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The History of Art Survey
Lecture 4
Egypt I: Predynastic and Old Kingdom
3- .......................................title ................................................site
Predynastic Period c 3500 - 2920 BCE
1 People, boats and animals (det. of water color copy) Hierakonpolis
2 Palette of King Narmer Hierakonpolis
Style Period: Old Kingdom 2575 - 2150 BCE
3 Mastaba : section, plan, reconstruction
4 Stepped Pyramid, attributed to Imotep, King Djoser’s Complex Saqqara
5 Djoser’s mortuary complex: site plan, isometric reconstruction Saqqara
6 Fluted Columnar entrance
7 Papyrus pilasters, North Palace
Intro-15 Hesire Saqqara
8 Great Pyramids Gizeh
9 Section of Khufu’s Pyramid Gizeh
10 Reconstruction of Pyramid complex Gizeh
* Khafre’s valley temple (interior) Gizeh
11 Great Sphinx Gizeh
12 Khafre Gizeh
13 Menkaure and Khamerernebty Gizeh
14 Seated scribe Saqqara
15 Ka-Aper Saqqara
16 Ti watching a hippopotamus hunt Saqqara
17 Goats treading seed, cattle fording a canal (tomb of Ti) Saqqara

The First Dynasty begins with the uniting of Upper and Lower Egypt and Narmer in 2920 BCE. The Early Historical period (writing) seems to come in c. 3000 BCE. The Old Kingdom (begins with the 4th Dynasty) 2575 - 2134 BCE.

“Pharaohs and the Afterlife: the Art of Ancient Egypt”

As we can tell from Gardner’s title for their chapter on Egyptian art, we are again, as throughout our study, looking at elitelore, the arts that served the minuscule sliver of the militarized elite that controlled Ancient Egypt, not the cultural production of the people as a whole. This doesn’t limit our study’s usefulness, but we shouldn’t mistake it for what it is not.

The history of Ancient Egypt parallels that of the regions further north and east in the Fertile Crescent. What we see here represents the same revolutionary transformation of Neolithic into Archaic Civilization. The point at which isolated tribal, agriculturists banded together into villages, towns and then cities and states, with complex social organizations, refined technology and crafts, trade, and writing. This produced monumental arts in permanent materials. One of the things we will consider here is how the visual arts demonstrate the power to not only attract attention and convey information, but to inspire interest with instrumental consequences.

Egyptian culture is organized geographically on the banks of the Nile River and divided consciously between Upper Egypt, in the dryer more rocky, arid, rural highlands of the inland south, and Lower Egypt, the richer and more highly populated planes reaching to the delta and the Mediterranean Sea. The Nile flowing from deep in Africa brought annual floods that left rich alluvial soil producing the agricultural wealth and dense population upon which the culture rose. In the ancient period there was a much richer cover of all sorts of vegetation than there is today, and plentiful game as well domestic crops and livestock.

The ancient period runs from c 3500 BCE to 332 BCE the Ptolemaic (Greek) period. Modern European interest in ancient Egypt was propelled by Napoleon’s invasion of 1799, and the succeeding competition between the French and English to colonize and control the regions wealth.

1 People, boats and animals (det. of water color copy) c 3500-3200 BCE Hierakonpolis
Tombs had enhancing decorations painted on their walls, long before city culture and writing. Here we see stick figures in a meager setting of boats and animals. Boats appear to be symbolic of travel through life and on to an afterlife.

Among the figures we see (lower center) a heraldic set of a human holding animals symmetrically and (in the lower left) a figure menacing kneeling figs with a club.

Gardner’s suggests a possible Mesopotamian “influence” in the heraldic image
in contrast to the indigenous origin of the menacing set.

This is what I mean by influence theory in the established hegemonic approach. All culture in the hegemonic culture must be traced if possible to great power centers. Indeed Mesopotamia does record such an imagery earlier, and this imagery may have travelled here from there. But it is also possible that like the wheel of animals beside it and the menacing scene it was evolved locally. Symmetry is one of human kinds most common design devices, as common as lining motifs up, like the four gazelles in the upper right.

