Greece, Egypt, and the Near East

Greece, Egypt, and the Near East

Today a dwindling body of intellectuals stubbornly upholds the supremacy of ancient Greece as the unique progenitor and eternal paragon of Western Civilization. Indeed, for some of these latter-day Hellenophiles the term “Western Civilization” is redundant; for them, there are no other civilizations worthy of the name.

These partisans of the “Greek miracle” tend to pass over very quickly the more unsavory aspects of the Hellenic legacy. For example, slavery was universal in ancient Greece and misogyny was rampant.

Oh. but what about democracy? Indeed. Let us look at the matter without rose-colored glasses. Wherever it existed, ancient Greek democracy was much too elitist to meet modern standards. Participation was limited to free-born male citizens, excluding the majority of the population from having any say. Moreover, democracy, such as it was, flourished for relatively brief periods in but a few city states. The default settings for Greek city states were oligarchy and tyranny, two institutions that retain an unmistakably repellent aura.

Then there is the influence of Greek classical art at various periods of Western culture. Sometimes, as in the Renaissance, this archetype has been beneficial, but all too often recourse to formulaic Grecian classicism has yielded dreariness and deadness. A recent and lamentable example is the styrofoam backdrop the Democrats unwisely chose for their Denver Convention.

With regard to Greek art and its ostensibly perennial verity, here is what the noted art critic Robert Hughes wrote about a 1993 exhibition:

“It must be said, straight off, that The Greek Miracle: Classical Sculpture from the Dawn of Democracy, now at the National Gallery in Washington . . . is a very odd show. . . . Insofar as an exhibition can assemble great sculpture and have practically no scholarly value, this one does.
“The reason is that The Greek Miracle is an exercise in political propaganda, and has to embrace stereotypes that no classicist today would accept without deep reservations. First, the exhibit wants to indicate how Greek sculpture changed in the classical period, by showing its movement from the frontal, rigid forms of 6th century B.C. kouroi, whose ancestry lay in Egyptian cult figures, to the more naturalistic treatment of balance and bodily movement one sees in works such as The Kritios Boy (circa 480 B.C.), which was found on the Acropolis. And it demonstrates this in considerable detail, through marvelous examples of 5th-century sculpture . . .

“As an orientation course for those who don't know much about classical Greek sculpture . . . this show ought not to be missed. But neither should its second premise be taken seriously: the idea that there was some causal connection between the advent of the classical style in sculpture and that of democracy in Athenian politics. Both happened at roughly the same time: in the late 6th century an Athenian aristocrat, Kleisthenes, made an alliance with the people of Athens in order to defeat another noble, Isagoras, and pushed through a number of democratic reforms that were permanently enshrined in the Athenian constitution.

“These measures gave the vote and other rights to citizens who had not enjoyed them before, though not, of course, to slaves or women [or to the foreign-born--WRD]. But the idea that the beginnings of democracy in Athens changed the way that rituals, gods and heroes were represented is hokum: exactly the same changes of style occurred in cities, like Olympia, that were run by tyrants. The fact that modern Greeks apparently want to believe it--this being a time of superchauvinism in Greece, as in other Balkan countries--means nothing, except in the scheme of simplistic politico-cultural fantasy. You might as well claim that Abstract Expressionism was "caused" by the election of Harry Truman. Nevertheless, such is the show's political motive, and it seems a poor pretext for taking great art and jetting it to America like so many get-well cards, for the sake of political p.r.

“In its reflexive idealization, the show sets before us a notion of Greek antiquity that was conceived in the 18th century by the German archaeologist- connoisseur Johann Winckelmann and then elaborated into an all-pervading imagery through the 19th. Balance, harmony, transcendence, sublimation--all are characteristics of great classical art, but not the whole story, and not one that would have been wholly intelligible to the ancient Greeks. It is as though the organizers of this show still felt obliged to believe in the division of the world claimed by the original Athenians. Here is Hellas, populated by people. Outside, is the domain of hoi barbaroi, those who are not quite human: the superstitious Orientals, the treacherous mountain dwellers, the lesser breeds without the law. The Greeks, by contrast, stop just short of turning into marble statues of themselves--effigies of undying self- congratulation, picked up by later cultures to signify the reign of the past over the present.

“It is true that since the image of classical Greece began to lose the power it had accumulated up to the end of the 19th century, many writers have found this marmoreal stereotype insufficient. ‘How one can imagine oneself among them,’ mused the English poet Louis MacNeice, no mean classicist himself, in his 1938 poem, Autumn Journal, ‘I do not know.’ And was this antiquity a world of heroes or something more like modern Athens?

"When I should remember the paragons of Hellas I think instead of the crooks, the adventurers, the opportunists, the careless athletes and the fancy boys, the hair-splitters, the pedants, the hard-boiled skeptics, and the Agora and the noise of the demagogues and the quacks; and the women
pouring libations over graves, and the trimmers at Delphi and the dummies at Sparta and lastly I think of the slaves.

“No such doubts obtrude upon the archaic fantasy world set up by the writers in the catalog to this show. Slavery, as important an institution for Periclean Greece as for America's antebellum South, does not enter their vague lucubrations about the matched ‘miracles’ of Art and Democracy. For them, all is idealism, naturalism, the world of formal purity, grace and refinement. Whatever speaks of demonism, fear, magic and irrational superstition is simply swept under the carpet; and yet these were colossally important elements even in the "rational" Athens of the 5th century B.C., let alone in the rest of Greece. The naively optimistic idea expressed in Nicholas Gage's introduction, echoing a long succession of enlightened Hellenophiles from Winckelmann to Matthew Arnold, that ‘Mortal man became the standard by which things were judged and measured,’ simply does not fit the facts of classical culture. On the contrary: the Greeks of Pericles' time, like their ancestors and successors, were obsessed with the weakness of the dike that protected their social and mental constructions against uncontrollable forces. Their culture was webbed with placatory or ‘apotropaic,’ rituals, charms, and images meant to keep the demons at bay.

“This is why classical Greek sculpture, in its original form, was so very unlike the version made of it by Neoclassicists 2,000 years later, and recycled in this show. ‘No symbols or special trappings of divinity,’ writes Gage, ‘were required beyond the figure's physical harmony. The most perfect beauty, to the Greek of the 5th century, was the pure and unadorned.’ But classical Greek sculpture was neither pure nor unadorned; its decor has been lost or worn away. Were we to see it in its original state, we would find it shockingly ‘vulgar.’ All the great figures and sculpture were painted in violent reds, ochers and blues, like a seaside restaurant in Skopelos. The colossal figure of Athena inside the Parthenon was sheathed in ivory ‘skin.’ As for adornment, there were ‘real’ metal spears fixed in the hands of marble warriors, brightly simulated eyes with colored irises set in the now empty sockets of The Kritios Boy. And far from rising above anxiety, classical Greek art pullulated with horrors: snakes, monsters, decapitated Gorgons, all designed to ward off the terrors of the spirit world. One sometimes wonders if ancient Greece, more lurid than white, so obsessed with blood feud and inexpungible guilt, wasn't closer to modern Bosnia than to the bright world of Winckelmann. But you cannot put that kind of ‘classicism’ in a museum, or relate it to ‘democracy.’”

With his pungent analysis, Hughes makes a key point, one that is well known to social scientists: correlation is not causality. That is, the fact that democracy and classic art arose at the same time is no proof that there was any causal link between them.

Recently, in his book “Greek Ways: How the Greeks Created Western Civilization,” the neocon historian Bruce Thornton has attempted a rejoinder. In a nutshell, his strategy is briefly to acknowledge the shortcomings we have mentioned, and then return to extolling the good old religion. Uncontestably, he argues that some of the ideas that were necessary building blocks for the rise of Western civilization, such as that there should be a rational explanation for natural phenomena, originated with Greek thinkers. However, the discussion of slavery and misogyny shows much special pleading. Thornton also supports some outdated ideas about Greek attitudes to sexuality--ideas that have been exploded by such scholars as Sir Kenneth Dover and William A. Percy. All in all, it is too late in the day for the worshipful exclusivism of a Bruce Thornton to prevail.

To be sure, ancient Greek culture remains a considerable achievement. The poems of Homer and Hesiod, the plays of the Greek dramatists, and the philosophical writings of Plato and Aristotle will always be rewarding. In the originals and in translation, these works have a cherished place in my library, and I go back to them repeatedly. Greek art offers much delight and instruction. By the same token, though, there are many things of equal value that have been produced by other high cultures in the course of humanity’s striving. I see no reason to deprive myself of Confucius and Lao-tse, of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, of the epics of Atrahasis and Gilgamesh, or of the Arthurian cycle in Old French--all things that have nothing to do with ancient Greece. The Greek element must now take its place as but one of many in the concert of cultures.

At all events, the first contention of the miraculists, that ancient Greece still provides an unrivaled paradigm for our own age, lies in tatters. What of their second assertion, namely that Greek culture is entirely autonomous and self-generating, with no dependence on the venerable societies of the ancient Near East?

At this point, we must acknowledge the entrance of Martin Bernal, a professor of government and Near Eastern studies at Cornell. The first volume of his magnum opus, entitled “Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785-1985),” appeared in 1989.

Because of the salience of this first Bernal volume (there are now three) in the ensuing debate, it is worthwhile examining its arguments in some detail. At the outset. one needs to dispose of two common misconceptions. Bernal’s book is not about whether the Ancient Egyptians were black. Nor does he claim that Greek civilization as it exists today and became known to the Romans was a wholesale copy of Egyptian civilization, as it obviously wasn't.

In considerable detail, this first volume spells out Martin Bernal's historiographic assumption, that is, that ancient history can be seen as having been molded into specific narratives, depending on the age when that narrative was created and found its resonance. In this regard, he defines three different models or narratives, namely the Ancient Model, the Aryan Model, and his own Revised Ancient Model. He includes some suggested timelines, but basically the Ancient Model of Greeks like Herodotus indicated that in 15th century BCE, Egyptians and Phoenicians had set up colonies in Greece and the Aegean, creating Greek civilization. By contrast, the Aryan Model stipulates that civilization started with the indigenous creation of a civilization in Greece, and that there were Nordic invasions of Indo-European speakers who mixed in with the non-Indo-European speaking indigenous population (the mysterious Pelagians). Bernal's Revised Ancient Model places the Egyptian and Phoenician invasions in the 21st-19th century, pushes back the introduction of the alphabet to the 17th century (from the 9th century), while acknowledging that indeed there were Nordic invasions.

