Unit 8/9. Lesson 5: Art in Mesopotamia and Egypt

This is the final lesson of this unit. We are going to study basically the art of Ancient Egypt but it's necessary to mention a little bit of Mesopotamian art.
This is the presentation. In your book you can also read sections 5.2 and 5.3 of page 134 about Mesopotamian art and sections 6.2 and 6.3 of page 152 about Egyptian art.



I've also uploaded the presentation in video format, with my comments, if you prefer:

Here I give you a bilingual wordlist with terms of art history that we have come across:

Beam: viga
Gate: puerta (entrada monumental)
Hypogeum: hipogeo
Hypostyle hall: sala hipóstila
Lintel: dintel
Post-and-lintel architecture: arquitectura adintelada o arquitrabada
Relief: relieve (escultórico). There are two main types of relief.

• High relief is a relief were the figures stand out of the wall, although they are not separated from it (altorrelieve)

  

  Triad of Mykerinos: high relief

• Low relief or bas-relief is a relief were the figures stand out very little on the surface of the wall (bajorrelieve)

  

  Low relief: the wounded lioness from Ashurbanipal's palace (Nineveh, Assyria)

• Egyptians also practised sunk relief, which is sculpted at a lower level than the surrounding wall  (relieve hundido) 

  

  Horus (sunk relief)

Stepped pyramid: pirámide escalonada

Next Monday we are going to do some test or exercises to finish this lesson and then we will start studying Greece.

If you are interested in learning more about Mesopotamian and Egyptian sculpture, here I post some videos for the weekend.

In the first lesson we saw the victory stele of Naram-Sin of Akkad (3rd millennium BC).



This video is about the relief decoration of Ashurbanipal's palace (7th century BC)



This video is a little bit longer. It talks about Hatshepsut, her monuments and Egyptian history in general



Akhenaten's religious reform also affected the rules of Egyptian art:



And finally this video is about the Judgement of Osiris, Egyptian painting and writing: