Jeff Searle: 2009

Friday 31 July 2009

Early civilisation: Women in art

The enormous social changes of early civilisation influenced women’s role in art.

It isn’t always possible to distinguish between women and men in prehistoric and ancient art. When it is, a society’s artistic depictions of men and women’s behaviours and activities, along with the archaeological contexts, provide valuable evidence about gender roles.

Women had been relatively equal to men under primitive communism, but suffered, in Engels’ words, a ‘world-historical defeat’ [1] with the advent of class society. We have already outlined the roots of the oppression of women, and shan’t repeat those arguments here. The degree and forms of this oppression varied from civilisation to civilisation – they had more rights in Egypt than in Greece, for example – but wherever class society existed they were pushed into a subordinate relationship with men. The situation is summed up in Genesis when God casts Adam and Eve out of Eden, and tells Eve: “thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee” [2]. In the ancient world, it was mostly assumed that men should administer society and control its wealth. This had an inevitable influence upon the arts.

The inequality of the sexes has been universal in class society, to the point that it became thought of as innate to human nature. Yet as Rosalind Miles argued in her book The Women’s History of the World, “Women have been active, competent and important through all the ages of man.” Even though women were subordinated to men, they still lived, worked, and contributed to society and culture, and many succeeded in carving out significant roles for themselves. There have always been women who managed to overcome the obstacles placed in their way.

Images of women, possibly also by women, take an immense variety of forms after the Paleolithic, far more than we can examine here. We could mention votive statuettes of women worshippers from Mesopotamia; statuettes of ageing midwives or codex drawings of the exploits of Lady Six Monkey, from Mesoamerica; clay figurines of women by the Jōmon culture of Japan; fresco paintings of ladies from the Minoan culture of Crete; and much more. Many forms, such as textiles or tattooing, are much less durable than others, so as ever we are restricted by what archaeological evidence happens to have come down to us – we must also practice caution in our interpretations.

Neolithic art

As we have discussed, images of women are predominant in the Paleolithic, mostly in the form of figurines.

Female figurine from the Cycladic
culture of the Aegean. White marble,
ca. 3000 BCE.

The creation of female figurines persists into the Neolithic, with a geographical shift towards the Mediterranean and a much greater diversity of forms, commensurate with a higher level of development and a wider variety of societies. Their purpose is often unclear: their diversity across time and space means that however tempting it may be to seek a single interpretation, we must consider each culture independently. Archaeologists have suggested that they are images of deities or of esteemed ancestors, magic tools aimed at helping women conceive, or even toys for the dead.

One of the most popular theories about Neolithic images of women is that they represent a universal ‘mother’ or ‘fertility’ goddess. Such claims are difficult to prove. There is documented evidence of a fertility goddess cult from Anatolia which post-dates the region’s figurines but does suggest that they might be early forms of such a cult. Cases like this cannot be put forward as an explanation for such images across all Eurasia, especially in the early Neolithic when religion is likely to have focused on spirits and natural forces rather than humanised deities; nor does it explain the male figurines that are often found at the same sites. Archaeologists and other commentators are sometimes too quick to label a female representation as a ‘fertility’ figure, as if that explains everything, or as an incarnation of the ‘great goddess’. In reality each culture and/or region has to be considered upon its own evidence.

It was between the early Neolithic and the rise of literate society that women lost their relative importance in food production and became increasingly subordinated to men. As gatherers, it was probably women who took the decisive steps towards agriculture, but with the advent of more intensive farming techniques – above all the introduction of the plough – the food surplus became an increasingly male sphere. It may be no coincidence that these enigmatic works of art disappear over the same period.

Gordon Childe raised the likelihood that several Neolithic crafts – pot-making, , – were the invention of women, and noted for example that a temple in Lagash listed female spinners and weavers amongst its considerable staff.[3] Pottery, one of the most distinctive Neolithic art forms, was largely made by women as a public and collective activity. When the wheel was introduced, pottery production became faster and more regular: “the making of pots by hand is a domestic craft plied by the women, whereas manufacture on the wheel is a specialised trade reserved to men” (Childe).[4] Thus pottery became an increasingly male art as it gained in status.

Weaving, which began with the making of baskets and mats, is one of the most ancient arts, often associated with women in tradition and mythology. The discovery of silk-making in ancient China (around 2700–2650 BCE) is credited by tradition to a woman named Lei-tzu, also known as ‘Si Ling-Chi’ or ‘Lady of the Silkworm’. Male weavers did exist – we see them in images from the New Kingdom in Egypt, for example – but the , one of the great inventions of agricultural society, was predominantly worked by women. Used to produce linens for clothing, household items and funerary goods, the loom used yarn created above all from cotton and wool. Ancient looms were mostly made of wood, so little has survived of them besides spindle whorls and weights. The vast majority of the textiles created are also lost (one finely preserved exception is the set of clothes found with the body of a girl at the Egtved site in Denmark). But we get an insight into their aesthetics from images such as wall-paintings that record decorative textiles and fashions [5].

Fresco image of a woman,
from Knossos, Crete. Mid-second
millenium BCE.

It is likely these were also designed by the women who made them.

In Greek mythology, it was seen as a sexual humiliation for Herakles to have to assist Omphale with her spinning. The story reminds us of the loss of status suffered by women and the activities associated with them – despite women’s indispensable role in food production, child-rearing, toolmaking and many other skills both before and after the Neolithic Revolution, ‘women’s work’ became a perjorative term.

A key expression of this loss of status is the movement away from ‘mother right’. In The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Friedrich Engels discusses the transition to monogamous marriage and its role as the core of the nuclear family, in which the woman and children were dependent upon the man. Developing alongside class society, this saw the replacement of matrilinearity or ‘mother right’ with ‘father right’ – measuring the line of descent through the father. Engels proposed an example of how this was later expressed in literature:

Bachofen [6] interprets the Oresteia of Aschylus as the dramatic representation of the conflict between declining mother-right and the new father-right that arose and triumphed in the heroic age. For the sake of her paramour, Aegisthus, Clytemnestra slays her husband, Agamemnon, on his return from the Trojan War; but Orestes, the son of Agamemnon and herself, avenges his father’s murder by slaying his mother. For this act he is pursued by the Furies, the demonic guardians of mother-right, according to which matricide is the gravest and most inexpiable crime... Apollo now comes forward in Orestes’ defence; Athena calls upon the Areopagites – the Athenian jurors – to vote; the votes for Orestes’ condemnation and for his acquittal are equal; Athena, as president, gives her vote for Orestes and acquits him. Father-right has triumphed over mother-right, the “gods of young descent,” as the Furies themselves call them, have triumphed over the Furies; the latter then finally allow themselves to be persuaded to take up a new office in the service of the new order.[7]

There is no need to jump to ancient Greece to see the effect of women’s falling status on their representation in the arts.

The early civilisations

After the Urban Revolution, the Stone Age emphasis on women in art faded away as the predominance of males became established in most societies. In the schematic art of early civilisation, males become prominent, engaging in dynamic deeds such as hunts or battles. Renfew and Bahn pointed out:

Three new dominant themes appear: weaponry, especially males with daggers; hunting images, particularly stags identified by antlers; and plowing, with oxen identified by horns. This consistent association of male form with male cultural icon – men/daggers; stags/antlers; oxen/horns – builds a symbolic system used to enact and express male gender from which an ideology of male power and vitality is created.[8]

From the Bronze Age there is an increasingly clear social distinction between the sexes, which laid the basis for a division that persists to this day. (The Egyptian practice of representing wives on a smaller scale than their husbands sums it up.) Instead of being equally respected, women were seen as ornaments, breeders, or objects of sexual pleasure. This was particularly true of ruling class women, who despite their material privileges were broadly sheltered from wider society. Women in the toiling classes, by contrast, were essential to production and so had a different experience of oppression – not least a long series of pregnancies to reproduce labour and sustain the household income.

Various cultures are held up as exceptions to this pattern. One was the diverse Iron Age Celtic culture of north-western Europe, which we shall return to when we discuss the Roman Empire and its contemporaries. Another was the Minoan culture which flourished on Crete from about 2700–1450 BCE. The Minoans were a highly civilised trading people, who created very beautiful works of art [9]. These include murals of bull-leaping where women participate alongside men on an apparently equal footing, and put a disproportionate emphasis upon female deities and priestesses; the Grand Fresco from the palace of Knossos portrays a large number of men (painted red) together with a smaller number of women (painted white) who seem to have the best seats. Such works have been cited by archaeologists and feminists as evidence that Minoan women enjoyed equal or even superior status.

Snake goddess figurine from
the palace of Knossos. Photo: Chris 73.

Some of the most regularly reproduced works are the so-called ‘snake goddess’ figurines which have been found at various Minoan sites. These terracotta statuettes, of bare-breasted women in long skirts with snakes curling around their hands, seem to be religious in purpose, perhaps representing priestesses or goddesses. Depictions in frescos show figures like these being venerated, mostly by women.

