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| Paleolithic handprint from Pech Merle cave |
These prehistoric people, though non-literate, were not knuckle-dragging ‘cavemen’ but intelligent and anatomically modern humans, like us. We can only speculate about what ideas they may have had on creativity, art objects and aesthetic experience. It is unlikely they had a theoretical conception of ‘art’ as such, as this distinction emerged much later. But in ways now forgotten our ancestors must have observed their own practices such as painting, dancing, singing, weaving and sculpting, and wondered what they were, and why they did them.
Early civilisation
Around 11,000 years ago the Old Stone Age was succeeded by the New, known as the Neolithic – a revolutionary change signalled by the rise of agriculture and the domestication of animals. The Neolithic world sowed the seeds of many early civilisations, the first of which – the Sumerians in Mesopotamia and the Egyptians in north Africa – lay in the ‘Fertile Crescent’, an immense green arc stretching from the Middle East to the Nile. The invention of writing in those regions launched the age of history.
The Bronze Age social surplus grew big enough to fund, beside the more everyday art like pottery, the creation of monumental buildings, ceremonies and artworks.
Strictly speaking, these creations are a waste of resources. When we leave aside the cultural or religious claims we make for them, a pyramid is just a heap of stones in a field; a sculpture of a god is just a piece of rock bashed into a form; a burial ritual, however elaborate and expensive, has no significance for the person being buried, who is after all dead. Why spend so much time and energy on these strange practices? And why do only human beings do it? Thoughtful people in this age, too, must have puzzled over such things, just as early astronomers and priests puzzled over the stars in the sky, or the nature of sun and moon, day and night, life and death.
However, we have inherited no philosophy of art from the early civilisations. The Egyptians did not even have a word for ‘art’ as we understand it. They had words for various forms – ‘stela’, ‘statue’ and so on – but their conception was much broader, and nearer to what we call ‘craft’. The Egyptians seem to have judged their cultural products in terms of durability, quality of craftsmanship and splendour rather than as ‘art objects’ as such. As Monroe C. Beardsley observes in his history of aesthetics:
In tens of thousands of inscriptions in which these masters are praised, by themselves or others, it is never the beauty of their works, but only strength and everlastingness or richness and lavishness of metal that are cited.1
The lack of theory is not because of intellectual poverty. The succession of Mesopotamian empires and Egyptian dynasties sustained, for thousands of years, a magnificent culture of literature, architecture, theology, mathematics, astronomy and often spectacular art.
The Greeks, normally lauded as the first philosophers, are said to have learnt a great deal from the sages of Egypt. There is various evidence of this from ancient writers. In the 1st century BCE the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus wrote a grand history known in Latin as the Bibliotheca historica (Library of History), much of which survives. In its first book he reports that Greeks “who have won fame for their wisdom and learning” visited Egypt for education. Such eminent figures as the poet Homer, the statesman Solon of Athens, the mathematician Pythagoras, and the philosophers Plato and Democritus were among the visitors. The priests of Egypt argued that “the things for which they were admired among the Greeks were transferred from Egypt” (Book I, 96). Diodorus is not necessarily reliable, and perhaps those priests aren’t either, but there is other evidence that Egypt was regarded as a highly respected centre of learning by the Greeks. For example, in the 3rd century CE Diogenes Laertius recorded in his Lives of the Philosophers that Thales of Miletus, regarded as the first Greek philosopher, “learnt geometry from the Egyptians” (Book I, Chapter 1). Whatever the facts about precisely who travelled there and when, the Greeks seem to have been comfortable acknowledging a cultural debt to their north African mentors.
Not only could the Egyptians boast an advanced intellectual tradition, their artistic work is second to none. Think of the rich colours, the bustling wooden models of peasants at work, the stunning birds from the tomb of Nebamun, the grandiose architecture of Karnak, or the serenity of Thutmose’s perfectly modelled Nefertiti.
Why then did the ancient Egyptians leave us no evidence of a philosophy of art or beauty? Whereas Greece produced Pythagoras’s study of music, Polykleitos’s treatise on proportion, Plato’s Ion, Republic and Symposium, and Aristotle’s Poetics, the Egyptians seem to have taken no interest in aesthetic questions. This may in part be a misfortune of archaeology, but the absence of an aesthetics amongst their vast cultural inheritance is striking.
The answer I think is two-fold. Firstly, the historical context was not ripe for philosophical thought as we understand it today. I’ll come back to that at the end. The other answer is that they did in fact leave an aesthetics, spoken to us through the art objects themselves.
Take an example of their two-dimensional visual art. The painting below is from the tomb of an official named Nakht. Ancient Egypt’s art was functional, often serving, as in this case, funerary or religious purposes. The function of this work is to win a prosperous existence for the family in death, as they had enjoyed in life.
