It is designed to be used with the sections and pages in the Art and Theatre Notebook . Although the canon of great art is well established for Ancient Egypt, Greece, Mesopotamia, Persia, and Rome as well as for Medieval and Modern Europe and for the United States, there is much less agreement among art historians about the greatest or most representative pieces of art for Asia, Subsaharan Africa, and the Americas. This, coupled with the fact that considerably more Egyptian, European, Greek, Roman, and U.S. art is currently available on the Web than art from the rest of the world, means that the lists of the great art of Egypt, Europe, Greece, Rome, and the United States are significantly more defensible than lists for the rest of the world. Part of the course grade depends upon meaningful comments. Students taking Humanities 290 from Professor Clark through CAPA or at the San Fernando Valley or Inland Empire Centers may take the virtual tour of the Great Art and Architecture and comment to their classes.
History begins when records are kept.
The story of humankind before the invention of writing and the creation of written records is the realm of archaeology. Archaeologists have uncovered some spectacular prehistoric art in southern Europe, North Africa, and other parts of the world. Technically the prehistoric period continued to exist in some parts of the world long after the invention of writing elsewhere. Thousands of years after written records had become commonplace in Asia, Europe, North Africa, and middle America, for instance, large parts of Africa, the Americas, and the islands of the Pacific Ocean remained prehistoric. A few groups in these areas remain that way today and are the subjects of anthropological studies.