This is a careful copy of paintings from the wall of Tomb 100 of the site. It is a fragment without a controlling frame, we can see.

2 Palette of King Narmer, c 3000 - 2920, 2’ Hierakonpolis
Gardner calls Narmer’s Palette “Early Historical” because it is of the time when writing is beginning. Narmer is the uniter of Upper and Lower Egypt and the first king of the First Dynasty. This monumental cosmetic palette memorialized this event.

Reverse, in three registers: the king, wearing the white crown (of Upper Egypt), accompanied by an official (carrying his sandals) slays an enemy (as above). Below are two more slain enemies. Beside him we see the human armed falcon, Horus, the king’s protector, over a human-headed papyrus hieroglyph for Lower Egypt. Below are fallen enemies and above are further symbols for the king’s palace and the cow-faced goddess, Hathor.

Obverse, in four registers: centrally a symmetrical pair of [lions] with their necks intertwined, apparently symbolizing the unification. Below this a bull topples a rebellious city. Above Narmer, in the red, cobra crown of Lower Egypt reviews beheaded enemies.

Hierarchical scale and composite figure depiction are distinctive throughout.
Conscious organization of the composition within its frame is striking
as is the subtly silhouetted very low relief.

Gardner makes a particular point of the continuity of these formulas. “The figure of Narmer on both sides reveals the stereotype of kingly transcendence that, with several slight variations, was repeated, with few exceptions, in subsequent representations of all Egyptian rulers.” (47) he repeats the point two more times .

You can see the phonteic heiroglyphic marks for Narmer’s name at the center top of each side. The horizontal fish: nar and the vertical chisel: mer.

Old Kingdom: 2575 - 2150 BCE
This is a modern historian’s formula, beginning the Old Kingdom with the 4th Dynasty. The previous edition and other historians include the 3rd Dynasty and Djoser, who is elsewhere transliterated as Zoser.

3 Mastaba : section, plan, reconstruction
The Egyptians believed in an afterlife; Herodotus thought them obsessive about it. Their monumental arts take this as their most important and common subject.
Mastabas (Arabic: bench, for their shape) are way station tombs, for the deceased on their passage to the underworld.

They are low rectangular masses with sloping sides and small interior chambers.
There is a deep burial chamber and above a more accessible memorial chapel with a niche for a sculptural image of the deceased and a blind doorway to the next world. The importance of the tomb was to preserve the body of the deceased so it would be recopied by the Ka in the afterlife.

The largest proportion of the art in the funerary contexts is representation of the activities of daily life and the exercise of royal power, not death.

4 Stepped Pyramid and mortuary precinct of King Djoser, , attributed to Imotep, Saqqara, 3rd Dyn, 2630- 2611.
The first pyramid was a twice enlarged pile of mastaba forms graduated in six layers, 200’ high. Imhotep was the king’s chancellor and also the chief priest of Re (the sun). He is credited as the creator of the design of the entire complex. And so Gardner calls him the first known artist in history. This is pious, but silly
Its four battered sides face the cardinal directions. Mortuary temple on the north.
It’s composed of stone blocks. It is solid, but for tomb and treasure chambers.

5 Djoser’s mortuary complex: site plan, isometric reconstruction. 1800 x 900 ‘ Saqqara
The pyramid was not an isolated mountain, but part of an elaborate complex. This one is surrounded by a 34’ stone (fortress like) wall, enclosing 37 acres of living mortuary and blind symbolic buildings. Celebrations of the king took place twice daily.

To understand the plan you need to read through it. The Pyramid at the middle has a mortuary temple on its north (2). There are large north and south palace buildings (9, 11) and a set of blind chapels on the south (6). It was entered at southeast by a long corridor ending in the Entrance Portico (5). All are careful replicas in stone of structures normally built in organic materials.

