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Around 1700 AD, a watershed in the history of ancient Egypt, Egypt suffered the first foreign invasion in history, and the uncivilized tribes from the Mitanni region of northern Syria invaded Egypt after annexing the Hurita, Canaanites, and desert Bedouin tribes.
They won victory with iron weapons and horse-drawn chariots. These were known as "Hiksos" (foreign rule in ancient Egyptian) for a century and a half, forcing the 1st 3rd and 1st 4th dynasties to Nagon, but, around 1600 BC, the 17th dynasty broke out in the liberation war.
It was under the leadership of Seckenne and his son Camos that expelled the Hiksos and traced them to the East. Before that, the ancient Egyptian Empire lived a peaceful, even proud, life; After this, ancient Egypt began to decline. The early period mainly belonged to internal royal succession issues, local military divisions, and the covetousness of priests to imperial power.
In the later period, mainly the Cyxos, Nubians, Assyrians (671 BC), Persians (525 BC), Libyans, Xitai, Mediterranean maritime peoples, etc. invaded Egypt one after another, although the Egyptians eventually drove them out of the country, but these invasions still changed the peaceful development trajectory of Egyptian art.
The biggest change was the transformation of the pharaoh's image from divine ideology to secular heroism, the Narmai slate pattern began to be replaced by the pharaoh's battlefield or hunting activities in the New Kingdom, and the war horse and chariot appeared for the first time in art, which is also a relic of the Hiksor.
The once static, majestic, and indifferent style was replaced by a style rich in expression and action. The most famous was Thutmose III, the most famous war hero in Egyptian history, who sent 17 consecutive expeditions to the Syba region in 20 years.
These battles were inscribed on the walls of the Temple of Thebes as offerings to the gods. This heroism was gradually imitated by the nobility and the world, secular ideas began to emerge, and the pharaoh figure slowly detached from complete deification to become a hero with a personal sense.
By the time of Armana, Akhenaten was determined to reform, especially the Reformation, closing the temple and revering the gods as the sun god Aten. This emerged in art in a completely secular style, who completely changed the image of the king and appeared as an ordinary person.
In the statue, his "ugly" image of narrow shoulders, hunchback, straight belly, plump buttocks, pointed mouth, turned lips, and high cheeks is exposed; And for the first time his queen, Nefertiti, appeared in a truly stunning image, just like her name: The Beautiful Arrival. There are also scenes with "family fun" significance, such as the king hugging the queen in public and holding his daughter on his lap and kissing.
The nobility also built spectacular mausoleums on the high slopes of the mountains. The revival of arts and crafts formed a class of artists and artisans. These works are delicate, delicate, feminine, delicate and colorful. The muscles, bones, and structures of the human body in the sculpture also began to appear obvious realism, instead of the previous aesthetic tendency, ignoring the human structure.
A bust of a nude woman unearthed in the city of Amarna, with a distinctly realistic color on the chest, abdomen, pelvis, and thighs. Each family has its own characteristics, diverse styles, some grandiose, some exquisite and decorative, some large and dull, some unrestrained, beautiful and expressive.
At this time, ordinary people also began to appear in the artistic field of vision with independent images, creating simple popular art, such as the girl with a wooden basket on her head, the woman kneading the dough, the grape picking map, the watering garden picture, the fish drying map, the fishing map, the farming picture, the labor scene constantly appeared in the art theme, and the New Kingdom era was the golden age of art.
In addition to foreign invasions, marriage with foreign princesses may also be responsible for this artistic phenomenon. Beginning with Thutmose IV, the marriage of Amenhotep III and IV to the royal family of Matanni became a last resort, and their "pure Egyptian blood" gradually faded.
Amenhotep III was only half Egyptian, and his son, Akhenaten, was still married to Princess Matanitaduhiba. Akhenaten was followed by Tutankhamun, and after his death the young queen wrote to Supiluliumas, king of Sitai, asking him to send a prince to marry her.
Ramses II married King Sitai. The 30th Dynasty king Nektambu became independent in 350 BC, however, the Persians made a comeback and regained control of Egypt, and since then, no king who ruled Egypt has been of Egyptian origin.
