ART2030Test2B

Hashepsut was a female pharaoh famous for having the audacity to portray herself as a man. She reigned from 1479 to 1458 B.C..

. King’s of Egypt’s 18th dynasty (c. 1539-1292 BCE) regained control of the entire Nile region, extending from Nubia in the south to the Mediterranean Sea in the north, and restored political and economic strength…

Challenge in her art was to deal with the paradox of the ruler having to be a man. Not trying to fool anybody just trying to conform to tradition

Depicted early on as basically a woman and a man. Always has the same portrait like face, heart shape with small chin. Around year 7 she became more fully depicted as a man with the false beard, cobra (later smashed off), ….and painted her dark red (men were shown in art with dark red skin). Only male images take a wide stride. Hatshepsut is dressed in a traditional restrictive ankle-length gown but with her feet wide apart in the striding pose of the king

• Hatshepsut’s funerary temple is located at Deir el-Bahri, about a mile away from her actual tomb in the Valley of the Kings. This imposing complex was designed for funeral rites and commemorative ceremonies and is much larger and more prominent than the tomb itself, reversing the scale and relationship we saw in the Old Kingdom pyramid complexes. Magnificently sited and sensitively reflecting the natural three-part layering in the rise of the landscape-from flat desert, through a sloping hillside, to the crescendo of sheer stone cliffs-Hatshepsut’s temple was constructed on an axial plain.
• Nice piece of environmental art: Plays with the terrain it is in, imitate the terrain, Magnificently sited and sensitively reflecting the natural three part layering in the rise of landscape- from flat desert, to sloping hillside, to sheer stone cliffs, Made of the same limestone as terrain, The temple is literally built into the cliffs, 3 tiers, its porticoes, its spacious ramp-linked terraces, its now vanished sphinx lined causeway and beautiful gardens with papyrus pools and shade casting myrrh trees
• 1. A shrine of Hathor inside the temple: goddess of love, music, beauty, drunkenness, nurtures the young king, lover of Amun 2.reliefs with Hatshepsut’s divine birth 3. Reliefs show the famous expedition to Punt: did a peaceful expedition to explore and bring back exotic things instead of fighting battles
• Hatshepsut’s funerary temple- directly across form Karnak which was a brilliant political and religious move since she claimed to be the daughter of Amun- Ra chief deity of the New Kingdom

Carter made another discovery in a tomb close by—tomb KV60, a minor structure whose entrance was cut into the corridor entrance of KV19. In KV60 Carter found "two much denuded mummies of women and some mummified geese." One mummy was in a coffin, the other on the floor. Carter took the geese and closed the tomb. Three years later another archaeologist removed the mummy in the coffin to the Egyptian Museum. The inscription on the coffin was later linked to Hatshepsut's nurse. The mummy on the floor was left as she was, as she had been since being stashed there, probably by priests during the reburials of the 21st dynasty, around 1000 B.C.

• Close to two decades after Donald Ryan rediscovered the location of KV60, Zahi Hawass asked the curators at the Egyptian Museum to round up all the unidentified and possibly royal female mummies from the 18th dynasty, including the two bodies—one thin, one fat—that had been found in KV60. The thin mummy was retrieved from storage in the museum's attic; the fat one, KV60a, which had remained in the tomb where it had been found, was transported from the Valley of the Kings. Over a four-month period in late 2006 and early 2007, the mummies passed through a CT scanner that enabled the archaeologists to examine them in detail and to gauge their age and cause of death.
• The CT results from the four candidate mummies were inconclusive. Then Hawass had another idea. A wooden box engraved with Hatshepsut's cartouche had been found in a great cache of royal mummies at Deir el Bahri in 1881; it was believed to contain her liver. When the box was run through the scanner, the researchers were astonished to detect a tooth. The team dentist identified it as a secondary molar with part of its root missing. When Ashraf Selim, professor of radiology at Cairo University, reexamined the jaw images of the four mummies, there in the right upper jaw of the fat mummy from KV60 was a root with no tooth. "I measured the root in the mummy and the tooth, and we found that they both matched," Selim says.
• To be sure, the scientists have proved only that a tooth in a box belongs to a mummy. The identification is based on the assumption that the contents of the box are properly labeled and were once vital parts of the famous female pharaoh. And the box inscribed with Hatshepsut's cartouche is not the typical canopic vessel in which mummified organs are found. It's made of wood, not stone, and might have been used to hold jewelry or oils or small valuables.
• "Some would say we have not found absolute proof," Selim says. "And I would agree."
• Still, Hawass asks, what are the odds that a box identified with Hatshepsut and found in a cache of royal mummies contains a tooth that exactly matches a hole in the smile of a mummy found next to the beloved nurse of Egypt's great female pharaoh? And how marvelous that the tooth was there to connect Hatshepsut's cartouche with a mummy. "If the embalmer hadn't picked it up and put it in with the liver, there is no way we would have known what happened to Hatshepsut," Hawass says.
• Already the CT scans have changed history, dispelling theories that Hatshepsut might have been killed by her stepson. She probably died of an infection caused by an abscessed tooth, with complications from advanced bone cancer and possibly diabetes. Hawass speculates that the high priests of Amun may have moved her body to the tomb of her nurse to protect it from looters; many royalty of the New Kingdom were hidden in secret tombs for security. As for the DNA tests, the first round began in April 2007 and has shown nothing definitive.

