right in this video we're going to continue uh over here in Sumeria primarily and we're going to we're going to look at what art can tell us about the life of regular people over there about what you know a little bit more about the religious practices the intertwining of of religion and power and such um through different art forms so we've been looking in uru primarily but we're actually going to start off at in another city state of eshnuno which is actually up on the Tigris a little bit further north so again here's modern day Iraq but with some of these sites on it so we've been down here in and later today we'll actually look down at or oh gosh is another important site but the works I want to look at at ashnuna are actually these little statuettes they're quite striking and tell us a lot about culture in Mesopotamia so what they tell us is um how you know a little bit about what the practice was at the time these statuettes were left in temples um and so when we look at the statuettes a few things we can grab just by looking at the Aesthetics of them for one thing their eyes are huge right we've got these really massive oversized over emphasized eyes with different inlays in them um which is supposed to emphasize that right and meanwhile other features such as their hands are actually very small in their hands they're carrying these little cups there's hundreds of these little cups that have been found these these offerings of liquid right would have been brought to the temple on a regular basis um so what is it what is going on with these sculptures these are actually not of gods these are of regular people people leave these in their temples um so remember when we looked in Uruk there was that Central room known as the waiting room right and of course this is the most important Temple so you know the regular people wouldn't have been able to go in that probably but in some temples you could go closer and remember waiting room being that the gods can come down to that space these it's theories would have been left in one of those rooms right and there's a lot of these so in other words you would go you'd put this and it stands in your place waiting for the God right now these tell us a lot in also because they're often inscribed right so they have the name of the person who who it's supposed to be standing in for right so they would write my name is blah blah and they would put that in there so it stands in for them constantly watchful and this is probably why the eyes are so large unblinking unceasing devotion it's it's and that's why we call these kind of devotional figurines so they stand there in a in a scene of devotion all the time while obviously you can't you have to go about your daily life farming or doing whatever other specialized labor that you're involved in in your life um also on these sometimes they have inscribed what God they're looking to right so you you know that sometimes they have a whole prayer inscribed on it so you know what it is that they're hoping to gain from the gods um they also tell us a little bit about the way people dressed right this is again one of the first depictions of Regular People how did people in ancient Samaria dress what did their clothes look like what was fashion like now that's not to say that these are portraits these are not portraits right these would have been created by Artisans they would have made a whole bunch of them right they would there'd be a whole bunch of men a whole bunch of women all different sizes there's some children actually on the woman's there you can see a little broken off leg there was a you know some child's legs that that that's gone so you buy a figurine that sort of represents you right woman and child man whatever it is man and woman together whatever it is right so you buy those figurines they vary in size um some of them over two feet tall some of them quite small so you buy something along those lines you inscribe it you leave it in the temple now obviously this is a devotional image to the god you don't want to scream so you buy the most expensive one you can handle so it's not a portrait in that sense but the artist is still going to base this on what people look like what people dress like right the men with their beards and the way that they wore their hair and the woman how she tied up her hair and how you know their clothing so it's still representing in a certain sense for the first time a peek into what life was like four or five thousand years ago right so we have these types of figurines standing ever watchful um indicating how regular people are practicing this religion not just the king uh or priests um but just kind of everyone's sort of participating this gives us some Clues now again ashnuna is not ruled by the same King as urugu this is not a unified Kingdom but they do seem to be sharing a lot of religious practices as evidenced for from from the writings that we have that go along with a lot of this stuff so shifting from now I want to go down to or or which was close to the coast at the time incidentally or in Lagos um quite a bit has irritated since then but down in or there's an elaborate burial ground lots and lots of graves um and this also tells us something now originally each of these Graves was thought to be a king or queen but now a lot of people think that it's actually just showing the stratification of society a lot of aristocrats a lot of priests or priestesses all right so you get a lot of that kind of stuff going on but we have these very very elaborate burials happening there in fact we find with a lot of these Kings uh our Queens um a whole bunch of bodies even right so likely what was happening is people would have probably ingested poison when their King died if the aura King's attendant you would die with him if he died now there's a trade-off in life there right if you have a choice which probably you didn't but there's a trade-off in that living in the palace with the king is very you know Easy Life comparable to your to your peers right who are who are outside the palace walls but then of course this is the other side of it but if you're truly devotional and you do believe that the king holds this divine power um you know there's going to be a voluntary aspect to that so we know that that's that that kind of thing is happening there as well as all these Treasures now this work uh when it was Unearthed people believed that it would have been mounted on a stick and probably was a and that's where the term standard came from like a military standard there's more likely explanations a lot of people think more likely explanation is that it's a music box but we can kind of get into that a little bit but what's most remarkable about this is the scene of depiction so once again you know we're looking at things in registers and it's made of this really clever and skillful uh inlaying of different stones and shells and things like that to depict a scene right and one thing that it tells us about Sumerian society is all this blue is a material