Antiquities

Egyptian and North African

However, the predynastic period was marked from the earliest times by fine pottery, some of redware with reduced fired black upper sections, others of red with brown linear paintings depicting boats and animals. The pottery is often accompanied by large stone bowls and elegant beakers. The hard stone, sometimes granite or vari-coloured conglomerates, was abraded into most beautiful shapes. Schist and green slate were much used for ceremonial 'palettes' and as small pendants in the form of animals. Fine beads were made from quartz, turquoise and chalcedony. Ivory was much used for ornament and for handles of weapons, carved in low relief with the help of stone tools. Weapons include stone-headed maces, often carved. In the later phases of the period we find the first appearance of hieroglyphic writing.

After Upper and Lower Egypt had been politically united in the late fourth millennium B.C., there was a fairly continuous progress in all the arts. Pottery was wheel-turned and not very adventurous, though some of the larger wine jars were beautifully painted with designs of flowers. Jewelry was at first simple, and small sculpture was strongly realist though somewhat stiff in posture. The work improved through the Fourth Dynasty [c. 2300 B.C.], and then a decline came. In the later period, after the Eleventh Dynasty [c. 2150 B .C.], there was a great revival in which relief sculptures became important, and jewelry became more complex. Fašence replaced pottery for important ceremonial use, and was used for decorative beads. Metalwork increased both in quantity and elegance. More small stone figures were made, with a greater degree of realism. Relief carvings also became more realistic and yet kept to the conventions of profile presentation.

There was an interregnum during the Hyksos invasions of Egypt [c, 1700 B.C.], though many beautiful small objects are known in all materials. However, after the expulsion of the Hyksos a great revival of luxury arts took place in an increasingly rich Egypt. Many fine wooden objects, spoons, pillows, and furnishings were made and wooden shrines with delicate carvings reached a very high standard. During the short reign of Akhenaten [c. 1379-1362 B.C.] a new style was introduced both in fresco painting and realistic carving. There are some parallels with Cretan work here. After the worship of the traditional god of Egypt, Amun, returned in [p. 37] 1351 B.C., the arts continued with a great luxuriousness. Small bronzes of the gods became common, and figurines in gold and silver were made in quantity. There were many more ornaments, including polychrome ceramic jewelry; fašence was more common, and iron was in full use for tools. Frescoes from tombs became more brilliant. Mummies and mummy-cases were even more elaborately decorated and papyri have survived in greater numbers.

Gradually a decline in the arts occurred, and demotic script almost replaced the hieroglyphic except for religious sculptures. Eventually Egypt was overthrown by the Persian invasion [c. 525 B.C.]. A short Egyptian revival followed with a more realistic style in sculpture, but the campaigns of Alexander the Great led to the country's being controlled by the Greek family of the Ptolemies [332-30 B.C.]. The weight of tradition, however, kept Egyptian native religion and art throughout the Ptolemaic period. Greco-Egyptian sculpture was a charming hybrid style, and is most marked in the regions around the great city of Alexandria. The last of the Ptolemies, the brilliant and unfortunate Cleopatra IX, was unable to stave off a period of Roman administration in which the arts of the Egyptians declined and the generalized classic Mediterranean styles took over.

By this time the whole of the North African coast had become Roman in culture. The history of the area began with native North African cultures producing pottery and jewelry in the second millennium B.C. The early civilization had formed around trading posts of Greek and Phoenician merchants. These grew into city states, of which Cyrene [c. 630 B.C.-A.D. 660] and Carthage [c. 800-201 B.C.] were excellent and successful establishments.

Carthage is mostly represented by inscribed stelae and small funerary cists. This Punic work, simple and sometimes grotesque, is inscribed in the Phoenician alphabetic script, and there is some fine jewelry. The later Roman Carthage was also a flourishing city with a brilliant trading organization. Its art, together with that of most cities of the Maghreb [Africa north of the Sahara - Africa to the Romans], includes statuary and inscribed tablets. The styles are Roman, becoming increasingly realistic as the imperial period progresses. Pottery was not highly developed, metalwork was in the Roman styles and often very beautiful, and glass was important and among the best in the Roman Empire.

The Greek trading posts, the cities of what is now Libya, produced fine pottery, and by trading with the homeland acquired first-class works of art for private and public display. The Roman conquest did little to change the arts: language remained Greek and the cultural pattern became international.

The center of international culture for some centuries became the Ptolemaic Egyptian city of Alexandria from 331 B.C. onwards. This great polyglot market was a trading emporium in which objects from the whole civilized world could be found. It was a center of fine glass-making and in its workshops the metallurgists perfected techniques of gilding and gave rise to many alchemical traditions. In painting, a school of Greco-Egyptian art flourished, represented by many excellent encaustic portraits from mummy cases of the period. Of equally high standard was the work of Alexandrian jewelers.

The high point of Alexandrian culture was the Museion and Library. From the ruins, after the tragedy of the Arab destruction in A.D. 642, many small artistic works were retrieved, and many Egyptian papri on a variety of subjects were found in cemeteries, so that all of the old learning was not lost. Among the manuscripts preserved have been many illustrated works of the Gnostic churches of Africa. Alexandria was a great center of heresies, and many strange manuscripts and inscribed amulets and seals remain from the time just before the Arab invasions. The burning of the Library was an isolated incident. On the whole the rule of the Arab Caliphs was beneficent, and Egypt and the Maghreb as a whole became centers of Islamic art. Throughout North Africa, metalwork and ceramics flourished, glass achieved new standards of excellence and tiles were of exquisite formal beauty. The arts of Arab North Africa were among the most beautiful in the Islamic world.

A special group of cultures developed to the south of Egypt--the Meroitic kingdom, which lasted for a thousand years. It is of earlier origins but probably developed in the main when Egyptians moved south at the time of the Persian invasions of the sixth century B.C. and its great days were in the early centuries of the Christian era. The kingdom survived into Roman times, and it was probably the source of Egyptian ideas which reached West Africa. At al times its arts, which included sculpture, jewelry and pottery, were strongly African in style rather than Egyptian.

Another kingdom which owed much to Egyptian influence was Ethiopia. The early Coptic Christian Church Christianized the kingdom, but its traditional history and its arts show a close contact with Arabia. In later times [c. A.D. 600] the city of Aksum became important, and small sculptures, jewelry and some sculpture of Aksumite style survive. The later works of early Abyssinian art include religious crosses, wall paintings and a number of very beautiful formal books executed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries A.D. [pp. 37-39]