• Historians long cast Hatshepsut in the role of evil stepmother to the young Thutmose III. The evidence of her supposed cruelty was the payback she posthumously received when her stepson had her monuments attacked and her kingly name erased from public memorials. Indeed, Thutmose III did as thorough a job smiting the iconography of King Hatshepsut as he had whacking the Canaanites at Megiddo. At Karnak her image and cartouche, or name symbol, were chiseled off shrine walls; the texts on her obelisks were covered with stone (which had the unintended effect of keeping them in pristine condition).
• At Deir el Bahri, the site of her most spectacular architectural achievement, her statues were smashed and thrown into a pit in front of her mortuary temple. Known as Djeser Djeseru, holy of holies, on the west bank of the Nile across from modern Luxor, the temple is set against a bay of lion-colored cliffs that frame the tawny temple stones the way the nemes frames a pharaoh's face. With its three tiers, its porticoes, its spacious ramp-linked terraces, its now vanished sphinx-lined causeway and T-shaped papyrus pools and shade-casting myrrh trees, Djeser Djeseru is among the most glorious temples ever built. It was designed (perhaps by Senenmut) to be the center of Hatshepsut's cult.
• Images of her as queen were left undisturbed, but wherever she had proclaimed herself king, the workers of her stepson followed with their chisels, the vandalism careful and precise. "The destruction was not an emotional decision; it was a political decision," says Zbigniew Szafrań¬ski, the director of the Polish archaeological mission to Egypt that has been working at Hatshepsut's mortuary temple since 1961.
• By the time excavators cleared the debris from the mostly buried temple in the late 1890s, the mystery of Hatshepsut had been refined: What kind of ruler was she? The answer seemed self-evident to a number of Egyptologists quick to embrace the idea that Thutmose III had attacked Hatshepsut's memory as revenge for her shameless usurpation of his royal power. William C. Hayes, the curator of Egyptian art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a principal at the Deir el Bahri excavations in the 1920s and '30s, wrote in 1953: "It was not long … before this vain, ambitious, and unscrupulous woman showed herself in her true colors."

• . When archaeologists discovered evidence in the 1960s indicating that the banishment of King Hatshepsut had begun at least 20 years after her death, the soap opera of a hotheaded stepson wreaking vengeance on his unscrupulous stepmother fell apart. A more logical scenario was devised around the possibility that Thutmose III needed to reinforce the legitimacy of his son Amenhotep II's succession in the face of rival claims from other family members. And Hatshepsut, once disparaged for ruthless ambition, is now admired for her political skill.
• "Nobody can know what she was like," says Catharine Roehrig, now a curator in the same department once headed by Hayes. "She ruled for 20 years because she was capable of making things work. I believe she was very canny and that she knew how to play one person off against the next—without murdering them or getting murdered herself."

Thutmose II extended Egypt’s influence along the eastern Mediterranean coast as far as the region of present day Syria. His accomplishment was the result of 15 or more military campaigns and his own skill at diplomacy. A buffer of empire now surrounded the heartland of ancient Egypt.

? Hashepsut was the daughter of Thutmose I, she married her half brother, who reigned for 14 years as Thutmose II. When he died in c. 1473 , she became regent for his underage son, Thutmose III, who was born to one of his concubines. Within a few years Hatshepsut had herself declared “king” by the priests of Amun, a maneuver that made her co-ruler with Thutmose III for 20 years.

