Discovering the humanities 3rd by henry m sayre 2016 chapter 01

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Discovering the Humanities

by Pearson Education, Inc or its affiliates

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Learning Objectives

1 Discuss the rise of culture and how

developments in art and architecture reflect the growing sophistication of

prehistoric cultures.

2 Describe the role of myth in prehistoric

culture.

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Learning Objectives

3 Distinguish among the ancient

civilizations of Mesopotamia, and focus on how they differ from that of the Hebrews.

4 Account for the stability of Egyptian

culture.

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Wall painting: Horses, Chauvet Cave, Vallon-Pont-d'Arc, Ardèche gorge, France.

ca 30,000 BCE Paint on limestone cave wall Approx height: 6'.

Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication Direction Régionale des Affaires Culturelles de Rhone-Alpes Service Régional de l'Archéologie akg-images [Fig 1.1]

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Major Paleolithic caves in France and Spain.

[Fig Map 1.1]

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The Great River Valley Civilizations ca 2000 BCE

[Fig Map 1.2]

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Agency and Ritual: Cave Art

behaviors shared by a group of people, developed over time, and passed down from one generation to the next

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• Most scholars believe that the cave

paintings in southern France and

northern Spain possessed some sort of

agency (i.e., they were created to

exert power or authority over those

who came in contact with them)

• The agency could be connected to

hunting

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• The caves could also have served as

ritual spaces intended to serve the

common good (i.e., connected to

religious or quasi-religious contexts)

• The different artistic styles in the

various caves suggest that the choice between naturalistic and non-

naturalistic was driven by cultural

factors

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• The artists of Chauvet cave seemed to

understand perspectival drawing, or a

sense of three dimensions in a

two-dimensional space.

 This cave also demonstrated modeling,

or shading that gives volume and

dimension.

 The artists strove for naturalism, or a

representation imitating the actual

appearance of the animals.

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Wall painting with bird-headed man, bison, and rhinoceros,

Lascaux Cave, Dordogne, France.

ca 15,000-13,000 BCE Paint on limestone cave wall Approx length: 9'.

IGN [Fig 1.2]

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Paleolithic Culture and Its Artifacts

• The Paleolithic era is the period of

Homo sapiens' ascendancy.

• Homo sapiens were hunter-gatherers

whose survival depended on animals

they could kill and foods they could

gather

• People carved stone tools, weapons,

and small sculptural objects

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Woman (Venus of Willendorf), found at Willendorf, Austria.

ca 24,000-21,000 BCE Limestone Height: 4".

Naturhistorisches Museum, Vienna akg-images/Erich Lessing [Fig 1.3]

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Paleolithic Culture and Its Artifacts

• Female figurines vastly outnumbered

representations of males, which

suggests that women played a central

role in Paleolithic culture

• Most likely, women had considerable

religious and spiritual influence

• The Paleolithic culture may have been

matrilineal and matrilocal.

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Woman seated between two felines, Çatalhöyük, Turkey ca 6850–6300 BCE

Terra cotta, height 4-5/8".

Museum of Anatolian Civilizations, Ankara The Art Archive/Museum of Anatolian

Civilisations Ankara/Gianni Dagli Orti [Fig 1.4]

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Reconstruction of a "shrine," Çatalhöyük, Turkey ca 6850–6300 BCE

Museum of Anatolian Civilizations, Ankara The Art Archive/Museum of Anatolian

Civilisations Ankara/Gianni Dagli Orti [Fig 1.5]

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The Rise of Agriculture

• A culture of farming gradually replaced hunting as the primary means of

sustaining life

• Great rivers of the Middle East and Asia provided a consistent and predictable source of water, and people were able

to develop irrigation techniques that

fostered organized agriculture and

animal husbandry

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Neolithic Pottery Across Cultures

• The transition from cultures based on

hunting and fishing to cultures based

on agriculture led to the increased use

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Neolithic Pottery Across Cultures

• In most Neolithic societies, women

made and decorated the pottery

• By 3000 BCE, the potter's wheel was

in use in the Middle East as well as in

China, which is seen as the first

mechanical and technological

breakthrough in history

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Beaker with ibex, dogs, and long-necked birds, from Susa, southwest Iran.

ca 5000–4000 BCE Baked clay with painted decoration Height: 11-1/4" Musée du Louvre, Paris © RMN-Grand Palais/Droits réservés [Fig 1.6]

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Neolithic Ceramic Figures

• While there are examples of Paleolithic figurative sculptures, these were never fired

• Among the fired Neolithic sculptures, the approximately life-size animal and human figures created by the so-called

Nok peoples (modern Nigeria) are

most interesting

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Neolithic Ceramic Figures

• The high level of technical and artistic sophistication suggests older artistic traditions in West Africa that have not yet been discovered

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Head, Nok.

ca 500-200 BCE Terracotta Height: 14-3/16".

Werner Forman Archive/National Museum, Lagos, Nigeria [Fig 1.7]

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The Neolithic Megaliths of

Northern Europe

architectural construction, were built without the use of mortar

• The constructions built merely with

upright posts are called menhirs.

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The Neolithic Megaliths of

Northern Europe

• The megalithic construction that

consists of two posts roofed with a

capstone is called a post-and-lintel

structure

• The megalithic construction that is laid

out in a circle is known as a cromlech.

