Assignment task: Analyze the Art (Short Paper)
Analyze the art that portrays pharaoh Akhenaten. Take some notes on how Akhenaten is depicted in art. Think about Akhenaten's reforms in Ancient Egypt. Watch the documentary The Golden Age: Treasures of Ancient Egypt on Films On Demand.
Films Media Group. (2014). The golden age: Treasures of ancient Egypt [Video]. Films On Demand.
The Emergence of Early Civilizations - Egypt
Geography and The Nile
Egypt is a river civilization like Mesopotamia. Unlike Mesopotamia, Egypt's relationship to its river, The Nile, was an organized and fruitful one. In Mesopotamia, the Tigris and Euphrates rivers would flood at any time, no matter the season. The Nile would periodically and slowly flood every year at the same time. Ancient Egyptians developed a relationship with the river, and the civilization that grew around the Nile was a product of that relationship. The Nile was a medium of communication, transportation, trade, and commerce. It was perfect for traveling. The winds from the north helped sail against the current. It provided food and drinking water and even fertile the earth to grow crops and develop agriculture. It is the longest river on the planet, and its delta is connected to the Mediterranean Sea.
Geography protected Egypt. Egypt developed along the Nile. When we look at a map further from the Nile on both sides, there is just a desert. Being surrounded by desert meant that invaders would not attempt to invade Egypt, since they would have to travel through the desert before they reached Egypt. The other option was to invade through the Mediterranean Sea, but Egyptians guarded their delta to handle any who would attempt it.
A sense of security and a feeling of changelessness evolved in the people of Egypt. The outside world did not touch them for thousands of years. The culture developed as a very dogmatic, a conservative culture. It was not later into ancient Egyptian history that Egyptians attempted invading other lands. Otherwise, they kept to themselves.
Life was a cycle for the Egyptians. Things did not change. They just grew.
Kingdoms
According to an ancient Egyptian scribe called Manetho, there were many dynasties in Ancient Egypt. Later historians have divided the history of Ancient Egypt into three major periods, the Old Kingdom, the Middle Kingdom, and the New Kingdom.
In the Old Kingdom, king (later pharaoh) Menes unites Upper and Lower Egypt in one kingdom. The region in the south of Egypt is known as Upper Egypt. It might not make sense geographically on a map, but Upper Egypt is in the southern part of the Nile, and Lower Egypt is in the north. Uniting the two kingdoms, Menes started using the royal crown with the double diadem. The Old Kingdom was an age of prosperity and splendor. During this kingdom, the greatest and largest pyramids were built. The capital of Egypt was at Memphis, south of the Delta of the Nile in the Mediterranean Sea.
Pharaoh means great house or palace. This was when the pharaoh concept for the ruler of Egypt was established. The chief principle was called Ma'at. A good pharaoh had to rule with Ma'at.
The kingdom has a re-structure in the Middle Kingdom (2050 - 1652). The different communities or nomes (named by the Greeks) were settled. This was a way of establishing boundaries and organizing the kingdom's administration more effectively. Collecting taxes was better organized. Egyptians later portrayed the Middle Kingdom as a golden age (Spielvogel, 1997).
A very important change was that the pharaohs were concerned for the people. Before, pharaohs were more admired and almost worshiped, but in the middle kingdom, the pharaoh became a shepherd of his people, building public works and providing for the public welfare (Spielvogel, 1997).
Egypt embarks in a spirit of expansion and, for a short time, invades some of their neighbors. Lower Nubia, for example, was conquered, and Egypt tried imperialism.
The Pyramids
The pyramids we admire so much today were built during the Old Kingdom. Some of us do not realize it, but the pyramids are a city of the dead. For the Egyptians, we had two bodies, a physical one and a spiritual one called the ka. Our spiritual body would travel after death to pass to the afterlife. The pyramids were built as a resting place for the pharaohs only, as of the place in which their bodies would lay. But their spirit would leave. The physical body was preserved through mummification. This was a process that took around seventy days. The organs were extracted from the body, and the brain was pulled through the dead bodies' noses. The Egyptians did not think much about the brain. It was just an organ.