It was fundamentally important that Hatshepsut was to be portrayed as a male king, wearing a kilt and linen headdress, occasionally even a king’s false beard. The formula for portraying kings was not adapted to suit one individual; she was adapted to conform to convention. There could hardly be a more powerful manifestation of the premium on tradition in Egyptian royal art.

• A causeway lined with sphinxes once ran from a valley temple on the Nile to the huge open space of the first court, where rare myrrh trees were planted in the temple’s garden terraces. From there, visitors ascended a long, straight ramp to a second court where shrines to Anubis and Hathor occupy the ends of the columned porticos. On the temple’s uppermost court, colossal royal statues fromted another colonnade (a row of columns supporting a lintel or a seriew of arches), and behind this lay a large hypostyle hall with chapels dedicated to Hatshepsut, her father, and the gods Amun and Ra-Horakhty- a powerful form of the sun god Ra combined with Horus. Centered in the hall’s back wall was the entrance to the innermost sanctuary, a small chamber cut deep into the cliff.
• Nice piece of environmental art: Plays with the terrain it is in, imitate the terrain, Magnificently sited and sensitively reflecting the natural three part layering in the rise of landscape- from flat desert, to sloping hillside, to sheer stone cliffs, Made of the same limestone as terrain, The temple is literally built into the cliffs, 3 tiers, its porticoes, its spacious ramp-linked terraces, its now vanished sphinx lined causeway and beautiful gardens with papyrus pools and shade casting myrrh trees
• 1. A shrine of Hathor inside the temple: goddess of love, music, beauty, drunkenness, nurtures the young king, lover of Amun 2.reliefs with Hatshepsut’s divine birth 3. Reliefs show the famous expedition to Punt: did a peaceful expedition to explore and bring back exotic things instead of fighting battles
• Hatshepsut’s funerary temple- directly across form Karnak which was a brilliant political and religious move since she claimed to be the daughter of Amun- Ra chief deity of the New Kingdom

Akhenaten ruled from 1353-1336 BCE. His famous wife was Queen Negertiti. Their famous son was Tutankhamun.

Akhenaten founded a new religion honoring a single supreme god, the life-giving sun deity Aten (represented by the sun’s disk). NGM:When Amenhotep III dies, he is succeeded by his second son, Amenhotep IV—a bizarre visionary who turns away from Amun and the other gods of the state pantheon and worships instead a single deity known as the Aten, the disk of the sun. In the fifth year of his reign, he changes his name to Akhenaten—"he who is beneficial to the Aten." He elevates himself to the status of a living god and abandons the traditional religious capital at Thebes, building a great ceremonial city 180 miles to the north, at a place now called Amarna. Here he lives with his great wife, the beautiful Nefertiti, and together they serve as the high priests of the Aten, assisted in their duties by their six cherished daughters. All power and wealth is stripped from the Amun priesthood, and the Aten reigns supreme.

The art of this period is also infused with a revolutionary new naturalism; the pharaoh has himself depicted not with an idealized face and youthful, muscular body as were pharaohs before him, but as strangely effeminate, with a potbelly and a thick-lipped, elongated face.

Was the mother of Akhenaten and the chief wife of Amenhotep III. The portrait originally included a funerary silver headdress vobered with gold cobras and gold jewelry. But after her son came to power and established his new religion a brown cap covered with blue glass beads was placed over the original headdress.

The proportions of Nefertiti’s refined, regular features, long neck, and heavy-lidded eyes appear almost too ideal to be human, but are eerily consisten with standards of beauty in our own culture. The quen’s brows, eyelids, cheeks, and lips are heightened with cosmetics in real life. Even if Nefertiti’s beauty is exaggerated she was referred to as “beautiful of face”, “Mitress of Happiness”, “Freat of Love”’ or “ Endowed with Favors”, which is supported in the author’s vision.

The king holds a crook and a flail, symbols that were associated with Osiris and had become a traditional part of the royal regalia.