However, the anthropologist Margaret Ehrenberg sounded a note of caution about overstating the status of women because of Minoan art:

The frescos certainly show women involved in a wide variety of activities, some physical... There may well be some connection here with religious ritual, in which women, in the form either of goddesses or of cult leaders or priestesses, or both, certainly appear to predominate. But it is important to bear in mind that all the evidence comes from the palaces, which clearly were primarily occupied by the wealthy or higher strata of society, and that the frescos presumably reflect the interests of these people. Taken at face value, it certainly seems that elite women may have had more status and participated in a wider range of activities than women in many other societies. But the question of how relevant the frescos and other evidence are to the lives of most women living in Crete during the Minoan period remains unclear.[10]

The degree of oppression of women in the early civilisations varied a great deal. It seems likely that women held a respected place in Minoan society. But an emphasis upon women in art, and their likely predominance in religion, does not by itself prove they enjoyed pre-eminence in politics. To claim matriarchy existed in the Minoan culture or any other is, on the evidence, unsustainable.

Ruling class women

Given the disproportionate control of material and human resources enjoyed by the ruling class, it is no surprise that the most accomplished images portray elite women.

Disc from Ur portraying the priestess Enheduanna.
Alabaster, ca. 3rd millennium BCE.
Photo: University of Pennsylvania Museum.

One of the most significant is an alabaster disc found in the residence of a priestess in Ur. The front shows four figures approaching a ziggurat, the second of whom wears the headgear of a priestess. A cuneiform inscription mentions Enheduanna, princess of Akkad and priestess of the moon god Nanna, whom we have mentioned briefly before. Enheduanna is one of the most prominent figures from ancient Mesopotamia, and as the author of several hymns she is the earliest ever literary figure known by name. This ten-inch disc is a relative rarity in the ancient world because it honours a woman.

More impressive again are the images of female royalty. The most famous female image of the ancient period is probably Thutmose’s bust of Queen Nefertiti. But there are other lesser known works, such as the life-size bronze and copper statue of the Elamite queen Napir-Asu or the carved wooden head of Queen Tiye. One of the most interesting cases is that of the female Pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty, Hatshepsut.

Limestone sculpture of Hatshepsut.
The queen is recogniseably female, although
dressed as a king. Photo: Postdlf.

Hatshepsut occupies an unusual place in ancient history. She was exceptional in being a female Pharaoh, but she was not unique – Cleopatra VII is the most famous of the others, but we could also mention such figures as Merneith (whether she was actually a Pharaoh is unclear), Sobeknefru and Twosret. Archaeologists believe that Hatshepsut acted as regent during the minority of Thutmose III and was accepted as Pharaoh, reigning for roughly twenty-one years. Only upon her death in 1458 BCE did Thutmose take power.

One product of Hatshepsut’s very successful reign was the production of a great deal of building and statuary, including of course images of herself. The great architectural achievement of her reign is the remarkable mortuary temple at Deir el Bahari, designed by her architect Senenmut, where relief sculptures unusually tell the story of the birth of a female Pharaoh.

As Pharaoh, Hatshepsut adopted the regalia associated with kings, such as the khat headcloth and even the traditional false beard. As Gay Robins observed:

The majority of Hatshepsut’s images show her as a male king in male dress and without female breasts. A few, however, show her in female dress. It is possible that when she proclaimed herself king, artists tried to reconcile her biologically female sex with what was traditionally a male gender role. The result may have been felt to be unsatisfactory, since for most of her reign Hatshepsut was represented by the conventional image of a male king.[11]

Whether Hatshepsut wore male clothing in real life is not as important as the fact that over time she felt an increasing need to adopt a more masculine appearance in art to legitimise herself as a ruler.

Female Pharaohs were very exceptional cases, of course. Here is Gay Robins again to put it into context:

Women could not hold office and benefit from its privileges, so that their status accrued mainly from that of their parents or their husbands. The male monopoly of office is reflected in the art through the far greater number of monuments owned by men than women, and through the gender hierarchy that privileged husbands over wives by generally giving them the primary position in both two- and three-dimensional compositions. Nevertheless, the frequent inclusion of wives, mothers and other female relatives on the monuments of men suggests they had a salient role within society. The nature of their contribution is indicated by the idealised female image used to depict women of all ages. As well as embodying an aesthetic concept of feminine beauty, the youthful image that frequently reveals the form of the body stresses the role of women as potential child-bearers, on whom the continuity of the family and society depended.

Some of the best images of lower class women are also from Egypt. They were not created because artists had a documentary interest in depicting workers. Rather, they take the form of ‘servant statuettes’ buried in tombs so that nobles would still be provided for after death.

Woman making bread. Photo: Einsamer Schütze.

Made of stone and later increasingly of wood, many of these illustrate women baking, brewing, carrying baskets, grinding grain and carrying out other day-to-day work, and have a directness and realism at odds with the idealised images of aristocratic women.

Egyptologist Jaromir Malek commented: “Women were involved in the manufacture of everyday objects such as textiles and pottery, which form some of the most attractive products of ancient art” [12]. But there is little evidence, across all the ancient world, of women participating in large-scale works of art or in workshops as professional craftspeople or artists.

Fertility and sexuality

Regarding the figurines of the Stone Age, we have advised a cautious approach to their proposed role in ‘fertility’ cults or rituals. The early civilisations, by contrast, devised many deities responsible for pregnancy, birth and reproduction both in humans and in nature as a whole. The cult of fertility made particular reference to women, not least because of their role in childbirth, and perhaps also their likely role in the discovery of agriculture.

Fertility was important firstly because of the reproduction of the species, itself tied to the compelling subject of sex. It was also a key theme in agricultural societies whose wealth was hard-won from the soil and who lived in fear of famine. Animal fertility was important for replenishing a community’s livestock, and it was women who bore the main burden of producing more hands to work the land. In the ancient world it was considered women’s duty to bear children, leading to a pregnancy rate significantly higher than that under primitive communism. Eleanor Leacock was not just speaking for the modern world when she wrote: “In some ways it is the ultimate alienation in our society that the ability to give birth has been transformed into a liability.”[13]

A variety of goddesses relating to the earth, fertility and birth can be found in the ancient world – such as the Egyptian Isis or the Greek Gaia – who appear in creation stories and a wide variety of other works of art. In Mesopotamia, the most important figure connected to fertility was a goddess known as Inanna to the Sumerians, Ishtar to the Babylonians.

Babylonian relief of Ishtar, ca. 1700 BCE.
Photo: seriykotik1970.

Inanna was also responsible for sexual love and, curiously given its male-dominated nature, also for warfare [14]. Among her artistic incarnations are the Warka vase, on which she is depicted in an agricultural context receiving gifts; the female poet Enheduanna’s hymn, the Nin-me-sara, or ‘Exhaltation of Inanna’; and her role in the Ur III poem Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta.

Goddesses were essential in the ancient pantheons, but they tended to become objects of beauty and motherhood/fertility. There are few male equivalents for such female deities of beauty and sex as Inanna, Aphrodite/Venus, and Astarte. The trend was for the old goddesses to be gradually demoted and made subordinate to ruling male deities. An example of this is the overthrow of Tiamat by Marduk in Tablet IV of the Babylonian creation epic, the Enuma Elish:

He seized the spear and burst her belly,
He severed her inward parts, he pierced her heart.
He overcame her and cut off her life;
He cast down her body and stood upon it.

When the single deity of the Abrahamic religions became ascendant in the Middle East, he was created in a male image.

As women lost status relative to their husbands, their sexuality too became male property, something which should be constrained to guarantee the legitimacy of the husband’s children. The term ‘patriarchy’ – rule of the father over the household – is often misused, but in the ancient world it actually prevailed.

This had a strong influence upon representations of female sexuality. Women tend to be presented in terms of their physical attractiveness to men. We could take countless examples of this. One is the way female garments in art tend to reveal the body shape underneath (as in the less well-known image of Nefertiti here), along with a tendency to expose the breasts and clearly delineate the pubic area. Or to take a literary example, in the Epic of Gilgamesh the two main female characters are both seen in sexual roles. Not only does Ishtar tempt the hero, but a harlot seduces his companion Enkidu and acclimatises him to human culture against the animals with whom he used to live, in an equation of prostitution with civilisation:

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.[15]

But there was more to it than that – sexuality potentially gave women the ability to overturn the ‘normal’ power balance between the sexes, and was viewed with deep suspicion. The Sumerian deity Lilith, a demon who appears from around 4000 BCE, and for whom there is again no male equivalent, was not only lascivious and a prostitute but was also associated with bringing disease and death.[16] The Hebrew story of Salome is a classic example of a woman portrayed as using her sexuality to bring ruin upon a man (John the Baptist).