All ten chapters in this book address distinct periods and the changing perspectives and the emphasis that is put on a particular origin of history or culture, from “The Ancient Model in Antiquity” (I), through this model's transmission during the dark ages and the renaissance (II), “The Triumph of Egypt in the 17th and 18th Centuries” (III), and the beginning of “Hostilities To Egypt in The 18th Century” (IV) (a development that in Bernal’s view long preceded J.-F. Champollion's decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphic in 1822). The anti-Egyptian chill evident among European elites was not unrelated to the existing race-based slavery, colonialism. and the challenges from within Europe to the transatlantic slave trade.

Chapters V through IX deal with other topics, beginning with the “Romantic Linguistics” (V), triggered by Sir William Jones’ epochal discovery that Sanskrit is an Indo-European language (1786), and the ensuing rise of the Indian-Aryan model. “Hellenomania. 1” (VI) addresses with the rise of Greece as a fount of European civilization and ideals, championed by the German school of Wilhelm von Humboldt and Friedrich August Wolf. “Hellenomania 2” (VII) traces the migration of this trend to England in the context of the growing preeminence of the Aryan Model in the middle of the 19th century. “The Rise and Fall of The Phoenicians” (VIII) deals with the recognition of the Phoenicians and the influence of anti-Semitism, as does chapter (IX).

The book concludes with “The Post-War Situation” (X), discussing the contributions of Cyrus Gordon and Michael C. Astour--two pioneers who have been unjustly marginalized--and their reclaiming of the legacy of the Phoenicians.

Bernal’s underlying premise is that much of the current body of Greek/Western Civilization historical literature reflects the prejudices of racists who have suppressed evidence of a non-Aryan component in the origin of the Greek civilization. I confess that the term racist makes me nervous, as that charge is all-too-frequently hurled nowadays, sometimes with little foundation. Still there is no doubt that much of the appeal of the Aryan Model lies in the idea that ancient Greece was exclusively the creation of white people coming down from the North, with little contribution from their venerable brown brothers to the East and South. As will be evident in what follows, this fable of parthenogenesis is simply unbelievable.

After the appearance of Bernal’s first volume, scholars began taking sides. Afrocentrists found support for their views therein, even though Bernal takes no position on the role of sub-Saharan Africa, their center of interest. With but few exceptions, the response from classicists was outrage and disbelief. Bernal, trained in sinology, was alleged to be a poacher who had no business challenging the sacred truths so long cherished by the Classical Guild. The hysterical tone of these miraculists, who seemed incapable of weighing the evidence impartially, served only to lend substance to Martin Bernal’s allegation of the irrationality implicit in the Aryan Model.

At all events, the classical scholar Mary Lefkowitz sought to demolish Bernal through the production of two volumes. one of which she wrote in its entirely, the other being an collection of essays by Bernal’s critics. The first book, “Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History” (1996), is basically a straw-man argument. Her main target is Afrocentrism, the doctrine that civilization stems mainly from sub-Saharan (“Black”) Africa. To be sure, excesses have been committed by overenthusiastic Afrocentrists. Yet Martin Bernal is not in fact an Afrocentrist, so that most of her attack on him fails on this ground. In fact, she missed many opportunities to address his shortcomings. Even though there are evident weak spots in Bernal's exposition (a defect that is perhaps understandable with such a broad perspective), Lefkowitz often insists on attacking arguments that Bernal never actually made. Ultimately, the flaw that vitiates Lefkowitz’s campaign against Bernal stems from a simple wish to defend her turf against an impudent outsider. In her eyes his greatest sin seems to be his lack of a degree in classical or ancient Mediterrainean studies. While the matter of credentials elicits real concern, an individual’s degree is not the sum of his knowledge. This is a subject on which I have some expertise, in as much as over the years I have shifted my main interest from art history (the field in which I received my graduate training) to gay studies. To this day, academia has offered very few opportunities to pursue advanced study in the history and culture of homosexuality. To insist that one can never move from another field to this one would prevent the discipline from ever arising, a manifest absurdity. Moreover, as one writer has pointed out, “her academic snobbery on this point seems a little misplaced for someone whose own specialty does not include Egyptology or Semitic Bronze Age cultures (or even Greek Bronze Age culture).”

Together with Guy MacLean Rogers, Mary Lefkowitz edited “Black Athena Revisited” (1996). This big book, containing twenty essays reflecting several disciplines, was designed to pulverize Martin Bernal’s magnum opus. At first, it appears to do so, but over the years a good many cracks have appeared in the machinery.

In reality "Black Athena Revisited" is a very mixed bag. Some contributions are convincing, pinpointing various weak or even absurd points in Bernal's works. But some of the other essays are surprisingly flimsy or overdogmatic. Truly to devastate Bernal a stronger case would have to have been marshaled.

First, let us note some of the strong points. Jay H. Jasanoff and Alan Nussbaum sternly criticize Bernal's attempts to prove that the Greek language is heavily Egyptian. Over many generations professional linguistics have established strict criteria for the historical evolution of languages. Bernal’s amateurish excursions into this area do not meet these standards. The Egyptologist John Baines points out that Bernal's fascination with Greece is itself a social and ideological construct. Despite his strictures, Bernal tacitly accepts the "Eurocentrist" position that ancient Athens was the cradle of the West. He only wants to prove that, in turn, the cradle of Athens was northwest Africa. Robert Palter attacks the notion that Egyptian science was very sophisticated, claiming that Babylonian and Greek science was much better. It would seem that the jury is still out on this one, for it is difficult to believe that the Egyptians, who built the pyramids to very exacting standards, didn't have advanced mathematical and astronomical knowledge. In a rare departure from the uniform condemnation, Frank Yurco actually concedes some of Bernal's points. He points out that the East Mediterranean was a cosmopolitan place during the Bronze Age, with many crisscrossing cultural influences. (This point was made in considerable detail by W. Stevenson Smith as early as 1965.)

At all events, many readers (including, briefly, the present writer) were initially swept away by the double-barreled attack orchestrated by the formidable Mary Lefkowitz. In 1997 the Egyptologist John Ray pronounced that “Black Athena is dead.” Yet the ensuing decade has not borne out this dismissive judgment.

In a revealing and shocking instance of bad faith, Lefkowitz refused to allow Bernal to publish a rebuttal in “Black Athena Revisited,” her edited volume. Undeterred and unabashed, he has since rounded on his critics in a barrage of articles published in learned journals. These pieces are conveniently gathered in his book “Black Athena Writes Back: Martin Bernal Responds to His Critics” (2001).

In this collection Bernal responds to the whirlwind of criticism surrounding his work, providing additional documentation for his thesis and exposing the sometimes petty conflicts among academics. Conceding some shortcomings in his original work, Bernal bolsters his thesis with new findings. In harsh terms Bernal lambastes the hypocrisy of academics, steeped in the "cult of Europe," who only recently and grudgingly credited Egypt's contributions to Western civilization.

Bernal offers point-by-point rebuttals of, for instance, Egyptologist David O'Connor, who argues that Bernal is far too trusting of ancient literary sources; of his arch-opponent Mary Lefkowitz, a classicist who finds very little of value in his work; and of Emily Vermeule, an Aegean Bronze Age specialist, who questions Bernal's archaeological methodology. In response to Vermeule's allegations of "exaggerated sensitivity" (Bernal's words), he returns to passages from studies that he quoted in “Black Athena” as examples of scholarly racism.

With grim determination, Lefkowitz and her allies had sought to demolish Martin Bernal. In the sequel it is evident that they have failed to do so.

In closing this section, I signal an effort to reach a balanced view by a professor of Jewish studies at Georgetown University, Jacques Berlinerblau: “Heresy in the University: The Black Athena Controversy and the Responsibility of the Intellectuals” (1999). In this book the author provides a fair summary of the work of Martin Bernal (whom he apparently interviewed, permitting him to comment on various parts of the book). Berlinerblau concludes that Bernal proves that much of the body of antiquity studies produced by accredited scholars reveals serious biases. Truculently, and with not a little bad faith, Hellenophiles and their sympathizers have attempted a limited reassessment. By the same token, these scholars have shown that Bernal has made serious errors. Berlinerblau calls some of Bernal's critics to task for the vehemence of their attack on Bernal, pommeling him on facts while ignoring the larger larger points at issue. Berlinerblau praises Bernal for engaging the public in his work, maintaining that scholars should work more to became public intellectuals.

So much then for the main points of the intricate “Black Athena” controversy.


That is not the end of the matter. In the course of its development over the last nineteen years, the discussion has tended to elide two major themes: 1) what was the contribution of the visual arts (as distinct from the literary evidence that these writers habitually privilege)?; and 2) what was the role of the Semitic peoples residing in Western Asia, including the Akkadians, the Assyrians, and the Phoenicians?

As it happens, a little-known archaeological monograph addresses both of the these issues. The book is Janice L. Crowley, “The Aegean and the East: An Investigation into the Transference of Artistic Motifs Between the Aegean, Egypt, and the Near East in the Bronze Age” (1989). Employing an artistic-iconographic approach, Crowley assembles a base of 544 items, which she has carefully catalogued. Her target area is Mycenean Greece, a cultural realm that is now generally acknowledged as Greek-speaking, and therefore constituting the foundations of Greece as we know it. Her impressive list of borrowings in the visual arts includes the following: heraldic poses; antithetical groupings of human or animal figures about a center piece; symmetrical composition about an invisible median line; a hero combatting a lion or a bull; the “master/mistress of animals” (hero, god, or goddess between two animals in antithetical groupings); the sphinx; the “sacred tree,” especially as the focus of an antithetical composition, or as the object of a watering ceremony; the palm tree and palmette pattern; the papyrus plant; the rosette; the overlapping scale pattern; the convention of representing human figures in profile or with the body twisted at the waist to face the front; differentiation of male and female figures by skin color (a standard convention in Egyptian art); siege scenes with a man falling from a city wall; and hunting scenes.