The wall was to keep nearly everyone in the Egyptian world out. Access was limited strictly to the royal family and their servants.

P’s Cave: Djoser’s portrait from his mortuary temple.
This life sized ka portrait is the oldes known for any Pharaoh. It was placed between the pyramid and the mortuary temple, where it could “watch” the rituals through a hole in its encasement, but not be observed by those conducting them. It was later vandalized, including a gouging out of its precious shell-eyes.

6 (fluted)columnar entrance
The columns of the entrance are actually attached to walls, not free standing. [We call these engaged-pillars of pilasters.] They are articulated to depict bundles of reeds. The result is convex fluting. They rise out of a small base footing.

Lining up the columns in this manner, which certainly has no structural logic, they didn’t support anything much, was intended to make a rich passageway. Emerging from this relatively dark interior one was in an open area with the entire pyramid, the first immense human construction of its kind, all at once. This was staging conceived to be spectacular.

Looking at the surviving fragments we are reminded that these are depictions of vertical columns composed of inner cores and outer veneer in horizontal layers. Like most architecture they depict other structures than they are.

The ancient Greeks traced the highest culture to the Egyptians. Gardner suggests that such fluted columns as these may come from Greek familiarity with the Egyptians. I’ll doubt it.

7 Pilasters of the North Palace facade

The facade of the North Palace offers us a look at the elegance of Egyptian design and the subtlety of its craft.

We see three pilasters conceived of as stylized papyrus flowers.

The vertical shafts are capped, by stylized papyrus blossoms. The stem-columns are not round but lens-shaped. At the bottom they don’t go into bases or straight into the earth, but cusp under slightly.

Intro-15 Hesire, from his tomb at Saqqara, wood, 3’ 9”
c 2630 BCE

Here is a wooden relief, the model source for the more expensive, but longer lasting work in stone relief. The upper third is in hieroglyphics describing Hesire’s identity. Below he is depicted in a model figure in the standard composite form. Only the symbols in his hands are specific to his personality, and those only formally so. Are any of the features modeled on his? We can’t know for sure, but the uniformity of the type militates against it.

8 Great Pyramids Gizeh
Egyptians buried their dead on the west (sunset) side of the Nile. The three largest and most famous are for 4th Dynasty pharaohs at Gizeh, opposite modern Cairo, and now being encircled by the growth of the city. They belong to Khufu, Khafre, and Menkaure. And they were so famous they are included in every list of the Wonders of the Ancient World.

According to the latest thinking, the priests of Heliopolis were responsible for raising the importance of their symbol for the god Re, the benben (a miniature pyramid), and so motivating a change from a tomb in the form of a stepped pile of mastaba to one in form of a benben.

So, our Egyptologists wonder: is the result a formal development or a symbolic one? Our answer does not have to be a binary choice of one or the other. The fact is all cultural developments are subject to multiple reinforcing causes. There is never one simple causal reason. In this case both of the two cited logics likely played a part, along with others.

Seeing them as the iconic trio, with their coda of three nearby miniatures is so familiar it is difficult to remove ourselves from our contemporary fetishized esthetic vision and reconstitute some idea of the images designed at Gizeh some 47 centuries ago.

9 Section of Khufu’s Pyramid 2551-2528 BCE 775’ on a side, height 450’ Gizeh
Khufu’s tomb was the first of the three and probably the first pharaohnic tomb of the simple geometric solid to be completed. We will look at it to understand its functional purpose as a tomb. It was a massive attempt to bury the remains of the king in a manner that would allow him to take as much of his wealth as possible with him and keep both him and his wealth safe from enemies and robbers. With this secretion of valuables as a goal it was ingenious as well as massive. And, as we all know, it failed totally, and almost immediately.

Our section (diagram of the structure as if sliced through, to reveal its inner structure) shows how the pyramid stands over the rock of the plateau, its inner rooms housing the tomb (the king’s chamber. the queen’s and the false one) and the way to it (the Grand gallery). It also shows air shafts and the thieves tunnels.

