It's week two, lecture number two. We're talking about Egypt and Mesopotamia. Let's get into it.
So we're starting this course with Egypt and Mesopotamia for a few reasons. One, Egypt and some of the civilizations that started in Mesopotamia are some of the earliest civilizations we know of in the entire world, and they're definitely one of the earliest that actually hasn't. architectural history and architectural monuments that we can still study today because many of them still exist and they also represent sort of a new way for humans to interact with architecture that would essentially influence how the world would use architecture particularly Central Asia in Europe and Africa until today right there their influence kind of never stopped.
And we can trace lines going back all the way, nearly 5,000 years, to what they were doing at the time. So both of these cultures, in particular today, we're going to talk about Egypt and within Mesopotamia, Sumer, or the Sumerians, and the city of Ur, the city-state of Ur. We'll be looking at... mainly those two through about four projects. Both of these cultures had extremely sophisticated architectural styles that lasted and developed throughout these kingdoms.
They had complex social, cultural, and religious practices which influenced this architecture. And by studying this architecture, we can really see and understand the values and the technologies that were being used at the time, right? So we're not going to start all the way at the beginning, but I wanted to start with something that you might, just might be, familiar with, and that might just be because you've watched movies about Egypt, right? And we're going to start right here with one of the largest monuments in the world of any kind, of any time, the Great Pyramid of Giza, or the Great Pyramid of Khufu.
It goes by a few different names and it's obviously gone by different names since it was built in the early dynastic period of Egypt, right? So a little bit of background, right? So Egypt, as we think of Egypt, this sort of monotheistic but very complex social structure.
that was building pyramids, eventually had pharaohs like Khufu going building pyramids and temples, which we're going to look at today. That's really a 3,000 year period that happens, all the way up to Cleopatra, right? And a little bit past Cleopatra, I should say. But going going back to around 3000 BC and lasting all the way through sort of there's an era of Roman rule which goes through about 640, 642, we actually know the date 642 CE. Now a quick note about dates throughout this entire course and I'll probably bounce back and forth a little bit.
but I don't want there to be too much confusion about how dates are read in this class. Much of what we'll be looking at is in BC or BCE. I'll often try and always write it as BCE, and some of it will eventually obviously make that jump to what people often call AD or CE.
Now, BC... when we just say BC, which was a more common way of saying it in the past, is before Christ. BCE is a slightly more secular way of saying it, and that's generally before the Common Era, which is what we live in right now. AD, it means Anno Domani, or Year of the Lord, is essentially when Jesus was. the dates in which Jesus was born forward, or we say CE which is common era.
Now these names are sort of interchangeable. The dates we used are based whether you know most western scholars and most of the western world and actually the entire world like at least economically uses sort of the calendars that we use today, right? It's 2024 everywhere. Obviously, there's different parts of the world that have other yearly calendars, but that year 2024 when I'm recording this is in reference to when Jesus was born, whether you believe in Jesus or not, whether you're Christian or not, right?
So saying BC or AD, there's nothing wrong with that, and it's not necessarily a religious statement. It's just kind of the way that dates are used. The reason I'll be using BCE and CE in this class is that's become a more common way, a common way for scholars to write. It's just what's sort of popular at the moment.
So if you understand that, so BCE and CE, that switch between the two was 2,024 years ago. And we're talking about when you see BCE counting up from that point backwards. So look at this date and you see it says 2580 to 2560 BCE.
That's a 20 year period. And 2560 is closer to us than 2580, if that makes sense. I understand most of you probably understand this.
But when we're seeing these dates, remember they're sort of... backwards. Also, it should be noted that nobody at this time ever used these numbers, right?
They had their own dates and their own calendars and everything like that, so they never referred to themselves as BC or anything like that. It's like one of those things you don't really think of necessarily. The terms BC and AD came, you know, I think...
sometime in the 100s, or not the 100s, in the 100s, in the first millennium, by priests. And, well, actually by Pope Gregory, I believe. But that's all outside of the point.
I just wanted to make that note, just so you understand what I'm talking about when I'm doing it. That's a bit of an aside. But, here we are, back in Egypt, Great Pyramid of Giza, built by Pharaoh Khufu. It is, like many of you probably already understand, it's a burial monument.
But as an exemplar of sort of the height of pyramid building, this project is sort of mind-boggling, what it actually represents. So the Egyptians did a bunch of things. that had kind of not been done before.
Obviously building super tall buildings is one of them, but they're doing a bunch of things that really set the stage for monumental building, precise building, planned building, urbanism, everything. One of the first things it starts with is the use of stone. So The idea of building out of stone in our minds makes sense. We can think, when we think of old buildings, we think of them as being built out of stone. But remember what those time periods actually are.
When we think of castles in England or cathedrals in France, those are 500 years old, you know, maybe somewhere in that range. 800 years old, if they're very old. This building, this... This project is nearly 5,000 years old.
