Ancient Civilization

 This week we studied about ancient civilizations. In the Middle East, there were three main civilizations that stand out: Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Nubia. Egypt produced awe-inspiring monuments that have piqued the world’s imagination for millennia. Mesopotamia is home to the world’s first urban centers, and saw considerable strides in mathematics, writing, and astrology. Nubia is the least studied of the three. It is also known as Kush, and it was the African civilization that continually influenced Egypt and briefly ruled it for a period. 

Mesopotamia

Mesopotamia is a geographic designation that includes the fertile plain fed by the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. It is roughly contiguous with modern-day Iraq. By 4000 BCE the area had a network of villages that served one of the most productive grain-producing regions of the world. They were the leading civilization in writing, mathematics, time, urban civilization, the sail, and astronomy. The people from the Tigris River Valley had a system of standardized weights and record keeping. The citizens of these cities had a capacity for organization that allowed them to develop the world’s first large-scale urban centers. Initially the homes that were made in this region were made of mud, timber, and reeds. In order to differentiate between the royale quarters and the servant quarters, an elaborate taxonomy of applied finishes was utilized. They didn’t have much access to stone and wood, and it was very expensive, so it was used sparingly. 

Cities

Mesopotamia used their cities to perform rituals, and it was also used to organize their agricultural and pro-industrial production. They constructed their city with bridges, tunnels, moats, and walls with ceremonial gates. They utilized blue bricks to emphasize their entryways. 

Palaces

The palaces were largely accumulative affairs. Individual rooms of the palace were not much different from modest structures in regard to size and material. The largest areas were the exterior courtyard. What made their palaces extraordinary was the number of rooms and the quality of their artwork. There were several methods for signaling the importance of the rooms. They added additional layers of mud/plaster, painted the interior walls, or used massive sculptures to mark their entrances. 

Sculpture

The most famous artworks from their palaces are the colossal gateway figures that were placed at the entrances. The sculptures were 15 feet tall and were human heads that were placed on top of winged lion or bull bodies. They also used sphinxes to guard their entryways. 

Reliefs

The sculptures in a public room expressed the wealth of a king or kingdom. Sphinxes were the largest element that covered the walls of the throne room. The state rooms of palaces featured decorative programs that featured scenes of hunting, celebration, worship, processions of courtiers bearing tribute, natural landscapes, and scenes of military technology and organization. 

Furniture

Assyrian furniture has not survived to the extent that Egyptian furniture. The knowledge we have of it comes from their inscriptions and representations on reliefs. They found that they had chairs of maple and boxwood, tables of ivory with inlay, silver, gold, lead, copper, and iron. Most Assyrian furniture was made of wood and adorned with bronze plates that were attached was small nails. 

Egypt

Egyptian history has several important people and impressive monuments. Ancient Egyptians used a chronology based on dynasties and pharaohs, but modern-day historians rely on a simplified system that divides the period into the Old Kingdom, the Middle Kingdom, and the New Kingdom. Egypt was located on the Nile and had a huge workforce of slaves and laborers that worked in the fields and crafted the buildings. 

Monuments

Old Kingdom: Egyptian religion was focused on death and the afterlife. Because their attention was focused almost exclusively on monuments, tombs, cenotaphs, and temples, there is little to know about Egyptian daily life. Egyptian art was highly stylized, conventional, and conservative, meaning that changes came about slowly, over the course of centuries. An intermediate step in the development of pyramids was during the reign of the Pharaoh Snefru. One of the pyramids he built was the Bent Pyramid of Snefru. It was envisioned to be higher, but because of structural failure during construction, the angle of the pyramid was changed. The most famous pyramids are those of Giza, made by Snefru’s son. The pyramid named for him, was the biggest and built first, and the pyramid of Khafre followed. 

     Egyptian Pyramids                                                Modern Version

Middle Kingdom: During the Middle Kingdom, the hold of pyramids as the principal type of royal monument decreased and the pharaohs turned their focus to outfitting the great pylon temples.

New Kingdom: Although some pyramids continued to be built during this period, it was the classic age of Egyptian art and architecture. 

Tutankhamen

Tutankhamen’s greatest legacy is that he is the only pharaoh whose royal tomb was discovered intact. Among his treasures, there was a wealth of furnishings. There was a folding bed made of wood with rush matting for support and comfort. Many Egyptian pieces were collapsible because furniture pieces were rare and used in travel. Pieces of furniture operate under two systems: the importance of the simple geometry, and a sensitivity to the shape of the human figure. In many reliefs, chairs are represented as cubes at a right angle, with stretchers occurring at either third or quarters. A child’s chair from Tutankhamen’s tomb shows the characteristic Egyptian curved seat. Tutankhamen’s tomb also had a single drawer as a storage device. They were used to store small objects and precious items, such as fine linens, cosmetics, jewelry, and games. There was also a folding stool in his tomb. 

 

                              Chest on High Legs                                    Modern Version

Nubia

Nubia is the land to the south of Egypt; it occupied the areas that today lie in Sudan and Ethiopia. The most valued of Nubia’s natural materials were metals. Nubia helped satiate the Egyptian thirst for gold, and the Egyptians relied upon Nubian’s for their considerable knowledge of iron metallurgy. 

The 25th Dynasty

For most of history, Nubia was ruled by Egypt. During the 25th century, Nubian pharaohs ruled Egypt. Nubian rulers made sure that Napata was architecturally worthy to rule Egypt. They built an Egyptian-style pylon temple, the Temple of Amun at Jebel Barkal. Nubian pyramids are smaller in scale than the Egyptians and they had a pylon porch in front of the steep pyramids. When making grand public gestures, such as temples, mortuary tombs, and sculpture of rulers, Nubians looked to Egypt for inspiration. More common objects continued to rely on local traditions like baskets, mats, simple pieces of furniture, and ceramics. 

                                Nubian Ceramics                                                Modern Verion