However, none of this changed the trend of Egypt's decline. In 3 3 2 BC, Alexander the Great of Macedon conquered Egypt, thus ending the great era of Egypt and entering the Ptolemaic era. In 1 6 8 BC, the Roman Republic sought to protect Egypt and became a province of the Roman Empire until it was conquered by the Arabs BC.
Because Alexander and Ptolemy were tolerant of Egypt, their way of life was Hellenistic, but their faith was Egyptian. Greek cultural art, which is associated with the secular, and art that reflects religious content did not contradict Egypt, and art at this time had both a Greek shadow and preserved the traditions of ancient Egypt.
But the two styles are difficult to blend, because the conceptual Egyptian style presents a beautiful but uniform appearance, while the Greek style is very expressive, with realism and idealism, the two are very different, and ultimately separate in the end.
But in general, in the Hellenistic era of Egypt, the traditional style gradually faded, and the Greek realist style increased greatly, such as the king's head printed on silver coins, and strands of hair flowing naturally. On some of the frescoes in the tomb of Tunajbel, the artist painted colorful frescoes using ancient Greek mythology, and the characterization paid attention to the use of light and shade to create a sense of three-dimensionality.
During the Roman era of Egypt (31 BC-306 AD), ancient Egypt was no longer the center of Greek culture, and the traditional artistic characteristics were almost exhausted, replaced by Greco-Roman colors, which were scattered everywhere as an extension of ancient Greek art, especially in Alexandria and Fayoum.
In the later period, the ancient Egyptian Greek style was replaced by the Roman style, which was purely Roman style and had nothing new. The color portraits painted on the front of the mummy in Roman times pay more attention to the use of shadows, rich in three-dimensionality, and the face is obviously colored with layers.
After the rise of Christianity throughout the Roman Empire, a style of Christian art with local overtones emerged, called Coptic art. This is one of the earliest folk arts produced in the Middle East, which initially benefited from Greco-Roman art, and later got rid of colonial influences and formed Coptic art with local characteristics.
Since the Sassanid dynasty conquered Egypt, it contains elements of Sassanid art. Coptic art remained popular for some time after Egypt's Arab conquest, but eventually surrendered to the triumph of Christian unity and turned to the search for the only eternity of Christ.
The artistic characteristics of ancient Egypt can be summarized as follows: "class" conceptual, flat, semantic accuracy, order, religion, and eternity.
The most distinctive feature of ancient Egyptian art was the "like" conceptual figure, which replaced the reality of the visual image with a conceptual image (or idealized impression). This concept of cognition of natural objects, which does not care too much about specific details and differences, is a "number-sum" relationship.
Carefully comparing ancient Egyptian art, especially painting art, the characteristics of the human figure are almost all portrayed in a template, only the difference in species, gender and age. This artistic image is the most essential summary of all natural objects, which can be called idealized impressions, or impressionistic concepts. The concept itself is an abstract generalization of the nature of things, and the sum of impression concepts forms the concept of "class".
Language is a system of artificially created symbols that convey ideas, emotions and desires. It is first and foremost an auditory symbol, which has a minimum verbal meaning only if it is further associated with the thing through human experience or other means (e.g., visual impressions, feelings, experiences).
This experiential component that indicates content or "meaning" must also be associated with a whole set of experiences with certain boundaries, and then extended to a common category that is tacitly accepted by a community. In this way, the impression of an individual, concrete thing is combined with all other similar impressions, and all the feelings or impressions formed by all those who feel this form the basis of "classification".
Tens of millions of other phenomena of similar nature in natural things, although large and significant differences in detail, are considered to be sufficiently similar to be classified as homogeneous, that is, a symbol of "concept"; It's like a capsule that contains tens of millions of different natural objects.
So, the art of ancient Egypt was "class" concept graphics. Speech or higher language is the only way to mind, and ancient Egyptian script belongs to figurative writing, so its written and graphic meanings (concepts) have a natural connection.
Since the conceptual thinking of "class" emphasizes distinction and characteristics, grasping the most common features to form graphics (words) was the most concerned thing of the ancient Egyptians. The best way is to use the method of wandering point perspective, extract the image characteristics that can best reflect things from different angles, and carry out mixed shapes.
