Writing and Record Keeping in Mesopotamia

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The Humanities Culture, Continuity & Change

Henry M. Sayre

VOLUME I

PREHISTORY TO 1600

SECOND EDITION

OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sayre, Henry M.

The humanities : culture, continuity & change / Henry M. Sayre. -- 2nd ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-205-78215-4 (alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-205-78215-9 (alk. paper) 1. Civilization--History--Textbooks. 2. Humanities--History--Textbooks. I. Title. CB69.S29 2010 909--dc22

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Volume I ISBN 10: 0-205-78215-9 ISBN 13: 978-0-205-78215-4

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The history of human beings on this planet is, geologi-cally speaking, very short. The history of their coming together in groups for their common good iseven shorter, covering a span of perhaps 25,000 to 50,000 years on a planet that scientists estimate to be between 4 and 5 billion years old. We call these groups, as they become more and more sophisticated, civilizations. A civilization is a

social, economic, and political entity distinguished by the ability to express itself through images and written language. Civilizations develop when the environment of a region can support a large and productive population. It is no accident that the first civilizations arose in fertile river valleys, where agriculture could take hold: the Tigris and the Euphrates in Mesopotamia, the Nile in Egypt, the Indus on the Indian

B O O K O N E

The Ancient World and the Classical Past P R E H I S T O RY T O 2 0 0 C E

Detail from Nebamun Hunting Birds, from the tomb of Nebamun, Thebes. ca. 1400 BCE (see Fig 3.2).

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subcontinent, and the Yellow in China. Civilizations require technologies capable of supporting the principal economy. In the ancient world, agriculture was supported by the tech- nologies related to irrigation.

With the rise of agriculture, and with irrigation, human na- ture began to assert itself over and against nature as a whole. People increasingly thought of themselves as masters of their own destiny. At the same time, different and dispersed popu- lations began to come into contact with one another as trade developed from the need for raw materials not native to a par- ticular region. Organizing this level of trade and production also required an administrative elite to form and establish cul- tural priorities. The existence of such an elite is another char- acteristic of civilization. Finally, as the history of cultures around the world makes abundantly clear, one of the major ways in which societies have acquired the goods they want and simultaneously organized themselves is by means of war.

If a civilization is a system of organization, a culture is the set of common values—religious, social, and/or political— that govern that system. Out of such cultures arise scientific and artistic achievements by which we characterize different cultures. Before the invention of writing sometime around the fourth millennium BCE, these cultures created myths and leg- ends that explained their origins and relation to the world. As we do today, ancient peoples experienced the great uncon- trollable, and sometimes violent forces of nature—floods, droughts, earthquakes, and hurricanes. Prehistoric cultures understood these forces as the work of the invisible gods, who could not be approached directly but only through the medi- ating agency of shamans and priests, or kings and heroes. As cultures became increasingly self-assertive, in the islands be- tween mainland Greece and Asia Minor, in Egypt, in China, on the Indian subcontinent, and on the Greek mainland, these gods seemed increasingly knowable. The gods could still intervene in human affairs, but now they did so in ways that were recognizable. It was suddenly possible to believe that if people could come to understand themselves, they might also understand the gods. The study of the natural world might well shed light on the unknown, on the truth of things.

It is to this moment—it was a long “moment,” extending for centuries—that the beginnings of scientific inquiry can be traced. Humanism, the study of the human mind and its moral and ethical dimensions, was born. In China, the formalities of social interaction—moderation, personal integrity, self- control, loyalty, altruism, and justice—were codified in the writings of Confucius. In Mesopotamia and Greece, the pre- sentation of a human character working things out (or not) in the face of adversity was the subject of epic and dramatic literature. In Greece, it was also the subject of philosophy— literally, “love of wisdom”—the practice of reasoning that fol- lowed from the Greek philosopher Socrates’s famous dictum, “Know thyself.” Visual artists strove to discover the perfec- tions of human form and thought. By the time of the rise of the Roman Empire, at the end of the first millennium BCE, these traditions were carried on in more practical ways, as the Romans attempted to engineer a society embodying the val- ues they had inherited from the Greeks.

BOOK ONE TIMELINE

30,000 BCE Art created in caves at Chauvet

LEARN MORE Explore an interactive timeline on www.myartslab.com

10,000–8000 BCE Emergence of agricultural civilizations in Mesopotamia, India, Egypt, China

1792–1750 BCE Hammurabi’s Law Code

1500–322 BCE Vedic period in India; origins of Hinduism

3200–2000 BCE Development of pictographic writing systems in Mesopotamia, India, Egypt, China

2500 BCE Pyramids in Egypt

1200 BCE Mesopotamia: Epic of Gilgamesh

1200 BCE Earliest use of Phoenician phonetic alphabet

1300 BCE Emergence of Olmec culture in Mesoamerica

800–600 BCE Etruria: Origins of Roman culture

563–483 BCE Lifetime of Siddhartha Gautama (Buddha) in India

551–479 BCE Lifetime of Confucius in Zhou dynasty China

469–399 BCE Lifetime of Socrates, Greek philosopher

461–429 BCE Pericles, Socrates, Sophocles Parthenon on Athens Acropolis

1000 BCE King David reigns in Israel

800 BCE Acropolis (citadel) and agora (market) Homeric epics: Iliad and Odyssey

27 BCE Octavian becomes Emperor Augustus

20 BCE Augustus of Primaporta

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THINKING AHEAD

What features characterize the beginnings of human culture?

What characteristics distinguish the Neolithic from the Paleolithic?

What is a megalith?

How can we understand the role of myth in prehistoric culture?

On a cold December afternoon in 1994, Jean-MarieChauvet and two friends were exploring the cavesin the steep cliffs along the Ardèche River gorge in southern France. After descending into a series of narrow passages, they entered a large chamber. There, beams from their headlamps lit up a group of drawings that would as- tonish the three explorers—and the world (Fig. 1.1).

Since the late nineteenth century, we have known that prehistoric peoples, peoples who lived before the time of writing and so of recorded history, drew on the walls of caves. Twenty-seven such caves had already been discov- ered in the cliffs along the 17 miles of the Ardèche gorge (Map 1.1). But the cave found by Chauvet [shoh-veh] and his friends transformed our thinking about prehistoric peo- ples. Where previously discovered cave paintings had ap- peared to modern eyes as childlike, this cave contained drawings comparable to those a contemporary artist might have done. We can only speculate that other comparable artworks were produced in prehistoric times but have not survived, perhaps because they were made of wood or other perishable materials. It is even possible that art may have been made earlier than 30,000 years ago, perhaps as people began to inhabit the Near East, between 90,000 and 100,000 years ago.

Fig. 1.1 Wall painting with horses, Chauvet Cave, Vallon-Pont-d’Arc, Ardèche gorge, France. ca. 30,000 BCE. Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication. Direction Regionale des Affaires Culturelles de Rhone-Alpes. Service Regional de l’Archeologie. Paint on limestone, approx. height 6’. In the center of this wall are four horses, each behind the other in a startlingly realistic space. Below them, two rhinoceroses fight.

HEAR MORE Listen to an audio file of your chapter at www.myartslab.com

At first, during the Paleolithic [PAY-lee-uh-LITH-ik] era, or “Old Stone Age,” from the Greek palaios, “old,” and lithos, “stone,” the cultures of the world sustained them- selves on game and wild plants. The cultures themselves were small, scattered, and nomadic, though evidence sug- gests some interaction among the various groups. We begin

The Rise of Culture From Forest to Farm

100 miles

100 km

4 miles

4 km

Bayol

Niaux Réseau Clastres

Fontanet

Chauvet

Vacheresse

Ebbou Le Colombier

Tête-du-Lion Les deux-Ouvertures

Chabot Le FiguierOulen

Le Portel

Gargas

Altamira Les Trois Freres`

Jovelle

Gabillou

Rouffignac Lascaux

La Mouthe Pech Merle Cougnac

La Baume-Latrone

Cosquer

Ardeche`

Ardeche `

Marseilles

Lyons

Toulouse

Major Paleolithic caves in France and Spain

Cahors

Bordeaux Isle

FRANCE

SPAIN

ARDECHE REGION

ARDECHE REGION`

ATLANTIC

OCEAN R

h ôn

e Garonne

Dordogne

Lot

Map 1.1 Major Paleolithic caves in France and Spain.

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4 BOOK ONE The Ancient World and the Classical Past

this book, then, with the cultures of prehistoric times, evi- dence of which survives in wall paintings in caves and small sculptures dating back more than 25,000 years.

THE BEGINNINGS OF CULTURE IN THE PALEOLITHIC ERA A culture encompasses the values and behaviors shared by a group of people, developed over time, and passed down from one generation to the next. Culture manifests itself in the laws, customs, ritual behavior, and artistic production common to the group. The cave paintings at Chauvet suggest that, as early as 30,000 years ago, the Ardèche gorge was a center of culture, a focal point of group living in which the values of a community find expression. There were others like it. In northern Spain, the first decorated cave was dis- covered in 1879 at Altamira [al-tuh-MIR-uh]. In the Dordogne [dor-DOHN] region of southern France to the west of the Ardèche, schoolchildren discovered the famous Lascaux Cave in 1940 when their dog disappeared down a hole. And in 1991, along the French Mediterranean coast, a diver discovered the entrance to the beautifully decorated Cosquer [kos-KAIR] Cave below the waterline near Marseille [mar-SAY].

Agency and Ritual: Cave Art Ever since cave paintings were first discovered, scholars have been marveling at the skill of the people who pro- duced them, but we have been equally fascinated by their very existence. Why were these paintings made? Most scholars believe that they possessed some sort of agency— that is, they were created to exert some power or authority

over the world of those who came into contact with them. Until recently, it was generally accepted that such works were associated with the hunt. Perhaps the hunter, seeking game in times of scarcity, hoped to conjure it up by depict- ing it on cave walls. Or perhaps such drawings were magic charms meant to ensure a successful hunt. But at Chauvet, fully 60 percent of the animals painted on its walls were never, or rarely, hunted—such animals as lions, rhinocer- oses, bears, panthers, and woolly mammoths. One drawing depicts two rhinoceroses fighting horn-to-horn beneath four horses that appear to be looking on (see Fig. 1.1).

What role, then, did these drawings play in the daily lives of the people who created them? The caves may have served as some sort of ritual space. A ritual is a rite or ceremony habitually practiced by a group, often in religious or quasi- religious context. The caves, for instance, might be under- stood as gateways to the underworld and death, as symbols of the womb and birth, or as pathways to the world of dreams experienced in the dark of night, and rites connected with such passage might have been conducted in them. The gen- eral arrangement of the animals in the paintings by species or gender, often in distinct chambers of the caves, suggests to some that the paintings may have served as lunar calendars for predicting the seasonal migration of the animals. What- ever the case, surviving human footprints indicate that these caves were ritual gathering places and in some way were intended to serve the common good.

At Chauvet, the use of color suggests that the paintings served some sacred or symbolic function. For instance, al- most all of the paintings near the entrance to the cave are painted with natural red pigments derived from ores rich in iron oxide. Deeper in the cave, in areas more difficult to reach, the vast majority of the animals are painted in black

Fig. 1.2 Wall painting with bird-headed man, bison, and rhinoceros, Lascaux Cave, Dordogne, France. ca. 15,000–13,000 BCE. Paint on limestone, length approx. 9 . In 1963, Lascaux was closed to the public so that conservators could fight a fungus attacking the paintings. Most likely, the fungus was caused by carbon dioxide exhaled by visitors. An exact replica called Lascaux II was built and can be visited.

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CHAPTER 1 The Rise of Culture 5

pigments derived from ores rich in manganese dioxide. This shift in color appears to be intentional, but we can only guess at its meaning.

The skillfully drawn images at Chauvet raise even more important questions. The artists seem to have understood and practiced a kind of perspectival drawing—that is, they were able to convey a sense of three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface. In the painting reproduced on the opening page of this chapter, several horses appear to stand one behind the other (see Fig. 1.1). The head of the top horse overlaps a black line, as if peering over a branch or the back of another animal. In no other cave yet discov- ered do drawings show the use of shading, or modeling, so that the horses’ heads seem to have volume and dimension. And yet these cave paintings, rendered over 30,000 years ago, predate other cave paintings by at least 10,000 years, and in some cases by as much as 20,000 years.

One of the few cave paintings that depicts a human figure is found at Lascaux, in the Dordogne region of southwestern France. What appears to be a male wearing a bird’s-head mask lies in front of a disemboweled bison (Fig. 1.2). Below him is a bird-headed spear thrower, a device that enabled hunters to throw a spear farther and with greater force. (Sev- eral examples of spear throwers have survived.) In the Las- caux painting, the hunter’s spear has pierced the bison’s hindquarters, and a rhinoceros charges off to the left. We have no way of knowing whether this was an actual event or an imagined scene. One of the painting’s most interesting and inexplicable features is the discrepancy between the rel- atively naturalistic representation of the animals and the highly stylized, almost abstract realization of the human fig- ure. Was the sticklike man added later by a different, less tal- ented artist? Or does this image suggest that man and beast are different orders of being?

Before the discovery of Chauvet, historians divided the history of cave painting into a series of successive styles, each progressively more realistic. But Chauvet’s paintings, by far the oldest known, are also the most advanced in their realism, suggesting the artists’ conscious quest for visual naturalism, that is, for representations that imitate the ac- tual appearance of the animals. Not only were both red and black animals outlined, their shapes were also modeled by spreading paint, either with the hand or a tool, in gradual gradations of color. Such modeling is extremely rare or un- known elsewhere. In addition, the artists further defined many of the animals’ contours by scraping the wall behind so that the beasts seem to stand out against a deeper white ground. Three handprints in the cave were evidently made by spitting paint at a hand placed on the cave wall, result- ing in a stenciled image.

Art, the Chauvet drawings suggest, does not necessarily evolve in a linear progression from awkward beginnings to more sophisticated representations. On the contrary, al- ready in the earliest artworks, people obtained a very high

degree of sophistication. Apparently, even from the earliest times, human beings could choose to represent the world naturalistically or not, and the choice not to represent the world in naturalistic terms should not necessarily be attrib- uted to lack of skill or sophistication but to other, more cul- turally driven factors.

Paleolithic Culture and Its Artifacts Footprints discovered in South Africa in 2000 and fossilized remains uncovered in the forest of Ethiopia in 2001 suggest that, about 5.7 million years ago, the earliest upright hu- mans, or hominins (as distinct from the larger classification of hominids, which includes great apes and chimpanzees as well as humans), roamed the continent of Africa. Ethiopian excavations further indicate that sometime around 2.5 or 2.6 million years ago, hominid populations began to make rudimentary stone tools, though long before, between 14 mil- lion and 19 million years ago, the Kenyapithecus [ken-yuh- PITH-i-kus] (“Kenyan ape”), a hominin, made stone tools in east central Africa. Nevertheless, the earliest evidence of a culture coming into being are the stone artifacts of Homo sapi- ens [ho-moh SAY-pee-uhnz] (Latin for “one who knows”). Homo sapiens evolved about 100,000–120,000 years ago and can be distinguished from earlier hominids by the lighter build of their skeletal structure and larger brain. A 2009 study of genetic diversity among Africans found the San people of Zimbabwe to be the most diverse, suggesting that they are the most likely origin of modern humans from which others grad- ually spread out of Africa, across Asia, into Europe, and finally to Australia and the Americas.

Homo sapiens were hunter-gatherers, whose survival de- pended on the animals they could kill and the foods they could gather, primarily nuts, berries, roots, and other edible plants. The tools they developed were far more sophisti- cated than those of their ancestors. They included cleavers, chisels, grinders, hand axes, and arrow- and spearheads made of flint, a material that also provided the spark to cre- ate an equally important tool—fire. In 2004, Israeli arche- ologists working at a site on the banks of the Jordan River reported the earliest evidence yet found of controlled fire created by hominids—cracked and blackened flint chips, presumably used to light a fire, and bits of charcoal dating from 790,000 years ago. Also at the campsite were the bones of elephants, rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses, and small species, demonstrating that these early hominids cut their meat with flint tools and ate steaks and marrow. Homo sapiens cooked with fire, wore animal skins as clothing, and used tools as a matter of course. They buried their dead in ritual ceremonies, often laying them to rest accompanied by stone tools and weapons.

The Paleolithic era is the period of Homo sapiens’ ascen- dancy. These Upper Paleolithic people carved stone tools and weapons that helped them survive in an inhospitable

HEAR MORE Listen to an account of the discovery of Chauvet Cave at www.myartslab.com

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6 BOOK ONE The Ancient World and the Classical Past

climate. They carved small sculptural objects as well, which, along with the cave paintings we have already seen, appear to be the first instances of what we have come to call “art” (see Materials & Techniques, page 7). Among the most remarkable of these sculptural artifacts are a large number of female figures, found at various archeological sites across Europe. The most famous of these is the lime- stone statuette of a woman found at Willendorf [VIL-un- dorf], in modern Austria (Fig. 1.3), dating from about 22,000 to 21,000 BCE and often called the Willendorf Venus. Markings on Woman and other similar figures indicate that they were originally colored, but what these small sculp- tures meant and what they were used for remains unclear. Most are 4 to 5 inches high and fit neatly into a person’s hand. This suggests that they may have had a ritual pur- pose. Their exaggerated breasts and bellies and their clearly delineated genitals support a connection to fertility and childbearing. We know, too, that Woman from Willendorf was originally painted in red ochre, suggestive of menses. And, her navel is not carved; rather, it is a natural in- dentation in the stone. Whoever carved her seems to have recognized, in the raw stone, a connection to the origins of life. But such figures may have served other purposes as well. Perhaps they were dolls, guardian figures, or images of beauty in a cold, hostile world where having body fat might have made the difference between survival and death.

Female figurines vastly outnumber representations of males in the Paleolithic era, which suggests that women played a central role in Paleolithic culture. Most likely, they had considerable religious and spiritual influence, and their preponderance in the imagery of the era suggests that Pale- olithic culture may have been matrilineal (in which descent is determined through the female line) and matrilocal (in which residence is in the female’s tribe or household). Such traditions exist in many primal societies today.

The peoples of the Upper Paleolithic period followed herds northward in summer, though temperatures during the Ice Age rarely exceeded 60 degrees Fahrenheit (16 de- grees centigrade). Then, as winter approached, they re- treated southward into the cave regions of northern Spain and southern France. But caves were not their only shelter. At about the same latitude as the Ardèche gorge but east- ward, in present-day Ukraine, north of the Black Sea, archeologists have discovered a village with houses built from mammoth bone, dating from 16,000 to 10,000 BCE (Fig. 1.4). Using long curving tusks as roof supports, con- structing walls with pelvis bones, shoulder blades, jaw- bones, tusks, and skulls, and probably covering the structure with hides, the Paleolithic peoples of the region built houses that ranged from 13 to 26 feet in diameter, with the largest measuring 24 by 33 feet. The total of bones incorporated in the structure belonged to approxi- mately ninety-five different mammoths. Here we see one of the earliest examples of architecture—the construction of living space with at least some artistic intent. The remains

Fig. 1.3 Woman (Venus of Willendorf), found at Willendorf, Austria. ca. 25,000–20,000 BCE. Limestone, height 4 . Naturhistorisches Museum, Vienna. For many years, modern scholars called this small statue the Venus of Willendorf. They assumed that its carvers attributed to it an ideal of female beauty comparable to the Roman ideal of beauty implied by the name Venus.

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of these structures suggest that those who built them gath- ered together in a village of like dwellings, the fact that most underscores their common culture. They must have shared resources, cooperated in daily tasks, intermarried, and raised their children by teaching them the techniques necessary for survival in the harsh climate of the Ukraine.

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CHAPTER 1 The Rise of Culture 7

Fig. 1.4 Reconstruction of a mammoth-bone house, Mezhirich, Ukraine. ca. 16,000–10,000 BCE. Kiev Museum of Paleontology, Mezhirich, Ukraine. Mammoth jawbones are inserted upside down into one another to form the base of the house. About three dozen huge, curving mammoth tusks were used as arching supports for the roof.

Methods of Carving

Materials & Techniques

Carving is the act of cutting or incising stone, bone, wood, or another material into a desired form. Surviving artifacts of the Pale- olithic era were carved from stone or bone. The artist proba- bly held a sharp instrument, such as a stone knife or a chisel, in one hand and drove it into the stone or bone with another stone held in the other hand to remove excess material and realize the figure. Finer details could be scratched into the material with a pointed stone instrument. Artists can carve into any material softer than the instrument they are using. Harder varieties of stone can cut into softer stone as well as bone. The work was probably painstakingly slow.

There are basically two types of sculpture: sculpture in the round and relief sculpture. Sculpture in the round is fully three- dimensional; it occupies 360 degrees of space. The Willendorf statuette (see Fig. 1.3) was carved from stone and is an example of sculpture in the round. Relief sculpture is carved out of a flat background surface; it has a dis- tinct front and no back. Not all relief sculptures are

alike. In high relief sculpture, the figure extends more than 180 de- grees from the background surface. Woman Holding an Animal

Horn, found at Laussel, in the Dordogne region of France, is carved in high relief and is one of the earliest re-

lief sculptures known. This sculpture was origi- nally part of a great stone block that stood in front of a Paleolithic rock shelter. In low or bas relief, the figure extends less than 180 de-

grees from the surface. In sunken relief, the image is carved, or incised, into the sur- face, so that the image recedes below it. When a light falls on relief sculptures at an angle, the relief casts a shadow. The higher the relief, the larger the shadows and the greater the sense of the figure’s three-dimensionality.

EXPLORE MORE To see a studio video about carving, go to www.myartslab.com

Woman Holding an Animal Horn, Laussel (Dordogne), France. ca. 30,000–15,000 BCE.

Limestone, height Musée des Antiquites Nationales, St. Germain-en-Laye, France.

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8 BOOK ONE The Ancient World and the Classical Past

THE RISE OF AGRICULTURE IN THE NEOLITHIC ERA As the ice covering the Northern Hemisphere began to re- cede around 10,000 BCE, the seas rose, covering, for in- stance, the cave entrance at Cosquer in southern France (see Map 1.1), filling what is now the North Sea and English Channel with water, and inundating the land bridge that had connected Asia and North America. Agri- culture began to replace hunting and gathering, and with it, a nomadic lifestyle gave way to a more sedentary way of life. The consequences of this shift were enormous, and ushered in the Neolithic [nee-uh-LITH-ik] era, or “New Stone Age.”

For 2,000 years, from 10,000 to 8000 BCE, the ice covering the Northern Hemisphere receded farther and farther north- ward. As temperatures warmed, life gradually changed. Dur- ing this period of transition, areas once covered by vast regions of ice and snow developed into grassy plains and abundant forests. Hunters developed the bow and arrow, which were easier to use at longer range on the open plains. They fashioned dugout boats out of logs to facilitate fishing, which became a major food source. They domesticated dogs to help with the hunt as early as 11,000 BCE, and soon other animals as well—goats and cattle particularly. Perhaps most important, people began to cultivate the more edible grasses. Along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, they har- vested wheat; in Asia, they cultivated millet and rice; and in the Americas, they grew squash, beans, and corn. Gradually, farming replaced hunting as the primary means of sustaining

life. A culture of the fields developed—an agri-culture, from the Latin ager, “farm,” “field,” or “productive land.”

Agricultural production seems to have originated about 10,000 BCE in the Fertile Crescent, an area arching from southwest Iran, across the foothills of the Taurus Mountains in southeastern Turkey, then southward into Lebanon. By about 8000 BCE, Neolithic agricultural societies began to concentrate in the great river valleys of the Middle East and Asia (Map 1.2). Here, distinct centers of people in- volved in a common pursuit began to form. A civilization is a social, economic, and political entity distinguished by the ability to express itself through images and written language. Civilizations develop when the environment of a region can support a large and productive population. An increasing population requires increased production of food and other goods, not only to support itself, but to trade for other commodities. Organizing this level of trade and pro- duction also requires an administrative elite to form and to establish priorities. The existence of such an elite is another characteristic of civilization. Finally, as the history of cul- tures around the world makes abundantly clear, one of the major ways that societies have acquired the goods they want and simultaneously organized themselves is by means of war.

Gradually, as the climate warmed, Neolithic culture spread across Europe. By about 5000 BCE, the valleys of Spain and southern France supported agriculture, but not until about 4000 BCE is there evidence of farming in the northern reaches of the European continent and England. The Neolithic era does not end in these colder climates until about 2000 BCE,

Map 1.2 The great river valley civilizations. ca. 2000 BCE. Agriculture thrived in the great river valleys throughout the Neolithic era, but by the end of the period, urban life had developed there as well, and civilization as we know it had emerged.

1,000 km

1,000 miles

YELLOW RIVER (Shang)

INDUS-GANGES (Harappan and

Vedic civilizations)

TIGRIS-EUPHRATES (Ancient Mesopotamia

and Babylonia)

NILE (Ancient Egypt)

River Valley Civilizations

Jericho Susa Jiangzhai

GANSU

Ain Ghazal

CHINA

AFGHANISTAN

PACIFIC

OCEAN Arabian

Sea

Lake Balkhash

Lake Baikal

Black Sea

Aral Sea

Bay

Bengal

South

China

Sea

East

China

Sea

Brahamaputra

In du

Ganges

Yel

lo w

N ile

Persian

Gulf

R e

d S

e a

C aspian

Sea

Su tle

Euphrates

Tigris

Ya ng

tze

Danube

Mediterranean Sea

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CHAPTER 1 The Rise of Culture 9

Fig. 1.5 Early Neolithic wall and tower, Jericho, Jordan. ca. 7500 BCE. The smooth walls and sand brick at Jericho construction are architectural innovations that go far beyond the rudimentary construction techniques of the hunter-gatherers (compare Fig. 1.4, for instance).

Fig. 1.6 Plastered skull from Jericho. Pre-pottery Neolithic B period. ca. 7000–6000 BCE. Life-size. Nicholson Museum, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia. NM Inv. 57.03: presented by Dame Kathleen Kenyon, British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem. Hair was originally painted onto the head, and the eye sockets were filled with cowrie shell to give the “portrait” realism.

and continues on more remote regions, such as Africa and the Americas, well into the first millennium.

Meanwhile, the great rivers of the Middle East and Asia provided a consistent and predictable source of water, and people soon developed irrigation techniques that fostered or- ganized agriculture and animal husbandry. As production outgrew necessity, members of the community were freed to occupy themselves in other endeavors—complex food prepa- ration (bread, cheese, and so on), construction, religion, even military affairs. Soon, permanent villages began to ap- pear, and villages began to look more and more like cities.

Neolithic Jericho and Skara Brae Jericho is one of the oldest known settlements of the Ne- olithic era. It is located in the Middle East some 15 miles east of modern Jerusalem, on the west bank of the Jordan River. Although not in one of the great river valleys, Jericho was the site of a large oasis, and by 7500 BCE, a city had developed around the water source. The homes were made of mud brick on stone foundations and had plaster floors and walls. Mud bricks were a construction material found particularly in hot, arid regions of the Neolithic Middle East, where stone and wood were in scarce supply. The city was strongly fortified (Fig. 1.5), indicating that all was not peaceful even in the earliest Neolithic times. It was sur- rounded by a ditch, probably not filled with water, but dug out in order to increase the height of the walls behind. The walls themselves were between 5 and 12 feet thick, and the towers rose to a height of 30 feet. What particular troubles

necessitated these fortifications is debatable, but Jericho’s most precious resource was without doubt its water, and others probably coveted the site.

The most startling discovery at Jericho is the burial of ten headless corpses under the floors of the city’s houses. The skulls of the dead were preserved and buried separately, the features rebuilt in plaster and painted to look like the living ancestor (Fig. 1.6). Each is unique and highly realis- tic, possessing the distinct characteristics of the ancestor. The purpose of the skull portraits is unknown to us. Perhaps the people of Jericho believed that the spirit of the dead lived on in the likeness. Whatever the case, the existence of the skulls indicates the growing stability of the culture, its sense of permanence and continuity.

Preserved in the cold northern climate of the Orkney Islands off the northeast coast of Scotland is Skara Brae [SKAR-uh brey]. Some 4,000 years younger than Jericho, Skara Brae is a Neolithic village dating from between 3100 and 2600 BCE. The seaside village was apparently buried long ago beneath a layer of sand during a massive storm, and then, in 1850, uncovered when another storm swept the sand away.

The houses of Skara Brae are made entirely of stone— virtually the only buildings on the treeless Orkney Islands. The walls are made by corbeling, a construction technique (see Materials & Techniques, page 18), in which layers of flat stones are piled one upon the other, with each layer pro- jecting slightly inward as the wall rises. As the walls curve inward, they are buttressed, or supported, on the outside by earth. Nothing of the roofs has survived, suggesting that they were constructed of organic matter such as straw thatch or seaweed (seaweed remained a common roofing material in the Orkney Islands into the twentieth century). Furniture

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10 BOOK ONE The Ancient World and the Classical Past

was built into the walls—in the house shown here, rectan- gular stone beds at either side of a central hearth, and a stone bench along the back wall (Fig. 1.7). The bed frames would have been filled with organic materi- als such as heather or straw, and covered with furs. Storage spaces have been fashioned into the walls above the beds and in the back left corner. The only light in the house would have come from the smoke hole above the hearth.

The houses in the village were connected by a series of narrow walkways that were probably covered (Fig. 1.8). Each of the houses is more or less square, with rounded corners. They are relatively spacious, ranging in size from 12 by 14 feet to 20 by 21 feet. That Skara Brae was con- tinually inhabited for five hundred years suggests that life in the village was relatively comfortable despite the harsh climate.

Fig. 1.7 House interior, Skara Brae, Orkney Islands, Scotland. ca. 3100–2600 BCE. This is a view of the interior of house 7 in Fig. 1.8. In this and other houses, archeologists have found stone cooking pots; mortars for grinding grains, including barley and wheat; carved stone balls; bone tools used for fishing and sewing; and pottery. In this view, the walls are just beginning to curve inward in corbeling.

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Fig. 1.8 Plan, Village of Skara Brae, Orkney Islands, Scotland. ca. 3100–2600 BCE. The numbers refer to individual houses.

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CHAPTER 1 The Rise of Culture 11

Fig. 1.9 Deep bowl with sculptural rim, late Middle Jomon period (ca. 2500–1600 BCE), Japan. ca. 2000 BCE. Terracotta, . Musée des Arts Asiatiques-Guimet, Paris, France. The motifs incised on this pot may have had some meaning, but most interesting is the potter’s freedom of expression. The design of the pot’s flamelike rim is anything but practical.

14 1>2– * 12 1>3– Fig. 1.10 Basin (pen), Majiayao culture, Majiayao phase, Gansu Province, China. ca. 3200–2700 BCE. Earthenware with painted decoration, diameter . The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Anonymous Loan (L.1996.55.6). The designs on this bowl are examples of the kind of markings that would eventually develop into writing.

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Neolithic Pottery Across Cultures The transition from cultures based on hunting and fishing to cultures based on agriculture led to the increased use of pottery vessels. Ceramic vessels are fragile, so hunter- gatherers would not have found them practical for carrying food, but people living in the more permanent Neolithic settlements could have used them to carry and store water, and to prepare and store certain types of food.

There is no evidence of pottery at the Jericho site. But, as early as 10,000 BCE, Japanese artisans were making clay pots capable of storing, transporting, and cooking food and wa- ter. Over the course of the Neolithic era, called the Jomon [joe-mon] period in Japan (12,000–300 BCE), their work be- came increasingly decorative. Jomon means “cord markings” and refers to the fact that potters decorated many of their wares by pressing cord into the damp clay. As in most Ne- olithic societies, women made Jomon pottery; their connec- tion to fertility and the life cycle may have become even more important to Neolithic cultures in the transition from

hunting and gathering to agricultural food production. Jomon women built their pots up from the bottom with coil upon coil of soft clay. They mixed the clay with a variety of adhesive materials, including mica, lead, fibers, and crushed shells. After forming the vessel, they employed tools to smooth both the outer and interior surfaces. Finally, they decorated the outside with cord markings and fired the pot in an outdoor bonfire at a temperature of about 1650 degrees Fahrenheit (900 degrees centigrade). By the middle Jomon period, potters had begun to decorate the normal flat-bottomed, straight-sided jars with elaborately ornate and flamelike rims (Fig. 1.9), distinguished by their asymmetry and their unique characteristics. These rims suggest animal forms, but their significance remains a mystery.

The Neolithic cultures that flourished along the banks of the Yellow River in China beginning in about 5000 BCE also produced pottery. These cultures were based on growing rice and millet (grains from the Near East would not be intro- duced for another 3,000 years), and this agricultural empha- sis spawned towns and villages, such as Jiangzhai, the largest Neolithic site that has been excavated in China. The

Jiangzhai community, near modern Xi’an [she-an], in Shaanxi [shahn-shee] province, dates to about 4000 BCE and consisted of about 100 dwellings. At its center was a communal gathering place, a cemetery, and, most im- portant, a kiln, an oven specifically designed to achieve the high temperatures necessary for firing clay. Indeed, the site yielded many pottery fragments. Farther to the

east, in Gansu [gan-soo] province, Neolithic potters began to add painted decoration to their work (Fig. 1.10). The

flowing, curvilinear forms painted on the shallow basin illustrated here include “hand” motifs on the outside and round, almost eyelike forms that flow into each other on the inside.