known as lapis lazuli and we know where this came from this came from afghanist Modern Day Afghanistan in other words this Society is trading with farther away cultures further strengthening the idea that the Egyptians the Sumerians they're probably seeing each other they're seeing what's happening likewise we've got Travelers going to the east to areas like Afghanistan looking for rare materials that can be brought back and shown off so if we look at what's depicted here there's two sides to it we don't know for sure the interpretation there's no inscription clearly delineating it but it seems to be here's the king's duties right on the top what we're looking at here you've got right in the middle the biggest figure hierarchy of scale remember they have it it's usually not as Extreme as the Egyptian hierarchy of scale but nonetheless it exists he even breaks through the band that marks the different uh levels of the registers but nonetheless he stands there behind him you've got chariots and warriors in front of them more Warriors and captives who have been stroked naked to further degrade them right below that the same a similar type of scene you can see the soldiers marching those captives probably towards this so there's there seems to be something of a connection between the different registers here and then below different chariots right chariots were a new invention um and as you can imagine they probably led to a lot of military victories if you have a chariots and the other side does not have chariots this is a side effect of domestication we think of domestication in terms of food production but also in terms of military Alice that's another part of what's going on here so we see the military side we see the king being presented with the captives that's one side of his is leading the Army on the other side we again can identify the king because he's breaking through the register he's much much larger and we seem to be seeing a banquet of important people right they're all sitting here enjoying it off to the far right We've Got Musicians right one is playing a harp look at one of those a little closer here and some people speculate that this is actually the music box to a harp and then a singer um and then down below again we've got this the goods right we've got the domesticated animals this time as food below that we've got you know not only the animals but also the grains this is kind of echoing what we saw in the work of Ace in Uruk right where we saw you know the the grain animals the offerings of of different types right the kind of Plenty that happens in in a society like this so the same type of of motif is emerging again right essentially I can command these things right um all together this is now all of this doesn't survive the Bull's Head and the front part is what was found and it's believed it was mounted to one of this harp music box with the Bull's Head Mark you know mounted on it so we have a pretty good idea that that's what the purpose of this was it's a really interesting thing again elaborate gold and Lapis Lazuli really expensive materials um so fairly showy there and then on the front we've got all these scenes that again tell us probably a little bit about their mythology even more we get a lot of hybridization right we've got hybrids of man and Beast this is something that's emerged in human history from the earliest known object right this person with a femaline head we've got Horus with a human arm as well as a bull with a female face right the Egyptian societies can have a lot of this type of thing here we've got you know a man hugging two bulls with human heads we've got you know uh you know a bear playing a harp you've got a scorpion man here right you've so you've got people you've got animals doing people things um and so this is probably related to their religious belief where the natural world animals blended with human you know when you're trying to imagine the Divine something grander than what you've got you try and combine all the the most awesome in the original form uh forms that you can think of um and so that's that's where this comes from incidentally Bulls are really uh kind of pointed out in a lot of cultures you see that here in Egyptian you've got a bowl as a symbol of power in fact on another part of the Paladin armor I didn't discuss there's the King as a bull um we see it here again a lot of bulls will see them show up in minoan society so so Bulls as a symbol of power uh is a very common Motif that we're going to see quite often um so before we move off of this early Bronze Age there's one other area we haven't looked at yet and that is the cichlidies up here this is this kind of ancient Greece the Aegean world and it should be noted that this is a little quote unquote behind in the sense that we haven't seen the same emergence of large population centers um or anything like that yet we will see that start to emerge shortly but we're starting to see some of the same signs of development so the prehistoric Aegean we're going to be looking at a few different cultures it's roughly broken down into location right so we've got the cichlidies here in red we've got the hellatic area which is a green that's Greece proper as we think of it today where Athens and Sparta and all that it's going to be and then this really important island of Crete which we'll get into a little bit later with the Minoans Mycenaeans and such but I want to look at the cyclides because this is where we have some of the earliest evidence of of art production and it's very abstract it's in the form of these sculptures and this is still a prehistoric culture so while we're looking at the the you know the Sumerians they've got this this writing system we've got this elaborate form of government we've got cities of 40 000 plus going on we've got developed religious practice with Monumental architecture same type of thing happening in Egypt um Egypt maybe even a little you know further along in their development towards Empire we've got the consolidation Monumental architecture in the form of these uh the the Pyramid of Jose right we've got the writing systems all of that happening in the Cyclades we don't have any of that so this is a little bit unknown but these figures are not not exactly small mostly of females with emphasis on on the breast and pubic regions again so they're reproductive but not all at times there's a man here playing a harp and these were all in burial Chambers so we're not exactly sure we're still in the realm of speculation because of the lack of a writing system you know the fact the emphasis on reproductive systems makes us think of something like the Venus of villendorf these these really ancient things that have happened in other prehistoric cultures but the fact that they play uh seemingly a significance in in burial which is often associated with religion perhaps they're more like these statuettes right maybe there's something to that we're not really sure and we probably will never be sure because in the modern era