This may be due to the fact that much of surviving Egyptian art and architecture was connected in some way with religion, death, burial or the afterlife, but other factors as well need to be considered. Most of the surviving art and architecture that we shall examine from Egypt in fact has some connection with burial. We shall concentrate on architecture, free-standing sculpture, temple wall reliefs, tomb painting and reliefs. We shall be concerned almost exclusively with monuments connected with royalty or the highest levels of the Egyptian elite. The lectures will often focus on the role that the king played in society, and his prominence in official and private art.
Egyptian culture differs greatly from traditional Western culture.
Nevertheless, Greece, and so the West, owes a tremendous debt to Egypt. Recently there has arisen a heated argument over the exact nature of this debt. There exists a good deal of bad information and scholarship on this topic. If time allows, we may at the end of this class explore the relationship between Egypt and Greece, attempting to sort fact from fiction. Reading assignments are light, since I expect you to spend much time going through materials on reserve in the library in order to become more familiar with the monuments discussed in class.