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12 BOOK ONE The Ancient World and the Classical Past

Some of the most remarkable Neolithic painted pottery comes from Susa [soo-suh], on the Iranian plateau. The patterns on one par- ticular beaker (Fig. 1.11) from around 5000 to 4000 BCE are highly stylized animals. The largest of these is an ibex, a popular decorative feature of prehistoric ceramics from Iran. Associ- ated with the hunt, the ibex may have been a symbol of plenty. The front and hind legs of the ibex are rendered by two triangles, the tail hangs behind it like a feather, the head is oddly discon- nected from the body, and the horns rise in a large, exaggerated arc to encircle a decorative circular form. Hounds race around the band above the ibex, and wading birds form a decorative band across the beaker’s top.

In Europe, the production of pottery apparently developed some time later, around 3000 BCE. Early pots were made either by molding clay over a round stone or by coiling long ropes of clay on top of one an- other and then smoothing the seams between them. Then the pots were fired at temperatures high enough to make them watertight—above 700 degrees Fahren- heit (370 degrees centigrade).

By this time, however, artisans in Egypt had begun using the potter’s wheel, a revolving platter for forming vessels from clay with the fingers. It allowed artisans to produce a uniformly shaped vessel in a very short time. By 3000 BCE, the potter’s wheel was in use in the Middle East as well as China. Because it is a machine created ex- pressly to produce goods, it is in many ways the first me- chanical and technological breakthrough in history. As skilled individuals specialized in making and decorating pottery, and traded their wares for other goods and ser- vices, the first elemental forms of manufacturing began to take shape.

Neolithic Ceramic Figures It is a simple step from forming clay pots and firing them to modeling clay sculptural figures and submitting them to the same firing process. Examples of clay modeling can be found in some of the earliest Paleolithic cave sites where, at Altamira, for instance, in Spain, an artist added clay to an existing rock outcropping in order to underscore the rock’s natural resemblance to an animal form. At Le Tuc d’Au- doubert, south of Lascaux, an artist shaped two, two-feet- long clay bison as if they were leaning against a rock ridge.

But these Paleolithic sculptures were never fired. One of the most interesting examples of Neolithic fired clay figurines were the work of the so-called Nok peoples who lived in modern Nigeria. We do not know what they called themselves—they are identified instead by the name of the place where their artifacts were discovered. In fact, we know almost nothing about the Nok. We do not know how their culture was organized, what their lives were like, or

Fig. 1.11 Beaker with ibex, dogs, and long-necked birds, from Susa, southwest Iran. ca. 5000–4000 BCE. Baked clay with painted decoration, height Musée du Louvre, Paris. The ibex was the most widely hunted game in the ancient Middle East, which probably accounts for its centrality in this design.

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Fig. 1.12 Head, Nok. ca. 500 BCE– 200 CE. Terracotta, height © Werner Forman/Art Resource, NY. This slightly-larger-than-life-size head was probably part of a complete body, and shows the Nok people’s interest in abstract geometrical representations of facial features and head shape. Holes in the eyes and nose were probably used to control temperature during firing.

14 3>16–.

what they believed. But while most Neolithic peoples in Africa worked in materials that were not permanent, the Nok fired clay figures of animals and humans that were ap- proximately life-size.

These figures were first unearthed early in the twenti- eth century by miners over an area of about 100 square kilometers. Carbon-14 and other forms of dating revealed that some of these objects had been made as early as 800 BCE and others as late as 600 CE. Little more than the hollow heads have survived intact, revealing an artistry based on abstract geometrical shapes (Fig. 1.12). In some cases, the heads are represented as ovals, and in others, as cones, cylinders, or spheres. Facial features are combinations of ovals, triangles, graceful arches, and straight lines. These heads were probably shaped with wet clay and then, after firing, finished by carving details into the hardened clay. Some scholars have argued that the technical and artistic

sophistication of works by the Nok and other roughly contemporaneous groups suggests that it is likely there are older artistic traditions in West Africa that have not as yet been discovered. Certainly, farther to the east, in the sub- Saharan regions of the Sudan, Egyptian culture had exerted considerable influence for centuries, and it may well be that Egyptian technological sophistication had worked its way westward.

The Neolithic Megaliths of Northern Europe A distinctive kind of monumental stone architecture appears late in the Neolithic period, particularly in what is now Britain and France. Known as megaliths [MEG-uh-liths], or “big stones,” these works were constructed without the use of mor- tar and represent the most basic form of architectural construc- tion. Sometimes, they consisted merely of posts—upright

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stones stuck into the ground—called menhirs [MEN-hir], from the Celtic words men, “stone,” and hir, “long.” These single stones occur in isolation or in groups. The largest of the groups is at Carnac [kahr-nak], in Brittany (Fig. 1.13), where some 3,000 menhirs arranged east to west in 13 straight rows, called alignments, cover a 2-mile stretch of plain. At the east end, the stones stand about 3 feet tall and gradually get larger and larger until, at the west end, they attain a height of 13 feet. This east–west alignment suggests a connection to the rising and set- ting of the sun and to fertility rites. Scholars disagree about their significance; some speculate that the stones may have marked out a ritual procession route; others think they symbol- ized the body and the process of growth and maturation. But there can be no doubt that megaliths were designed to be per- manent structures, where domestic architecture was not. Quite possibly the megaliths stood in tribute to the strength of the leaders responsible for assembling and maintaining the consid- erable labor force required to construct them.

Another megalithic structure, the dolmen [DOLE-muhn], consists of two posts roofed with a capstone, or lintel. Because it is composed of three stones, the dolmen is a trilithon [try- LITH-un], from Greek tri, “three,” and lithos, “rock,” and it formed the basic unit of architectural structure for thous ands of years. Today, we call this kind of construction post-and- lintel (see Materials & Techniques, page 18). Megaliths such

14 BOOK ONE The Ancient World and the Classical Past

as the dolmen, in County Clare, Ireland (Fig. 1.14), were probably once covered with earth to form a fully enclosed burial chamber, or cairn [karn].

A third type of megalithic structure is the cromlech [krahm-lek], from the Celtic crom, “circle,” and lech, “place.” Without doubt, the most famous megalithic struc- ture in the world is the cromlech known as Stonehenge (Fig. 1.15), on Salisbury Plain, about 100 miles west of modern London. A henge is a special type of cromlech, a circle surrounded by a ditch with built-up embankments, presumably for fortification.

The site at Stonehenge reflects four major building periods, extending from about 2750 to 1500 BCE. By about 2100 BCE, most of the elements visible today were in place. In the mid- dle was a U-shaped arrangement of five post-and-lintel trilithons. The one at the bottom of the U stands taller than the rest, rising to a height of 24 feet, with a 15-foot lintel 3 feet thick. A continuous circle of sandstone posts, each weighing up to 50 tons and all standing 20 feet high, sur- rounded the five trilithons. Across their top was a continu- ous lintel 106 feet in diameter. This is the Sarsen Circle. Just inside the Sarsen Circle was once another circle, made of bluestone—a bluish dolerite—found only in the mountains of southern Wales, some 120 miles away. (See Closer Look, pages 16–17.)

Fig. 1.13 Neolithic menhir alignments at Ménec, Carnac, Brittany, France. ca. 4250–3750 BCE. According to an ancient legend, the Carnac menhirs came into being when a retreating army was driven to the sea. Finding no ships to aid their escape, they turned to face their enemy and were transformed into stone.

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CHAPTER 1 The Rise of Culture 15

Fig. 1.15 Stonehenge, Salisbury Plain, Wiltshire, England. ca. 2750–1500 BCE. Like most Neolithic sites, Stonehenge invites speculation about its significance. Of this, however, we are certain: At the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, the sun rises directly over the Heel Stone. This suggests that the site was intimately connected to the movement of the sun.

Why Stonehenge was constructed remains a mystery, although it seems clear that orientation toward the rising sun at the summer solstice connects it to planting and the harvest. Stone- henge embodies, in fact, the growing impor- tance of agricultural production in the northern reaches of Europe. Perhaps great rituals celebrat- ing the earth’s plenty took place here. Together with other megalithic structures of the era, it suggests that the late Neolithic peoples who built it were extremely social beings, capable of great cooperation. They worked together not only to find the giant stones that rise at the site, but also to quarry, transport, and raise them. In other words, theirs was a culture of some magni- tude and no small skill. It was a culture capable of both solving great problems and organizing itself in the name of creating a great social center. For Stonehenge is, above all, a center of culture. Its fascination for us today lies in the fact that we know so little of the culture that left it behind.

Fig. 1.14 Neolithic dolmen. Poulnabrone Dolmen, on the Burren limestone plateau, County Clare, Ireland. ca. 2500 BCE. A mound of earth once covered this structure, an ancient burial chamber.

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CLOSER LOOK

How the Neolithic peoples of Britain constructedStonehenge is uncertain. Scholars believe that thegiant stones of the Sarsen Circle, which weigh up to 50 tons, were transported from the Marlborough Downs, roughly 20 miles to the north, by rolling them on logs. Most of the way, the going is relatively easy, but at the steepest part of the route, at Redhorn Hill, modern work studies es- timate that it would have taken at least 600 men to push the stones up the hill. A relatively sophisticated under- standing of basic physics—the operation of levers and pulleys—was needed to lift the stones, and their lintels, into place.

Recently, archeologists at Stonehenge have uncovered a second cromlech-like circle at Durrington Wells, about 2 miles north of the stone megalith, consisting of a circular ditch surrounding a ring of postholes out of which very large timber posts would have risen. The circle was the center of a village consisting of as many as 300 houses. The site is comparable in scale to Stonehenge itself. These discoveries—together with the ability to carbon-date human

Finally, the platform is removed, and the trilithon is complete.

Once the platform reaches the top of the posts, the lintel is levered onto the posts.

The pit around the stone is filled with stones and chalks to pack it into place.

As many as 200 men pull the stone upright on ropes as timbers support it from behind.

One by one, layers of timber are placed under the lever, both raising the stone and dropping it into the prepared pit.

The sarsen stone is raised with a long lever. Logs are placed under the stone, and then it is rolled into place.

The lintel is raised on successive layers of a timber platform.

Something to Think About . . . The circle is a geometric form that appears in the earliest manifestations of art and architecture. Can you speculate on its appeal?

remains found at Stonehenge with increased accuracy— suggest that Stonehenge was itself a burial grounds. Arche- ologist Mike Parker-Pearson of the University of Sheffield speculates that villagers would have transported their dead down an avenue leading to the River Avon, then journeyed downstream, in a ritual symbolizing the passage to the after- life, finally arriving at an avenue leading up to Stonehenge from the river. “Stonehenge wasn’t set in isolation,” Parker- Pearson says, “but was actually one half of this monument complex. We are looking at a pairing–one in timber to rep- resent the transience of life, the other in stone marking the eternity of the ancestral dead.”

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CHAPTER 1 The Rise of Culture 17

The Outer Bank This ditch, 330 feet in diameter, is the oldest construction at the site, originally exposing the white limestone beneath the surface soil to form a giant circle.

The Avenue The shadow cast by the Heel Stone on Midsummer’s Eve would extend directly down this ceremonial approach.

The Heel Stone On Midsummer’s Eve, it casts a shadow directly into the circle. The stone stands 16 feet high and weighs 35 tons. It was brought from a quarry 23 miles away.

The Slaughter Stone It was once believed that humans were sacrificed on this stone, which now lies flat on the ground, but it was originally part of a great portal.

The Bluestone Circle This circle of 80 smallish slabs was built in about 2000 BCE from stone quarried in South Wales.

The Sarsen Circle Erected about 1500 BCE, the circle is capped by lintel stones held in place by mortise-and-tenon joints, similar to those used by woodworkers. The end of the post is narrowed and slotted into a hole in the lintel.

The Altar Stone One of the most distinct stones in Stonehenge, the so-called altar stone is a 16-foot block of smoothed green sandstone located near the center of the complex.

Five Massive Trilithons Inside the outer circle stood a horseshoe of trilithons, two on each side and the largest at the closed end at the southwest. Only one of the largest trilithons still stands. It rises 22 feet above ground, with 8 feet more below ground level. The stone weighs about 50 tons.

The Design and Making of Stonehenge

SEE MORE For a Closer Look at Stonehenge, go to www.myartslab.com

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18 BOOK ONE The Ancient World and the Classical Past

THE ROLE OF MYTH IN CULTURAL LIFE A myth is a story that a culture assumes is true. It also em- bodies the culture’s views and beliefs about its world, often serving to explain otherwise mysterious natural phenom- ena. Myths stand apart from scientific explanations of the nature of reality, but as a mode of understanding and expla- nation, myth has been one of the most important forces dri- ving the development of culture. Although myths are speculative, they are not pure fantasy. They are grounded in observed experience. They serve to rationalize the unknown and to explain to people the nature of the uni- verse and their place within it.

Much of our understanding of the role of myth in pre- historic cultures comes from stories that have survived in cultures around the world that developed without writing—that is, oral cultures—such as San cultures of Zimbabwe and the Oceanic peoples of Tahiti in the South Pacific. These cultures have passed down their myths and histories over the centuries, from generation to generation, by word of mouth. Although, chronologically speaking, many of these cultures are contemporaneous with the me- dieval, Renaissance, and even modern cultures of the West, they are actually closer to the Neolithic cultures in terms of social practice and organization, and, especially in terms of agency, myth, and ritual, they can help us to understand the outlook of actual Neolithic peoples.

Both nineteenth-century and more recent anthropologi- cal work among the San people suggests that their belief sys- tems can be traced back for thousands of years. As a result, the meaning of their rock art that survives in open-air caves below the overhanging stone cliffs atop the hills of what is now Matobo National Park in Zimbabwe (Fig. 1.16), some

of which dates back as far as 5,000 to 10,000 years ago, is not entirely lost. A giraffe stands above a group of smaller gi- raffes crossing a series of large, white, lozenge-shaped forms with brown rectangular centers, many of them overlapping one another. To the right, six humanlike figures are joined hand in hand, probably in a trance dance. For the San peo- ple, prolonged dancing activates num, a concept of personal energy or potency that the entire community can acquire. Led by a shaman, a person thought to have special ability to communicate with the spirit world, the dance encourages the num to heat up until it boils over and rises up through the spine to explode, causing the dancers to enter into a trance. Sweating and trembling, the dancers variously con- vulse or become rigid. They might run, jump, or fall. The San believe that in many instances, the dancer’s spirit leaves the body, traveling far away, where it might enter into battle with supernatural forces. At any event, the trance imbues the dancer with almost supernatural agency. The dancers’ num is capable of curing illnesses, managing game, or con- trolling the weather.

Native American Cultural Traditions Seventeen thousand years ago, about the time that the hunter-gatherers at Lascaux painted its caves, the Atlantic and Pacific oceans were more than 300 feet below modern levels, exposing a low-lying continental shelf that extended from northeastern Asia to North America. It was a land- scape of grasslands and marshes, home to the woolly mam- moth, the steppe bison, wild horses, caribou, and antelope. Although recent research has found evidence of migration into North America as early as 25,000 years ago, at some

Post-and-Lintel and Corbel Construction

Materials & Techniques

Post-and-lintel is the most basic technique for spanning space. In this form of construction two posts, or pieces fixed firmly in an upright position, support a lintel, or horizontal span. Two posts and a single lintel, as seen at Carnac and Stonehenge (see Figs. 1.14, 1.15), constitute a trilithon (from the Greek tri, “three,” and lithos, “rock”). The corbel construction of the houses at Skara Brae (see Fig. 1.8). In corbeling, layers of rock are laid with the edge of each row projecting inward beyond the row below it until the walls al- most meet at the top. The rows are buttressed, or supported, by earth piled on the outside. A roof of organic material can cover the top, or a stone can be set over the top to completely enclose the space (to create a tomb, for instance).

posts

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LEARN MORE View an architectural simulation about post-and-lintel construction at www.myartslab.com

Post-and-lintel construction

Corbel construction

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CHAPTER 1 The Rise of Culture 19

point around 15,000 BCE, large numbers of hunter-gatherers in northeastern Asia followed these animals across the grasslands land bridge into the Americas. By 12,000 BCE, prehistoric hunters had settled across North America and begun to move farther south, through Mesoamerica (the region extending from central Mexico to northern Central America), and on into South America, reaching the southern end of Chile no later than 11,000 BCE.

Around 9000 BCE, for reasons that are still hotly debated—perhaps a combination of overhunting and climatic change—the peoples of the Americas developed agricul- tural societies. They domesticated animals—turkeys, guinea pigs, dogs, and llamas, though never a beast of burden, as in the rest of the world—and they cultivated a whole new range of plants, including maize and corn (domesticated in the Valley of Mexico by 8000 BCE), beans, squash, toma- toes, avocados, potatoes, tobacco, and cacao, the source of chocolate. The wheel remained unknown to them, though they learned to adapt to almost every conceivable climate

and landscape. A creation myth, or story of a people’s ori- gin, told by the Maidu [MY-doo] tribe of California, charac- terizes this early time: “For a long time everyone spoke the same language, but suddenly people began to speak in dif- ferent tongues. Kulsu (the Creator), however, could speak all languages, so he called his people together and told them the names of the animals in their own language, taught them to get food, and gave them their laws and ritu- als. Then he sent each tribe to a different place to live.”

The Anasazi and the Role of Myth The Anasazi [ah- nuh-SAH-zee] people thrived in the American Southwest from about 900 to 1300 CE, a time roughly contemporaneous with the late Middle Ages in Europe. They left us no written record of their culture, only ruins and artifacts. As William M. Ferguson and Arthur H. Rohn, two prominent scholars of the Anasazi, have described them: “They were a Neolithic people without a beast of burden, the wheel, metal, or a writ- ten language, yet they constructed magnificent masonry

Fig. 1.16 Wall painting with giraffes, zebra, eland, and abstract shapes, San people, Inanke, Matobo National Park, Zimbabwe. Before 1000 CE. Photo: Christopher and Sally Gable © Dorling Kindersley. The animals across the bottom are elands, the largest of antelope, resembling cattle.

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20 BOOK ONE The Ancient World and the Classical Past

housing and ceremonial structures, irrigation works, and water impoundments.” At Mesa Verde [MAY-suh VURD-ee], in what is today southwest- ern Colorado, their cliff dwellings (Fig. 1.17) re- semble many of the Neolithic cities of the Middle East, such as Ain Ghazal [ine gah-zahl] (“spring of the gazelles”), just outside what is now Amman, Jordan. Though Ain Ghazal flour- ished from about 7200 to 5000 BCE, thousands of years before the Mesa Verde community, both complexes were constructed with stone walls sealed with a layer of mud plaster. Their roofs were made of wooden beams cross-layered with smaller twigs and branches and sealed with mud. Like other Neolithic cultures, the Anasazi were accomplished in pottery-making, decorating their cre- ations with elaborately abstract, largely geometric shapes and patterns.

The Anasazi abandoned their communities in the late thirteenth century, perhaps because of a great drought that lasted from about 1276 to 1299. Their descendants may be the Pueblo [PWEB-loh] peoples of the American Southwest today. (Anasazi is in fact a Navajo word meaning “enemy

ancestors”—we do not know what the Anasazi called them- selves.) What is remarkable about the Pueblo peoples, who despite the fact that they speak several different languages share a remarkably common culture, is that many aspects of their culture have survived and are practiced today much as they were in ancient times. For all Pueblo peoples, the village is not just the center of culture but the very center of the world. And the cultural center of village life is the kiva

Fig. 1.17 Spruce Tree House, Mesa Verde, Anasazi culture. ca. 1200–1300 CE. The courtyard was formed by the restoration of the roofs over two underground kivas.

Fig. 1.18 Cribbed roof construction of a kiva. After a National Park Service pamphlet.

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CHAPTER 1 The Rise of Culture 21

[KEE-vuh] (Fig. 1.18), two of which have been restored at Spruce Tree House to form the plaza visible in Fig. 1.17. They are constructed of horizontally laid logs built up to form a dome with an access hole. The roof area thus created is used as a common area. Down below, in the enclosed kiva floor, was a sipapu [see-paw-poo], a small, round hole sym- bolic of the Anasazi creation myth, which told of the emer- gence of the Anasazi’s ancestors from the depths of the Earth. In the parched Southwestern desert country, it is equally true that water, like life itself, also seeps out of small fissures in the Earth. Thus, it is as if the Anasazi community, and everything necessary to its survival, were to emerge from Mother Earth.

Zuni Pueblo Emergence Tales The Pueblos have main- tained the active practice of their ancient religious rites and ceremonies, which they have chosen not to share with out- siders. Most do not allow their ceremonial dances to be photographed. These dance performances tell stories that relate to the experiences of the Pueblo peoples, from plant- ing, hunting, and fishing in daily life to the larger experi- ences of birth, puberty, maturity, and death. Still other stories explain the origin of the world, the emergence of a particular Pueblo people into the world, and their history. Most Pueblo people believe that they originated in the womb of Mother Earth and, like seeds sprouting from the soil in the springtime, were called out into the daylight by their Sun Father. This belief about origins is embodied in a type of narrative known as an emergence tale, a form of creation myth (Reading 1.1).

clouds—the source of rain—and breath itself. Later in the tale, the two children of the Sun Father bring everyone out into the daylight for the first time:

READING 1.1

Zuni Emergence Tale, Talk Concerning the First Beginning

Yes, indeed. In this world there was no one at all. Always the sun came up; always he went in. No one in the morn- ing gave him sacred meal; no one gave him prayer sticks; it was very lonely. He said to his two children: “You will go into the fourth womb. Your fathers, your mothers, kä-eto·we, tcu-eto·we, mu-eto·we, le-eto·we, all the soci- ety priests, society pekwins, society bow priests, you will bring out yonder into the light of your sun father.”

So begins this emergence tale, which embodies the fun- damental principles of Zuni religious society. The Zuni, or “Sun People,” are organized into groups, each responsible for a particular aspect of the community’s well-being, and each group is represented by a particular -eto·we, or fetish, connecting it to its spiritual foundation in Earth’s womb. The pekwins mentioned here are sun priests, who control the ritual calendar. Bow priests oversee warfare and social behavior. In return for corn and breath given them by the Sun Father, the Zuni offer him cornmeal and downy feath- ers attached to painted prayer sticks symbolizing both

Into the daylight of their sun father they came forth standing. Just as early dawn they came forth. After they came forth there they set down their sacred pos- sessions in a row. The two said, “Now after a little while when your sun father comes forth standing to his sacred place you will see him face to face. Do not close your eyes.” Thus he said to them. After a little while the sun came out. When he came out they looked at him. From their eyes the tears rolled down. After they had looked at him, in a little while their eyes became strong. “Alas!” Thus they said. They were covered all over with slime. With slimy tails and slimy horns, with webbed fingers, they saw one another. “Oh dear! is this what we look like?” Thus they said.

Then they could not tell which was which of their sacred possessions.

From this point on in the tale, the people and priests, led by the two children, seek to find the sacred “middle place,” where things are balanced and orderly. Halona-Itiwana [ha-LOH-nah it-ee-WAH-nah] it is called, the sacred name of the Zuni Pueblo, “the Middle Ant Hill of the World.” In the process, they are transformed from indeterminate, salamander-like creatures into their ultimate human form, and their world is transformed from chaos to order.

At the heart of the Zuni emergence tale is a moment when, to the dismay of their parents, many children are transformed into water-creatures—turtles, frogs, and the like—and the Hero Twins instruct the parents to throw these children back into the river. Here they become kachinas [kuh-CHEE-nuhs] or katcinas, deified spirits, who explain:

May you go happily. You will tell our parents, “Do not worry.” We have not perished. In order to remain thus forever we stay here. To Itiwana but one day’s travel remains. Therefore we stay nearby. . . . Whenever the waters are exhausted and the seeds are exhausted you will send us prayer sticks. Yonder at the place of our first beginning with them we shall bend over to speak to them. Thus there will not fail to be waters. Therefore we shall stay quietly nearby.

The Pueblo believe that kachina spirits, not unlike the num of the San people of Africa, manifest themselves in performance and dance. Masked male dancers impersonate the kachinas, taking on their likeness as well as their super- natural character. Through these dance visits the kachinas, although always “nearby,” can exercise their powers for the good of the people. The nearly 250 kachina personalities embody clouds, rain, crops, animals, and even ideas such as

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22 BOOK ONE The Ancient World and the Classical Past

Japan and the Role of Myth in the Shinto Religion A culture’s religion—that is, its understanding of the divine—is thus closely tied to and penetrated by mythical elements. Its beliefs, as embodied in its religion, stories, and myths, have always been closely tied to seasonal celebrations and agricultural production—planting and harvest in particular, as well as rain—the success of which was understood to be inextricably linked to the well-being of the community. In a fundamental sense, myths reflect the community’s ideals, its history (hence, the pre- ponderance of creation myths in both ancient soci- eties and contemporary religions), and its aspirations. Myths also tend to mirror the culture’s moral and political systems, its social organization, and its most fundamental beliefs.

A profound example is the indigenous Japanese religion of Shinto. Before 200 CE, Japan was frag- mented; its various regions were separated by sea and mountain, and ruled by numerous competing and of- ten warring states. The Records of Three Kingdoms, a classic Chinese text dating from about 297 CE, states that in the first half of the third century CE, many or

most of these states were unified under the rule of Queen Himiko. According to the Records: “The country formerly had a man as ruler. For some seventy or eighty years after that there were disturbances and warfare. Thereupon the people agreed upon a woman for their ruler. Her name was Himiko.” After her rule, Japan was more or less united under the Yam- ato emperors, who modeled their rule after the Chinese, and whose imperial court ruled from modern-day Nara Prefec- ture, then known as Yamato Province. Its peoples shared a mythology that was finally collected near the end of the Yamato period, in about 700 CE, called the Kojiki [koh-JEE- kee] or “Chronicles of Japan.” (See Reading 1.2, page 29.) According to the Kojiki, the islands that constitute Japan were formed by two kami [KAH-mee], or gods—Izanagi [izah- NAH-gee] and his consort Izanami [izah-NAH-mee]. Among their offspring was the sun goddess, Amaterasu Omikami [AH-mah-teh-rah-soo OH-mee-kah-mee], from whom the Japanese Imperial line later claimed to have de- scended. In other words, Japanese emperors could claim not merely to have been put in position by the gods; they could claim to be direct descendants of the gods, and hence divine.

Amaterasu is the principal goddess of the early indigenous religious practices that came to be known as Shinto. She

growth and fertility. Although kachina figurines (Fig. 1.19) are made for sale as art objects, particularly by the Hopi, the actual masks worn in ceremonies are not considered art objects by the Pueblo people. Rather, they are thought of as active agents in the transfer of power and knowledge between the gods and the men who wear them in dance, just like the African Baule mask. In fact, kachina dolls made for sale are considered empty of any ritual power or significance.

Pueblo emergence tales, and the ritual practices that ac- company them, reflect the general beliefs of most Neolithic peoples. These include the following:

• belief that the forces of nature are inhabited by living spirits, which we call animism

• belief that nature’s behavior can be compared to human behavior (we call the practice of investing plants, animals, and natural phenomena with human form or attributes anthropomorphism), thus explaining what otherwise would remain inexplicable

• belief that humans can communicate with the spirits of nature, and that, in return for a sacrificial offering or a prayer, the gods might intercede on their behalf

Fig. 1.19 Buffalo Kachina, Zuni culture. ca. 1875. Wood, cloth, hide, fur, shell, feathers, horse hair, tin cones. © Millicent Rogers Museum. The Buffalo Kachina is designed to increase the population of furbearing animals in the arid environment of the Southwest. Derived from a Plains Indian ritual dance, it was first danced by the Zuni near the end of the last century as the region’s wildlife was becoming increasingly threatened.

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CHAPTER 1 The Rise of Culture 23

is housed in a shrine complex at Ise, a sacred site from pre- historic times. In many respects, Shinto shares much with Pueblo religions. In Shinto, trees, rocks, water, and mountains—especially Mount Fuji, the volcano just outside Tokyo which is said to look over the country as its protector—are all manifestations of the kami, which, like kachinas, are the spirits that are embodied in the natural world. Even the natural materials with which artists work, such as clay, wood, and stone, are imbued with the kami and are to be treated with the respect and reverence due to a god. The kami are revered in matsuri, festivals that usually occur on an annual basis in which, it is believed, past and present merge into one, everyday reality fades away, and people come face-to-face with their gods. The matsuri serve to purify the territory and community associated with the kami, restoring them from the degradation inevitably worked upon them by the passing of time. During the festival, people partake of the original energies of the cosmos, which they will need to re- store order to their world. Offerings such as fish, rice, and vegetables, as well as music and dancing, are presented to the kami, and the offerings of food are later eaten.

The main sanctuary at Ise, or shoden [SHOH-dehn], con- sists of undecorated wooden beams and a thatched roof (Fig. 1.20). Ise is exceptional in its use of these plain and simple materials, which not only embody the basic tenet of Shinto—reverence for the natural world—but also the

Fig. 1.20 Naiku (Inner) Shrine housing Amaterasu, Ise, Japan. Late fifth–early sixth century CE. Although the site has been sacred to Shinto since prehistoric times, beginning in the reign of the emperor Temmu (r. 673–86 CE), the Shinto shrine at Ise has been rebuilt by the Japanese ruling family, with some inevitable lapses, every 20 years. The most recent reconstruction occurred in 1993 and will occur again in 2013.

continuity and renewal of a tradition where wood, rather than stone, has always been the principal building material. The most prominent festival at Ise is the shikinen-sengu cere- mony, which involves the installation of the deity in a new shrine in a celebration of ritual renewal held every 20 years. The shrine buildings are rebuilt on empty ground adjacent to the older shrine, the deity is transferred to the new shrine, and the older shrine is razed, creating empty ground where the next shrine will be erected. The empty site is strewn with large white stones and is left totally bare except for a small wooden hut containing a sacred wooden pole, a practice that scholars believe dates back to very ancient times. This cycle of destruction and renewal connects the past to the present, the human community to its gods and their original energies.

The three sacred treasures of Shinto—a sword, a mirror, and a jewel necklace—were said to be given by Amaterasu to the first emperor, and they are traditionally handed down from emperor to emperor in the enthronement ceremony. The mirror is housed at Ise, the sword at the Atsuta Shrine in Nagoya, and the jewel necklace at the Imperial Palace in Tokyo. These Imperial regalia are not considered mere sym- bols of the divine but “deity-bodies” in which the powers of the gods reside, specifically wisdom in the mirror, valor in the sword, and benevolence in the jewel necklace. To this day, millions of Japanese continue to practice Shinto, and they undertake pilgrimages to Ise each year.

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SACRED SITES: THE EXAMPLE OF THE AMERICAS In some prehistoric cultures, priests or priestesses were princi- pally responsible for mediating between the human and the di- vine. In others, as in Shinto, the ruler was the representative of the divine world on Earth. But in almost all prehistoric cul- tures, communication with the spiritual world was conducted in special precincts or places such as Ise. Many scholars believe that caves served this purpose in Paleolithic times. In Neolithic culture, sites such as Stonehenge and the Anasazi kiva served this function.

The Olmec As early as 1300 BCE, a preliterate group known as the Olmec [OHL-mek] came to inhabit the area between Veracruz and Tabasco on the southern coast of the Gulf of Mexico (see Map 1.3), where they built huge ceremonial precincts in the middle of their communities. Many of the characteristic fea- tures of later Mesoamerican culture, such as pyramids, ball courts, mirror-making, and the calendar system, originated in the lowland agricultural zones that the Olmec inhabited.

The Olmec built their cities on great earthen platforms, probably designed to protect their ceremonial centers from rain and flood. On these platforms, they erected giant pyrami- dal mounds, where an elite group of ruler-priests lived, sup- ported by the general population that farmed the rich, sometimes swampy land that surrounded them. These pyramids

may have been an architectural reference to the volcanoes that dominate Mexico, or they may have been tombs. Exca- vations may eventually tell us. At La Venta [luh VEN-tuh], very near the present-day city of Villahermosa [vee-yuh-er- MOH-suh], three colossal stone heads stood guard over the ceremonial center on the south end of the platform (Fig. 1.21), and a fourth guarded the north end by itself. Each head weighs between 11 and 24 tons, and each bears a unique emblem on its headgear, which is similar to old-style Ameri- can leather football helmets. At other Olmec sites—San Lorenzo, for instance—as many as eight of these heads have been found, some up to 12 feet high. They are carved of basalt, although the nearest basalt quarry is 50 miles to the south in the Tuxtla [toost-luh] Mountains. They were evi- dently at least partially carved at the quarry, then loaded onto rafts and floated downriver to the Gulf of Mexico before going back upriver to their final resting places. The stone heads are generally believed to be portraits of Olmec rulers, and they all share the same facial features, including wide, flat noses and thick lips. They suggest that the ruler was the culture’s princi- pal mediator with the gods, literally larger than life.

The Mound Builders Sometime between 1800 and 500 BCE, at about the same time that the Olmec were building the La Venta mound cluster in Mexico, Neolithic hunter-gatherers in eastern North Amer- ica began building huge ceremonial centers of their own, consisting of large-scale embankments and burial mounds

24 BOOK ONE The Ancient World and the Classical Past

200 miles

200 km

Tres Zapotes

Laguna de los Cerros La Venta

San Lorenzo

San Jose Mogote

Oaxaca

Tehuazan

Alvarado

San Cristobel de las Casas

Villahermosa

Tuxtla Gulterres

Principal site

Modern town or city

BELIZE

GUATAMALA

HONDURAS

EL SALVADOR

M E X I C O

YUCATAN

CAMPECHE

TABASCO

VERACRUZ

OAXACA CHIAPAS

QUINTANA

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r eMap 1.3 Olmec civilization sites. The Olmec inhabited most of the area that we now refer to as Mesoamerica from 1300 to 400 BCE.

