- general
- Mediterranean: middle
- middle of three continents: Africa, Europe, Asia
- converging of tectonic plates: Crete, earthquakes
- huge area conducive to trade
- Egypt
- south of the mediterranean, north africa
- what do you think of geographically when you think of egypt or africa?
- Western Desert
- what we think of when we think of egypt
- sandy, barren, desolate
- 2/3 of the land
- cant really farm here
- actually a little less of the land in ancient egypt
- Nile river
- longest river, 4,258 miles
- floods yearly, provides minerals in silt, this dirt, that is great for farming
- yearly, could count on it, made calendar to track it
- sustainence, relied on it for food
- duality: desert & lush land
- see the idea of duality come up over and over in egyptian art
- opposites, coexisting
- death and life, connected with desert and river
- comes as no surprise then, that most of the tombs are built in the western dessert, land of the dead
- Egypt divided into two: more duality
- upper and lower egypt
- not where you'd expect
- river flows south to north; up river = upper egypt
- flora and fauna
- these are plants and animals that will show up in egyptian art
- also get a sense of what these people were surrounded by
- papyrus; make paper, ever been to met museum; grows in marshy areas
- lotus, also gows in water
- two trees: acacia and date palm
- egypt doesnt really have lots of trees, no thick trees that can supply a lot of wood
- so they use mudbrick to create homes and things lke that; also imported trees and wood from other places
- lots of different animals; scary animals; hippopotomas and crocodile; associated with the nile; life giving but also very dangerous; again, duality; see they used these forms to create their gods and mythical creatures
- Crete
- just north of egypt
- southernmost part of europe
- currently: part of the country of greece
- no concept of "greece" in the bronze age
- right at the meeting of two tectonic plates: eurasian and african plates; earthquakes; destructions in the bronze age
- quite different than egypt
- maybe 8 or 9 hours to drive from one side to the other
- crete is mountainous; good farmland though
- island; big maritime parts
- live off of the water
- lots of settlements all across crete, many in central and east
- flora and fauna
- two biggest exports are wine and olive oil; grow a lot of grapes and olives
- crocuses and lilies all over the island, all over the art
- tamarisk trees, cyprus trees as well
- see goats and bulls all throughout the artwork
- also lots of octopi and nautilus, cephalopod like an octopus or squid
- unlike egypt, there was no flooding, no such concept of duality that we know of
- good time to point out we odn't know a lot about the people of crete
- even the name minoans, is something we gave them
- writing
- a bit of a shift
- but since i mentioned we dont' know much about hte minoans
- because we don't have their language deciphered, and they didnt keep many records
- language is called Linear A, survives in clay tablets that were accidentally fired and survived
- originally they were meant to be temporary; wet clay tablets that could be wiped and written on again; destructive fires they were fired and made permanent
- know numbers, horizontal lines are numbers, a lot of times htey seem to be recording numbers of things
- Egyptian
- egyptian on the other hand, is deciphered
- deciphered in the 18th century thanks to the discovery of the rosetta stone with Napoleon Bonaparte's conquest of Egypt
- has egyptian hieroglyphs, later demotic script, and greek, which allowed Jean-Francois Champollion to translate the hieroglyphs
- hieroglyph script probably have seen before
- little pictures that represent sounds
- sacred form of writing; only select people knew them
- consonent sounds, no vowels; a lot of times you'll see names of people spelled differently, like the god Re or Ra, bc we don't know which vowels they used
- this script was thought to be magical; come to life; so the owl here could become a real owl at any time; esp. in tombs where the realm of the living and dead was kind of blurred
- sometimes you'd see snakes broken in half so that they couldn't come to life and hurt the viewer
- pretty fun
dec 12 2017 ∞
jan 1 2018 +