all right in this video we're continuing to look at the same time period in which we have Old Kingdom Egypt the Acadian Empire and the Indus Valley Civilization all uh roughly at the same time interacting with one another but I'm going to look at uh depictions of the human form a little bit more specifically to compare the different ways in which this might happen so starting off in Egypt probably the best example of this from this time period is this sculpture of coffrey one of those three the middle pyramid at Giza um so again these sculptures they were created as yet another place that that could inhabit in other words we're going to mummify the body so that the the can have a space from which to exist but also let's make some sculptures as well as a way of of doing the same type of thing these types of sculptures may have also would have been more public facing often these were in contained within the temples uh the visible temples um so they they convey that type of power and within Egyptian Society there's a few telling things here for one the ceremonial beard right I talked about the importance of beards in a lot of these ancient cultures in particular with their religious significance headdress right often has some significance to it as well you see these kind of idealized forms and this isn't true of all Egyptian people so the royalty always has the more or less the same idealized uh kind of body where maybe if you're a scribe or something you're going to be a little bit different on the sides here you see images that would represent the North Upper and Lower Egypt kind of unification and behind his head is Horus right another you know kind of embracing him so this idea of his divinity reinforced yet again in this really hard Stone known as diorite which is a great way of you know hopefully it'll last really well and as you can see it's lasted quite well um with minimal damage here and the sculptor was clever in how they did it to avoid too many protruding um elements so that it really could survive for a long period of time um if we look at a statue of mankari you know the third of those similar type of thing in fact it would be difficult to tell the difference you see the subtleties in the face there's not that much difference here there's a lot of consistency in Egyptian this is the other possible pose that happens a lot in Egyptian this very sturdy shoulders rigid arms straight down one foot in front of the other four talking standing poses on the side perhaps his wife right that's the most generally uh accepted interpretation although it may be a goddess right again representing that Divinity but it's yet another place for the car to exist into the Afterlife and this consistency of depiction is something I've mentioned in Egypt that's going to last for a long long time we'll kind of get into that in a minute the Sphinx is another one we're not sure it's it's in front of cough raise um pyramid right by his River temple but it might have actually begun for Khufu the first pyramid and then finished with coffee we can't tell which one it is but either way it was carved out of an outcropping a live rock sculpture from the Quarry where they were taking all the stone stands out there yet another image very consistent with the others a public-facing thing would have been painted brightly um to again signal that the entryway to this Palace of the dead right of these dead Kings who are now um Divine Gods essentially so we have Egypt you know is going to be very consistent with this I show one more thing I'm not going to get into this too much um this mastaba of tea a less significant figure but I bring it up just as a way of uh emphasizing this consistency from Narmer through this down to the tomb of T very very similar form and this is not accidental the Egyptians valued stability they largely had stability and it's and as I say it's not accidental because we know that they created Canon's books there's a reference to in other words if you're an artist and you are responsible to depict the human form you open this book and it tells you the proportions that you lay it out on a grid this is an unfinished tomb on the right that still has the grid there right so you lay out this grid and then you you lay out the forms and then you begin kind of painting and carving or whatever you're going to do and this type of consistency that we have in Egypt is something that other areas really aren't going to match we're going to see a lot more variation in places like Mesopotamia for a number of reasons probably the most significant is Egypt is consistent in terms of rule religion culture for thousands of years although dynasties will fall its internal fighting so another in other words it's the culture and religion is still the same even as different Kings take power where say in Mesopotamia we have Sumerian society and then another culture with a different religion and language coming and conquering right and imposing their own forms the image you're looking at on the right is the head of an Acadian ruler some believe it was Sargon the one who founded the okay you know conquered everything and founded the Empire there's no way to to know that for sure um so but as you can see here they're borrowing some forms from the Sumerians but they've got their own Keys here we've got that emphasized beard again you know the strong face this would have been on a on a sculpture in the round in other words a three-dimensional sculpture full human body we believe made of metal so this showing some advancements in you know casting metal sculptures but what's really interesting about this one is that it is damaged right and so we you know one of the things we find here is that the acadians are not going to last as long as Egypt right so I mentioned before that you know you have not on sin attacking the lilithum here well the glutium Apparently come in and defeat the acadians and their empire collapses and then there's this period of chaos where it's not exactly sure who's ruling where the gushians try and rule the whole area but we know that the the elimites for example are involved in some way um so we're seeing this kind of chaos and eventually what results is they're not able to hold on to power either and Mesopotamia reverts to what we call the neo-sumerian which is a city-states right once again independent being ruled independently um so what happened in ancient times after the acadians fell someone went through removed the head and really took a lot of effort to gouge out the eye remove part of the beard hack off parts of the ear so this seems to be a ceremonial way right like again remember we got a different religion they were imposing saying I am a God I am a God over you right the imposing that on the