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(Map 1.4). These people, who probably had arrived in North America sometime between 14,000 and 10,000 BCE, are known as the Woodlands peoples because the area where they lived, from the Mississippi River basin in the West to the Atlantic Ocean in the East, was originally forested.

One of these Woodlands peoples, the Hopewell culture in southern Ohio, enveloped the corpses of what we pre- sume were their highest-ranking leaders from head to toe in freshwater pearls, weighted them down with plates of beaten copper, and then surrounded them with jewelry, sculpture, and pottery. These burials give us a fair idea of the extent of Woodlands trade. Their copper came from the Great Lakes, decorative shell from the Gulf Coast, alligator and shark teeth from Florida, and mica from the Ap- palachian Mountains. There are even examples of obsidian that can be traced to what is now Yellowstone National Park, and grizzly bear teeth from the Rocky Mountains.

CHAPTER 1 The Rise of Culture 25

Fig. 1.21 Colossal head, La Venta, Mexico, Olmec culture. ca. 900–500 BCE. Basalt, height 7 50 . La Venta Park, Villahermosa, Tabasco, Mexico. Giant heads such as this one faced out from the ceremonial center and evidently served to guard it.

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Map 1.4 Archeological sites of the Anasazi and the mound builders’ archeological sites in North America.

500 km

500 miles

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Spiro Moundville

Etowh

Cahokia

Yellowstone National Park

Mesa Verde

Great Serpent Mound

Archeological site

MISSOURI

OHIO

MINNESOTA

ILLINOIS

WISCONSIN

MICHIGAN PENNSYLVANIA

IOWA

INDIANA

NEW YORK

KANSAS KENTUCKY

TEXAS

OKLAHOMA

ARKANSAS TENNESSEE

NORTH CAROLINA

LOUISIANA

MISSISSIPPI GEORGIA

ALABAMA

FLORIDA

VIRGINIA

WEST VIRGINIA

NEBRASKA

NEW MEXICO

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SOUTH DAKOTA

MONTANA

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26 BOOK ONE The Ancient World and the Classical Past

Fig. 1.22 Great Serpent Mound, Adams County, Ohio, Hopewell culture. ca. 600 BCE– 200 CE. Length approx. 1,254 . Recently, archeologists have carbon-dated an artifact found at the Great Serpent Mound as late as 1070 CE. As a result, some now think that the mound may be related to Halley’s comet, which passed by the Earth in 1066.

Fig. 1.23 Reconstruction of central Cahokia, East St. Louis, Illinois, Mississippian culture. ca. 1150 CE. East–west length approx. 3 mi.; north–south length approx. mi.; base of great mound, 1,037 790 ; height approx. 100 . William Iseminger, “Reconstruction of Central Cahokia Mounds”. c. 1150 CE. Courtesy of Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site. The stockade, or fence, surrounding the central area, indicates that warfare probably played an important role in Mississippian life.

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The most intriguing of the Hopewell mounds is the Great Serpent Mound, near Locust Grove, Ohio (Fig. 1.22). Nearly a quarter of a mile long, it contains no burial sites. Its “head” consists of an oval enclosure that may have served some ceremonial purpose, and its tail is a spiral. The spiral would, in fact, become a favorite decorative form of the Mississippian culture, which developed out of the Woodlands-era cultures and raised ritual mound building to a new level of achievement. The great mound at Cahokia [kuh-HO-kee-uh] (Fig. 1.23), near the juncture of the Illinois, Missouri, and Mississippi rivers at modern East St. Louis, Illinois, required the moving of over 22 million cubic feet of earth and probably three centuries to construct, beginning about 900 CE. It was the focal point of a ritual center that contained as many as 120 mounds, some of

which were aligned with the position of the sun at the equinoxes, as well as nearly 400 other platforms, wooden enclosures, and houses. Evidence suggests that the Mississip- pians worshipped the sun: The Natchez people, one of the Mississippian peoples who survived contact with European culture, called their chief the Great Sun, and their highest social class the Suns.

The Mississippian culture sustained itself primarily by the cultivation of corn, suggesting close connections to Mexico, where cultivation of corn was originally per- fected. As many as 4 million people may have lived in the Mississippi Valley. Cahokia itself thrived, with a pop- ulation of 20,000 people within its six-square-mile area, until just before 1500, when the site was mysteriously abandoned.

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CHAPTER 1 The Rise of Culture 27

Representing the Power of the Animal World

The two images shown here in some sense bracket thesix volumes of The Humanities. The first (Fig. 1.24),from the Chauvet Cave, is one of the earliest known drawings of a horse. The second (Fig. 1.25), a drawing by contemporary American painter Susan Rothenberg (b. 1945), also represents a horse, though in many ways less realistically than the cave drawing. The body of Rothenberg’s horse seems to have disappeared and, eyeless, as if blinded, it leans forward, its mouth open, choking or gagging or gasping for air.

In his catalog essay for a 1993 retrospective exhibition of Rothenberg’s painting, Michael Auping, chief curator at

&CONTINUITY CHANGE

Fig. 1.25 Susan Rothenberg. Untitled. 1978. Acrylic, flashe, and pencil on paper, 20 20 . Collection Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Art Center Acquisition Fund, 1979. © 2008 Susan Rothenberg/Artist’s Rights Society (ARS), NY. Part of the eeriness of this image comes from Rothenberg’s use of flashe, a French vinyl-based color that is clear and so creates a misty, ghostlike surface.

–*–Fig. 1.24 Horse. Detail from Chauvet Cave, Vallon-Pont-d’Arc, Ardèche gorge, France (Fig. 1.1). ca. 30,000 BCE. Note the realistic shading that defines the volume of the horse’s head. It is a realism that artists throughout history have sometimes sought to achieve, and sometimes ignored, in their efforts to express for the forces that drive them.

the Albright-Knox Museum in Buffalo, New York, de- scribed Rothenberg’s kind of drawing: “Relatively sponta- neous, the drawings are Rothenberg’s psychic energy made imminent . . . . [They] uncover realms of the psyche that are perhaps not yet fully explicable.” The same could be said of the cave drawing executed by a nameless hunter- gatherer more than 20,000 years ago. That artist’s work must have seemed just as strange as Rothenberg’s, lit by flickering firelight in the dark recesses of the cave, its body disappearing, too, into the darkness that surrounded it.

It seems certain that in some measure both drawings were the expression of a psychic need on the part of the artist—whether derived from the energy of the hunt or of nature itself—to fix upon a surface an image of the power and vulnerability of the animal world. That drive, which we will see in the art of the Bronze Age of the Middle East in the next chapter—for instance, in the haunting image of a dying lion in the palace complex of an Assyrian king at Nineveh—remains constant from the beginnings of art to the present day. It is the compulsion to express the inex- pressible, to visualize the mind as well as the world. ■

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GLOSSARY agency The idea that an object possesses qualities that help to effect change. animism The belief that the forces of nature are inhabited by living spirits. anthropomorphism The practice of investing plants, animals, and natural phenomena with human form or attributes. cairn A fully enclosed burial chamber covered with earth. carving The act of cutting or incising stone, bone, wood, or other material into a desired form. civilization A culture that possesses the ability to organize itself thoroughly and communicates through written language. corbeling A method for creating walls and roofs by layering stones so that they project inward over the layer beneath. creation myth A story of a people’s origin. cromlech A circle of megaliths, usually surrounding a dolmen or mound. culture The set of values, beliefs, and behaviors that governs or determines a common way of living formed by a group of people and passed on from one generation to the next.

dolmen A type of prehistoric megalithic structure made of two posts supporting a horizontal capstone. emergence tale A type of narrative that explains beliefs about a people’s origins. hominids The earliest upright mammals, including humans, apes, and other related forms. hunter-gatherer One whose primary method of subsistence depends on hunting animals and gathering edible plants and other foodstuffs from nature. kiva A Pueblo ceremonial enclosure that is usually partly underground and serves as the center of village life. lintel A horizontal architectural element. megalith Literally, “big stone”; large, usually rough, stones used in a monument or structure. menhir A large, single, upright stone. modeling The use of shading in a two-dimensional representa- tion to give a sense of roundness and volume. myth A story that a culture assumes is true. A myth also embodies the culture’s views and beliefs about its world,

THINKING BACK

What features characterize the beginnings of human culture?

The widespread use of stone tools and weapons by Homo sapiens, the hominid species that evolved around 120,000 to 100,000 years ago, gives rise to the name of the earliest era of human development, the Paleolithic era. Carvers fashioned stone figures, both in the round and in relief. In cave paintings, such as those discovered at Chau- vet Cave, the artists’ great skill in rendering animals helps us to understand that the ability to represent the world with naturalistic fidelity is an inherent human skill, unre- lated to cultural sophistication. Culture can be defined as a way of living—religious, social, and/or political—formed by a group of people and passed on from one generation to the next. What can the earliest art tell us about the first human cultures? What questions remain a mystery?

What characteristics distinguish the Neolithic from the Paleolithic?

As the ice that covered the Northern Hemisphere slowly melted, people began cultivating edible grasses and domesticating animals. Gradually, farming sup- planted hunting as the primary means of sustaining life, especially in the great river valleys where water was abundant. The rise of agriculture is the chief character- istic of the Neolithic age. Along with agriculture, per- manent villages such as Skara Brae begin to appear. What does the appearance of fire-baked pottery tell us about life in Neolithic culture?

What is a megalith? During the fifth millennium BCE, Neolithic peoples

began constructing monumental stone architecture, or megaliths, in France and England. Upright, single stone posts called menhirs were placed in the ground, either individually or in groups, as at Carnac in Brittany. Ele- mentary post-and-lintel construction was employed to create dolmens, two posts roofed with a capstone. The most famous of the third type of monumental construc- tion, the circular cromlech, is Stonehenge, in England. What does the enormous amount of human labor re- quired for the construction of these megaliths suggest about the societies that built them?

How can we understand the role of myth in prehistoric culture?

Neolithic culture in the Americas lasted well into the second millennium CE. Much of our understanding of the role of myth in prehistoric cultures derives from the traditions of contemporary Native American tribes that still survive in tribes such as the Hopi and Zuni, who are the direct descendents of the Anasazi. Their legends, such as the Zuni emergence tale, encapsulate the fundamental religious principles of the culture. Such stories, and the ritual practices that accompany them, reflect the general beliefs of most Neolithic peoples. Can you describe some of these beliefs? What role do sa- cred sites, such as those at Ise in Japan, or Cahokia in the Mississippi Valley, play?

PRACTICE MORE Get flashcards for images and terms and review chapter material with quizzes at www.myartslab.com

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CHAPTER 1 The Rise of Culture 29

often serving to explain otherwise mysterious natural phenomena. naturalism In art, representations that imitate the reality in appearance of natural objects. oral culture A culture that develops without writing and passes down stories, beliefs, values, and systems by word of mouth. perspectival drawing The use of techniques to show the rela- tion of objects as they appear to the eye and to convey a sense of three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface. post A piece fixed firmly in an upright position. post-and-lintel A form of construction consisting of two posts (upright members) that support a lintel (horizontal member).

prehistoric Existing in or relating to the times before writing and recorded history. relief sculpture A three-dimensional work of art carved out of a flat background surface. ritual A rite or ceremony habitually practiced by a group, of- ten in religious or quasi-religious context. sculpture in the round A fully three-dimensional work of art. shaman A person thought to have special ability to communi- cate with the spirit world. trilithon A type of megalithic structure composed of three stones: two posts and a lintel; served in prehistory as the basic architectural unit.

READINGS

READING 1.2

The Japanese Creation Myth: The Kojiki The following is a beginning of a modern retelling of the Kojiki or Records of Ancient Matters the oldest surviving account of ancient Japanese history. This creation myth details the origins of Japan and the sacred spirits, or kami, which are objects of worship for the indigenous religion of Japan, Shintoism.

Before the heavens and the earth came into existence, all was a chaos, unimaginably limitless and without definite shape or form. Eon followed eon: then, lo! out of this boundless, shapeless mass something light and transparent rose up and formed the heaven. This was the Plain of High Heaven, in which materialized a deity called Ame-no-Minaka-Nushi-no-Mikoto (the Deity-of-the- August-Center-of-Heaven). Next the heavens gave birth to a deity named Takami-Musubi-no-Mikoto (the High-August-Producing- Wondrous-Deity), followed by a third called Kammi-Musubi-no- Mikoto (the Divine-Producing-Wondrous-Deity). These three divine beings are called the Three Creating Deities.

In the meantime what was heavy and opaque in the void gradually precipitated and became the earth, but it had taken an immeasurably long time before it condensed sufficiently to form solid ground. In its earliest stages, for millions and millions of years, the earth may be said to have resembled oil floating, medusa-like, upon the face of the waters. Suddenly like the sprouting up of a reed, a pair of immortals were born from its bosom. . . . Many gods were thus born in succession, and so they increased in number, but as long as the world remained in a chaotic state, there was nothing for them to do. Whereupon, all the Heavenly deities summoned the two divine beings, Izanagi and Izanami, and bade them descend to the nebulous place, and by helping each other, to consolidate it into terra firma. [The heavenly deities] handed them a spear called Ama-no-Nuboko, embellished with costly gems. The divine couple received re- spectfully and ceremoniously the sacred weapon and then with- drew from the presence of the deities, ready to perform their august commission. Proceeding forthwith to the Floating Bridge

of Heaven, which lay between the heaven and the earth, they stood awhile to gaze on that which lay below. What they beheld was a world not yet condensed, but looking like a sea of filmy fog floating to and fro in the air, exhaling the while an inexpress- ibly fragrant odor. They were, at first, perplexed just how and where to start, but at length Izanagi suggested to his companion that they should try the effect of stirring up the brine with their spear. So saying he pushed down the jeweled shaft and found that it touched something. Then drawing it up, he examined it and observed that the great drops which fell from it almost im- mediately coagulated into an island, which is, to this day, the Is- land of Onokoro. Delighted at the result, the two deities descended forthwith from the Floating Bridge to reach the miraculously created island. In this island they thenceforth dwelt and made it the basis of their subsequent task of creating a country . . . . First, the island of Awaji was born, next, Shikoku, then, the island of Oki, followed by Kyushu; after that, the island Tsushima came into being, and lastly, Honshu, the main island of Japan. The name of Oyashi-ma-kuni (the Country of the Eight Great Islands) was given to these eight islands . . . .

READING CRITICALLY

One of the key moments in this creation myth is when the heavenly deities order Izanagi and Izanami to “descend to the nebulous place, and by helping each other, to con- solidate it into terra firma.” What does this tell us about Japanese culture?

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THINKING AHEAD

What characteristics distinguish the ancient civilizations of Sumer, Akkad, Babylon, and Assyria?

How does the Epic of Gilgamesh embody the relationship between the Mesopotamian ruler and the gods?

What distinguished the Hebrews from other cultures of the Ancient Near East?

What characteristics did the Persian religion share with Judaism?

In September 1922, British Archeologist C. Leonard Woolleyboarded a steamer, beginning a journey that would take himto southern Iraq. There, Woolley and his team would dis- cover one of the richest treasure troves in the history of ar- cheology in the ruins of the ancient city of Ur. Woolley concentrated his energies on the burial grounds surrounding the city’s central ziggurat [ZIG-uh-rat], a pyramidal temple structure consisting of successive platforms with outside stair- cases and a shrine at the top. (Fig. 2.1). Digging there in the winter of 1927, he unearthed a series of tombs with several rooms, many bodies, and masses of golden objects (Fig. 2.2)— vessels, crowns, necklaces, statues, and weapons—as well as jewelry and lyres made of electrum and the deep-blue stone lapis lazuli. With the same sense of excitement that was felt by Jean-Marie Chauvet and his companions when they first saw the paintings on the wall of Chauvet cave, Woolley was careful to keep what he called the “royal tombs” secret. On January 4, 1928, Woolley telegrammed his colleagues in Latin. Translated to English, it read:

I found the intact tomb, stone built, and vaulted over with bricks of queen Shubad [later known as Puabi] adorned with a dress in which gems, flower crowns and animal figures are woven. Tomb magnificent with jewels and golden cups.

—Woolley

Fig. 2.1 The ziggurat at Ur (modern Muqaiyir, Iraq). ca. 2100 BCE. The best preserved and most fully restored of the ancient Sumerian temples, this ziggurat was the center of the city of Ur, in the lower plain between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

HEAR MORE Listen to an audio file of your chapter at www.myartslab.com

Mesopotamia Power and Social Order in the Early Middle East2

Fig. 2.2 Vessel in the shape of an ostrich egg, from the Royal Cemetery of Ur. ca. 2550 BCE. Gold, lapis lazuli, red limestone, shell, and bitumen, hammered from a single sheet of gold and with geometric mosaics at the top and bottom of the egg. Height ; Diameter University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. The array of materials came from trade with neighbors in Afghanistan, Iran, Anatolia, and perhaps Egypt and Nubia.

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When Woolley’s discovery was made public, it was world- wide news for years.

Archeologists and historians were especially excited by Woolley’s discoveries, because they opened a window onto the larger region we call Mesopotamia [mes-uh-po-TAY-mee-uh], the land between the Tigris [TIE-gris] and Euphrates [you- FRAY-teez] rivers. Ur was one of 30 or 40 cities that arose in Sumer, the southern portion of Mesopotamia (Map 2.1). Its people abandoned Ur more than 2,000 years ago, when the Euphrates changed its course away from the city.

The peoples of the region were, in fact, almost totally de- pendent on the two rivers for their livelihoods. By irrigating the lands just outside the marshes on the riverbanks, the conditions necessary for extensive and elaborate communi- ties such as Ur began to arise: People dug canals and ditches and cooperated in regulating the flow of water in them, which eventually resulted in crops that exceeded the needs of the population. These could be transformed into food- stuffs of a more elaborate kind, including beer. Evidence in- dicates that over half of each grain harvest went into producing beer. Excess crops were also traded by boat with nearby communities or up the great rivers to the north, where stone, wood, and metals were available in exchange. As people congregated in central locations to exchange goods, cities began to form. Cities such as Ur became hubs of great trading networks. With trade came ideas, which were incorporated into local custom and spawned newer and greater ideas in turn. Out of the exchange of goods and ideas, then, the conditions were in place for great cultures to arise.

This chapter outlines the cultural forces that came to de- fine Mesopotamia. After agriculture, first among these was

metallurgy, the science of separating metals from their ores and then working or treating them to create objects. The technology probably originated in the Fertile Crescent to the north about 4000 BCE, but as it spread southward, the peoples of Mesopotamia adopted it as well.

This new technology would change the region’s social organization, inaugurating what we have come to call the Bronze Age. Metallurgy required the mining of ores, spe- cialized technological training, and skilled artisans. Al- though the metallurgical properties of copper were widely understood, technicians discovered that by alloying it with tin they could create bronze, a material of enormous strength and durability. Bronze weapons would transform the military and the nature of warfare. Power consolidated around the control and mastery of weaponry, and thus bronze created a new military elite of soldiers dedicated to protecting the Sumerian city-states from one another for control of produce and trade. The city-states, in turn, spawned governments ruled by priest-kings, who exercised power as intermediaries between the gods and the people. In their secular role, the priest-kings established laws that contributed to the social order necessary for maintaining successful agricultural societies. The arts developed largely as celebrations of the priest-kings’ powers. In order to keep track of the production and distribution of goods, the costs of equipping the military, and records relating to enforcing laws and regulations, writing, perhaps the greatest innova- tion of the Bronze Age, developed. If agricultural produc- tion served to stimulate the creation of urban centers, metallurgy made possible the new military cultures of the city-states. The arts served to celebrate these new centers of

power, and writing, which arose out of the necessity of tracking the workings of the state, would come to celebrate the state in a lit- erature of its own.

250 km

250 miles

Fertile area of early agriculture

modern-day coastline

Susa

Ur Eridu

LagashGirsu

Uruk

Babylon

Nineveh Kalhu

Tell Asmar

Assur

Sippar

Jerusalem SUMER

A N A T O L I A

T U R K E Y

S Y R I A

I R A Q

I R A N

JORDAN

ASSYRIA

S A U D I

A R A B I A

C A

N A A N

BABYLONIA

CHALDEA

AKKADLE B

A N

O N

N ile Pe r s i a n

G u l f

Euphrates

Tigris

M e d i t e r r a n e a n

S e a

Z a

g r o

s M

o u n

t a

i n s

Dead Sea

C a s p i a n

S e a

Red Sea

M E

S O

P O

T A

M I

Map 2.1 Major Mesopotamian capitals. ca. 2600–500 BCE.

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CHAPTER 2 Mesopotamia 33

Fig. 2.3 Reconstruction drawing of the ziggurat at Ur (modern Muqaiyir, Iraq). ca. 2100 BCE. British archeologist Sir Leonard Woolley undertook reconstruction of the ziggurat in the 1930s (see Fig. 2.1). In his reconstruction, a temple on top, which was the home of the patron deity of the city, crowning the three-tiered platform, the base of which measures 140 by 200 feet. The entire structure rose to a height of 85 feet. Woolley’s reconstruction was halted before the second and third platforms were completed.

SUMERIAN UR Ur is not the oldest city to occupy the southern plains of Mesopotamia, the region known as Sumer [SOO-mur]. That distinction belongs to Uruk [oo-RUK], just to the north. But the temple structure at Ur is of particular note because it is the most fully preserved and restored. It was most likely de- signed to evoke the mountains surrounding the river valley, which were the source of the water that flowed through the two rivers and, so, the source of life. Topped by a sanctuary, the ziggurat might also have symbolized a bridge between heaven and earth. Woolley, who supervised the reconstruc- tion of the first platform and stairway of the ziggurat at Ur (Fig. 2.3), speculated that the platforms of the temple were originally not paved but covered with soil and planted with trees, an idea that modern archeologists no longer accept.

Visitors—almost certainly limited to members of the priesthood—would climb up the stairs to the temple on top. They might bring an offering of food or an animal to be sac- rificed to the resident god—at Ur, it was Nanna or Sin, god of the moon. Visitors often placed in the temple a statue that represented themselves in an attitude of perpetual prayer. We know this from the inscriptions on many of the statues. One, dedicated to the goddess Tarsirsir, protector of Girsu, a city- state across the Tigris and not far upstream from Ur, reads:

To Bau, gracious lady, daughter of An, queen of the holy city, her mistress, for the life of Nammahani . . . has dedicated as an offering this statue of the protective goddess of Tarsirsir which she has introduced to the courtyard of Bau. May the statue, to which let my mis- tress turn her ear, speak my prayers.

A group of such statues, found in 1934 in the shrine room of a temple at Tell Asmar, near modern Baghdad, includes seven men and two women (Fig. 2.4). The men wear belted,

fringed skirts. They have huge eyes, inlaid with lapis lazuli (a blue semiprecious stone) or shell set in bitumin. The single arching eyebrow and crimped beard (only the figure in the at the right is beardless) are typical of Sumerian sculpture. The two women wear robes. All figures clasp their hands in front of them, suggestive of prayer when empty and of making an offering when holding a cup. Some schol- ars believe that the the tallest man represents Abu, god of vegetation, due to his especially large eyes, but all of the figures are probably worshippers.

Fig. 2.4 Dedicatory statues, from the Abu Temple, Tell Asmar, Iraq. ca. 2900–2700 BCE. Marble, alabaster, and gypsum, height of tallest figure, approx. 30 . Excavated by the Iraq Expedition of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, February 13, 1934. Courtesy of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. The wide-eyed appearance of these figures is probably meant to suggest they are gazing in perpetual awe at the deity.

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34 BOOK ONE The Ancient World and the Classical Past

Fig. 2.5 Cylinder seal impression and the Seal of Adda. Akkadian. ca. 2200–2159 BCE. Greenstone, height

. The two-line inscription at the left identifies the seal’s owner as Adda, a scribe.

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Religion in Ancient Mesopotamia Although power struggles among the various city-states domi- nate Mesopotamian history, with one civilization succeeding another, and with each city-state or empire claiming its own particular divinity as chief among the Mesopotamian gods, the nature of Mesopotamian religion remained relatively constant across the centuries. With the exception of the Hebrews, the religion of the Mesopotamian peoples was polytheistic, consisting of multiple gods and goddesses con- nected to the forces of nature—sun and sky, water and storm, earth and its fertility (see Context, this page). We know many of them by two names, one in Sumerian and the other in the Semitic language of the later, more powerful Akkadians. A famous Akkadian cylinder seal (Fig. 2.5), an engraved cylinder used as a signature by rolling it into a wet clay tablet in order to confirm receipt of goods or to identify ownership, represents many of the gods. The figures are recognizably gods because they wear pointed headdresses with multiple horns, though the figure on the left, beside the lion and hold- ing a bow, has not been definitively identified. The figure with two wings standing atop the scaly mountain is Ishtar [ISH-tar], goddess of love and war. Weapons rise from her shoulders, and she holds a bunch of dates in her hand, a sym- bol of fertility. Beneath her, cutting his way through the mountain so that he can rise at dawn, is the sun god, Shamash [SHAH-mash]. Standing with his foot on the mountain at the right, streams of water with fish in them flowing from his shoulders, is Ea [EE-ah], god of water, wis- dom, magic, and art. Behind him is his vizier [vih-ZEER], or “burden-carrier.”

To the Mesopotamians, human society was merely part of the larger society of the universe governed by these gods and a reflection of it. Anu, father of the gods, represents the au- thority, which the ruler emulates as lawmaker and -giver. Enlil [EN-lil], god of the air—the calming breeze as well as the violent storm—is equally powerful, but he represents force, which the ruler emulates in his role as military leader. The active principles of fertility, birth, and agricultural plenty are those of the goddess Belitili [bell-eh-TEE-lee], while water, the life force itself, the creative element, is em- bodied in the god Ea, or Enki [EN-kee], who is also god of the arts. Both Belitili and Ea are subject to the authority of

CONTEXT Mesopotamian Gods and Goddesses

Name Symbol Role

An/Anu Father of the gods, god of the sky

Enlil God of the air and storm; later replaces Anu as father of the gods

Utu/Shamash Sun-god, lord of truth and justice

Inanna/Ishtar Goddess of love and war

Ninhursag /Belitili Mother Earth

Enki/Ea God of water, lord of wisdom, magic, art

Marduk Chief god of Babylon

horned cap

solar disc

star

‘omega’ symbol

goat-fish

spade

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CHAPTER 2 Mesopotamia 35

Fig. 2.6 Soundbox panel front of the lyre from Tomb 789 (alternatively identified as the unknown king’s or Puabi’s tomb), from the cemetery at Ur (modern Muqaiyir, Iraq). ca. 2600 BCE. Wood with inlaid gold, lapis lazuli, and shell, height approx. . University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Philadelphia. Museum object #B17694, (image #150848). The meaning of the scenes on the front of this lyre has always puzzled scholars. On the bottom, a goat holding two cups attends a man with a scorpion’s body. Above that, a donkey plays a bull-headed lyre held by a bear, while a seated jackal plays a small percussion instrument. On the third level, animals walking on their hind legs carry food and drink for a feast. In the top panel, a man with long hair and beard, naked but for his belt, holds two human- headed bulls by the shoulders.

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Fig. 2.7 Lyre from Tomb 789 (alternatively identified as the unknown king’s or Puabi’s tomb), from the cemetery at Ur (modern Muqaiyir, Iraq). ca. 2600 BCE. Gold leaf and lapis lazuli over a wood core, height restored 1971–1972. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

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Anu. Ishtar is subject to Enlil, ruled by his breezes (in the case of love) and by his storm (in the case of war). A host of lesser gods represented natural phenomena, or, in some cases, abstract ideas, such as truth and justice.

The Mesopotamian ruler, often represented as a “priest-king,” and often believed to possess divine attrib- utes, acts as the intermediary between the gods and hu- mankind. His ultimate responsibility is the behavior of the gods—whether Ea blesses the crop with rains, Ishtar his armies with victory, and so on.

Royal Tombs of Ur Religion was central to the people of Ur, and the cemetery at Ur, discovered by Sir Leonard Woolley in 1928, tells us a great deal about the nature of their beliefs. Woolley un- earthed some 1,840 graves, most dating from between 2600 and 2000 BCE. The greatest number of graves were individ- ual burials of rich and poor alike. However, some included a built burial chamber rather than just a coffin and con- tained more than one body, in some cases as many as 80. These multiple burials, and the evidence of elaborate burial rituals, suggest that members of a king or queen’s court ac- companied the ruler to the grave. The two richest burial sites, built one behind the other, are now identified as royal tombs, one belonging to Queen Puabi [poo-AH-bee], the other to an unknown king (but it is not that of her husband, King Meskalamdug [mes-kah-LAM-doog], who is buried in a different grave).

The Golden Lyres In the grave of either the unknown king or Queen Puabi (records are confusing on this point) were two lyres, one of which today is housed in Philadelphia (Fig. 2.6), the other in London (Fig. 2.7). Both are deco- rated with bull’s heads and are fronted by a panel of narrative scenes—that is, scenes representing a story or event. Although originally made of wood, which rots over time, these objects were able to be saved in their original form due to an innovation of Woolley’s during the exca- vation. He ordered his workers to tell him whenever they came upon an area that sounded hollow. He would fill such hollows (where the original wood had long since rot- ted away) with wax or plaster, thus preserving, in place, the decorative effects on the object’s outside. It seems likely that the mix of animal and human forms that deco- rate these lyres represents a funerary banquet in the realm of the dead. They are related, at least thematically, to events in the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, which we will discuss later in the chapter. This suggests that virtually

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36 BOOK ONE The Ancient World and the Classical Past

every element of the culture—from its music and litera- ture to its religion and politics—was tied in some way to every other. The women whose bodies were found under the two lyres may have been singers and musicians, and the placement of the lyres over them would indicate that the lyres were put there after the celebrants died.

Such magnificent musical instruments indicate that mu- sic was important in Mesopotamian society. Surviving doc- uments tell us that music and song were part of the funeral ritual, and music played a role in worship at the temple, as well as in banquets and festivals. Indeed, a fragment of a

poem from the middle of the third millennium BCE found at Lagash [LAY-gash] indicates that Sumerian music was any- thing but funereal. It is music’s duty, the poet says,

To fill with joy the Temple court And chase the city’s gloom away The heart to still, the passions calm, Of weeping eyes the tears to stay.

The Royal Standard of Ur One of Woolley’s most important discoveries in the Royal Cemetery was the so-called Royal Standard of Ur (Fig. 2.8). Music plays a large part here, too.

Fig. 2.8 Royal Standard of Ur, front (“War”) and back (“Peace”) sides, from tomb 779, cemetery at Ur (modern Muqaiyir, Iraq). ca. 2600 BCE. Shell, lapis lazuli, and red limestone, originally on a wooden framework, height 8 , length 19 . © The Trustees of The British Museum/Art Resource, NY. For all its complexity of design, this object is not much bigger than a sheet of legal paper. Its function remains a mystery, though it may have served as a pillow or headrest. Sir Woolley’s designation of it as a standard was purely conjectural.

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SEE MORE To view a Closer Look feature about the Royal Standard of Ur, go to www.myartslab.com

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CHAPTER 2 Mesopotamia 37

The main panels of this rectangular box of unknown function are called “War” and “Peace,” because they illustrate, on one side, a military victory and, on the other, the subsequent ban- quet celebrating the event, or perhaps a cult ritual. Each panel is composed of three registers, or self-contained horizontal bands within which the figures stand on a ground-line, or baseline.

At the right side of the top register of the “Peace” panel (the lower half of Fig. 2.8), a musician plays a lyre, and be- hind him another, apparently female, sings. The king, at the left end, is recognizable because he is taller than the others and wears a tufted skirt, his head breaking the register line on top. In this convention, known as social perspective, or hierarchy of scale, the most important figures are repre- sented as larger than the others. In other registers on the “Peace” side of the Standard, servants bring cattle, goats, sheep, and fish to the celebration. These represent the bounty of the land and per- haps even delicacies from lands to the north. (Notice that the costumes and hairstyles of the figures carrying sacks in the lowest register are different from those in the other two.) This display of consumption and the distribution of food may have been intended to dramatize the power of the king by showing his ability to control trade routes.

On the “War” side of the Standard, the king stands in the middle of the top register. War chariots trample the en- emy on the bottom register. (Note that the chariots have solid wheels; spoked wheels were not invented until approx- imately 1800 BCE.) In the middle regis- ter, soldiers wearing leather cloaks and bronze helmets lead naked, bound pris- oners to the king in the top register, who will presumably decide their fate. Many of the bodies found in the royal tombs were wearing similar military gar- ments. The importance of the Royal Standard of Ur is not simply as documentary evidence of Sumerian life but as one of the earliest examples we have of historical narrative.

AKKAD At the height of the Sumerians’ power in southern Mesopotamia, a people known as the Akkadians arrived from the north and settled in the area around modern Baghdad. Their capital city, Akkad [AK-ad], has never been discovered and in all likelihood lies under Baghdad itself. Under Sargon [SAR-gun] I (r. ca. 2332–2279 BCE), the Akkadians con- quered virtually all other cities in Mesopotamia, including

those in Sumer, to become the region’s most powerful city- state. Sargon named himself “King of the Four Quarters of the World” and equated himself with the gods, a status be- stowed upon Akkadian rulers from Sargon’s time forward. Legends about Sargon’s might and power survived in the re- gion for thousands of years. Indeed, the legend of his birth gave rise to what amounts to a narrative genre (a class or cat- egory of story with a universal theme) that survives to the present day: the boy from humble origins who rises to a posi- tion of might and power, the so-called “rags-to-riches” story.