The sexualisation of women has been characteristic in class society, because when women became subordinate to men it was possible to exploit them. In the early civilisations we can see the birth of stereotypes that in more recent times have given us the academic nude and the fashion model. It would be wrong to claim that women of that period never had any ability to determine their own lives. But just as the ruling class has always had the greatest power to define the form and content of art, so too have men broadly been able to define the representation of women.

Conclusion

We have here only offered a few snapshots of the changing representation of women in art, and risk, as in any short survey, over-simplifying an immense and complex subject.

It is only in the last fifty or so years that the study of the particular experience of women has been taken seriously. The traditional approach of seeing art as the product of ‘Great Men’ has been consistently challenged and exposed, especially by feminists, and today has generally been abandoned by serious academics.

Reconstructing what works of art meant at the time they were created, without the distorting prism of modern Western values, styles and assumptions, is perhaps impossible. Archaeological evidence is incomplete, and much of what survives, such as literary records, will have been written by men. There are all sorts of reasons why ancient evidence cannot necessarily be taken at face value as representations of women, their lives and their contribution to culture. Some of the love poems of ancient Egypt for example are written in a female voice, which invites speculation that they were also written by women, but there is no way of knowing that they are not examples of males writing from female viewpoints [17]. There is also great diversity in how different societies across the world responded to social and historical change. The subordination of women did not follow a smooth, linear pattern, or one that can be easily applied to every culture. We must also remember that ruling class women had a different experience of oppression to that of women of the toiling classes.

It would be completely wrong to see all women post-Neolithic Revolution as passive victims of male oppression, and there is often a big gap between what a dominant ideology declares about a society and how that society actually is. However, we can assert that from the advent of class society there was a sexual division of labour, and a relative inferiority of social status for women, that greatly influenced how women were portrayed in art.

Thursday 16 July 2009

Early civilisation: Art and religion

Myth was described by Herbert Jennings Rose as ‘the result of the working of a naive imagination upon the facts of experience’ [1]. This applies equally to religion. Humans observe natural phenomena such as floods, thunder, the apparent passage of the sun across the sky, etc, and ‘the imagination is commonly set going by an object that appears wonderful or puzzling’. At a time when a poorly developed science was unable to provide many answers, humans’ attempts to understand their environment turned to the supernatural – how else to address the mysteries of the origins of the cosmos without the theory of the Big Bang?

There is no place for religion in scientific, materialist thinking. Religion is closely linked with idealism, the philosophical position that mind has primacy over matter, the laws of the universe being decided by the greatest mind conceivable – that of God, or the ‘absolute Idea’, or what have you. Gods, votive rituals and so on are invented by human beings, and are historical and social in origin. Nonetheless, supernatural beliefs have influenced art probably since its first flowering, so critics need to appreciate the ways in which religion and art interact.

We have already discussed religion in Neolithic art. Here we will take a look its role in the early civilisations. The subject is so huge that we must restrict ourselves to a few general observations.

Highly organised and ritualised religion, with complex deities, became a prominent part of human society from the time we had something to lose. As agriculturalists, our way of life depended upon rhythms and forces that were completely out of our control, and which could mean disaster for us. Every natural event was seen as an act of the gods. Through the notion that these gods could be appeased and worshipped to keep their goodwill, we sought to gain more control over our environment. When such supplication coincided with improvements in human conditions, religion was considered to be vindicated. When ineffective, it was taken as evidence that these were indeed unpredictable and unknowable beings.

Gordon Childe pointed out that successful civilisations had hit upon a way of life that worked – why should they change how they did things?

The success of simply equipped societies depends on everyone doing what has proved to be the right thing at the right time and in the proper way; it imposes a complete pattern of behaviour on all the community’s members. This pattern finds expression in social institutions and in traditional rules and prohibitions. It is sanctified by magico-religious beliefs and fears. Just as the practical acts of life are accompanied by appropriate rites and ceremonies, so mystical forces are supposed to watch over the traditional rules and avenge any transgression of them. The established economy is reinforced by an appropriate ideology.[2]

Religion has usually, though by no means always, played a conservative role ever since. In Ludwig Feuerbach, Engels outlined the origins of religion from a different angle:

From the very early times when men, still completely ignorant of the structure of their own bodies, under the stimulus of dream apparitions came to believe that their thinking and sensation were not activities of their bodies, but of a distinct soul which inhabits the body and leaves it at death – from this time men have been driven to reflect about the relation between this soul and the outside world. If, upon death, it took leave of the body and lived on, there was no occasion to invent yet another distinct death for it. Thus arose the idea of immortality, which at that stage of development appeared not at all as a consolation but as a fate against which it was no use fighting, and often enough, as among the Greeks, as a positive misfortune. The quandary arising from the common universal ignorance of what to do with this soul, once its existence had been accepted, after the death of the body, and not religious desire for consolation, led in a general way to the tedious notion of personal immortality. In an exactly similar manner, the first gods arose through the personification of natural forces.[3]

The early civilisations were : they worshipped pantheons [4] of gods, often seeing one particular god as ruling over the others. These gods probably originated, as Engels observes, from a variety of spirits and supernatural forces, and evolved into a kind of extended family around which a system of core beliefs was developed. But in the sun worship of Akhenaten, or in the patron deities of city states in Mesopotamia, the roots of can already be seen. As Engels goes on:

And these gods in the further development of religions assumed more and more extramundane form, until finally by a process of abstraction, I might almost say of distillation, occurring naturally in the course of man’s intellectual development, out of the many more or less limited and mutually limiting gods there arose in the minds of men the idea of the one exclusive God of the monotheistic religions.

As we implied at the beginning, belief in deities only became a possibility when our species acquired an imagination. The fluid human consciousness, able to make associations and connections regardless of whether they were physically possible, allowed us to conceive of beings who lived forever – a combination of human sentience with the longevity of nature (to a human, landscape features like mountains or the ocean seem like they exist forever).

But of course, these beings don’t exist, and can therefore never be seen, heard or experienced. Human society compensates for this partly through works of art. The archaeologist Steven Mithen wrote:

Ideas about supernatural beings are unnatural in the sense that they conflict with our deeply evolved, domain-specific understanding of the world. As a consequence they are difficult to hold within our minds and to transmit to others... Matthew Day, a professor of religious studies, has recently written, ‘one of the bedevilling problems about dealing with gods is that... they are never really there’; hence we have difficulty in knowing not only how to communicate with them, but also how to think about them...

Modern humans compensate for this by the use of material symbols that provide ‘cognitive anchors’. Whether supernatural beings are made tangible in a representational manner, as we suppose is the case with the lion/man from Hohlenstein Stadel, or in abstract form as in the Christian cross, such material symbols function to help conceptualise and share the religious entities and ideas in which one believes.[5]

Thus a community can share its ideas about religion by the use of music, figurines, ritual, special clothes, hymns, scriptures and so on that emphasise a common set of beliefs and group identity. Such forms provide religion with the concreteness which it cannot, of itself, possess. Without them, it is hard to see how religion could exist as a coherent structure or exercise any mass influence.

Religious beliefs provided a cosmological scheme to explain everything in the world, and played a huge role in shaping the ideologies upon which works of art were predicated. They influenced an immense number and variety of artistic forms: gorgeously designed and decorated temples; lavish tombs aimed at sending aristocrats safely to the afterlife; countless paintings, statues and other images on religious themes; stories and songs about the creation of the world and the deeds of the gods; and so on.

We can’t discuss every civilisation here, so let’s take a look at the Mesopotamian culture(s), and draw out some generalisations.

In Mesopotamia, a paradigm was established that was to persist for three millennia. The land was considered to be literally the property of the gods, and each city-state was not only dedicated to a deity but was thought to belong to that deity (Sippar to Shamash, Nineveh to Ishtar, etc). In George Roux’s words, “the mighty Assyrian monarchs whose empire extended from the Nile to the Caspian Sea were the humble servants of their god Assur just as the governers of Lagash who ruled over a few square miles of Sumer were those of their god Ningirsu.”[6] Religious ideas permeated the whole of Mesopotamian society: in their daily routines, their social structure, and in their art. One of the most important pieces of Mesopotamian literature that has survived, the Babylonian Enuma Elish, is a creation myth, and the gods intervene into human affairs in the Epic of Gilgamesh just as they do in Homer.

We know a good deal about early Mesopotamian religious beliefs, thanks mostly to texts preserved in libraries at Nippur, Assur and Nineveh. Sumer had a pantheon of hundreds of deities, each assigned to a particular area and covering everything from the sun to ploughs. Since these deities were ‘never really there’, it was to human behaviour that the Sumerians looked for a model. Here is Roux again:

These gods, like the Greek gods, had the physical appearance and all the qualities and defects of human beings: they were highly intelligent but could run out of ideas; they were good in general, but also capable of evil thoughts and deeds; they were subject to love, hatred, anger, jealousy and all other human passions; they ate and drank and got drunk; they quarrelled and fought and suffered and were wounded and could even die – i.e. go and live in the Netherworld. In brief, they represented the best and worst of human nature on a superhuman scale.