King Djoser built the first pyramid, and its architect was Inhotep. The fascinating story of this pyramid is that it seemed not supposed to be as high as it ended up. According to Egyptian tradition, you could not stop building the pyramid until the pharaoh died. Although the work on the pyramid of king Djoser was finished, the king had not died. So, they kept adding another level. When the king died, the pyramid had acquired a few levels. The famous step pyramid at Saqqara, according to Davis (2004), "looks like a Sumerian ziggurat." This was a very important comparison. It seems like the region's civilizations tended toward building tall structures.
Then came in 2600 B.C.E. King Snefru, who built three pyramids. But, the largest and most magnificent of all was built by Snefru's son, Khufu, who constructed it at Giza around 2540 B.C.E. The famous Great Pyramid covers thirteen acres.
Still today, there is great controversy related to who built these incredible structures. Based on accounts from the Hebrew Bible, it was thought that the Hebrew people were enslaved when they built the pyramids. But recent excavations have demonstrated that the people that built the pyramids seem to be workers from the population of Egypt.
The other controversy is related to how it is possible that ancient Egyptians built such structures, lacking the technology we have today. In a way, we are trying to understand a civilization from more than 5,000 years ago with our modern thinking. Ancient Egyptians created engineering marvels to proceed with their building project on a large scale. The more we look at ancient civilizations, the more we realize that human beings love challenges, and no challenge is bigger than human invention and will.
Egyptian art was largely functional. The human figures are seen in profile or semi profile all the time. Art was created to convey information, such as what type of life a person lived, what his successes were. All this was represented through Egyptian art. It was also formulaic, keeping a strict canon that all ancient Egyptian artists followed.
Writing has always been a powerful tool. One of the most popular elements in Ancient Egypt is Egyptian writing. The Greeks named it hieroglyphs "priest-carvings" or "sacred writing." The writing was reserved for the learned. Investigate more about ancient Egyptian writing.
New Kingdom
In what has been called the new kingdom, we find some fascinating people, like the pharaoh Akhenaten. His original name was Amenhotep. But he changed his name to Akhenaten, the lover of Aten, the sun god. Like popes today adopt names of other popes they identify, pharaohs made their names reflect their specific interests and preferences. This did not sit well with the religious tradition. Akhenaten thought that spiritual life in Egypt had gotten out of control. Hence, he decided to close temples that worshiped other gods, change the kingdom's capital, and introduce a sort of monotheism in the worship of Aten only.
Akhenaten wanted to be portrayed as a typical, ordinary human being. When we look at the Akhenaten statues that survive, he does not show perfect features like many pharaohs before and after. There is also a famous piece of art in which Akhenaten and his wife Nefertiti are portrayed in a familiar scene with their children. This is the pharaoh that challenged the religious establishment of his kingdom. But still, he was portrayed as an average person.
However, when Akhnaten died, his son Tutankhamun, who was still very young, took over and tried to erase his father's project from the history of Egypt. Although Tutankhamun is a more famous pharaoh, the ironic reason he is more famous is that he was not popular at all when he lived. His tomb was not even robed, and when it was found in modern times, it was filled with incredible treasures.
Hatshepsut
Pharaoh Hatshepsut was also a famous but controversial pharaoh. Djeser-Djeseru is part of the evidence in favor of Hatshepsut being a great builder. Being a woman was not illegal for a pharaoh, but it was not seen well. When Hatshepsut died, they attempted to erase her memory. Let us explore more the role of Egyptian women in leadership roles in Ancient Egypt.
Spiritual Life/Religion
The Egyptians had many gods. The most relevant were associated with the land and the sun. Osiris was an important symbol of resurrection or rebirth. They created The Book of the Dead to ensure a favorable journey to a happy afterlife. A list of actions proved that the dead had a clean record before they died. It secures passage to the afterlife. "At first the cult was reserved for the wealthy, later in the Middle Kingdom, the cult became" democratized (Spielvogel 1997).