This week we’ll be jumping into the profoundly long, and profoundly complex, history of ancient Egypt, beginning a few centuries before the Old Kingdom and extending to the end of the New Kingdom. That’s a period of history that extends nearly 1,500 years alone, a time scale reflecting both the profound continuities—with important discontinuities we’ll discuss in section—and consistency of Egyptian culture. As this is a survey, a great deal of the nuance will be dropped for brevity, but as we will do each week, we can simply the goals into learning a set of objects, a set of terms, and then reviewing a set of questions that this week’s artworks might evoke for us.

Key-works:

1)Palette of Narmer, slate, ca. 2950 BCE(early dynastic period) 

2) Step Pyramid of Djoser at Saqqara(Egypt), limestone, ca. 2650 BCE(Old Kingdom) 

3) Pyramid of Khufu (Great Pyramid)at Giza (Egypt), limestone, ca. 2550 BCE(Old Kingdom)

4) Khafre Enthroned, Anorthosite gneiss (hard, volcanic stone), ca. 2500 BCE (Old kingdom)

5) Last Judgment of Hunefer, Book of the Dead, Papyrus Scroll, ca. 1275 BCE(New Kingdom)

Keywords:

Mastaba: An ancient Egyptian flat-topped tomb, rectangular or square in plan, with sides sloping outward to the base. (OED)

Pyramid: A building or monument with a square or triangular base and sloping sides that meet in a point at the top; esp. (also with capital initial) any of the structures of this kind built in ancient Egypt from blocks of stone or brick and used as royal tombs. (OED)

Hieratic scale: A scale based on relative importance. The more important a figure, the larger he or she is in relation to the figures around him or her. (Khan Academy)

Papyrus: A material made from the papyrus plant, used originally by the ancient Egyptians and later by the Greeks, Romans, etc., chiefly formed into sheets for writing and painting on. Also used for making rope, sandals, etc. (OED)

Slides for the week.

Paper Discussion