Now we're gonna move to the Old Kingdom.
And the Old Kingdom lasts for, its pretty
specific we know how long it was, 2686 to
2181 BCE, so roughly 500 years. It's a
time of social cohesion. It's a time of
stability. The wealth is expanding, the
dynasty is doing well,
Egypt is doing well, the kings are strong,
and they begin commissioning colossal
statues of themselves. These huge
sculpted likenesses giving them stuff
place for their Ka to live forever. And
this is the time when we see the houses
for the Ka. It progresses from what's
called a mastaba to a pyramid.
Here are the dates for the historical
periods and in this class we're mostly
going to be concerned with old, middle,
and new kingdoms. We don't get too much
into the time in between, we don't get
too much into the late dynastic period.
The, the point is that there's there's
so many dynasties and it so complicated
that in this course we're not
necessarily going to break down to first
intermediate, second intermediate, late
dynastic period. The periods in bold early
dynastic, the Old Kingdom, Middle Kingdom,
and New Kingdom are going to be our
primary areas of focus. Familiarize with
yourselves with this vocabulary, because
when i use these words it will be easier
for you to picture where they are. So
this is a mastaba and it is in a
necropolis, a city of the dead. And there
is a Ka statue or would be. I don't know
that this particular one has been looted
or not. There. They really if you go to
Egypt you can see lots of these ruins,
these very low. They just almost look
like just you know little brick
buildings or foundations, but this is a
mastaba. And so this is the most common
tomb. This picture shows you the inside of
that. You can see the little door opening
on the right hand side here and then
there's another one over to the left. So
they would have usually a false door
with a false chamber in the hopes that
the looters would just go there and
wouldn't figure out that
there was actually another chamber where
the actual valuables were. So there's a
vertical shaft that drops all the way
down from the top of the mastaba down to
the burial chamber and that's where they
put the sarcophagus. The kings of the
third and fourth dynasty built the first
two cities of the dead at Saqqara and at
Giza, which are just outside modern Cairo.
Saqqara is a little older, so we look at
that first and then the last lecture
from the Old Kingdom will be the lecture
at Giza. So this lecture is going to
cover the evolution of a mastaba to a
pyramid and the pyramid at Saqqara and
its Ka statue and interior decoration.
This is in your textbook too under
Elements of Architecture. So here you can
see how these builders sort of evolved
into building pyramids and got the idea
for designing of a pyramid. And at first
they just had those little structures
that you just saw.
I like it when you can see the actual
thing. And that of course because
everybody wants something bigger and
bigger is better, right?
They started building them bigger and
bigger and they built them by stepping
them up into stepped pyramids.
So this type of stepped pyramid will be
what will see a Saqqara and then
eventually they filled it all in and
they made it smooth on the outside and
so that was the Pyramids at Giza.
Here's an overview of Djoser's or Djoser's
funerary complex at Saqqara. And so
you can see clearly how this is mustafas
piled on top of each other. And in
this necropolis there are many mastabas
all around and all sorts of other
buildings as well. This is a plan of this
funerary complex. So again we read these
plans as though we're in a weather
balloon or something on top and we've
just chop the top off so all of the
solid lines are solid walls and then the
openings would be doorways. So you can
see over to the left these shamb
buildings. They're not real buildings at all.
These buildings here on the side, but the
spirits can use them. Their not buildings for
humans, but the spirits use them. And then
there's a festival courtyard, there's
North and South palaces, the court for
the serdab which is, the serdab is where
the ka statue is, and then way
down here would be the Ka statue. So the
Ka statue in a complex like this is
situated so he can watch the ceremonies
and periodically there would be
ceremonies and there would be festivals. They
would come in honor the Ka of the
deceased. And every 30 years they would
come and have a festival for the renewal
of the kingship. So it would renew his
kingship every 30 years and if it
happened to be a different king the
spirit would just live on. So this
particular pyramid we know who built it.
It was built by an architect named
Imhotep and Imhotep was a high priest
and it expressed the god-kings claim to
supreme power. If you notice on the upper
left part of this side
I've got the spelling Z-O-S-E-R. So those
are, there's two spellings for it. Just so
you don't get confused.
DJOSCR or ZOSER are both spellings
for the same person, the same king. So
sometimes you'll see in some books as
one and sometimes is one other, but it is
one king and he was the ruler of the
first ruler of the Third Dynasty. His
capital was at Memphis in Lower Egypt,
which became the focal point of all of
the cultural life of Egypt. This
particular structure is the very first
successfully completed large stone
building in the history of Western art,
so that's one big reason why it's
important.
Here's a closer up view of the brickwork.
You can see all the little musta bus
around the bottom of it. These, all
these ruins are other people who had
their tombs here. So Imhotep was revered
as a magician, he was an astronomer, he
was
actually worshipped as a god in his own
right. Imhotep is where the people that
made the series of movies the money, The
Mummy got their name from, but he was
actually an architecture. He was really a
person.
His name is inscribed inside the pyramid
and he is designated as first after the
king of Upper and Lower Egypt. So later
on this site was maintained for both
Zoser and Imhotep in Mesopotamia. The
name of the patron lasted whoever
purchased the work of art, but in Egypt
the architecture actually got credit for
the conception and the building of a
structure. And here just some other views
of it. You can get a sense of scale here.