It's 4,500 years old, right? It's immensely old. And before this time, and during this time, much of the building process that was happening was not out of stone, because cutting stone is labor-intensive, it's difficult, and things were often built out of mud brick.
And mud brick continued to be used all over the world, sometimes to this day, right? We're going to talk a little bit about mud brick today. We're going to see it over and over again in a lot of different cultures. What's important about Egypt's use of stone, and in this case mostly limestone and granite, is that not only is it, like we understand it as being a very...
uh strong material that's hard to move and hard to work with it's it's chosen specifically for its durability and its ability to essentially last longer than anyone can live Right? And this, you know, this idea of building things that last longer than us is at the heart of why Egyptians were building this kind of stuff. So a little bit of information about just kind of the nuts and bolts technical stuff of the Great Pyramid of Giza.
I won't... Throughout this course, I won't always be going into heights and everything. I'll mention it if it's important. And in this case, it is sort of important. So originally, right, obviously, the building, there's stones missing and everything like that.
Now, and sort of that little hat has sort of been knocked off. Originally, this building was 400 and we believe, quite sure that it was 481 feet tall, right? This...
made it the tallest building in the world, the tallest man-made structure, I'm calling it a building, you know, tallest man-made structure for almost 4,000 years. For 3,800 years until a cathedral was built in England, in Lincolnshire, if you care, in the 1300s, this was the tallest man-made structure in the world. Like, just barf. None, right? That in itself is impressive, right?
We, nowadays, the tallest structures in the world sort of gets replaced every few years. Before kind of the 2000s, it was every maybe 30 or 40 years. Before that, it was about every 100 years.
Before that, it was every like 300 years, right? So the time for the tallest building in the world. gets shorter and shorter. The funny thing is the reason we build really tall buildings is it's often pretty much the same thing. Now they're not always for graves and they're not always cathedrals, but they're always for this idea of exalting whoever built it, right?
So this building, the Great Pyramid took, we're fairly sure it took about 27 years to build. build. Some interesting facts is 92 million cubic feet.
That number is so big that it doesn't really register in our brains I don't think. 2.3 million large rocks, large blocks. It weighs 6 million tons. Now these numbers are so big that it you know like we it's like we know them to be big but those are actually outside of our ability to... quite understand.
Generally understand 481 feet, right? That's almost, you know, that's 45 stories, I mean, 40, 45 stories tall. Like that's very tall, right?
That's huge. That's a skyscraper by any rights, you know? And the size and the shape of the building, right? So we have this very pure geometric form, a pyramid, four sides. with a square base, was something that was sort of developed.
And we're going to look at sort of the development of pyramids themselves. But all of this is very carefully calculated for a lot of things, right? So the building itself sits on cardinal directions, geographic cardinal directions, not magnetic cardinal directions.
So to make that understood. So the Earth spins on its axis, right, and that's geographic north, and they figured out where that is by watching the sun. Magnetic north, which is what we often use for our north, is using a compass, right?
I don't think actually compasses were necessarily used at the time, and they're aligning to sort of the circumpolar stars, using stars, using the sun. using the movement of the earth to figure out how to align these buildings. And, you know, it's... there's talk about sort of their mathematical perfection, and in a lot of ways, as far as the geometric form goes, they're mathematically very precise. More precise than almost anything that had come before them.
We're gonna look at some things that are older than this, but this idea of sort of the perfect pyramid... was a highly refined, highly designed object, right? So this building is...
Obviously, or not obviously, but it's the tomb of Pharaoh Khufu, right? And we know, or we're quite sure that he actually did get buried here. Here we're seeing a section of the building.
Most of it is just solid stone. There's a handful of sort of galleries that are usually called. There's one...
deep underground which was sort of never finished and we're going to talk a little bit in the next project about these sort of underground spaces which is an older way that the Egyptians used to sort of bury people. We're not exactly sure what that lower one was used for and then there's two there's the king's chamber which is sort of the big one in the middle and the queen's chamber and then there's a number of sort of air vents right here they're in air shafts where we're in quotes, we're not exactly sure what they're about. There's plenty of conjecture about sort of alignment to stars, which could be true, like we're not saying that that's not the case, but essentially there's these tight small galleries, these rooms, with the two main chambers on this image that you're seeing on the screen right now, number 10 and number 7, where there were granite sarcophaguses, right? So...
Khufu, we're quite sure actually, you know, after he died was buried into or interred into this into this monument. His body has not, we're quite sure, has not been there for thousands of years. It's thought that actually other people may have been buried in this throughout the ages.
It had been looted multiple multiple times of sort of everything. Different than what we think of with sort of later burials or what we might have in our minds from the movies, the interior of the space was not ornamented with writings and gold leaf and everything like that. That wasn't actually what was happening at this time.