• •Depicted early on as basically a woman and a man
• •Always has the same portrait like face, heart shape with small chin
• •Not trying to fool anybody just trying to conform to tradition
• •Gender and politics combine in her reign
• oAround year 7 she became more fully depicted as a man with the false beard, cobra (later smashed off), ….and painted her dark red (men were shown in art with dark red skin)
• oOnly male images take a wide stride
• •Hatshepsut is dressed in a traditional restrictive ankle-length gown but with her feet wide apart in the striding pose of the king
• •Hathor cow goddess

The discovery of King Tutankhamun’s tomb was on November 4, 1922, but English archaeologist Howard Carter, with the backing of a rich British amateur Egyptologist Lord Carnarvon, on February 1923, made the discovery of the Funerary Mask of Tutankhamun. The mask was located inside the tomb of Tutankhamun, in the Valley of the Kings, Egypt. The mask was placed over the face of King Tutankhamun’s mummified body. The most important part of the discovery was the fact that King Tutankhamun’s tomb was perfectly preserved and untouched by looters.

Napoleon and his armies administered the first large scale evacuations in 1798.

• Otto
• Schaden excavated a tomb with 7 coffins in the Valley of the Kings, in 2006.
  
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Why was the Nile so important for Egypt? How did that partly change in 1970? The Nile is so important to Egypt because when the Nile floods each summer it carried Ethiopia’s rich fertile soil. This made the farmland rich in the Nile Valley, which gave the farmers more free time to focus on creating a civilization and gave them abundant amounts of food to support a civilization. This changed in 1970 when the Aswan High Dam was put in place.

Around 8000 BC the people living in Nile Valley to advantage of the bountiful fish, game, and wild plants while living a rather stationary life style. Then during the Neolithic period around 5000 BC the people of the Nile Valley embraced a more agricultural way of life by controlling the floodwaters to their advantage. When they used the floodwaters in basin irrigation, they were able to allocate enough resources to balance the dry climate of North Africa. Then prior to the unification of Egypt in the Predynastic period there was a time of major progression socially and politically from 5000 to 2950 BC. By 3500 BC, large states had formed in the lower Nile Valley, and a centralized form of leadership.

Egypt was unified into one kingdom around 3000 BC. The legend says prior to unifying there were two major kingdoms, Upper Egypt located in the south and Lower Egypt located in the north. The two kingdoms were forced together when the powerful ruler who controlled Upper Egypt overthrew Lower Egypt.

In the early Dynastic period the people admired the Egyptian kings as gods in human form. When the Egyptian kings died they were said to be rejoining their father, the sun god Ra.

• Egyptian kings built
• splendid temples and provided priests to maintain them in order to please the
• gods and ensure their goodwill.

Gods were depicted in various forms, from human beings to animals, and even some that have animal heads with human bodies. The god Osiris, is known as the overseer of the realm of the dead, and normally is depicted as a human form dressed as a mummy. Osiris’ son, Horus, is the sky god, he is illustrated as a falcon or falcon-headed man. Amun, is the chief god of Thebes, he is portrayed as blue and wearing a plumed crown. Ra of Heliopolia, and Ptah of Memphis became the primary national gods. Thoth (ibis), is the god of writing, science, and law, while Ma’at (feather), represents the goddess of truth, order, and justice. Anubis (jackal) is the god of embalming and cemeteries, and Bastet (cat), daughter of Ra.

Artistic conventions are established ways of representing things, widely accepted by artists and patrons at a particular time and place.

Narmer was the Egyptian king of Upper Egypt who also controlled Lower Egypt. Narmer Palette is a piece of art that is from the Early Dynastic period, in 2950 BC. It was found in the temple of Horus. The Narmer palette celebrates the story of the unifying Upper and Lower Egypt and the evolution of Egypt as one kingdom. It possesses many of the artistic conventions that we continue to see in the aristocratic art of Egypt.

The large size of Narmer compared to the other figures around him in the Palette shows a shows the convention of hierarchy of scale. Narmer’s pose represents the image of the smiting king. The pose shows the physical power that he as a pharaoh possesses. The importance of Narmer correlates to the hierarchy of scale by showing him as the largest figure in the palette. The hierarchy of scale is also shown by the presence of the hawk god, Horus, who is placed higher that all representing his importance. The presence of Horus also illustrates the artistic conventions of showing gods as animals. In the palette there is no depiction of space so the smaller the figures around Narmer, like the sand-bearer. The composition is also organized with ground lines. Each of the figures poses in composite views making each figure an apparent purpose. On the top center of the palette Narmers Royal signia, which were a horizontal fish and a vertical chisel. Hieroglyphics cover the opposite side of the palette where it depicts the unification of Egypt.

A Ka is the soul, or life force that the Egyptians believed to be the core part of an individual’s personality. A ka was believed to live on after death of the body, continuing to take part in activities the person took pleasure in during their past life. Even after death the ka needs a body to live in. The ka lives in the deceased mummified body, or they could live in a ka-statue, a substitute that reflected the person in the form of a statue.