HEAR MORE Listen to the advice of a father to his son, written down over 4,000 years ago at www.myartslab.com

As depicted on surviving clay tablets, Sargon was an illegitimate child whose mother deposited him in the Euphrates River in a basket. There, a man named Akki [AK-kee] (after whom Akkad itself is named) found him while drawing water from the river and raised him as his own son. Such stories of abandonment, or- phanhood, and being a foundling raised by foster parents will become a standard fea- ture in the narratives of mythic heroes.

Although the Akkadian language was very different from Sumerian, through most of the third millennium BCE—that is, until Sargon’s dynastic ambitions altered the balance of power in the region—the two cultures coexisted peacefully. The Akkadians adopted Sumerian culture and customs (see Fig. 2.5) and their style of cuneiform writing, a script made of wedge-shaped characters (see Closer Look, pages 38–39), although not their lan- guage. In fact, many bilingual dictionaries and Sumerian texts with Akkadian trans- lations survive. The Akkadian language was Semitic in origin, having more in common with other languages of the re-

gion, particularly Hebrew, Phoenician, and Arabic. It quickly became the com- mon language of Mesopotamia, and peo- ples of the region spoke Akkadian, or dialects of it, throughout the second millennium BCE and well into the first.

Akkadian Sculpture Although Akkad was arguably the most influential of the Mesopotamian cultures, few Akkadian artifacts survive, per- haps because Akkad and other nearby Akkadian cities have disappeared under Baghdad and the alluvial soils of the Eu- phrates plain. Two impressive sculptural works do remain, however. The first is the bronze head of an Akkadian man (Fig. 2.9), found at Nineveh [NIN-eh-vuh]. Once believed to be Sargon the Great himself, many modern scholars now think it was part of a statue of Sargon’s grandson, Naramsin [nuh-RAHM-sin] (ca. 2254–2218 BCE). It may be neither, but it is certainly the bust of a king. Highly realistic, it

Fig. 2.9 Head of an Akkadian Man, from Nineveh (modern Kuyunjik, Iraq). ca. 2300–2200 BCE. Copper alloy, height Iraq Museum, Baghdad.

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Early pictogram for donkey In the cuneiform tablet, the sign for “donkey” (below) is everywhere apparent. It represents a later, abstracted version of the earlier pictogram (literally “picture-writing”) above. Such abstracted signs come into use not long after 2400 BCE and replace the earlier pictograms.

38 BOOK ONE The Ancient World and the Classical Past

CLOSER LOOK

W riting first appeared in the middle of thefourth millennium BCE in agricultural recordsas pictograms—pictures that represent things or concepts—etched into clay tablets. For instance, the sign for “woman” is a pubic triangle, and the more com- plicated idea of “slave” is the sign for “woman” plus the sign for “mountains”—literally, a “woman from over the mountains”:

stylus

woman mountains slave

friendshiphatred

Pictograms could also represent concepts. For instance, the signs for “hatred” and “friendship” are, respectively, an “X” and a set of parallel lines:

Beginning about 2900 BCE, most writing began to look more linear, for it was difficult to draw curves in wet clay. So scribes adopted a straight-line script made with a trian- gle-tipped stylus [STY-lus], or writing tool, cut from reeds. The resulting impressions looked like wedges. Cuneiform writing was named from the Latin cuneus, “wedge.”

By 2000 BCE, another significant development in the progress of writing had appeared: Signs began to represent not things but sounds. This phonetic writing liberated the sign from its picture. Previously, they had been linked, as if, in English, we represented the word belief with pictograms for “bee” and “leaf.”

Later cuneiform pictogram of donkey

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CHAPTER 2 Mesopotamia 39

Something to Think About . . . What is it about this “document” that underscores the necessity of writing in the development of a civilization?

Sumerian tablet from Lagash, modern Tello, Iraq. ca. 2360 BCE. Clay. Musée du Louvre, Paris. This tablet is an economic document detailing the loan of donkeys to, among others, a farmer, a smith, and a courier.

These stars are the Sumerian sign for “god.” They sometimes have many more points than the eight seen here.

Cuneiform Writing in Sumer

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Lost-Wax Casting

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Materials & Techniques

At about the same time that cuneiform script was adopted, Mesopotamian culture also began to practice metallurgy, the process of mining and smelting ores. At first, copper was used al- most exclusively; later, an alloy of copper and tin was melted and combined to make bronze. The resulting material was much stronger and more durable than anything previously known.

Because sources of copper and tin were mined in very different regions of the Middle East, the development of trade routes was a

depicts a man who appears both powerful and majestic. In its damaged condition, the head is all that survives of a life-size statue that was destroyed in antiquity. Its original gemstone eyes were removed, perhaps by plundering sol- diers, or possibly by a political enemy who recognized the sculpture as an emblem of absolute majesty. In the fine de- tail surrounding the face—in the beard and elaborate coif- fure, with its braid circling the head—it testifies to the Akkadian mastery of the lost-wax casting technique, which originated in Mesopotamia as early as the third mil- lennium BCE (see Materials & Techniques, above). It is the earliest monumental work made by that technique that we have.

The second Akkadian sculpture we will look at is the Stele of Naramsin (Fig. 2.10). A stele [STEE-lee] is an up- right stone slab carved with a commemorative design or in- scription. (The word is derived from the Greek for “standing block.”) This particular stele celebrates the vic- tory of Sargon’s grandson over the Lullubi [lool-LOO-bee] in the Zagros Mountains of eastern Mesopotamia sometime between 2252 and 2218 BCE. The king, as usual, is larger than anyone else (another example of social perspective or hierarchy of scale). The Akkadians, in fact, believed that Naramsin became divine during the course of his reign. In the stele, his divinity is represented by his horned helmet and by the physical perfection of his body. Bow and arrow in hand, he stands atop a mountain pass, dead and wounded Lullubians beneath his feet. Another Lullubian falls before

him, a spear in his neck. Yet another seems to plead for mercy as he flees to the right. Behind Naramsin, his soldiers climb the wooded slopes of the mountain—here repre- sented by actual trees native to the region.

The sculptor abandoned the traditional register system that we saw in the Royal Standard of Ur and set the battle scene on a unified landscape. The lack of registers and the use of trees underscore the reality of the scene—and by implication, the reality of Naramsin’s divinity. The divine and human worlds are, in fact, united here, for above Naramsin three stars (cuneiform symbols for the gods) look on, protecting both Naramsin, their representative on Earth, and his troops. Both the copper bust of the Akkadian king and Stele of Naramsin testify to the role of the king in Mesopotamian culture, in general, as both hero and divin- ity. If the king is not exactly the supreme god Marduk of the Hymn, he behaves very much like him, wielding the same awe-inspiring power.

BABYLON The Akkadians dominated Mesopotamia for just 150 years, their rule collapsing not long after 2200 BCE. For the next 400 years, various city-states thrived locally. No one in Mesopotamia matched the Akkadians’ power until the first decades of the eighteenth century BCE, when Hammurabi [ham-uh-RAH-bee] of Babylon [BAB-uh-lon] (r. 1792– 1750 BCE) gained control of most of the region.

necessary prerequisite to the technology. While solid bronze pieces were made in simple molds as early as 4000 BCE, hollow bronze casts could produce larger pieces and were both more eco- nomical and lightweight. The technology for making hollow bronze casts was developed by the time of the Akkadians, in the second millennium BCE. Called lost-wax casting, the technique is illus- trated below.

A positive model (1), often created with clay, is used to make a negative mold (2). The mold is coated with wax, the wax shell is filled with a cool fireclay, and the mold is removed (3). Metal rods, to hold the shell in place, and wax rods, to vent the mold, are then added (4). The whole is placed in sand, and the wax is burned out. Molten bronze is poured in where the wax used to be (5). When the bronze has hardened, the whole is removed from the sand and the rods and vents are removed (6).

EXPLORE MORE To see a studio video on lost-wax casting, go to www.myartslab.com

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Fig. 2.10 Stele of Naramsin, from Susa (modern Shush, Iran). ca. 2254–2218 BCE. Pink sandstone, height approx. 6 6 . Chuzeville/Musée du Louvre, Paris, France. This work, which was stolen by invading Elamites around 1157 BCE, as an inscription on the mountain indicates, was for centuries one of the most influential of all artworks, copied by many rulers to celebrate their own military feats.

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Fig. 2.11 Stele of Hammurabi, from Susa (modern Shush, Iran). ca. 1760 BCE. Diorite, height of stele, approx. 7 , height of relief, 28 . Musée du Louvre, Paris. Like the Stele of Naramsin, this stele was stolen by invading Elamites and removed to Susa, where, together with the Stele of Naramsin, it was excavated by the French in 1898.

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The Law Code of Hammurabi Hammurabi imposed order on Babylon where laxness and disorder, if not chaos, reigned. A giant stele, the so-called Law Code of Hammurabi, survives (Fig. 2.11). By no means the first of its kind, though by far the most complete, the stele is a record of decisions and decrees made by Ham- murabi over the course of some 40 years of his reign. Its purpose was to celebrate his sense of justice and the wisdom of his rule. Atop the stele, in sculptural relief, Hammurabi receives the blessing of Shamash, the sun god; notice the rays of light coming from his shoulders. The god is much

larger than Hammurabi; in fact, he is to Hammurabi as Hammurabi, the patriarch, is to his people. If Hammurabi is divine, he is still subservient to the greater gods. At the same time, the phallic design of the stele, like such other Mesopotamian steles as the Stele of Naramsin, asserts the masculine prowess of the king.

Below the relief, 282 separate “articles” cover both sides of the basalt monument. One of the great debates of legal history is the question of whether these articles actually con- stitute a code of law. If by code we mean a comprehensive, systematic, and methodical compilation of all aspects of

SEE MORE To view a Closer Look feature about the Stele of Naramsin, go to www.myartslab.com

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Mesopotamian law, then it is not. It is instead selective, even eccentric, in the issues it addresses. Many of its articles seem to be “reforms” of already existing law, and as such they define new principles of justice.

Principles and Social Inequalities Chief among these is the principle of talion [TAL-ee-un]—an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth—which Hammurabi introduced to Mesopotamian law. (Sections of earlier codes from Ur compensate victims of crimes with money.) This principle punished the violence or injustice perpetuated by one free person upon another, but vi- olence by an upper-class person on a lower-class person was penalized much less severely. Slaves (who might be either war captives or debtors) enjoyed no legal protection at all—only the protection of their owner.

The code tells us much about the daily lives of Mesopotamian peoples, including conflicts great and small. In rules governing family relations and class divisions in Mesopotamian society, inequalities are sharply drawn. Women are inferior to men, and wives, like slaves, are the personal property of their husbands (although protected from the abuse of neglectful or unjust husbands). Incest is strictly forbidden. Fathers cannot arbitrarily disinherit their sons—a son must have committed some “heavy crime” to justify such treatment. The code’s strongest concern is the maintenance and protection of the family, though trade practices and property rights are also of major importance.

The following excerpts from the code, beginning with Hammurabi’s assertion of his descent from the gods and his status as their favorite (Reading 2.1), give a sense of the code’s scope. But the code is, finally, and perhaps above all, the gift of a king to his people, as Hammurabi’s epilogue, at the end of the excerpt, makes clear:

READING 2.1

from the Law Code of Hammurabi (ca. 1792–1750 BCE)

When the august god Anu, king of the Anunnaku deities, and the god Enlil, lord of heaven and earth, who determines the destinies of the land, allotted supreme power over all peoples to the god Marduk, the firstborn son of the god Ea, exalted him among the Igigu deities, named the city of Babylon with its august name and made it supreme exalted within the regions of the world, and established for him within it eternal kingship whose foundations are as fixed as heaven and earth, at that time, the gods Anu and Bel, for the enhancement of the well-being of the people, named me by my name, Hammurabi, the pious prince, who venerates the gods, to make justice prevail in the land, to abolish the wicked and the evil, to prevent the strong from oppressing the weak, to rise like the Sun-god Shamash over all humankind, to illuminate the land. . . . 1. If a man accuses another man and charges him with homicide but cannot bring proof against him, his accuser shall be killed. . . .

8. If a man steals an ox, a sheep, a donkey, a pig, or a boat—if it belongs either to the god or to the palace, he shall give thirtyfold; if it belongs to a commoner, he shall replace it tenfold; if the thief does not have anything to give, he shall be killed. . . . 32. If there is either a soldier or a fisherman who is taken captive while on a royal campaign, a merchant re- deems him, and helps him get back to his city—if there are sufficient in his own estate for the redeeming, he himself shall redeem himself: if there are not sufficient means in his estate to redeem him he shall be redeemed by his city’s temple; if there are not sufficient means in his city’s temple to redeem him, the palace shall redeem him; but his field, orchard, or house shall not be given for his redemption. . . . 143. If [a woman] is not circumspect, but is wayward, squanders her household possessions, and disparages her husband, they shall cast that woman into the water. . . . 195. If a child should strike his father, they shall cut off his hand. 196. If an awilu [in general, a person subject to law] should blind the eye of another awilu, they shall blind his eye. 197. If he should break the bone of another awilu, they shall break his bone. . . . 229. If a builder constructs a house for a man but does not make his work sound, and the house he constructs collapses and causes the death of the householder, that builder shall be killed. . . . 282. If a slave should declare to his master, “You are not my master,” he (the master) shall bring charge and proof against him that he is indeed his slave, and his master shall cut off his ear. . . .

These are the decisions which Hammurabi, the able king, has established, and thereby has directed the land along the course of truth and the correct way of life.

I am Hammurabi, noble king. . . May any king who will appear in the land in the

future, at any time, observe the pronouncements of jus- tice that I have inscribed upon my stele. May he not al- ter the judgments that I rendered and verdicts that I gave, nor remove my engraved image. If that man has discernment, and is capable of providing just ways for his land may he heed the pronouncements I have inscribed upon my stele, may the stele reveal for him the traditions, the proper conduct, the judgements of the land that I rendered, the verdicts of the land that I gave and may he, too, provide just ways for all humankind in his care. . . .

I am Hammurabi, king of justice. . . .

42 BOOK ONE The Ancient World and the Classical Past

Consequences of the Code Even if Hammurabi meant only to assert the idea of justice as the basis for his own divine rule, the stele established what amounts to a uniform code throughout Mesopotamia. It was repeatedly copied for over a thousand years, long after it was removed to Susa in 1157 BCE with the Naramsin stele, and it established the rule of law in

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Mesopotamia for a millennium. From this point on, the au- thority and power of the ruler could no longer be capricious, subject to the whim, fancy, and subjective interpretation of his singular personality. The law was now, at least ostensibly, more objective and impartial. The ruler was required to fol- low certain prescribed procedures. But the law, so prescribed in writing, was now also much less flexible, hard to change, and much more impersonal. Exceptions to the rule were few and difficult to justify. Eventually, written law would remove justice from the discretion of the ruler and replace it by a le- gal establishment of learned judges charged with enacting the king’s statutes.

THE ASSYRIAN EMPIRE With the fall of Babylon in 1595 BCE to a sudden invasion of Hittites from Turkey, the entire Middle East appears to have undergone a period of disruption and instability. Only the Assyrians, who lived around the city of Assur in the north, managed to maintain a continuing cultural identity. Over the centuries, they became increasingly powerful until, be- ginning with the reign of Ashurnasirpal II (r. 883–859 BCE), they dominated the entire region.

Ashurnasirpal [ah-SHOOR-na-zir-pahl] II built a mag- nificent capital at Kalhu (modern Nimrud), on the Tigris River, surrounded by nearly 5 miles of walls, 120 feet thick and 42 feet high. A surviving inscription tells us that Ashurnasirpal invited 69,574 people to celebrate the city’s dedication. The entire population of the region, of all classes, probably did not exceed 100,000, and thus many guests from throughout Mesopotamia and farther away must have been invited.

Assyrian Art Alabaster reliefs decorated many of the walls of Ashurnasirpal’s palace complex, including a depiction of Ashurnasirpal II Killing Lions (Fig. 2.12). The scene uses many of the conventions of Assyrian pictorial representa- tion. For instance, to create a sense of deep space, the sculptor used the device of overlapping, which we first en- countered in prehistoric cave paintings (see Fig. 1.2). This is done convincingly where the king stands in his chariot in front of its driver, but less so in the case of the horses drawing the chariot. For instance, there are three horse heads but only six visible legs—three in front and three in back. Furthermore, Assyrian artists never hid the face of an archer (in this case, the king himself) by realistically having him aim down the shaft of the arrow, which would have the effect of covering his eye with his hand. Instead, they drop the arrow to shoulder level and completely omit the bowstring so that it appears to pass (impossibly) be- hind the archer’s head and back.

The scene is also a synoptic view, that is, it depicts sev- eral consecutive actions at once: As soldiers drive the lion toward the king from the left, he shoots it; to the right, the same lion lies dying beneath the horses’ hooves. If Assyrian artists seem unconcerned about accurately portraying the animals, that is because the focus of the work is on the king himself, whose prowess in combating the lion, traditional symbol of power, underscores his own invincibility. And it is in the artists’ careful balance of forms—the relationship be- tween the positive shapes of the relief figures and the nega- tive space between them—that we sense the importance placed on an orderly arrangement of parts. This orderliness reflects, in all probability, their sense of the orderly charac- ter of their society.

CHAPTER 2 Mesopotamia 43

Fig. 2.12 Ashurnasirpal II Killing Lions, from the palace complex of Ashurnasirpal II, Kalhu (modern Nimrud, Iraq). ca. 850 BCE. Alabaster, height approx. 39 . The British Museum, London. The repetition of forms throughout this relief helps create a stunning design. Notice especially how the two shields carried by the soldiers are echoed by the chariot wheel and the king’s arched bow.

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Cultural Propaganda Rulers in every culture and age have used the visual arts to broadcast their power. These reliefs were designed to celebrate and underscore for all visitors to Ashurnasirpal’s palace the military prowess of the Assyrian army and their king. They are thus a form of cultural propa- ganda, celebrating the kingdom’s achievements even as they intimidate its potential adversaries. In fact, the Assyrians were probably the most militant civilization of ancient Mesopotamia, benefactors of the invention of iron weaponry. By 721 BCE, the Assyrians had used their iron weapons to conquer Israel, and by the middle of the seventh century BCE, they controlled most of Asia Minor from the Nile Valley to the Persian Gulf.

The Assyrians also used their power to preserve Mesopotamian culture. Two hundred years after the reign of Ashurnasirpal, Ashurbanipal (r. 668–627 BCE) created the great library where, centuries later, the clay tablets containing the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, discussed in the following pages, were stored. Its still partially intact

collection today consists of 20,000 to 30,000 cuneiform tablets containing approximately 1,200 distinct texts, including a nearly complete list of ancient Mesopotamian rulers. Each of its many rooms was dedicated to individual subjects—history and government, religion and magic, geography, science, poetry, and important government materials.

As late as Ashurbanipal’s reign, reliefs of the lion hunt were still a favored form of palace decoration, but those de- picted from his palace at Nineveh, in what is now northern Iraq, reveal that the lions were caged and released for the king’s hunt, which was now more ritual than real, taking place in an enclosed arena. The lions were sacrificed as an offering to the gods. In one section of the relief, Ashurbani- pal, surrounded by musicians, pours a libation, a liquid of- fering to the gods, over the dead animals as servants bring more bodies to the offering table. This ritual was implicit in all kingly hunts, even Ashurnasirpal’s 200 years earlier, for in his pursuit and defeat of the wild beast, the ruler masters the most elemental force of nature—the cycle of life and death itself.

The Assyrian kings represented their might and power not only through the immense size of their palaces and the decorative programs within, but also through massive gateways that greeted the visitor. Especially impressive are the gateways with giant stone monuments, such as those in Iraq at the Khorsabad [KOR-suh-bahd] palace of Sar- gon II (r. 721–705 BCE), who named himself after Sargon of Akkad. These monuments (Fig. 2.13) are composites, part man, part bull, and part eagle, the bull signifying the king’s strength and the eagle his vigilance. The king him- self wears the traditional horned crown of Akkad and the beard of Sumer, thus containing within himself all Mesopotamian history. Such composites, especially in monumental size, were probably intended to amaze and terrify the visitor and to underscore the ruler’s embodi- ment of all the forces of nature, which is to say, his em- bodiment of the very gods.

MESOPOTAMIAN LITERATURE Sumerian literature survives on nearly 100,000 clay tablets and fragments. Many deal with religious themes in the form of poems, blessings, and incantations to the gods.

The Blessing of Inanna One particularly interesting Sumerian religious work is The Blessing of Inanna (Reading 2.2). It recounts the myth of the goddess Inanna, here depicted as a young girl from Uruk who decides to visit Enki, the god of wisdom. Inanna trav- els south to Eridu, the chief seaport of Sumer, where Enki lives. Apparently taken with Inanna, Enki offers a series of toasts, each time bestowing upon her one of his special powers, including the highest powers of all:

Fig. 2.13 Human-Headed Winged Bull, one of a pair from the entrance to the palace of Sargon II, Khorsabad, Iraq. ca. 720 BCE. Limestone, height approx. 13 10 . Musée du Louvre, France. Seen from a three-quarter view, as here, this hybrid beast that guarded the palace entrance has five legs. He stands firmly before you when seen from the front, and seems to stride by you when seen from the side.

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CHAPTER 2 Mesopotamia 45

The Epic of Gilgamesh One of the great surviving manuscripts of Mesopotamian culture and the oldest story ever recorded is the Epic of Gil- gamesh. It consists of some 2,900 lines written in Akkadian cuneiform script on eleven clay tablets, none of them com- pletely whole (Fig. 2.14). It was composed sometime before Ashurbanipal’s reign, possibly as early as 1200 BCE, by Sin- leqqiunninni [sin-lek-KEE-un-nin-nee] a scholar-priest of Uruk. This would make Sinleqqiunninni the oldest known author. We know that Gilgamesh was the fourth king of Uruk, ruling sometime between 2700 and 2500 BCE. (The dates of his rule were recorded on a clay tablet, the Sumerian King List.) Recovered fragments of his story date back nearly to his actual reign, and the story we have, known as the Standard Version, is a compilation of these earlier versions.

The work is the first example we have of an epic, a long, narrative poem in elevated language that follows characters of a high position through a series of adventures, often in- cluding a visit to the world of the dead. For many literary scholars, the epic is the most exalted poetic form. The cen- tral figure is a legendary or historical figure of heroic propor- tion, in this case the Sumerian king Gilgamesh. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey (see Chapter 4) had been considered the earli- est epic, until late in the nineteenth century, when Gilgamesh was discovered in the library of King Ashurbanipal at

READING 2.2

The Blessing of Inanna (ca. 2300 BCE)

Enki and Inanna drank beer together. They drank more beer together. They drank more and more beer together. With their bronze vessels filled to overflowing, With the vessels of Urash, Mother of the Earth They toasted each other; they challenged each other. Enki, swaying with drink,

toasted Inanna: “In the name of my power! In the name of my holy shrine! To my daughter Inanna I shall give The high priesthood! Godship! The noble, enduring crown! The throne of kingship!” Inanna replied: “I take them!”

Having gathered all 80 of Enki’s mighty powers, Inanna piles them all into her boat and sails back up river. The drunken Enki realizes what he has done and tries to recover his blessings, but Inanna fends him off. She returns to Uruk, blessed as a god, and enters the city triumphantly, bestow- ing now her own gifts on her people, who subsequently wor- ship her. Enki and the people of Eridu are forced to acknowledge the glory of Inanna and her city of Uruk, as- suring peace and harmony between the two competing city-states.

The Sumerians worshipped Inanna as the goddess of fertility and heaven. In this tale, she and Enki proba- bly represent the spirits of their respective cities and the victory of Uruk over Eridu. That Inanna appears in the work first as a mere mortal is a classic example of anthropomorphism, endowing the gods and the forces of nature that they represent with humanlike traits. The story has some basis in fact, since Uruk and Eridu are the two oldest Mesopotamian cities, and surviv- ing literary fragments suggest that the two cities were at war sometime after 3400 BCE.

Fig. 2.14 Fragment of Tablet 11 of the Epic of Gilgamesh, containing the Flood Story. From the Library of Ashurbanipal, Nineveh (modern Kuyunjik, Iraq). Second millennium BCE. © The Trustees of the British Museum/Art Resource, NY. This example, which is relatively complete, shows how difficult it is to reconstruct the Gilgamesh epic in its entirety.

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46 BOOK ONE The Ancient World and the Classical Past

Nineveh, believed to be the first library of texts in history systematically collected and organized.

The scope of an epic is large. The supernatural world of gods and goddesses usually plays a role in the story, as do battles in which the hero demonstrates his strength and courage. The poem’s language is suitably dignified, often consisting of many long, formal speeches. Lists of various heroes or catalogs of their achievements are frequent.

Epics are often compilations of preexisting myths and tales handed down generation to generation, often orally, and finally unified into a whole by the epic poet. Indeed, the main outline of the story is usually known to its audience. The poet’s contribution is the artistry brought to the subject, demonstrated through the use of epithets, metaphors, and similes. Epithets are words or phrases that characterize a per- son (for example, “Enkidu, the protector of herdsmen,” or “Enkidu, the son of the mountain”). Metaphors are words or phrases used in place of another to suggest a similarity be- tween the two, as when Gilgamesh is described as a “raging flood-wave who destroys even walls of stone.” Similes com- pare two unlike things by the use of the word “like” or “as” (for example, “the land shattered like a pot”).

Perhaps most important, the epic illuminates the develop- ment of a nation or race. It is a national poem, describing a people’s common heritage and celebrating its cultural iden- tity. It is hardly surprising, then, that Ashurbanipal preserved the Epic of Gilgamesh. Just as Sargon II depicted himself at the gates of Khorsabad in the traditional horned crown of Akkad and the beard of Sumer, containing within himself all Mesopotamian history, the Epic of Gilgamesh preserves the his- torical lineage of all Mesopotamian kings—Sumerian, Akka- dian, Assyrian, and Babylonian. The tale embodies their own heroic grandeur, and thus the grandeur of their peoples.

The poem opens with a narrator guiding a visitor (the reader) around Uruk. The narrator explains that the epic was written by Gilgamesh himself and was deposited in the city’s walls, where visitors can read it for themselves. Then the narrator introduces Gilgamesh as an epic hero, two parts god and one part human. The style of the following list of his deeds is the same as in hymns to the gods (Reading 2.3a):

It was he who crossed ocean, the vast seas, to the rising sun,

who explored the world regions, seeking life. It was he who reached by his own sheer strength the

Utanapishtim, the Faraway, who restored the cities that the Flood had

destroyed! . . . Who can compare to him in kingliness? Who can say like Gilgamesh: “I am King!”?

After a short break in the text, Gilgamesh is described as having originally oppressed his people. Hearing the pleas of the people for relief, the gods create a rival, Enkidu [EN-kee-doo], to challenge Gilgamesh (Reading 2.3b):

READING 2.3b

from the Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet I (ca. 1200 BCE)

Enkidu born of Silence, endowed with the strength of Ninurta. His whole body was shaggy with hair, he had a full head of hair like a woman. . . . He knew neither people nor settled living. . . . He ate grasses with the gazelles, and jostled at the watering hole with the animals.

Enkidu is, in short, Gilgamesh’s opposite, and their con- frontation is an example of the classic struggle between na- ture, represented by Enkidu, and civilization, by Gilgamesh. Seduced by a harlot (see Reading 2.3c, page 47), Enkidu loses his ability to commune with the animals (i.e., he liter- ally loses his innocence), and when he finally wrestles Gil- gamesh, the contest ends in a draw. The two become best friends.

Gilgamesh proposes that he and Enkidu undertake a great adventure, a journey to the Cedar Forest (either in present-day southern Iran or Lebanon), where they will kill its guardian, Humbaba [hum-BAH-buh] the Terrible, and cut down all the forest’s trees. Each night on the six-day journey to the forest, Gilgamesh has a terrible dream, which Enkidu manages to interpret in a positive light. As the friends approach the forest, the god Shamash informs Gilgamesh that Humbaba is wearing only one of his seven coats of armor and is thus extremely vulnerable. When Gil- gamesh and Enkidu enter the forest and begin cutting down trees, Humbaba comes roaring up to warn them off. An epic battle ensues, and Shamash intervenes to help the two he- roes defeat the great guardian. Just before Gilgamesh cuts off Humbaba’s head, Humbaba curses Enkidu, promising that he will find no peace in the world and will die before his friend Gilgamesh. In a gesture that clearly evokes the triumph of civilization over nature, Gilgamesh and Enkidu

READING 2.3a

from the Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet I (ca. 1200 BCE)

Supreme over other kings, lordly in appearance, he is the hero, born of Uruk, the goring wild bull. He walks out in front, the leader, and walks at the rear, trusted by his companions. Mighty net, protector of his people, raging flood-wave who destroys even walls of stone! . . . It was he who opened the mountain passes, who dug wells on the flank of the mountain.

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CHAPTER 2 Mesopotamia 47

cut down the tallest of the cedar trees to make a great cedar gate for the city of Uruk.

At the center of the poem, in Tablet VI, Ishtar, goddess of both love and war, offers to marry Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh refuses, which unleashes Ishtar’s wrath. She sends the Bull of Heaven to destroy them, but Gilgamesh and Enkidu slay it instead (see Reading 2.3c)

READING 2.3c

from the Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet VI (ca. 1200 BCE)

A Woman Scorned . . .When Gilgamesh placed his crown on his head Princess, Ishtar raised her eyes to the beauty of Gilgamesh.

“Come along, Gilgamesh, be you my husband, to me grant your lusciousness.1

Be you my husband, and I will be your wife. I will have harnessed for you a chariot of lapis

lazuli and gold, with wheels of gold . . . Bowed down beneath you will be kings, lords,

and princes. The Lullubu people2 will bring you the produce of the

mountains and countryside as tribute. Your she-goats will bear triplets, your ewes twins, your donkey under burden will overtake the mule, your steed at the chariot will be bristling to gallop, your ox at the yoke will have no match.”

Gilgamesh addressed Princess Ishtar saying: Do you need oil or garments for your body? Do you lack anything for food or drink? I would gladly feed you food fit for a god, I would gladly give you wine fit for a king . . . a half-door that keeps out neither breeze nor blast, a palace that crushes down valiant warriors, an elephant who devours its own covering, pitch that blackens the hands of its bearer, a waterskin that soaks its bearer through, limestone that buckles out the stone wall, a battering ram that attracts the enemy land, a shoe that bites its owner’s feet! Where are your bridegrooms that you keep

forever? . . . You loved the supremely mighty lion, yet you dug for him seven and again seven pits. You loved the stallion, famed in battle, yet you ordained for him the whip, the goad,

and the lash, ordained for him to gallop for seven and seven

hours, ordained for him drinking from muddied waters,3

4This line probably contains a word play on hurdatu as “vulva” and “date palm,” the latter being said (in another unrelated text) to be “like the vulva.” 5Or “frog”?

you ordained for his mother Silili to wail continually.

You loved the Shepherd, the Master Herder, who continually presented you with bread

baked in embers, and who daily slaughtered for you a kid. Yet you struck him, and turned him into a wolf, so his own shepherds now chase him and his own dogs snap at his shins. You loved Ishullanu, your father’s date gardener, who continually brought you baskets of dates, and brightened your table daily. You raised your eyes to him, and you went to him:

‘Oh my Ishullanu, let us taste of your strength, stretch out your hand to me, and touch our

“vulva.”’4

Ishullanu said to you: ‘Me? What is it you want from me?. . .’

As you listened to these his words you struck him, turning him into a dwarf(?),5 . . . And now me! It is me you love, and you will ordain

for me as for them!”

Her Fury When Ishtar heard this in a fury she went up to the heavens, going to Anu, her father, and crying, going to Antum, her mother, and weeping:

“Father, Gilgamesh has insulted me over and over, Gilgamesh has recounted despicable deeds

about me, despicable deeds and curses!”

Anu addressed Princess Ishtar, saying: “What is the matter? Was it not you who

provoked King Gilgamesh? So Gilgamesh recounted despicable deeds about

you, despicable deeds and curses!”

Ishtar spoke to her father, Anu, saying: “Father, give me the Bull of Heaven, so he can kill Gilgamesh in his dwelling. If you do not give me the Bull of Heaven, I will knock down the Gates of the Netherworld, I will smash the door posts, and leave the doors

flat down, and will let the dead go up to eat the living! And the dead will outnumber the living!”

Anu addressed Princess Ishtar, saying: “If you demand the Bull of Heaven from me, there will be seven years of empty husks for the

land of Uruk. Have you collected grain for the people? Have you made grasses grow for the animals?”

Ishtar addressed Anu, her father, saying: “I have heaped grain in the granaries for the people,

1Literally “fruit.” 2The Lullubu were a wild mountain people living in the area of modern-day western Iran. The meaning is that even the wildest, least controllable of peoples will recognize Gilgamesh’s rule and bring tribute. 3Horses put their front feet in the water when drinking, churning up mud.

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I made grasses grow for the animals, in order that they might eat in the seven years of

empty husks. I have collected grain for the people, I have made grasses grow for the animals. . . .”

