Transcript for:
art Ancient Egypt Overview

well hello everyone and today we go back in time we go back in time from mesopotamia we go to egypt in mesopotamia we went from about 3 500 bc to to about 500 bc now we go back even before that and we're going to egypt right here here's mesopotamia persia there here's our egypt um now we looked at the fertile crescent here it is that incorporates mesopotamia and palestine and we did mention the neolithic revolution that started well it began in different places at a different time but 10 000 bc is a good place to to point it to uh about some places 12 000 bcs some 8 000 bc so 10 000 is good and this was this was the time when uh humanity slowly but surely abandoned hunting and gathering in favor of agriculture and domestication of animals and plants now this is the fertile crest we saw however in many cases it also incorporates egypt as you see here and in egypt it it appears that these communities that now settled in egypt began to observe nature and domesticated as i said the archaeological data indicates that domestication of various types of plants began in various parts now uh this is something extremely approximate this is really kind of an uh mnemonic device to remember what we're going to talk about the timeline of ancient egypt please observe extremely approximate just so you remember now the early dynastic period figure the first 500 years after 3 000. so 3000 bc to 2500 bc that's the early dynastic period during which egypt the upper egypt and the lower egypt will unite now once they unite by 2500 bc again very approximate the old kingdom and that's when art is most excellent in fact the old kingdom kingdom counts from 2500 bc to about 2000 bc another 500 years after that begins middle kingdom and during middle kingdom the the best works that were done were in literature which which means that we probably we will not be looking at it very carefully because uh our uh this is uh the survey class and uh we need to go ahead so middle kingdom is from 2000 to about 1500 bc and finally the next period we'll be looking at is the new kingdom or empire and that is between 1500 to 1000 bc after 1000 bc uh egypt will be occupied best by the assyrians then the persians then the greeks it will no longer be its own entity even though the the imagery will consider uh will continue uh similarly to what it was before now during the lecture i will be giving you much more precise dates but i will never ask you to remember them you do need to approximately remember these just it's 500 years intervals and here we begin um the value of the nile was uninhabitable really before about 6000 bc and it seems that no one really lived there but um uh it appears that the the the banks of the river were uh being cleared and irrigated and it was underway pretty much by the sixth millennium bc that's when the valley began to be inhabited by that time there was so-called global warming the parts of africa were turning into desert and naturally populations tended to move towards water and that happened around 6000 bc now another thing that we need to remember is tigers and euphrates remember in mesopotamia flowed north south so the upper regions were geographically in the upper map and the lower regions geographically in the lower map this is not the case in egypt which is which may be a bit confusing the nile flows from south to north therefore the upper egypt is considered the lower map and the lower egypt in fact is the delta the delta and places around the delta so upper egypt lower egypt the upper egypt is in fact the south of egypt and the lower egypt is the north of egypt okay now um what will happened the best way i find the best way to remember it is lower is closer to the water higher is closer higher is further away from the water lower is closer to the water exactly the mediterranean is the water in this scenario so if you're in lower egypt you're closer to the big body of water and if you're in upper egypt you're further from the big body of water perfect to have my audience here my daughter who is stuck with me in the house now for half a year uh so we're here together and as i said before it's much better to have to have an audience so yeah here we go the entire life of egypt was determined by the river there's there almost no rains in egypt but the river once a year in the fall would swell with the sediments that it brought from the south from the middle of africa and leave these incredibly uh wonderful rich sediments on the riverbanks and that would provide the river that and that's what made the river so incredibly um gift-giving and the land around it so fertile herodotus once said that egypt is the gift of denial and it is very true now by everything that okay excuse me now around 3000 bc now remember early dynastic period the year 3000. around 3000 bc there appeared to be a legendary king menace also known as narmer we don't exactly know who he was but it appears that about that time the lower egypt and the upper egypt were united into one cohesive unit and uh the record that we have of that is an extremely important record and it's called the narmer palette and it is a great archaeological find dates from about 31st century and contains some of the earliest hieroglyphic inscriptions it also contains this standard of representation completely new that will exist now for 3000 years which in a way is some sort of a miracle because representation existed before but it was just your regular neolithic painting or scratching whereas this comes as a bit of a miracle completely formed as if as if the egyptian art began at the top and then declined whereas of course the normal development is from from nothing onto the apex and then decline was egyptians seem to have started at the very top with this palette now a palette here uh they were typically