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Neolithic menhir alignments at Ménec, Carnac, Brittany, France ca 4250–3750 BCE

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Stonehenge, Salisbury Plain, Wiltshire, England ca 2750–1500 BCE

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Durrington Walls in Relation to Stonehenge Courtesy of National Geographic [Fig Map 1.3]

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The Role of Myth in Prehistoric

Cultural Life

• Most of our understanding of

prehistoric cultures comes from stories that have survived in cultures that

developed without writing, or oral

cultures.

• A myth is a story that a culture

assumes is true

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Cultural Life

• A myth embodies a culture's views and beliefs about its world, often serving to explain otherwise mysterious natural

phenomena

• As a mode of understanding and

explanation, myth has been one of the most important forces driving the

development of culture

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Cultural Life

• For the San people, prolonged dancing activates num, a concept of personal

energy or potency It is led by a

shaman, a person who is thought to

have special ability to communicate

with the spirit world

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San people Wall painting with giraffes, zebra, eland, and abstract shapes, Inanke,

Matobo National Park, Zimbabwe Before 1000 CE.

Wall painting or rock art.

Christopher and Sally Gable © Dorling Kindersley [Fig 1.10]

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Myth in the Native American Cultures of the Southwest

• The ancient religious rites and

ceremonies tell stories that relate to

the experiences of the Pueblo peoples, from planting, hunting, and fishing in daily life to the larger experiences of birth, puberty, maturity, and death

• For Pueblo peoples, the village, or

kiva, is not the center of culture but

the center of the world

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• The emergence tales explain the

origin of the world, the beginning of a particular Pueblo people, and their

history They reflect these general

beliefs of the Neolithic peoples:

 Animism, or the forces of nature being

inhabited by living spirits

 Nature's behavior can be compared to

human behavior—anthropomorphism

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• The emergence tales explain the

origin of the world, the beginning of a particular Pueblo people, and their

history They reflect these general

beliefs of the Neolithic peoples:

 Humans can communicate with the

spirits of nature and in return for a

prayer or sacrifice, the gods might

intercede on their behalf.

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Spruce Tree House, Mesa Verde Anasazi culture, ca 1200–1300 CE

John Deeks/Photo Researchers, Inc [Fig 1.11]

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Roof construction of a kiva After a National Park Service pamphlet.

[Fig 1.12]

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Japan and the Role of Myth in the

Shinto Religion

• A culture's religion is closely tied to and penetrated by mythical elements

• Myths reflects the community's ideals,

its history, its aspirations, its moral and political system, its social organization,

and its most fundamental beliefs

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Shinto Religion

• According to the indigenous Japanese

religion of Shinto, Japanese emperors

were not only put in position by the

gods, but directly descended from the

gods, and were hence divine

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Shinto Religion

• The three sacred treasures of Shinto or

Imperial regalia are not merely

considered symbols of the divine, but

"deity bodies" in which the powers of

the gods reside (i.e., valor in the

sword, wisdom in the mirror, and

benevolence in the jewel necklace)

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Naiku (Inner) Shrine housing Amaterasu, Ise, Japan Late fifth–early sixth century CE

age fotostock/SuperStock [Fig 1.13]

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Mesopotamia: Power and Social Order in the Early Middle East

• Mesopotamia is a large region between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers

• A ziggurat is a pyramidal temple

structure consisting of successive

platforms with outside staircases and a shrine at the top

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Major Mesopotamian capitals ca 2600–500 BCE

[Fig Map 1.4]

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The ziggurat at Ur (present-day Muqaiyir, Iraq) ca 2100 BCE

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Reconstruction drawing of the ziggurat at Ur (present-day Muqaiyir, Iraq) ca 2100 BCE

[Fig 1.15]

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Sumerian Ur

• Ur is not the oldest city to occupy the southern plains of Mesopotamia

• The temple structure at Ur is of

particular note because it is the most fully preserved and restored

• Visitors (likely limited to priests) might bring an offering of food or an animal

to be sacrificed to the resident god, or

a statue representing perpetual prayer

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Dedicatory statues, from the Abu Temple, Tell Asmar, Iraq ca 2900–2700 BCE

Marble, alabaster, and gypsum Tallest figure approx 30".

Courtesy of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago [Fig 1.16]

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Religion in Ancient Mesopotamia

• The governments in the Sumerian states were ruled by priest-kings, who exercised power as intermediaries

city-between the gods and the people

• In their secular role, the priest-kings

established laws that contributed to the social order necessary for maintaining successful agricultural societies

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Religion in Ancient Mesopotamia

• The religion of the Mesopotamian

peoples was polytheistic, consisting of multiple gods and goddesses connected

to the forces of nature—sun and sky,

water and storm, earth and its fertility

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Royal Tombs of Ur

• Religion was central to the people of

Ur, and human society was seen as

part of the larger society of the

universe governed by the gods

• The Royal Standard of Ur depicts "War"

and "Peace" in three registers, or

self-contained horizontal bands within which

the figures stand on a ground-line.

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Royal Tombs of Ur

• In the "Peace" panel of the Standard,

the king is recognizable because he is taller than the others and his head

breaks the register line on top

 This convention is known as social

perspective, or hieratic scale, in

which the most important figures are represented as larger than the others.

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Standard of Ur, front ("War") and back ("Peace") sides, from tomb 779, cemetery at Ur

(present-day Muqaiyir, Iraq) ca 2600 BCE Shell, lapis lazuli, and red limestone, originally on a wooden framework Height: 8"

Length: 19".

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Akkad

• Under Sargon I (r ca 2332–2279 BCE), the Akkadians conquered all other cities

in Mesopotamia

• The legend of Sargon's might and

power gave rise to a narrative genre

that survives to the present day: the

so-called "rags to riches" story

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