When Anu heard her words, he placed the nose-rope of the Bull of Heaven in her

hand. Ishtar led the Bull of Heaven down to the earth. When it reached Uruk. . . It climbed down to the Euphrates . . . At the snort of the Bull of Heaven a huge pit opened

up, and 100 Young Men of Uruk fell in. At his second snort a huge pit opened up, and 200 Young Men of Uruk fell in. At his third snort a huge pit opened up, and Enkidu fell in up to his waist. Then Enkidu jumped out and seized the Bull of

Heaven by its horns. The Bull spewed his spittle in front of him, with his thick tail he flung his dung behind him (?). Enkidu addressed Gilgamesh, saying:

“My friend, we can be bold(?) . . . Between the nape, the horns, and . . . thrust your

sword.” Enkidu stalked and hunted down the Bull of Heaven. He grasped it by the thick of its tail and held onto it with both his hands (?), while Gilgamesh, like an expert butcher, boldly and surely approached the Bull of Heaven. Between the nape, the horns, and . . . he thrust his

sword. . . . Ishtar went up onto the top of the Wall of Uruk-

Haven, cast herself into the pose of mourning, and hurled

her woeful curse: “Woe unto Gilgamesh who slandered me and

killed the Bull of Heaven!” When Enkidu heard this pronouncement of Ishtar, he wrenched off the Bull’s hindquarter and flung it in her

face: “If I could only get at you I would do the same to

you! I would drape his innards over your arms!”. . .

Gilgamesh said to the palace retainers: “Who is the bravest of the men? Who is the boldest of the males? —Gilgamesh is the bravest of the men, the boldest of the males! She at whom we flung the hindquarter of the Bull

of Heaven in anger, Ishtar has no one that pleases her . . .”

READING 2.3d

from the Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet X (ca. 1200 BCE)

My friend . . . Enkidu, whom I love deeply, who went through every hardship with me,

the fate of mankind has overtaken him. Six days and seven nights I mourned over him and would not allow him to be buried until a maggot fell out of his nose. I was terrified by his appearance, I began to fear death, and so roam the wilderness. The issue of Enkidu, my friend, oppresses me, so I have been roaming long trails through the

wilderness. How can I stay silent, how can I be still? My friend whom I love has turned to clay. And I not like him? Will I lie down, never to get up again?

But Gilgamesh and Enkidu cannot avoid the wrath of the gods altogether. One of them, the gods decide, must die, and so Enkidu suffers a long, painful death, attended by his friend, Gilgamesh, who is terrified (Reading 2.3d):

Dismayed at the prospect of his own mortality, Gilgamesh embarks on a journey to find the secret of eternal life from the only mortal known to have attained it, Utnapishtim [ut- na-PISH-tim], who tells him the story of the Great Flood. Several elements of Utnapishtim’s story deserve explanation. First of all, this is the earliest known version of the flood story that occurs also in the Hebrew Bible, with Utnapishtim in the role of the biblical Noah. The motif of a single man and wife surviving a worldwide flood brought about by the gods occurs in several Middle Eastern cultures, suggesting a single origin or shared tradition. In the Sumerian version, Ea (Enki) warns Utnapishtim of the flood by speaking to the wall, thereby technically keeping the agreement among the gods not to warn mortals of their upcoming disaster. The pas- sage in which Ea tells Utnapishtim how to explain his ac- tions to his people without revealing the secret of the gods is one of extraordinary complexity and wit (Reading 2.3e). The word for “bread” is kukku, a pun on the word for “dark- ness,” kukkû. Similarly, the word for “wheat,” kibtu, also means “misfortune.” Thus, when Ea says, “He will let loaves of bread shower down, / and in the evening a rain of wheat,” he is also telling the truth: “He will let loaves of darkness shower down, and in the evening a rain of misfortune.”

READING 2.3e

from the Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet XI (ca. 1200 BCE)

Utanapishtim spoke to Gilgamesh, saying: “I will reveal to you, Gilgamesh, a thing that is hidden, a secret of the gods I will tell you! Shuruppak, a city that you surely know, situated on the banks of the Euphrates, that city was very old, and there were gods inside it. The hearts of the Great Gods moved them to inflict

the Flood . . . .

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Ea, the Clever Prince, was under oath with them so he repeated their talk to the reed house: ‘Reed house, reed house! Wall, wall! Hear, O reed house! Understand, O wall! O man of Shuruppak, son of Ubartutu: Tear down the house and build a boat! Abandon wealth and seek living beings! Spurn possessions and keep alive human beings! Make all living beings go up into the boat. The boat which you are to build, its dimensions must measure equal to each other: its length must correspond to its width, Roof it over like the Apsu.’ I understood and spoke to my lord, Ea: ‘My lord, thus is your command. I will heed and will do it. But what shall I answer the city, the populace, and

the Elders?’

Ea spoke, commanding me, his servant: ‘. . . this is what you must say to them: “It appears that Enlil is rejecting me so I cannot reside in your city, nor set foot on Enlil’s earth. I will go . . . to live with my lord, Ea, and upon you he will rain down abundance, a profusion of fowls, myriad fishes. He will bring you a harvest of wealth, in the morning he will let loaves of bread shower down, and in the evening a rain of wheat.”’ . . .

I butchered oxen for the meat(?), and day upon day I slaughtered sheep. I gave the workmen(?) ale, beer, oil, and wine, as if it

were river water, so they could make a party like the New Year’s

Festival. . . . The boat was finished. . . . Whatever I had I loaded on it: whatever silver I had I loaded on it, whatever gold I had I loaded on it. Al the living beings that I had I loaded on it, I had all my kith and kin go up into the boat, all the beasts and animals of the field and the

craftsmen I had go up. . . .

I watched the appearance of the weather— the weather was frightful to behold! I went into the boat and sealed the entry. . . . Just as dawn began to glow there arose on the horizon a black cloud. Adad rumbled inside it. . . . Stunned shock over Adad’s deeds overtook the heavens, and turned to blackness all that had been light. The . . . land shattered like a . . . pot. All day long the South Wind blew . . . , blowing fast, submerging the mountain in water, overwhelming the people like an attack. No one could see his fellow, they could not recognize each other in the torrent. The gods were frightened by the Flood, and retreated, ascending to the heaven of Anu.

The gods were cowering like dogs, crouching by the outer wall.

Ishtar shrieked like a woman in childbirth. . . . Six days and seven nights came the wind and flood, the storm flattening the land. When the seventh day arrived, the storm was pounding, the flood was a war—struggling with itself like a

woman writhing (in labor). The sea calmed, fell still, the whirlwind (and) flood

stooped up. I looked around all day long—quiet had set in and all the human beings had turned to clay! The terrain was flat as a roof. I opened a vent and fresh air (daylight?) fell upon the

side of my nose. I fell to my knees and sat weeping, tears streaming down the side of my nose. I looked around for coastlines in the expanse of the sea, and at twelve leagues there emerged a region (of land). On Mt. Nimush the boat lodged firm, Mt. Nimush held the boat, allowing no sway.

When the gods discover Utnapishtim alive, smelling his incense offering, they are outraged. They did not want a single living being to escape. But since he has, they grant him immortality and allow him to live forever in the Faraway. As a reward for Gilgamesh’s own efforts, Utnapishtim tells Gilgamesh of a secret plant that will give him perpetual youth. “I will eat it,” he tells the boatman who is returning him home, “and I will return to what I was in my youth.” But when they stop for the night, Gil- gamesh decides to bathe in a cool pool, where the scent of the plant attracts a snake who steals it away, an echo of the biblical story of Adam and Eve, whose own immor- tality is stolen away by the wiles of a serpent—and their own carelessness. Broken-hearted, Gilgamesh returns home empty-handed.

The Epic of Gilgamesh is the first known literary work to confront the idea of death, which is, in many ways, the very embodiment of the unknown. Although the hero goes to the very ends of the earth in his quest, he ultimately leaves with nothing to show for his efforts except an un- derstanding of his own, very human, limitations. He is the first hero in Western literature to yearn for what he can never attain, to seek to understand what must always re- main a mystery. And, of course, until the death of his friend Enkidu, Gilgamesh had seemed, in his self-confident confrontation with Ishtar and in the defeat of the Bull of Heaven, as near to a god as a mortal might be. In short, he embodied the Mesopotamian hero-king. Even as the poem asserts the hero-king’s divinity—Gilgamesh is, remember, two parts god—it emphasizes his humanity and the mortal- ity that accompanies it. By making literal the first words of the Sumerian King List—“After the kingship had descended from heaven”—the Epic of Gilgamesh acknowledges what many Mesopotamian kings were unwilling to admit,

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at least publicly: their own, very human, limitations, their own powerlessness in the face of the ultimate unknown— death.

THE HEBREWS The Hebrews (from Habiru, “outcast” or “nomad”) were a people forced out of their homeland in the Mesopotamian basin in about 2000 BCE. According to their tradition, it was in the delta of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers that God created Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. It was there that Noah survived the same great flood that Utnapishtim survived in the Epic of Gilgamesh. And it was out of there that Abraham of Ur led his people into Canaan [KAY-nun], in order to escape the warlike Akkadians and the increas- ingly powerful Babylonians. There is no actual historical evidence to support these stories. We know them only from the Hebrew Bible—a word that derives from the Greek, biblia, “books”—a compilation of hymns, prophecies, and laws transcribed by its authors between 800 and 400 BCE, some 1,000 years after the events the Hebrew Bible de- scribes. Although the archeological record in the Near East confirms some of what these scribes and priests wrote, espe- cially about more contemporaneous events, the stories themselves were edited and collated into the stories we know today. They recount the Assyrian conquest of Israel, the Jews’ later exile to Babylon after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar [neb- uh-kud-NEZ-ur] in 587 BCE, and their eventual return to Jerusalem after the Persians conquered the Babylonians in 538 BCE. The stories represent the Hebrews’ attempt to maintain their sense of their own history and destiny. But it would be a mistake to succumb to the temptation to read the Hebrew Bible as an accurate account of the historical record. Like all ancient histories, passed down orally through generation upon generation, it contains its fair share of mythologizing.

The Hebrews differed from other Near Eastern cultures in that their religion was monotheistic—they worshipped a single god, whereas others in the region tended to have gods for their clans and cities, among other things. Ac- cording to Hebrew tradition, God made an agreement with the Hebrews, first with Noah after the flood, later renewed with Abraham and each of the subsequent patriarchs (scriptural fathers of the Hebrew people): “I am God Almighty; be fruitful and multiply; a nation and a com- pany of nations shall come from you. The land which I gave to Abraham and Isaac I will give to you, and I will give the land to your descendants after you” (Genesis 35: 11–12). In return for this promise, the Hebrews, the “cho- sen people,” agreed to obey God’s will. “Chosen people” means that the Jews were chosen to set an example of a higher moral standard (a light unto the nations), not cho- sen in the sense of favored, which is a common misunder- standing of the term.

Genesis, the first book of the Hebrew Bible, tells the story of the creation of the world out of a “formless void.” It describes God’s creation of the world and all its creatures, and his continuing interest in the workings of the world, an interest that would lead, in the story of Noah, to God’s near-destruction of all things. It also posits humankind as easily tempted by evil. It documents the moment of the in- troduction of sin (and shame) into the cosmos, associating these with the single characteristic separating humans from animals—knowledge. And it shows, in the example of Noah, the reward for having “walked with God,” the basis of the covenant. (See Reading 2.4, pages 61–63, for two se- lections from Genesis, the story of Adam and Eve and the story of Noah.)

Moses and the Ten Commandments The biblical story of Moses and the Ten Commandments embodies the centrality of the written word to Jewish cul- ture. The Hebrew Bible claims that in about 1600 BCE, drought forced the Hebrew people to leave Canaan for Egypt, where they prospered until the Egyptians enslaved them in about 1300 BCE. Defying the rule of the pharaohs, the Jewish patriarch Moses led his people out of Egypt. Ac- cording to tradition, Moses led the Jews across the Red Sea (which miraculously parted to facilitate the escape) and into the desert of the Sinai [SYE-nye] peninsula. (The story became the basis for the book of Exodus.) Most likely, they crossed a large tidal flat, called the Sea of Reeds; subse- quently, that body of water was misidentified as the Red Sea. Unable to return to Canaan, which was now occupied by local tribes of considerable military strength, the Jews settled in an arid region of the Sinai desert near the Dead Sea for a period of 40 years, which archeologists date to sometime between 1300 and 1150 BCE.

In the Sinai desert, the Hebrews forged the principal tenets of a new religion that would eventually be based on the worship of a single god. There, too, the Hebrew god supposedly revealed a new name for himself— YHWH, a name so sacred that it could neither be spoken nor written. The name is not known and YHWH is a ci- pher for it. There are, however, many other names for God in the Hebrew Bible, among them Elohim [eh-loe- HEEM], which is plural in Hebrew, meaning “gods, deities”; Adonai [ah-dun-EYE] (“Lord”); and El Shaddai [shah-die], literally “God of the fields” but usually trans- lated “God Almighty.” Some scholars believe that this demonstrates the multiple authorship of the Bible. Oth- ers argue that the Hebrews originally worshipped many gods, like other Near Eastern peoples. Still other scholars suggest that God has been given different names to re- flect different aspects of his divinity, or the different roles that he might assume—the guardian of the flocks in the fields, or the powerful master of all. Translated into Latin as “Jehovah” [ji-HOH-vuh] in the Middle Ages, the name is now rendered in English as “Yahweh.” This God

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also gave Moses the Ten Commandments, carved onto stone tablets, as recorded in Deuteronomy 5:6–21. Subse- quently, the Hebrews carried the commandments in a sacred chest, called the Ark of the Covenant (Fig. 2.15), which was lit by seven-branched candelabras known as menorahs [men-OR-uhz]. The centrality to Hebrew culture of these written words is even more apparent in the words of God that follow the commandments (Reading 2.4a):

Testament.) The Hebrews considered these five books di- vinely inspired and attributed their original authorship to Moses himself, although, as we have noted, the texts as we know them were written much later.

The body of laws outlined in the Torah is quite different from the code of Hammurabi. The code was essentially a list of punishments for offenses; it is not an ethical code (see Fig. 2.11 and Reading 2.1). Hebraic and Mesopotamian laws are distinctly different. Perhaps because the Hebrews were once themselves aliens and slaves, their law treats the low- est members of society as human beings. As Yahweh declares in Exodus 23:6: “You will not cheat the poor among you of their rights at law.” At least under the law, class distinctions, with the exceptions of slaves, did not exist in Hebrew soci- ety, and punishment was levied equally. Above all else, rich and poor alike were united for the common good in a com- mon enterprise, to follow the instructions for living as God provided.

After 40 years in the Sinai had passed, it is believed that the patriarch Joshua led the Jews back to Canaan, the Promised Land, as Yahweh had pledged in the covenant. Over the next 200 years, they gradually gained control of the region through a protracted series of wars described in the books of Joshua, Judges, and Samuel in the Bible. They named themselves the Israelites [IZ-ree-uh-lites], after Is- rael, the name that was given by God to Jacob. The nation consisted of 12 tribes, each descending from one of Jacob’s 12 sons. By about 1000 BCE, Saul had established himself as king of Israel, followed by David, who as a boy rescued the Israelites from the Philistines [FIL-uh-steenz] by killing the giant Goliath with a stone thrown from a sling, as des- cribed in First Samuel, and later united Israel and Judah into a single state.

Fig. 2.15 The Ark of the Covenant and sanctuary implements, mosaic floor decorations from Hammath near Tiberias, Israel. Fourth century CE. Z. Radovan/ www.BibleLandPictures.com. Israel Antiquities Authority, Jerusalem. Two menorahs (seven-branched candelabras) flank each side of the Ark. The menorah is considered a symbol of the nation of Israel and its mission to be “a light unto the nations” (Isaiah 42:6). Instructions for making it are outlined in Exodus 25:31–40. Relatively little ancient Jewish art remains. Most of it was destroyed as the Jewish people were conquered, persecuted, and exiled.

READING 2.4a

from the Hebrew Bible (Deuteronomy 6:6–9)

6 Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart.

7 Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise.

8 Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead,

9 and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.

Whenever the Hebrews talked, wherever they looked, wherever they went, they focused on the commandments of their God. Their monotheistic religion was thus also an ethical and moral system derived from an omnipotent God. The Ten Commandments were the centerpiece of the Torah [tor-AH], or Law (literally “instructions”), consisting of the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. (Christians would later incorporate these books into their Bible as the first five books of the Old

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Map 2.2 The United Monarchy of Israel under David and Solomon. ca. 1000 BCE.

100 km

100 miles

ISRAEL

JUDAH

EGYPT

SYRIA

EDOM

MOAB

PHILISTIA

AMMON

P H

O E

N I C

I A

AR AM

-ZO HAB

ARAM- DAM

ASC US

The United Monarchy under David and Solomon, c.1100 BCE

DamascusSidon

Tyre

Jerusalem

Beer Sheeba

Samaria

Jericho

Gaza

Dead Sea

Sea of Galilee

Jo rd

Mediterranean

Sea

Kings David and Solomon, and Hebrew Society King David reigned until 961 BCE. It was he who captured Jerusalem from the Canaanites and made it the capital of Israel (Map 2.2). As represented in the books of Samuel, David is one of the most complex and interesting individu- als in ancient literature. A poet and musician, he is author of some of the Psalms. Although he was capable of the most deceitful treachery—sending one of his soldiers, Uriah [you-RYE-uh], to certain death in battle so that he could marry his widow, Bathsheba [bath-SHE-buh]—he also suf- fered the greatest sorrow, being forced to endure the be- trayal and death of his son Absalom. David was succeeded by his other son, Solomon, famous for his fairness in meting out justice, who ruled until 933 BCE.

Solomon undertook to complete the building campaign begun by his father, and by the end of his reign, Jerusalem was, by all reports, one of the most beautiful cities in the Near East. A magnificent palace and, most especially, a splendid temple dominated the city. First Kings claims that Yahweh himself saw the temple and approved of it.

The rule of the Hebrew kings was based on the model of the scriptural covenant between God and the Hebrews. This covenant was the model for the relationship between the king and his people. Each provided protection in return for obedience and fidelity. The same relationship existed between the family patriarch and his household. His wife

and children were his possessions, whom he protected in re- turn for their unerring faith in him.

Although women were their husbands’ possessions, the Hebrew Scriptures provide evidence that women may have had greater influence in Hebrew society than this patriarchal structure would suggest. In one of the many texts later incor- porated into the Hebrew Bible and written during Solomon’s reign, the “The Song of Songs, which is Solomon’s” (as Chapter 1, Verse 1 of this short book reads), the woman’s voice is particularly strong. It is now agreed that the book is not the work of Solomon himself, but rather a work of secu- lar poetry, probably written during his reign. It is a love poem, a dialogue between a man (whose words are reproduced here in regular type) and a younger female lover, a Shulamite [SHOO-luh-mite], or “daughter of Jerusalem” (whose voice is in italics) (Reading 2.4b). This poem of sexual awakening takes place in a garden atmosphere reminiscent of Eden, but there is no Original Sin here, only fulfillment:

READING 2.4b

from the Hebrew Bible (Song of Solomon 4:1–6, 7:13–14)

The Song of Songs (translated by Ariel and Chana Bloch) How beautiful you are, my love, My friend! The doves of your eyes looking out from the thicket of your hair.

Your hair like a flock of goats bounding down Mount Gilead. . . .

Your breasts are two fauns twins of a gazelle, grazing in a field of lilies.

An enclosed garden is my sister, my bride, A hidden well, a sealed spring. . . .

Awake, north wind! O south wind, come, breathe upon my garden, let its spices stream out. Let my lover come into his garden and taste its delicious fruit. . . .

Let us go early to the vineyards to see if the vine has budded, if the blossoms have opened and the pomegranate is in flower.

There I will give you my love . . . rare fruit of every kind, my love, I have stored away for you.

So vivid are the poem’s sexual metaphors that many people have wondered how the poem found its way into the Scrip- tures. But the Bible is frank enough about the attractions of

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sex. Consider Psalms 30:18–19: “Three things I marvel at, four I cannot fathom: the way of an eagle in the sky, the way of a snake on a rock, the way of a ship in the heart of the sea, the way of a man with a woman.” The Song of Songs is full of double entendres [on-TAHN-druh], expressions that can be understood in two ways, one of them often sexual or risqué. Although the implications of such language are almost un- avoidable, embarrassed Christian interpreters of the Bible for centuries worked hard to avoid the obvious and assert a higher purpose for the poem, reading it, especially, as a de- scription of the relation between Christ and his “Bride,” the Church.

Generations of translators also sought to obscure the powerful voice of the female protagonist in the poem by presenting the young woman as chaste and submissive, but of the two voices, hers is the more active and authoritative. In a world in which history is traced through the patriarchs, and genealogies are generally written in the form of the fa- ther “begetting” his sons, the young woman asserts herself here in a way that suggests that if in Hebrew society the records of lineage was in the hands of its men, the traditions of love-making—and by extension, the ability to propagate the lineage itself—were controlled by its women. It is even possible that a woman composed all or large parts of the poem, since women traditionally sang songs of victory and mourning in the Bible, and the daughters of Jerusalem ac- tually function as a chorus in the poem, asking questions of the Shulamite.

The Prophets and the Diaspora After Solomon’s death, the United Monarchy of Israel split into two separate states. To the north was Israel, with its capital in Samaria [suh-MAR-ee-uh], and to the south, Ju- dah, with its capital in Jerusalem. In this era of the two kingdoms, Hebrew culture was dominated by prophets, men who were prophetic not in the sense of foretelling the future, but rather in the sense of serving as mouthpieces and interpreters of Yahweh’s purposes, which they claimed to understand through visions. The prophets instructed the people in the ways of living according to the laws of the Torah, and they more or less freely confronted anyone guilty of wrongful actions, even the Hebrew kings. They at- tacked, particularly, the wealthy Hebrews whose commer- cial ventures had brought them unprecedented material comfort and who were inclined to stray from monotheism and worship Canaanite [KAY-nuh-nite] fertility gods and goddesses. The moral laxity of these wealthy Hebrews trou- bled the prophets, who urged the Hebrew nation to reform spiritually.

In 722 BCE, Assyrians attacked the northern kingdom of Israel and scattered its people, who were thereafter known as the Lost Tribes of Israel. The southern kingdom of Judah survived another 140 years, until Nebuchadnez- zar and the Babylonians overwhelmed it in 587 BCE, de- stroying the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem and deporting the Hebrews to Babylon (Fig. 2.16). Not only had the Hebrews lost their homeland and their temple,

Fig. 2.16 Exile of the Israelites, from the palace of Sennacherib, Nineveh, Assyria. Late eighth century BCE. Limestone. This relief shows a family of Israelites, their cattle yoked to a cart carrying their household into exile after being defeated by the Assyrians in 722 BCE. The relief seems to depict three generations of a family: the father in front with the cattle, the son behind carrying baggage, the wife of the father seated on the front of the cart, the son’s wife and children seated behind her.

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Fig. 2.17 Reconstruction drawing of Babylon with the Processional Way and the Ishtar Gate as it might have appeared in the sixth century BCE. Courtesy of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. In the distance is the Marduk Ziggurat, and between the ziggurat and the Ishtar Gate are the famous Hanging Gardens in the palace of Nebuchadnezzar II.

but the Ark of the Covenant itself disappeared. For nearly 60 years, the Hebrews endured what is known as the Baby- lonian Captivity. As recorded in Psalm 137: “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea we wept, when we re- membered Zion.”

Finally, invading Persians, whom they believed had been sent by Yahweh, freed them from the Babylonians in 520 BCE. They returned to Judah, known now, for the first time, as the Jews (after the name of their homeland). They rebuilt a Second Temple of Jerusalem, with an empty chamber at its center, meant for the Ark of the Covenant should it ever return. And they welcomed back other Jews from around the Mediterranean, including many whose families had left the northern kingdom almost 200 years earlier. Many others, however, were by now permanently settled elsewhere, and they became known as the Jews of the Diaspora [die-AS-puh-ruh], or the “dispersion.”

Hebrew culture would have a profound impact on Western civilization. The Jews provided the essential ethical and moral foundation for religion in the West, including Christianity and Islam, both of which incorporate Jewish teachings into their own thought and practice. In the Torah, we find the ba- sis of the law as we understand and practice it today. So mov- ing and universal are the stories recorded in the Torah that over the centuries they have inspired—and continue to inspire—countless works of art, music, and literature. Most important, the Hebrews introduced to the world the concept of ethical monotheism, the idea that there is only one God, and that God demands that humans behave in a certain way, and rewards and punishes accordingly. Few, if any, concepts have had a more far-reaching effect on history and culture.

NEO-BABYLONIA From the eighth through the seventh century BCE, Babylon fell in and out of Assyrian rule, until Nabopolassar (r. 626–604 BCE), the first king of Babylonia, defeated the Assyrians, sacking Nineveh in 612 BCE. The Assyrian Empire collapsed completely in 609 BCE. Nabopolassar was followed by his son and heir, Nebuchadnezzar (r. 604–562 BCE), who continued on with his father’s plan to restore Babylon’s palace as the center of Mesopotamian civilization. It was here that the Hebrews lived in exile for nearly 50 years (586–538 BCE) after Nebuchadnezzar captured the people of Jerusalem.

Nebuchadnezzar wished to remake Babylon as the most remarkable and beautiful city in the world. It was laid out on both sides of the Euphrates River, joined together by a single bridge. Through the middle of the older, eastern sec- tor, ran the Processional Way, an avenue also called “May the Enemy Not Have Victory” (Fig. 2.17). It ran from the Euphrates bridge eastward through the temple district, past the Marduk ziggurat. (Many believe this ziggurat was the legendary Tower of Babel [BAB-ul], described in Genesis 11 as the place where God, confronted with the prospect of “one people. . . one language,” chose instead to “confuse the language of all the earth,” and scatter people “abroad

over the face of the earth.”) Then it turned north, ending at the Ishtar Gate, the northern entrance to the city. Pro- cessions honoring Marduk, the god celebrated above all others in Babylonian lore and considered the founder of Babylon itself, regularly filled the street, which was as much as 65 feet wide at some points and paved with large stone slabs. Marduk’s might is celebrated in the Hymn to Marduk (Reading 2.5), found in Ashurbanipal’s library:

READING 2.5

from the Hymn to Marduk (1000–700 BCE)

Lord Marduk, Supreme god, with unsurpassed wisdom. . . .

When you leave for battle the Heavens shake, when you raise your voice, the Sea is wild!

When you brandish your sword, the gods turn back.

There is none who can resist your furious blow! Terrifying lord, in the Assembly of the gods no

one equals you! . . . Your weapons flare in the tempest! Your flame annihilates the steepest mountain.

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Fig. 2.18 Ishtar Gate (restored), from Babylon. ca. 575 BCE. Glazed brick. Staatliche Museen, Berlin. The dark blue bricks are glazed—that is, covered with a film of glass—and they would have shown brilliantly in the sun.

No trace of the city’s famous Hanging Gardens sur- vives, once considered among the Seven Wonders of the World, and only the base and parts of the lower stairs of the Marduk ziggurat still remain. But in the fifth century BCE, the Greek historian Herodotus [he-ROD-uh-tus] (ca. 484–430/420 BCE) described the ziggurat as follows:

There was a tower of solid masonry, a furlong in length and breadth, on which was raised a second tower, and on that a third, and so on up to eight. The ascent to the top

is on the outside, by a path which winds round all the towers. . . . On the topmost tower, there is a spacious tem- ple, and inside the temple stands a couch of unusual size, richly adorned with a golden table by its side. . . . They also declare that the god comes down in person into this chamber, and sleeps on the couch, but I do not believe it.

Although the ziggurat has disappeared, we can glean some sense of the city’s magnificence from the Ishtar Gate (Fig. 2.18), named after the Babylonian goddess of fertility.

SEE MORE To view a Closer Look feature about the Ishtar Gate, go to www.myartslab.com

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Today, the gate is restored and reconstructed inside one of the Berlin State Museums. It was made of glazed and unglazed bricks, and decorated with animal forms. The en- tire length of the Processional Way was similarly decorated on both sides, so the ensemble must have been a wondrous sight. The gate’s striding lions are particularly interesting. They are traditional symbols of Ishtar herself. Alternating with rows of bulls with blue horns and tails, associated with deities such as Adad [AD-dad], god of the weather, are fan- tastic dragons with long necks, the forelegs of a lion, and the rear legs of a bird of prey, an animal form sacred to the god Marduk. Like so much other Mesopotamian art, it is at once a monument to the power of Nebuchadnezzar, an affirma- tion of his close relation to the gods, and a testament to his kingdom’s wealth and well-being.

THE PERSIAN EMPIRE In 520 BCE, the Persians, formerly a minor nomadic tribe that occupied the plateau of Iran, defeated the Babyloni- ans and freed the Jews. Their imperial adventuring had be- gun in 559 BCE with the ascension of Cyrus II (called the Great, r. 559–530 BCE), the first ruler of the Achaemenid dynasty, named after Achaemenes [eck-KEE-min-ees], a warrior-king whom Persian legend says ruled on the Iranian plateau around 700 BCE. By the time of Cyrus’s death, the Persians had taken control of the Greek cities in Ionia on the west coast of Anatolia. Under King Darius [duh-RY-us] (r. 522–486 BCE), they soon ruled a vast empire that stretched from Egypt in the south, around Asia Minor, to the Ukraine [you-KRAIN] in the north. The capital of the empire was Parsa, which the Greeks called Persepolis

[per-SEP-uh-lis], or city of the Persians, located in the Zagros [ZAG-rus] highlands of present-day Iran (Fig. 2.19). Built by artisans and workers from all over the Persian Empire, including Greeks from Ionia, it reflected Darius’s multicul- tural ambitions. If he was, as he said, “King of King, King of countries, King of the earth,” his palace should reflect the diversity of his peoples.

The columns reflect Egyptian influence, and, especially in their fluting, the vertical channels that exaggerate their height and lend them a feeling of lightness, they reflect, as we will later see, in Chapter 4, the influence of the Greeks. Rulers are depicted in relief sculptures with Assyrian beards and headdresses (Fig. 2.20). In typical Mesopotamian fash- ion, they are larger than other people in the works. These decorations further reflect the Persians’ sense that all the peoples of the region owed them allegiance. This relief, from stairway to the audience hall where Darius and his son Xerxes received visitors, is covered with images of their sub- jects bringing gifts to the palace—23 subject nations in all—Ionian, Babylonian, Syrian, Susian, and so on—each culture recognizable by its beards and costumes. Darius can be seen receiving tribute as Xerxes stands behind him as if waiting to take his place as the Persian ruler. Huge winged bulls with the heads of bearded kings, reminiscent of the human-headed winged bulls that guard the Khorsabad palace of Assyrian king Sargon II (see Fig. 2.13), dominated the approach to the south gateway. Thus, Mesopotamian, Assyrian, Egyptian, and Greek styles all intermingle in the palace’s architecture and decoration.

The Persians also perfected the art of metalwork. The rhyton, or ritual cup, illustrated here (Fig. 2.21), is re- lated to the many mythological creatures that can be

56 BOOK ONE The Ancient World and the Classical Past

Fig. 2.19 Palace of Darius and Xerxes, Persepolis, Iran. 518–ca. 460 BCE. The palace stands on a rock terrace 545 yards deep and 330 yards wide. Approached by a broad staircase decorated with men carrying gifts, its centerpiece was the Hall of One Hundred Columns, a forest of stone comprised of ten rows of ten columns, each rising to a height of 40 feet.

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Fig. 2.20 Darius and Xerxes Receiving Tribute, detail of a relief from a stairway leading to the Apadana, ceremonial complex, Persepolis, Iran. 491–486 BCE. Limestone, height 8 4 . Iranbastan Museum, Teheran. This panel was originally painted in blue, scarlet, green, purple, and turquoise. Objects such as Darius’s necklace and crown were covered in gold.

–¿

Fig. 2.21 Rhyton. Achaemenid, fifth–third centuries BCE. Gold. Archaeological Museum, Teheran, Iran. This elaborate gold vessel would have probably served as both a drinking cup and a wine decanter.

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58 BOOK ONE The Ancient World and the Classical Past

found throughout Mesopotamian art—the hybrid human and bull creature that guarded the palace gate at Parsa, for instance, or the dragon with lion’s feet decorating the Ishtar Gate in Babylon. This gold rhyton has been fash- ioned into a simurgh, a mythical creature with the body of a lion, the head of a dog, the wings of a griffin, and a pea- cock’s tail.

The rhyton would have been used in rituals connected to the Zoroastrian religion practiced by the Persians. Zoroaster (the Greek name for the Iranian Zarathustra) was a Persian prophet who according to tradition lived in the sixth century BCE. However, linguistic analysis of the writ- ings that are attributed to him places him ca. 1000 BCE. Whatever the case, his writings and other ritual hymns, prayers, and laws associated with the religion were collected in the sixth century into the Zend-Avesta [zen-dah-VES- tah], or Book of Knowledge, the holy book of the Zoroas- trian faith. Ahura Mazda, “the Wise Lord,” is its supreme deity, creator of heaven and earth, and in almost all inscrip- tions, the one and only god. But Zoroastrianism is only semi-monotheistic: there are lesser gods—many of them remnants of earlier religious practices—but all of them cre- ated by Ahura Mazda himself. The Zend-Avesta sets up a dualistic universe in which asha (literally, “truth”) is op- posed to druj (“lie” or “deceit”). The physical order of the universe is the chief manifestation of asha and is wholly the work of Ahura Mazda. Druj manifests itself as anything that is opposed to this physical order—chaos, natural decay, evil deeds. Perhaps Zoroaster’s greatest contribution to religious thought is his emphasis on free will. As the Zend-Avesta says, Ahura Mazda “has left it to men’s wills” to choose for themselves whether to lead a life of “good thoughts, good words, good deeds.” Those who do—thus helping Ahura Mazda to maintain the order of the universe—will be admitted to heaven. Those who choose to follow the path of evil will be condemned to hell.