used for grinding cosmetics and the egyptians loved their cosmetics but then they also then were used for ceremonial purposes sort of today you see the royal families of england or or sweden or spain what have you and during their ceremonies men wear their swords needless to say they're not going to use their swords in any practical way they're called ceremonial sorts and the same thing would happen to these pallets with time they were seen as a method to to portray interesting uh interesting events and to give them as presents and this was the case with the palette of narmer um it is about two feet high and it's done it's made in um from soft flat sort of gray green silts down this is the front in fact the one on your right is the front this is the back so uh obverse it's called reverse we'll start with the reverse what do we see here it is it is divided into three registers the small register up the small register down and a large one in the middle in the upper register you see two cows they both represent goddess hathor goddess of fertility goddess of procreation protectors of households and she protects the house of the pharaoh which we see right here so this is the protectors goddess who protects the house of the pharaoh in fact the pharaoh in fact the name pharaoh means a house and here at the bottom you see fleeing enemy in the middle however you see the pharaoh who is wearing the white crown of upper egypt when you see this bowling pin on his head it is it is a crown of upper egypt and this palette was no doubt painted and the crown that crown is white he is he stands here in profile his his face is in profile rather his shoulders are not his shoulders are frontal and then his legs are in profile and he's holding by the front lock he is holding the enemy it's called the smiting pose and throughout egyptian history these smiting poses will be uh very frequent behind him stands his servant and the uh and the size here is hierarchical whoever is most important is the biggest so clearly the servant is much less important he is standing on a ground line that's given him otherwise otherwise the ground is the entire face of the palate there's no perspective here so he stands on the ground and he's holding the sandals he's holding the king's sandals because the king walks on the sacred ground and as such he is unshot now this is this uh representation right to the uh to the right of the king you see a different representation which in fact means the same thing uh the bird which is um falcon and it represents god horus who is one of the original gods of egypt and bought prosperity brought prosperity to the land he also represents the pharaoh so when you see horus that's also the pharaoh and this god is holding this interesting hieroglyphic by a string the string around the neck now this is the hieroglyphic of a papyrus flower and papyrus grows in the lower egypt the king narmer comes from upper egypt and this symbol of upper egypt is the lotus flower the symbol of the lower egypt is the papyrus flower so what you see here is that the bird horus that represents the pharaoh is is holding on a string an impression of a papyrus flower that means the same thing is here here's the king of upper egypt with his um upper egypt crown who is holding uh the enemy by the four lock the enemy is the lower egypt and the same thing here here is the god falcon who is uh who has conquered the uh lower egypt represented here by paparaz flowers so everything is right there for everyone to see and here is the enemy fleeing now this is the reverse of the uh of the palette this is the obverse the front of the palette and that now is divided into four registers the uh the upper a register is the same it's the goddess hathor multiplied a double image of the goddess hathor that protects the pharaoh right here and this image here is you see the tarot this one now he is wearing the crown of the lower egypt kind of looks like a chair right here so this is the crown of the lower egypt the same servant as here is carrying his sandals he is walking behind the standards of the lower egypt which he had captured and here we see 10 decapitated figures now the figures that we see we now see from up above whereas everything else here we see from the side the so-called twisting or shifting perspective they're decapitated and their heads are between their legs tells the same story as this the king of the upper egypt now is wearing the crown of the lower egypt which he captured and the standards of the captured lands are in front of him the image right here is uncertain it certainly forms it forms the concave spot right here where uh where cosmetics would be ground it is formed by two uh mythological animals that appear to be half lions uh have cats with very long necks and they twist the necks and form our concave dish essentially it's possible it's another way to see the two lens unified right here and then on the lower register is one of the first maps that in existence now the bull is also the representation of the pharaoh because the bull is the king of the animals just as sparrow is the king of the lands and here's the bull there's a fleeing enemy here and the bull and the enemy again seen from the side now the perspective twists are to the top and we see a plan of a fortress right there which also tells us that fortresses were built in the fourth millennium and perhaps even earlier and the bull is capturing the fortress so essentially this image this image this image and this image they're all the same presented in um in different ways uh so which is why this palette is so extraordinary is so important because most probably it celebrates the unification of two lands it is also extraordinary in a different way as i said before and that is oh here for instance here is a painting by herbert herjet and this is