The Swiss Walter Burkert probably ranks as the leading scholar today in the field of Greek religion. His “The Orientalizing Revolution: Near Eastern Influences on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Age” (1998) makes a significant contribution to the debate. Chronologically, his focus is deliberately narrow, for the most part relying on evidence that has long been considered secure. With these premises, Burkert convincingly displays a number of points where the Greeks, in the early Archaic Age, borrowed from the cultures around them or at least shared common beliefs or practices.

Burkert’s volume comprises three chapters, each organized around a particular class of people through whom East-West contacts occurred: craftsmen; seers/healers (workers in the sacred); and poets/singers. In this way he combines the visual and literary evidence.

Himself a Hellenist, Burkert shows no inclination to knock the Greeks off their pedestal. Instead, he seeks to help us better understand the Greeks, by presenting some aspects of their culture in a broader light and by teaching us to apply insights from other lands and peoples. In this respect his work compares with those of the English scholars Jane Ellen Harrison and E. R. Dodds.

A massive contribution to the debate is M. L. West’s "The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth" (1997), a book of 662 pages. This book is too complex to summarize here. Suffice it to say that West focuses only on the civilizations of Western Asia (sometimes known as the Levant), factoring out Egypt altogether. His evidence, it seems to me, tips the balance in favor of the Near East proper. While the contribution of Egypt remains significant (as others, especially Martin Bernal, have shown), it is outshone by the mainly Semitic cultures of Western Asia.

At this point it is best to bring this perhaps overlong examination to a close. Without attempting further to sift the evidence, I would estimate the makeup of ancient Greek civilization to reflect the following proportions: Indo-European, 35%; Near Eastern, 35%; Egyptian, 30%.

If these estimates hold, it will be seen that Bernal was basically on the right track. However, his acknowledgment of the all-important Near Eastern (mainly Semitic) strands tends to be perfunctory, and lacking in key details. These strands were almost certainly more important than the Egyptian ones, though not perhaps by much.

What should be clear, though, is that some sixty-five percent of ancient Greek culture was borrowed. The “Greek miracle” (if we are to retain this hoary term) may have been made in Greece, but the ingredients were largely imported. So massive were these imports that it is fair to say that Greek civilization could not have come into being without them. Far from being a case of parthenogenesis--that is, unaided birth--ancient Greece came about through massive foreign insemination. It could not have been otherwise.



Greece and the Near East

Greece and the Near East

A few years back I wrote a piece on the debt of ancient Greece to pharaonic Egypt. While I did not go the full nine yards with the Egyptocentric Martin Bernal, there are so many significant borrowings as to make the conventional view of the parthenogenisis of Greece (the “Greek miracle”) untenable. This essay is available at my ancillary site: Dynegypt,blogspot,com.

At the time I promised to produce a similar study on the Mesopotamia-Greece connection, which is perhaps even more important than the Egypt-Greece one. Until now the press of other business has prevented my from fulfilling that vow. I will make a stab at doing that here.

First, what is ancient Mesopotamia? The word stems from the Greek for “[the land] between the rivers,” and serves to designate the area comprised today by Iraq and parts of eastern Syria, together with southeastern Turkey and southwestern Iran.

Ancient Mesopotamia included Sumer and the Akkadian, Babylonian, and Assyrian empires. During the Iron Age, it was controlled by the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian empires. The indigenous Sumerians and Akkadians (including Assyrians and Babylonians) dominated Mesopotamia from the beginning of written history (the late fourth millennium BCE) to the fall of Babylon in 539 BCE, when it was conquered by the Achaemenid Empire. It fell to the Macedonian Alexander the Great in 332 BCE, and after his death it became part of the Greek Seleucid Empire.

MESOPOTAMIAN (SUMERIAN) FIRSTS

The Sumerologist Samuel Noah Kramer (1897-1990) produced a popular volume (History Begins at Sumer, first ed., 1956) in which he undertook to catalog a series of “firsts” that should be credited to ancient Sumeria.

Among the items Kramer listed are: the First Schools, the First Case of Juvenile Delinquency, the First "War of Nerves," the First Bicameral Congress, the first Historian, the First Case of Tax Reduction, the First Legal Precedent, the First Pharmacopoeia, the First Moral Ideals, the First Animal Fables, the First Literary Debates, the First Love Song, the First Library Catalog, the First "Sick" Society, the First Long-Distance Champion, the First Sex Symbolism, and so on.

Some of these items, such juvenile delinquency and the notion of a “sick society,” seem dated, reflecting as they do the Cold War atmosphere in which Kramer lived. Others are cases of parallel invention, as the innovation crops up in Egypt at about the same time.

Perhaps most significant of all such advances is the invention of writing. It used to be thought that Mesopotamia was somewhat ahead of Egypt in this realm. However, recent discoveries in the Nile Valley place the inventions at about the same time, in the closing centuries of the fourth millennium BCE.

What then of the links with ancient Greece?

LITERATURE AND MYTHOLOGY

As early as 1966 in his edition of Hesiod's Theogony, the English classicist Martin L. West acknowledged the dependency of early Greece on the Near East. With remarkable persistence and energy, he stuck to the task, and some thirty years later produced a magisterial study comprising 662 pages: The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry.

West begins with a bird's-eye view of commonalities of Near Eastern and Aegean cultures--commonalities that can only be explained by direct transmission or a shared origin. Such common elements include a substantial store of loan words. Because of the importance of trade many of these words designate commodities. Yet others pertain to social institutions such as kingship with its complex accoutrements and rituals. The treaties negotiated by Aegean and Near Eastern kings are replete with similar formulas. Methods of accounting, counting, and weighing are similar or identical. Musical instruments are much the same in East and West, as are styles of luxurious behavior. At the top of the Greek pantheon, Zeus is a god of storms and high places, and so was the Semitic Baal; both were honored with the same kinds of sacrifices performed in the same way.

Then West turns to the literature of Western Asia, still too little known. The emphasis is on epic and myth, but the author also describes Sumero-Akkadian wisdom literature, hymns, disputations, and royal inscriptions. Of particular interest is the Bronze Age literature from Ugarit (Ras Shamra), a north Syrian port which ranked as a virtual gateway to the West. The Hebrew Bible also figures in this equation. Then there are the Hurrians of north Syria, whose kingdom was called Mitanni, who transmitted Sumero-Akkadian traditions to the Hittites. The Hurro-Hittite stories about the storm god Teshub's conflict with the older god Kumarbi served as a model for Hesiod's Theogony.

Another feature is the idea of the assembly of the gods, familiar to us from Olympus. In fact the notion of the organization of heaven, presided over by a company of gods at which stands a powerful patriarch, seems to have been invented by the Sumerians. This powerful idea was copied by the Akkadians, Hurrians, Hittites, West Semites, and finally the Greeks.

Many other parallels are cited, some perhaps too general to command universal assent. However, West is on firm ground with the poetry of Hesiod, about which he is the leading expert. He also discusses Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, where he finds a number of revealing parallels in the heroes, incidents, motifs, and expressions. There are many other borrowings in the general realm of mythology.

Finally, West turns to the complex matter of how Eastern traditions might have passed to Greece. He pinpoints two historical periods in which such transmission was likely to have taken place: the Late Bronze Age and the 8th-7th centuries BCE. Here writing is obviously key.

VISUAL ART AND WIDER CONTEXTS

The special role of the Near East during one particular period of Greek art and culture has long been recognized. In fact, this era is conventionally termed the Orientalizing period, lasting from about 750 to 650 BCE. That phase saw a shift from the prevailing Geometric style to a style with different sensibilities, which were inspired by the East. During this period the Assyrians advanced along the Mediterranean coast, accompanied by Greek mercenaries, who were also active in the armies of Psammeticus in Egypt. The new groups started to compete with established Greek merchants. There were various shifts in population. Phoenicians from the east coast of the Mediterranean settled in Cyprus and in western regions of Greece, while Greeks established trading colonies at Al Mina, Syria, and in Ischia, an island off the Tyrrhenian coast of Italy. These changes constituted the background of an intense penetration of Semitic cultural traits into Greece.

Massive imports of raw materials, including metals, and a new mobility among foreign craftsmen led to the introduction of new craft skills in Greece.

In 1992 the German scholar Walter Burkert offered a new interpretation of this trend (The Orientalizing Revolution: Near Eastern Influence on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Age). Burkert described the new movement in Greek art as a revolution: "With bronze reliefs, textiles, seals, and other products, a whole world of eastern images was opened up which the Greeks were only too eager to adopt and adapt in the course of an "orientalizing revolution.” Depictions of Greek myths that were destined to become standard types originated from attempts to naturalize foreign visual formulae stemming from the East. As has been noted in the previous section some of the myths themselves appear to be imports from Mesopotamia.

In addition, Burkert emphasizes the role of migrating seers and healers, bringing their skills in divination and purification ritual along with elements of their mythological wisdom. Surely the most outstanding contribution of this period was the invention of the Greek alphabet, based on the earlier phonetic Phoenician writing. This change caused a great leap in literacy and literary production, as the oral traditions of the epic began to be transcribed onto imported Egyptian papyrus and other media..

In Attic pottery, the distinctive Orientalizing style known as "proto-Attic" was marked by floral and animal motifs; for the first time specific religious and mythological themes appeared in vase painting. The new style fostered a narrative clarity that had previously been lacking.

In 2004 Walter Burkert published a book seeking to integrate these findings into the larger picture: Babylon Memphis Persepolis: Eastern Contexts of Greek Culture (2004).
In general Burkert adopts a moderate position on the question of Greek indebtedness to the Near East and to Egypt, the claims of the latter of course being famously challenged by Martin Bernal, who is not at all moderate. Concerning the Bernal controversy, Burkert remarks: "Vigorous debates have ensued: yet while many details of Bernal and his followers' statements are open to argument, polemics are not worthwhile. One ought to look for further evidence and new perspectives, and to work out more equitable judgments,”

Burkert has taken on a big assignment, attempting to create a balance sheet of our knowledge of the how, why, and what of cultural influences on Greece from the Near East, Egypt, and Persia, mainly during the Archaic and Classical Periods. He attends to the historical and geographical contexts of cultural transmission: trade between Greece and the East (a push fueled by the Greek search for metals), politics (diplomacy, war, and conquest), to be sure, but also factors such as roads, libraries, schools, and writing materials (e.g., the switch from clay tablets to perishable materials with the Greek import of the Phoenician alphabet). Allowing for the possibility of “creative misunderstanding," Burkert seeks to discern a dialectical process of give and take on all sides.