In Zoroastrian tradition, the simurgh whose image is in- voked on the rhyton lives on Mount Alburz, the highest mountain in the world, around which circled the sun, moon, and stars. From the summit of the mountain, the legendary Chinwad bridge, the “bridge of judgment,” extended to heaven. There, the souls of the good men and women are greeted by a beautiful maiden and led across an ever-widening pathway to pairidaeza, from which the English word “paradise” derives, and the souls of the bad are greeted by an ugly old

READING 2.6

from the Zend-Avesta (ca. 600 BCE)

27. O Maker of the material world, thou Holy One! Where are the rewards given? Where does the rewarding take place? Where is the rewarding fulfilled? Whereto do men come to take the reward that, during their life in the material world, they have won for their souls?

28. Ahura Mazda answered: “When the man is dead, when his time is over, then the wicked, evil-doing Daevas1 cut off his eyesight. On the third night, when the dawn appears and brightens up, when Mithra, the god with beautiful weapons, reaches the all-happy moun- tains, and the sun is rising

29. ‘Then the fiend, named Vizaresha2, O Spitama3

Zoroaster, carries off in bonds the souls of the wicked Daeva-worshippers who live in sin. The soul enters the way made by Time, and open both to the wicked and to the righteous. At the head of the Chinwad bridge, the holy bridge made by Mazda, they ask for their spirits and souls the reward for the worldly goods which they gave away here below.

30. “Then comes the beautiful, well-shapen, strong and well-formed maid, with the dogs at her sides, one who can distinguish, who has many children, happy, and of high understanding. She makes the soul of the righteous one go up above . . . the Chinwad bridge; she places it in the presence of the heavenly gods themselves.”

In this context, it is worth recalling that the Zend-Avesta was compiled at about the same time as the Hebrew Bible. Its teachings would, in fact, influence all three of the great reli- gions of the Western world—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

1Daevas: supernatural entities with variously disagreeable characteristics; in the oldest Zoroastrian works they are “wrong” or “false” gods that are to be re- jected in favor of the worship of the one God, Ahura-Mazda. 2Vizaresh: a demon who, during that struggle of three days and three nights with the souls of the departed, wages terror on them and beats them. He sits at the gate of hell. 3Spitama: the original name of Zoroaster, who as a prince gave up his royal du- ties to meditate, spending fifteen years searching for enlightenment before a vi- sion of Ahura-Mazda gave him the answers to his many questions.

hag and led across an ever-narrowing bridge until they fall into hell. The bridge is described at some length in the Zend-Avesta (Reading 2.6):

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What most distinguishes Mesopotamian from Egyptian culture, however, is the relative stability of the latter. Mesopotamia was rarely, if ever, united as a single entity. Whenever it was united, it was through force, the power of an

army, not the free will of a people striving for the common good. In contrast, political transition in Egypt was dynastic—that is, rule was inherited by members of the same family, some- times for generations. As in Mesopotamia, however, the ruler’s authority was cemented by his associa- tion with divine authority. He was, indeed, the mani- festation of the gods on Earth. As a result, the dynastic rulers of Egypt sought to immortalize themselves through art and architecture. In fact, there is clear reason to be- lieve that the sculptural image of a ruler was be- lieved to be, in some sense, the ruler himself.

Embodying the ruler’s sense of his own perma- nence is an obelisk— a four-sided stone shaft topped by a pyramid- shaped block—which once marked the entrance to the Amon temple at Luxor during the reigns of the pharaohs Ramses II and Ramses III (Fig. 2.22). Some 3,300 years old, it stands today at the center of the Place de la Con- corde in Paris, a gift to the French from the Egyptian government in the nine- teenth century. The in-

scription, carved in hieroglyphics, says it all: “Son of Ra [the sun god]: Ramses-Meryamum [“Beloved of Amun”]. As long as the skies exist, your monuments shall exist, your name shall exist, firm as the skies.” ■

Civilization in Mesopotamia developed across thelast three millennia BCE almost simultaneouslywith civilization in Egypt, a region on the north- eastern corner of the African continent in close proxim- ity to Mesopotamian and Mediterranean cultures. The civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia have much in common. Both formed around river sys- tems—the Tigris and Eu- phrates in Mesopotamia; the Nile in Egypt. Both were agrarian societies that depended on irrigation, and their economies were hostage to the sometimes fickle, sometimes violent flow of their respective river systems. As in Mesopotamia, Egyptians learned to control the river’s flow by construct- ing dams and irrigation canals, and it was probably the need to cooperate with one another in such endeav- ors that helped Mesopotamia and Egypt to create the civi- lization that would eventu- ally arise in the Nile Valley.

The Mesopotamians and the Egyptians built massive architectural structures ded- icated to their gods—the ziggurat in Mesopotamia and the pyramid in Egypt (see Figs. 2.1 and 3.6). Both unite the Earth and the heavens in a single architec- tural form, although the Mesopotamian ziggurat is topped by a temple and is considered the house of the city-state’s god, and the Egyptian pyramid is funerary in nature with a royal burial in the bottom. Both cultures developed forms of writing, al- though the cuneiform style of Mesopotamian culture and the hieroglyph style of Egyptian society were very different. There is ample evidence that the two civilizations traded with one another, and to a certain degree influenced one another.

&CONTINUITY CHANGE The Stability of Egyptian Culture

Fig. 2.22 Obelisk of Luxor in the Place de la Concorde, Paris. Dynasty 19, ca. 1279–1213 BCE. Height 75 . The obelisk was a gift of the Egyptian government to the French, presented to them in 1829 by the Egyptian viceroy, Mehemet Ali. Gilded images on the pedestal portray the monumental task of transporting the monolith to Paris and erecting it in the city’s most central square, the Place de la Concorde.

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60 BOOK ONE The Ancient World and the Classical Past

THINKING BACK

What characteristics distinguish the ancient civilizations of Sumer, Akkad, Babylon, and Assyria?

The royal tombs at the Sumerian city of Ur reveal a highly developed Bronze Age culture, based on the social order of the city-state, which was ruled by a priest-king acting as the intermediary between the gods and the people. The rulers also established laws and encouraged record-keeping, which in turn required the development of a system of writing—cuneiform script. In Sumer and subsequent Mesopotamian cultures, monumental archi- tecture such as ziggurats were dedicated to the gods, and in each city-state, one of the gods rose to prominence as the city’s protector. Under the rule of Hammurabi of Babylon, Mesopotamian law was codified, specifically in the stele that records the Law Code of Hammurabi. How would you characterize the general relationship between Mesopotamian rulers and the gods?

How does the Epic of Gilgamesh embody the relationship between the Mesopotamian ruler and the gods?

Preserved in the library of the Assyrian king Ashurban- ipal, the Epic of Gilgamesh remains one of the greatest ex- pressions of world literature. The sense of cultural continuity in Mesopotamia is underscored by the fact that the Epic of Gilgamesh preserves the historical lineage of all Mesopotamian kings—Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian,

and Assyrian. While asserting the king’s divinity, the story also admits the king’s human mortality. What are the char- acteristics of its epic form? What are its principal themes?

What distinguished the Hebrews from other cultures of the Ancient Near East?

The Hebrews practiced a monotheistic religion. They considered themselves the “chosen people” of God, whom they called Yahweh. The written word is central to their culture, and it is embodied in a body of law, the Torah, and more specifically in the Ten Commandments. What does the Torah have in common with the Law Code of Hammurabi? How does it differ? How do the sto- ries in Genesis, the first book of the Hebrew Bible, com- pare to the Epic of Gilgamesh?

What characteristics did the Persian religion share with Judaism?

The last of the great Mesopotamian empires arose on the Iranian plateau. The Persian kings practiced the Zoroastrian religion. Like the Jews, the Persians’ beliefs were collected in a single holy book, compiled at about the same time as the Hebrew Bible. However, the Per- sian religion was only semi-monotheistic. Their supreme deity, Ahura Mazda, was the creator of many lesser gods. In what way was Zoroastrian religion dualistic?

GLOSSARY city-states Governments based in urban centers of the Mesopotamian basin that controlled neighboring regions; also an independent self-governing city. composite Made up of distinct parts. cuneiform writing A writing system composed of wedge- shaped characters. cylinder seal An engraved piece of stone or other material used as a signature, confirmation of receipt, or identification of ownership. double entendre A word or expression that can be understood two ways, with one often having a sexual or risqué connotation. epic A long narrative poem in elevated language that follows characters of a high position through a series of adventures, often including a visit to the world of the dead. epithet A word or phrase that characterizes a person. fluting The vertical channels in a column shaft. ground-line A baseline. hierarchy of scale A pictorial convention in which the most important figures are represented in a larger size than the oth- ers; see also social perspective. lost-wax casting A sculptural process in which a figure is modeled in wax and covered in plaster or clay; firing melts away the wax and hardens the plaster or clay, which then be- comes a mold for molten metal. metallurgy The science of separating metals from their ores.

metaphor A word or phrase used in place of another to suggest a likeness. narrative genre A class or category of story with a universal theme. narrative scene A scene that represents a story or event. patriarch A scriptural father of the Hebrew people. phonetic writing A writing system in which signs represent sounds. pictogram A picture that represents a thing or concept. priest-king In ancient Mesopotamia, a government leader who acted as an intermediary between gods and people and established laws. prophet One who serves as a mouthpiece for and interpreter of Yahweh’s purposes, which is understood through visions. register A self-contained horizontal band. simile A comparison of two unlike things using the word like or as. social perspective A pictorial convention in which the most important figures are represented in a larger size than the oth- ers; see also hierarchy of scale. stele An upright stone slab carved with a commemorative de- sign or inscription. stylus A writing tool. synoptic A view that depicts several consecutive actions at once. ziggurat A pyramidal temple structure consisting of successive platforms with outside staircases and a shrine at the top.

PRACTICE MORE Get flashcards for images and terms and review chapter material with quizzes at www.myartslab.com

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CHAPTER 2 Mesopotamia 61

READINGS

READING 2.3

from the Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet I (ca. 1200 BCE) (translated by Maureen Gallery Kovacs) The Epic of Gilgamesh describes the exploits of the Sumerian ruler Gilgamesh and his friend Enkidu. The following passage, from the first of the epic’s 12 tablets, recounts how Enkidu, the primal man raised beyond the reach of civilization and fully at home with wild animals, loses his animal powers, and with them his innocence, when a trapper, tired of Enkidu freeing animals from his traps, arranges for a harlot from Uruk to seduce him. The story resonates in interesting ways with the biblical tale of Adam and Eve and their loss of innocence in the Garden of Eden.

Shamhat unclutched her bosom, exposed her sex, and he took in her voluptuousness.

She was not restrained, but took his energy. She spread out her robe and he lay upon her, she performed for the primitive the task of womankind. His lust groaned over her; for six days and seven nights Enkidu stayed aroused, and had intercourse with the harlot until he was sated with her charms. But when he turned his attention to his animals, the gazelles saw Enkidu and darted off, the wild animals distanced themselves from his body. Enkidu . . . his utterly depleted (?) body, his knees that wanted to go off with his animals went rigid; Enkidu was diminished, his running was not as before. But then he drew himself up, for his understanding had

broadened.

READING CRITICALLY

In giving in to the temptation of the harlot Shamhat, Enkidu loses much here, but he also gains something. What is it that he comes to understand? How does it dif- fer from the physical prowess that he has evidently lost?

TABLET I THE HARLOT The trapper went, bringing the harlot, Shamhat, with him, they set off on the journey, making direct way. On the third day they arrived at the appointed place, and the trapper and the harlot sat down at their posts(?). A first day and a second they sat opposite the watering hole. The animals arrived and drank at the watering hole, the wild beasts arrived and slaked their thirst with water. Then he, Enkidu, offspring of the mountains, who eats grasses with the gazelles, came to drink at the watering hole with the animals, with the wild beasts he slaked his thirst with water. Then Shamhat saw him—a primitive, a savage fellow from the depths of the wilderness!

“That is he, Shamhat! Release your clenched arms, expose your sex so he can take in your voluptuousness. Do not be restrained—take his energy! When he sees you he will draw near to you. Spread out your robe so he can lie upon you, and perform for this primitive the task of womanhood! His animals, who grew up in his wilderness, will become

alien to him, and his lust will groan over you.”

READING 2.4

from the Hebrew Bible, Genesis (Chapters 2–3, 6–7) The following excerpts from the first book of both the Hebrew Torah and the Christian Old Testament describe the story of Adam and Eve and the story of Noah. Together they demonstrate some of the characteristics of Hebrew monotheism—belief in the direct agency of their God in the workings of the world and his creation of a universe that is systematically planned and imbued with a moral order that derives from him. The passages also demonstrate the power and authority the Hebrews invested in their God.

CHAPTER 2

1 Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all their multitude.

2 And on the seventh day God finished the work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done.

3 So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all the work that he had done in creation . . .

7 then the LORD God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.

8 And the LORD God planted a garden in Eden, in the east; and there he put the man whom he had formed.

9 Out of the ground the LORD God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

10 A river flows out of Eden to water the garden, and from there it divides and becomes four branches.

11 The name of the first is Pishon; it is the one that flows around the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold;

12 and the gold of that land is good; odellium and onyx stone are there.

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13 The name of the second river is Gihon; it is the one that flows around the whole land of Cush.

14 The name of the third river is Tigris, which flows east of Assyria. And the fourth river is the Euphrates.

15 The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it.

16 And the LORD God commanded the man, “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden;

17 but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.”

18 Then the LORD God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner.”

19 So out of the ground the LORD God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and what- ever the man called every living creature, that was its name.

20 The man gave names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every animal of the field; but for the man there was not found a helper as his partner.

21 So the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then he took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh.

22 And the rib that the LORD God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man.

23 Then the man said, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; this one shall be called Woman, for out of Man this one was taken.”

24 Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh.

25 And the man and his wife were both naked, and were not ashamed.

THE TEMPTATION AND EXPULSION

CHAPTER 3

1 Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat from any tree in the garden’?”

2 The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden;

3 but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.”’

4 But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not die;

5 for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

6 So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate.

7 Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves.

8 They heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden.

9 But the LORD God called to the man, and said to him, “Where are you?”

10 He said, “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.”

11 He said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?”

12 The man said, “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit from the tree, and I ate.”

13 Then the LORD God said to the woman, “What is this that you have done?” The woman said, “The serpent tricked me, and I ate.”

14 The LORD God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this, cursed are you among all animals and among all wild creatures; upon your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life.

15 I will put enmity between you and the woman, and be- tween your offspring and hers; he will strike your head, and you will strike his heel.”

16 To the woman he said, “I will greatly increase your pangs in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children, yet your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.”

17 And to the man he said, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten of the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it,’ cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life;

18 thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field.

19 By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

20 The man named his wife Eve, because she was the mother of all living.

21 And the LORD God made garments of skins for the man and for his wife, and clothed them.

22 Then the LORD God said, “See, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever”—

23 therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken.

24 He drove out the man; and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim, and a sword flaming and turn- ing to guard the way to the tree of life.

THE STORY OF NOAH

CHAPTER 6

5 The LORD saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually.

6 And the LORD was sorry that he had made humankind on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart.

7 So the LORD said, “I will blot out from the earth the human beings I have created—people together with animals and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them.”

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8 But Noah found favor in the sight of the LORD. . . .

13 And God said to Noah, “I have determined to make an end of all flesh, for the earth is filled with violence because of them; now I am going to destroy them along with the earth.

14 Make yourself an ark of cypress wood; make rooms in the ark, and cover it inside and out with pitch. . . .

17 For my part, I am going to bring a flood of waters on the earth, to destroy from under heaven all flesh in which is the breath of life; everything that is on the earth shall die.

18 But I will establish my covenant with you; and you shall come into the ark, you, your sons, your wife, and your sons’ wives with you.

19 And of every living thing, of all flesh, you shall bring two of every kind into the ark, to keep them alive with you; they shall be male and female.

20 Of the birds according to their kinds, and of the animals according to their kinds, of every creeping thing of the ground according to its kind, two of every kind shall come in to you, to keep them alive.

21 Also take with you every kind of food that is eaten, and store it up; and it shall serve as food for you and for them.”

22 Noah did this; he did all that God commanded him.

CHAPTER 7

6 Noah was six hundred years old when the flood of waters came on the earth.

7 And Noah with his sons and his wife and his sons’ wives went into the ark to escape the waters of the flood.

8 Of clean animals, and of animals that are not clean, and of birds, and of everything that creeps on the ground,

9 two and two, male and female, went into the ark with Noah, as God had commanded Noah.

10 And after seven days the waters of the flood came on the earth. . . .

11 . . . on that day all the fountains of the great deep burst forth, and the windows of the heavens were opened.

12 The rain fell on the earth forty days and forty nights. . . .

18 The waters swelled and increased greatly on the earth; and the ark floated on the face of the waters.

19 The waters swelled so mightily on the earth that all the high mountains under the whole heaven were covered; . . .

21 And all flesh died that moved on the earth, birds, domestic animals, wild animals, all swarming creatures that swarm on the earth, and all human beings;

22 everything on dry land in whose nostrils was the breath of life died.

23 He blotted out every living thing that was on the face of the ground, human beings and animals and creeping things and birds of the air; they were blotted out from the earth. Only Noah was left, and those that were with him in the ark. . . .

READING CRITICALLY

The story of Noah is, in some sense, a parable of the value of choosing to “walk with God.” How does it reflect, then, the idea of the covenant, God’s agreement with the Hebrews?

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THINKING AHEAD

How did the idea of cycles shape Egyptian civilization?

Originally, what purposes did Egyptian sculpture and architecture serve?

What important change distinguishes the Middle Kingdom?

Who was Amenhotep IV? Why did he change his name to Akhenaten?

How did Egypt decline and fall?

Can you see anything?” “Yes, wonderful things!” Eng-lish archeologist Howard Carter was peering into achamber of a tomb that had been sealed for over three thousand years. On November 26, 1922, he had pried loose a stone from the wall and inserted a candle through the hole. “At first I could see nothing,” he later wrote, “. . . but presently, as my eyes grew accustomed to the light, details of the room within emerged slowly from the mist, strange animals, statues, and gold—everywhere the glint of gold. For the moment I was struck dumb with amazement, and when Lord Carnarvon [Carter’s financial supporter] . . . inquired . . . ‘Can you see anything?’ It was all I could do to get out the words ‘Yes, wonderful things.’ ”

The tomb was that of Tutankhamun, and among the most spectacular of the “wonderful things” Carter and Carnarvon would find inside was a coffin consisting of three separate coffins placed one inside the other. These were in turn encased in a quartzite sarcophagus, a rectan- gular stone coffin that was encased in four gilded, boxlike wooden shrines, also nestled one inside the other. Inside the innermost coffin, itself made of solid gold, a gold fu- nerary mask had been placed over the upper body of the young king’s mummified body (Fig. 3.1). As news of

Carter’s discovery leaked out, the world press could hardly contain its enthusiasm. “This has been, perhaps, the most extraordinary day in the whole history of Egyptian exca- vation,” The Times of London wired The New York Times on February 18, 1922, the day that the sealed door to the burial chamber was finally opened. “Whatever one may have guessed or imagined of the secret of Tut-ankh- Amen’s tomb, they [sic] surely cannot have dreamed the truth that is now revealed. The entrance today was made into the sealed chamber of the tomb of Tut-ankh-Amen, and yet another door opened beyond that. No eyes have seen the King, but to practical certainty we know that he lies there close at hand in all his original state, undis- turbed.” It would be another year until the quartzite lid to Tutankhamen’s coffin, weighing nearly 1.25 tons, was hoisted off, and yet another nine months before the inner coffins were removed to reveal the king’s body. Carter’s discovery revealed the wealth that defined the Egyptian kingship, as well as the elaborate rituals surrounding the burial of the king himself.

The Egyptian kingship was deeply connected to the lifeblood and heart of Egyptian culture, the Nile River. Like the Tigris and Euphrates in Mesopotamia, the Nile could be said to have made Egypt possible. The river begins in

The Stability of Ancient Egypt Flood and Sun3

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Fig. 3.1 Funerary mask of Tutankhamun. Dynasty 18, ca. 1327 BCE. Gold inlaid with glass and semiprecious stones, height . Egyptian Museum, Cairo. So many items of extraordinary value were found in Tutankhamen’s tomb—furniture, perfumes, chariots, weapons, jewelry, clothing, utensils, cups, and on and on—that it took Carter ten years to empty it and inventory its contents.

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central eastern Africa, one tributary in the mountains of Ethiopia and another at Lake Victoria in Uganda, from which it flows north for nearly 4,000 miles. Egyptian civi- lization developed along the last 750 miles of the river’s banks, extending from the granite cliffs at Aswan, north to the Mediterranean Sea (see Map 3.1).

Nearly every year, torrential rains caused the river to rise dramatically. Most years, from July to November, the Egyptians could count on the Nile flooding their land. When the river receded, deep deposits of fertile silt cov- ered the valley floor. Fields would then be tilled, and crops planted and tended. If the flooding was either too great or too minor, especially over a period of years, famine could result. The cycle of flood and sun made Egypt one of the most productive cultures in the ancient world and one of the most stable. For 3,000 years, from 3100 BCE until the defeat of Mark Antony and Cleopatra by the Roman general Octavian in 31 BCE, Egypt’s institutions and

culture remained remarkably unchanged. Its stability con- trasted sharply with the conflicts and shifts in power that occurred in Mesopotamia. The constancy and achieve- ments of Egypt’s culture are the subject of this chapter.

THE NILE AND ITS CULTURE As a result of the Nile’s annual floods, Egypt called itself Kemet, meaning “Black Land.” In Upper Egypt, from Aswan to the Delta, the black, fertile deposits of the river covered an extremely narrow strip of land. Surrounding the river’s alluvial plain was the “Red Land,” the desert environment that could not support life, but where rich deposits of minerals and stone could be mined and quar- ried. Lower Egypt consists of the Delta itself, which today begins some 13 miles north of Giza [GHEE-zuh], the site of the largest pyramids, across the river from what is now

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Map 3.1 Nile River Basin with archeological sites in relation to modern Cairo. The broad expanse of the Lower Nile Delta was crisscrossed by canals, allowing for easy transport of produce and supplies.

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Fig. 3.2 Nebamun Hunting Birds, from the tomb of Nebamun, Thebes. Dynasty 18, ca. 1400 BCE. Fresco on dry plaster, approx. 2 8 high. The British Museum, London. The fish and the birds, and the cat, are completely realistic, but this is not a realistic scene. It is a conventional representation of the deceased, in this case Nebamun, spearing fish or hunting fowl, almost obligatory for the decoration of a tomb. The pigments were applied directly to a dry wall, a technique that has come to be known as fresco secco [FRES-coh SEK-koh], dry fresco. Such paintings are extremely fragile and susceptible to moisture damage, but Egypt’s arid climate has preserved them.

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modern Cairo. But in ancient times, it began 18 miles south of Giza, near the city of Memphis.

In this land of plenty, great farms flourished, and wildlife abounded in the marshes. In fact, the Egyptians linked the marsh to the creation of the world and represented it that way in the famous hunting scene that decorates the tomb of Neba- mun [NEB-ah-mun] at Thebes [theebz] (Fig. 3.2). Nebamun is about to hurl a snake-shaped throwing stick into a flock of birds as his wife and daughter look on. The painting is a sort of visual pun, referring directly to sexual procreation. The verb “to launch a throwing stick” also means “to ejaculate,” and the word for “throwing stick” itself, to “create.” The hieroglyphs written between Nebamun and his wife translate as “enjoying oneself, viewing the beautiful, . . . at the place of constant renewal of life.”

Scholars divide Egyptian history into three main periods of achievement. Almost all of the conventions of Egyptian art were established during the first period, the Old Kingdom. During the Middle Kingdom, the “classical” literary language that would survive through the remainder of Egyptian his- tory was first produced. The New Kingdom was a period of prosperity that saw a renewed interest in art and architec- ture. During each of these periods, successive dynasties—or royal houses—brought peace and stability to the country. Between them were “Intermediate Periods” of relative insta- bility (see Context, page 68).

Egypt’s continuous cultural tradition—lasting over 3,000 years—is history’s clearest example of how peace and prosperity go hand in hand with cultural stability. As opposed to the warring cultures of Mesopotamia, where city-state vied with city-state and empire with successive empire, Egyptian culture was predicated on unity. It was a theocracy, a state ruled by a god or by the god’s representative—in this case a king (and very occasionally a queen), who ruled as the living representative of the sun god, Re [reh]. Egypt’s government was indistinguishable from its religion, and its religion mani- fested itself in nature, in the flow of the Nile, the heat of the sun, and in the journey of the sun through the day and night and through the seasons. In the last judgment of the soul af- ter death, Egyptians believed that the heart was weighed to determine whether it was “found true by trial of the Great Balance.” Balance in all things—in nature, in social life, in art, and in rule—this was the constant aim of the individual, the state, and, Egyptians believed, the gods.

Whereas in Mesopotamia the flood was largely a destruc- tive force (recall the flood in the Epic of Gilgamesh), in Egypt it had a more complex meaning. It could, indeed, be destructive, sometimes rising so high that great devastation resulted. But without it, the Egyptians knew, their culture could not endure. So, in Egyptian art and culture, a more complex way of thinking about nature, and about life itself, developed. Every aspect of Egyptian life is countered by an

CHAPTER 3 The Stability of Ancient Egypt 67

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opposite and equal force, which contradicts and negates it, and every act of negation gives rise to its opposite again. As a result, events are cyclical, as abundance is born of devas- tation and devastation closely follows abundance. Likewise, just as the floods brought the Nile Valley back to life each year, the Egyptians believed that rebirth necessarily fol- lowed death. So their religion, which played a large part in their lives, reflected the cycle of the river itself.

Egyptian Religion: Cyclical Harmony The religion of ancient Egypt, like that of Mesopotamia, was polytheistic, consisting of many gods and goddesses who were associated with natural forces and realms (see Context, page 69). When represented, gods and goddesses have hu- man bodies and human or animal heads, and wear crowns or other headgear that identifies them by their attributes. The religion reflected an ordered universe in which the stars and planets, the various gods, and basic human activi- ties were thought to be part of a grand and harmonious de- sign. A person who did not disrupt this harmony did not fear death because his or her spirit would live on forever.

At the heart of this religion were creation stories that explained how the gods and the world came into being. Chief among the Egyptian gods was Re, god of the sun. According to these stories, at the beginning of time, the

Nile created a great mound of silt, out of which Re was born. It was understood that Re had a close personal rela- tionship with the king, who was considered the son of Re. But the king could also identify closely with other gods. The king was simultaneously believed to be the personifi- cation of the sky god, Horus [HOR-us], and was identified with deities associated with places like Thebes or Mem- phis when his power resided in those cities. Though not a full-fledged god, the king was netjer nefer [net-jer nef-er], literally, a “junior god.” That made him the representa- tive of the people to the gods, whom he contacted through statues of divine beings placed in all temples. Through these statues, Egyptians believed, the gods man- ifested themselves on earth. Not only did the orderly functioning of social and political events depend upon the king’s successful communication with the gods, but so did events of nature—the ebb and flow of the river chief among them.

Like the king, all the other Egyptian gods descend from Re, as if part of a family. As we have said, many can be traced back to local deities of predynastic times who later assumed greater significance at a given place—at Thebes, for instance, the trinity of Osiris, Horus, and Isis gained a special significance. Osiris [oh-SY-ris], ruler of the under- world and god of the dead, was at first a local deity in the eastern Delta. According to myth, he was murdered by his

CONTEXT Major Periods of Ancient Egyptian History

5500–2972 BCE Predynastic Period No formal dynasties Reign of Narmer and unification of Upper and Lower Egypt

2972–2647 BCE Early Dynastic Period Dynasties 1–2 A unified Egypt ruled from Memphis

2647–2124 BCE Old Kingdom Dynasties 3–8 The stepped pyramids at Saqqara in Dynasty 3; Pyramids at Giza in Dynasty 4

2123–2040 BCE First Intermediate Period Dynasties 9–10 Egypt divided between a Northern power center at Hierakon- polis and a Southern one at Thebes

2040–1648 BCE Middle Kingdom Dynasties 11–16 Reunification of Upper and Lower Egypt

1648–1540 BCE Second Intermediate Period Dynasty 17 Syro-Palestinian invaders, the Hyksos, hold Lower Egypt and much of Upper Egypt until the Thebans defeat them

1540–1069 BCE New Kingdom Dynasties 18–20 Reunification of Egypt; an extended period of prosperity and artistic excellence

1069–715 BCE Third Intermediate Period Dynasties 21–24 More political volatility

715–332 BCE Late Period Dynasties 25–31 Foreign invasions, beginning with the Kushites from the south and ending with Alexander the Great from the north

The dates of the periods of Egyptian history, as well as the kingships within them, should be regarded as approximate. Each king numbered his own regal years, and insufficient information about the reign of each king results in dates that sometimes

vary, especially in the earlier periods, by as much as 100 years. Although there is general consensus on the duration of most in- dividual reigns and dynasties, there is none concerning starting and ending points.

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wicked brother Seth, god of storms and violence, who chopped his brother into pieces and threw them into the Nile. But Osiris’s wife and sister, Isis [EYE-zis], the goddess of fertility, collected all these parts, put the god back to- gether, and restored him to life. Osiris was therefore iden- tified with the Nile itself, with its annual flood and renewal. The child of Osiris and Isis was Horus, who de- feated Seth and became the mythical first king of Egypt. The actual, living king was considered the earthly mani- festation of Horus (as well as the son of Re). When the living king died, he became Osiris, and his son took the throne as Horus. Thus, even the kingship was cyclical.

At Memphis, the triad of Ptah, Sakhmet, and Nefertum held sway. A stone inscription at Memphis describes Ptah as the supreme artisan and creator of all things (Reading 3.1):

READING 3.1

from Memphis, “This It Is Said of Ptah” (ca. 2300 BCE)

This it is said of Ptah: “He who made all and created the gods.” And he is Ta-tenen, who gave birth to the gods, and from whom every thing came forth, foods, provisions, divine offerings, all good things. This it is recognized and understood that he is the mightiest of the gods. Thus Ptah was satisfied after he had made all things and all divine words.

He gave birth to the gods, He made the towns, He established the nomes [provinces], He placed the gods in their shrines, He settled their offerings, He established their shrines, He made their bodies according to their wishes, Thus the gods entered into their bodies, Of every wood, every stone, every clay, Every thing that grows upon him In which they came to be.

Sekhmet is Ptah’s female companion. Depicted as a lioness, she served as protector of the king in peace and war. She is also the mother of Nefertum, a beautiful young man whose name means “perfection,” small statues of whom were often carried by Egyptians for good luck.

The cyclical movement through opposing forces, em- bodied in stories such as that of Osiris and Isis, is one of the earliest instances of a system of religious and philosophic thought that survives even in contemporary thought. Life and death, flood and sun, even desert and oasis were part of a larger harmony of nature, one that was predictable in both the diurnal cycle of day and night but also in its sea- sonal patterns of repetition. A good deity like Osiris was necessarily balanced by a bad deity like Seth. The fertile Nile Valley was balanced by the harsh desert surrounding it. The narrow reaches of the upper Nile were balanced by the broad marshes of the Delta. All things were predicated upon the return of their opposite, which negates them, but

CONTEXT Some of the Principal Egyptian Gods

A Horus, son of Osiris, a sky god closely linked with the king; pictured as a hawk, or hawk-headed man.

B Seth, enemy of Horus and Osiris, god of storms; pictured as an unidentifiable creature (some believe a wild don- key), or a man with this animal’s head.

C Thoth, a moon deity and god of writing, counting, and wis- dom; pictured as an ibis, or ibis-headed man, often with a crescent moon on his head.

D Khnum, originally the god of the source of the Nile, pic- tured as a bull who shaped men out of clay on his potter’s wheel; later, god of pottery.

E Hathor, goddess of love, birth, and death; pictured as a woman with cow horns and a sun disk on her head.

F Sobek, the crocodile god, associated both with the fertil- ity of the Nile, and, because of the ferocity of the croco- dile, with the army’s power and strength.

G Re, the sun god in his many forms; pictured as a hawk- headed man with a sun disk on his head.

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which in the process completes the whole and regenerates the cycle of being and becoming once again.

Pictorial Formulas in Egyptian Art This sense of duality, of opposites, informs even the earli- est Egyptian artifacts, such as the Palette of Narmer, found at Hierakonpolis [hy-ruh-KAHN-puh-liss], in Upper Egypt (see Closer Look, pages 70–71). A palette is techni- cally an everyday object used for grinding pigments and making body- or eye paint. The scenes on the Palette of Narmer are in low relief. Like the Royal Standard of Ur (see Fig. 2.8), they are arranged in registers that provide a ground-line upon which the figures stand (the two lion- tamers are an exception). The figures typically face to the right, though often, as is the case here, the design is symmetrical, balanced left and right. The artist represents the various parts of the human figure in what the Egyp- tians thought was their most characteristic view. So, the face, arms, legs, and feet are in profile, with the left foot advanced in front of the right. The eye and shoulders are in front view. The mouth, navel and hips, and knees are

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CLOSER LOOK

The Egyptians created a style of writing very differentfrom that of their northern neighbors in Mesopotamia.It consists of hieroglyphs, “writing of the gods,” from the Greek hieros, meaning “holy,” and gluphein, “to engrave.” Although the number of signs increased over the centuries from about 700 to nearly 5,000, the system of symbolic communication underwent almost no major changes from its advent in the fourth millennium BCE until 395 CE, when Egypt was conquered by the Byzantine Empire. It consists of three kinds of signs: pictograms, or stylized drawings that represent objects or beings, which can be combined to express ideas; phonograms, which are pictograms used to represent sounds; and determinatives, signs used to indicate which category of objects or beings is in question. The Palette of

Narmer is an early example of the then-developing hiero- glyphic style. It consists largely of pictograms, though in the top center of each side, Narmer’s name is represented as a phonogram.