A mastaba is the most common tomb design used by the upper class members of society, like the king’s relatives. The tomb structure is an aboveground structure that was a flat topped one-story building with slanted walls. They were built above the burial chambers. They were first made from mud brick, but as the Third Dynasty approached, many used cut stone especially on the outside wall. A serdab is a small sealed room, found in the mastaba. The room would contain the ka-statue of the deceased person, and a chapel constructed for the mourning relatives and gifts.

Imhotep was the designer of Third Dynasty King Djoser’s tomb complex at Saqqara, and he was also Djoser’s prime minister. The tomb complex was the earliest known monumental architecture in Egypt, and Imhotep is the first architect in history to be identified. His name is engraved beside the King Djoser’s on the base of a statue of the king found near the Step Pyramid.

The Step Pyramid designed with structures similar to six mastadas stack on top of each other from largest to smallest. The Step Pyramid symbolize a stairway to the sun god, Ra. The purpose of the complex is to protect the tomb, even though it is similar to the ziggurats. A 96 foot shaft descended from the original mastaba enclosed within the pyramid. At the base of the step pyramid there was a cascading corridor that provided linked the outside to a granite-lined burial vault.

The visual aspects of Khafre’s statue like the presence of Horus, the hawk god, shows he is protected and the features of the chair that represent lion’s legs show his royal authority. Then depicted bellow the seat are the lotus symbolizing Upper Egypt and papyrus symbolizing Lower Egypt plants which exemplify the kings power over each.

• •An image of unity in an idealized king and queen
• oShe is embracing him (seems like she might even be propping him up), mirroring each others body language (feet forward=active pose), emerging out of the same stone, almost the same height, Gendered body ideals: Power vs. fertility
• •Image of queen is similar to woman of willendorf
• •Ideals of youth, beauty, power
• oKing- linen headdress, false beard, natural sideburns, linen kilt with wide belt
• oQueen- long wig with natural hair showing sheer sheath dress
• •Principal queen: Ka-Merer-Nebty the 2nd
• •Wigs were a symbol of status, wealth, beauty
• •The Sheath dress in art: a real dress? Or a symbol of fertility?
• •Symbol of fertility- her chief role is to produce the chief heir
• •Real Egyptian dresses were not tight

The ka is a part of the king’s spirit that is thought to remain with his mummified body after death. Egyptians used pyramids to protect the king’s ka, or soul that remained with his body.

When the king dies he becomes Osiris, known as the king of the dead.

Later Egyptians used pyramids to preserve the tomb’s sacred remains, which included the pharaoh’s ka, or soul, that stayed with body.

The pyramids were built by about 20,000 to 30,000 Egyptian men, and possibly even women, that lived in villages that were established and maintained by advisors of the pharaoh. Some of the builders were the pharaoh’s permanent employees and others who were requisitioned from the surrounding villages on a more temporary basis.

Pharaoh Djoser built the first pyramid.

The shape of the Step Pyramid of Djoser was first designed to be a more traditional mastaba, but its design was altered by six stepped layers making it 204 feet high and the largest building of it’s time.

The Step Pyramid of Djoser was built at Saqqara during Djoser’s 19-year reign around 2630 BC.

Imhotep was accredited with inventing stone architecture and he was the head architect of the Step Pyramid of Dojser.

Pharaoh Snefru built the Maidum pyramid.

Currently, only three steps of the Maidum pyramid are detectable due to the sands displacing, fallen fragments, and the inclining base.

The aboveground burial chamber is located on top of the level of the first step.

• Pharaoh Snefru built the Bent Pyramid.

Pharaoh Snefru’s pyramid was called Bent Pyramid because in the middle of building the architects decided to target a new angle. The decision was made to counteract the lack stability caused by the originally designed extremely steep sides.

Even though Snefru had a unique two burial chambers built in the Bent Pyramid he was never buried at Bent Pyramid.

The first ‘true’ pyramid was called the Red Pyramid.

Pharaoh Khufu built the earth’s largest pyramid.

Pharaoh Khufu was the son of Snefru.

The Great Pyramid is located in Giza.

The builder’s oriented the Great Pyramid almost precisely north.

The Great Pyramid was built with 2.3 million stone blocks that were on average between 2.5 to 15 tons a piece.

