let's take a look at this double portrait of a pharaoh and his wife this is men khari and khmer mayor meb tea we're at 20 490 BCE and this is about four foot high but it's very bulky in the back it has a lot of carved detail that they don't really show you but what they want you to focus on here is the couple in this rigid and frontal pose the way that she is standing with her arm behind him and one on his his other arm is called a marriage pose and so that's how what lets us know that this is a couple he is standing in this traditional way with one foot forward one foot black and then look at the front of his legs do you see that we call that a knife blade shin it is not realistic okay and you can see that he is forever young Egyptian sculptures are almost always idealize that means that they don't show age they don't show imperfection he is wearing the linen kilt she is wearing a one-piece linen garment that we refer to using the French term chamise so it's sort of like a thin nightgown like garment generally pharaohs had their head shaved and they wore wigs in this case the wife certainly is and then they wear a kind of a beard that is stylized or removable he's holding these two rods in his hands those are symbols of power and this is made from the subtractive method so we've got a big hunk of diorite which is an expensive difficult stone to carve and someone is going to be chipping away chipping away chipping away because of the value this reinforces the concept that this is of a royal couple the headdress that you see there is meant to reflect the protective pose of the when a bird is protecting its young it will spread its wings out in a low fashion and that's what you see going on here so this is reminding us that the Pharaoh is supposed to protect his people I really enjoy these pictures of when these objects were first found this is the image showing us the partial excavation of this sculpture and imagine the thrill of the archaeologists and imagine how difficult to carve away all of that sand and then to lift that enormous structure out of the ground all right so pause the recording and write down everything you notice about this object so I just got finished telling you that Egyptian pharaohs are generally shown in an idealized fashion so that could be a hint that maybe this is not a pharaoh it's from 2500 BCE and this is a limestone figure so limestone easier to carve and then the word we use is poly chrome it means it's painted poly means many chrome chroma color a mini color painted sculpture about two feet high and the look on his face is very intensive but he is very calm and learned okay but he is not idealized you see his flabby chest right there this man is someone who really lived this is an image of a scribe and a scribe would have been someone who was highly valued in Egyptian society this is someone who was literate and was able to write in the hieroglyphic form and it's just really the exception rather than the rule and that's one thing that we always love in in art is show us what the rule is and then show us the exception he looks at us so intently and he painted in these lifelike colors in order to give it vivacity to make him look like he is alive look at this sophisticated idea of the space between the arms now let's go back and look at Mancari do you see there's none all right he's carved in a uniform fashion but this artist was sort of interested in positive and negative space now that's not an intellectual thought necessarily that they had using this modern art terminology but it's something interesting to think about another important exception in our story is the first female to be a pharaoh and her name is hatshepsut there's a lot of really good material written about her we've jumped up to the New Kingdom now we're at about 1450 BCE and we've got an attribution which means we know the name of the architect who designed this space and his name is cinnamon so notice how different this is from the Pyramids at Giza this is what we call a rock-cut structure it means that the builders carved right into the side of the rock mountain and you can see the sheer face of the mountain here and this is much more subtle much easier to protect but keep in mind that it would have looked very different at the time of hatshepsut it would have been a beautiful garden environment with reflecting pools and fountains and plants that had been brought in this type of mortuary complex shows us that no expense was spared this would have been a place for the elite to worship during life and then a burial during death and look at those wonderful ramped processional walkways and in this photo you can see it's covered with tourists which is kind of cool and so here she is hot she ups up the first female ruler in recorded Western history and here's how that happens her nephew to most the third was a too young to rule and so she appointed herself as his Regent our eg ENT Regents have a very interesting role across time and culture sometimes Regents help minors rule and sometimes they are very divisive and power-hungry but Hachi ups up was one pretty smart girl because when she appeared in public she dressed like a man to the point of which she wore a beard that was attached to her face to look like all the other male pharaohs it's also interesting to know that cinema her architect was also her lover and then they in fact had a child together this is a sculpture of her in the kneeling position carved from granite and makes for an important part of the story she is youthful and idealized we don't know what she really looked like this is as close as we're ever gonna get let's jump out a place farther up the Nile referred to as Karnak and I want to quickly show you the overall view as recreated by an artist you know these places are largely in ruin today and we need these reconstructions to understand what we're looking at so where we're going to focus is right here on a structure we call the hypo style Hall this is located within the temple of Amun RA in Karnak and we're at about the 12 90s remember we're still counting backwards right BCE this is a building that is grand in every manner it's enormous and it is post and lintel construction and so what remember the palace at Persepolis we're gonna have to have a column every 10 feet if this thing is going to stand up but what's hard to realize is the enormous scale of those columns so look right here and see the people it takes about ten people standing arm and arm to link arms all the way around one of these columns so the temple itself kind of is what it is but what we're interested in is what they've done here to the roof line they have lifted the center and made the columns in the center taller than the columns on the side and this creates a space and that space right here is what we are interested in we call that a clerestory c el e ar e sto R Y it is a way that the ancient Egyptians figured out to allow light into a structure look at this reconstruction of how close these columns were it would have been darkest could be in there and so by lifting these Center columns it's going to allow light and air and this is a technique that we're going to find use throughout architectural history will point it out to you when we get to the Gothic period where the center nave of the church is lifted up higher than either aisle and that lets them have stained-glass windows to admit light same thing in modern air architecture if you go into a bathroom and there's a little skinny window at the top that's like a clerestory it's letting in light and air so the invention of the clerestory is a big innovation and an important part of the architectural story of Egypt let's check back in with how wall painting has evolved we saw wall painting by prehistoric man and we saw cat oh hell yuck the landscape and volcano so then let's see how the Egyptians are going to take up where the ancient near-eastern people left off so far we have only looked at dry fresco or paint on a wall a wall mural we are going to look now some techniques expanding on those ideas one of them is called wet fresco where you paint directly on wet plaster and the pigment gets absorbed into the wall becomes part of the wall can you remember the definitions of pigment vehicle or binder and support let's take a look at this dry fresco from the interior of an Egyptian of fair onic to pause the recording for a moment and write down everything that you notice that makes this Egyptian and then what do you see that is different how'd you do well right away you'll notice that the figures are shown in a typical twisted perspective we even know this guy's name he is larger than his wife or his child nebamun is the gentleman shown here and they are going bird hunting his wife stands on the back of the boat and his son sits in the center I'm gonna go back to the larger image for a moment Egyptian children of the royal court generally had this hairstyle called the lock of youth so their heads were shaved except for this big long ponytail and here he is he's got his weapon and he's grabbed not one not two but three cranes he's gonna get them all in one blow so what did you notice that was similar right hierarchical scale twisted perspective hieroglyphs telling us who we're looking at a smiting scene what's different what's different is this wonderful realistic depiction of the birds these animals are fabulous they're so lifelike these are the papyrus Reed's down by the river they are very stylized so the humans are stylized the papyrus are stylized but the birds and the fish are not look at those wonderful fish in the sea to see all those zigzag lines that is stylized water so it's such an interesting combination of naturalism and the more traditional stylized elements that we see in typical Egyptian art