That's sort of later Egypt, that that sort of stuff happens. And we'll see a little bit of that with one of the temples we look at. But essentially, this is like a giant solid.
monument, right? And that's important that it's a monument. It is to memorialize King Khufu.
And it worked, right? So he had this built and the cult of Khufu, essentially pharaohs were living deities, lasted for hundreds of years. nearly thousands of years right until the end of egypt he was worshipped and remembered for the most part i know i said like this was somebody stole his body and everything like that but the name kufu i mean we know it today and we know other versions of it and uh about those that worshipped him uh because of this pyramid because of what he built now he wasn't alone though it It didn't just build this pyramid, and this was sort of the last of a series of pyramids on this Giza plateau, and we can see this map where we see other cemeteries.
If you look closely, there's other tombs, a handful of smaller pyramids, the Pyramid of Khafre, we see the Sphinx, if you can see that, and there's causeways, and you'll see the word Mastabas on here. And this is part of what we call a necropolis. And this is a small piece of the larger necropolis we call the memphite necropolis.
What is necropolis? It sounds like a word we know, right? Metropolis comes from that same word.
It's a Greek word, not an Egyptian word. And the Greeks didn't really exist at this time, so we know they probably weren't, you know, the Egyptians weren't using the word necropolis. But this has come to be known as a necropolis.
It's it's a word we use for essentially a city of the dead, right? It's a place where there's monuments to the dead, bodies, temples, and this one happens to stretch along the Nile near ancient Memphis, which is one of the capitals of Egypt at the time, along the Nile for 19 miles, and it's where most of the pyramids are. It's where everything we're looking at today exists, right?
So if you travel to Egypt... you will travel to this necropolis. And that term, we're going to use it a few more times today.
Also, you know, we would call this small area a necropolis, probably the Giza Plateau Necropolis, right? And what's happening here is... This is telling us, again, this idea of like instilling the memory of sort of these god kings and queens, these pharaohs, and also showing this idea of the worship of the dead, right? And this is, you know, we know this from Hollywood, but it really is an important part of the society where so much effort.
So much energy, so much time, so many resources are put literally to build the tallest building in the world that has two rooms in it. And there's, you know, kind of one or two bodies in this entire thing, right? This is mind-blowing. When we think about that amount of effort, the 27 years to build that, this entire, just what we're seeing on this map.
hundreds of years of work, right? So it's important to sort of keep that in mind, right? Because that's telling us something about the Egyptians. Now we don't know everything about how these were built.
We don't know everything about their society. Luckily the Egyptians had a written language, hieroglyphics. hieroglyphics meaning literally a language that's that's pictorial it's made out of pictures right we've been able to decipher how to read it um we can so we we know quite a bit about egypt because they left us giant monuments there were other other societies at the time all over the world obviously but because of the fact that they they built this to say remember us we can remember them and that's you know, this is a class about architecture and there's, we remember them because of their architecture more than anything, more than anything at all, right?
So that's sort of the clue that's happening. Now, a little bit about how these were built because there is technology involved. Most of the limestone was, we know where it was quarried, it was quarried sort of right across right across the Nile River from here.
There's giant quarries where the amount of stone is missing, and now it's in the shape of a pyramid. The granite from the inside came further, from further down the Nile on boats. A lot of it had to do with moving stone on boats, and then on sledges, and using sand, and rollers.
Cutting the stones, we're fairly sure that they were using essentially using sand itself and using rope and rubbing the sand to make, you know, cuts and then filling them with wedges and then getting those wooden wedges wet, forcing the stones to break off. This is not actually that different than how we quarry today. Obviously, we're using mechanical systems, but it's a matter of wedging and cracking stones. And then the stones were finished with hand tools and just using limestone isn't the hardest stone and you can use harder stones to cut it, right? It was not built by aliens so that's just not a thing.
But there more recently we've found out a little bit more about who probably built it. It was thought for a long time that it was built by slaves, and knowing the time in their being slave, definitely being slavery at, you know, throughout Egyptian history and throughout most of world history, it was always thought that these must have been built by slaves. But today it's pretty well established that it wasn't built by slaves. It was built by workers and, you know, essentially this is one of the first cases where there's... multiple generations working on the same thing over decades, right?
We know this because outside, you know, just in these cemeteries and from some written records, there was essentially a city built around this for the workers that were just sort of always there. And we have records of sort of how they were sort of paid a little bit. So it wasn't necessarily slave labor. Probably hard labor, but not necessarily slave labor. That's what's thought.
right now. Now, this was a really long time ago, and everything that we kind of know about it is putting together a lot of pieces, and it's debated, debated to death. But I think it's, if, if it is true, which we believe it is, that it wasn't built by slaves, that tells us something else, right?
That these people were, you know, when you're paying people to work, the payment is obviously one of the big motivating factors of, you know. of getting them to do the work. But as if any of you that have ever had a job, that can't be the only thing, right?