It sum 3.2 million blocks of stone, each 2 1/2 tons in weight. The sides face the cardinal directions. The mortuary temples at Gizeh are on the river (eastern) sides.

Most important for our understanding today, it also shows the outline of the original outermost shell of fine limestone, since robbed by later builders of Medieval Cairo. The original 480’ height is now only 450’.

10 Reconstruction of Khafre’s Pyramid complex 2520-2494 BCE Gizeh
Reconstructing Khafre’s pyramid give us a better idea of the way each looked originally. A full pyramid is not the simple geometric form we normally associate with the term, but a complex mortuary structure of several distinct elements. The most important difference from the simple mass is inclusion of the mortuary temple on its east side and long causeway connected with the Valley temple at the river’s edge.

There were continuing prayers offered in the mortuary temple to a permanently employed set of priests. The causeway was for bringing the body up from the Valley temple to which it was delivered in the royal procession that preceded the entombment.

P’s Cave Khafre’s Valley Temple (interior) Gizeh
It is impossible to understand the meaning of what you see, unless you have and understanding of how a place was created or what it was created to accomplish. Here are the simplest elements of building. Is it architecture? It reveals fine material, finely proportioned by design and finely crafted in manufacture. It is the reception room for the Pharaoh’s body on its way from this world toward the next.

11 Great Sphinx, 240’ Gizeh

Here is one of the most famous monuments in the world. Largely a ruin, it has become famous as a ruin. It is also interesting as the oldest of any sphinx known.

The Sphinx (another Greek designation, for a human-headed lion) crouches besides Khafre’s Valley temple and the Causeway leading to his pyramid. A lion’s body whose human head carries a pharaoh’s headdress. A guardian of his tomb.

Given its immense size, as a natural feature of the site, it would have been much more expensive to remove the stone outcrop it is carved from, than to cut it into this form.

Looking up, behind the Sphinx to the Kharfe’s pyramid itself we can see the remains of its smooth outer sheath of fine finishing limestone. The Pyramids we are used to are only the core of a fragment of the living bodies they were intended to support. At the very peak the were finished by a distinctly finished benben tip. They were, after all, symbols of the Sun god, that the Pharaoh actually was.

Like the building of Khafre’s pyramid beside Khufu’s, there were economic and social considerations as well as aesthetic and funerary ones to be considered. Khufu’s tomb was striking as it stood out from the flat desert just beyond the greenbelt, whose agriculture ultimately financed it. Kharfe’s sacrificed that uniqueness along its own in being sited next to it. But it gained direct access to the established engineering and social infrastructure on the site. And the established priestly and defensive institutions. Menkaure built next to these, piggy-backing on the same establishment.

12 Khafre, 2520-2494 BCE, 5’ 6” Gizeh
Sculpture, stone figures, in the tombs were alternative carriers for the deceased’s ka, in the case that their embalmed bodies were damaged. So a diorite image, with its exceptional hardness, was an ideal example. This was the source for a great deal of figurative sculpture. Those who couldn’t afford such expense got theirs in more malleable, but perishable materials. This one was originally created for Khafre’s Valley Temple. The stone comes from a quarry over 700 miles away.

The dress is that of the king: kilt, royal linen nemes headdress backed up by Horus the falcon. The king’s chin bears the ceremonial, attached beard. The body beneath is as idealized as the severely symmetrical decorations. Indeed idealized perfection is a mark of the style. Observers have noted the compactness of the design, with few elements leaving the silhouette to be vulnerable. Internal details, at the same time, are sharply articulated. This is a type, not a personal portrait. [This is one of 22 originally placed there..]