We may generalise here and say that for this reason, religious art, despite the superhumanity of the deities involved, always has a human character. When we look at images of gods in friezes, sculptures, frescos and other forms, it is men and women we see before us. And these men and women live in something resembling the conditions of human society at the time. We are reminded here of Marx:

Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc... We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process. The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises.[7]

Or, as he put it in his fourth Thesis on Feuerbach, “the earthly family is... the secret of the holy family”.

Stela of Shamshi-Adad V from the Assyrian city
of Nimrud, ca. 820 BCE. The king stands next to
the symbols of his main gods;
from left to right: Ishtar, Adad, Sin,
Shamash and Ashur. Photo: nrares

True, the Mesopotamian deities were not always represented in human form: Enlil appeared as a bull, Shamash as a sun, Inanna as an evening star.

But the briefest look at their behaviour makes their nature very clear, as in the episode from the Epic of Gilgamesh where the goddess Inanna tries to seduce the hero:

When Gilgamesh placed his crown on his head,
a princess Ishtar raised her eyes to the beauty of Gilgamesh.
‘Come along, Gilgamesh, be you my husband,
to me grant your lusciousness.
Be you my husband, and I will be your wife.’

Gilgamesh spurns her advances, citing the many cases of lovers she has taken and abandoned in the past:

See here now, I will recite the list of your lovers...
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 muddled waters,
you ordained far 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. [8]

The passage tells us nothing about the operations of the cosmos, but a great deal about the loves and lusts of humans and a particular (fearful and disapproving) attitude towards female sexuality.

Not only were the individual gods created in humanity’s image, with very human jealousies, needs, passions, etc, but religion echoed the social hierarchy of human class society. Some gods were more powerful than others. At the apex of the Sumerian pantheon was An, the ruler of the heavens – beneath him were Enlil, god of the air, and Enki, god of the earth and the waters. Beneath them were further deities such as the moon-god Nanna (Sin), the sun-god Utu (Shamash), the love goddess Inanna (Ishtar). Other deities were important only in their own towns, or represented the humble brick or pickaxe.

Image of the sun-god Shamash (right), before a king and his attendants.
Stone tablet, 9th century BCE. Shamash appears much larger and in
repose, emphasising his greater status. This is similar to how
human kings are portrayed in relation to their subjects throughout
Bronze Age art.

So religion was an expression, as well as a mainspring, of the ideologies of the early civilisations. These ideologies overwhelmingly promoted the interests of the ruling class. Divine support was a means of legitimising the inequalities in class society, and thus hugely important in explaining why religion was taken so seriously; Marx refers to priests as ‘the first form of ideologists’.[9] The alliance between kings and priests is made clear by the many holy rituals that associate the nobility with religion. Kings of Ur participated in a ceremony on New Year’s Day in which they climbed the ziggurat to be symbolically married to Inanna, the goddess of fertility, and the Akkadian king Narâm-Sin declared himself a god, thus winning his home city the distinction of being the seat of a divine being. In Egypt, the Pharaoh was technically the highest priest of all, who delegated the necessary rituals to lower ranks.

This does not mean that religion may be reduced to a tool of ruling class oppression. Marx’s understanding was more complex. One of his key statements was made in the Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right:

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless circumstances.[10]

Religion is the product of a human race alienated from itself, oppressed by its system of production. Marx referred to this as an ‘inverted world’, in which humans created gods in their own image and then worshipped them as all-powerful. Far more than a weapon wielded in a class war, it is “the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form... the fantastic realisation of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality.”

As John Raines pointed out, “for Marx the essence of religion is its voicing of ‘suffering’ – its crying out against the realities of exploitation and degradation.”[11] For this reason alone it would be wrong to reject it out of hand – Raines cites the example of Black slaves in the Americas for whom religious songs were a collective expression of their search for dignity. Religion’s obvious failing – not being true – need not concern us from an aesthetic point of view, for reasons we will explore another time. Art is no less valuable for drawing inspiration from fictional deities instead of, say, realistic but equally fictional humans. Religion in ancient times was science, ethics, philosophy and law – our attempt to explain the unexplainable. It was therefore inseparable from art.

Religion is entwined with the cultural products of civilisation to the point that objects with no direct religious purpose must still be understood within the context of that society’s religions if its full meaning is to be explored. Take for example this work from Egypt:

Model of painted wood, ca. 2000 BCE. Photo: Gérard Ducher.

This model seems to be an entirely secular depiction of farmers herding cattle. Yet it was found, among other models, in the tomb of a noble called Meketre. Ancient Egyptian burials often included images of servants performing daily chores, soldiers marching, etc, so that the dead noble might continue to enjoy them in the afterlife. If it were not for religion, this model might never have been made at all.

Obviously no work of art can be reduced to its religious value alone. The Pyramids, for example, embody many meanings simultaneously – they are religious buildings aimed, we believe, at assisting the Pharaoh’s passage to the afterlife; they are the summation of Egyptian mathematics, engineering and construction skills; they are aesthetic creations of great beauty, along with the funerary objects put inside them; and they are massive affirmations of the power of the ruling class. But again: remove religion from this totality, and the Pyramids would simply not have been built.

[1] Herbert Jennings Rose, A Handbook of Greek Mythology (1928). This has been updated as The Routledge Handbook of Greek Mythology (2008).
[2] Childe, Man Makes Himself (1936).
[3] Engels, ‘Part 2: Materialism’ from Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (1886).
[4] This should not be equated with pantheism, a concept which includes ‘belief in many gods’ but also “the belief that God exists in and is the same as all things, animals and people within the universe” (Cambridge Dictionary).
[5] Steve Mithen, The Singing Neanderthals (2005).
[6] Georges Roux, Ancient Iraq (1964, rev. 1992).
[7] Marx and Engels, ‘Part 1 A: Idealism and Materialism’ from The German Ideology (1845).
[8] Tablet 6 of the Epic of Gilgamesh.
[9] Marx and Engels, op. cit.
[10] Marx, Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1843).
[11] John Raines, Marx on Religion (2002).

Thursday 18 June 2009

Early civilisation: The art of ancient Egypt

Around 10,000–5000 years ago at the turn of the Pleistocene, north Africa was becoming dryer. Its inhabitants moved towards the Nile, a 4000-mile water source that ran like a thread through the arid landscape. Not only did the river attract game animals, its periodic floods made the neighbouring land fertile and ideal for growing crops. In Jaromir Malek’s phrase, “ancient Egypt was created by the Nile”.[1]

A chain of cities grew up along the river, uniting in around 3100 BCE to produce a civilisation we now know as ancient Egypt. Large-scale agriculture required organisation and centralisation, and this, combined with the wealth created by surpluses, formed the basis of a class structure whose social apex was a god-king, the Pharaoh. The pre-eminence of the Pharaoh and his relationship to the divine and the dead is inseparable from Egypt’s most accomplished art.

The making of Egypt

Egypt was home to a series of Neolithic cultures that produced pottery, rock art, jewellery, statuettes and other items, often preserved as grave goods. By the end of this Predynastic period and in transition from the Naqada II culture, the region began to be unified and we find evidence of an emerging hierarchy. Egyptian tradition credits this to a king named Menes, who may simply represent a number of early leaders in the period 3200–3000 BCE. In this context, the Narmer Palette is very significant. Made around 3150 BCE, it depicts the king Narmer, who is believed by some historians to have brought together the north and south, or to be one of several kings responsible.

The Narmer Palette, carved from siltstone and found in the ancient town of Hierakonpolis.
Large image here.

Egyptian culture of the pharaonic period had its own character from the beginning, building upon its Neolithic antecedents. The Palette already shows a recogniseably ‘Egyptian’ style with its strict sense of order, arrangement into bands or ‘registers’, and the characteristic stylisation of the figures. From this point art “became the main vehicle for expressing the ideology on which the Egyptian kingdom was based, especially the definition of the role of the king in Egyptian society and his relationship to the gods and to ordinary Egyptians” (Malek).

The Egyptians rapidly mastered a variety of art forms, such as carvings, pottery, furniture, metalworking, glassworking, sculpture and architecture, and absorbed new forms and materials as their civilisation developed. Native materials included an abundance of stone, such as diorite, alabaster and limestone, whereas others were imported: copper from Sinai, timber from Palestine, gold from Nubia. The decorative material called faience, in which a core of powdered quartz was coated in a glaze, often in a rich blue, was moulded into a range of small items. The human body itself was adorned with makeup, kohl being used as a distinctive eye paint.

The conventions of Egyptian art seem to have been established by the beginning of the Dynastic period, within a space of a few generations. This speed was in marked contrast to the conservatism that followed.