In this case, to get people to move gigantic blocks around, you know, you can generally believe that they probably believed that these pyramid builders were gods, that they were doing this for their gods. And that's going to come back over and over again, because many of the great monuments in the world weren't. built by slaves.
They're built by people that just care a lot. It's not always the case. We'll see some that were, but in a lot of these cases the really spectacular things were built by people that care a ton about what they're building, right? So I wanted to start with that Great Pyramid because that's the one that you've probably seen.
Some of you may have even been there before. I hope so. I've not.
I'd love to go. But I want to step back. to this project, right?
Now that looks like a pyramid. It is a pyramid. We call it the Step Pyramid at Saqqara.
It was built, you can see, a bit earlier, a hundred years earlier, pretty sure, by a king dozer. So this is not in the pharaoh period, but it's early dynastic period. And this is generally considered the first Egyptian pyramid, right? And this is also part of another small necropolis, part of the larger Memphite necropolis that we were just looking at. And it's considered one of the first uses of, again, of that necropolis and this building, uses of stone.
Not the only uses of stone, but stone for for sort of monument building um and this is part of you can see the little tiny people this is also like this it's very you know it's a very large uh pyramid in itself it's probably the tallest building in the world when it's built but one of the things that we care about this building is that we know who designed it and we're quite sure we know who designed it um there's At the base of it, there's inscriptions that mention this person. And you're going to hear this person throughout your careers and joke about it. And sometimes he's represented in movies about mummies and stuff like that.
This is Imhotep. This is a little statue that was built, you know, nearly 2,000 years after he died. He was essentially...
King Dozer's like right-hand man. He was the high priest of the Temple of Ra, the Sun God, you know, this very important god. He was an administrator. He was everything.
He was a sculptor, we're quite sure, and we think he was an architect. He was the builder of the pyramid and the entire necropolis that goes around. We have some historical records from his time, so we know he was a real person. And then there's what's sort of amazing and kind of intense and probably not great for a lot of architects'egos.
His name continued on for thousands of years. I mean, we know it now, but he was worshipped. He was eventually deified.
So this was not the king of Egypt. He was not a pharaoh. He was not anything. but he was made into a god. He was deified and worshipped for a very long time.
And even this, we're seeing that there's statues being made of him, idols being made of him, thousands of years after his life. Now, architects are sort of known for their big egos, but I And there's this thing that it's like, I always like to joke, if you're a really famous architect, eventually your buildings will lose the name that they were given when they were built, and they'll gain your name, or they'll put a hotel in it with your name. We have the Burnham Hotel as a famous Chicago architect, and the Atwood Restaurant, and the Howlin'Hood Restaurant. These places that are named after these famous architects from the modern era. but none of them compared to Imhotep.
He was a god, right? And he was a god because of the fact that he designed these pyramids, right? He was known as the person that kind of put into people's minds that the building can become the symbol of the god. And this diagram And another side note, a lot of the images I've seen, if you look this stuff online, I am pulling them from online.
I'm pulling a lot of them from Wikipedia because they're Creative Commons. You can use these with attribution and stuff like that. I should probably put their full attribution on the bottom.
These are images that you can all get high resolution versions of for yourself if you ever need to write a paper about any of these. But this image tells us a lot about... sort of the evolution of the pyramid. Again, if you see the black rectangle on the bottom, or I guess that's technically a trapezoid, it says initial mastaba platform used for the base of the later structures.
So before pyramids, and even throughout the rest of the time for burying non-pharaohs and gods, the mastaba was one of the main burial buildings. It's a solid flat roofed, you know, flat low building that usually had a chamber below where the sarcophagus sits. And in this case we can see that's where Dozer's sarcophagus was. We know it was. It was inscribed with his name.
Luckily they signed everything. And we can see it protects that, right? So it was used and they were massive buildings for the time period.
But What's interesting about this one, it sits within the necropolis, which is surrounded by massive walls. You may remember this. If you do the reading, there's more about all of that, and we'll look at it a little bit.
But from the outside, you would only see the walls. You would never actually see the burial site of the king. And this is where there's sort of a tipping point, where Imhotep sort of...
flips things around a little bit. So these mostabas are very common for for varying royalty and important people. They take a ton of time to build and digging holes and everything like that and that's how this started for King Dozer. And he was alive for the building of all of this.
And in Imhotep they were contemporaries and they lived about the same time they died near each other. But as they were building it they just kind of kept going and he first built one four-step to step pyramid which would have peeked over the walls of the necropolis. Within the necropolis the temples and everything were probably not for lay people, likely only for priests and sort of the royalty for doing ceremonies.
But now over the massive walls we can see the top of the pyramid but it's maybe not tall enough. Then we get the much taller one where we add you know two or three more steps and now you can really see it and now you can see it from a distance now you can really understand like ah that's where the king is buried that is it and uh that's that's where sort of a new god these these kings are being deified um or or they're they're chosen by god it sort of fluctuates throughout the egyptian time but eventually they're all gods living gods So each one of these gets bigger and bigger until that moment when it truly becomes an icon of the king, right? The mastabas are sort of low and unarticulated.