In my view, he has not entirely freed himself from the bonds of Greek exceptionalism, as when he flirts with the hoary contrast of Oriental prerationalism and Greek rationalism. A somewhat wistful nostalgia transpires from the following statement: “Philosophy has largely tried to follow such an ideal of truth. It threatens to become obsolete, though, with the onset of relativity and deconstruction within the more modern trends in the social sciences and humanities. It is still to be hoped that the Greek heritage will not be totally lost.” We may be critical of modern relativism, but surely it is not necessary to go back to ancient Greece to oppose it.

In Chapter Four Burkert offers a case study of religious syncretism, involving the 6th-century Greek identification of Dionysus with Osiris. In his view, mystery rites promising a blissful afterlife provide the strongest basis for the association of the two gods. From Dionysus one can easily move on to Orpheus and the question of putative Egyptian influences on Orphic religion. This matter is made difficult by the fact that, despite intriguing new discoveries, we still know little about Orphic religion. All too often, assertion outruns the evidence.

Still, Burkert hazards the following conclusion: Orphism can be situated within a general family of teachings guaranteeing renewed life after death through the performance of ritual; such rituals or mysteries were associated with Orpheus as well as with Dionysus and taught by itinerant teachers. In this way Egyptian influences in the 6th century BCE were probably of prime importance for the transformation of the Mycenaean Dionysus into the Dionysus of mystery rites. The centrality of the afterlife to the Egyptian world view needs no underlining.

For the period after the Persian War, Burkert notes two religious ideas, both apparently Persian imports to Greece. The first is the concept of the ascent of the pious dead to a better life in heaven, an idea that replaces the uniformly bleak picture of an afterlife held by first millennium Greeks, Mesopotamians, Syrians, and Jews. There remains the problem of the dating of the original Zoroastrian texts, A more familiar issue is well-accepted Iranian homeland of the principle of dualism, which emphasizes a persistent battle between good and evil forces. This vein of thought finds several Greek avatars, the first perhaps being the philosopher Empedocles' depiction of a war between Love and Hate as the driving cause for natural processes.

In his careful way, Burkert joins forces with the current interest in hybridization. Cultural mixing is not only a fact, but it is a positive force. "Culture, including Greek culture, requires intercultural contact" Our stereotypes of an isolated Greek miracle developed as the result of a historical accident: "Greek culture had the good fortune to find successors who established a heritage and took care of it continuously, while neighboring civilizations fell victim to the ravages of time and to the victory of either Christianity or Islam.” Still, Burkert is not altogether happy with the recent dethronement of Classicism, which for him betokens an abandonment of standards. "Classicism presupposes and confirms recognized standards or norms -- but these are disappearing from our multicultural world and will not be recovered easily.”

Burkert’s final position is somewhat that of a mugwump; he recognizes the important catalytic role of the Eastern models, but still believes that there is something unique and exemplary about Greek culture, which he holds has determined the shape of “world civilization.” India and China are apparently of no account.

DEMOCRACY

In one sphere it is generally agreed that the Greek contribution is unique--democracy. Is that strictly true?

Using Sumerian epic, myth and historical records, the noted scholar Thorkild Jacobsen has identied what he calls primitive democracy. By this he means a government in which ultimate power rests with the mass of free male citizens, although "the various functions of government are as yet little specialized, the power structure is loose." In the early period of Sumer, kings such as Gilgamesh could not command the autocratic power which later Mesopotamia rulers wielded. Rather, major city-states had a council of elders and a council of "young men" (probably comprising free men bearing arms). These collective bodies possessed the final political authority, and had to be consulted on all major issues such as war.

Although Jacobsen advanced this idea as early as 1943, it has not received the discussion it deserves. Some critics assert that the same evidence also can be interpreted to demonstrate a power struggle between primitive monarchs and the nobility, a struggle in which the common people act more as pawns than the sovereign authority. For a recent study, see B. Sakhan, “Engaging ‘Primitive Democracy’: Mideast Roots of Collective Governance.” Middle East Policy, 2007.


UPDATE. I have just acquired an important new book, which facilitates a reconsideration of the problems discussed above. This is "When the Gods Were Born: Greek Cosmogonies and the Near East" by Carolina López-Ruiz (Harvard University Press, 2010). This book offers two important perspectives. First, we should no longer think of the Near East-Greek nexus as simply one of donor-recipient in which the older cultures of Western Asia simply exported ideas and motifs, which were then reframed by the Greeks. Instead, she believes that one should speak of a larger koine, in which these elements freely circulate. This model would imply that there are components which started in Greece and moved eastwards (in addition to the more familiar reverse process). Thus far the components of this kind that have been detected are few, at least prior to the Hellenistic period. But one may expect to find more of them.

Secondly, she emphasizes the pivotal role of the Ugarit (Ras Shamra) and the Phoenicians--the northwest Semitic area in what is now western Syria and Lebanon--as a a kind of laboratory or entrepot in which the culture mixing took place. Hitherto the greatest emphasis has been on the Hittites and Hurrians (in Asia Minor) as transmitters. That northern route was still important though, and since the Hittites and Hurrians were Indo-European, it serves to remind us that the matter is not a simple contrast between Indo-European Greeks and Semitic Mesopotamians. In the transmission of myth, language was probably not as important as usually assumed. We must also expect that a good many bilingual individuals were involved.

The author also provides valuable references to recent research, and some indication of new contributions that we may expect shortly.

Primacy of Egyptian art and architecture

"Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization" (1987-91), a major polemic by J. D. Bernal, has elicited much controversy. Despite the misleading title, this publication is not a contribution to Afrocentrism, as the term is usually understood. Instead the author seeks to restore what he terms the "ancient model," which posits the massive indebtedness of ancient Greece to Egypt. He holds that this view was dominant in ancient Greece itself, and prevailed in Europe until the late 18th century, when rising Eurocentrism sidelined it.

Against Bernal, Mary R. Lefkowitz has orchestrated a torrent of criticism--in her own book "Not Out of Africa," and in an edited volume, "Black Athena Revisited," gathering a whole raft of scholars to smite Bernal’s work. In the eyes of some this massive assault demolished Bernal. Yet he was not to go down so easily. In a collection of essays and reviews, "Black Athena Writes Back" (2001), Bernal vigorously rebutted his opponents. The upshot is this: some of what Bernal says is true, and some of it isn’t.

Yet that which is the case suffices to refute the conventional wisdom of the Hellenophile miraculists, who assert that the Greek "miracle" was a case of parthenogenesis, for it emerged without any help from the older peoples dwelling to the east and south. Apart from its fantastic etymologies, "Black Athena"'s major defect (in my view) is neglect of the ancient Near Eastern sources from Sumeria, Assyria, and Syria-Palestine (as pointed out by Walter Burkert and others).

Bernal postponed the subject of artistic relations for a later volume. It appears that this sequel will not be appearing. If so, this will be a pity, as the case for artistic indebtedness is a substantial one. It is not impossible, though, to divine some of the points Bernal might make in his putative supplement. The following outline of the Egyptian legacy in art and architecture looks beyond Greece and Rome, to modern Europe

1. Ashlar masonry. The Third Dynasty funerary precinct of Zoser at Saqqara (ca. 2630-2611 BCE) is the first major architectural enterprise to be executed in stone throughout. Moreover, the fine limestone blocks are in ashlar masonry. That is, they are parallelepipeds, six-faced regular solids of standard sizes, laid in regular horizontal courses. Before this, such monuments were of mud brick. Imitating the regularity of the six-faced bricks (top, bottomm and four sides), the Saqqara limestone blocks are examples of skeuomorphism, a learned term for the migration of a form native to one medium into another. Once invented, ashlar masonry had a great future. One thinks of the walls of Greek monumental buildings, not to mention countless stately banks, libraries, and governmental buildings of our own time—all executed in ashlar masonry. It is sometimes assumed, by the way that standardization is a product of our own industrial age. However, standarized bricks and limestone blocks long preceded it.

2. Modularity. The invention of ashlar masonry is probably the first instance of the principle of modularity—the regular "scansion" of space using architectural means. A kind of negative version appears in the regular bays of Egyptian temples and hypostyle halls.

3. Columnar architecture. The Saqqara complex shows several types of engaged (attached) columns. Later, the columns are freestanding, surmounted by capitals, and marshaled into rows (colonnades). Indebted to Egypt, columnar architecture was fundamental in ancient Greece, Rome, and the Renaissance.

4. Pyramids. As is well known, the Egyptians perfected the pyramid as a geometrical monument with five smooth faces (counting the base). There is a long history of replication of pyramids, culminating in I.M. Pei’s glass examples in Paris and Washington, D.C., as well as the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas. However, the pyramid embodies the broader theme of elementalism. As architects from Le Doux to Le Corbusier have shown, beauty and authority stem from dramatically simple forms.

5. The hypostyle hall. As seen at the Karnak temple, this is a large pillared hall in which the central section, the nave, is higher than the two wings on either side. Light floods into the structure’s middle from the clerestory at the top of the nave. This principle recurs in Roman basilicas, and again in Christian churches, including many modern cathedrals.

6. Orthogonal city planning. Groups of Old Kingdom mastabas are distributed according to a gridiron plan. Like most early towns everywhere, most Egyptian cities were apparently “organic” (higgledy-piggeldy) in planning. Hower, the Middle Kingdom town of Kahun, created anew to accommodate workers, reflects a system of right angles. Broadly speaking this is the pattern found in Greek “Hippodamean” cities, Roman towns, and many American cities. Regardless of whether there is a direct connection, the Egyptians pioneered the orthogonal principle.

