Ancient Art Lecture 10: New Kingdom Egyptian Art

Hey everyone, welcome back. We are finishing up Egypt today. You can see in our timeline we're at about 1500 to about 1000 BCE. This is before even the rise of Greece, a thousand years before the rise of Rome, and this is kind of the high point of the Egyptian empire. Gone are the days of giant pyramids, but not of giant construction projects. And today we're going to look at three giant construction projects. Two are still kind of around, one is absolutely gone, it's just like this desert plain where it used to be. We're going to talk about Hatshepsut, who was a queen. We're going to talk about Akhenaten, who is a guy that kind of tried to change the rules a little bit. We'll see what happened with him. And then we'll finish with Ramses II, and we'll talk about his temple at Abu Simbel, which is on the southern border of the Egyptian empire, and we'll talk about why that's important as well. One of your big questions today for the lecture questions will be to choose one of the following pharaohs, Hatshepsut, Akhenaten, Ramses II, and explain how their building projects reflected their power struggles. So that's what today's theme will be, is power struggles. And we're going to start with Hatshepsut, and she had a power struggle with her stepson. I'm going to read off a slide because it's important that you know all these things. So first of all, she was the daughter of Thutmose I, the wife of Thutmose II, one of the wives. And then she became regent for her stepson, who was born of another wife, Thutmose III. And she basically kept him from being king for 20 years, and the whole time he was not happy about this. She was the fifth pharaoh of the 18th dynasty. She was one of the most successful because she established all these trading relationships with other nations. She did engage in military expeditions, but also the core of her success was trade. And one of the largest expeditions was to the land of Plum. After she died, attempts were made to erase her name. We will talk about why that is important, but you should already kind of know. There's a timeline video that I want you to watch of Hatshepsut. It's that same woman from the last one where she went and visited the Temple of Karnak. This time she talks about Hatshepsut. And it's about eight minutes, but she does a really good job of sort of laying out what you can see inside of her temple. So watch that now, watch that after, but please watch that video. We are going to start off geographically in the same place that we started in our last lecture, which is in Upper Egypt, in the Theban part of Egypt. And we're going to talk about the Temple of Hatshepsut. And it was a temple at the foot of the Theban hills, and it's a really cleverly designed structure. I'd say it's one of the most effectively designed structures of all Egypt. Her temple employs most of the grand effects of common temples, but it also makes use of open space in contrast with nature. Most of the area is based upon the experience of arrival at the temple. The wide column halls are put on top of each other, there are two ramps that bring you up to the second floor, and it's also deliberately dwarfed by the huge hills in the back. She could have built this higher, but there is a point of making this sort of look like it's part of the landscape, but also deliberately man-made as well. Hatshepsut built her temple directly next to that of Mentehotep that we saw earlier, the founder of the Middle Kingdom and this giant in the history of Egypt. So you have to ask the question, why did she build right next to this other sort of terraced thing into the mountain? And we can speculate, right? First, she was a woman. And while it was not unheard of for a woman to be pharaoh, she was not the first, it was still very rare. So she needed this to sort of claim some kind of legitimacy. Also, she was the stepmother of a young man who thought he was supposed to be pharaoh, so this connection to Mentehotep might have worked to strengthen her claim to rule as well. In this drawing, you can see that somebody put the pyramid on top of Mentehotep's tomb, so this artist believed the idea that there was a pyramid. If you watch the video with the lady with the purple hair, you'll find out that she traded with this land of Punt and she got myrrh trees from them. And that myrrh was used as a fragrance. And so she planted on that first terrace, like a row of myrrh trees to kind of create this fragrance as you walked up to the temple. So it wasn't just about being awestruck by the size, but also you were overwhelmed by other things like scent. And the myrrh trees kind of looked like a huge bush, and they're not visually impressive, but seriously, the smell is unrivaled. And myrrh was also compulsory in religious rituals, which meant you needed to have it in order to sort of waft incense around to properly worship all of the deities. Here the temple, like you used to have to trade for this, but now the temple employees could extract their own, and then they could even splurge a bit on the delicate smell. You'll find out more about this when you watch the video. In addition to rows of myrrh trees, leading from the lower ramp, there used to be these sphinxes that led all the way down to the Nile. And now several of these sphinxes are in New York in the Metropolitan Museum. I promise you, this is the conversation we're going to have about what does it mean that something that originally was in Egypt is now in New York, or Paris, or London. You can see on the bottom right that that line of sphinxes kind of leads up to the ramp, but it also corresponds exactly to the east-west axis of the Temple of Amun at Karnak, which is right across the river. So processional