They're large, but they're not the biggest thing on the landscape. But once these pyramids are built, nothing's larger than them. Nothing's taller than them. And this idea of sort of...
bridging this gap from sort of the earthly realm to sort of an above. realm where the gods might be, where the dead preside, starts to take physical form, right? It's a representation of, I mean, it's argued like, is this supposed to look like actual steps or stairs?
It's hard to say, but definitely the idea that by building tall, we get higher and closer to the gods, right? We're quite sure that that's one of the main reasons we're building these tall pyramids, right? Is to like...
sort of transcend the earth from the earth, right? Now this is from the reading so you can take a closer look at this at some times, but we see sort of this entire complex. There's courtyards, other small buildings, temples connected to the pyramid itself, storerooms for storing treasure and food and tribute and everything.
One of the things I want to point out, so we have this sort of variegated wall that goes around, and then if you look down in the lower left-hand corner, it says Main Gate. There's only one entrance into this entire complex. There's, I believe, 15 other sort of false entrances.
They have what look like giant doors, but they just are backed by... massively thick walls, but there is this one gate that goes into a hypostyle hall. And that term, we're going to talk about that a little bit more with the temple, but essentially it's a hall of many great large columns, right?
And these columns, and we'll look at a few of them, are like trees. in an oasis in the desert. This was a desert at the time, just as it is today. And it sort of makes a forest to go through.
And moving through that entrance hall into this is this movement from sort of the profane exterior into a sacred space on the inside where things are happening. Here we can see that entrance and what's sort of left of a lot of the walls. This is massive.
You know, this is like 50 feet tall or something like that, 40 feet tall. Many of it's still standing. Also, a lot of these, some of the things we're going to look at today, you know, have fallen down and were built back up at different times, torn down, built up.
And obviously, with all of the stone over the years, even the technology that buildings has been found and lost and found and lost. So a lot of them were harvested for, you know, harvested for their materials. That should be said about the Great Period of Giza. We're pretty sure that it was covered in a very smooth limestone, and the wall wasn't, if we take a look real quick. Right now we see all the blocks, and it's believed that it was truly, like, a smooth, it was smooth.
We're not exactly sure what it looked like. And there's all this talk that it was a golden cap. We don't really know that for sure. Not out of the question, though.
So we see the Great Walls. Here is the hypostyle going in. And we see these columns.
And we see that the columns themselves are sort of what we call fluted. If we're going to talk about fluted columns a little bit more. But sort of in reverse.
Like these... don't look like columns we think of when we think of you know like our government buildings but the idea is that they look like bundles of reeds bundles of papyrus papyrus reeds right which we made we call the paper papyrus but that comes from the plant and essentially these stone columns uh make this hall this is sort of important because this is believed to be one of the first uses of columns to hold up a ceiling mind-blowing that that's something that you actually have of stone columns i should say that hold up a roof um the roof that's on here right now is obviously not not the original but there was a roof on this and it's like the idea that stone columns which in all of our minds is something that you see everywhere in the world now had to be invented it was invented by in hotep or we believe it was that's why they made him a god so invent something really great So that's kind of where we started, where it all kind of started right here. And it got to the side, to the pyramids, right? To the great pyramids here.
And this is all, you know, kind of the... this time period of 2500 BCE and again over 3 000 years, thousands of years, the architecture kept on on developing. I'm not going to cover everything but I wanted to cover at least one of the temples as well.
So this is the Temple of Karnak. This is the peristyle courtyard and we've used the word hypostyle peristyle. and I'll talk about the difference between these. But the peristyle courtyard means a courtyard that is surrounded by sort of these alleys or these colonnades that surround, right?
We're going to see this sort of peristyle courtyard. We're going to use other words for it eventually. I won't get into those for other building types, but this continues for thousands of years as a as a spatial building type. So this main courtyard at the, excuse me, at the Temple of Karnak is where a lot of the religious, you know, religious things started. There were processionals, it's directional sort of moves through.
We don't know actually how exactly what all of the, you know, religious rites were, what exactly the priests were always doing. But they were moving through this and then through the rest of the temple getting to sort of more and more intimate more and more intimate spaces with sort of less and less priests until it's just you know the god king and a priest or something like that we believe right but here we see uh uh large the large columns with sort of their uh their their odd bulbous tops which look like again papyrus again single reeds. Sometimes they look like lotus leaves, like lotus flowers which grew along the Nile River, water plants. So we're seeing this like sort of idea of naturalism being carved into the architecture. It's not more than just simple ornament.