7. Monumental sculpture. Beginning in the Third Dynasty the Egyptians created canons of monumental sculpture, life-size or nearly life-size pieces that follow well-defined patterns of arrangement. In this way they invented the s t a t u e, as distinct from the “figurines” and rough “idols” formerly dominant.

8. The nude. During the Fifth Dynasty the Egyptians introduced nude male figures in the tombs. These are shown striding, with the left foot forward. Sporadically recurring, the form was purloined by the Greeks for their k o u r o s.

9. The bust. This is an abbreviated human being, a type of sculpture showing only the head and shoulders. The earliest surviving example seems to be the Old Kingdom Ankh-haf in Boston. There is a charming wooden example in the Tut treasure—and of course the world-famous Nefertiti in Berlin. The Romans produced busts of revered ancestors. And busts proliferated in the European baroque.

10. The sphinx. Egyptian sphinxes (atypical examples of animal-human hybrids) generally represent rulers. In Greece the form, always female, is hypothesized. Modern artists like Elihu Vedder and František Kupka have quoted the form as a token of inscrutability.

11. The frame. Early relief carvings, such as the Wadji stele in the Louvre and the wooden Hesira panels, fix the frame situation by raising the surface outside the picture area so as to create a uniform boundary. Later, the Egyptians developed wall paintings that clearly suggest beaded frames. Simulated frames occur in Pompeiian painting, while real three-dimensional examples enclose European canvases from the Renaissance to the present.

12. Illustrated books. In their papyri the Egyptians invented the practice of interspersing pictures amidst columns of text. The illuminated books of Byzantium inherited this practice. It lives on in our art books, with their dialogue of picture and text.

13. Comic papyri of animals simulating human conduct. A striking example is the strip of the lion and the gazelle in the British Museum. These images show that the ancient Egyptians had a sense of humor. Yet such depictions are not just humorous but embody social commentary. Cats peacefully look after mice and geese, while a gazelle must ponder how to cater to her lion master. Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck came much later.

14. Abstract art. During the Amarna period (ca. 1372-54 BCE) the old anthropomorphic and thereomorphic (human and animal) forms of deities were discarded in favor of a circular rendering, the concave disk standing for the Aten, the solar principle. Modern abstraction, also rejecting the depiction of living beings, has also favored circles and disks. Among the abstract artists exploiting the disk form are Robert Delaunay, Theo van Doesburg, and Kenneth Noland.

15. Gender variation. During the Old Kingdom and Middle Kingdom human figures complied with an established gender contrast. Men were robustly muscled, their buff upper torso revealed by the standard kilt. Women were slender, graceful, and lissom, generally wearing a slight slip-like garment. During the New Kingdom major changes became evident. Queen Hatshepsut (r. 1479-1457 BCE) ruled as a man. Her statues sometimes reflect her birth gender (her feminine side) and sometimes her masculine status, with pronounced features and a false beard. With his shrunken upper torso and pear-shaped middle section, the Amarna pharaoh Akhenaten (r. 1353-1337) shows a pronounced gender ambiguity. Recent scholarship holds that his wife Nefertiti may have assumed the male identity of Smenkhare, so as to be co-ruler with her husband during his last years. The depictions of Smenkhare are notably androgynous.

In their number and variety, these "firsts" speak for themselves. To be sure, there were many firsts in the rival civilization of Mesopotamia, but rarely in art. Egyptian primacy in this realm suggests the following stark conclusion. In all of Western art there are two main sequences, BE (Before Egyptian, i.e. prehistoric) and E plus (Egyptian and after).

Lecture thirteen (and supplement)

We briefly discussed the evidence from Egyptian art for the dialogic link between deity and worshipper, noting that in most cases in the world’s religion this potential symmetry is honored more in the breach and the observance. That is, the worshipper extends offerings, sacrifices, prayers, hymns of praise--even sometimes cajolerie and threats. For the most part, there is no direct reciprocation. However, the famous Amarna panel of the royal family under the Aten’s rays shows an almost aggressive, “in-your-face” reciprocity on the part of the deity.

 The idea of an ongoing loop of reciprocation was expressed in different terms by the noted Jewish philosopher Martin Buber in his “I and Thou.” These issues deserve more pondering than I can provide at this time.


THE AMARNA AFTERMATH

Four rulers round out the Eighteenth dynasty: the mysterious Smenkhare, who may have reigned only a year or so; the now-famous Tutankhamen; the elderly vizier Ay; and the nonroyal Horemhab.

Tutankamun did not receive this name at birth, but rather Tutankhaten (meaning "Living Image of the Aten"), placing him in the line of pharaohs following Akhenaten who was most likely his father.  His mother was probably Kiya, though this too is in question.  He changed his name in year two of his rule to Tutankhamun (or heqa-iunu-shema), which means "Living Image of Amun”--”Ruler of Upper Egyptian Heliopolis.” a reference to Karnak.

The boy spent his early years in Amarna, where he even started a tomb. At the age of nine he married Ankhesenpaaten, his half-sister, later termed Akhsesenatun. At the end of Akhenaten's reign, Ay and the general Horemheb, both senior members of that king’s court, seemed to have realized that the Atenic religion could not continue: it was too disruptive and unpopular. Upon the death of Akhenaten and Smenkhkare, they had the young king who was nine years old crowned in the old secular capital of Memphis. And since the young pharaoh had no living female relatives old enough, he was probably under the care of Ay or Horemheb or both, who would have actually been the factual ruler(s) of Egypt.

By year two of his reign--in keeping with the return to traditional religion--he changed his name, as well as Ankhesenpaaten's, removing the "aten" and replacing it with "amun."

One reason why Tutankhamun was not listed on the classical king lists is probably because Horemheb, the last ruler of the Eighteenth dynasty, usurped most of the boy-king's work, including a restoration stele that records the reinstallation of the old religion of Amun and the reopening and rebuilding of the temples.

Tutankhamun’s building at Karnak and Luxor included the continuation of the entrance colonnades of the Amenhotep temple at Luxor, including associated statues, and his embellishment of the Karnak temple with images of Amun, Amunet, and Khonsu.

Militarily, little happened during the reign of Tutankhamun, a surprising fact considering that Horemheb was a well known general.  Apparently there were campaigns in Nubia and Palestine/Syria, but this is only known from a brightly painted gesso box found in Tutankhamun's tomb, which we have seen on several occasions. It portrays scenes of the king hunting lions in the desert and gazelles, as well as smiting Nubians and then Syrians.

Tutankhamun died young, but the manner of his death has long been a subject of speculation. There is still some support for the theory that he was murdered. In fact, a recent CT scan seems to indicate that he may very well have died from infection brought about by a broken leg, which may have occurred in a chariot accident.


THE TOMB

Located in the Valley of the Kings, it is not the grandest tomb in Egypt, and was certainly not occupied by one of Egypt's most powerful rulers.  All the same, the public knows the tomb of Tutankhamen (KV 62) better then any other, because of all the royal tombs, it was found mostly intact. What was found in this tomb surely gives us pause to understand the motive behind ancient tomb robberies.  If such a vast fortune in treasure (approximately 3,700 items) was found in this modest tomb owned by a relatively minor king, what must have dazzled the eyes of the thieves who first entered the huge tomb of Rameses II or one of Egypt's other grand kings? Or possibly for some reason the tomb of the boy king was particularly lavish. We cannot know. Of course, the range of funerary equipment has proved very useful to Egyptologists, giving them an idea of the standard equipment of a royal tomb.

The tomb, which lies in an area that was not normally used for royal burials in the Valley center, was apparently quickly buried deep below the surface. It was forgotten until the English archaeologist Howard Carter discovered it on November 4th, 1922. Part of Carter's luck was that it was not discovered earlier when, his predecessor in the Valley, Theodore Davis who was American, came within little more then a meter of finding it himself.

Carter was told, prior to finding the tomb, that his patron Lord Carnarvon was withdrawing from the project. After pleading his case, he was given one more season of excavation in order to find it.

The sequence of rooms is not arranged according to a linear axis (typical of the great royal tombs) but assumes a somewhat convoluted, cramped space. The entrance Corridor leads to a broad Anteroom. From there one can procede to the Annexe, something of a blind alley, or to the Burial Chamber proper, which is accompanied by the Treasury.

While the king’s mummy has been returned to a climate-controlled glass case in the tomb, the funerary equipment has been removed to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. What is to be seen is mostly the wall paintings, which are restricted to the Burial Chamber. Here all the walls have the same golden background.  On the west wall we find scenes depicting the apes of the first hour of the Amduat. On the south wall the king is followed by Anubis as he appears before and as he is being welcomed into the underworld by Hathor, Anubis, and Isis.   The north wall depicts the King before Nut with the royal ka embracing Osiris. On the same wall, we also find the scene of Ay performing the opening of the mouth ritual before the mummy of Tutankhamun.  Finally, on the east wall, Tutankhamun's mummy is depicted being pulled on a sledge during the funeral procession.

This tomb was not found completely intact.  In fact, there had been at least two robberies of the tomb, perhaps soon after Tutankhamen's burial, probably by members of the tomb workers.  

The centerpiece for the whole tomb is of course the housing for the royal mummy. This consists of four big rectangular boxes, one inside the other. These serve to protect no less that three coffins. The associated golden masks of the king are slightly different, but there is no reason to believe that they have been usurped from a previous owner.

Also notable is the Golden Shrine, with its four protective goddesses. A number of figures show the king in the guise of various divine or protective figures. There are two interesting pars pro toto images: the so-called manikin and the wooden image of the king’s head rising from a lotus (an image of rebirth).

Of an almost incredible quality, the jewelry rings all the changes of the ancient Egyptian craft, whether in solid or ajoure’ form.

Any account of the tomb can only scratch the surface as we have done. For further insights, monographs must be consulted.


PART TWO (not given in class):

“NOTES ON THE LEGACY OF ANCIENT EGYPT”

The following outline of the Egyptian legacy in art and architecture looks beyond Greece and Rome, to modern Europe and North America.

