Art History Volume 1

For the Greeks, the deceased entered a place of mystery and obscurity that living humans could not define precisely, and their funerary art, in contrast, focused on the emotional reactions of the survivors. The scene of human mourning on this pot contains no supernatural beings, nor any identifiable reference to an afterlife, only poignant evocatio

The Old Kingdom was a time of social and political stability,

people (mostly sexless, some with horned helmets, but also men with erect penises),

the similarity between the burial of bodies under house floors and the burial of the plaster figures in pits is striking.

Objects such as gold-covered scepters, bracelets, beads, arm rings, lip-plugs, and copper axes and chisels distinguish the graves of a small number of adult males, and in a very few of them, no skeleton was present. Instead, the body was represented by a clay mask richly decorated with gold adornments (see FIG. 1–28) and the grave contained extraor

the eyes of the statues are open, as if they are alive and awake.

constructed by covering bundled-twig cores with layers of plaster, the statues were found in two pits. One contained 12 busts and 13 full figures, and in the other were two full figures, two fragmental busts, and three figures with two heads. These statues, each about 3 feet tall, are disturbing for many modern viewers, especially the startlingly s

but in the Near Eastern site of ’Ain Ghazal in modern Jordan, archaeologist Gary Rollefson found 32 extraordinary HUMAN FIGURES (FIG.

In addition, the clear and repeated emphasis on death, violence, wild animals, and male body parts at Çatalhöyük has challenged traditional interpretations of the Neolithic worldview that concentrated on representations of the female body, human fertility, and cults of the Mother Goddess.Most Neolithic