It's not just like a decoration on the outside, but the true form of it is actually sort of natural forms. Now, this is not something that everyone talks about with Egypt, because we're always talking, you know, like in popular culture, we're talking about, you know, Osiris and Ra and these gods of underworlds and everything like that. But this does point to an idea that their connection to nature, particularly to the Nile River and the reeds and the papyrus that grew there, was intense, right? Like the things that they were going to pray for here.
had to do with the flooding of the Nile, with obviously their crops, with all sorts of different naturalistic things that really mattered to them. And it was inscribed into the architecture through sort of this informal terms. So there's those, I believe, are the papyrus. Here we start to see sort of the growing tops, which were carved. like lotuses, like lotus leaves.
You can see the date here, 1290, 1224 BCE. It's kind of when it was started. This temple and this, the area that this, this is in, it's near a town called Karnak.
That was not always the name of it. There's, there's temples throughout this, this entire complex. It's one of the largest religious sites in the entire world in all history.
It's, I mean, it's, you know, absolutely massive. But here we see, again, another hypostyle hall, way bigger than before. But this was added to over and over and over again by different cults, by different, you know, religious groups for different gods.
Kind of all the way... through all of Egypt's history from the time it sort of started. There's sort of 30, I'm just looking at some facts, 30 different pharaohs added to it. And you got to know pharaohs, they usually had the job for life, so you can have an idea of how long that took or how much time that is. Um, there's hundreds of these columns.
These, uh, this... Just like when I was saying that other people might have been buried into the pyramids, like there's evidence of that and sort of histories of, you know, when people came there and found it and re-looted it and everything. This site is something that we're going to see probably again in some other cultures as well.
It was an Egyptian space, but eventually it actually became a Christian space, right? It was used by... Parts of it were used for Coptic churches, Coptic Christians.
It's a small sect of Christianity that still exists in Egypt. So this, again, there's sort of this reusing. It's been around for so long that it's seen many lives.
It's, as I've sort of noted, like, it's been around so long that we've forgotten more about it than we know about it still. But we know... a fair bit more about this type of thing because here again we see the papyrus columns absolutely covered in writing and history of what was here.
This point is going to come back over and over again, especially today. We're starting with Egypt because we know something about it. Because the buildings still exist because they were built out of stone and they wrote everything down.
And we have that. We have that history. We have architects, designers, pharaohs that are building, writing their names all over their buildings and telling us the histories of battles and stories of their gods. And it's all being inscribed into architecture.
This is something that... It goes in and out of style for all history to this day, this conversation about how architecture can work either as a symbol, an icon, as just a functional thing to keep the rain out, right? We've talked about that in the first lecture, but I want you to like kind of think about that, right?
A space like this just doesn't need to functionally exist for anything. These are massive columns. uh nobody can read what that says either though but it's there it's still it's recorded there right this this is this is is completely you know this is at the time it is complete it's still completely new to the world right here we see it again here we see the lotus capitals and you know all of the text uh As a side note, these were painted.
They were carved in relief, right? So that's when it's slightly indented, but they were also painted. Today, this is something I'll repeat again when we talk about Greece and Rome. Today, we see all of this stuff and it's all kind of tan or white marble or whatever. But for most of antiquity, this kind of stuff would have all been painted.
It would have been... lavishly colored, brightly colored in a lot of ways, even more legible. So I want to move away from Egypt for the second half here, the shorter, the last third here, and talk about some other, we could call them pyramid builders, the Sumerians.
So this is happening in Sumer. This is in Mesopotamia, a term you may sometimes call the cradle of civilization. It is not the only cradle of civilization, but it's probably the main cradle of Western civilization.
It is Sumer and its main city, the capital of the city-state of Ur, is located between the Tigris and the Sumer. and the Euphrates rivers which are now in present-day Iraq, kind of in the middle. And this building is the Ziggurat of Ur.
Now, ziggurats, there's many of them throughout the region, throughout this part of Asia, throughout mostly, today they're mostly in present-day Iraq. This is one of the most... one of the largest and one that we know kind of the most about.
It's also one of the most complete. And while it's not, you know, not quite as massive as, I mean, it's not as massive as the Great Pyramid, it's still very large. It's still a hundred feet tall. Still would have absolutely dominated the land that it that it existed on. But it does serve a different purpose and it's built very differently.
So this area today is desert, right? It's very deserty for a lot of reasons. But at the time that it was built, again, look at the time.
So we're looking at, you know, again, about 5,000, almost 5,000 years ago. This was actually essentially a port. Now, the rivers lead out to the Persian Gulf, but there were marshes and lakes and waterways throughout this whole area.
And around this and in this area, there were large cities. And this is, you know, when we're talking about Ur, the ziggurat always comes up, but also the city that's surrounded. the city of war um as being some people call it the first city and it had thousands of people of it we're not exactly sure how many but maybe tens of thousands of people lived here at a time um people lived in uh sort of in sort of planned quarters you know there was like an artist area and a mercantile area and you know just residential areas and places for an aristocracy to live and so it was really you know like a city it was a city it wasn't just a collection of equally understood huts or a town where you know kind of everything was not so much planned but it was an entire city now at the time egypt was starting to build cities as well something like this, but not quite to the same scale or sophistication of these cities.