1. Ashlar masonry. The Third Dynasty funerary precinct of Zoser at Saqqara (ca. 2630-2611 BCE) is the first major architectural enterprise to be executed in stone throughout. Moreover, the fine limestone blocks are in ashlar masonry. That is, they are parallelepipeds, six-faced regular solids of standard sizes, laid in regular horizontal courses. Before this, such monuments were of mud brick. Imitating the regularity of the six-faced bricks (top, bottomm and four sides), the Saqqara limestone blocks are examples of skeuomorphism, a learned term for the migration of a form native to one medium into another. Once invented, ashlar masonry had a great future. One thinks of the walls of Greek monumental buildings, not to mention countless stately banks, libraries, and governmental buildings of our own time—all executed in ashlar masonry. It is sometimes assumed, by the way that standardization is a product of our own industrial age. However, standarized bricks and limestone blocks long preceded it.

2. Modularity. The invention of ashlar is probably the first instance of the principle of modularity—the regular "scansion" of space using architectural means. A kind of negative version appears in the regular bays of Egyptian temples and hypostyle halls.

3. Columnar architecture. The Saqqara complex shows several types of engaged (attached) columns. Later, the columns are freestanding, surmounted by capitals, and marshaled into rows (colonnades). Indebted to Egypt, columnar architecture was fundamental in ancient Greece, Rome, and the Renaissance.

4. Pyramids. As is well known, the Egyptians perfected the pyramid as a geometrical monument with five smooth faces (counting the base). There is a long history of replication of pyramids, culminating in I.M. Pei’s glass examples in Paris and Washington, D.C., as well as the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas. However, the pyramid embodies the broader theme of elementalism. As architects from Le Doux to Le Corbusier have shown, beauty and authority stem from dramatically simple forms.

5. The hypostyle hall. As seen at the Karnak temple, this is a large pillared hall in which the central section, the nave, is higher than the two wings on either side. Light floods into the structure’s middle from the clerestory at the top of the nave. This principle recurs in Roman basilicas, and again in Christian churches, including many modern cathedrals.

6. Orthogonal city planning. Groups of Old Kingdom mastabas are distributed according to a gridiron plan. Like most early towns everywhere, most Egyptian cities were apparently “organic” (higgledy-piggeldy) in planning. Hower, the Middle Kingdom town of Kahun, created anew to accommodate workers, reflects a system of right angles. Broadly speaking this is the pattern found in Greek “Hippodamean” cities, Roman towns, and many American cities. Regardless of whether there is a direct connection, the Egyptians pioneered the orthogonal principle.
Orthogonal planning is evident also in the planning of Akhetaten, Akhenaten’s new capital at Amarna. Foreshadowing Washington, DC, Canberra, and Brasilia, this is the first example known to history of a capital founded afresh, rather than developing organically from an existing town.

7. Monumental sculpture. Beginning in the Third Dynasty the Egyptians created canons of monumental sculpture, life-size or nearly life-size pieces that follow well-defined patterns of arrangement. In this way they invented the s t a t u e, as distinct from the “figurines” and rough “idols” formerly dominant.

8. The nude. During the Fifth Dynasty the Egyptians introduced nude male figures in the tombs. These are shown striding, with the left foot forward. Sporadically recurring, the form was purloined by the Greeks for their k o u r o s.

9. The bust. This conventional form is an abbreviated human being, a type of sculpture showing only the head and shoulders. The earliest surviving example seems to be the Old Kingdom Ankh-haf in Boston. There is a charming wooden example in the Tut treasure—and of course the world-famous Nefertiti in Berlin. The Romans produced busts of revered ancestors. And busts proliferated in the European baroque.

10. The sphinx. Egyptian sphinxes (atypical examples of animal-human hybrids) generally represent rulers. In Greece the form, always female, is hypothesized. Modern artists like Elihu Vedder and František Kupka have quoted the form as a token of inscrutability.

11. The frame. Early relief carvings, such as the Wadji stele in the Louvre and the wooden Hesira panels, fix the frame situation by raising the surface outside the picture area so as to create a uniform boundary. Later, the Egyptians developed wall paintings that clearly suggest beaded frames. Simulated frames occur in Pompeiian painting, while real three-dimensional examples enclose European canvases from the Renaissance to the present.

12. Illustrated books. In their papyri the Egyptians invented the practice of interspersing pictures amidst columns of text. The illuminated books of Byzantium inherited this practice. It lives on in our art books, with their dialogue of picture and text.

13. Comic papyri of animals simulating human conduct. A striking example is the strip of the lion and the gazelle in the British Museum. These images show that the ancient Egyptians had a sense of humor. Yet such depictions are not just humorous but embody social commentary. Cats peacefully look after mice and geese, while a gazelle must ponder how to cater to her lion master. Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck came much later.

14. Abstract art. During the Amarna period (ca. 1372-54 BCE) the old anthropomorphic and theriomorphic (human and animal) forms of deities were discarded in favor of a circular rendering, the concave disk standing for the Aten, the solar principle. Modern abstraction, also rejecting the depiction of living beings, has also favored circles and disks. Among the abstract artists exploiting the disk form are Robert Delaunay, Theo van Doesburg, and Kenneth Noland.

15. Gender variation. During the Old Kingdom and Middle Kingdom human figures complied with an established gender contrast. Men were robustly muscled, their buff upper torso revealed by the standard kilt. Women were slender, graceful, and lissom, generally wearing a slight slip-like garment. During the New Kingdom major changes became evident. Queen Hatshepsut (r. 1479-1457 BCE) ruled as a man. Her statues sometimes reflect her birth gender (her feminine side) and sometimes her masculine status, with pronounced features and a false beard. With his shrunken upper torso and pear-shaped middle section, the Amarna pharaoh Akhenaten (r. 1353-1337) shows a pronounced gender ambiguity. Recent scholarship holds that his wife Nefertiti may have assumed the male identity of Smenkhare, so as to be co-ruler with her husband during his last years. (This idea is speculative.) At all events, the depictions of Smenkhare are notably androgynous.

In their number and variety, these "firsts" speak for themselves. To be sure, there were many firsts in the rival civilization of Mesopotamia, but rarely in art. Egyptian primacy in this realm suggests the following stark conclusion. In all of Western art there are two main sequences, BE (Before Egyptian, i.e. prehistoric) and E plus (Egyptian and after).

APPENDIX: “Red and Black”

A recent B-movie about winning at Las Vegas made me think about the conventions of the roulette wheel. Apart from the numbers on the rim (which are, appropriately, numerous) there are two binary contrasts: odd vs. even, and red vs. black. The first reflects a fundamental property of mathematics that is, so to speak, built into the universe. Every number must be either odd or even.

Not so the red/black opposition. To be sure, hues may be measured in angstrom units, arraying them in a vast rainbow, but the only contrast that seems objectively valid is between white (total fusion of colors) and its opposite black (the absence of color). And we do speak of black-and-white contrasts. Among other things, piano keyboards and old movies reinforce the perception of this complementarity. However, red is just a hue among countless others, with no objective or necessary companion, except as convention dictates. In traffic lights, for example, red contrasts with green.

Why then the red/black antinomy? The answer goes back to the writing conventions of the ancient Egyptians, whose beautiful hieroglyphs we admire in our museums and libraries. In Egyptian papyri black is preferred for the main body of running text. Red, which occurs less often, is reserved for headings and words that need to be emphasized, italicized as it were.

Among the Egyptians this contrast was in part practical, reflecting the ready availability of black ink (carbon black) and red (hematite, or red iron oxide). There were also symbolic overtones. The Egyptians often called their own country Kemet, the Black Land, acknowledging the rich dark soil brought from East Africa by the annual inundation’s. By contrast red was associated with the desert, a potentially dangerous, but inescapable accompaniment of the Black Land.

These symbolic associations faded, but not the idea that black is to be preferred for main texts, red for exceptional indications. Medieval scribes called the use of red "rubrication." Even today, we use the term "red-letter days," which originally referred to special feasts and saints' days in the calendar. At the beginning of her career, the Theosophist Annie Besant wrote a book on "black-letter saints," worthy figures but not as famous as the red-letter ones.

Today a version of the contrast occurs in bookkeeping, where accountants traditionally enter debits in red. This practice has influenced ordinary language. No one wants to be "in the red," while the assurance that one is "in the black" is calming.

The bookkeeping practice draws on the association of red with danger, which may be biological in origin. In the case of the roulette wheel, however, this association is not present. Given the mathematical nature of the odds, a better would be foolish to avoid red.

In Stendhal’s great novel, "Le Rouge et le noir" (1831), red refers to a political career, possibly a revolutionary one, while black means choice of the Church. Roughly they correspond to to our Left and Right. The contrast could also occur within factions of the Left. In 1834, if memory serves, two flags were unfurled in Paris: a red one for socialism, a black one for anarchism. Red has continued to be favored in the symbology of Marxist regimes, while some Anarchists unfurl the black flag.

It is a curious fact that a custom that started in ancient Egypt lingers in two realms where the red/black contrast is significant: in gambling and accounting. Perhaps someone should alert the Las Vegas hotel, the Luxor (where I stayed several years ago). Both types of endeavor, gaming and accounting, figure in the business side of the hotel.

Lecture twelve

Leaving the realm of the private tombs, with their impressive murals, we return to the major personalities of the Eighteenth dynasty. Who was the most outstanding? Hatshepsut would certainly make a claim. She demonstrated the virtues of trade and peace, instead of war. In her own person, she fused (in her view) the perfect female and the perfect male, introducing an androgynous model that resurfaced with Akhnaten (albeit in different form). Her nephew, the macho Tuthmose III could make his claim based on his conquests, which extended Egyptian territory significantly. Amenhotep III, the “dazzling sun” and creator of over 1000 statues of himself, represented the zenith of Egyptian power. His son Amenhotep IV, known as Akhnaten, introduced a new religion and a new style of art. As his virtual coregent, Nefertiti could have made a claim, with her serene beauty and self-confidence. Finally, the boy king Tutankhamen, owing to the happy accident of the survival of his treasure, ranks as one of the most famous--if not the most famous--pharaohs for our own age.

