Ancient Art Lecture 8: Old Kingdom Egyptian Art

Welcome back everyone. As you can see, we are still kind of at the beginning of Egypt, and today we are going to continue with the Old Kingdom. So we started last time with just kind of telling you about the culture and religion of Egypt and some of the geography, and we began with the Talmud of Narmer and the Steppe Pyramid, and that is all the beginning of the Old Kingdom. Today we get to the stuff that everyone knows about, giant pyramids, and we're going to talk about the purpose of those pyramids, how they were built, and what kind of art was housed inside of them. So if we were in class right now, what I would have done before getting into this lecture was showing you the video of the Engineering and Empire that you watched for the last lecture, but the section of polyps. And so if you want to do that now, watch the video from about 29.42 to about 43.37, and then come back to the lecture, that would be fine. If you want to watch it after, that's fine too. But a lot of the things that I'm going to talk about in this lecture relate to that video. That being said, what I want you to have sort of in the back of your mind while you're watching all of this, and you're looking at all this art, is that permanent stability and consistency play a major role in all Egyptian art, from funerary architecture to statues to hieroglyphs, everything all revolves around those ideas. And the reason for this is they believed that this is what would keep the Nile flowing and keep the crops growing, keep them alive. We begin with the Giza Complex, or the Necropolis, basically means City of the Dead. It's the site on the Giza Plateau in Egypt that includes the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Pyramid of Khafre, and the Pyramid of Menkaure, along with their associated pyramid complexes and the Great Sphinx of Giza. And all were built during the Fourth Dynasty of the Old Kingdom of Ancient Egypt, and the site also includes several cemeteries and the remains of a worker's village. Now, we always get the image on the left when we're looking at these pyramids, but I love the image on the right that shows how close the city comes to these, and you can actually be sitting at the Kentucky Fried Chicken, looking out the window at these pyramids, and we think that they're just kind of out there in the middle of nowhere, but they're very close to the city. The largest of the three pyramids is that of Khufu, or Cheops, that's the Greek name for him. And it was a tomb that was constructed over a 14 to 20 year period. I'm about to give you a bunch of numbers, so prepare yourself. It was originally 280 Egyptian cubits tall, which is about 480 and a half feet. Each base side was 440 royal cubits, or 755-ish feet in length. And these proportions equate to pi, 3.14, divided by 2, to an accuracy of better than 0.05%. So if you divide the bottom by the top, you get pi divided by 2. And this is deliberate, this design proportion. The total mass of the pyramid is estimated at 5.9 million tons, and that's T-O-N-N-E-S, so I think that's like 4,000 pounds. The volume is 2,500,000 cubic meters. In 20 years, you would have to do 800 metric tons of stone every day, or 1,763,000 pounds of stone every day to get this done in 20 years. The casing stones and the interior chamber blocks of the Great Pyramid fit together with extremely high precision. The opening of the joints are only 0.5 millimeters wide, or 1 50th of an inch. It was the tallest man-made structure in the world for over 3,800 years, until the Lincoln Cathedral in England was built in 1300. And the sides of the square base are closely aligned to the four cardinal compass points, which means they're based on true north, not magnetic north. Cardinal compass points meaning north, south, east, and west. They use 2.3 million limestone blocks. The Torah limestone used for the casing was quarried across the river, and many scholars believe that they were built not using slave labor at all, because you needed extremely skilled labor to produce the precision in these stones. And it does not seem to indicate indiscriminate use of slave labor. Large numbers of slave laborers are conducive to rebellion and coups, and not to efficiently and quickly building mammoth structures. One of the questions I will give you for this lecture is, why is their tomb the shape of a pyramid? Like, what is the reason behind it? So I'm going to give you a few hints, but you're actually going to have to do a little research for this one. All right, so here are some helpful tips. It's perfectly straight and smooth. It is a four-sided pyramid. And the religion in Egypt is based on worshiping the sun. And it also could be related to their creation myth, which has something to do with the swirling chaos of the universe. And it has something to do with the government structure, which I told you about in the last lecture. So the question that I have for you is, why do you think they chose this? Did they come upon it accidentally, and then they created a justification for it? Which is quite possible, considering what we saw with the Masaba. Or, did they come up with this idea because it actually represents something? In the last lecture, we talked