Art History For Dummies. Jesse Bryant Wilder
task of managing a pharaoh’s tomb was given to an entire town.
During the Middle and New Kingdoms, rich and middle-class Egyptians also built elaborate tombs. After someone passed, a family member known as “the priest of the double” supervised the tomb and fed the dead relation from a sort of mummy menu, which included bread, fruit, meat, wine, and — yes — beer! (Picture a tipsy mummy chasing you at night.) For insurance, pictures of food were painted on the walls in case a descendant neglected his duties and stopped supplying meals. The pictures, combined with the right spells uttered by the deceased’s spirit, would magically zap the food onto the table.
The tomb housed not only the mummy, but also the deceased’s ka, or soul, which was represented by a statue kept in a sealed-off part of the mastaba. The ka statue was a backup in case the mummy disintegrated or was stolen. The statue had to look like the dead person in order for its magic to work. The words carved from life are inscribed on many ka statues.
mfa.org). This realism wasn’t intended to impress anybody. When the pharaoh died, the statue was sealed up with him. No one ever saw it again.
logan09 / 123 RF
FIGURE 6-2: Ka statues, like those of Prince Rahotep and his wife, had to be realistic to perform their magic.
In 1799, one of Napoleon’s officers, Captain Pierre-François Bouchard, discovered the Rosetta Stone, which was dated 196 BC, in the port city of Rosetta (present-day Rashid). An important decree was inscribed on the stone in two languages — Egyptian and Greek — so everybody would understand it, like Canadian road signs that are written in both French and English.
One of the languages, Egyptian, was expressed in two different scripts. One of the scripts, hieroglyphics, was the sacred writing that Egyptian priests used. The other, demotic, was the common people’s script starting in the eighth century BC. Greek was the language of the foreigners who ran the country.
The key was to find common ground between the three scripts. About 20 years after the Rosetta Stone was discovered, Thomas Young, an Englishman whose hobby was studying Ancient Egypt, matched a couple of names in hieroglyphs on the top third of the Rosetta Stone with the Greek equivalents in the bottom register. In 1822, Jean-François Champollion, a French Egyptologist and the founder of scientific Egyptology, continued Young’s work, matching the hieroglyphic symbols of the names with phonetic sounds in a related ancient language that Champollion spoke, called Coptic. (Coptic is an in-between language, part Greek, part Egyptian.) Soon Champollion figured out the whole alphabet. The rest is art history.
The Egyptians also preserved and mummified internal organs that the dead would need in the hereafter, like the stomach for digesting delicacies on the mummy menu. The organs were stored in four canopic jars, which were usually capped by the animal heads of the four sons of Horus.
The In-Between Period and Middle Kingdom Realism
In 2258 BC, Egypt fractured into constellations of competing states. During this era, Egyptian people modified their view of the afterlife. Now petty princes and the rich who supported them could also have tombs to guarantee them a place among the stars. Instead of building pyramids (which would have been too showy), wealthy Egyptians carved their tombs in rock cliffs. Soon the pharaohs began to imitate them.
Trade expanded during the Middle Kingdom, especially during the 12th dynasty, creating a middle class who demanded rights, including admission to the afterlife. The demand for tomb and coffin paintings soared.
With these liberal trends, the rules for artists also relaxed somewhat. More naturalism was permitted. For example, the bust of Senusret III, a 12th-dynasty pharaoh, shows that the new realism applied to all ranks. His slightly downcast, heavy eyes and sensitive mouth show that he feels the burden of his rule. Senusret is represented more as a man than a god.
New Kingdom Art
The Middle Kingdom ended when the Hyksos, an Asian people, conquered most of Lower Egypt in 1720 BC. The arts declined during this intermediate period, even though the Hyksos tended to respect Egyptian traditions. The decline ended in 1567 BC, when Ahmose I, the founder of the 18th dynasty, reunited Egypt, ushering in the New Kingdom. Egypt expanded into Nubia and Libya during this period, becoming an empire. This expansion spread the influence of Egyptian art far beyond its borders and also brought foreign influences into Egypt.
Pharaohs stopped building pyramids and began to be buried in the Valley of the Kings in rock-hewn tombs on the West Bank of the Nile near Thebes (modern-day Luxor). The naturalism trend continued in the New Kingdom, especially during the reigns of Hatshepsut and Ahkenaten.
Hatshepsut: A female phenom
The 18th-dynasty female pharaoh Hatshepsut ruled from 1473 BC to 1458 BC. She was the queen of her half-brother Thutmose II before becoming regent for her stepson Thutmose III and finally pharaoh after her husband’s death. During her 21-year reign Hatshepsut accomplished much, including:
Cultivating peace instead of war, commissioning great building projects, and restoring monuments destroyed by the Hyksos.
Completing the tombs of her father (Thutmose I) and husband (Thutmose II).
Building an even more magnificent funerary temple for herself at Deir el-Bahri. Her tomb complex consists of tiered colonnades (rows of columns) and two long, sloping causeways (one formerly lined with sphinxes), which may have suggested her spiritual ascent after death.At the ends of the second colonnade, she built shrines to Anubis, the god of the underworld, and Hathor. Behind the upper colonnade were temples to Hatshepsut herself and her father, as well as to the chief gods Amun, the king of the gods, and Re, the god of the solar disk. These two eventually merged into one god, Amun-Re or Amun-Ra.
metmuseum.org. By most counts, Egypt had only four queens in its 3,000-year history, so perhaps Hatshepsut needed to commission tough-guy images to survive in a man’s world. She was buried in the Valley of the Kings.
Akhenaten and Egyptian family values
The 18th-dynasty pharaoh Amenhotep IV (1352 BC–1355 BC) launched a new monotheistic religion in Egypt, built around the sun god Aten (a variation of the sun god Re). Amenhotep IV shut down the temples of competing gods, especially Amun, whose powerful priests tried to prevent the new religion from taking root.
The pharaoh changed his name from Amenhotep, which means “Amun is satisfied,” to Akhenaten, meaning “It pleases Aten.” Then he moved the capital from Thebes, where the cult of Amun was strongest, to a new location that he dubbed Akhetaten. (The modern name of the city is Amarna.) The artists and architects who Akhenaten hired to announce his new religion created a new style of art, which art historians call the