The round circle formed by the two elongated lions’ heads intertwined on the recto, or front, of the palette is a bowl for mixing pigments. The palette celebrates the defeat by Narmer (r. ca. 3000 BCE) of his enemies and his unifica- tion of both Upper and Lower Egypt, which before this time had been at odds. So on the recto side, Narmer wears the red cobra crown of Lower Egypt, and on the verso, or back, he wears the white crown of Upper Egypt—representing his ability (and duty) to harmonize antagonistic elements.

Flanking the top of each side of the palette is a goddess wearing cow’s horns; such headdresses represent the divine attributes of the figure. Later, Hathor, the sky mother, a goddess embodying all female qualities, would possess these attributes, but this early image probably represents the cow- goddess, Bat.

The mace was the chief weapon used by the king to strike down enemies, and the scene here is emblematic of his power.

As on the other side of the palette, the king is here accompanied by his sandal- bearer, who stands on his own ground- line. He carries the king’s sandals to indicate that the king, who is barefoot, stands on sacred ground, and that his acts are themselves sacred.

Narmer, wearing the white crown of Upper Egypt, strikes down his enemy, probably the embodiment of Lower Egypt itself, especially since he is, in size, comparable to Narmer himself, suggesting he is likewise a leader.

The hawk is a symbolic representation of the god Horus. The king was regarded as the earthly embodiment of Horus. Here, Horus has a human hand with which he holds a rope tied to a symbolic representation of a conquered land and people.

A human head grows from the same ground as six papyrus blossoms, possibly the symbol of Lower Egypt.

Palette of Narmer, verso side, from Hierakonpolis. Dynasty 1, ca. 3000 BCE. Schist, height Egyptian Museum, Cairo.

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Two more figures represent the defeated enemy. Behind the one on the left is a small aerial view of a fortified city; behind the one on the right, a gazelle trap. Perhaps together they represent Narmer’s victory over both city and countryside.

This hieroglyph identifies the man that Narmer is about to kill, a name otherwise unknown.

SEE MORE For a Closer Look at the Palette of Narmer, go to www.myartslab.com

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Reading the Palette of Narmer

Narmer’s Palette was not meant for actual use. Rather, it is a votive, or ritual object, a gift to a god or goddess that was placed in a temple to ensure that the king, or perhaps some temple official, would have access to a palette throughout eternity. It may or may not register actual his- torical events, although, in fact, Egypt marks its beginnings with the unification of its Upper and Lower territories. Sub- sequent kings, at any rate, presented themselves in almost

identical terms, as triumphing over their enemies, mace in hand, even though they had no role in a similar military campaign. It is even possible that by the time of Narmer such conventions were already in place, although our system of numbering Egyptian dynasties begins with him. Whether the scene depicted is symbolic, the pictorial formulas, or conventions of representation, that Egyptian culture used for the rest of its history are fully developed in this piece.

We are able to identify Narmer not only from his hieroglyphic name, next to him, but by his relative size. As befits the king, he is larger than anyone else.

Similarly positioned on the other side of the palette and identified by the accompanying hieroglyph, this is the king’s sandal-bearer.

The defeated dead lie in two rows, their decapitated heads between their feet. Narmer in sacred procession reviews them, while above them, a tiny Horus (the hawk) looks on.

This is the mixing bowl of the palette. The lions may represent competing forces brought under control by the king. Each is held in check by one of the king’s lion- tamers, figures that in some sense represent state authority.

This is a representation of a fortified city as seen both from above, as a floor plan, and from the front, as a facade. It is meant to represent the actual site of Narmer’s victory.

Palette of Narmer, recto side, from Hierakonpolis. Dynasty 1, ca. 3000 BCE. Schist, height . Egyptian Museum, Cairo.

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The bull here strikes down his victim and is another representation of the king’s might and power. Note that in the depictions of Narmer striking down his victim and in procession, a bull’s tail hangs from his waistband.

These are two instances of the hieroglyphic sign for Narmer, consisting of a catfish above a chisel. Each individual hieroglyph is a pictogram but is utilized here for its phonetic sound. The word for “catfish” is nar, and the word for “chisel” is mer (or, perhaps, “sickly”)—hence “Narmer.” In the lower instance, the hieroglyph identifies the king. In the instance at the top, the king’s name is inside a depiction of his palace seen simultaneously from above, as a ground plan, and from the front, as a facade. This device, called a serekh, is traditionally used to hold the king’s name.

Something to Think About . . . Do you see any connection between the Egyptian hieroglyphs, as seen on the Palette of Narmer, and Sumerian cuneiform writing?

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Fig. 3.4 Section and restored view of typical mastaba tombs. The mastaba is a brick or stone structure with a sloping (or “battered”) wall. The serdab is a chamber for a statue of the deceased.

serdab

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shaft

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in three-quarter view. As a result, the viewer sees each person in a composite view, the integration of multiple perspectives into a single unified image.

In Egyptian art, not only the figures but the scenes them- selves unite two contradictory points of view into a single im- age. In the Palette of Narmer, the king approaches his dead enemies from the side, but they lie beheaded on the ground before him as seen from above. Egyptian art often represents

architecture in the same terms. At the top middle of the Palette of Narmer, the external facade of the palace is depicted simultaneously from above, in a kind of ground plan, with its niched facade at the bottom. The design contains Narmer’s Horus-name, consisting of a catfish and a chisel. The hiero- glyphic signs for Narmer could not be interpreted until the Rosetta Stone was discovered (see Context, page 75), but we are still not sure whether it is to be read “Narmer,” which are

the later phonetic values of the signs. In fact, later meanings of these signs suggest that it might be read “sick catfish,” which seems rather unlikely.

THE OLD KINGDOM Although the Palette of Narmer probably commemorates an event in life, as a votive object it is devoted, like most surviving Egyptian art and architecture, to burial and the afterlife. The Egyptians buried their dead on the west side of the Nile, where the sun sets, a symbolic refer- ence to death and rebirth, since the sun always rises again. The pyramid was the first monumen- tal royal tomb. A massive physi- cal manifestation of the reality of the king’s death, it was also the symbolic embodiment of his eternal life. It would endure for generations as, Egyptians be- lieved, would the king’s ka [kah]. This idea is comparable to an enduring “soul” or “life force,” a concept found in many other religions. The ka, which all persons possessed, was created at the same time as the physical body, itself essential for the per- son’s existence since it provided

Fig. 3.3 Possibly the work of Imhotep. Stepped pyramid and funerary complex of Djoser, Saqqara. Dynasty 3, 2610 BCE. Limestone, height of pyramid 197 . The base of this enormous structure measures 460 feet east to west, and 388 feet north to south. It is the earliest known use of cut stone for architecture. The architect, Imhotep, was Djoser’s prime minister. He is the first architect in history known to us by name.

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false tomb chamber

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the ka with an individual identity in which its personality, or ba [bah], might also manifest itself. This meant that it was necessary to preserve the body after death so that the ba and ka might still recognize it for eternity. All the necessities of the afterlife, from food to furniture to entertainment, were placed in the pyramid’s burial chamber with the king’s body.

Funerary temples and grounds surrounded the temple so that priests could continuously replenish these offerings in order to guarantee the king’s continued existence after death. Pyramids are the massive architectural product of what is known as the Old Kingdom, which dates from 2647 to 2124 BCE, a period of unprecedented achievement that solidified the accomplishments of the Early Dynastic Pe- riod initiated by Narmer.

The Stepped Pyramid at Saqqara The first great pyramid was the Stepped Pyramid of Djoser [DJOH-zer] (r. ca. 2628–2609 BCE), who ruled at Saqqara [suh- KAHR-uh], just south of modern Cairo (Figs. 3.3, 3.4). It pre- dates the Ziggurat at Ur by nearly 500 years and is therefore the first great monumental architecture in human history to have survived. It consists of a series of stepped platforms rising to a height of 197 feet, but since it sits on an elevated piece of ground, it appears even taller to the approaching visitor.

Above ground level, the pyramid of Djoser contains no rooms or cavities. The king’s body rested below the first level of the pyramid, in a chamber some 90 feet beneath the original mastaba [MAS-tuh-buh]—a trapezoidal tomb structure that derives its name from the Arabic word for “bench.” Such mastabas predate Djoser’s pyramid but con- tinued to be used for the burial of figures of lesser importance

for centuries. The pyramid is situated in a much larger, rit- ual area than this earlier form of tomb. The total enclosure of this enormous complex originally measured 1,800 by 900 feet—or six football fields by three.

The idea of stacking six increasingly smaller mastabas on top of one another to create a monumental symbol of the everlasting spirit of the king was apparently the brainchild of Imhotep [im-HO-tep], Djoser’s chief architect. He is the first artist or architect whose name survives, and his reputa- tion continued to grow for centuries after his death. Graffiti written on the side of the pyramid a thousand years after Djoser’s death praises Imhotep for a building that seems “as if heaven were within it” and as though “heaven rained myrrh and dripped incense upon it.”

Three Pyramids at Giza From Djoser’s time forward, the tomb of the king was dra- matically distinguished from those of other members of the royal family. But within 50 years, the stepped form of Djoser’s pyramid was abandoned and replaced with a smooth-sided, starkly geometric monument consisting of four triangular sides slanting upward from a square base to an apex directly over the center of the square. The most magnificent examples of this form are found at Giza, just north of Djoser’s tomb at Saqqara.

Khufu’s Pyramid Of the three pyramids at Giza, Khufu’s (r. 2549–2526 BCE) is both the earliest and the grandest one (Fig. 3.5), measuring 479 feet high on a base measuring 755 feet square, built from an estimated 2.3 million stone blocks, weighing between 2 and 5 tons each. Historians

Fig. 3.5 Cutaway elevation of the pyramid of Khufu.

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Fig. 3.7 Plan of the pyramids at Giza. Surrounding the northernmost pyramid of Khufu were mastaba fields, a royal cemetery in which were buried various officials, priests, and nobility of the king’s court. When a king died in the royal palaces on the east bank of the Nile, his body was transported across the river to a valley temple on the west bank. After a ritual ceremony, it was carried up the causeway to the temple in front of the pyramid where another ritual was performed—the “opening of the mouth,” in which priests “fed” the deceased’s ka a special meal. The body was then sealed in a relatively small tomb deep in the heart of the pyramid (see Fig. 3.5).

Pyramid of Khufu

Pyramid of Khafre

subsidiary pyramid

Mortuary Temple

causeway

enclosure walls

Pyramid of Menkaura

Mortuary Temple

Pyramids of Queens

Valley Temple

300 m0

0 1000 ft

Valley Temple

Sphinx Temple

Great Sphinx

western mastaba

field

boat pits causeway

to the NIle

eastern mastaba

field

Pyramids of Queens

boat pits

Fig. 3.6 The pyramids at Menkaure (ca. 2470 BCE), Khafre (ca. 2500 BCE), and Khufu (ca. 2530 BCE). Giza was an elaborate complex of ritual temples, shrines, and ceremonial causeways, all leading to one or another of the three giant pyramids.

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CHAPTER 3 The Stability of Ancient Egypt 75

CONTEXT

Until the nineteenth century, Egyptian hieroglyphs remained un- translated. The key to finally deciphering them was the Rosetta Stone, a discovery made by Napoleon’s army in 1799 and named for the town in the Egyptian Delta near where it was found. On the stone was a decree issued in 196 BCE by the priests of Memphis honoring the ruler Ptolemy V, recorded in three separate languages—Greek, demotic Egyptian (an informal and stylized form of writing used by the people—the “demos”), which first came into use in the eighth century BCE, and finally hieroglyphs, the high formal communication used exclusively by priests and scribes.

The stone was almost immediately understood to be a key to deciphering hieroglyphs, but its signifi- cance was not fully realized until years later. French linguist Jean-François Champollion began an inten- sive study of the stone in 1808 and concluded that the pictures and symbols in hieroglyphic writing stood for specific phonetic sounds, or, as he described it, con- stituted a “phonetic alphabet.” A key to unlocking the code was a cartouche, an ornamental and sym- bolic frame reserved for the names of rulers. Cham- pollion noticed that the cartouche surrounded a name, and deciphered the phonetic symbols for P, O, L, and T—four of the letters in the name Ptolemy. In another cartouche, he found the symbols for Cleopatra’s name. By 1822, he had worked out enough of the writing system and the language to translate two texts, but Egyptologists have contin- ued to improve and refine our understanding of the language to this day.

The Rosetta Stone

speculate that the stones were dragged up inclined ramps made of compacted rubble bonded and made slippery with a kind of lime-clay, called tafl, although they may well have been raised from tier to tier up the side of the pyramid by means of levers not unlike those used by the workers at Stonehenge (see Closer Look, pages 16–17 Chapter 1). Whatever feats of engineering accomplished the transport of so much stone into such an enormous configuration, what still dazzles us is this pyramid’s astronomical and mathematical precision. It is perfectly oriented to the four cardinal points of the compass (as are the other two pyra- mids, which were positioned later, probably using Khufu’s alignment as a reference point).

The two airshafts that run from the two top chambers seem oriented to specific stars, including Sirius, the bright- est star in the night sky. The relationship between the

various sides of the structure suggests that the Egyptians un- derstood and made use of the mathematical value (pi). All of this has led to considerable theorizing about “the se- cret of the pyramids,” the other two of which are Khafre’s (r. 2518–2493 BCE), and Menkaure’s (r. 2488–2460 BCE) (Figs. 3.6 and 3.7). Most convincing is the theory that the pyramid’s sides represented the descending rays of the sun god Re, whose cult was particularly powerful at the time the pyramids were built. Because they were covered in a pol- ished limestone sheath (the only remnant survives atop Khafre’s pyramid), the sun must have glistened off them. And one convincing text survives: “I have trodden these rays as ramps under my feet where I mount up to my mother Uraeus on the brow of Re.” Whatever their symbolic signif- icance, they are above all extraordinary feats of human construction.

The Rosetta Stone. 196 BCE. Basalt, . © The Trustees of the British Museum/Art Museum, NY. The top, parts of which have been lost, contains the formal hieroglyphs; the middle, demotic Egyptian; and the bottom, the Greek text of the decree.

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Fig. 3.8 The Great Sphinx (with the pyramid of Khafre in the background), Giza. Dynasty 4, ca. 2500 BCE. Limestone, height approx. 65 . Over the years, legend has had it that the artillery forces of Napoleon’s invading army shot off the Sphinx’s nose and ears. In truth, a fanatical Muslim cleric from Cairo severely damaged the statue in an attack in 1378.

Fig. 3.9 Seated statue of Khafre, from valley temple of Khafre, Giza. Dynasty 4, ca. 2500 BCE. Diorite, height 660. Egyptian Museum, Cairo. On the side of Khafre’s throne, intertwining lotus and papyrus blossoms signify his rule of both Upper and Lower Egypt.

76 BOOK ONE The Ancient World and the Classical Past

Monumental Royal Sculpture: Perfection and Eternity The Sphinx’s monumentality indicates the growing impor- tance of sculpture to the Egyptian funerary tradition. The word for sculpture in Egyptian is, in fact, the same as for giving birth, and funerary sculpture served the same pur- pose as the pyramids themselves—to preserve and guaran- tee the king’s existence after death, thereby providing a kind of rebirth. Although there are thousands of limestone and not a few sandstone funerary monuments, the materials of choice were diorite, schist, and granite, stones as durable

The Great Sphinx In front of the pyramid dedicated to Khufu’s son Khafre, and near the head of the causeway leading from the valley temple to the mortuary temple (see Fig. 3.6), is the largest statue ever made in the an- cient world, the Great Sphinx [sfinks], carved out of an existing limestone knoll (Fig. 3.8). As in Egyptian depic- tions of the gods, the Sphinx is half man and half animal. But where the gods are normally depicted with an animal’s head and a human body, the Sphinx is just the opposite: a lion’s body supports the head of a king wearing the royal headcloth. The sculpture probably represents Khafre him- self protecting the approach to his own funerary complex, and thus it requires Khafre’s physical likeness, but its com- bination of animal and human forms also suggests the king’s connection to the gods.

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CHAPTER 3 The Stability of Ancient Egypt 77

and enduring as the ka itself. These stones can also take on a high polish and, because they are not prone to fracture, can be finely detailed when carved. These stones were carved into three main types of male statue: (1) a seated fig- ure, looking directly ahead, his feet side by side, one hand resting flat on the knee, the other clenched in a fist; (2) a standing figure, his gaze fixed into the dis- tance, left foot forward, both hands alongside the body with fists clenched; and (3) a figure seated on the ground with legs crossed. The first two types were used for kings as well as important officials. The third was used for royal scribes. Also popular were statue pairs of husband and wife, either seated or standing.

The statue of Khafre from his valley temple at Giza (see Fig. 3.5) is an example of the first type (Fig. 3.9). The king sits rigidly upright and frontal, wearing a simple kilt and the same royal headdress as the Great Sphinx outside the valley temple. His throne is formed of the bodies of two stylized lions. Behind him, as if caressing his head, is a hawk, a man- ifestation of the god Horus, extending its wings in a protective gesture. In Egyptian society, the strong care for and protect the weak; so too Horus watches over Khafre as Khafre watches over his people. Because Khafre is a king and a divinity, he is shown with a per- fectly smooth, proportioned face and a flawless, well- muscled body. This idealized anatomy was used in Egyptian sculpture regardless of the actual age and body of the king portrayed, its perfection mirroring the perfection of the gods themselves. Most Egyptian statues were monolithic, or carved out of a single piece of stone, even those depicting more than a single figure.

The same effect is apparent in the statue of Menkaure with a woman—perhaps his queen, his mother, or even a goddess—that was also found at his valley temple at Giza (Fig. 3.10). Here, the deep space created by carving away the side of the stone to expose fully the king’s right side seems to free him from the stone. He stands with one foot ahead of the other in the second traditional pose, the con- ventional depiction of a standing figure. He is not walk- ing. Both feet are planted firmly on the ground (and so his left leg is, of necessity, slightly longer than his right). His back is firmly implanted in the stone panel behind him, but he seems to have emerged farther from it than the female figure who accompanies him, as if to under- score his power and might. Although the woman is al- most the same size as the man, her stride is markedly shorter than his. She embraces him, her arm reaching round his back, in a gesture that reminds us of Horus’s protective embrace of Khafre, but suggests also the sim- ple marital affection of husband and wife. The ultimate effect of both of these sculptures—their solidity and unity, their sense of resolute purpose—testifies finally to their purpose, which is to endure for eternity.

Fig. 3.10 Menkaure with a Queen, probably Khamerernebty, from valley temple of Menkaure, Giza. Dynasty 4, ca. 2460 BCE. Schist, height

. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Harvard University-Boston Museum of Fine Arts, 11.1738. Photograph © 2008 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Note that the woman’s close-fitting attire is nearly transparent, indicating a very fine weave of linen.

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The Sculpture of the Everyday Idealized athletic physiques, austere dignity, and grand scale were for royalty and officials only. Lesser figures were de- picted more naturally, with flabby physiques or rounded shoulders, and on a more human scale. The third tradi- tional type of male figure in Egyptian sculpture was the royal scribe, and in Figure 3.11, we can see that a soft, flabby body replaces the hardened chest of a king. But the scribe’s pose, seated cross-legged on the floor, marks him as literate and a valuable official of the king. The stone was carved out around his arms and head so that, instead of the monumental space of the king’s sculpture, which derives from its compactness and its attachment to the slab of stone behind it, the scribe seems to occupy real space. The scribe’s task was important: His statue would serve the king through eternity as he had served the king in life.

Fig. 3.12 Lector Priest Ka-aper (also known as the “Sheikh el-Beled” ), from mastaba of Ka-aper, Saqqara. Dynasty 5, ca. 2450 BCE. Plaster and painted wood, height 3 7 . Egyptian Museum, Cairo. This paunchy priest lacks the idealized physique reserved for more eminent nobility.

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Fig. 3.11 Seated Scribe, from his mastaba, Saqqara. Dynasty 5, ca. 2400 BCE. Painted limestone, height 21 . Musée du Louvre, Paris, France. Scribes were the most educated of Egyptians—not only able to read and write but accomplished in arithmetic, algebra, religion, and law. Their ka statues necessarily accompanied those of their kings into the afterlife.

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Statues of lesser persons were often made of less perma- nent materials, such as wood. Carved from separate pieces, with the arms attached to the body at the shoul- ders, such statues as that of the priest Ka-aper, found in his own tomb at Saqqara, could assume a more natural pose (Fig. 3.12). The eyes, made of rock crystal, seem vital and lively. Originally, the statue was covered with plaster and painted (men were usually red-brown, like the seated

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CHAPTER 3 The Stability of Ancient Egypt 79

Fig. 3.13 Nebhepetre Mentuhotep II, from his funerary temple at Deir el-Bahri, Western Thebes. Dynasty 11, ca. 2000 BCE. Painted sandstone, height 72 . Egyptian Museum, Cairo. The king’s dark color here may refer to the “black land” of the Nile Valley, another symbol of the cycle of death and resurrection that is embodied in the Osiris myth.

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scribe, and women yellow). Small statues of servants, es- pecially those who made food, have also been found in the tombs of officials.

THE MIDDLE KINGDOM AT THEBES The Old Kingdom collapsed for a variety of reasons— drought, a weakened kingship, greater autonomy of local administrators—all of which led to an Egypt divided be- tween competing power centers in the North and South. After over 150 years of tension, Nebhepetre Mentuhotep II (2040–1999 BCE) assumed the rule of the Southern capital at Thebes, defeated the Northern kings, and reunited the country. The Middle Kingdom begins with his reign.

Thebes, on the west bank of the Nile, was the primary capital of the Middle Kingdom and included within its outer limits Karnak, Luxor, and other sites on the east bank (see Map 3.1). Although certain traditions remained in place from the Old Kingdom, change was beginning to occur.

Middle Kingdom Literature One of the greatest changes took place in literature. Earlier, most writing and literature served a sacred purpose. But, dur- ing the Middle Kingdom, writers produced stories, instructive literature, satires, poems, biography, history, and scientific writings. Much of the surviving writing is highly imaginative, including tales of encounters with the supernatural. Among the most interesting texts is The Teachings of Khety [KEH-tee], a satiric example of instructive literature in which a scribe tries to convince his son to follow him into the profession. He begins by extolling the virtues of the scribe’s life: “I shall make you love books more than your mother, and I shall place their excellence before you. It is greater than any office. There is nothing like it on earth.” But he goes on to defend his own work by detailing all that is wrong with every other profession available to him:

I have seen a coppersmith at his work at the door of his furnace. His fingers were like the claws of the crocodile, and he stank more than fish excrement. . . .

I shall also describe to you the bricklayer. His kidneys are painful. When he must be outside in the wind, he lays bricks without a garment. His belt is a cord for his back, a string for his buttocks. His strength has vanished through fatigue and stiffness. . . .

The sandal maker is utterly wretched carrying his tubs of oil. His stores are provided with carcasses, and what he bites is hides.

The work provides us with a broad survey of daily life in the Middle Kingdom. It ends in a series of admonitions about how a young scribe must behave—advice that parents have been giving children for millennia (see Reading 3.2, page 93 for more of the text).

Middle Kingdom Sculpture Although a new brand of literature began to appear in the Middle Kingdom, sculpture remained firmly rooted in tradi- tion. The only innovation in the traditional seated king fu- nerary statue of Nebhepetre Mentuhotep II is that the pose has been slightly modified (Fig. 3.13). Most noticeably, the king crosses his arms tightly across his chest. The pose is reminiscent of a mummy, an embalmed body wrapped for burial (see Materials & Techniques, page 84). The king’s mummy-like pose probably refers to the growing cult of the god Osiris, discussed earlier. As early as the late Fifth Dy- nasty, the dead king was called “Osiris [King’s Name].” By the time of the Middle Kingdom, ordinary, nonroyal people were beginning to be identified with Osiris as well. Osiris, god of the underworld, overseer of the judgment of souls, is usually depicted wrapped in white linen, but unlike Nebhepetre Men- tuhotep II, whose legs and hands are exposed, Osiris is usually completely wrapped.

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Figs. 3.14 and 3.15 Senwosret Led by Atum to Amun-Re, from the White Chapel at Karnak, Thebes. Dynasty 12, ca. 1930 BCE. Limestone relief; and grid drawing showing proportions employed. Many of the elements visible in the Palette of Narmer, which dates from over 1,000 years earlier, are still visible here. Not only are the bodies depicted in the conventional poses, but note the two figures on the right: King Senwosret wears the crown of Upper Egypt, and the god Atum wears the double crown of both Upper and Lower Egypt. Note also that just like Narmer, Senwosret and Atum each wears a bull’s tail draped from his waist.

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aims and aspirations of the Middle Kingdom. The funerary temple of Hatshepsut [hat-SHEP-sut] in western Thebes is an interesting case in point.

Temple and Tomb Architecture and Their Rituals Hatshepsut (r. ca. 1479–1457 BCE) was the daughter of Thut- mose [TOOT-mo-zeh] I (r. ca. 1504–1492 BCE) and married her half-brother Thutmose II. When her husband died, she became regent for their young son, Thutmose III, and ruled for 20 years as king (priests of Amun, in fact, declared her king). As her reign continued, sculptures of Hatshepsut in- creasingly lost many of their female characteristics until she is barely distinguishable, given family resemblances, from later sculptures of her son, Thutmose III (Fig. 3.16). Her breasts are barely visible, and she wears the false beard of the

CHAPTER 3 The Stability of Ancient Egypt 81

In relief carvings found in the temples of the Middle Kingdom, the traditional pose of the figure, which dates back to Narmer’s time, still survives. The figures in a Twelfth Dynasty relief from the White Chapel at Karnak are depicted with right foot forward, feet and face in pro- file, and the shoulders and hips frontal (Fig. 3.14). But we have learned that figures were now conceived according to a grid. Much like a piece of graph paper, a grid is a sys- tem of regularly spaced horizontally and vertically crossed lines. Used in the initial design process, it enables the artist to transfer a design or enlarge it easily (Fig. 3.15). In the Egyptian system, the height of the figure from the top of the forehead (where it disappears beneath the head- dress) to the soles of the feet is 18 squares. The top of the knee is 6 squares high, the waist, 11. The elbows are at the twelfth square, the armpits at the fourteenth, and the shoulders at the sixteenth. Each square also relates to the human body as a measure, representing the equivalent of one clenched fist.

This particular relief depicts the rise of yet another god in the Middle Kingdom—Amun, or, to associate him more closely with the sun, Amun-Re. Originally the chief god of Thebes, as the city became more prominent, Amun became the chief deity of all of Egypt. His name would ap- pear (sometimes as “Amen”) in many subsequent royal names—such as Amenhotep [ah-men-HO-tep] (“Amun is Satisfied”) or, most famously, Tutankhamun [too-tahnk- AH-mun] (“The Living Image of Amun”). In the relief from the White Chapel, Atum, the god of the city of He- liopolis, just north of Memphis, that Nebhepetre Men- tuhotep II had defeated four generations earlier, leads King Senwosret [sen-WAHZ-ret] I (1960–1916 BCE) to Amun, who stands at the left on a pedestal with an erect penis, signifying fertility. Atum turns to Senwosret and holds the hieroglyph ankh [ahnk], signifying life, to his nose. The king is depicted as having received the gift, since he holds it in his left hand.

The continuity and stability implied by this relief ended abruptly in 1648 BCE, when a Hyksos [HIK-sohs] king declared himself king of Egypt. The Hyksos were foreigners who had apparently lived in Egypt for some time. They made local alliances, introduced the horse- drawn chariot (which may well have helped them achieve their military dominance), and led Egypt into another “intermediate” period of disunity and disarray. Dissatisfaction with Hyksos rule originated, once again, in Thebes, and finally, in 1540 BCE, the Theban king Ahmose [AH-moh-seh] defeated the last Hyksos ruler and inaugurated the New Kingdom.

THE NEW KINGDOM The worship of Amun that developed in the Twelfth Dy- nasty continued though the Middle Kingdom and into the Eighteenth Dynasty of the New Kingdom, 500 years later. In fact, there is clear evidence that the rulers of the Eigh- teenth Dynasty sought to align themselves closely with the

Fig. 3.16 Kneeling statue of Hatshepsut. New Kingdom, Dynasty 18, Joint reign of Hatshepsut and Thutmose III. ca. 1473–1458 BCE. Granite, paint, Height ; width ; diameter . © The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource, NY. This is one of at least eight, perhaps twelve, small kneeling statues of Hatshepsut believed to have lined the processional way of her temple at Deir el-Bahri.

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Egyptian kings, the traditional symbol of the king’s power and majesty.

Hatshepsut’s temple, built on three levels, is modeled precisely on the two-level funerary temple of Nebhepetre Mentuhotep II, next to which it stands. Hatshepsut’s tem- ple is partly freestanding and partly cut into the rock cliffs of the hill (Fig. 3.17). The first level consisted of a large open plaza backed by a long colonnade, a sequence or row of columns supporting a lintel and roof. A long ramp led up to a second court that housed shrines to Anubis (god of em- balming and agent of Osiris) and Hathor (the sky mother, probably a reference to Hatshepsut’s gender). Another ramp led to another colonnade fronted with colossal royal statues, two more colonnades, a series of chapels, and be- hind them, cut into the cliff, a central shrine to Amun-Re.

The Great Temple of Amun at Karnak Directly across the valley from Hatshepsut’s temple, and parallel to it, is the Great Temple of Amun at Karnak. It is a product of the age in which the Egyptian king came to be known as pharaoh [FAY-roh], from Egyptian per-aa, “great house,” meaning the palace of the king. In the same way that we refer to the presidency as “the White House,” or the government of England as “10 Downing Street,” so the Egyptians, begin- ning in the Eighteenth Dynasty, came to speak of their rulers by invoking their place of residence. (The modern practice of referring to all Egyptian kings as “pharaoh,” incidentally, can probably be attributed to its use in the He- brew Bible to refer to both earlier and later Egyptian kings.)

The pharaohs engaged in massive building programs dur- ing the New Kingdom, lavishing as much attention on their temples as their tombs. Not only was Amun a focus of worship, but so was his wife, Mut, and their son Khonsu. Although each temple is unique, all of the New Kingdom temples share a number of common architectural premises. They were fronted by a pylon, or massive gateway with slop- ing walls, which served to separate the disorderly world of everyday existence from the orderly world of the temple.

Behind the pylon was one or more open courtyards leading to a roofed hypostyle hall, a vast space filled with

82 BOOK ONE The Ancient World and the Classical Past

Fig. 3.17 Senenmut. Funerary temple of Hatshepsut, Deir el-Bahri, Western Thebes. Dynasty 18, ca. 1460 BCE. At the far left is the ramp and funerary temple of Nebhepetre Mentuhotep II. Dynasty 11 (Middle Kingdom). ca. 2000 BCE. Senenmut’s name is associated with the tomb because he has titles that suggest he oversaw the project, and he had little images of himself carved behind doors, where they would not be seen. But he may or may not have been the actual architect.

Fig. 3.18 Hypostyle hall, Great Temple of Amun, Karnak, Thebes. Dynasty 19. ca. 1294–1212 BCE. It is difficult to sense the massive scale of these columns from a photo. Dozens of people could easily stand on the top of one of them, and it takes at least eight people, holding hands, to span the circumference of a given column near its base. An average person is no taller than the base and first drum, or circular disk of stone, forming the column.

SEE MORE For a Closer Look at the Temple of Queen Hatshepsut, go to www.myartslab.com

the many massive columns required to hold up the stone slabs forming the roof. The columns in the hypostyle hall of the Great Temple of Amun at Karnak have flower and bud capitals (Figs. 3.18, 3.19). Behind the hypostyle hall was the sanctuary, in which the statue of the deity was placed. To proceed into the temple was to proceed out of the light of the outside world and into a darker and more spiritual space. The temple was therefore a metaphor for birth and creation.

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Each day, priests washed the de- ity statue, clothed it with a clean garment, and offered it two meals of delicious food. It was the “spirit” of the food that the gods enjoyed, and after the offering, the priests them- selves ate the meals. Only kings and priests were admitted to the sanctu- ary, but at festival times, the cult statue of the deity was removed to lead processions—perhaps across the Nile to the funerary temples of the kings or to visit other deities in their temples (Mut regularly “vis- ited” Amun, for instance).

