both ancient Greece and ancient Rome have cultures that come before them pre-roman and pre Greek cultures and for the world of ancient Greece it is the Aegean name that we use to sort of categorize the three cultures that we study the Cycladic the Minoan and the Mycenaean so the Aegean art is pre Greek and this will lead to what we see shortly with ancient Greece we're running for about 3000 to 1100 BCE and this is the same timeframe as the old middle and new kingdom in Egypt just to give you a time reference and also to let you know that we're definitely contact between the ancient Egyptians and the ancient Aegean groups we don't know that much about the ancient a genes because in part they weren't really excavated until the 1850s but also because we don't really understand their writing systems so for our learning objectives for the Aegean culture we want you to be able to visually identify between these three pre Greek cultures the Cycladic the minhwan and the Mycenaean we want you to be able to relate how the environment impacts art in architecture and with the Aegean group we see a moment in time where women actually have a little bit of power and so we'll want you to talk about the roles that women have and I had just have to let you know this is one of my favorite pots ever with that wonderful octopus on it so the prehistoric Aegean is what you see on the map before you so here is what we know as Greece alright but before we study ancient Greece we need to look at who was there first and we've got the Cycladic groups the Minoan groups and the Mycenaean groups okay the Cyclopes what we now call the island island of Crete and the mainland but in a place called Mycenaean so that's we're getting to very shortly here the Cycladic people's really only show us a couple of kinds of art that survives to this day this is very early on and these are these little sculptures that are about two feet in height these are the female form represented and I hope that you immediately think about a very other famous nude female sculpture from the prehistoric period when you see something like this these are created from marble and they are primarily grave goods and so on the less then we see a photograph of one of these figures in situ remember that important word in the place where the artist put it or in the place where it was meant to go when you see this pristine cleaned figure in a museum setting it is no longer in situ you're like oh how did they get these crazy things to stand up well they weren't meant to stand up they were meant to lay down to be horizontal and that's what we see here in this excavated example the women of course are highly stylized and even less dominantly female than the woman of Willendorf for example but we also see the male form and here we see seated male musician he is playing a harp like instrument called a liar these also are quite large about two feet high and what's he doing well maybe he's playing for the deceased you can be sure that he has some kind of religious significance look at that elaborate chair and then look at the his tipped back head position and that highly stylized nose now let's look at the woman and even though we're looking at her in a frontal way you can also get the sense that her head is tipped back and she has that same stylized so the minions here on the island of modern-day Crete all right you can see that it is about what a hundred and 150 miles long and not even fifty miles wide at the widest part and it is very much a rich culture but there's a lot of difficulty in studying studying it so the Minoan culture we're at 3,500 to 1050 BCE and it was not excavated until the 1850s by Arthur Evans it continues on to this day keep in mind that in 1850 excavations excavations were not done in the proper manner and there was a lot of sort of plowing and plundering through the archaeological archaeological evidence and we've learned a lot since there we know that folks lived in these four major urban areas we also know that this culture was decimated at least twice once in 1700 BCE by an earthquake 300 years later by invasion from the Greek mainland and this is also a highly volcanic region so there's all kinds of natural phenomenon that leads to problems for the people living here so there is a map to show you we're going to pile from mmm primarily take a look at canosa sphere and we're going to mention Phaistos here in just a second because this is a group that was literate this is a historic culture and this little object here known as the Phaistos disc has been causing scholars problems for a long long time this little disc is two-sided and it has a very deliberate set of pictographs or hieroglyphs on it so this is the actual object in a museum setting this is a copy being held something to give you a sense of the scale and this little object has this writing on both sides and so you know very clearly this has to say something what does it say well if you're interested I suggest you google and look at the constant argument about the decipherment of this little object there is still they're getting closer and closer but they're still not clear enough for more than one scholar to agree and it's until they get that agreement that we will really know what this is all about so let's take a look at the palace at canosa this is what was underneath the farmland you see the surrounding farmland here and this is where Arthur Evans excavations began we've got a nice plan view here and then we have a wonderful artist reconstruction recall how important those reconstructions are in our understanding of a site that is largely in ruin so this is an isometric right we're looking at it from an angle this is a photographic plan view looking at it from above one of the issues with visiting kenosis today is that it has many portions of it have been rebuilt by conservators and that's fine it's just you have to know that that's what happened here and the reason is because the columns are made from wood so the stone features much survived but of course the wooden columns would not so you just see how everything's collapsed here this was collapsed as well but they said this is a good place for us to reconstruct the wooden columns that people get an idea of what's going on and then from that they have drawings and renderings that give us a much clearer image this is the traditional home of the mythic king - well how can it be the home of a mythic King well this is where we get into trouble because we've got a spotty historic record we know of King Minos from mythology right he's the guy who hoards the gold he's guy with the labyrinth and the centaur and supposedly this is where he lived we don't know whatever moving on one thing you note for sure is that this is not a fortified structure and that's an important part of the story because they are on an island when enemies come they have a long time to see that they're coming that gives them plenty of time to prepare and this is going to be the opposite of what we see in Mycenae on the mainland what's really interesting here are a series of architectural innovations especially this use of the inverted wooden column which tapers bigger at the bottom sorry reverse bigger at the top smaller at the bottom with a type of column capital we like to name these things remember the bullhead capitals from the ancient Near East we call this a cushion capital and in this image you get a good sense of this architectural innovation called a light well the structure I'm the environment here in the Mediterranean is much like it is here in Southern California so it's it's moderate in the winter and hot in the summer and so they need ways to let in light and to keep air circulating and to block the Sun and so they just leave these open light wells and that serves that purpose very nicely they have a lot of central courtyards that have structures we refer to as a mega Ron a mega Ron is a religious space it's not completely clear how they were used but we know that there was a fire pit in the center it was a rectangular structure and that is going to lead to design plans for other religious structures that will come in the future so these are multi-storied made from stone with wooden columns featuring things like light wells and mega Ron's and we've got beautiful frescoes so in this particular religious space it's called the Queen's mega Ron you can see that wooden columns you can see stone and then we've got true wet fresco images here and look at those wonderful dolphins remember where we are we are on an island in the Mediterranean a place that would be surrounded by the ocean and these elaborate wall frescoes are painted in the true wet fresco technique the true wet fresco technique is quite different than what we see with dry frescoes which is what we've seen up to this point