius or a religious nut--there is a difference, though it's often hard to tell--but being king he could do as he saw fit.  At this date, no one thought that there was one universal god; if you read Genesis you realize that the Hebrews did not deny that other peoples' gods existed, but they deemed them weak or bad; neither did Amenhotep; this is henotheism, a sort of step in the direction of monotheism.  What Akhenaten (his new name) did was to change the State religion to worship of the sun in the form of the aten, the radiant sun disk, light and warmth of life.  This was not new, but one of several aspects of the sun in Egyptian religion.  Since the cult of the sky god Amen was greatly entrenched at Thebes, he built a new city as his capital in Middle Egypt and called it Akhetaten, "Aten on the Horizon", which has been excavated at the site of a modern town called Amarna--hence Tell el Amarna.  The city did not much outlast his reign, so it is an archaeologist's dream; everything there is of one period.  The finds are in Berlin and Cairo; Nefertiti's portrait is just the most famous.

[M 88] Nefertiti is beautifully preserved, but one eye is missing, so the lovely profile is the view of choice for photos.  The art of this reign is exaggerated in style, in the direction of caricature, and the sun-worship element is expressed in relaxed poses, sun tans for both sexes, near nudity under the caressing rays emanating from the aten disk.  Nefertiti is red-brown, though a royal queen, but less exaggerated in style than the king; a beautiful woman's portrait perhaps could not be like his.  Her very name means "beautiful".

[M 89] The excavators found the actual sculptor's workshop at Amarna, and we have some instructive unfinished pieces.  Here one of the queen with a center guide line and the features drawn (for a day's work) in water-based paint on it.  There was, in fact, one master sculptor whom the king entrusted with the creation of this exceptional style.  One of the unfinished portraits is of the king himself, with the creases alongside the nose drawn on and also around the eyes.  Exaggeration of his own features; they actually had long heads, long jaws, long necks, full lips, short noses--distinctive.

[M 111] Here in a sculptured head is one of the lovely little daughters (in the Berlin Museum), a real chip off the old block.  Also two of the smallest on a cushion at their parents' feet (notice his heel and sandal) in a painting fragment now in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (Engl.).  Royal family lolling on cushions, the youngest stark naked.  Note the extreme exaggeration of the style here, with the little girls' necks really impossibly scrawny.  We don't know why they went so far, what it meant to them.  The true nudity is regarded as more dignified than the dancing girls' G-strings [a bikini calendar is more provocative than a Greek Aphrodite statue]; it is part of the Aten cult--the temple at Amarna is unlike other Egyptian temples, being completely open to the sky.  Why do they draw the royal family with thin chests and protruding bellies?  The only answer we can think of is that the king looked like that.

The wall paintings from the North Palace at Amarna, with plants and birds, are done more loosely with brushstrokes, not outlined like other Egyptian paintings.  More "impressionistic".  Contact with Minoan Crete or the Aegean in general?  That can't be proved, but the difference is plain to see.

[M 179] When Akhenaten died in 1352, he was succeeded, we think, by a half brother named Smenkhara, who shortly returned to Thebes.  When he died, succeeded by the youngest and last surviving son of Amenhotep III, the adolescent Tutankhamen, who was married to one of the six little princesses, whom we know so well because his hastily assembled poor little tomb (which looks so rich to us and fills a series of rooms in the Cairo Museum, but was overlooked by tomb robbers) was excavated in the early 1920s by Howard Carter, giving rise to King Tut style all over the urban world, in women's fashions, in jewelry, in interior design, even in Art Deco architecture.  Stone sarcophagus contained triple mummy cases, one inside the other; another shrine held his mummified soft parts.  The innermost mummy case shows him wearing the traditional regalia: headcloth, uraeus, wig, false beard, pectoral, hands crossed with shepherd's crook and flail to identify him with Osiris and that god's rebirth when the rains return and east Africa is suddenly lushly green and the Nile floods the fields downstream.  Lapis lazuli and lots of gold (the Nubian gold mines, the source of their great wealth).  There is a strong holdover of Amarna art in Tutankhamen's art, going beyond the sheer family resemblance, but the iconography is mostly Theban.

[M 116]  This chest shows Tutankhamen at war in a chariot, something he probably never did, but as king he must be shown, in effect, as Commander in Chief of the army.  Chariot horses and light chariot with large spoked wheels, a fast, Late Bronze chariot, of the Age of Chariot Warriors.  The subject matter is a little hard to take: Levantines ridden over roughshod on one side, black Africans on the other.  To show the confusion of the rout, the figures are scattered pell mell over the picture field.  Dogs tear apart the bodies of the enemy.  In the history books of the Bible, too, are passages too graphically dreadful for children--perhaps we have made a little progress, after all, in our attitudes.  The young king takes aim with a great bow in a conventional pose.

