Usually, but not always, one can learn a great deal about a civilization's level of sophistication by observing its visual arts. For most of human history, until the development of the camera in the mid-1800s, drawing and other forms of visual art, such as painting and sculpture, were the primary means for recording the appearances of people and things. As societies developed, likewise their artists' ability to"see" the world developed, much as a child goes from drawing scribbles to stick figures to more detailed representations of human figures.
It is surprising, then, that the Old Kingdom society that produced the pyramids could also have produced the visual arts it did. The pyramids were built to a degree of exactness that still baffles scientists. Their design indicates that the people who created them had a great understanding of spatial relationships. The phrase spatial relationships refers to the
Space between and within objects, concepts that are also closely related to the idea of proportion. Proportion describes the size of one thing in relation to something else: if someone drew a picture of a man whose head was twice as big as his body, one would say the picture was "out of proportion."
Egyptian visual art of the Old Kingdom, however, shows little sense of spatial relationships, proportion, or perspective, which helps artists to represent faraway objects as being smaller than objects close by. The Egyptians did not know how to do this, so if they wanted to show that something was farther away, they simply put it on top of the thing that was closer. In a crowd scene, for instance, they would show the first row of men standing side by side, then the next row above them, and so on.
Along with this lack of perspective, there was a lack of depth in early Egyptian
Second phase of unrest confronted something it had not had to face before: invasion.
The conquerors were called Hyksos (HICK-sose), and they entered Egypt in about 1670 b. c. They seem to have come from the region of Palestine, later occupied by the Hebrews; in fact, it is possible that the Hyksos and the Hebrews were one and the same. Egyptian texts from the time refer to one of the Hyksos chieftains as Ya'kob, which may be a reference to the biblical name Jacob.
Artwork. Everything seemed to be flat, as though the people in the pictures were crammed up against a sheet of glass. Their bodies were turned away from the viewer in strange, unnatural ways, with their arms and legs stretched sideways, while their eyes (which always looked more or less the same) faced outward. (The title of a hit song from the 1980s, "Walk Like an Egyptian" by the Bangles, played on the weird stance of figures in Egyptian artwork.)
Egyptian artists also showed the pharaoh much larger than other men, as though he were twelve feet tall. This was not a problem with proportion: the artists simply wanted to point out that he was more important than others. By the time of the New Kingdom, however, much had changed in both society and art. to the influence of other cultures, Egyptian art had become considerably more realistic. Also, the pharaoh's status had become
More human; for example, artists during the reign of Akhenaton depicted their king with a fat stomach and skinny legs.
Still, sculpture continued to be more advanced than drawing or painting. Sculptors work in three dimensions— length, width, and depth—whereas painting or drawing involves only length and width. Though two-dimensional art improved greatly, the Egyptians still had a hard time figuring out how to translate three-dimensional figures to a flat surface. By contrast, the bust (a sculpture of ahead) of Akhenaton's wife Queen Nefertiti represents some of the most advanced and realistic artwork of the ancient world.
With the end of Akhenaton's reign in 1336 B. c. came a widespread reaction to the reforms he had brought. Part of the reaction was manifested in a return to more traditional styles of artwork, including a less realistic representation of the human figure.
Whatever the case, the Egyptians hated the Hyksos, but they were unable to resist them due to their enemies' superior military technology. Whereas the Egyptians went to war in donkey-carts, the Hyksos rode into battle in horse-drawn chariots, which made them a much more powerful fighting force. Rather than repel the Hyksos, Lower Egypt came under their domination; these were the Fifteenth and Sixteenth dynasties, composed of Hyksos kings. Other Egyptians gathered around their own pharaoh at Thebes in Upper Egypt.
The Theban pharaohs of the Seventeenth Dynasty found themselves caught between the Hyksos in the north and the kingdom of Kush in the south. At one point the Hyksos tried to become allied with the Kushites against the Egyptians, but they failed to do so. The Egyptians, meanwhile, had learned from their enemies and began to make use of chariot warfare. Led by Ahmose (AH-moze) I, they expelled the Hyksos in about 1550 b. c., a victory that opened the way for another great period in Egyptian history.
Sarcophagus lid depicting Ahmose I. Corbis/Cianni Degli Orti. Reproduced by permission.
World History