But there are differences too. So everything here was built out of mud brick, including these ziggurats. The mud brick was used because, again, cutting stone, that technology obviously existed at the time in Egypt, but not really everywhere else. and they had mud. I told you this was sort of a wet area.
Not so much anymore. But the use of mud bricks is sort of an easy way to build, a fast way to build. It's fairly durable, right?
But this entire thing is built out of mud bricks with the outer layer bricks that were burned. right? They were fired.
It's not a high fire like we use bricks today. We'll talk about that probably later. The technology for bricks has been around for a long time, but it has progressed over time.
But these are, when we say mud bricks, we generally mean mud put into a cast, dried in the sun, and then it's done. The idea and the technology of brick is important because it allows you to build something durable, something that can provide walls and protection, both thermally and from attack, and it can be built by hand, right? When we look at the pyramids and we look at those giant temples, there's all sorts of technology needed, levers and ropes and pulling and giant crews of people, whereas when you build with bricks, you know, If time isn't a matter, you can build anything of any size, one person, because you can hold a brick in your hand. So that technology of building with bricks, again, it's hard to think of the fact that it needed to be invented, but it did.
And it sort of was invented around this time. The people that lived here, the Sumerians, you know, they had... something of a civilization, but when this is built, it sort of, again, shows this sort of tipping point into a new level of sophistication. In this case, we see the ziggurat. And I think early on, you know, in our brains, because of how we think about pyramids, we're like, well, this must be where they bury people again, right?
Is there a king? But that's not actually the case. This is, it is a religious site, but essentially it is just a large and extremely tall, 100 foot tall platform that had a temple on top. uh in this case to worship to the god nana or sin sometimes i mean we we know this because they also had writing they had one of the oldest forms of writing cuneiform right and so this entire thing was built to have a temple on top but it's doing some of the other same things where it's being this big imposing thing on the landscape so you know what is important the most important thing happening right and this unlike sort of the necropolises we talked about with the Egyptians this was essentially the city center the Senate grew around the ziggurats throughout throughout all of Mesopotamia and in this case there was a large city surrounding this and it had another barrier of walls and temples and worship areas but also administrative buildings, right? That we're quite sure that's where the people who controlled the city worked and lived, right?
So all of these, the pyramids and these, are symbols of power, right? Of the godliness of the pharaohs, of, you know, this being an administrative center. But that's sort of, it's like power, but...
in different ways, right? That, you know, the Egyptians, it has to do with their unending immortality. This has to do with the power of the state, which is, that is something, again, that will, that comes up over and over and over in architecture. And so we have this, this massive building. Let's see, I think I have some more photos of it.
that is used to say who's in power, right? And who can go up on this through these theocracies, right? So the builders of this weren't gods.
They were kings. Some of them... Some of them eventually made themselves gods or were deified in other ways, but it wasn't presupposed that this was built by gods.
It was still built for gods. And that's going to be something that different civilizations go back and forth on, but that's maybe more familiar to us today. Building great temples, churches, mosques, etc. for the gods, for some other god.
Not the god is building it, as it was in Egypt. There's a few interesting things that still go on, why this site is still sort of important. You can see it's sort of not much around it today, right?
I believe you can visit it now. it's still there's still some things that are sort of important to some people about this building even religiously so or is considered or believed to be where Abraham was born so For people in that are part of the Abrahamic religions, right? So that's Muslims Christians and Jews so a lot of people in the world.
This is a very important site because it's believed that Abraham is from Ur. Now, you can believe what you want, whether he was or not. There's a building on the site that is believed to be his actual home.
Don't know how they know that. But this is sort of becoming a pilgrimage site again, right? Like this is 5,000 years old, and it's still sort of... becoming sort of a holy place again the pope um the pope visited it so apparently he believes that this is where abraham is is from also um In the 1980s, Saddam Hussein, who was the dictator of Iraq until the early 2000s, had the exterior walls rebuilt.
So it didn't really look like this for the last few hundred years, a few thousand years. That first layer was rebuilt. There were probably, I think, three more layers on top. We only see kind of one more. It was throughout this area there were tons of artifacts found.
Most of those artifacts are not in Iraq. You can actually see them here. They're at UPenn, mostly, or in the British Museum.
I didn't really go into that much with Egypt, but the British Museum has more artifacts of Central Asia and North Africa than anyone. They have a lot of artifacts of the Middle East. stole, I guess. Now they're sort of holding on to it and some of them are being repatriated.
