Ancient Near East
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Introduction
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Prehistory: Proto-writing
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Sumerian Art: Standard of Ur
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Sumerian Art: Great Lyre from the "King's Grave" at Ur
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Akkadian Art: Victory Stele of Naram-Sin
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Babylonian Art: Law Code Stele of King Hammurabi
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Assyrian Art: Human Headed Winged Lion and Bull (Lamassu)
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Neo-Babylonian Art: Ishtar Gate and Processional Way
Prehistory: Proto-writing The origin of pictographic & ideographic writing systems.
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- Imagine Alice traveled back over 50,000 years
- to find her distant ancestor, Bob.
- Now, up until this time,human culture was relativily unsophisticated
- usualising the same primitive stone tools
- which went unchanged for thusands of years.
- But somewhere around 50,000 years ago,
- something interesting happened,
- and nobody knows for sure why.
- There was a sudden explosion of diverse cultural artifacts,
- including instruments for making music, new tools
- and other forms of creative expression.
- Humans developped the ability to externalise their inner thoughts.
- They begin to communicate using language.
- So, Alice begins her search by looking for water.
- She knows that human and animal populations tend to migrate towards and along rivers,
- which are the life blood of ecosystems.
- Eventually she comes across an interesting marking.
- Bob's handprint.
- This marking contains very little information,
- simply that he was here, and could possibly return.
- Alice knows Bob is equally intelligent,
- he can communicate orally,
- although he culture has not yet developped the ability to read or write
- in their native language.
- At the time, the universal written language was art.
- So she finds natural materials around her to paint him a picture in case he returns.
- She renders an animal she is tracking,
- hoping this will offer a clue about the direction she is traveling in the future.
- Our ancestors used natural materials to create pictorial representations of their reality.
- Here is an actual cave painting from around 30,000 years ago,
- found preserved deep inside Chauvet cave in France.
- Similar renderings are found in the caves of Spain as well.
- A common theme among these ancient paintings are animal forms as well as the human hand.
- Perhaps as a signature, a story or a ritual calling.
- When Bob returns to the waterfall,
- he finds her painting and proceeds towards the river where he thinks
- she might be.
- When he arrives, he does not find her.
- Though he finds a sign that she here before.
- He decides to paint her a picture, explaining where he is going next.
- which is half-way up the river towards the setting sun.
- He has little time to paint the picture as night is approaching.
- Therefore, he needs a fast way to visualise his message.
- He thinks about it for a moment,
- and realises his message only contains three distinct mental objects...
- middle, river, west.
- So he decides to use simplified pictures to represent them.
- For river he draws a symbol which resembles its natural form,
- known as a pictogram,
- which is a drawing that resembles the physical object it represents.
- Pictograms are an important step in the evolution of writing.
- Here is a ceremonial slate palet found in Egypt,
- dated before 3,000bc. The surrounding scene shows a struggle between civilised humans
- and the wild and ferocious animals.
- However, it is difficult to draw pictures of abstract concepts,
- such as calm, old, dangerous,
- or in Bob's case, middle.
- For this he draws a line with a box over the middle.
- It represents "half-way".
- This is known as an ideogram, or a conceptual picture of an abstract idea.
- Here is an example of the same symbol
- on an ancient chinnese bronze inscription.
- For the idea of West, he decides on a picture of the setting sun.
- Now he does something interesting.
- He combines his individual symbols in turns of their meaning,
- to create a message.
- Meaning plus meaning equals new meaning.
- He leaves this in hope of Alice finding it.
- Some of the earliest artifacts of this symbolic merging
- are found in ancient Mesopotamia, now modern Irak.
- Home of the Summerians.
- This is the birthplace of many of the world's earliest civilisations.
- Here we find clay accounting tablets,
- which are some of the oldest written documents ever found.
- Some dating before 3,000bc.
- The rectangular tablets record the payments in cattle,
- shipments of cattle to shepperds for fattening,
- and gifts of cattle as an offering.
- Notice that instead of drawing a picture of ten sheep,
- they draw a symbol representing "ten",
- using small notches, and another symbol representing sheep or donkey,
- meaning simply 10 sheep.
- We call this proto-writing.
- Finally, Alice returns to the base of the river
- and finds Bob's message.
- She interprets the meaning correctly,
- half-way, west, down the river.
- So, she marches down the river towards the setting sun
- and eventually they finally meet.
- Over time, Bob learns to speak Alice's language,
- allowing them to use the same oral language to communicate shared concepts and ideas.
- This gives them an idea.
- The root of a more powerful written language.
- It starts with something very simple, writting her name.
- She disassociates the sound from the picture.
- For her name, Alice, Alice, AAlice.
- She combines the mathematical symbol for A and the picture for Ice, Al Ice.
- Al...ice
- Notice her name has nothing to do with the individual symbols.
- Sound plus sound equals new meaning.
- This is known as the Rebus principle.
- A great example of this was found in Egypt along the Nile river.
- Dated to aroung 3,100bc it contains some of the earliest hieroglyphic insciptions ever found.
- The Narmer palet depicts the Egyptian pharaoh, Narmer.
- On the back we see him to the left of a kneeling prisoner,
- who is about to be struck down by Narmer,
- who we see standing tall wearing a crown.
- What we are looking for is on the other side.
- Between the two bovine heads at the top
- we see an inscription of his name.
- It is written as a fish and a chisel.
- Which translated to Nar Mer
- Narmer
- Two sounds separated from the pictures together giving new meaning.
- A key development in the history of written language.
- But before they could advance towards what we know of as an alphabet,
- something had to happen.
- They needed to save time.
Be specific, and indicate a time in the video:
At 5:31, how is the moon large enough to block the sun? Isn't the sun way larger?
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