A Companion to Ancient Egyptian Art

Melinda K. Hartwig, Melinda K. Hartwig

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781118325087
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire ancienne et classique

A Companion to Ancient Egyptian Art presents a comprehensive collection of original essays exploring key concepts, critical discourses, and theories that shape the discipline of ancient Egyptian art.

•Winner of the 2016 PROSE Award for Single Volume Reference in the Humanities & Social Sciences
•Features contributions from top scholars in their respective fields of expertise relating to ancient Egyptian art
•Provides overviews of past and present scholarship and suggests new avenues to stimulate debate and allow for critical readings of individual art works
•Explores themes and topics such as methodological approaches, transmission of Egyptian art and its connections with other cultures, ancient reception, technology and interpretation,
•Provides a comprehensive synthesis on a discipline that has diversified to the extent that it now incorporates subjects ranging from gender theory to 'X-ray fluorescence' and 'image-based interpretations systems'

Chapter 1
What Is Art?

John Baines

Introduction: “Art” and the Aesthetic

Studies of ancient Egyptian art since the nineteenth century have generally used approaches and categories similar to those that have dominated research on western art. Earlier Egyptologists and art historians often assumed implicitly that ancient Egypt, being older than European traditions, produced works that were less evolved and at a lower level than those of later times. An opposed, but nonetheless related and continuing tendency has been to say that since no ancient Egyptian term exists that closely corresponds to the modern western concept of art, there was no “art” in ancient Egypt, and to use approaches based on a modern concept would be methodologically slipshod.

Both of these points of departure privilege post-Renaissance and post-eighteenth century western perspectives. They do not take into account the universality of aesthetic concerns in human society, at least since the emergence of modern Homo sapiens and probably earlier. If applied to other social phenomena, the terminologically based argument would yield the conclusion that the Egyptians had neither mathematics nor religion, because ancient terms for those domains are lacking. Furthermore, a good correspondence can be found between the Egyptian

mt and pre-nineteenth century western terms and usages for “art” (Baines 2007b [1994]).

One reason for the unreflecting use of a western-based approach has been the high degree of apparent congruence between core western artistic genres and those of ancient Egypt. It is seductively easy, and not necessarily wrong, to place architecture, statuary, and painting (here including painted and unpainted low relief) at the center of both traditions. Ancient Egypt, however, is an archaeologically recovered civilization for which a continuous tradition that might describe the living artistic environment and lead into modern discourse is lacking. Because of this disjuncture, one must be very cautious about accepting congruence between ancient and modern traditions and classifications. Although unusual numbers of works in organic and often ephemeral materials survive from Egyptian antiquity, it remains difficult to gain a sense of the total range of ancient artistic production. For some periods, it is clear that genres other than those just named were at least as significant as the standard trio of architecture, statuary, and painting. The possible range and focus of aesthetic concerns in antiquity should be left open for testing against material and indirect evidence, as well as against reconstructions of the ancient context.

Another complication often encountered in nineteenth and twentieth-century western attitudes to art—whether or not what is discussed belongs in the western tradition—is the widespread assumption that only works that have no function beyond being aesthetic objects can be termed art. The art world of today—displaying new creations or those from the past—is then seen as a domain of action and experience that would be partly detached from its social context and from other areas of human experience. The programmatic title of Hans Belting's work on medieval religious icons: Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image Before the Era of Art (1994 [1990]) raises the implication that the icons might not have been “art” by more recent definitions because they had functions. Problems with taking lack of function to be a defining feature are evident. For example, because most works of architecture have a clear utility, they would be excluded from belonging to the category of art, as would a high proportion of what was produced in many aesthetic domains before the modern period of art galleries and museums—homes for functionless objects. The same would apply to a great deal of music and literature. Moreover, within their modern setting, objects in art galleries and museums do not lack a function: they are cultural artifacts that serve numerous purposes, including some that have been fulfilled by religion in other societal contexts. Be this as it may, one should assume that all aesthetic products have a function; the non-functional definition is an obstacle to understanding.

The rise of the art gallery and museum in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries contributed to narrowing the conception of art. By contrast, developments in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, in which the range of activities of visual artists extends to include performances and various interventions in the environment, have been helpful in stimulating thought about the range of phenomena and traditions, whether surviving or lost, that might have belonged to ancient artistic environments. Here one might compare Richard Bradley's concluding question in his Image and Audience: Rethinking Prehistoric Art: “Is it possible that, quite by chance, Installation Art and Conceptual Art have more in common with prehistoric archaeology than they do with the dominant trends in the Modern Movement?” (Bradley (2009), 233–234). Perhaps this parallel is not “quite by chance” but is in keeping with broader human proclivities.