about how shameful it would be to rob the tomb of a pharaoh because of how disrespectful that was. However, there's nothing left in this pyramid. The only thing the tomb robbers left was the king's broken sarcophagus. And that's only because it wouldn't fit through the entrance passage. It was put in position while the pyramid was still under construction. So if you go through this whole thing, this stone sarcophagus is all that's left. You can see from this diagram of the pyramid that running from the subterranean chamber where the king's body would have been, the pharaoh's body, that there are these ventilation shafts. And they call these star shafts. And they aim from the chamber directly through the mass of the pyramid to frame the constellation of Orion's Belt. So if you look out this thing, you would be right in the center of Orion's Belt. And it wasn't Orion at the time. It was some other god. But basically, they believed that these stars were linked with the god Osiris. And the appearance in the sky occurred during the Nile's flood. So this group of stars was of great significance. And this is very similar to what we saw in the Persian Empire where they had the lion attacking the bull and that brought about the spring festival. So this idea of connecting the pharaoh with the god Osiris and that being in connection with the flooding of the Nile tells you that they kind of put these two ideas together. This royal barge is kind of my favorite part. So it was buried in one of the boat pits. So they had, basically, they buried ships around the pyramid. And this barge was found next to it. It most likely represented the solar boat, which is what, like if you look at the pictures in the tombs, you'll see this kind of journey across the sky with the sun going up. And so this boat was meant to represent this solar ship across the sky. There is evidence that it had been in the water there. And the speculation is that it was used to transfer Khufu's body from wherever he was to the pyramid. It also could have been a barge that he used while he was still alive to travel to sacred places. Another thing I like about this barge is that the deck counts. So on the deck stands a roofed, windowless deckhouse that's about 30 feet long. And within it is a seven-foot-long inner chamber. And the question is, was Khufu's body placed here for transport across the Nile for internment in the Great Pyramid? Or was the pharaoh meant to find shelter here while traveling in the Apulia? As with everything, you know, regarding this ship's function, the intended use of even this deckhouse remains unknown. By the way, they found this all in pieces and they reconstructed it. Here's a bird's-eye view of the whole complex. And if you look closely, you can see that there are boat pits in front of the pyramid of Khafre. And there's also some in the pyramid of Khufu. And if you look at Khafre's pyramid, you can see that sort of ramp that goes all the way down. And it goes right next to the Sphinx, which most experts believe to be a statue of Khafre. So the Sphinx has the body of a lion and the head of a man. It's a hybrid, like a lamassu. And it faces east to west, and it's cut directly out of the bedrock. So it wasn't transported like the pyramids were. It's possibly a quarry site for the stones for the pyramids. So they took away all the stone, converted that stone into the pyramids, and what was left was the Sphinx. Of all the structures in Giza, the most complete complex is that of Khafre. And there is this long causeway that goes from the valley temple, where Khafre's body was mummified. And then the priest brought the body up that 440-yard-long causeway. In addition to all of these things still being intact, sort of, the pyramid of Khafre is the only one that still has some of its original limestone casing at the top. So in that valley of the temple, you would find Khafre's Kha statue. And we've talked about Kha already. It's the life force. And so this statue is where the life force is meant to reside after the body decomposes. And the portraiture is idealized. It's not meant to record exactly individualized features. Instead, it's supposed to proclaim the divine nature of Egyptian kingship itself. It has things like a cobra headdress, a false beard. It's youthful. And as one of your lecture questions, I'm going to ask you, what is the benefit of portraying a ruler as youthful, even though he might have died at 70 years old? In addition to those other things of kingship, you have lions on either side of this throne. And those lions represent power. We've seen that already, right, with Babylonians, Persians. And then you also have lotus and papyrus on the side. And those represent the unification of upper and lower Egypt. Horus is that falcon that's kind of cradling his head. And he protects Khafre. And then Khafre's feet are resting on nine bows. Nine is a small number, but it's supposed to represent a larger number. And that's a symbol of dominance over his enemies. And also, we've seen this when we looked at the statue of Boudia, that Khafre is stiff and still. And the way he's all compact represents permanence and order. The stone itself represents permanence for both the Kha and Egypt's eternal glory. Okay, I'm