The ancient artist was a specialist employed by priests and princes, kept busy in workshops attached to temples and palaces. These roles were often handed from father to son. Reliefs and paintings show us craftsmen making sculptures, making music and dancing, etc. Egyptian artists had the financial and intellectual resources of a powerful civilisation behind them, and boasted some of the most impressive artistic achievements of the ancient world. The best works have been equalled but arguably never surpassed.

The form of Egyptian art

As with other early civilisations, little of Egypt’s art could be described as ‘art for art’s sake’. Egyptian art was functional, either as an everyday item or as a political, funerary or religious object. This functionality does not detract from its value as art. Instead, the aesthetic and functional aspects of an object went hand in hand.

The aesthetic aspects aligned with a particular way of seeing. Modern Western artistic practice since the Renaissance, influenced by bourgeois individualism, has tended to show how the world looks to one individual at one moment, as if through the lens of a camera. The Egyptians showed little awareness of perspective, and never discovered the dynamic three-dimensional modelling mastered by the Greeks. This was not down to the shortcomings of their artists – anyone doubting their ability to work naturalistically need only look at the portrait busts of Nefertiti or Vizier Ankh-haf, or later the haunting Faiyum mummy portraits.

Bust of Nefertiti, ca. 1350 BCE.
Painted stucco on a limestone core.

Rather, individualism and ephemerality had nothing in common with the worldview of this ancient civilisation, whose artists worked according to very different conventions to our own. Rather than attempting the illusion of space, ancient Egyptian art was schematic, or diagrammatic. It used flat colours and shapes and generally had a very shallow sense of depth. It is therefore no surprise that relief was a popular form, either raised, where the surrounding stone was cut away from the image, or sunk, where the image was cut into the surrounding stone. Painting used the same visual style but was cheaper and allowed a little more freedom.

The goal of Egyptian art was to preserve the appearance of things as completely as possible, without foreshortening. Each element of an object was drawn from the angle at which its appearance was most typical, then assembled into a whole that was not naturalistic, but was in its own way consistent.

In two dimensions, the head is shown in profile but the eye and eyebrow are seen as if from straight ahead. The chest is shown frontally, but the waist is in profile, and the limbs are shown from the side so their articulation is most clear. The left foot is advanced so that we may see there are two feet. One method of ideological differentiation between figures is scale: an important person, usually male, is drawn bigger than his wife, children, servants or subjects. Various other rules follow, for example that we are sometimes allowed to see through the side of a box or vase so that an object inside can be seen in full. Men tend to be painted red and women yellow.

Agricultural scene from the tomb of Nakht, 18th Dynasty Thebes, showing the distinctive Egyptian conventions for rendering two-dimensional figures.

Most images come side by side with texts describing what is happening, who is shown, or other information. Stylised images blend seamlessly with hieroglyphs, which are themselves pictures and become a part of the composition.

The result was a precise and predictable rendering of the subject. Egyptian artists drew what they knew was there, not what they saw – their art was not only schematic but conceptual. This doesn’t mean that artists were entirely oblivious to perspective, viewpoint and so on, or that there were no deviations at all. See how the feet of the bottom two farmers above are invisible because they are standing amidst their crops. Artists found ways to introduce subtle variations to avoid monotony, and the static and highly conventionalised figures of gods and aristocrats contrast with more freely treated images of the lower classes. Paintings of animals in particular, perhaps because less depended upon animals’ place in the hierarchy, show a very keen eye for naturalistic detail and texture (see for example the famous image from the Tomb of Nebamun, whose unusually lively images have earned the unknown artist the label ‘the Michelangelo of antiquity’).

The use of colour complements the scheme, as it is taken from a very limited palette and applied flat without variations in shade. Objects are clearly outlined, mostly in black. Equally complementary is the use of registers, that is, the organisation of figures along horizontal lines that, one on top of the other, form vertical strips. Again the emphasis is upon symmetry, uniformity and clarity.

No treatises on art from ancient Egypt have come down to us. But an insight into the Egyptians’ methods can be gained from the unfinished tomb of Horemheb, and from a drawing at the tomb of Ramose, governor of Thebes at Luxor. Perhaps because of political upheaval or the moving of Ramose to Amarna, the tomb was not quite finished, and the drawing shows clearly the lines of a grid marked in red paint. The grid was established by 2000 BCE and appears time and again in both painting and sculpture – imposing a predictable and idealised order upon artists’ work.

A similar grid technique was used to mark out sections on a block of stone in preparation for a sculpture.

Statue of Khafra.
Photo: José-Manuel Benito.

There was no role in ancient Egypt for the lithe and transitory dynamics of the human body later explored by the Greeks. Egyptian statues at their best are powerful and beautifully finished – they are also schematic extensions of the system we have just explored. The left foot of standing figures is set a little forward, just as the feet of painted figures were separated, and all gaze to the front in static poses. We must overcome any temptation to criticise this, because the statues were designed for a particular context. As votive images in which the gods manifested themselves, they were addressed frontally, and were often set into niches from which only a frontal approach was possible. Arnold Hauser offered a further insight:

In the frontal representation of the human figure, the forward turning of the upper part of the body is the expression of a definite and direct relationship to the onlooker... [It] makes a direct approach to the receptive subject; it is an art which both demands and shows public respect. Its approach to the beholder is an act of reverence, of courtesy and etiquette. All courtly and courteous art, intent on bestowing fame and praise, contains an element of the principle of frontality – of confronting the onlooker, the person who has commissioned the work, the master whom to serve and delight is the artist’s duty.[2]

Art and the Egyptian worldview

The schematic approach to art did not arise randomly. It was partly influenced by Egypt’s geography: isolated by deserts on the west and east and by the sea to the north, and built upon the mostly predictable floods of the Nile. The Egyptians distinguished between the ‘black land’, or cultivable area darkened by the Nile inundations, and the ‘red land’, the inhospitable deserts that surrounded it. The Pharaoh acted as the guarantor of fertility in the face of barrenness, of order amidst chaos. Malek argues that this duality between order and chaos is “all-pervading” in Egyptian art:

The examples are endless, and careful observation of almost any Egyptian work of art will reveal them... That the concept of duality encouraged balance and equivalence, especially in architecture, is immediately obvious to the viewer. Egyptian symmetry always emphasises the contrasting character of the two elements rather than that of two identical components, so that the balance is never absolute and can be more aptly described as opposition.[3]

Just as the human order was supposedly unchanging, so too was the cosmic. The Pharaohs mediated between humanity and heaven, ensuring the smooth running of the natural and human worlds, so challenging the order they represented was an affront to the gods [4]. The rules of art themselves were of divine origin and must be respected. As observed by the art historian H. W. Janson:

Since the scenes depict solemn and, as it were, timeless rituals, our artist was not concerned with the fact that this method of depicting the human body made movement or action almost impossible. Indeed, the frozen quality of the image seems well suited to the divine nature of the pharaoh. Mere mortals act; he simply is.[5]

Janson writes here about the Narmer Palette, but he might as well be describing any ancient Egyptian image. Egyptian art was produced under royal patronage, and its conventions were predicated upon the values of the ruling class. These interests were characterised by a preoccupation with stasis, permanence and a geometrical sense of order. This tendency can be seen in the art of other early civilisations, but perhaps most of all in Egypt, where art’s purpose was the creation of an idealised world, abstract and timeless. Realism and historical accuracy were not very important – thus scenes and exploits attributed to particular monarchs sometimes re-occur, ascribed to another monarch, centuries later. This is one reason why we must be cautious before interpreting scenes in Egyptian art as historically correct records of everyday life.

It is not hard to see the material basis of this worldview: the nobility created by the Neolithic Revolution had an absolute right to rule over everyone else, and lived in opulence in finely furnished houses with lots of servants. Little wonder they insisted this arrangement should not be changed, and encouraged ideologies that helped perpetuate it.

One of the most powerful of these ideologies was of course religion. Egypt had hundreds of gods, some of them – such as Amun, Horus, Re and Osiris – more important than others. Their importance is nowhere clearer than in the huge amount of art created for the dead. The Egyptians believed that it was proper to provide for the afterlife – of the aristocracy, at any rate – so that it might be conducted in much the same way as before. This meant the storage not only of food, furniture, weapons and so on but of ‘art objects’ as well. The decorated tombs built for members of the ruling class were designed to last, just like the mummified remains inside, and those that were not plundered by robbers kept works of art protected.[6] (The most complete collection of funerary objects to survive was found in the tomb of Tutankhamun.) Beginning as relatively modest box-like structures called mastabas, which had a burial chamber under the ground, Egyptian tombs progressed to step pyramids such as that of Djoser at Saqqara (“so that [the King] may mount up to heaven thereby”, as one inscription put it), and then to the perfected form exemplified by the great pyramids at Giza.

The step pyramid of Djoser at Saqqara, ca. 2800 BCE. Photo: Buyoof.

Other architectural forms included pylons, obelisks, and temples, the grandest of which is the one dedicated to Amun at Karnak. Art on this scale required not only central organisation but mass labour – it had a massive effect upon the everyday life of thousands of people.

Not all Egyptian artworks were masterful homages to the gods and aristocracy. Alongside the masterpieces now illustrated in art books and displayed by museums, there were a great number of cruder or less imposing works. The Egyptologist Gay Robins commented:

The difference between those objects that we prize as high-quality art and those we relegate to storage frequently derives from the status of their owners. The prized objects prove on examination to have been made almost invariably for kings and their high-ranking officials; the lesser pieces were usually commissioned by people lower in the social hierarchy. Since the king and his top officials commanded the most resources in ancient Egypt, it follows that they had access to the best artists... People of lesser rank who could not get access to first-class artists had to accept work from second-rate talents.[7]

Many craftspeople worked among the common people, and although the work was of lower quality, it was still important to them and offered a mix of the practical and the aesthetic. We have models of butchers, brewers or women grinding grain; musical instruments including the flute, harp and tambourine; erotic statuettes; even children’s toys. Modest secular objects included jewellery, mirrors, vases, game-boxes and decorated utensils such as combs. And one of the treasures of ancient Egyptian art is its poetry, which is more intimate, secular and human than the great works of public art and expresses feelings with which we can easily identify. Here is an excerpt from The Flower Song:

To hear your voice is pomegranate wine to me:
I draw life from hearing it.
Could I see you with every glance,
It would be better for me
Than to eat or to drink.

There were also variations across Egypt’s long history, such as the breakthroughs of individuality and turn to everyday subjects seen in the politically fractured Middle Kingdom. In this period the eternal confidence of the kings appears to have been shaken by years of internal warfare, as seen for example in statues of Senwosret III (example here), whose worldweary expressions betray the burden of rule. Religion was reinterpreted over the centuries, and there was a temporary break with tradition during the reign of Akhenaten. So Egyptian art is not quite as static and unchanging as has often been portrayed, although it showed a remarkable continuity over 3500 years.

Art of the Amarna period

The artists of ancient Egypt were expected to produce art that belonged to one official style, with little room for ‘self-expression’ or experimentation. There are thousands of human figures depicted in tomb paintings but all follow the same conventions. The forms for two- and three-dimensional art were ordained by the creator god Ptah, and artists’ duty was to keep to these eternal rules as closely as they could. Also, we know from evidence at sites like Deir el-Medina, home to workers on the tombs of the Valley of the Kings, that artists worked in teams under close state supervision. It is a great lesson in the relative and social origin of our assumptions about art that despite these restrictive conditions, Eygptian artists created some of the great art of all time. They seem to have felt no need to sign their work or ‘immortalise’ themselves [8]. The only people to be immortalised were their aristocratic patrons, who were the principal audience for the art that glorified them and assisted their passage into the afterlife. This does not mean that all art was identical. As Malek pointed out, “the creativity of Egyptian artists lay in producing a new and pleasing combination using known elements”.

Egypt’s great example of aesthetic deviation was the so-called Amarna period, roughly corresponding to the reign of Akhenaten (1353–1335 BC) and taking its name from the new capital city [9]. Akhenaten, originally named Amenhotep IV, rejected the state pantheon and tried to create a cult to the sun-god Aten, a new world view celebrated in the monotheistic text Hymn to the Aten. This dramatic shift in religion was matched by a shift in art, though it is unclear how far Akhenaten intervened to bring this about. Amarna art introduces a new aesthetic language. Temples were built with courts open to the sun; diverse deities disappeared from reliefs and were replaced with new realistic subjects; and conventions softened to allow figures to show emotion, individualised details, and a languid sense of movement.

A relief in limestone of a royal couple, in the Amarna style,
ca. 1330 BCE.

The bust of Nefertiti already illustrated belongs to this period, found in the remains of the workshop of the sculptor Thutmose at Amarna. In it we see some of the elongation typical of the sculpture of the period. Akhenaten himself was portrayed in a very distinctive way, with an long head, almond eyes and thick lips, and feminine body. The reasons for this are still debated.

The essence of the innovations of Amarna art is a significant shift in ideology. As the old gods were replaced with monotheism, the old artistic conventions were shaken as well. As Hauser put it, “the formalism of the Middle Kingdom yields both in religion and art to a dynamic and naturalistic approach which encourages men to delight in making new discoveries.”

After Akhenaten’s death, his successor Tutankhamun renounced the new religion and artistic conventions were quietly restored. Already in Tutankhamun’s funerary goods, only glimpses remain of the Amarna style.

Conclusion

A great deal has been lost from the culture of ancient Egypt, and we have to piece together as much context as we can when trying to understand its art. The key theme is the religious and political role played by the pharaoh and his peers in the ruling class.

Ancient Egypt changed hands several times over its long history: the Hyksos, the Kushites, the Assyrians and the Persians each ruled it between periods of independence. In 332 BCE it fell to Alexander the Great, and was never to be independent again – the Greeks ruled Egypt through the Ptolemaic dynasty until the Romans incorporated it into their empire in 30 BCE. This was the beginning of the end for ancient Egyptian civilisation, not least because it became exposed to Christianity. This zealous new social force was savage in its treatment of Egyptian culture, mutilating buildings, destroying images of gods and kings, and burning papyrus texts in the name of their ‘one true god’. In 642 CE the Arabs conquered Egypt and the majority of Egyptians went down a new road again, that of Islam.

A great deal of Egypt’s ancient art has fortunately survived. And from it we can trace a line of influence into the art of archaic Greece, and from there to Rome, whose respect for this ancient culture can sometimes be seen in works made in a pastiche ‘Egyptian’ style.

Further investigation

Youtube user easeen has posted the History Channel documentary Civilisations: The Way of Eternity (2006), a popular show narrated by Simon Chilvers. See the episode in six parts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.

[1] Jaromir Malek, Egyptian Art (1999).
[2] Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art, vol. 1 (1951).
[3] Malek, op. cit.
[4] Pharaohs were not normally thought to be gods themselves, but neither were they ordinary mortals. They interceded with the gods to keep society running smoothly, thus supposedly acting for the good of everyone. In the period following the Old Kingdom, a series of low floods hit agriculture and contributed to bringing the Pharaoh’s ability to rule into question.
[5] Janson, H. W. and Janson, A. F., History of Art: The Western Tradition (6th ed. 2003).
[6] Tomb robbery was already a problem at the height of Egyptian civilisation, showing that not everybody at the time took seriously the Pharaoh’s divine nature, or the curses supposedly laid upon anyone disturbing their tombs. Tomb robbery may have been committed by unpaid tomb workers, or even by pharaohs hungry for gold to recycle.
[7] Gay Robins, The Art of Ancient Egypt (2008).
[8] Nonetheless we do know some names. The famous bust of Nefertiti was probably the work of a sculptor called Thutmose, whose workshop was found at Amarna. The multi-talented Imhotep (2650–2600 BCE), whose most imposing work was the step pyramid of Djoser, may be the first architect known to us by name. Many names of architects were recorded not to immortalise the artist but simply because they were high-ranking figures mentioned in tomb inscriptions, etc.
[9] At the time the city was called Akhetaten, and became known as Amarna in the later Arabic period.

Wednesday 20 May 2009

Early civilisation: Art and war

One of the consequences of greater material wealth was the appearance of organised state violence into human affairs. Naturally, war was introduced to art, too – to better understand the art of war, we must begin by examining the nature of war itself.

Is war an inescapable feature of human societies? The pessimistic response is to claim that warlike behaviour is in our DNA, thus making it inevitable. One way of asserting this tendency to violence is to stress our close genetic relationship with animals. But crude analogies with other species, even our closest ape relatives, can only be taken so far – gorillas and chimpanzees are as peaceable as they are combative, and human evolution diverged from the great apes six million years ago. Our evolution owes much more to tool-making and social cooperation than it does to blood-soaked competition. ‘Human nature’ includes a potential for violence among its many behaviours, but it does not follow that war is inevitable. This raises the question of how behaviours are encouraged by particular conditions.

The ‘killer ape’?

The extreme view is that humans are a species of ‘killer ape’. This was proposed in the 1950s by the Australian anthropologist Raymond Dart with his theory of the ‘predatory transition from ape to man’, in which human evolution was predicated on violent competition. It was later built upon by the American anthropologist Robert Ardrey in his book African Genesis, where he wrote, “man had emerged from the anthropoid background for one reason only: because he was a killer” whose “natural instinct is to kill with a weapon”. This is the fundamental assumption behind William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies: that civilisation is a veneer that conceals bloodthirsty instincts. In fact, the idea is not, and has never been, taken seriously by anthropologists, as Dart and Ardrey relied upon the misinterpretation of tool and fossil evidence.[1]

The debate on war is not just about anthropology – it is also deeply political. People who love peace will argue against its inevitability, people who support wars will argue for it. The theory that humans have an innate and inescapable propensity to violent conflict is useful, even necessary, for reactionaries, and persists to the present day, for example in the work of reductive sociobiologists. This persistence gives us absurdities like this from war historian John Keegan:

Warfare is almost as old as man himself, and reaches into the most secret places of the human heart, places where self dissolves rational purpose, where pride reigns, where emotion is paramount, where instinct is king.[2]

That ‘almost’ is telling. The reality is that for the vast majority of human history there is little evidence for violence between humans at all, let alone war [3]. This is equally true of art. As R. Dale Guthrie pointed out:

Paleolithic art shows no drawings of group conflict, and there is virtually no indication from late Paleolithic skeletons of murderous violence. There is one Magdalenian skeleton from Le Veyrier, France, whose skull is marked with what appears to be a blow. A poorly preserved skull from Boil-Blu, France, likely of Aurignacian age, has a small flint embedded in the temporal bone. However, there are no Paleolithic ‘after-the-battle’ mass burials of warrior-aged males, which are common among later tribal groups.