And the Egyptians did just that, and they usually extracted the most characteristic front and side mixtures, and finally formed the positive law. The ancient Egyptian script was separated in sound and meaning, with an "inflected" nature, which is very different from the European language family.
It is difficult to determine whether this separation of ancient Egypt ultimately influenced the creation of painting, but the figure of the figure in ancient Egyptian painting clearly presents this combination after separation.
Since Egyptian art was influenced by the concept of "class", its art did not pay much attention to some specific details and showed flat characteristics.
Its sculptures do not reproduce the structure of the human body perfectly and realistically like ancient Greek art, and vividly depict the ups and downs of muscles; Its painting art, using line outline and then filling in and painting, also rarely pursues some subtle changes and accuracy of light and shade, light and shadow, volume, and structure.
Its entire picture space is flat, and there is rarely an alternation of deep images, generally 2 layers of alternation. In the representation of the concept of "up, down, left, and right" of something, it is directly attached to the upper, lower, left and right spatial position of something in the picture, rather than the physical spatial relationship of the world.
Statues and murals are subordinate to architectural art, statues, reliefs, murals, architecture have a unified connection, separated from architecture, these art forms are difficult to present in an independent posture.
Every art of ancient Egypt is associated with writing, so that its transmission meaning is very clear. If the words are removed, it is difficult to discern the specific intention of its artistic communication, but only an impressionistic cognition. After the failure of the Akhenaten Reformation, successive generations erased all the names of Akhenaten and its queens from art throughout the country, and some even directly engraved their own names.
This was the greatest punishment for ancient Egypt. The name (literal) is the greatest guarantee of attaining the meaning of the eternal life of religion in connection with the art form, and the name is unique. The ancient Egyptians were the first to understand the combination of images and words in the communication of art, which was rare in other arts. Ancient Egyptian relief and mural art are closely related, relief is just a 2.5-dimensional mural.
The art of ancient Egypt had a clear sense of order. In mural art, the artist organically divides the picture, splitting the picture into parallel horizontal lines, and unfolding the shaping on it. This is the second-order order, on the basis of which the pharaoh and empress have the largest image, protruding from the second-order order, forming the first-order visual order.
The rest will be according to the first and second order, homeopathic modeling, large or small, free combination. Within the framework of such a large picture keel, any image is everywhere, without conflict. And the text is always arranged independently, forming a sense of illustration and text.
Even in the art of carving, this division of order is clearly characterized, either as a static standing statue or as a sitting position with a broken line. This is determined by its function, since these statues, the greatest use is to be buried in tombs, to be worshiped by subjects, so he must face forward, easily accept worship from a posture, or find his card after the soul is resurrected after death.
The tomb is a place where his soul reunites for eternal life, not a space for burying the body, and it can be seen from the unearthed funerary objects that the tomb is completely arranged according to the living state of the deceased during his lifetime, from drinks, bread, wine, seats, beds, chariots, weapons, props used in his life, etc., everything is available.
Death for the ancient Egyptians was a different state of being, a continuation of living, rather than physical death in the modern medical sense. The ancient Egyptians lived by the rising sun and died by the sunset, and the soul was a "living, separable, longer-lived entity (Taylor)", pharaoh meaning "palace".
As can be seen from the above, the development of ancient Egyptian art has undergone a typical pattern of biological development: origin, development, maturity, decline, disappearance. In the process, the perceptions that influence artistic creation are constantly changing. Its development is basically consistent with the rise and fall of the empire (due to the inconsistency of the establishment time of the ancient Egyptian dynasties, and the large number of publications, I will not repeat it here).
At the same time, due to religious influences and separational thinking, this positive law was strictly prescribed by successive dynasties (said to have been done by Imhotep, the designer of the pyramid of Zhorsal, but not certainly), thus ensuring the continuity of art. This art, with an orderly visual flow, combines graphics and words, has clear meaning, and is easy to communicate.
With the help of powerful visual conquests, ancient Egyptian art reached its artistic pinnacle. However, the extremes of things must be reversed, and this model, when treated with uniform idealization, also has the same consequence - as long as the name of the artwork is removed, all pharaoh images are the same. Ancient Egypt, after a powerful visual conquest, acquired temporary eternity, however, it was its meaning, not material form, that was eternal.