sort of a painted representation of the king norma's uh palette here's the king with a white crown of upper egypt holding the the enemy by by the forelock and there's his servant as you see with his um with his sandals now what's important as i said it seems that egyptian art began at a very high level and then descended and as we saw on the palette of king norma this became egyptian canon convention of proportion there were so many qubits for for hands for feet uh the face profile even though the eye itself is frontal the eye is not like this but the eye is represented like that which is a frontal eye whereas the face is profile and and then the legs the legs are in profile also depending whether a person walks from right to left both feet uh right feet and if the person walks from left to right both feet are left feet so there's certain proportions for every position whether sitting standing lying uh these cannons are established by 3000 bc how we don't know because we don't see any examples of anything like this before but then it suddenly happened um now uh for the egyptians the life after death was far more important than life on earth and um to to that end very early on they began to um uh to bury the dead in small pits and in the desert and the heat and dryness of the sand would dehydrate the body and save the body as you see it now this uh this person lives in the british museum and very fascinating he is um with time however with the development of society and development of rituals and ceremonies uh the bodies began to be to be placed in uh coffins in sarcophagus but the problem with that of course there was no dryness in sarcophagus so they did over thousands of years the egyptians developed the art of mummification as you see it here and to uh they they would treat the uh the corpse and then they would wrap the course the corpse in in hundreds of meters of of linen and uh and thus preserve it uh for posterity now it lasted the the the process of mummification which we call embalming would last 70 days 7-0 now but once this was done they needed ceremonial places for vario and as such the the first uh such places uh they are called the bridget and the or the house of eternity it's a type of ancient egyptian tomb in the form of flat roofed rectangular structure it will be called mastaba mastaba in arabic means a bench and essentially the burial sites were marked by them because the burial itself would take place underneath they would they would dig underneath and and dig the burial chambers there one a burial chamber and another perhaps a false one because egyptians placed great treasures with their dead since they believe that life continues after death then the person the car of the person the spirit of the con of the person would now live in the money or in various statues placed with the dead and then the person also needed all the articles that this person used in life and usually these were of course the very wealthy people who could afford something like this so with there would be a great deal of jewelry and great deal of precious objects as well as you know with the burial of tutankhamun now let's see the old kingdom epoch now we are in the old kingdom kings began to be buried in pyramids instead of mustafas although non-royal use of mustaphas still continued for another thousand years here is what it looks like today in reality comes from arabic word as i said for a bench of mud sort of similar to what the mesopotamians did with their ziggurats except this is just one level but solid level of mudbricks uh yes and the historians speculate that this may have been borrowed from mesopotamia we don't know now the one the the first great pyramid of the old kingdom now old kingdom now remember 2500 to about 2 000. uh under a king jose a king jose had a vizier by the name of imhotep and who was also an architect and he had this brilliant idea of placing six mastabas one on top of the other essentially in decreasing order and as such he came up with the step pyramid of king jose in sakhara near cairo uh this is what's left of it today uh the um now cairo is here there'll be two capitals throughout the history of egypt one is the ancient capital of memphis right there near cairo at the bottom of the delta triangle right here and another capital is thieves now the memphis will be the capital of the lower egypt and thebes the capital of the upper egypt now uh here's our and then this now this is this uh pyramid is located in sakhara here sakara there is giza with the great three pyramids so it's all happening at the uh at the apex the upside down apex of that triangle um here's the pyramid and still the burial chamber is still underneath shaft burial chamber false chamber while this is sort of like a ziggurat even though there's but there's no temple uh on top the um the old kingdom so this was the pyramid number one then they were various other pyramids that experimented various shapes and of course finally we've come up with the pyramids that you know the one uh the pyramid of cubes or uh keeps this uh uh these are greek names or kufu in egyptian and chefrine cuops is here chef in here and finally my serenas in fact cubes this one is higher than chefrine but chefrin sits on a higher plateau and as such appears to be higher in front of this pyramid is is the sticks now in this case now the pyramid is built in such a way it's no it's no longer mud bricks it is of stone and um uh the burial chamber is inside here's the king chamber there's also the so-called kings uh a queen's chamber these burial places i had mentioned were great target for thieves because everybody knew that when someone important is buried in a pyramid there's a great deal of treasure uh there and uh the majority of these pyramids all later tombs uh were despoiled the total common was a miracle which