Painting from the Tomb of Nakht, c.1400 BCE. Nakht and his wife Tawy (left) are shown enjoying the products of the fields. At the top right we see the family on a hunt. Source: Osirisnet.netThe artist shows little interest in perspective, preferring flat colours and shapes. The action is arranged into bands or ‘registers’ divided by straight lines, making a very schematic composition. Within this scheme, the portrayal of people and events follows strict rules. Here are a few:
1. Men were painted red, women yellow; gods were sometimes painted in symbolic colours like black and green.
2. The figures are stylised to capture each element from the angle at which its appearance is most typical. The eye is seen as if from the front, even though the head is normally shown in profile. Similarly, the chest is frontal but the limbs are shown from the side, where their articulation is most clear. The shape of a foot is much clearer in a side view, too.
3. The relative size of the figures obeys a scale where the more important a person was, the larger they were. Compare the size of Nakht and Tawy with the peasants bearing goods.
4. When drawing the figure, the Egyptians developed a canon of proportions based upon a grid system about 19 squares high. One of these grids, from the Tomb of Ramose, has survived because the tomb was left unfinished, giving us a rare insight into how the artists worked. In the illustration below, I’ve applied a grid to one of the peasants from TT52:
The figure had to fit into this scheme, however unnatural it looked.
In short, the art is functional, schematic, and highly conventional. The rules are not immune to variation, and artists found ways to avoid monotony. But the same canon of style, developed during the Old Kingdom, continued to be used almost without interruption until the gradual breakdown of the traditional culture following the invasions of Alexander and the Romans. It is an approach to art that is different to ours. The historian of aesthetics, Władysław Tatarkiewicz, observed:
To judge by the surviving examples, they did not attach great importance to the representation of reality, to the expression of feelings or to giving pleasure to spectators. They linked their art to religion and the next world rather than with the world about them. They sought to embody in their works the essence of things rather than their appearance.2
Why was this?
The Egyptians were not incapable of realism: if you have doubts, see their portrait busts, or their exquisite paintings of animals. No, they worked this way because they had an aesthetic. What ancient Egyptian art speaks of is a desire for strict order. Someone’s place in the social hierarchy is always explicit, and the mode of representation remains roughly the same across the culture, regardless of time and place, creating a extraordinary sense of continuity, necessity, and eternity.
Think of the changes wrought by the Neolithic Revolution. The earliest human societies were small bands of hunters and gatherers, roaming the landscape in search of food and owning only what they could carry. Living hand to mouth, they would have shared their resources more or less equally. Settled Neolithic and Bronze Age farmers with crops and animals, on the other hand, depended upon stability from politics and predictability from nature. In a mythopoeic age, weather, disease and other dangers were believed to be arbitrated by gods, and people looked to organised religion to keep them on good terms with the divine. The new wealth of the agricultural revolution was swallowed by the priesthood and aristocracy as a reward for providing stability – they were the ones who sponsored major artworks, and in them they affirmed their class structure and system of belief.
Civilisation also encouraged new kinds of thought. The socialisation of labour and the development of regional markets of exchange required standardised measurements and more complex mathematics; as families permanently settled land they needed new concepts of property and law. The practical needs of a changing society demanded a turn towards systematisation and abstraction.
These, in brief, are persuasive reasons why the art of the early civilisations tended to be schematic and monumental. The Egyptians had no philosophy of art, but, just like us, they had a way of thinking that heavily influenced how they represented the world in the objects they made. Although their art is sometimes considered too stiff and static for modern taste, these were precisely the qualities that best communicated their preoccupation with order and eternity. Fulfilling that role was more important than questions about beauty – which is why they were ready to spend great labour and resources on superb work only to bury it in subterranean darkness where it would never be seen.
This brings us back to the question of philosophical thought. The early civilisations laid the foundation stone for the emergence of philosophy, including aesthetics. New needs give birth to new thoughts and new forms, which build upon the existing corpus of ideas but transform it. However splendid a culture’s art, a sophisticated body of theory does not necessarily follow: there is no Aristotle or Aquinas of the Renaissance. The Mesopotamians and Egyptians seem to have had no use for philosophical reflection as we know it, let alone aesthetic theories, therefore they did not conceive of that kind of thought. Just as it was not possible to create bronze statues until innovations in metallurgy enabled ancient cultures to extract tin and copper ores and combine them into an alloy, it was not possible to devise philosophy as we now understand it until ancient thought received an adrenaline shot from the individualism fostered by Greek democracy.
Once the Greeks had ‘discovered’ the concept of reflecting upon art and beauty, the cat was out of the bag, but someone had to do it first. It wasn’t because the Greeks were cleverer than their neighbours. It was simply that in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt, the conditions for this specific step were not yet ripe. The lack of a conscious theory of art, however, in no way impaired their ability as artists. As usual, the artists lead and the theorists follow.
Notes
1. Monroe C. Beardsley, Aesthetics: From the Classical World to the Present (1966). Beardsley notes the Egyptians’ lack of a philosophy of art and moves quickly on to the Greeks, but in my view there is more to say.
2. Władysław Tatarkiewicz, History of Aesthetics, Volume 1 (1970).
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