Ancient to Medieval Art Test

• Title: Women from Willendorf
• Date: 24,000 BCE
• Historical Period: Prehistoric 
• Medium: Limestone (originally colored red with ocher)

• ⋅Health & Fertility
• ⋅producing strong children
• ⋅survival of the clan

11 cm Statue carved from limestone depicting an exaggerated female form. Exaggerated female attributes include pendulous breasts, a big belly with a deep navel, wide hips, and dimpled knees and buttocks.

• these sculptures were subtle
• forms of nonverbal communication among small, isolated groups of Paleolithic people spread out across vast regions. When groups of Paleolithic hunter-gatherers met up, the female statues may have signaled whether a group was friendly and acceptable for interaction/mating. These figures would have provided reassurance of shared values about the body, and its size would have demanded engagement at a close personal level

• Title: Stele of Hammurabi
• Date: 1750 BCE
• Historical Period: Babylonian/Mesopotamian
• Medium: Black basalt stone

• ⋅Law and Justice
• ⋅Devine authority
• ⋅The ideals and values upheld by the Mesopotamian people

Carved out of a long narrow piece of stone. At the top of the stele Hammurabi stands before Shamash, the sun god and god of justice. Shamash gives the law to Hammurabi and the laws are listed underneath them in horizontal bands of engraved cuneiform signs. A prologue on the front of the stele lists the temples Hammurabi has restored, and an epilogue on the back glorifies him as a peacemaker

for 300 years, political turmoil and stable government alternated in Mesopotamia until Amorites united the nation Babylon under Hammurabi. In attempts to "cause justice to prevail in the land and destroy the wicked and the evil.." he makes a codification of his people's rights, duties, and punishments for wrongdoings. The idea of god-given laws became a long tradition in the ancient Near East.