This analogy between ancient practice and modern performance, neither of which fits familiar categories, suggests that, while some western ideas about art and the debates surrounding it can stand in the way of productive approaches to ancient Egyptian art, other western developments can point toward a broader understanding. Since study of ancient Egypt is necessarily undertaken from an outside perspective, it is legitimate to exploit such parallels. Is it possible to define art satisfactorily for ancient contexts, and how close will such a definition be to definitions used elsewhere? Rather than addressing this question directly, in this chapter I survey issues that I consider to be relevant to the context and significance of art in ancient society. I characterize art informally as the complete range of aesthetically ordered activity in a society, whether or not this results in the production of artifacts or leaves permanent traces or other features that can be recovered from the material, pictorial, or textual record. My basic category is thus “the aesthetic” rather than “art.” This expansive approach is intended to avoid excluding anything that might be relevant, and it is tempered by taking into account that art and its products need to be seen in relative terms: things can be more or less artistic and can have more or less effort and value invested in them. In keeping with the aim of this volume, I focus on visual phenomena. Other sensory domains, such as music and verbal art, are embedded in Egyptian visual works and should be borne in mind as integral to the aesthetic environment.

The Aesthetic Context

The majority of the material culture known from ancient Egypt is aesthetically formed. This preponderance is due, in large part, to the fact that royalty and the elite controlled most of the society's wealth. They appropriated vast resources in order to create durable monuments and to place products that were as beautiful as possible in locations where they have survived to be found in modern times. Both the contexts for those products—temporary and permanent ordered spaces and structures—and the products themselves constitute works of art in the sense advocated here (the notion of beauty just evoked would repay analysis, but this cannot be offered here).

Indirect evidence shows that aesthetic expenditure in other domains was enormous. One arena, among a number for which pointers are available from many periods, is navigation on water, the most important and prestigious mode of travel and transport. From the beginning of the pictorial tradition in the Naqada I Period onward, images of boats often emphasize their display features (e.g., Landström 1970). These are particularly conspicuous in the decoration of Naqada II period pottery (“D-Ware”; e.g., Patch (2011) 67–77). The Gebel el-Araq knife (Naqada III) shows two types of boats belonging to opponents in a battle, with the victors' craft having high, decorated prows (e.g., Malek (2003), 24; and see Figure 22.2 in Ataç, this volume). A flotilla of 14 large boats was entombed at Abydos as part of the funeral of a Dynasty 1 king (O'Connor (2009), 182–194). Several larger ships were dismantled and deposited next to the Great Pyramid. The boat that has been reassembled is elaborately designed, with both practical amenities and marked embellishments of form. An image of a river ship from the Dynasty 5 mortuary temple of Sahure is hoist with a huge sail that is shown as colored and embroidered with a flower pattern, a winged disk, and the royal titulary across the top fringe (Borchardt et al. (1913), pl. 9). A stela that narrates the architectural and spatial remodeling of Thebes by the Dynasty 18 king Amenhotep III has a section describing the newly commissioned river barque of Amun-Re, which is accorded almost equal status with major temples (O'Connor (1998), 162–165, figs 5.5, 5.6).

Two of the ships just mentioned survive, and they happen to be plain in appearance. Images of royal and divine barques are painted in bright colors and show cloth or leather coverings to cabins; the effect they gave through their reflection in the river is described in the stela text just mentioned. The finest barques would have been gilded. They were part of a culture of display on the river that gave indispensable élan to the movement of gods, kings, and elite. Funeral processions, sometimes conveyed on land and sometimes by water, were comparably significant arenas of display; the salience of such processions is evident both from images of them and from the grave goods which survive in particularly large quantities from the New Kingdom (e.g., much material in Brovarski, Doll, and Freed 1982). Although such funerals would have been performed only for the wealthiest, high mortality and variable age at death made them more prominent in people's normal lives than comparable events are in the modern world. Moreover, the reality that the tomb would almost certainly be robbed, of which most people were surely aware, could only heighten the significance of the process of the funeral and the ceremony of burial, when the material was intact and being used for its intended purpose.

Thus, ceremonies of travel, festivals, and funerals were strongly aesthetic performances, and if possible, sited in aesthetically ordered locations (e.g., Plate 1). They presumably followed custom or defined rules, but they no doubt also departed at times from inherited forms in order to enhance their character, or to evoke modes hallowed by antiquity, as is stated in the tomb of Kheruef, where the performance of the sed-festival of Amenhotep III is depicted in the artistic style of its period but with archaizing details of costume and dance steps (Epigraphic Survey (1980), 43–45, pls. 24–28, 33–40). This was also a time when “curiosities”...