is quite so it's so uh famous today but as these pyramids were spoiled as well that's why you see here thieves tunnels or the official entrance uh the um so as i said there's an air shaft right here uh this is where the burial chamber now is inside in front of the pyramid of the middle pyramid cuoms sets the great sphinx of giza the giza plateau we still don't know what the meaning of the sphinx is which is why sphinx is of course is an epitome of something very very mysterious he is the greatest guardian of all and in this case he guards the pyramid of chafrin uh despite his guardianship the thieves did manage to get in and um and take everything from there uh you have decided he's enormous he is carved out of what's called a living rock in other words there was a mount there and out of that mound the sphinx was carved it's not that masonry was brought from other parts and then put together and carved this is carved out of living rock it's the oldest monumental sculpture and it's believed it is believed to have been built in the middle of the third millennium the fact is there if you if you look up you'll probably see um various theories that the stinks intact is much much older than that but we don't know he is certainly monumental we don't quite have the face because it was supposedly used as target practice for shooting by various troops that invaded egypt in the 19th century he's supposed to to be a very very large replica of pharaoh of the pharaoh jeffren's uh image and here we have a small one it's only five feet uh tall it lives he lives in the cairo museum he is carved out his this one is carved out of a very heart stone called diorite and this is an idealized body this is in no way a portrait what the egypt the egyptians built and created art for eternity not for momentary pleasure so all of this was created for eternity and in fact this uh statue also was placed presumably in one of the monuments dedicated to um to chefrine and we are very fortunate to have it he is wearing linen nemis the headdress right there here it is he is wearing a eureus on his which is cobra emblem and the false royal beard he also his body is entirely idealized to show him as godly in fact this depiction is not a portrait but a symbol of kaphras or chefferin power through using the artistic conventions of egypt flawless body perfectly unaged face and ideal body propulsions here you can see him the same bird the falcon protects him from the back and that's the bird of the statue also in the old kingdom and we will never see it again from the old kingdom comes this extraordinary statue over a scribe now this is not royal of course this is uh he is a servant of of a temple perhaps and he belongs to an extremely privileged however uh category of people who knew hieroglyphics and who knew how to write the uh the art of writing developed in egypt at about the same time as in mesopotamia so what you see here the body is not idealized intact it's rather pudgy so he clearly is well fed and comfortable the face is extremely intelligent extremely intent in on his knees is the role of papyrus and he used to have a stylus in his uh right hand uh the eyes in fact are made of of rock crystal so they shine with intensity here you can even see it and he is called the seated scribe from sakhara and you see here that the body is certainly not idealized uh it is still not a portraiture it is an image of an extremely intel intelligent man who had who had conquered a very difficult skill of writing and as such he is he is very valuable um these wool paintings can all come from the tombs because again a wealthy man dies but he continues to live in the same circumstances so he's surrounded by the same his same servants and by his fields by his jewelry and everything that was done in his life is now depicted on the walls which is why we know so much about uh life in egypt it is done in relief where the background is carved away slightly and uh and then it's so the image is relieved from the wall and that is painted also in registers egyptians did not know perspective it's all done and registers and we ought to understand that the upper register takes place behind the lower register this is the papyrus forest right there the cows the cows uh fourth the river here's the river here is a worker it was very hot in egypt therefore the majority of people in the fields in fact worked in the nude and uh and the uh uh the papyrus forest is rich with all sorts of bird life it's interesting yeah it's interesting that um coming from mesopotamia where there was human sacrifice and right if you know if you if the king died or if the lord died his servants died with him it's interesting that egyptians just kind of bypass that whole thing altogether and replace it with either representative servants or they would do a painting of their servant well the real little statues or shabti statues exactly exactly it's interesting that in life you know when the master dies the servant would probably get a stipend and retire but their spirit would be painted on the tomb wall yeah but it wasn't the case that the real life human had to die alongside i mean we don't know maybe some some long long long time sure but not in the tombs we found no no not in the current year not in the later times you don't know you don't have the situations where you have with mesopotamian tombs where it's just a field of dead bodies here it's just a dead pharaoh a lot of little statues people yeah because they are the servants they will be doing his bidding in the next life yeah uh all right now uh we are uh so if you looked at the early dynastic period that's when the kingdom was united we now looked at the old kingdom with the spectacular art over of the pyramids of course beginning with the step pyramid and and then a representation of a pharaoh as opposed to