This person in front. The pyramids far
far behind and then here's a person here.
Here's a close-up view of the Sham
buildings. This is the wall of the North
palace. They are covered with these
engaged columns and the capitals of the
columns are in the form of papyrus
blossoms so this becomes an Egyptian
column form.
Here's some symbols of the Egyptian king,
because we're about to look at a Ka
statue. We've already seen some of these
when we looked at the palette of Narmer
in the crown of Upper and Lower Egypt.
Here they are here drawn out for you.
Here's a seated king, he's got the Sun
disc autumn in the copra, holding a
scepter. Here's the falcon which
is the image of the god Horus. So the
king is the son of the Sun God Ra and
the king rules over both upper and lower
Egypt which system was fully developed
by the end of the Old Kingdom. In the
beginning of these lectures we
talked about the fact that the Egyptian
gods transform and change and mutate. And
animals always remain important, but in
the Old Kingdom they start really
getting humanized. And when they're humanized
they begin building temples, they
begin building places of worship, and
they begin having new concepts of what
life is like for the dead in the world
beyond. And so this contributed to the
way they constructed tombs and the tombs
are a lot like the houses
of the living. So this god-king, he plays
a part in the political and religious
life of the people and even after he's
dead. So he controls from the grave. He
can speak on behalf of the living, so
they're statues are put in these temples
and tombs. The living would come see
these statues. They will get information
from the Kings that had gone before,
so the King continues to rule. That's
part of how he's keeps his spirit long
after he's alive on the face of this
earth.
We're first going to look at the tombs
which we've just done and now we'll look
at all the stuff they put in these tombs.
So here's king Zoser, look at him.
This is his Ka statue. It's in that serdab
that we just looked at in Saqqara in
the third dynasty. Ss he not forbidding?
Is he not staring out through the ages
on this November 7 2016? We already
looked at the sculptures at work and now
you can see them in context.
This is a whole relief and it's actually
somewhat in progress. You can notice this
kind of drawn out on the top. It's
living sculptures. They're portrayed and
twisted poses and then this the statues
are appearing in full profile. So this is
really interesting, because here King
Zoser is preserving the memory of his
own preservation. That is he is teaching
this is how you create your imagery, this
is my power. I had all these people
working and making these images for this
tomb that will last forever. For people
to see throughout the next thousands of
years. So that's the context where this
image belongs that we looked at last
time. So you can see this is you know
quite a few hundred years later after
Narmer that we have this can of
proportions is not changed. So this tomb
decoration it includes symbolic scene
and everyday scenes and it's really our
main source of information about these
people. And the primary motive is to give
the departed spirits a pleasant place to
live.
We also have paintings inside the tombs
and this particular one is in the tomb
of Ti at Saqqara. And it was from 2450. Ti
was a high official, so he had the money
to buy an elaborate mastaba. So all of
these relief carvings, and this is kind
of degraded if you look really carefully
you can see that there's trees and
things behind Ti also but there isn't
this picture looks kind of bad is
because it's worn away. The subjects are
all divided into registers and this is a
common thing that we've seen in other
art forms. So all over these tombs there
be men in the fields or birds or fishing,
hunting game, banquets, all kinds of
scenes of everyday life. And they have
this hieratic scale its use. They
separate the officials from the servants.
So as we've said these servants, they
need their soldiers, they need their boat,
they need all of the trappings in the
afterlife. And if you notice there's a
guy scratched out here and that's
because he probably lost Ti's good graces.
So they came in and they chopped his image
out of there because Ti didn't want to
spend the afterlife with this guy he'd had a
fight with. Which it just humanizes them,
doesn't it? Now
Ti is hunting a hippopotamus here. Which
there's two things about this for one
thing hippopotami are dangerous and so
you don't want hippopotami in your
field. If you want to go and gather your
crops you don't wanna hippopotamus
chasing you. They're pretty dangerous. So
they didn't need people to chase them
off. Its. The land was different than it
is now and there was wild animals
everywhere, there's wild game everywhere at
this time. Also
it's a magic rite. It's designed to ward
off hostile forces. You can see the that Ti
is bigger.
He's more important and man are depicted
as reddish brown. Usually women are
whiter and men are browner. Not sure why,
but you're going to see this in another
statue as well. One reason why this image
of Ti is important is because of its
landscape setting. And this is a new
thing in art. We really haven't seen
these the actual landscape set into
imagery before the Egyptians and the
Egyptians do this pretty well. The
background here this is all papyrus
which is sacred. Here's another
painting from the tomb of Ti. It's cattle
fording a river.
Look at how naturalistically the cattle
are portrayed. So these scenes of
daily life are really offering artist an
opportunity to widen their powers of
observation.
There's so much variety and I encourage
you to go online and find pictures from
these different tombs, because the
paintings are amazing. They're
naturalistic, they're well preserved, and
you really get to see the hand of the
artist in these. So we'll end by looking
at Zoser are again.
Kings Zoser from Saqqara, 2650 BCE, and his
Ka statue is watching over us through
eternity.