Previously we dealt with the first two of these Great Ones, Hatshepsut and Thutmose III. Now we transition to the third worthy by means of Amenhotep II and Thutmose IV. The former’s tomb survives in the Valley of the Kings (KV 35) in reasonably good condition. The sarcophagus is superb (note the golden figure of Isis), and the walls are decorated with scenes from the Amduat (the book of “That Which Is in the Netherworld), divided into 12 hours (of the night). He had reigned for 27 years.

The succession of Thutmose IV seems to have been uncertain, confirmed though (as he believed) by a dream in which the sphinx appeared to him, commanding her restoration. Thutmose’s sphinx is clearly “solarized,” by the identification Khepri-Ra-Atum, that is, the rising sun, zenith, and setting sun. He reigned for only 9-10 years.

The Eighteenth dynasty peaked during the reign of Amenhotep III, who reigned for almost 40 years.. Sustained by the enormous wealth of past conquests, by tribute and diplomatic gifts of vassal kings and foreign rulers, Amenhotep III became one of the greatest builders in the history of his country.

Like his ancestors, he continued extending the great temple of Amun at Karnak. He was responsible for rebuilding the Temple core at Luxor. His architect may have been Amenhotep, son of Hapu. On the Theban west bank, he built a large palace complex (known as Malkata) and a funerary temple of which, unfortunately, only the two damaged colossi (“of Memnon”) now bear witness. Excavators have uncovered the basic elements of the plan of the palace which consisted of a succession of halls and courtyards, with satellite villas.

His sculptures show an oscillation of features, from the severe “basilisk countenances” to the baby-faced types. He is sometime shown with his wife Tiye, daughter of Yuya and Tuya (the latter occupied tomb KV 46).

Anticipating Louis XIV, Amenhotep III had himself identified as the “dazzling sun.” The Aten disk appears in the iconography of his reign. As we noted at the outset of this course, a tendency to solar preeminence was always latent in Egyptian culture (note, e.g., the Sun Temple at Abu Ghurob of the Fifth dynasty). In view of the absolute triumph of the sun under his son Akhneten, it is tempting to seek elements of the new, revolutionary religion in the long reign of the father. In this quest for origins, it is difficult to find a balance--in part because the theologians of Amenhotep III did not know where they were going. Akhenaten did.

AKHENATEN AND AMARNA

In the early years of his reign, Amenhotep IV lived at Thebes with Nefertiti and his 6 daughters. Initially, he permitted worship of Egypt's traditional deities to continue, but near the Temple of Karnak (Amun-Re's great cult center), he erected several massive buildings including temples to the Aten or sun disk. These buildings at Thebes were later dismantled by his successors and used as infill for new constructions in the Temple of Karnak; when they were later dismantled by archaeologists, some 36,000 decorated blocks from the original Aten building here were revealed which preserve many elements of the original relief scenes and inscriptions.

The relationship between Amenhotep IV and the priests of Amun-Re gradually deteriorated. In Year 5 of his reign, Amenhotep IV took decisive steps to establish the Aten as the exclusive, monotheistic god of Egypt. With stunning ruthlessness, the pharaoh disbanded the priesthoods of all the other gods, diverting the income from the other cults to support the Aten. This step suggests that their may have been an economic subtext behind his reform, a subtext that would garner support among the military and the bureaucracy, increasingly concerned about priestly domination.

The king officially changed his name from Amenhotep IV to Akhenaten or “Servant of the Aten.”
As we have previously noted, their is a kind of latent solarism that runs through Egyptian religion. This theme had become stronger in the reign of the father Amenhotep III, the “dazzling son.” Thus Akhenaten’s “heresy” had real roots.

Still, there is no doubting the genuinely revolutionary character of Akhenaten’s new faith, which was, in essence, a “found” religion, and not one that had simply evolved like all previous belief systems. Contrary to some doubters, I believe that it was genuinely monotheistic. As such, it proclaimed a new dichotomous standard of truth and falsehood, seen as absolutely opposed. With regard to the Aten, there was no “complementary dualism,” unless it was the pharaoh himself, the deity’s own vicar on earth. Atenism was both aniconic (no anthropomorphic or animal representation) and iconoclastic (destruction of images of rival gods). In all these respects, it forecasts later forms of monotheism.

As seen in the Great Hymn (possibly written by Akhenaten himself) the new religion presented many appealing aspects. The supremacy of the sun, the source of all life, accounts for both human diversity (what we would term multiculturalism) and human solidarity (the sun shines equally on all lands). The Hymn shows some similarities with other forms of Middle Eastern wisdom literature (cf. Psalm 104).

As if this new religion was not enough, Akhenaten made two other innovations: his new capital and his new style (or styles) of art.

THE NEW CAPITAL

Akhenaten's fifth year also marked the beginning of construction on his new capital, Akhetaten, or “Horizon of Aten,” at the site known today as Amarna. This city ranks as the first effort in world history to create a new capital from scratch, foreshadowing Washington, Canberra, and Brasilia.
The area of the city was effectively a virgin site. It may be that the Royal Wadi's resemblance to the hieroglyph for horizon showed that this was the place to found the city.

Construction started in or around Year 5 of the king’s reign (1346 BCE) and was probably completed by Year 9 (1341 BCE), although it became the capital city two years earlier. To speed up construction of the city most of the buildings were constructed out of mud brick, and white-washed. The most important buildings were faced with local stone.

It is the only ancient Egyptian city that integrally preserves its internal plan, in large part because the city was abandoned after the death of Akhenaten. The city seems to have remained active for a decade or so after his death, and a shrine to Horemheb indicates that it was at least partially occupied at the beginning of his reign, if only as a source for building material elsewhere.

Hastily constructed, Akhetaten extended along approximately 8 miles of territory on the east bank of the Nile River; on the west bank, land was set aside to provide crops for the city's population. The entire city was encircled with a total of 14 boundary stelae detailing Akhenaten's conditions for the establishment of this new capital city of Egypt.

The ruins of the city are laid out roughly north to south along a grand avenue, the Royal Road. The royal residences are generally to the north, in what is known as the North City, with a central administration and religious area and the south of the city is made up of residential suburbs.
Most of the important ceremonial and administrative buildings were located in the central city. Here the Great Temple of the Aten and the Small Aten Temple were used for religious functions; between these the Great Royal Palace and the Royal Residence were the ceremonial abodes of the King and Royal Family, being linked by a bridge and ramps. Located behind the Royal Residence was the Pharaoh’s Bureau of Correspondence, where the Amarna Leters were found. This central zone was probably the first area to be completed.

To the south of the city was the area now referred to as the Southern Suburbs, containing the estates of many of the city's powerful nobles. This area also held the studio of the sculptor Thutmose, where the famous bust of Nefertiti was found in 1912.

The tombs broke with the tradition of location on the west bank of the nile Away from the city Akhenaten's royal necropolis was started in a narrow valley to the east of the city, hidden in the cliffs.

The king was active in architecture outside of his new capital. In honor of Aten, Akhenaten also oversaw the construction of some of the most massive temple complexes in ancient Egypt. In these new temples, Aten was worshipped in the open sunlight, rather than in dark temple enclosures, as had been the previous custom.

ART STYLES

Styles of art that flourished during this short period are markedly different from other Egyptian art, bearing a variety of inflection, from elongated heads to protruding stomachs, outright ugliness and the beauty of Nefertiti. Significantly, and for the only time in the history of Egyptian royal art, Akhenaten's family was depicted in a decidedly naturalistic manner, and they are clearly shown displaying affection for each other. Nefertiti also appears beside the king in actions usually reserved for a Pharaoh, suggesting that she attained unusual power for a queen. Artistic representations of Akhenaten give him a strikingly bizarre appearance, with an elongated face, slender limbs, a protruding belly, wide hips, and an overall pear-shaped body. It has been suggested that the pharaoh had himself depicted in this way for religious reasons, or that it exaggerates his distinctive physical traits. Until Akhenaten's mummy is located and identified, such theories remain speculative, though some evidence from mummies of relatives has recently come to light.

Because of its surpassing beauty, the famous bust of Nefertiti (now in Berlin) is both the masterpiece and the exception among the Amarna works. Probably a model rather than a finished work, the Nefertiti relies upon superb detailing and (compositionally) on a kind of counterintuitive balancing, with the most massive element at the top. Several other heads and torsos of female figures suggest that the Amarna approach was (to our eyes at least) more congenial for women rather than for men. There are, however, some eloquent male heads, some apparently modeled from life.

AFTERMATH AND CONCLUSION

Although it is accepted that Akhenaten himself died in Year 17 of his reign, the question of whether Smenkhkare became coregent perhaps 2 or 3 years earlier or enjoyed a brief independent reign is unclear. If Smenkhkare outlived Akhenaten, and became sole Pharaoh, he likely ruled Egypt for less than a year. The next successor was either Neferneferuaten, possibly a female Pharaoh who reigned for perhaps 2 or three years, or Tutankhaten (later, Tutankhamun), with the country perhaps being run by the chief vizier and future Pharaoh, Ay. Tutankhamun is believed to be a younger brother of Smenkhkare and a son of Akhenaten, and possibly Kiya although one scholar has suggested that Tutankhamun may have been a son of Smenkhkare instead. It has also been suggested that after the death of Akhenaten, Nefertiti reigned with the name of Neferneferuaten.
With Akhenaten's death, the Aten cult he had founded gradually fell out of favor. Tutankhaten changed his name to Tutankhamun in Year 2 of his reign (1332 BCE) and abandoned the city of Akhetaten, which eventually fell into ruin.

Finally, Akhenaten, Neferneferuaten, Smenkhkare, Tutankhamun, and Ay were excised from the official lists of Pharaohs, which instead reported that Amenhotep III was immediately succeeded by Horemheb. This is thought to be part of an attempt by Horemheb to delete all trace of Atenism and the pharaohs associated with it from the historical record. Akhenaten's name never appeared on any of the king lists compiled by later pharaohs and it was not until the late nineteenth century that his identity was rediscovered and the surviving traces of his reign were unearthed by archaeologists.

Akhenaten has been called by historian J. H. Breasted “the first individual in history." According to taste, he ranks as the first monotheist, the first scientist, and the first romantic. (The scientist claim seems to derive from his understanding of the sun as the source of energy.)