Is it possible that what we have learned so thoroughly from history – the inescapability of war – is not the whole truth? Is it possible that warfare is not an inherent part of our entire past? That is what I propose.[4]

The period at the end of the Paleolithic during which humans created art lasted at least 30,000 years. If warfare is innate, why is it never depicted? Its absence is significant, as the Paleolithic was our formative period as a species and generally accounts for all but the last 10,000 of Homo sapiens’ years of existence.

The potential for aggression and violence is part of our nature as animals, and it would be foolish to claim that nobody in the Paleolithic fell victim to it. But there is a difference between acts of violence and warfare. There is no archaeological evidence of warfare before the Mesolithic, nor is war depicted in art, the only record left by preliterate peoples. This poses an obstacle to the pessimists. Even Lawrence Keeley, who wrote a book insisting that primitive society was not peaceful [5], offers no unambiguous evidence predating 10,000 years ago.

The road to war

Paleolithic band societies subsisting from day to day had little material motivation to fight one another. When they were enjoying a small surplus, it was at least as much in their interests to share it with other groups, because those groups might help them in return should circumstances be reversed. This is not to posit a blissful Golden Age, or to claim that violence between groups or individuals never happened in the Paleolithic; it is simply that the systematic group violence characteristic of warfare would have been unrewarding. There are images in Paleolithic art that represent hunting, but that is very different to war, and we see nothing of the violence between human groups that is so prominent in the art of urban societies.

The key change that introduced warfare into human society was an increase in resources, which led to armed competition over them. After the Neolithic Revolution, human settlements produced great stores of food, valuable materials and long-distance trade goods that were worth fighting over. At the same time, it became possible for sedentary people or societies to own land, and therefore also to have it taken from them. This wealth required defending through the construction of forts and city walls – security was one cause of the concentration of people and resources into towns. As early as 8000 BCE, stone walls two metres thick and protected by a trench were built around Jericho. It is in the Neolithic period that we begin to find evidence for systematic violence between communities, for example at Site 117 at Jebel Sahaba, Egypt dating to around 12,000 years ago, or the mass grave at Talheim in Germany dating to about 5000 BCE (though the nature of this is disputed).

During the Neolithic and Bronze Age, warfare became a subject in art for the first time. Rock art in Arnhem Land in Australia from about 8000 BCE shows groups of human combatants. The rock art of the Spanish Levant, which dates to somewhere on the border between Mesolithic and Neolithic, features stick-like figures engaged in various activities including what look very like battle scenes, such as the confrontation between two groups of archers in the cave at Les Dogues.

Image of apparent combat between groups of archers. From Les Dogues in the Ares del Maestre, Spain. 8000 BCE or later.

Agricultural societies with food surpluses, highly skilled specialists, large populations, and strong social organisation had not only a motivation for warfare but a material basis for sustaining it. The surplus allowed the support of professional soldiers, and advanced techniques equipped them with armour, chariots, bronze weapons and siege engines. About 5000 years ago on the steppes of Asia, horses were tamed, and soon became the tanks of ancient warfare. Technological advances were not causes of war: they made killing more systematised and effective.

The military historian Richard Gabriel concluded:

This period saw the emergence of the whole range of social, political, economic, psychological, and military technologies that made the conduct of war a characteristic element of human social existence.[6]

Though anthropologists tend to subscribe to the view that warfare emerges with the development of surplus wealth through agriculture, recent research has provided evidence of warfare between some hunter-gatherer societies. This has been taken by the political right as proof that anthropologists are deluded and that peaceful human societies have never existed. A response to this was offered by the anthropologist Douglas P. Fry, who follows archaeologist Robert L. Kelly [7] in observing that we may differentiate between ‘simple’ hunter-gatherer societies, which are “nomadic and egalitarian”, and ‘complex’, which are socially stratified and share features with sedentary societies, such as storing food, higher populations and permanent settlements.

Evidence suggests that the simple tends to precede the complex, and archaeologically speaking, complexity is very recent... Warfare is rare among simple egalitarian hunter-gatherers and pervasive among complex hunter-gatherer societies.[8]

Our thesis that competition over resources was a major cause of warfare still stands. Hunter-gatherers go to war for a variety of reasons, including slaving, territorialism, rights to fishing and hunting, and population pressure, most of which are ultimately conflicts over resources.

An additional defence of the thesis was made by the anthropologist R. Brian Ferguson in his excellent article The Birth of War:

It looks as if, all around the world, what has been called primitive or indigenous warfare was generally transformed, frequently intensified, and sometimes precipitated by Western contact... Indigenous warfare recorded in recent centuries cannot be taken as typical of prehistoric tribal peoples.[9]

Conflicts that have been recorded by modern anthropologists, most notoriously the disputes among the Yanomami people of the Amazon recorded by Napoleon Chagnon, can not be taken as straightforward evidence of “the natural human condition of eons past” because external interference has altered social behaviour. Ferguson concludes for example that the Yanomami conflicts “seemed to have been fought over access to steel tools and other goods distributed by Westerners”. Extrapolations from ethnographic research into a generalised ‘human nature’ must be made cautiously and with regard to all the available evidence.

The existence of armed conflict between modern ‘complex’ hunter-gatherer societies does not prove its existence among the hunter-gatherers of the Paleolithic, so we may still reasonably argue that war is not an innate human behaviour but is historically conditioned.

Class and war

Some of the roots of class society lie in the resolution of disputes and crises. To take the example of Sumer: whereas decisions used to be taken by councils of elders, around 2800 BCE the Sumerians began to elect a lugal or ‘big man’ with special executive powers in order to resolve particular crises, such as wars. The more endemic warfare became, the longer the lugal remained in power and gained authority through his influence over the military and other social forces. Once he began to hand his position down to his children, monarchy had been born. Later, these monarchs sought to increase the extent of their wealth and prestige through success in war. As Gordon Childe wrote, “military conquest is one means of assuring the accumulation of a surplus of wealth.”[10]

Command of material resources and the promotion of war went hand-in-hand, therefore, with the development of class society. This was summarised by Friedrich Engels in his pioneering work on anthropology:

The military leader of the people, rex, basileus, thiudans – becomes an indispensable, permanent official. The assembly of the people takes form, wherever it did not already exist. Military leader, council, assembly of the people are the organs of gentile society developed into military democracy – military, since war and organisation for war have now become regular functions of national life. Their neighbours’ wealth excites the greed of peoples who already see in the acquisition of wealth one of the main aims of life. They are barbarians: they think it more easy and in fact more honorable to get riches by pillage than by work. War, formerly waged only in revenge for injuries or to extend territory that had grown too small, is now waged simply for plunder and becomes a regular industry. Not without reason the bristling battlements stand menacingly about the new fortified towns; in the moat at their foot yawns the grave of the gentile constitution, and already they rear their towers into civilisation. Similarly in the interior. The wars of plunder increase the power of the supreme military leader and the subordinate commanders; the customary election of their successors from the same families is gradually transformed, especially after the introduction of father-right, into a right of hereditary succession, first tolerated, then claimed, finally usurped; the foundation of the hereditary monarchy and the hereditary nobility is laid.[11]

Leaving aside Engels’ rather crude comment about ‘barbarians’ who don’t want to work, this is a fair account. So it is unsurprising that monarchs take pride of place in the works of art celebrating success in war.

Pharaoh Ahmose I fighting the Hyksos.The Pharaoh is portrayed several times larger than both his enemies and his own troops, emphasising his exceptional status.

The new state structures created by class society provided the basis for the organisation and promotion of warfare, and saw a shift of allegiances from clans to state. This was assisted by the rise of organised religion, with the priesthood providing ideological justification for conflict by asserting the aristocracy’s divine imperative. If the cosmic order declares in favour of a war, who will dare to challenge it? Rulers rarely declare a selfish class interest as their motivation – the toiling majority who make up the soldiery stand to gain little or nothing from war, so the reasons are presented in terms of collective security, benefits and necessity. This practice continues today.