The Great Pyramid has three burial chambers. Early investigators decided that the second burial chamber, called the queen’s chambers, even though it was never meant to hold the one of the king’s wives, but possibly it was intended to hold a sacred statue of Khufu.

The structure around the pyramid had multiple small pyramids, five boat pits, a mortuary temple, a causeway, a valley temple, and many flat-roofed tombs, which were for used by officials and relatives of Khufu.

The mystery shafts that were found were probably constructed for Khufu’s travel to the stars after death because they were too narrow to be hallways and sealed.

The Valley temple at Khafre’s pyramid was a mortuary temple. Inside the Valley temple there was an entrance hall, colonnaded courtyard, alcoves for royal statues, storage chambers, and an interior sanctuary.

The city of Ife is know as the “navel of the world,” the site of creation, the place where Ife’s first ruler- the oni(king) Oduduwa- came down from heaven to create earth and then to populate it. Ife was, and remains, the sacred city of the Yoruba people. A tradition of naturalistic sculpture began there about 1050 CE and flourished for some 4 centuries.

• A cast-bronze head shows the extraordinary artistery of ancient Ife. The modeling of the flesh is remarkably msensitive, especially the subtle transitions around the nose and mouth. The lips are full and delicate, and the eyes are strikingly similar in shape to those of some modern Yoruba. The face is covered with thin, parallel scarification patterns (decorations made by scarring). The head was cast of zinc brass using the lost-wax method.
• The head was cast with a crown; its size and delicate features suggest it may represent a female oni. Although its precise use is not known, similar life-size heads have large holes in the neck, suggesting they may have been attached to wooden figures. Mannequins with naturalistic facial features have been documented at memorial services for deceased individuals among contemporary Yoruba peoples. The Ife mannequin was probably dressed in the oni’s robes; the head probably bore his crown. The head could also have been used to display a crown during annual purification and renewal rites.
• There debate as to whether the Ife heads are true portraits. Their realism gives an impression that they could be. The heads, however, all seem to represent individuals of the same age and embody a similar concept of physical perfection, suggesting they are idealized images representing both physical beauty and moral character. Idealized images of titled individuals are a common feature of sub-Saharan African sculpture, as they are among many cultures throughout the world.
• The superb naturalism of Ife sculpture contradicted everything Europeans thought they knew about African art. The German scholar, Leo Frobenius, who discovered Ife sculpture in 1910 suffested that it was created not by Africans but by surviviors from the legendary lost island of Atlantis. Later, there was speculation that influence from ancient Greece or Renaissance Europe must have reached Ife. Scientific study, however, finally put such predjudice ideas to rest.

The Portuguese king’s respect was well founded- Benin was vastly more powerful and wealthier than the small European country that had just stumbled upon it.

• These incised abstract patterns predate any other findings of ancient art by more than 30,000 years, and they suggest a far earlier development of modern behavior than had been previously recorded, dating to approximately 77,000 years ago.

The word primitive was once used by Western art historians to categorize the art of Africa, the art of the Pacific islands, and the indigenous art of the Americas. The term itself means “early” or “first of its kind,” but its use was meant to imply that these cultures were crude, simple, backward, and stuck in an early stage of development. Criteria that have been used to label a people “primitive” include the use of so-called Stone Age technology, the absence of written histories, and the failure to build great cities. Based on these criteria however, the accomplishments of the people of Africa, to take just one example, contradict such prejudiced condescension: Africans south of the Sahara have smelted and forged iron since at least 500 BCE. Africans in many areas made and used high- quality steel for weapons and tools. Many African peoples have recorded their histories in Arabic since at least the tenth century CE. The first European visitors to Africa admired the style and sophistication of urban centers such as Benin and Luanda, to name only two of the continent’s great cities. Clearly, neither the cultures of ancient Africa nor the artworks they produced were “primitive” at all.

The flourished in western Sudan, in present day Nigeria, as early as 500 BCE. The Nok people created the earliest known sculpture of sub-Saharan Africa, producing accomplished terra-cotta figures of human and animal subjects between about 500 BCE and 200 CE. The Nok head shown slightly larger than life-size, probably formed part of a complete figure. The triangular or D-shaped eyes are characteristic of Nok style and appear also on sculptures of animals. Holes in the pupils, nostrils, and mouth allowed air to pass freely as the figure was fired. Each of the large buns of its elaborate hairstyle is pierced with a hole that may have held ornamental feathers. Nok sculpture may represent ordinary people dressed for special occasions or it may portray people of high status, thus reflecting social stratification in this early farming culture. In either case, the sculpture provides evidence of considerable technical accomplishment, which has led to speculation that Nok culture was built on the achievements of an earlier culture still to be discovered.