boats would connect the two sides of the Nile, and this allowed for these amazing festivals, rituals, processions that would happen between the two temples. Hatshepsut referred to her temple as the Splendor of Splendors. She claimed that she deserved to be pharaoh because her father willed it so. And so this is where the power struggle comes in. Thutmose II, who has a child, Thutmose III, who thinks he should be pharaoh, but Hatshepsut says, no, my father said that I was supposed to be the next pharaoh. There's no evidence of this in any of the written records. There's no evidence that Thutmose I said, yes, I should be Hatshepsut. But nonetheless, this temple that she built is kind of a symbol of the success of her diplomacy and her power as pharaoh. Now the reason we know that there was this struggle is because of the next part, which is nearly 20 years after she died, most public displays of her were destroyed. Not all of them, but just enough that the commoners wouldn't see her anymore. So now we again ask, why? Why did it take 20 years to do this? So one of the questions is, if it was her stepson, Thutmose III, who eventually did become pharaoh, why did he wait so long? Why did he wait until 20 years after she died? Why didn't he use his powers as a co-regent to overthrow her? Why did he let her rule? If it was his son, Amenhotep II that did it, maybe he did it after his father died, Thutmose III, to erase the legacy of this woman that emasculated his father? We don't really know, but we do know that it's hard to find images of Hatshepsut because of all of the different chippings away. And we also know what that means now, right? It means that she does not get to commune with the gods. She does not get to partake of the meals that are provided for her. She doesn't have a face or a name. So they really wanted to kind of destroy her. Here's another lecture question for you. I want you to compare Khufu's Pyramid and Hatshepsut's Temple. Now if you want to also talk about the complex that was around Khufu's Pyramid when you do this comparison, that's fine. But I want you to take into consideration landscape, size, ego, all that stuff when you're doing this comparison. Okay now we're moving on to my favorite pharaoh. And it's funny because he was not well-loved in Egypt, but I love it as an art historian and you'll understand why in about a minute. So this is Akhenaten, which was not his original name. There is a video, Engineering an Empire, it's about 20 minutes long, it's fantastic, it talks all about how he changed his name, everything else, how he built his city, so please watch that. But what I love about Akhenaten is that it is something different. Now in Egypt something different is bad, but to art historians it's kind of awesome. So he was the great, great grandson of Thutmose III, the guy who was kept from power by Hatshepsut. And just as Hatshepsut was unwilling to give up her rule to Thutmose III, Akhenaten was having a power struggle with those priests that ran the Temple of Amun at Tarnak, amongst other places. So Akhenaten's power struggle was between himself and the priest class, and we'll see what he does as a result of that struggle. I want you to look at this kind of disturbing image of Akhenaten breaking a duck's neck, making a sacrifice, while I kind of explain him to you. So Akhenaten is often recognizable by his elongated features, and I'll show you another image that's his body, his wife's body, and you'll understand better. In this actual image, what he's doing is he's holding this duck towards Aten, and Aten is like the disk that represents the sun, also a god. And I don't know if you can see, but the little sort of, there are little hands that are coming down from the top, they look like, maybe like golf clubs or something, but those are basically the rays of light, those little hands. Here's the big change. So Akhenaten wasn't a polytheist, he was more of a monotheist, which means he really only thought there was one divine power in the universe, and that was the Aten. Along with this break from polytheism was a break from those artistic conventions that we talked about, with those cubits and waists being a specific size and shoulders at a specific place. He messes with everything. And in this scene, Akhenaten's hands grasp the struggling duck. So already, like, that's kind of a new thing, is that there's this struggle in the art. Oftentimes it's not so violent or graphic, and it's an attempt to capture a single moment in time, which is crazy in Egyptian art, because you're supposed to have this sort of eternal quality. Another thing about this image is that it's in sunken relief, which means the artist has cut outlines of the figure into the surface. This technique was most commonly used on the exteriors of buildings, and it will make so much sense when I tell you this, that if you do this kind of sculpture on the exterior of buildings, when the light hits the building, it will emphasize the outlines and make everything pop out more, because of the shadows that are created by this sunken relief. This is a really great example of the Amarna style, which is the style that Akhenaten developed, versus the conventional Egyptian style. And you can see that Ramses came after Akhenaten, but his style looks more like traditional style. You can see on the left, the Akhenaten style, the Amarna period, is very different. You can see the belly fats, and the sort of elongated necks, and the jaws protruding. There's a lot of very strange exaggerations in this style, as opposed to the style that's more traditional. Ramses is on the right. And this is another form of his rebellion against the priest class. He's like, I'm only going to worship the Aten, I'm going to be the one