representation of a mere mortal and now we are going to skip the middle kingdom as i said it was very very um rich in literature but less rich in art and we're going to jump now 500 years from the year 2000 to about the year 1500 to the new kingdom or the empire that's when egypt that that tended to be very focused on itself now began to uh to to go elsewhere and to conquer other lands here now the new kingdom as i said also referred to as egyptian empire the period from the 16th to the 11th century bc it's egypt's most prosperous time that's when egypt gains its greatest possessions the art is not nearly as good as it was in the old kingdom interestingly enough but it's huge it becomes huge now whereas they all came to the qualities delightful the size may not be except the pyramids of course um in the new kingdom the quality declines but the size increases uh the new kingdoms of egypt attempt to create a buffer between here's the levant the levant comes from the word the sun rises in the east in french so that's where we get the word the levant and egypt and attain its greatest territorial extent as i said i i gave you very very proximate dates but in between egypt was subjected to foreign rule it was the hittites the hittites from anatolia then the hicks's from uh from the east so there were periods of foreign rules so now the new kingdom wants to create a buffer and uh as such expands its ruling that into the levant into palestine and also to the south and one of the first great pharaohs of the new kingdom is a woman and her name is hachepsut and who proved to be an extraordinary ruler and very mindful of not only of construction but also of trade and of peace she established a number of trade routes uh most impressively to the land of punt right there which was under the egyptian uh influence and all sorts of goods were traded with palestine with the in the north to the uh with the south and uh this trading to punt was roughly during her chipset's ninth year of reign uh she also she was called her chipset which is foremost of noble ladies now she was also one of the most prolific builders in uh in egypt and uh initiated construction projects throughout the entire land um later pharaohs attempted to claim her projects as theirs uh we even know the name of her architect which is not uh very often as we saw with the king jose uh back at the time of the step pyramid we also knew the name of the architect impatek and here too we know uh the name of the architect who could have been her lover as well but who knows um and during her reign so much stature was produced various times and of herself that pretty much every museum in the world has a statue of of her chips she often represented herself as a male pharaoh with male attributes there's the cobra the cobra the nemesis right there the linen head cloth here is the ceremonial beard and she is represented as a sphinx this one lives at the met i think yes one reason for that is that since there wasn't widespread social information yet um people who just lived in rural areas wouldn't have even known that she was a woman that's true so it was partly to just avoid confusion because in her early range she definitely still represented herself with feminine attributes but actually statute but as exactly exactly that's a very it's a very rare chapstick statue yeah because where she's a female because the older she gets she just sort of falls into this balance of how to rule and how to govern and when to exhibit individuality and when to just sort of let it slide right but there's so many statues of her chips right yeah yeah even though she was condemned presumably by later rulers which is why this incredible complex is in in its ruinous state well also of course the time that passed um it's called the their el bahari or the chipset uh necropolis uh the funeral temple of queen hachepsit right here it has this incredibly modern look almost frank lloyd wright as uh as the temple in fact blends into the surrounding rocks and it's extremely compelling however we do have to remember that it was all painted it was all painted there was a lot of statuary lots of beautiful gardens around the temple uh had a whole army of gardeners um so the uh this is what it looks like originally there were three temples there there was a temple of a predecessor then the chapel of hathor the cow goddess and then the temple of hachepsu herself the um this is just another uh way of seeing it again it's it's an extremely impressive uh image uh most of the statue from there in fact is missing because uh well for various reasons uh the uh the pharaoh that came after her may have resented her for occupying his throne and as such uh condemned for memory and the condemnation of memory usually involves uh uh destroying all uh all statuary that belong to that pertain to that pharaoh uh destroying all writing and what have you but fortunately so much was created that we still have quite a bit um here's there's the more black and white if you can see it better in that i mean obviously it had been uh but it had been restored uh this is one of the restoration drawings and it shows you also here the garden what what it may have looked originally this this part of the uh of the complex is actually completely destroyed uh and this is the uh the look from uh from the air and now behind these mountains is the um the valley of the kings where tutankhamen was found the uh and so things seem to be just fine uh the empire was prosperous trade was uh going on and then something very uh extraordinary happened they appeared a pharaoh who was a mystic very surprising and this mystic decided that there's only one god and that is the god of the sun of the disc of the sun well and himself of course the pharaohs consider themselves as godly and um so he closed down all the temples it was