going to talk about the image on the left for a little bit. And then at the end, I'll tell you what I want you to do with both of these So, the Menkaure and Queen were originally positioned within an architectural niche. And it made it appear as if they were emerging from the structure. Menkaure is wearing the traditional short pleated kilt known as the shenjet. And he has the primary pharaonic insignia, the striped headdress, the thing that you've seen on Tutankhamen, and an artificial royal beard. And in his clenched fists, held straight down to the sides, he grasps a ritual cloth rope. His body is straight and strong. It's youthful. And his facial features are remarkably individualized, prominent eyes, a fleshy nose, rounded cheeks, and a full mouth with a protruding lower lip. Menkaure's Queen articulates the ideal mature feminine beauty. Menkaure and his Queen stride forward with their left feet. This is entirely expected for the king, as males in Egyptian sculpture almost always do. But it is unusual for the female because they're generally depicted with their feet together. They both look beyond the present and into this kind of timeless eternity. They're displaying no human emotion whatsoever. It's called like the thousand yard stare. You see that often in images of Jesus Christ when he's maybe crucified or other images of saintly or godly figures. They don't really look at you. They kind of look above you and over you. The image was erected in the temple and was brightly painted. There are traces of red around the king's ears and mouth and yellow on the queen's face. We will learn about color schemes later. This is unusual for a pharaoh's image. The king has no protective cobra perched on his brow. This notable absence has led to the suggestion that both the king's nemes, or the headdress, and the queen's wig were originally covered in precious metal and that the cobra would have been part of that and that it was stolen. Interestingly, the identity of the queen is up for debate. She's clearly a royal female and she stands at nearly equal height with the king. And of the two of them, she's the one who's entirely frontal. But it may be that this is focused on the queen rather than Menkaure. This is called a dyad. And the prominence of the royal female at equal height and frontal aspect, in addition to the protective gesture she extends, suggests that it might actually be Menkaure's queen mother and not one of his wives. We know a lot about the Egyptians, way more than the Paleolithic and the Neolithic periods, more than Mesopotamia. And the question is, why do we know so much? And the answer is tomb painting. It gets lonely being in tomb for an eternity. You need to provide stories for the departed. You need to provide scenes from life, scenes representing what a person of this status does. There's also depiction of good over evil. In this picture of T, you see that hippos on the bottom there are seen as destructive forces. And by killing them, you were stopping the evil. This wall painting also sort of teaches us how to understand what's happening. The largest person, T, is also the most important. We know that from hieratic scale. The Egyptians used conventions, which means they had like a formula that they would use again and again to portray people. And they would do the shoulders facing front, and then you would have the side of the head. The feet would go in the same direction that the person was moving. But that's only for like the really important people. For lesser people, the action seems to be more casual. Maybe they're not shown exactly in these proportions or in using these conventions. Another thing that you will find in the Tomb of T is the making of the Tomb of T. This is fascinating to me. So we see the tomb and its contents being created. We can see workers engaged in building and people preparing food for the afterlife. So it wasn't just enough to leave real food in front of the temple for the priests. You had to sculpt in like bread and beer or whatever the person was going to need in the afterlife to sustain their life force. Another reason that we know so much about the Egyptians is because of scribes. And you can see here on the left that there is a sculpture of a scribe. And you have a video to watch too, I think, of Smart History. In fact, you have the discussion question is based on this slide. But I'm going to tell you about scribes real quick. So to become a scribe, you had to attend a special school. At this school, you would learn how to read and write hieroglyphics and hieratic scripts. And this was hard work. These scripts are complicated, and then there were many signs to learn. And most often, it was the children of scribes who became scribes. Although some craftsmen were able to get their sons into the school for scribes, but it was very rare. It could take four to five years for a person to go through scribe school. Scribes were then free from paying taxes and participating in manual labor. Some scribes became priests, minor officials in the government, or teachers of other scribes. Okay, that's the end. Your discussion question is going to be about who holds the power. And I know that's going to seem like a silly question, but give it a chance. ♪♪