Why Yupen has so many, I think it has to do from the time when a lot of it was excavated about 100 years ago. This place was also, just fun fact, visited by Agatha Christie, the mystery writer, because her husband was an archaeologist that helped find this. At one point this entire ziggurat was covered in sand like the whole area was under sand and it's been sort of dug, dug away So this this is you know You this is one of those things like obviously the pyramids of Egypt are in popular culture all the time But the ziggurats and this one in particular Now that you know it you're gonna start seeing it come up in places.
It's just like one of those things that once you know about it, you're like, oh yeah, they're talking about, they're talking about the Ziggurats, right? So these, again, there's like this moment where these incredibly old buildings are still sort of having their influence on us today, or at least they're, they're sort of, they still play a role. They've been around for so long that they still play a role, right? You know, there was during the first Persian Gulf War in the early 90s, 1991. This was actually the site of a battle as well. So the building is actually riddled with bullets from Iraqi and American soldiers as well, which is like sort of crazy.
So those are all the projects I wanted to show today. I don't know if I'm doing it for time. I think we're good.
Got a few more things that I just wanted to touch on. So... or just kind of wrap this wrap these thoughts up we're starting here again one just sort of chronologically these are some of the oldest monumental buildings anywhere in the world anywhere in the world um again there were other civilizations in like the indus valley and in present-day china that were just as sophisticated as far as even as far as building goes but the idea of building sort of these grand grand monuments for the gods by the gods to the gods um is really happening here and the idea that these two civilizations they're not super close to each other but there's likely trade happening in the in the region Today we obviously associate a lot of the Middle East with North Africa because of how Islam is a popular binding religion throughout the area, but that wasn't the case at the time.
These were extremely different different peoples. So today we're just like, oh Iraq and Egypt are like each other, they're deserts and close, but they really are not. Their societies were really different.
They were both probably very hot, but at the time, this area was a very, very lush area, like a lot of kind of southern Iraq used to be, even kind of in the not too distant past. Whereas Egypt was really just based on the Nile. It's been the desert.
It's been a desert for eons. But at the same time, this idea of building sort of these monumental things, you have to think that there was maybe some sort of connection, right? Or at least at the time we had gotten to the level of society where you could gather enough people, enough capital, enough power, to get people to build this kind of stuff and that's a that's a huge moment for humanity good or bad you can decide but the this idea that those things are happening uh it means that that the world had like kind of gotten to the next step the other side of it has to do but related is the planning of these they're geometrically really intense.
They're aligned, even the ziggurat, the ziggurat is aligned not like the pyramids but sort of with north being to a corner. Again, geographic north, right? So they're paying attention to the movement and understanding the movement of the stars and our Sun, but they're using mathematics now, right? Things are measured, things are laid out.
In the case of King Dozer's, we believe we know that not drawings in the sense, and we'll talk about drawings more later, but drawings in the sense we think of them today with architecture we use, but one-to-one scale drawings. When we say one-to-one, we mean full scale, on the ground, they've marked out. the shapes of the buildings and that's where some of the planning happens. Now that sort of happens today, like we put stakes in the ground and everything like that, but that's literally how they we believe that they were planning the buildings. We have evidence of that from sort of some texts but also sort of markers in the ground that show us how things were aligned, right?
So This is this moment where architecture is beginning, where this like, they're not just building with the materials they have, where they have in a, you know, in a, I'm going to make a room, so I'm just going to make it. Everything is planned. And when we look at, quickly, I just want to go back to this plan.
When we look at something like this, other ideas besides just. Again, like I said, besides just shelter and besides just protection and besides just defense are happening, these have ideas of linking space to ceremony, to ideas, to all of these things that are sort of deeper than just building are happening. And this is the leap. This is what's happening. This is why we, you know, it seems sort of passe to like look at Egypt.
the first day, but this is an important moment for architecture. It's an important moment for architects. And I wanted to show you that possibly by being an architect someday you could be deified and sort of live forever in the collective imagination. And that's what I want you to take away from today, right?
Like this type of architecture, these types of buildings are now transcending just functional use. They are now structures that are symbols. They represent something that they are not. That's what a symbol is.
They are icons, as in something that you can look at, and it immediately gives you the idea of something sort of grand. The actual shape of the building, the pyramid, the ziggurat, the shape of the building... in itself becomes the symbol of the power, in this case the power of the deities.
That is a real moment, and that's something that we're going to touch on almost every single week in one way or another. And this is kind of where this all starts. So that's what we have for this week. Next week, we're going to move a little bit further into, a little bit closer to our time, to another, to some other civilizations that you may be familiar with, being the Greeks, and then eventually the Romans there.
You know, I was thinking about not putting them together, but it's hard to separate them, even though they are two very, again, two very distinct cultures from sort of different times, but their influence on each other. and the influence of particularly Egypt on them. and Mesopotamia on them is kind of amazing, right? So we're going to draw all those lines, and we're going to continue this conversation about how architecture is used for power, in their case, civics, in organizing people around ideas, okay? So I'll see you all next week.
Thanks for watching.