in charge of worship, and our art is going to reflect these new ideas. You'll see from the Engineering an Empire video, that basically he just picked everybody up and said, we're all moving to this place in the north, in Tell al-Amarna. You get to see them sort of build everything, and then he dies, and they're like, enough of this craziness, we're going back to exactly how it was. After Akhenaten died, one of those little wiggly alien looking babies took over, and that was King Tut. Everybody knows King Tut, his name was Tutankhamun. And he moved everybody back to Thebes, he reinstated the priest class, he returned everything back to normal. And then he died like not that much longer, he was pretty young when he died. We will end with Ramses II, whose power struggle was basically with the world. He expanded the borders of the Egyptian Empire beyond what it had ever been. He was a military ruler, he conquered lands, he took power from all around Egypt. Ramses embarked on a lot of big building projects. In addition to his tomb in the Valley of the Kings, he created two massive temples. One was a cross from Karnak, it's called the Ramessium, or the Ramessium. Interestingly, Ramses referred to this temple at Karnak as the House of a Million Years. But we have not passed a million years yet, and this is the current state of the Ramessium. The temple that is still standing though, with the help of the Egyptian government from the 1960s I think, is the temple at Abu Simbel. And you can see that it is so far down on the southern border of Egypt. This marked the edge of the empire, but it had a second function as well. And that, I'm probably going to let you figure out. You can see that unlike Hatshepsut's temple, or the Temple of Amun at Karnak, this was actually built into the side of a mountain. They removed stone from the front in order to create this sort of temple entrance, but basically you have to go into this mountain to experience the temple. There are actually two temples. There's one of the queen, and then one of himself. We're going to focus on the one just of Ramses. At the front of this temple are four seated statues of the pharaoh. They are 65 feet high each, and they are seated in there, that's all. They show the ruler wearing a short kilt, a Nimes headdress, which is that cobra double headdress thing. And then he also has the false beard, which we saw on everybody since the beginning, even on Hatshepsut. Hatshepsut had to wear the false beard. Next to the legs of these four colossal statues are several smaller statues, and they represent the relatives of the pharaoh, his wife, his mother, his sons and daughters. And then at the top, I don't know if you can see it, but there is a row of 22 squatting baboons. And there is a very important reason for that, and it's basically baboons were like the roosters of Egypt, in that their cry was believed to welcome the rising sun. And we know how very important the sun is in Egyptian culture. So basically these baboons are screaming, the sun has arrived. Here's kind of a bird's eye view of the temple, if you're looking down and we can see through the mountain. The interior of the temple stretches into the mountain for about 210 feet, so it goes way back. And you'll see what happens, even though it goes way far back, it still has a connection to the sun. When you first walk in the door, well you wouldn't walk in because you weren't a priest, but let's say a priest. When a priest first walks in the door, the room that they first encounter is the atrium that is made up of eight pillars, four on each side. But those pillars are actually Ramses depicted as Osiris, the god. They're called Osiris statues. So these pillars serve a dual purpose. They are holding up this structure, and they are showing the divinity of Ramses II. On the walls of this atrium are lots of images of military victories of Ramses, specifically his victory at the Battle of Kadesh. The atrium also had a lot of empty storerooms. I know you now know what those storerooms were used for, but I'll probably ask you anyway. When you watch the Engineering an Empire video, they'll talk about this, because this is an engineering feat that's amazing. But basically, the water of the Nile River was about to rise because they built a dam, and so this thing was going to get covered up. So they had to basically move this whole mountain like 200 yards further away from the Nile. So watch the video, because that's a fascinating story on its own. Back to the monument itself, though. If you move deeper into the temple, there's a second atrium, and it has four decorated pillars, and it shows the king embracing various divinities. It's a sign of his spiritual union with the divine. And then the final, very last room, 210 feet all the way back, is this little space where there's four statues that are sitting together. There's a statue of Ramses II, and he's seated with three gods. He's seated with Ra-Hirakhti, Amun, and Ta. And two days of the year, on October 22nd and February 22nd, all of these statues, except for Ta, who is associated with the underworld, are bathed in sunlight. Does this sound like anything we've talked about before, perhaps something in Ireland? I know that I didn't really talk about Ramses' power struggle, because it's a weird one, his power struggle with the world, but I do want you to consider the temple at Abu Simbel as a sign of his power struggle, and that has to do with sort of its immensity and its geography. So when I put this question towards you, and you choose one of the three, just know that the temple at Abu Simbel does kind of represent Ramses' power struggle. Okay, that's it for Egypt. You guys did it, congratulations, and we will pick up in the Mediterranean next.