13 Menkaure and Khamerernebty II, ca 2490 - 2472 BCE, 4’ 6”, Gizeh

Though I’ve seen most of the pieces illustrated here, in Cairo or at their sites, it is through pictures that I can study them most of the time. And because this piece is in Boston I’ve been able to choose views and details myself, and to go back and see the piece more than once. I have a more personal, esthetic experience of it than most of the others. Though I will admit to having taken the walk through Khafre’s pyramid to see the burial chamber, my claustrophobia combined with the adrenaline of just being there wiped most of my experience there clean.

“Emotionless Royal Embrace” our book says. Menkaure and Khamerernebty II are shown in this just-under-life-sized double portrait, ideally proportioned and as elegantly articulated as any portrait in existence. The stone comes from Menkaure’s valley temple. The figures cling compactly to the form of the block they come from. The poses are the universal ones: striding, left foot forward, hands clenched around cylinders, etc. Khamerernebty stands beside him. Both are rigidly straight, without shift of hips, despite their stepping out.

Slatkin adds an interesting element to this description. The queen here is shown in a garment so skin tight that her breasts are accentuated and her pubic area highlighted, while he, by contrast, is in a garment that does not so fix on his genitals. That is, her sexuality is an issue where his is not.

The most human elements in the image, equaling the delicacy and humanity of the idealized faces and perhaps adding a bit of emotion unnoticed by Gardner’s authors, is found in the gesture of her hands, reaching to touch his arm and around his torso.

It is also be worth noting the relatively high level of optical realism achieved by Egyptian artists in the Old Kingdom, despite the idealizing and geomatrizing aspects of their style. We identify the figure here as a pharaoh based on his wearing the royal nemes headdress. Specialists agree that it must be Menkaure in part because it was found in his Valley Temple and in part because it is a very close portrait likeness to another, quite similar, image inscribed with that name. Knowing that this is an Individualized portrait is of great interest to us. It is quite different than identifying the pharaoh as a type.

It is not so surprising to find such specific portrait identity emerging at this time, as it is to find in on so convention-restricted a work as the Pharaoh’s image. Specific portraiture is a logical extension of role or even species depiction. Representation is based on the depiction of likeness and the portrait is only a short step more specific a likeness than an abstract type.

The issue of gender and the subordination of women, even the highest of them, is made clear here in the designation of the female in the portrait Khamerernebty II. This, designation is based purely on assumption that the woman here is the king’s chief queen. We have neither a separate location dedicated to the queen, or an inscribed portrait bearing her features to go by in this case. All we know is that the chief queen of Menkaure was Khamerernebty II, a sister and most important queen in h is household. Some specialists believe the gesture we have here actually signifies a presentation mode indicating that the woman should be recognized as the pharaoh’s mother, not his chief queen. Others point to the fact that the similar, inscribed image of Menkaure shows him between two female goddesses and not living members of his household at all.

However we may interpret the image and however we may identify her, it is clear that the queens of Ancient Egypt, even when they were important enough to have their names recorded, were important essentially as members of their male relative’s households, not on their own.

14 Seated scribe, 5th Dyn, c 2450 - 2350, [Kay? from his tomb] Saqqara
Here is a painted limestone portrait of a court scribe, in the pose of his office. The face here seems particularly personal, after looking at royal ideals. But then, this is a lesser personage and an actual portrait of this non-deity is acceptable. Are the ‘sunken cheeks difficult to reconcile with the flabby body’?

Coloring is standard in most of the world’s sculpture, only in special circumstance of the Later Roman Empire and some other traditions is it not. To our authors this coloring “is detrimental to the portrait’s success, inasmuch as the color detracts from the statue’s role as a timeless image of the deceased placed in his mastaba.”

Color can’t detract from the statue’s role as a portrait in the sense that its 5th dynasty creators intended it. Only from the point of view of the modern American or European art critic, trained on unpainted sculpture can that be so.

We notice here a different figure ideal than the royal one.

One of the things we forget or often fail to realize, but that such works remind us of, is that literacy isn’t a natural or easily available skill. Indeed it was, and contrary to common wisdom remains, a carefully guarded skill. Few knew how to read in the ancient world because few were allowed to learn. The records were too powerful and too important. Only those with a need to know were allowed to. [Even today with literacy such a minimum requirement for full social and political participation in modern democracy, our great democracies keep dole out access to it restrictively.]