Benin is in South Eastern Nigeria. Ife was probably the artistic parent of Benin. After a long period of misrule by the Ogiso, or Skyking, dynasty the people of Benin asked the oni of Ife for a new ruler. The oni sent PrinceOranmiyan, who founded a new dynasty in 1170. Some 2 centuries later, the fouth king, or oba, of Benin decided to start a tradition of memorial sculpture like that of Ife, and he sent to Ife for a master metal caster named Ifuegha. The tradition of casting memorial heads for the shrines of royal ancestors endures among the successors of Oranmiyan to this day. 13-6 This belongs to a small group of rare Early Period sculptures called “rolled-collar” heads that are distinguished by the rolled collar that serves as a firm base for the exquisitely rendered head.

1400-1897?? Benin traded with Portugal in the late 15th century. The 2 kingdoms established cordial relations in 1485 and carried on an active trade, at first in ivory and forest products but eventually in slaves. Benin flourished until 1897, when, in reprisal for the massacre of a party of trade negotiators, British troops sacked and burned the royal palace, sending the oba into exile from which he did not return until 1914. The palace was later rebuilt, and the present-day oba continues the dynasty started by Oranmiyan.

The Benin heads, together with other objects, were originally placed on a semicircular platform or altar and surmounted by large elephant tusks, another symbol of power. The increase in size and weight of Benin memorial heads overtime may reflect the growing power and wealth flowing to the oba from Benin’s expanding trade with Europe. The head is the symbolic center of a person’s intelligence, wisdom, and ability to succeed in this world or to communicate with spiritual forces in the ancestral world.

One of the honorifics used for the king is “Great Head”: The head leads the body as the king leads the people. All of the memorial heads include representations of coral beaded caps and necklaces and royal costume. Coral, enclosing the head and displayed on the body, is still the ultimate symbol of the oba’s power and authority.

It represents an iyoba (queen mother- the oba’s mother), the senior female member of the royal court. The mask was carved as a belt ornament and was worn at the oba’s hip. This particular ivory belt ornament may represent Idia, who was the mother of Esigie, a powerful oba who ruled from 1504 to 1550. Esigie commissioned it. Idia is particularly remembered for raising an army and using magical powers to help her son defeat his enemies. Like Idia, the Portuguese helped Esigie expand his kingdom.

Its pupils were originally inlaid with iron, as were the sacrification patterns on the forehead. The necklace represents head of Portuguese soldiers with beards and flowing hair. In the crown, more Portuguese heads alternate with figures of mudfish, which symbolize Olokun, the Lord of the Great Waters. Mudfish live near riverbanks, mediates between the human world and the supernatural world of Olokun.

Vast area of grasslands along the Niger River in the region known as the Niger Bend (present-day Mali), a trading crossroads as early as the first century BCE. In the 9th century islam was becoming an economic and religious force in west and north Africa, and the northern terminals of the trans-Saharan trade routes had already been incorporated into the Islamic empire.

The second mosque in the city of Jenne, Great Friday Mosque, was in turn replaced by the current grand mosque, constructed between 1906 and 1907 on the ancient site in the style of the 13th century original. The architect Ismaila Traore, the head of the Jenne guild of masons, supervised the reconstruction. The mosque’s eastern, or “marketplace,” façade boasts three tall towers, the center of which contains the mihrab. The finials, or crowning ornaments, at the top of each tower bear ostrich eggs, symbols of fertility and purity. The façade and sides of the mosque are distinguished by tall, narrow, engaged columns, which act as buttresses. These columns are characteristic of West African mosques architecture, and their cumulative rhythmic effect is one of great verticality and grandeur. The most unusual features of west African mosques are the torons, wooden beams projecting from the walls. Torons provide permanent supports for the scaffolding erected each year so that the exterior of the mosque can be replastered. The plan of the mosque is not quite rectangular. Inside, nine rows of heavy adobe columns, 33 feet tall and linked by pointed arches, supposrt a flat ceiling of palm logs. A great double wall only slightly lower than the walls of the mosque itself encloses an open courtyard on the west side. The main entrances to the prayer hall are in the north wall.