[1517]  The gold and silver throne from the tomb of Tutankhamen  has lion heads and lion feet, designed just like Khafre's in Dyn. IV.  On the back of the throne, some holdover from Amarna.  Tutankhamen wears an Amen crown but is in the slouched, royal ease pose of Amarna, and his wife is really cozy with him; this connubial familiarity is a leftover from aspects of the Aten cult at Amarna.  Here too the Aten disk is represented, its rays terminating in caressing hands, one of which holds the ankh before the king's face, for the breath of life.  Did the queen, Akhenaten's daughter, adhere to the Aten cult?  Dainty art and very alive.
The Red Granite Lions of Tutankamen in the British Museum: it is good to have something that isn't so romantic:

***

[G 1] [G 2] Dynasties XIX and XX produce huge art and a lot of it, but it seems repetitive and empty, not just traditional, and it often was hastily executed, especially the colossal sculpture and architecture.  But we must look at Rameses II'S great cenotaph at Abu Simbel, which had to be moved when Nasser built the great dam as Aswan.  Money raised by UNESCO.  Statues 60' high and whole chapel that was carved in the cliff cut out and moved block by block.  Cenotaph means "empty tomb"; he was buried at Thebes.  Colossi are carved at a scale too large for the sculptor actually to see what he's doing (like Mt. Rushmore); even when done by hand, work has to be mechanized.  Thus colossi are often dead-looking, and Abu Simbel is no exception, but very important.  Greek mercenaries scratched their names on them; Napoleon's army marvelled at them; the great early photographers took masterly photos of them.  Maxime du Camp's are the best, made with early paper negatives.  Art history in New World public universities like this one is wholly dependent on photography; in the 19th century, a mere hundred years ago, you had to be independently well off, so you didn't spend your time earning a living, so you could travel everywhere, in order to study art history; even 60 years ago, using expensive glass 4"X 5" slides, we'd have had only a few black-and-white slides to teach from.  This is the democratization of learning; by the time you are 50 or 60, you'll be able to directly access anything via fiber optic or some means not yet invented.

THE HITTITE EMPIRE OF THE LATE BRONZE AGE

This sphinx in Berlin is from Boghazköy

[M 208] [M 213] The other great empire was that of the Hittites, whose capital was Hattusas, at the modern Turkish village of Boghazköy, not too far from Ankara.  Nearby is Alaca Hüyük, from which we already saw Early Bronze Age metalwork.  These are the important Hittite sites.  The Hittites were invaders, Indo-Europeans who came in on top of earlier Anatolians, and the resultant Hittite nation and language were ethnically mixed.  Central Anatolia is high plateau; they have plenty of stone, as well as wood, and make large architecture sculpture of stone; it is impressive but not very technically accomplished by Egyptian standards.  Fortified cities with walls of huge boulders roughly fitted together and gates that look arched in a hairpin shape, but structurally are just lintels with the curve cut out.  On the jambs of these gates, animals emerge; their forequarters stick out of the jambs (all cut from one block).  This is something new, their invention, and important for the future.  At Alaca is the Sphinx Gate, at Boghazköy are the Lion Gate (this is not the only Late Bronze civilization with a Lion Gate, but only here do the lions emerge from the jambs) and the King's Gate, where the warrior (or god) is a low relief carving on a flat surface inside the gate.  The gates are double gates; these citadels are heavily fortified.  Next time we shall see at Mycenae and Tiryns contemporary citadels also fortified by walls of great boulders, which the historical Greeks called Cyclopean walls--referring to their being rough and gigantic, as if built by the one-eyed giant Cyclops.  In the figure of the warrior king or god on the King's Gate we see what the Hittites looked like: round head, large nose, thin-lipped mouth, compact physique; distinctive belt, sword sheath with curved tip, leather helmet with cheek pieces, shoes with turned-up toes--different from people whose representations we've seen elsewhere.

OTHER LATE BRONZE AGE KINGDOMS: MESOPOTAMIA AND IRAN

Berlin.  Altar of Tukulti-Ninurta of Assur, showing the king kneeling before an altar just like this one, before a sword (?) on it.

[MG 207] Up the Tigris River, around where Mosul is today, the Assyrians (whose great age is still to come) had a Late Bronze Age kingdom.  Tukulti-Ninurta I, who was their king in the late 13th century B.C., built Ashur, seen here in a reconstruction, with a temple on a ziggurat; this architecture is in the tradition of Sumerian and Babylonian architecture, as at Ur or Ishchali.  But up here they have more stone to incorporate in their building.

[M 208] Around modern Babylon were the Kassites, up the Euphrates the Mitanni, but here in the southern, flat part of Persia, in modern Iran, in Elam (remember early Susa), the Elamites have an important kingdom.  Here is a statue of their 13th-century queen, Napir-asu; very high technology in casting bronze, in its basic shapes related to the tradition of Mesopotamian sculpture, but with more emphasis on surface decoration.  On examination, this statue proves to be solid metal all the way through.

Part two of the Late Bronze Age will follow