Art Serial Patoi here, but you could call me Art. This is Explorations in Art History, starring me! And the hand. Well, what about the rest of me? How embarrassing people watching from around the world and I'm stuck waiting on some five-fingered prima donna. Oh, well that's better. It looks like we'll be talking about the Mesopotamian and Egyptian period. We're going back 5,000 years to a place the Greeks called Mesopotamia, which means land between the rivers. Those rivers were the Tigris and the Euphrates, which formed a fertile crescent, sometimes called the cradle of civilization. Very funny. Mesopotamia actually refers to an area rather than a country. At different times, it was ruled by the Sumerians, the Acadians, the Babylonians, the Assyrians, and the Persians. They lived close to the natural world and liked this lion that decorated the walls of the Ishtar Gate. Their animal art was pretty realistic. Their human art, not so realistic. Both Mesopotamian and Egyptian artists stylized the human body. In Mesopotamia, they invented the first written language called Cuniform. They started with pictographs, but over time the writing evolved into more abstract symbols. They also got to invent cool names for their buildings like Ziggurat. In Er, they built a massive Ziggurat to pay homage to the gods. Ziggurat. I love the sound of that. Ziggurat was the center of the city. Moving on. Mesopotamia may have started the civilization craze, but Egypt took it to a new standard. Egypt depended on one great river, the Nile, and developed a civilization that lasted over 3,000 years. When Tutankhamid became fabro, the great pyramids were already a thousand years old, and it was another thousand years after that when Cleopatra helped power. Egyptologists invented an ingenious system to classify the different periods of Egyptian rule. There's the Old Kingdom, Middle Kingdom, the New Kingdom, and the later Kingdom. How did they think of that? Interestingly, artistic styles never changed much over 3,000 years. The best artist was probably the one who could most closely copy the classic style of the past. Well, it was good enough for Kufu, and rances. Except for one brief moment called the Armana period, when a pharaoh named Akanaten ushered in a new style and a new religion. All of a sudden, faces got stretched, bodies got streamlined, and, lethened, thin was in. But when Akanaten passed away, Egypt quickly reverted back to the old familiar ways. That doesn't mean Egyptians weren't creative. Just look at their pantheon of gods. They imagined jack-o-headed gods and hawk-headed gods, lion-headed goddesses, rar! Crop-o-headed goddesses? Oh my! Crocodile-headed gods and ibis-headed gods. Cat-headed gods? And, well, you get the picture. Of course, the pharaohs themselves were considered the living gods. Pharaohs were portrayed according to specific rules that emphasized their perfect, unchanging nature. Usually, these representations included some symbols of authority like the royal headdress, the crook, and the flail, and a false beard. Even the female pharaoh, Hatshap-sut, commissioned statues of herself with the false beard to reinforce her position of authority. Oh, attractive. Egyptians obsessed over death and the afterlife. Paintings on the walls of tombs often showed the bar, or soul, on its journey through the afterlife. When an Egyptian artist painted a figure, every body part was shown from its most recognizable angle. The face was shown in profile, except for the eye, which was shown head-on. The body was shown head-on, and the legs and feet were twisted back into profile. Don't try this at home. Alexander the Great admired the Egyptian kingdom so much that he decided to conquer it in 332 BC. While in Egypt, he founded the city of Alexandria on the northern coast of Egypt and installed his general tolami as pharaoh. The Greek elements were introduced into the arts. The tolamic dynasty lasted 275 years and included several tolamis and cleopatraes. The most famous of these was Cleopatra VII, whose son, tolami the 15th, was the last pharaoh of Egypt, in 30 BC Rome conquered Egypt.