Gardners Art through the Ages A Global History

can vary by as much as two centuries. Exact years cannot be assigned

to the reigns of individual pharaohs until 664 BCE (26th Dynasty).^2

At the end of the 18th century, when Europeans rediscovered

Egypt, the land of the Nile became the first subject of archaeological

exploration. In 1799, Napoleon Bonaparte, on a military expedition to

Egypt, took with him a small troop of scholars, linguists, antiquarians,

the British Museum, provided the key to deciphering Egyptian hiero-

glyphic writing. The stone bears an inscription in three sections: one in

Greek, which the Frenchmen easily read; one in demotic (Late Egyp-

tian); and one in formal hieroglyphic. On the assumption that the text

was the same in all three sections, scholars attempted to decipher the

two non-Greek sections. Eventually, Jean-François Champollion de-

duced that the hieroglyphs were not simply pictographs but the signs

of a once-spoken language whose traces survived in Coptic, the lan-

guage of Christian Egypt. The ability to read hieroglyphic inscriptions

revolutionized the study of Egyptian civilization and art.

The Predynastic and Early Dynastic Periods

The Predynastic, or prehistoric, beginnings of Egyptian civilization

are chronologically vague. But tantalizing remains of tombs, paint-

ings, pottery, and other artifacts attest to the existence of a sophisti-

cated culture on the banks of the Nile around 3500 BCE.

Painting and Sculpture

In Predynastic times, Egypt was divided geographically and politi-

cally into Upper Egypt (the southern, upstream part of the Nile Val-

ley), a narrow tract of grassland that encouraged hunting, and Lower

(northern) Egypt, where the rich soil of the Nile Delta islands en-

couraged agriculture and animal husbandry. The major finds of Pre-

dynastic art come from Upper Egypt, especially Hierakonpolis.

TOMB 100, HIERAKONPOLIS Archaeologists exploring the

Predynastic cemetery at Hierakonpolis found extraordinary mural

paintings on three interior walls of tomb 100. The tomb is no longer

preserved, but a watercolor copy (FIG. 3-2) of the murals records

T

he worldview of the Egyptians was distinct from those of their

neighbors in the ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern worlds.

Egyptians believed that before the beginning of time the primeval

waters, called Nun, existed alone in the darkness. At the moment of

creation, a mound rose out of the limitless waters—just as muddy

mounds emerge from the Nile after the annual flood recedes. On this

mound the creator god appeared and brought light to the world. In

later times, the mound was formalized as a pyramidal stone called the

ben-ben supporting the supreme god, Amen, the god of the sun (Re).

The supreme god also created the first of the other gods and

goddesses of Egypt. According to one version of the myth, the cre-

ator masturbated and produced Shu and Tefnut, the primary male

and female forces in the universe. They coupled to give birth to Geb

(Earth) and Nut (Sky), who bore Osiris, Seth, Isis, and Nephthys. The

eldest, Osiris, was the god of order and was revered as the king who

brought civilization to Egypt. His brother, Seth, was his evil oppo-

site, the god of chaos. Seth murdered Osiris and cut him into pieces,

which he scattered across Egypt. Isis, the sister and consort of Osiris,

with the help of Nephthys, Seth’s wife, succeeded in collecting Osiris’s

body parts, and with her powerful magic brought him back to life.

The resurrected Osiris fathered a son with Isis—Horus, who avenged

his father’s death and displaced Seth as king of Egypt. Osiris then be-

came the lord of the Underworld. Horus is represented in art either as

a falcon, considered the noblest bird of the sky, or as a falcon-headed

man. All Egyptian pharaohs were identified with Horus while alive

and with Osiris after they died.

Other Egyptian deities included Mut, the consort of the sun god

Amen, and Khonsu, the moon god, who was their son. Thoth, another

lunar deity and the god of knowledge and writing, appears in art as

an ibis, a baboon, or an ibis-headed man crowned with the crescent

moon and the moon disk. When Seth tore out Horus’s falcon-eye

(wedjat), Thoth restored it. He, too, was associated with rebirth and

the afterlife. Hathor, daughter of Re, was a divine mother of the pha-

raoh, nourishing him with her milk. She appears in Egyptian art as

a cow-headed woman or as a woman with a cow’s horns. Anubis, a

jackal or jackal-headed deity, was the god of the Underworld and of

mummification. Maat, another daughter of Re, was the goddess of

truth and justice. Her feather was used to measure the weight of the

deceased’s heart on Anubis’s scales to determine if the ka (life force)

would be blessed in the afterlife.

The Gods and Goddesses of Egypt

RELIGION AND MYTHOLOGY

MAP 3-1 Ancient Egypt.

Alexandria

Rosetta

Naukratis

Heliopolis

Saqqara

Memphis

Gizeh

Ghurab

Maidum

Asyut

Akhetaton

(Tell el-Amarna)

Abydos

Deir el-Bahri

Thebes KarnakLuxor

Edfu

Hierakonpolis

Aswan

Kawa Kerma

Abu Simbel

Dashur

Beni Hasan

Mediterranean SeaMediterranean Sea

Red

Sea

Red

Sea

Ni

leR

.

Bahariya

Oasis

Sinai

Pen.

LOWER EGYPT

UPPER

EGYPT

FAIYUM

ARABIA

NUBIA PUNT

0 100 200 miles

1000 200 kilometers

New Kingdom

1550–1070 BCE

54 Chapter 3 EGYPT UNDER THE PHARAOHS