The Great Temple of Amun at Kar- nak was the largest temple in Egypt. Although the temple was begun in the Middle Kingdom period, throughout the New Kingdom period pharaohs strove to contribute to its majesty and glory by adding to it or rebuilding its parts. The pharaohs built other temples to Amun as well. Each year, in an elab- orate festival, the image of Amun from Karnak would travel south to visit his temple at Luxor. The most monumen- tal aspects of both temples were the work of the Nineteenth Dynasty pharaoh Ramses [RAM-zeez] II (1279–1213 BCE), whose 66-year rule was longer than that of all but one

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Fig. 3.19 Reconstruction drawing of the hypostyle hall, Great Temple of Amun, Karnak. Dynasty 19, ca. 1294–1212 BCE. The foreground columns have bud capitals, and the hall’s central columns are taller with flower capitals. The center columns are taller than the outer columns in order to admit light into the hall through windows along the upper walls. (Note that in this drawing the first five rows of columns in the front have been omitted for clarity. There are seven rows of columns on each side of the center rows.)

bud capitals

clerestoryflower capitals

Fig. 3.20 Pylon gate of Ramses II with obelisk in the foreground, at Luxor, Thebes. Dynasty 19, ca. 1279–1212 BCE. The inscriptions on the pylon celebrate Ramses II’s victory at the Battle of Qadesh over the Hittites as the two empires fought for control of Syria.

other Egyptian king. It was he who, with his father, was re- sponsible for decorating the enormous hypostyle hall at Kar- nak, and it was he who built the massive pylon gate at Luxor (Fig. 3.20).

Ramses’s Pylon Gate at Luxor In front of the pylon stand two enormous statues of the king and, originally, a pair of obelisks—square, tapered stone columns topped by a pyramid shape—although only the eastern one remains in place; the other is in the Place de la Concorde in Paris (see Fig. 2.22). The outside of the pylon was decorated with reliefs and texts describing the king’s victory over the Hittites, at a battle fought on the river separating modern Syria and Lebanon. The battle was not the unqualified military success depicted by the reliefs, so these may be an

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early example of art used as propaganda, a theme that con- tinues up to the present. It may be better to think of these reliefs as symbolic rather than historical, as images of the king restoring order to the land. Inside the pylon, around the walls of the courtyard, were complex reliefs depicting the king, in the company of deities, together with his chief wife, 17 of his sons, and some of the nearly 100 other royal children whom he fathered with 8 other official wives.

Such complexity typifies New Kingdom decoration. We see it clearly in the many surviving wall paintings in the rock-cut tombs across the river from Thebes. Earlier, we dis- cussed the variety of fish and bird life in the painting of

Nebamun Hunting Birds (see Fig. 3.2). In a feast scene from the same tomb, the guests receive food from a servant in the top register, while below them, musicians and dancers enter- tain the group (Fig. 3.21). Very little is known about how Egyptian music actually sounded. Evidently, hymns were chanted at religious festivals, and song was a popular part of daily life. As in Mesopotamia, musical instruments—flutes, harps, lyres, trumpets, and metal rattles called sistrums— were often found in Egyptian tombs. In this wall painting, the two nude dancers are posed in a complex intertwining of limbs. Furthermore, of the four seated figures on the left— one of whom plays a double flute while the others appear to be clapping and, perhaps, chanting—two are depicted

Mummification

Materials & Techniques

In the belief that the physical body was essential to the ka’s survival in the afterlife, the Egyptians developed a sophisticated process to preserve the body, mummification. This was a multi- staged, highly ritualized process.

The oldest evidence of mummification was recently found near Saqqara and dates from 3100 to 2890 BCE. Mummification methods changed over time, and the techniques used between 1085 and 945 BCE were the most elaborate. Upon death, the body was carried across to the west bank of the Nile, symbolically “going into the west” like the setting sun. There it was taken to “the place of pu- rification,” where it was washed with natron. (Natron is a hydrated form of sodium carbonate used to absorb the body’s fluids; it also turned the body black.) After this first step in its symbolic rebirth, the body was transferred to the House of Beauty, where it was properly embalmed, its inner organs removed, dried, coated in resin, and either preserved in their own special containers, called canopic jars, or wrapped in linen and put back inside the body. The body itself was stuffed with linen and other materials in order to maintain its shape and was surrounded by bags of natron for 40 days. The entire process was overseen by an Overseer of Mys- teries, God’s Seal-Bearer, who served as chief surgeon, and a lector priest who recited the required texts and incantations.

After 40 days, the body was cleaned with spices and perfumes, rubbed with oils to restore some of its suppleness, and then coated with resin to waterproof it. Its nails were sewn back on and artifi- cial eyes put into its eye sockets. Cosmetics were applied to the face and a wig put on its head. Dressed and decked out in jewels, the body was, finally, wrapped in a shroud of bandages from head to foot, along with small figurines and amulets as protection on the journey through the underworld. Finally, a mask was placed on the head and shoulders. The wrapping process involved several stages: First the head and neck were wrapped, then fingers and toes individually, and the same for the arms and legs, which were then tied together. The embalmers also placed a papyrus scroll with spells from the Book of the Dead between the wrapped hands (a). After several more layers of wrapping impregnated with liquid

resin to glue the bandages together, the embalmers painted a pic- ture of the god Osiris on the wrapping surface, did a final bandag- ing of the entire mummy with a large cloth attached by strips of linen (b), and then placed a board of painted wood on top. The mummy was now ready for its final ritual burial. The entire process took 70 days!

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frontally, a rarity in Egyptian art. The women wear cones of a scented fatty substance on their heads (as the cones melted, the women were bathed in its perfume), and the soles of their feet are turned toward us. In this luxurious at- mosphere, a new informality seems to have introduced itself into Egyptian art.

Akhenaten and the Politics of Religion Toward the end of the Eighteenth Dynasty, Egypt experi- enced one of the few real crises of its entire history when, in 1353 BCE, Amenhotep IV (r. 1353–1337 BCE) assumed the throne of his father Amenhotep III (r. 1391–1353 BCE). It was the father who had originally begun construction of the greater (southern) part of the Temple of Amun-Mut- Khonsu at Luxor and who built the third and tenth pylons at the Temple of Amun at Karnak. The great additions to these temples undertaken by Ramses II some 70 years later may have been a conscious return to the style—and traditions—of Amenhotep III. Certainly, they represent a massive, even overstated rejection of the ways of the son,

for Amenhotep IV had forsaken not only the traditional conventions of Egyptian representation but the very gods themselves.

Although previous Egyptian kings may have associated themselves with a single god whom they represented in human form, Egyptian religion supported a large number of gods. Even the Nile was worshipped as a god. Amen- hotep IV abolished the pantheon of Egyptian gods and established a religion in which the sun disk Aten was worshipped exclusively. Other gods were still acknowl- edged, but they were considered to be too inferior to Aten to be worth worshipping. Whether Amenhotep’s religion was henotheism—as we have seen before, in the Zoroastrian worship of Athura Mazda in Persia (see Chapter 2)—or truly monotheistic is a matter of some debate.

Amenhotep IV believed the sun was the creator of all life, and he may have composed The Hymn to the Sun, inscribed on the west wall of the tomb of Ay (r. 1327–1323 BCE) at el-Amarna [uh-MAHR-nuh] and in many other tombs as well (Reading 3.3):

Fig. 3.21 Female Musicians and Dancers Entertaining Guests at a Meal, detail of a fresco from the tomb of Nebamun, Western Thebes. Dynasty 18, ca. 1360 BCE. Paint on plaster, height of fragment 24 . The British Museum, London. © The Trustees of The British Museum/Art Resource, NY. The inclusion of such a scene in a tomb suggests that, in the New Kingdom, the dead demanded not only that they be accompanied by the usual necessities into the afterlife, but that they be entertained there as well.

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READING 3.3

from Akhenaten’s Hymn to the Sun (14th century BCE)

Let your holy Light shine from the height of heaven, O living Aton, source of all life!

From eastern horizon risen and streaming, you have flooded the world with your beauty.

You are majestic, awesome, bedazzling, exalted, overlord over all earth,

yet your rays, they touch lightly, compass the lands to the limits of all your creation.

There in the Sun, you reach to the farthest of those you would gather in for your Son,

whom you love; Though you are far, your light is wide upon earth;

and you shine in the faces of all who turn to follow your journeying.

When you sink to rest below western horizon earth lies in darkness like death,

Sleepers are still in bedchambers, heads veiled, eye cannot spy a companion;

All their goods could be stolen away, heads heavy there, and they never knowing!

Lions come out from the deeps of their caves, snakes bite and sting;

Darkness muffles, and earth is silent: he who created all things lies low in his tomb.

Earth-dawning mounts the horizon, glows in the sun-disk as day:

You drive away darkness, offer your arrows of shining, and the Two Lands are lively with morningsong.

Sun’s children awaken and stand, for you, golden light, have upraised the sleepers;

Bathed are their bodies, who dress in clean linen, their arms held high to praise your Return.

Across the face of the earth they go to their crafts and professions.

The herds are at peace in their pastures, trees and the vegetation grow green;

Birds start from their nests, wings wide spread to worship your Person;

Small beasts frisk and gambol, and all who mount into flight or settle to rest

live, once you have shone upon them; Ships float downstream or sail for the south,

each path lies open because of your rising; Fish in the River leap in your sight,

and your rays strike deep in the Great Green Sea. It is you create the new creature in Woman,

shape the life-giving drops into Man, Foster the son in the womb of his mother,

soothe him, ending his tears . . . .

Akhetaten (modern Tell el-Amarna). This move trans- formed Egypt’s political and cultural as well as religious life. At this new capital he presided over the worship of Aten as a divine priest and his queen as a divine priestess. Temples to Aten were open courtyards, where the altar received the sun’s direct rays.

Why would Amenhotep IV/Akhenaten have substituted monotheism for Egypt’s traditional polytheistic religion? Many Egyptologists argue that the switch had to do with en- hancing the power of the pharaoh. With the pharaoh repre- senting the one god who mattered, all religious justification for the power held by a priesthood dedicated to the tradi- tional gods was gone. As we have seen, the pharaoh was traditionally associated with the sun god Re. Now in the form of the sun disk Aten, Re was the supreme deity, embodying the characteristics of all the other gods, there- fore rendering them superfluous. By analogy, Amenhotep IV/Akhenaten was now supreme priest, rendering all other priests superfluous as well. Simultaneously, the temples ded- icated to the other gods lost prestige and influence. These changes also converted the priests into dissidents.

A New Art: The Amarna Style Such significant changes had a powerful effect on the visual arts as well. Previously, Egypt- ian art had been remarkably stable because its principles were considered a gift of the gods—thus perfect and eternal. But now, the perfection of the gods was in question, and the principles of art were open to reexamination as well. A new art replaced the traditional canon of proportion—the famil- iar poses of king and queen—with realism, and a sense of im- mediacy, even intimacy. So Akhenaten allowed himself and his family to be portrayed with startling realism, in what has become known, from the modern name for the new capital, as the Amarna style.

An example is a small relief from Akhenaten’s new capi- tal: The king is depicted with a skinny, weak upper body, his belly protruding over his skirt; his skull is elongated be- hind an extremely long, narrow facial structure; and he sits in a slumped, almost casual position (Fig. 3.22). (One the- ory holds that Akhenaten had Marfan syndrome, a genetic disorder that leads to skeletal abnormalities.) This depic- tion contrasts sharply with the idealized depictions of the pharaohs in earlier periods. Akhenaten holds one of his children in his arms and seems to have just kissed her. His two other children sit with the queen across from him, one turning to speak with her mother, the other touching the queen’s cheek. The queen herself, Nefertiti [nef-er-TEE- tee], sits only slightly below her husband and appears to share his position and authority. In fact, one of the most striking features of the Amarna style is Nefertiti’s promi- nence in the decoration of the king’s temples. In one, for example, she is shown slaughtering prisoners, an image tra- ditionally reserved for the king himself. It is likely that her prominence was part of Akhenaten’s attempt to substitute the veneration of his own family (who, after all, represent Aten on earth) for the traditional Amun-Mut-Khonsu fam- ily group.

86 BOOK ONE The Ancient World and the Classical Past

Re is clearly the life force and source of all good, the very origin of creation itself.

Amenhotep IV was so dedicated to Aten that he changed his own name to Akhenaten [ah-ken-AH-ten] (“The Shining Spirit of Aten”) and moved the capital of Egypt from Thebes to a site many miles north that he also named

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In a house in the southern part of Akhenaten’s new city at Amarna, the famous bust of Queen Nefertiti was discov- ered along with drawings and sculptures of the royal family (Fig. 3.23). This was the workshop of Thutmose, one of the king’s royal artists. It seems likely that many other sculp- tures and reliefs were modeled on the bust of Nefertiti. At any rate, the queen’s beauty cannot be denied, and this im- age of her has become famous worldwide. Even in her own time, she was known by such epitaphs as “Fair of Face” and “Great in Love.”

The Return to Thebes and to Tradition Akhenaten’s revolution was short-lived. Upon his death, Tutankhaten (r. 1336–1327 BCE), probably Akhenaten’s son, assumed the throne and changed his name to Tu- tankhamun (indicating a return to the more traditional gods, in this case Amun). The new king abandoned el- Amarna, moved the royal family to Memphis in the north, and reaffirmed Thebes as the nation’s religious center. He died shortly after and was buried in the west bank of the Nile at Thebes, near the tomb of Hatshepsut.

The Tomb of Tutankhamun Tutankhamun’s is the only royal tomb in Egypt to have escaped the discovery of looters. In addition to the royal sarcophagus discovered by Carter (see Fig. 3.1), there were also vast quantities of beautiful furni- ture in the tomb, including a golden throne that dates from early in the king’s rule and still bears the indelible stamp of

CHAPTER 3 The Stability of Ancient Egypt 87

Fig. 3.22 Akhenaten and His Family, from Akhetaten (modern Tell el-Amarna). Dynasty 18, ca. 1345 BCE. Painted limestone relief,

. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Ägyptisches Museum. Between Akhenaten and his queen Nefertiti, the sun disk Aten shines down beneficently. Its rays end in small hands, which hold the ankh symbol for life before both the king and queen.

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Fig. 3.23 Nefertiti, from Akhetaten (modern Tell el-Amarna). Dynasty 18, ca. 1348–1336 BCE. Painted limestone, 19 . Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Ägyptisches Museum. Some scholars theorize that Nefertiti’s long neck may not be so much her own as a reflection of the king’s—so that the reality of the king takes precedence over her own.

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the Armana style, with Aten shining down on both the king and queen (Fig. 3.24). Jewelry of exquisite quality abounded, as did textiles—rarest of all archeological finds because they deteriorate over time. Carter and his team also found a golden canopic [kuh-NOPE-ik] chest—which held the king’s embalmed internal organs—a shrine-shaped box of alabaster, carved with four compartments, each of which had a carved and gilded stopper depicting the king. It had an alabaster lid that covered the stoppers, and it was set in a larger shrine of gilded wood, protected by three gilded statues of goddesses, and covered by a shroud covered with gold rosettes.

The Final Judgment The elaborate burial process was not meant solely to guarantee survival of the king’s ka and ba. It also prepared him for a “last judgment,” a belief system that

would find expression in the Hebrew faith as well. In this two- part ritual, deities first questioned the deceased about their be- havior in life. Then their hearts, the seat of the ka, were weighed against an ostrich feather, symbol of Maat [mah-aht], the goddess of truth, justice, and order. Egyptians believed the heart contained all the emotions, intellect, and character of the individual, and so represented both the good and bad as- pects of a person’s life. If the heart did not balance with the feather, then the dead person was condemned to nonexis- tence, to be eaten by a creature called Ammit [AH-mit], the vile “Eater of the Dead,” part crocodile, part lion, and part hippopotamus. Osiris, wrapped in his mummy robes, oversaw this moment of judgment. Tut himself, depicted on his sar- cophagus with his crossed arms holding crook and flail, was clearly identified with Osiris.

Books of Going Forth by Day At the time of Tut’s death, the last judgment was routinely illustrated in Books of Going Forth by Day (also known as Books of the Dead), collec- tions of magical texts or spells buried with the deceased to help them survive the ritual of judgment. One such magical text was the “Negative Confession” (Reading 3.4), which the deceased would utter upon entering the judgment hall:

Fig. 3.24 Back of Tutankamun’s “Golden Throne,” from his tomb, Valley of the Kings, Western Thebes. Dynasty 18, ca. 1335 BCE. Wood, gold, faience, and semiprecious stones, height of entire throne 41�, height of detail approx. . Egyptian Museum, Cairo. This throne shows that early in his life, at least, Tutankamun was still portrayed in the Armana style.

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READING 3.4

from The Book of Going Forth by Day

I have come unto you; I have committed no faults; I have not sinned; I have done no evil; I have accused no man falsely; therefore let nothing be done against me. I live in right and truth, and I feed my heart upon right and truth. That which men have bidden I have done, and the gods are satisfied thereat. I have pacified the god, for I have done his will. I have given bread unto the hungry and water unto those who thirst, clothing unto the naked, and a boat unto the shipwrecked mariner. I have made holy offerings unto the gods; and I have given meals of the tomb to the sainted dead. O, then, deliver ye me, and protect me; accuse me not before the great god. I am pure of mouth, and I am pure of hands . . .

I offer up prayers in the presence of the gods, know- ing that which concerneth them. I have come forward to make a declaration of right and truth, and to place the balance upon its supports within the groves of amaranth. Hail, thou who art exalted upon thy resting place, thou lord of the atef crown,1 who declarest thy name as the lord of the winds, deliver thou me from thine angels of destruction, who make dire deeds to happen and calami- ties to arise, and who have no covering upon their faces, because I have done right and truth, O thou Lord of right and truth. I am pure, in my fore-parts have I been made clean, and in my hinder parts have I been purified; my reins have been bathed in the Pool of right and truth, and no member of my body was wanting. I have been puri- fied in the pool of the south . . . 1A conical headdress decorated with two ostrich feathers, joined with ram’s horns and a sun disk, and associated particularly with Osiris.

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The following moment of judgment is depicted in one such Book of Going Forth by Day, a papyrus scroll created for an otherwise anonymous man known as Hunefer [HOO-nef-er] (Fig. 3.25). The scene reads from left to right in a continu- ous pictorial narrative. To the left, Anubis [uh-NOO-bis], overseer of funerals and cemeteries, brings Hunefer into the judgment area. Hunefer’s heart, represented as a pot, is be- ing weighed against the ostrich feather. In this image, Hune- fer passes the test—not surprising, given that the work is dedicated to ensuring that Hunefer’s ka survive in the after- life. Horus brings Hunefer to Osiris, seated under a canopy, with his sisters at the right.

THE LATE PERIOD, THE KUSHITES, AND THE FALL OF EGYPT From Tutankhamun’s time through the Late Period (715–332 BCE) and until the fall of Egypt to the Romans in 30 BCE, the conventions of traditional representation re- mained in place. For example, the pose we saw in Menkaure’s funeral sculpture of 2460 BCE (see Fig. 3.10) is repeated in the seventh-century BCE statue of Mentuemhet, the Governor (Fig. 3.26). Mentuemhet [men-too-EM-het] strides forward into eternal life, nearly 2,000 years after that Old Kingdom pharaoh, a strong visual signal of the stability of Egyptian culture.

Mentuemhet was probably the most influential official of the Twenty-fifth Dynasty (ca. 715–656 BCE). He was ap- pointed governor of Thebes by the Kushites [KOOSH-ites] (from Kush, the Egyptian name for the southern region of Nubia, in today’s Sudan). Nubia had long been an impor- tant neighbor, appearing in Egyptian records as far back as

Fig. 3.25 Last Judgment of Hunefer by Osiris, from a Book of Going Forth by Day in his tomb at Thebes. Dynasty 19, ca. 1285 BCE. Painted papyrus scroll, height . The British Museum, London. At the top, Hunefer, having passed into eternity, is shown adoring a row of deities.

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Fig. 3.26 Mentuemhet, from Karnak, Thebes. Dynasty 25, ca. 660 BCE. Granite, height 54 . Egyptian Museum, Cairo. The only concession to naturalistic representation in this sculpture is in the governor’s facial features.

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the Old Kingdom. Nubia served as a corridor for trade be- tween Egypt and sub-Saharan Africa and was the main means by which Egypt procured gold and incense, as well as ivory, ebony, and other valuable items (Fig. 3.27). Be- cause of its links with tropical Africa, over time, the popu- lation of Nubia became a diverse mixture of ethnicities.

Nubia had been the location of several wealthy urban centers, including Kerma, whose walls, mud-brick buildings, and lavish tombs were financed and built by indigenous Nubian rulers around 1650 BCE. Napata was built during an Egyptian annexation of the area in approximately 1500 BCE, during the reign of Thutmose I. Napata became the provin- cial capital of southern Nubia, an area the Egyptians knew as Kush.

The Kushites The Kushites had an immense appetite for assimilating Egyptian culture. They adopted Egyptian religion and prac- tices, worshipping Egyptian gods, particularly Amun, the Egyptian state god. The main religious center of Kush was at Jebel Barkal [JEB-uh bar-kahl], a mountain near the fourth cataract of the Nile where the Kushites believed Amun dwelled. Their adoption of Egyptian ways neverthe- less retained their distinctly Nubian identity. The Kushites developed hieroglyphs to express their own language, con- tinued to worship many of their own gods, and though they also began to erect pyramids over their royal tombs, theirs started from smaller bases and were distinctly steeper and more needle-like than their Egyptian counterparts. There are nearly 300 of these pyramids in modern Sudan, more than in Egypt itself. Although annexed to Egypt, Kush was essentially an independent state toward the end of the New Kingdom. Egypt relied upon Kush to supply gold and other resources (including Nubian soldiers, among the most feared warriors in the region), but as Egypt struggled with its own enemies to the east, the rulers of Kush eventually found themselves in a position to take control of Egypt

themselves. In the eighth century BCE, the Egyptians turned to Kush for the leadership they needed to help hold off the mounting threat of an Assyrian invasion, and the Egyptian- ized African rulers of Kush became the Twenty-fifth Dy- nasty of pharaohs. As pharaohs, the Kushite kings ruled an empire that stretched from the borders of Palestine possibly as far upstream as the Blue and White Niles, uniting the Nile Valley from Khartoum [KAR-toom] to the Mediter- ranean. They were expelled from Egypt by the Assyrians af- ter a rule of close to 100 years.

Egypt Loses Its Independence The Assyrians left rule of Egypt to a family of local princes at Saïs [SAY-is], in the western portion of the Nile Delta, inau- gurating the Twenty-sixth, or Saite [SAY-eet] Dynasty (664–525 BCE). With Memphis as their administrative center, they emphasized Mediterranean trade, which in turn pro- duced over 100 years of economic prosperity. But Egypt was anything but secure in power struggles that dominated the larger political climate of the region. In 525 BCE, the Persians invaded from the north and made the country a mere province in its empire. For the next 200 years, Egypt enjoyed brief periods of independence, until the Persians invaded again in 343 BCE. They had ruled for not much more than a decade when the Macedonian [mass-uh-DOH-nee-un] con- queror Alexander the Great drove them out and asserted his own authority. According to legend, the god Amun spoke to Alexander through an oracle, acknowledging him as his son and therefore legitimate ruler of Egypt. Its independence as a state had come to an end. When Alexander died, the country fell to the rule of one of his generals, Ptolemy [TAHL-uh- mee], and beginning in 304 BCE, the final Ptolemaic [tahl- MAY-ik] Dynasty was under way. A kingdom in the Greek constellation, Egypt would finally fall to an invading Roman army in 30 BCE. But remarkably, until this moment, its artistic and religious traditions, as well as its daily customs, remained largely in place, practiced as they had been for 3,000 years.

Fig. 3.27 Nubians Bringing Tribute, from the tomb of Amenhotep Huy, the Nubian viceroy under Tutankhamen, Qurnet Murai, Western Thebes. Dynasty 18, ca. 1330 BCE. Painting on plaster. Editions Gallimard, Paris. This painting represents the kind of trade relations that Egypt enjoyed with Nubia and Kush.

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firewood found on board suggests the ship sank in about 1316 BCE. Its cargo included gold from Egypt, weapons from Greece, a scarab bearing Nefertiti’s name (Fig. 3.29), am- ber from northern Europe, hippopotamus and elephant ivory, and tin from Afghanistan. Such trade resulted not only in the transfer of goods between various regions, but in a broader cultural diffusion as well, for ideas, styles, reli- gions, and technologies spread from one culture to another throughout the region. Much work remains to be done on the interconnections and lines of continuity and change among the peoples of the Aegean, the broader Mediter- ranean, Mesopotamia, and Egypt, but it is clear that they knew of one another, traded with one another, and were stimulated by one another’s presence.

A lthough Egyptian art and culture remained extraor-dinarily stable for over 3,000 years, it would be a mis-take to assume that this was because the region was isolated. In fact, Egypt was a center of trade for the entire Mediterranean basin. Spiral and geometric designs on Egyptian pottery from as early as the Twelfth Dynasty (1980–1801 BCE) suggest the influence of Aegean civiliza- tions, and during the reign of Hatshepsut’s young son, Thut- mose III, connections with Aegean cultures appear to have been extremely close. Evidence from surviving images of both cultures’ ship designs—ships that would have facili- tated Aegean trade—suggests a mutual influence. A small- scale model of the king’s boat from the tomb of King Tut shows a stern cabin, decorated with images of the king, where the steersmen would have guided the boat (Fig. 3.28). Ships such as this were equipped with a mast that could be raised and fitted with a sail to catch the Nile winds from astern.

Egypt’s influence in the Mediterranean was far- flung, although it is unlikely that its ships set out to sea. Rather, their boats would have generally hugged the coast. But Egypt was a port of call, and traders from around the Mediterranean visited there. Archeologists excavating at Mycenae [my- SEE-nee], a center of culture that was firmly established on the Greek Peloponnesus [pel-uh- puh-NEE-sus] by 1500 BCE, have discovered Egypt- ian scarabs at the site, including one bearing the name of Queen Tiy [tee], mother of Akhenaten. Scarabs are amulets in the shape of a beetle, and since the Egyptian word for beetle, kheprer, is de- rived from the word kheper, “to come into being,” scarabs were associated with rebirth in the afterlife. Those displaying names were generally used as offi- cial seals. A shipwreck discovered off the coast of southern Turkey in 1982 gives us some sense of the extent of Mediterranean trade. Carbon dating of

&CONTINUITY CHANGE Mutual Influence through Trade

Fig. 3.28 Model of the King’s Boat. From the tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun. Dynasty 18, Egypt, ca. 1335 BCE. Egyptian Museum, Cairo.

Fig. 3.29 Scarab of Queen Nefertiti, wreck of the Uluburun. ca. 1330 BCE. The Bodrum Museum of Underwater Archaeology, Bodrum, Turkey.

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THINKING BACK

How did the idea of cycles shape Egyptian civilization? The annual cycle of flood and sun, the inundation of

the Nile River Valley that annually deposited deep lay- ers of silt followed by months of sun in which crops could grow in the fertile soil, helped to define Egyptian culture. This predictable cycle helped to create a cul- tural belief in the stability and balance of all things that lasted for over 3,000 years. Can you describe this belief in terms of cyclical harmony? How does the Egyptian religion reflect this belief system?

Originally, what purposes did Egyptian sculpture and archi- tecture serve?

Most surviving Egyptian art and architecture was de- voted to burial and the afterlife, the cycle of life, death, and rebirth. The pyramids at Saqqara and Giza and the statuary of kings and queens were especially dedicated to this cycle. How do sculptures of lesser figures serve the same ends?

What important change distinguishes the Middle Kingdom? Whereas in the Old Kingdom, writing had been used

almost exclusively in a religious context, in the Middle Kingdom a vast secular literature developed. What does this secular literature tell us about Egyptian society?

Who was Amenhotep IV? Why did he change his name to Akhenaten?

The New Kingdom kings, now called “pharaoh,” un- dertook massive, elaborately decorated building projects

at Karnak and Thebes. Toward the end of the Eighteenth Dynasty, Amenhotep IV forsook traditional conventions of Egyptian representation, abolished the pantheon of Egyptian gods, established a monotheistic religion in which the sun disk Aten was worshiped exclusively, and changed his own name to Akhenaten. How does Amen- hotep IV’s religion differ from Egyptian religion in gen- eral? What other changes to Egyptian tradition occurred during his reign?

Funeral practices soon included the incantation of texts and spells collected in Books of Going Forth by Day, which accompanied the deceased as they under- went a last judgment. What significance do you attach to the title of these books?

How did Egypt decline and fall? After the end of the New Kingdom, traditional repre-

sentational practices remained in place, even when Kushite kings from the south in modern Sudan ruled the country. How did the Nubians and Kushites contribute to Egyptian culture? Egypt became susceptible to inva- sion, and after it fell to Alexander the Great in 332 BCE, its independence as a state came to an end, even though the new Greek Ptolemaic Dynasty continued traditional Egyptian ways until Rome conquered the country in 30 BCE.

GLOSSARY ankh A hieroglyph of a cross topped with a loop; a symbol of life in ancient Egypt. ba In ancient Egypt, an idea comparable to a person’s person- ality. cartouche In ancient Egyptian art, an ornamental and symbolic frame reserved for the names of rulers and their wives. colonnade A sequence or row of columns supporting a lintel and a roof. composite view A view that integrates multiple perspectives into a single unified representation. determinative A sign used in Egyptian hieroglyphs to indicate the category of an object or being. fresco secco “Dry fresco”; the technique of painting on dry plaster. hieroglyph A sign used in hieroglyphic writing, a writing sys- tem consisting mainly of pictorial characters. hypostyle hall A vast space filled with columns supporting a roof. ka In ancient Egypt, an idea comparable to a “soul” or “life force.” mastaba A trapezoidal tomb structure.

mummification The process of embalming, drying, and preserving a body. mummy An embalmed body wrapped for burial. obelisk A square, tapered stone column topped by a pyramid shape. pharaoh A ruler of ancient Egypt. phonogram A pictogram used to represent a sound. pictogram A drawing that represents an object or being; often combined in hieroglyphic writing to express ideas. pictorial formula A convention of representation in art. pylon A massive gateway with sloping walls. sanctuary The most sacred place of a religious building. sarcophagus A rectangular stone coffin. serekh A hieroglyphic device representing a pharaoh’s palace seen simultaneously from above and the front, usually with a falcon on top of it (though not on Narmer’s Palette; used to hold the pharaoh’s name. symmetrical Balanced on the left and right sides. theocracy A state ruled by a god or by the god’s representative. votive A ritual object.

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READINGS

READING 3.2

The Teachings of Khety (ca. 2040–1648 BCE) In the following example of instructive literature, dating from the Middle Kingdom, a royal scribe tries to convince his son to follow him into the profession by debunking virtually every other career path the young man might choose to follow. The work is as instructive as it is amus- ing, since it presents a wonderfully complete picture of daily life in the Middle Kingdom.

The beginning of the teaching which the man of Tjel named Khety made for his son named Pepy, while he sailed south- wards to the Residence to place him in the school of writings among the children of the magistrates, the most eminent men of the Residence.

So he spoke to him: Since I have seen those who have been beaten, it is to writings that you must set your mind. Observe the man who has been carried off to a work force. Behold, there is nothing that surpasses writings! They are a boat upon the water. Read then at the end of the Book of Kemyet this state- ment in it saying:

As for a scribe in any office in the Residence, he will not suf- fer want in it. When he fulfills the bidding of another, he does not come forth satisfied. I do not see an office to be compared with it, to which this maxim could relate. I shall make you love books more than your mother, and I shall place their excellence before you. It is greater than any office. There is nothing like it on earth. When he began to become sturdy but was still a child, he was greeted (respectfully). When he was sent to carry out a task, before he returned he was dressed in adult garments.

I do not see a stoneworker on an important errand or a gold- smith in a place to which he has been sent, but I have seen a coppersmith at his work at the door of his furnace. His fingers were like the claws of the crocodile, and he stank more than fish excrement.

Every carpenter who bears the adze is wearier than a field- hand. His field is his wood, his hoe is the axe. There is no end to his work, and he must labor excessively in his activity. At nighttime he still must light his lamp . . . .

The barber shaves until the end of the evening. But he must be up early, crying out, his bowl upon his arm. He takes himself from street to street to seek out someone to shave. He wears out his arms to fill his belly, like bees who eat (only) according to their work.

The reed-cutter goes downstream to the Delta to fetch himself arrows. He must work excessively in his activity. When the gnats sting him and the sand fleas bite him as well, then he is judged.

The potter is covered with earth, although his lifetime is still among the living. He burrows in the field more than swine to bake his cooking vessels. His clothes being stiff with mud, his head cloth consists only of rags, so that the air which comes forth from his burning furnace enters his nose. He operates a

pestle with his feet with which he himself is pounded, penetrat- ing the courtyard of every house and driving earth into every open place.

The weaver inside the weaving house is more wretched than a woman. His knees are drawn up against his belly. He cannot breathe the air. If he wastes a single day without weav- ing, he is beaten with 50 whip lashes. He has to give food to the doorkeeper to allow him to come out to the daylight . . . .

See, there is no office free from supervisors, except the scribe’s. He is the supervisor!

But if you understand writings, then it will be better for you than the professions which I have set before you . . . . What I have done in journeying southward to the Residence is what I have done through love of you. A day at school is advanta- geous to you . . . .

Be serious, and great as to your worth. Do not speak secret matters. For he who hides his innermost thoughts is one who makes a shield for himself. Do not utter thoughtless words when you sit down with an angry man.

When you come forth from school after midday recess has been announced to you, go into the courtyard and discuss the last part of your lesson book.

When an official sends you as a messenger, then say what he said. Neither take away nor add to it . . . .

See, I have placed you on the path of God . . . . See, there is no scribe lacking sustenance, (or) the provisions of the royal house . . . . Honour your father and mother who have placed you on the path of the living.

READING CRITICALLY

Although the scribe Dua-Khety spends much time de- scribing the shortcomings of other lines of work, he also reminds his son how he should behave at school. What do the father’s words of advice tell us about the values of Egyptian society?

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