15 Ka-Aper, wood, 5th Dynasty c 2450 - 2350, 3’ 7” Saqqara
The image of Ka-Aper is executed in wood, with inlayed eyes of rock crystal, which add to the realism of his face. Again we have a seemingly unidealized body. Here again we have a court official, but not of the highest rank. The walking stick and (missing) baton are marks of his office.

When we proceed slowly through the Greek development of realism out of a stick figure conceptual ideal that takes half a millenium, we realize that it wasn’t simply the effort to learn the techniques of optical realism, which the Egyptians, the Greek’s guides in the arts, mastered long before and without a particularly labored or lengthy struggle. The choice is an esthetic one, not a scientific one.

16 Ti watching a hippopotamus hunt, 5th Dynasty
ca. 2450 - 2350, 4’ Saqqara
The Ka-Aper is a free standing sculpture, in fully rounded relief. This contrasts with the image still attached to a background, the relief, an example of which we see here. Typical of Egyptian relief, the work is essentially drawing around images only slightly raised above the background. Though that slight raise was an invaluable sensual effect. However the light hit the drawing, it left the subtlely different graduated shadows around of edges. This gave the entire image depicted an effecting expression of mass. Adding to this effect was the use of color. Egyptian reliefs were all about the depiction of separate objects and symbols silhouetted against a blank ground, representing space. Silhouettes were conceptually focused to be identifiable on their own. Overlaps were relatively few and limited. There was very little internal drawing. The result was a spare and elegant, Bach-like simplicity disguising extremely careful rhythms and narratives.

The major subject of tomb decoration was anything but morbid. On the contrary it is the agricultural and hunting activity which was the entire basis of daily life. Here we see Ti in his favorite pastime, or what was supposed to be the favorite pastime of an official of his rank. The overall artistic effect here is a contrast

This in part is what I wanted to learn in Egypt and in almost every other place I went to see art, Museums in particular, throughout my early life. What was it that was so special about these images that made people call them art? Why were these more important than so many others? And in part I did find my answer, getting very close here to the actual things in their settings. This was some very enjoyable visual imagery.

First, some things, and these were definitely among them, really were very finely conceived and executed. Brilliantly conceived compositions and deftly refined manufacture.

The love of pattern that characterizes Egyptian work is visible everywhere. We see it in the line-textured background, in the zig zag of the water, in the repeated floral and animal motifs, in the rhythmical repetition of the figures. The most commonly appealing and enjoyable elements are the silhouettes and the ripple effects of the barely raised relief. We can see these well in the relief of Ti watching a hippopotamus .

17 Goats treading seed, cattle fording a canal (tomb of Ti) Saqqara

There are also two richer, and more deeply moving characteristics. The simpler of these is the way some pieces capture actual human and animal forms and resonate with our wider human experiences. You can see that the images of cattle lined up in the treading scene from the tomb. The most moving and indeed the most personally affecting and peculiarly human found in those images that were most deeply resonant of my most personal, emotional experiences. An example of that in the figure carrying a calf across a river. The gesture of protections in the way the man bends below the weight of the beast was impossible for me to not be caught and moved by.

And then there is the look caught in the turning head and eye of the calf, looking back for feat toward its mother. Without a doubt I am reading more human emotion into this scene that may be the reality of the animal or even human life depicted. But that in no way keeps me from responding to the artists expression of these human situations. For me this is art at its highest: imagery that captures my attention and leads me to grow more deeply sensitive to the world in which I live and my experience of it.

Here we see the labor upon which the entire Egyptian cultural edifice rested: animal husbandry and agriculture. In the upper register a line of herders pursue a line of goats, marching around a threshing floor. Below lower ranked cowherds, as indicated by their lack of clothing and dignity, attend a bovine herd, fording a canal.