Sumerians who had their own religious practice so almost like a false god to them right you can see how they would want to topple it and this is not unique this happens throughout history when an invading force or someone in you know a dictatorship Falls often one of the first things where people rally is to those public monuments of power and ripping them down right it's breaking a taboo that would have been Unthinkable while the person was still in power um to show the that you're now uh that they that they no longer have any sway over you you see you know Saddam Hussein or hit or Stalin here right who have been defaced same type of thing happened to this head of an Acadian ruler um incidentally the type of thing happened with the victory Steely of know what I'm saying um so there's an inscription above now what I'm saying I mentioned but it's original and then there's one down the mountain here and this is actually what it says um and you know it's I am and it's got these names like I can hardly pronounce but essentially what it it is is it's a person born um person who is now king of Elam and he goes in in this time of chaos to sipar which is in the middle of what was previously the Acadian Empire grabs this Victory Steely that represents the defeat of his own people brings it back to Elam and dedicates it to his own God right so again we had not I'm sin imposing himself as a God on them and now he is showing that ceremonial defeat by saying my God defeated your you as a god essentially and he dedicates it to him and and inscribes with these words doesn't destroy the monument but inscribes it he he essentially makes the monument a monument of from from a monument of Victory to a monument of defeat um which is almost more powerful than just smashing it to Pieces so that nobody knows right so again we you know we've got these different the the fall of the acadians happening there results in these individualist city-states and what's interesting is in the these sculptures of this king who emerges in the South uh in Neo Samaria right now is independent city-states again um or or unified in some way but not the same way as an Empire of this guy named gudia of lagash and he once again depicts himself not as a God but as a priest and you see the inscriptions all over it's the inscriptions reference him as you know a devout you know kind of person priest to the gods right in in a certain way he's got Temple plans in this one right that he's building this Temple to the gods now what's interesting is when you look at these sculptures they may remind you of something quite Egyptian so again that cross influence is happening they're looking at these Egyptian sculptures which were very public and maybe interested in the same uh kind of permanence strength they like the look we're gonna go get diorite which is not native to to you know Mesopotamia they probably got it off the Persian uh peninsula there uh we're gonna make these out of diorite which is very hard Stone covered in writing right again but again about devotion and it shows a shift away from the Acadian beliefs back to something a little bit more Sumerian but as I mentioned we've got this consistency in Egypt because even as kings rise and fall the culture is is Unified and Mesopotamia we've got rapid change borrowing from other people because and inventing your own things because there isn't that kind of consistency um in that region um the last area to look at from this wrapping up this kind of 3D sculpture would be the Indus Valley Civilization was also active in their three-dimensional sculptures these may have had religious significance again we don't know for sure so for example this dancing girl um at first glance it doesn't look very much like a religious sculpture compared to what we're seeing in some of the other areas it doesn't seem to be is this a goddess or what's going on there but the reason we think this is because later Indian cultures from the Indian subcontinent this idea of dance as as a discipline or a yoga we're going to see a lot of goddesses and dancing poses things like that so there there may have been kind of the beginnings of what we're going to see in Hindu sculpture starting to emerge already here in this Indus River Valley Civilization here we also have this which is this sculpture which is known as a priest or a king we're not exactly sure again we don't have Monumental architecture there doesn't seem to be palaces as far as we've been able to find which is really really strange for for a society that shows so much consistency um throughout which shows Central planning and thought but it may have been one of the fundamental tenets of their cultural belief system that nobody does live in a larger area but this um kind of king or priest again it's going to show some similarities to things that we see later uh on the Indian subcontinent and their sculptures um there's an important kind of ornament on the head notice the robe goes over one shoulder and down the other that's something that was noted for example in these images of gudia he's always wearing a robe that goes over one shoulder and under the other which is not something we see in Mesopotamia before but remember Lagos is on the southern coast it would have had a lot of trade with maluha right so perhaps there's some influence there in terms of clothing or at least clothing depiction or cross influence who knows who who influenced whom but this does seem to be something that is perhaps showing some kind of consistency or cross-influence between the two of them now we're gonna find at this point real quick the the Indus Valley Civilization collapses um shortly after this period um so the Acadian Empire's gone Egypt is going to descend into chaos it's going to stay the same but in terms of culture and religion but the dynasties are going to collapse until they emerge into the middle um Middle Kingdom Egypt and we'll get into that a little bit Indus Valley seems to have collapsed for environmental reasons um the the rivers that they rely on the output is drastically reduced um so there seems to be irritation in that time period sustained drought and population seems to abandon these cities and moved further east um and so they it just kind of disappears from the the historical record of a Cod at roughly the same time so something happened over there probably climate related and the Chinese Liang Zhu also seems to have um dispersed for the opposite reason it appears that there was severe flooding in that region that seems to have washed out a lot of these major population centers and led to a more dispersed we're going to see this be a theme in the bronze where a lot of cultures are going to collapse and then re-emerge into a new era a little bit later on