The striking portrayals of Akhenaten, with a sagging stomach, thick thighs, pendulous breasts, and long, thin face--so different from the athletic norm of royal portraiture--have led certain Egyptologists to suppose that Akhenaten suffered some kind of genetic abnormality. However, Dominic Montserrat in Akhenaten: History, Fantasy and Ancient Egypt argues that "there is now a broad consensus among Egyptologists that the exaggerated forms of Akhenaten's physical portrayal...are not to be read literally.” Montserrat and others argue that the body-shape relates to some form of religious symbolism. Because the god Aten was referred to as "the mother and father of all humankind" it has been suggested that Akhenaten was made to look androgynous in art as a symbol of the androgyny of the god. This required "a symbolic gathering of all the attributes of the creator god into the physical body of the king himself", which will "display on earth the Aten's multiple life-giving functions". Akhenaten did refer to himself as "The Unique One of Re," and he may have used his control of artistic expression to distance himself from the common people, though such a radical departure from the idealized traditional representation of the image of the Pharaoh would be truly extraordinary. (As indeed, it is.)

There has also been interest in the identity of the pharaoh Smenkhare (to be discussed next time), the immediate successor to Akhenaten. In particular descriptions on a small box seemed to refer to Smenkhare beloved of Akhenaten, posing the possibility that Akhenaten might have been bisexual. In all likelihood, Smenkhkare was a half-brother or a son to Akhenaten.

Lecture eleven

EGYPT ELEVEN

The new exhibition at the Met, “Beyond Babylon,” fills in much detail from the central area of the “Fertile Crescent.” It is also pertinent to the New Kingdom era with which we are presently concerned. Before sharing with you some preliminary impressions, let us say something about Egyptian penetration into the Levant in our period. As we noted earlier, the expulsion of the Hyksos suggested the need for an Egyptian buffer, which was duly established. Then the Egyptians extended themselves into Nubia, as far as the area between the Fourth and Fifth cataract.

Thutmose I began a period of active imperialist expansion in the Levant, by landing with an army at the key city of Byblos. However, it was the twenty years of campaigning by Thutmose III that really established Egyptian hegemony. Thutmose took three “native” wives. The great temples of Luxor and Karnak are in large measure an evidence of the tribute exacted from the subject peoples.

The Levant that Egypt sought to control was called Retjenu (rṯnw; Reṯenu, Retenu). It covered the region from the Negev Desert north to Orontes River in Syria. The borders of Retjenu shifted with time, but it generally consisted of three regions. The southernmost was Djahy, more or less corresponding with Canaan. Lebanon proper was located in the middle. North of Lebanon was designated Amurru, the land of the Amorites. The latter was particularly strategic, as it included the timber exporting port of Byblos and Ugarit, source of important religious documents.

This area also developed what came to be known as the Phoenician script, based ultimately on Egyptian. The simplified Egyptian script seems not to have been created in the Sinai, as we previously thought, but has been attested in graffiti (1900-1800 BCE) at Wadi el-Kol, between Thebes and Abydos. This is the ultimate progenitor of our own alphabet.

Where do the ancient Israelites fit in? The first (and so far) only mention of “Israel” in Egyptian documents is a stele of king Merenptah (1213-1203)
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Did the Egyptians really colonize this area, or were their raids something of a quest for booty, and a “pacification” project? The reality is something in between. There was no massive settlement, but the local elites of the cities were encouraged to acculturate.

Ironically, the incursions showed the limits of Egyptian power by stimulating a countermovement: the rise of Mitanni and the Hittites. Desperate, Tutankhamen’s widow sought to have a Hittite prince come to Egypt as her husband, a step that might have led to the combination of the two empires. This plan came to naught.

The Amarna Letters (late 18th dynasty) tell the story of the decline of Egyptian influence in the region. The Egyptians showed flagging interest here until almost the end of the dynasty. Horemheb, last ruler of this dynasty, campaigned in this region. The neglect had proved costly to Egyptian interests.

This process continued in the nineteenth dynasty, with Seti I and especially his son Ramesses II. Historical records exist which record a large weapons order by Ramesses II the year prior to the expedition he lead to Kadesh in 1274 BC. The immediate antecedents to the Battle of Kadesh were the early campaigns of Ramesses II into the Levant. In the fourth year of his reign, he marched north into Syria, either to recapture Amurru (the northernmost region). or to as a probing effort to confirm his vassals' loyalty and explore the terrain of possible battles. Ramesses marched north the 5th year of his reign, and encountered the Hittites at Kadesh. Regrettably, there are varying opinions on almost every aspect of the battle.

Ramesses’ army came equipped with at least 2,000 chariots, an enormous force, divided into four divisions. For their part, the Hittites brought along 19 allies. Unfortunately, Ramesses committed major tactical errors. The Hittite chariotry crashed through the Amun division’s shield wall and began their assault.

The pharaoh, now facing a desperate fight for his life, summoned up his courage, called upon his god Amun, and fought valiantly to save himself. Ramesses personally led several charges into the Hittite ranks, together with his personal guard, deployed and attacked the overextended and tired Hittite chariotry.

The Hittites meanwhile, who understandably believed their enemies to be totally routed, had stopped to loot the Egyptian camp, and in doing so became easy targets for Ramesses's counterattack. Ramesses' action was successful in driving the Hittites back towards the Orontes and away from the Egyptian camp, while in the ensuing pursuit, the heavier Hittite chariots were easily overtaken and dispatched by the lighter, faster, Egyptians chariots.

The next morning a second, inconclusive battle, was fought. The Hittite king Muwatalli is reported by Ramesses to have called for a truce but this may be propaganda since Hittite records note no such arrangement. Neither side gained total victory. Both the Egyptians and the Hittites had suffered heavy casualties; the Egyptian army failed to break Kadesh’s defenses while the Hittite army had failed to gain a victory in the face of what earlier must have seemed certain success.

Today, there is no consensus about the outcome or even what took place, with views ranging from an Egyptian victory, a draw, and an Egyptian defeat (with the Egyptian accounts simply propaganda).

The Kadesh peace agreement-- on display in the Archaeological Museum in Istanbul--is believed to be the earliest example of any written international agreement of any kind. Proclaiming victory, Ramesses prudently retired back into Egypt--without taking Kadesh. This episode marked the high water mark of Egyptian power in the Levant.

Now to the Met exhibition, “Beyond Babylon.” Addressing the second millennium, this show is a sequel to the splendid “Art of the First Cities” (2003),

Extraordinary is the find of a Minoan fresco (copy in the exhibition) by the Austrian excavators at Tell el-Dab’a (Avaris). See the illustration in Malek, fig. 149. Another Minoan motif has long been known from the Malkata palace in Western Thebes. Crete, of course, lay beyond the reach of Egyptian arms, but trade was appreciated with these “Keftiu.”

Byblos played a key role, since its prosperity depended on the timber trade (the famous cedars of Lebanon) that passed through it.

PAINTING

First, a word about color symbolism, which tends to vary from culture to culture. In ancient Egypt, red was generally a color of danger (cf. a plea by Isis to protect her from “red things”). By contrast, black has a favorable connotation but not always. (In papyri notice the contrast between red and black; distantly continued by our own accountants.) White is associated with silver, and also favorable. Green is best, because it is associated with resurrection. Note that these qualities are rarely explicit in the paintings, which serve to designate the actual colors of objects.
Egyptian painters used mainly mineral pigments, which tend not to decay over time like colors made from plant sources. Various yellow, red, and brown colors were obtained from ochres, forms of iron oxide, which were common throughout Egypt. A more lemony yellow came from orpiment, a naturally occurring sulphite of arsenic.
 
White was made from limestone or gypsum (calcium carbonate or calcium sulphate), or from a mineral known as huntite (a magnesium calcium carbonate).
 
Black was carbon-based, using the charcoal from burnt plant materials or bone, or the soot scraped from an oven or a cooking pot. Green was more of a problem. Even though there were several compounds of copper, such as malachite (copper carbonate), which gave a green color, these tended to oxidize to a brownish tone. Technically, blue was the most elusive color.
 
There is some evidence that a cobalt pigment was used for coloring pottery during the Amarna Period, but this was unusual. Most blue coloring had to be artificially made by a method similar to the manufacture of glass or glazes. This blue pigment, known as “Egyptian Blue,” was a copper calcium silicate or frit. When mixed with one of the yellow pigments, Egyptian Blue produced a variety of greens.

The grids that are sometimes still visible are now thought to serve as guides for transfer, rather than guarantors of “ideal form.” For the wall paintings supports were of three types: smoothed limestone, stucco, or a loam-and-straw foundation. The artists did not use true fresco (in which the pigment penetrates the drying plaster), but a form of tempera. As a result the paintings are fragile, and suffer from the damp. In addition, some have been prized from the walls and placed in museums (our Met has generally avoided this unfortunate practice, and instead has assembled a collection of good watercolor copies).

At Thebes many of the rock-cut tombs contain wall paintings that rank among the finest products of ancient Egyptian art. Regrettably, many of these have suffered extensive damage since the 1820s, when they first began to be brought to light. Over four hundred tombs and tomb-chapels have been allotted numbers for ease of reference and control. Others are numbered more haphazardly.

The more lavish tombs (cf. Rekhmire, TT 100) typically have an inverted “T” plan, allowing for additional wall space in the vestibule which is perpendicular to the axis.

The imagery of the paintings is partly traditional (hunting; scenes of country life) and innovative (feasts). In the feasts the artists permitted themselves formal liberties in keeping with the occasions, which reflect the human wish to observe “zones of licence” where ordinary rules do not apply. The exuberant Egyptian zest for life is fully in evidence. Significantly, the is the period in which a quantity of Egyptian love poetry, evoking themes that recur later (e.g. in the biblical Song of Songs).

The British Museum has a refurbished site on its Nebamun paintings (also a book); the paintings have parted company with their tomb (no one knows its whereabouts).

We also looked at work from the tombs of Menna, Rekhmire, Nakht and others. Particularly impressive are the murals in the Nefertari tomb in the Valley of Queens (nineteenth dynasty).
For more data on these wonderful scenes, see individual entries on the Internet.