Another aspect of state structure was a coercive apparatus of which soldiers were an essential part – as Engels put it, “a public force which is no longer immediately identical with the people’s own organisation of themselves as an armed power.”[12] His fellow-communist Lenin famously commented:

Engels elucidates the concept of the ‘power’ which is called the state, a power which arose from society but places itself above it and alienates itself more and more from it. What does this power mainly consist of? It consists of special bodies of armed men having prisons, etc, at their command.[13]

Mesopotamia and Egypt fielded the first armies in history. An inscription records of Sargon of Akkad that “5,400 warriors ate bread daily before him”, a probable reference to a standing army. With such armies the Akkadians, Babylonians, Assyrians and many other cultures began creating the first empires. In China, evidence like the defensive walls at Taosi dates war to at least the third millenium BC, and war consolidated the early dynasties. In Mesoamerica, some Olmec iconography may represent war, but the evidence is clear from 700 BCE with the fortifications, weapons and war images of the Zapotec.

In this context, neighbouring hunter-gatherer societies were either conquered or had to adopt the new mode of production themselves in order to survive.[14]

War cannot be reduced to class alone (otherwise, explaining the existence of war in stratified but non-class hunter-gatherer societies would be impossible). It arises from the totality of conditions – resources, dynasticism, religion and many other things. But class society is the most fundamental single development.

The art of war in early civilisation

We cannot survey the depiction of war across all cultures, so I will simply look at a few important examples. We have already mentioned the Standard of Ur, whose ‘war’ panel depicts chariots and troops from an unknown campaign.

The ‘war’ panel from the Standard of Ur. Sumer, ca. 2500 BCE.

Sumer, never a unified state like Egypt or Assyria, was in a constant state of competitive warfare, with each city fighting one another or making temporary alliances for control of access to water, or to the systems of dams and irrigation canals that had been dug in the fertile valley. The prisoners taken in war became slaves. On the bottom strip of the Standard, four-wheeled wagons drawn by horses ride over the bodies of their enemies, in the earliest known depiction of the martial use of the wheel; on the middle strip, we see troops in metal helmets herding prisoners; and on the top strip, the king stands amidst his forces as prisoners are led to him.

Another of the early artistic testaments to war in Mesopotamia are the steles. We have referred already to the Victory Stele of Narâm-Sin. Another is the Stele of the Vultures, a stone monument built in about 2450 BCE for King Eannatum of Lagash. At this time, the dominant rivalry in Sumer was between the city states of Lagash and Umma, who fought one another over rights to irrigation from the Tigris. The Stele celebrates a victory of Lagash over Umma, with the monarch himself in a wagon brandishing weapons.

Section of the now fragmented Stele of the Vultures,
made of carved limestone. Photo: Eric Gaba.

The Stele shows us that the Sumerians fought in disciplined formations – phalanxes with an eight-man front. In other words, these were trained, professional soldiers.

Among Mesopotamia’s most impressive illustrations of war are the extraordinary friezes of the Assyrians. At its height, the Assyrian empire controlled an area from Egypt and the Mediterranean to the entirety of Mesopotamia. The kings of Assyria ordered impressive sculptures to record their battles. Success in war was a matter of great pride to them, as Georges Roux observed:

Scores of reliefs, obviously intended to illustrate the written descriptions that ran endlessly on orthostats, on steles, on monoliths, on mountain rocks and around statues, represent soldiers parading, fighting, killing, plundering, pulling down city walls and escorting prisoners.[15]

The Assyrians mastered the art of the relief, a technique which they may have acquired from the Hittites of Anatolia. Using slabs of stone either imported or mined from local hills, Assyrian artisans used great precision and an excellent sense of design to carve decorative friezes into the walls and corridors of their buildings. Although highly stylised, they are full of movement and closely observed detail. The scenes depicted concentrate upon the king and his exploits in hunting and war, and function as a kind of propaganda to inspire admiration and fear in the ruled.

Assyrian battle scene. Photo: Kaptain Kobold (flickr).

Roux adds that alongside this parade of kings, slayings and humiliations of enemies, another kind of subject matter can be seen:

In this series of pictorial war records without equivalent in any country, among this almost monotonous display of horrors, must be set apart some reliefs which have no parallel in the inscriptions: those that show soldiers at rest in their camps and under their tents, grooming horses, slaughtering cattle, cooking food, eating, drinking, playing games and dancing. These little scenes, teeming with life, give the tragedy of war a refreshing human touch. Through the ruthless killer of yore emerges a familiar and congenial figure: the humble, simple, light-hearted, eternal ‘rank-and-file’.

The few surviving examples of mural painting, such as those from Tell Ahmar, suggest that the Assyrians were skilled too in this technique, which would have decorated almost all public buildings. These reliefs were not surpassed until those of ancient Greece, but the parallel reveals one of the Assyrian works’ most striking characteristics: none of the many human beings depicted in these friezes possesses individuality. Every face, whether of a king hunting lions or of a dying soldier, is identical – characteristic of the static, anonymising art of early despotism.

The Assyrians built a big military empire, but their own turn came in 612 BCE, when their capital city of Nineveh was so completely destroyed by the Babylonians that it never recovered. None of the conquering peoples who marched one after another across the Fertile Crescent were able to impose their rule for more than a few centuries.

We could look at countless further examples of war in the art of ancient civilisation, from the prisoners of war depicted on murals at the Maya site of Bonampak to the Terracotta Army of China. What these works have in common is they are the product of a particular set of material conditions predicated upon agricultural surpluses and class-based state societies.

Conclusion

The idea that we cannot help fighting each other may seem convincing after the brutality displayed by Homo sapiens in two World Wars, Vietnam, etc. But many other species of animal kill each other much more frequently than humans, who are in fact extraordinarily co-operative and sociable. The existence of peaceable communities like the Mbuti of the Congo belie the claim that all humans are warlike (again, with the caveat that to be without war does not mean to be without violence altogether). The key consideration is how certain of our potential behaviours are encouraged and directed by society.

As with all theory, our explanations of war depend upon the political position of the theorist. One camp likes to suggest that war has always existed, because it is part of ‘human nature’ to compete violently with one another. This perspective allows one to avoid rooting war in class, inequality and imperialism. But it would follow that warfare must have existed in the Paleolithic and that the missing evidence has either perished or is still awaiting discovery. We could as easily insist that the ancient Egyptians bred titanosaurs and that we just haven’t found the bones yet. To understand (pre)history and society as they actually are, we need to respect the historical record. The absence of Paleolithic evidence allows the conclusion that warfare is a comparatively very recent development based on changes in material conditions. It arises as a result of conflicts over resources, whether among complex hunter-gatherer societies, or in urban societies with large surpluses of food and wealth, more technologically efficient ways of killing people, and above all a ruling class that was the main beneficiary from organised violence. The legacy of art supports this.

If war is historically conditioned, it is possible that changes in those conditions could eliminate war as a feature of human society. This is only utopian if one believes in a fixed and eternal human nature unaffected by its environment.

[1] See for example Boyce Rensberger, ‘The Killer Ape is Dead’ (1973).
[2] John Keegan, A History of Warfare (1994).
[3] This may of course simply be down to the incomplete fossil record, and the difficulty of interpreting both the causes of injuries and the purposes of tools – but the fact remains. A number of skeletons from the Mesolithic and Neolithic, by contrast, have been found with injuries from projectiles and other instruments.
[4] R. Dale Guthrie, The Nature of Paleolithic Art (2005).
[5] Lawrence H. Keeley, War Before Civilisation (1997).
[6] Richard A. Gabriel, The Great Armies of Antiquity (2002).
[7] Robert L. Kelly, The Foraging Spectrum Diversity in Hunter-Gatherer Lifeways (2007).
[8] Douglas P. Fry, Beyond War: The Human Potential for Peace (2007).
[9] R. Brian Ferguson, ‘The Birth of War’, Natural History July/August 2003.
[10] Childe, Man Makes Himself (1936).
[11] Engels, Chapter 9 ‘Barbarism and Civilisation’ from The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884).
[12] Ibid.
[13] Vladimir Lenin, from Chapter 1 of State and Revolution (1917).
[14] This is the probable reason why the hunter-gatherer societies that have survived into the present tend to be those who live in isolated locations, such as the island of Australia or the Amazon rain forest.
[15] Georges Roux, Ancient Iraq (1964, revised 1992).

Friday 31 July 2009

Early civilisation: Women in art

Neolithic art

The early civilisations

Ruling class women

Fertility and sexuality

Conclusion

Further reading

Thursday 16 July 2009

Early civilisation: Art and religion

Thursday 18 June 2009

Early civilisation: The art of ancient Egypt

The making of Egypt

The form of Egyptian art

Art and the Egyptian worldview

Art of the Amarna period

Conclusion

Further investigation

Wednesday 20 May 2009

Early civilisation: Art and war

The ‘killer ape’?

The road to war

Class and war

The art of war in early civilisation

Conclusion