Art History For Dummies. Jesse Bryant Wilder
New Kingdom
MUMMIFICATION
Because Egyptians believed the ka (soul) reunited with the body in the tomb, the body had to be painstakingly preserved through mummification. Here are the three basic steps of mummification:
1 Remove the body’s organs, preserving the important ones in jars.
2 Dry the corpse (because moisture causes decay).
3 Wrap the body with layers of linen bandages.
Embalming priests extracted the organs through a slit in the stomach, dried the body for 70 days with natron (baking soda and salt), and then bandaged it up.
Incense, jewels, and herbs were often tucked neatly between the layers of bandages — mummy clothes that didn’t go out of fashion for 3,000 years.
Thanking the Nile
The Nile River was the lifeline of Ancient Egypt. Without it, the most durable civilization in history couldn’t have survived. Herodotus said Egypt is “the gift of the river.” He was right. The Nile’s annual summer floods fertilize the land around it, which otherwise would be desert. Most Egyptian cities and tombs hug the banks of the Nile like children clinging to their mother. If you venture too far from the river, you end up in the desert like Moses did.
The ancient Egyptians believed the Nile’s life-giving floods, which occur during the hottest and driest part of summer, were the gods’ gift because they didn’t appear to be caused by the weather. The rain that swells the Nile actually falls hundreds of miles away in Ethiopia in the tributary called the Blue Nile, but before the advent of the Weather Channel, the floods in Egypt appeared to arrive miraculously.
The Art of a Unified Egypt
During the Predynastic period, the tribes of Lower and Upper Egypt gradually formed into two separate nations, which were united at the dawn of history in about 3100 BC, possibly by Narmer, the first pharaoh of the first dynasty.
Depicting the unification
The Palette of Narmer is a two-sided work of art that recounts the story of Narmer’s victories on the battlefield. On one side, Narmer wears the white bowling-pin crown of Upper Egypt; on the flip side, his head’s topped with the red hatchet-shaped crown of Lower Egypt. The artist made Narmer at least two times bigger than the people around him to show his superior status — not only was he bigger and better, but he was also worshipped as a god on earth. (A pyramid text states, “Pharaoh’s lifetime is eternity/His limit is everlastingness.”)
Noting art as history in the Palette of Narmer
Discovered in Hierakonpolis, the ancient capital of Upper Egypt, the Palette of Narmer may be the world’s oldest historical document, dating from around 3100 BC. The reliefs on both sides of the green siltstone, as shown in Figure 6-1, tell the story of the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt in horizontal bands, kind of like a comic strip. There’s even some helpful text (like comic-book text bubbles) in hieroglyphics, the picture language of Ancient Egypt. We can’t read every part of the palette, but we can interpret most of it.
CHOLPAN / SHUTTERSTOCK
FIGURE 6-1: The Palette of Narmer chronicles a victory of King Narmer over his enemies.
Placing Narmer among the gods: The hieroglyph for Narmer’s name — a catfish perched on a chisel — appears at the top on both sides, telling us that Narmer is the main character in the story. Notice that a pair of cow heads in the top strip set off Narmer’s hieroglyph, like bookends. Hathor, the cow goddess, is often viewed as the mother of pharaohs. Placing Narmer’s name between images of Hathor proclaims his divine origin.
Depicting Narmer as leader of ritual: When Moses meets god in the Old Testament, the first thing God tells him to do is take off his shoes. (Exodus 3:5 says, “put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground.”) On one side of the palette (refer to the left side of Figure 6-1), Narmer is also shoeless as he clobbers a kneeling enemy. (The victim resembles the two sprawling, naked guys in the bottom band. Apparently, they’ve already been clobbered and are now worm’s meat.) A servant behind Narmer lugs the pharaoh’s sandals. Is there a connection between removing shoes and clobbering somebody? Perhaps it’s because slaughtering defeated enemies was a religious ritual showing that the divine pharaoh was always right. (People always find ways to justify their brutalities.) Also, like Moses, Pharaoh is in the company of a god — in this case, Horus, the hawk-god hovering over him.
Showing victory for Upper Egypt and harmony with the gods: Horus, the god of war and light, is sometimes depicted as a man with a hawk’s head and other times simply as a hawk. Here he’s a hawk with one claw and one human arm with which he de-brains an enemy attached (like a vase) to a bouquet of papyrus plants. (In the process of mummification, the embalmer drained the dead person’s brain through the nose, which is what Horus seems to be doing with that hook in his hand.) The fact that the hawk stands atop papyrus plants, the symbol of Lower Egypt, shows that Lower Egypt has been subdued. Also, Horus’s action parallels the pharaoh’s and indicates that Narmer’s deeds are in harmony with those of the gods.
Revealing Narmer’s status and prestige: On the flipside of the Palette of Narmer (refer to the right side of Figure 6-1), Narmer, identifiable again by his size and by the hieroglyphic nametag next to his head, is also shoeless. Why? He’s probably performing another religious act, inspecting decapitated enemies who have been stacked with their lopped heads between their legs. The standard bearers of a priest and a pharaoh march before him. Their respective heights indicate their ranks.
Denoting Narmer as mighty ruler: On the next lower strip, two snake-necked lionesses face off. Their entwined necks and perfect symmetry may suggest the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt, and that both halves of Egypt are equal. Note that two of the pharaoh’s men restrain the lionesses, implying that the two Egypts need to be governed by a strong hand, Narmer’s. In the bottom band, a bull (possibly the Apis Bull,