sort of a revolution as you can imagine the priests who grew extremely wealthy uh did not like it not only he did that but he also moved the capital to uh right next to a place called the hermopolis uh today it is called amarna because amarn is the later name and tell amarn is the amarna hill that's where they found the remnants of of his of that civilization so you see uh giza memphis is here thieves is there amarna is in the middle so that's where he established a completely new capital uh he also is extremely what's fascinating with this particular pharaoh not only he now worshiped one god but he the art uh during his rule became a lot more naturalistic i mean it was never naturalistic in egypt it was very quite rigid it was very rigid and it was as i said idealized and suddenly look what we have here uh here is this rather extraordinary face with an extremely extended uh chin uh extended uh uh limbs as we will see and look at the body it's anything but idealized almost i mean he is he's supposed to be this idealized male body but he looks more uh like it looks more like a female body right here uh and uh we really cannot explain this shift here he represents himself as worshiping worshipping the disc of the sun right here as the sun extends its um arms with uh with hands at the end at the uh uh to the pharaoh uh and this is pharaoh the pharaoh wearing the uh the crown of the upper egypt with his queen nefertiti please notice also that a type of relief here is very different it's a sunken relief as you see it's carved in instead of the background being carved out it is carved into the background and in fact it's considerably more difficult to destroy as you can imagine this is his wife and you'll be surprised to know that his wife was the beautiful nefertiti here she is not represented as we usually see her um the medical profession the paleo medical profession still puzzled that by by the forms not only the pharaoh's uh skull but also his daughters this is something very unusual to represent uh the family pictures of the pharaoh because that never had happened before it was only ceremonial portraits that were presented never intimate and here it is a very intimate portrait of two of his i think four daughters five daughters uh but their skulls as you see are extended so the medical profession as i said is still puzzled as to that but they are represented in the very easy poses sort of very playful talking with each other playing with one another um and uh these also come these sculptures come from the same period as you see with the extended skull here is our pharaoh and there there's nothing idealistic about him he looks worried he looks fatigued he looked disturbed and some of the limp some of the impression of the limbs that come from the same period also show an extremely extremely elongated both hands and fingers on the other hand this is the famous portrait of nefertiti his his consort and um uh she lives in berlin yes and his co pharaoh for a time and he's called pharaoh for a time right but it's it's very possible that uh that this distortion in in their limbs is due to consequinity because they all married the their relatives of course um so now the bust was actually discovered in the workmen's uh shop and it's served as a model for for portraits of nefertiti here here's that beautiful bust also in berlin lives this statue full length of nivertiti the face is very much of hers the body however while the face looks sort of or determined the body is not it's just normal normal normal female uh here is another very famous image that comes from that period again very intimate here is acneton and nepertite with three of the uh of their daughters and just easy relaxing the girls are climbing all over the parents interestingly the energy of the sun is such that it blows as you see their scarves in different directions again the sun extends its hands with an ankh is that little cross at the end of the hand which is the symbol of immortality and bliss um tutankhamen was either a son of acne or a nephew he is directly related the reason he is so famous is because um is because uh his grave was in fact uh untouched by the robbers and as such an extraordinary cashier of treasure comes from there what's amazing is that he was a very unimportant king he lived he died very young he ruled for a very short time um the moment he came the moment uh eknaton died and agnetha was very young the priests of course exercised their influence and returned the country back to the old gods and amarna was was essentially scraped to the ground the um but then he dies and he is buried and apparently and his tomb was in fact uh buried underneath the tombs of greater kings that came after him and as a result of which the thieves did also well they didn't get into it in the first place but then with time they couldn't um the uh the man who found the tomb his name is howard carter and the finding happened on november 4th in 1922. the uh his sco well he had a number of he had a number of girlfriends right here at the end at the end was uh the body itself with the mask and here's the solid gold coffin that is uh encrusted with an incredible skill and a number of precious and semi-precious stones are involved it's uh this symmetry the uh the idealization uh the beauty of these is um is really uh uncomfortable here are the coffins and now we're almost at the end of our lecture we are now going past past thebes down to a place called abu simbel in the nubian desert the greatest pharaoh of egypt was perhaps one called ramses ii it was supposedly under his during his reign that moses led the jews out of egypt but remember a hundred years before this there was acneton with his idea of monotheism so it's very possible that moses in fact inherited the idea of monotheism from egnaton and right there as i showed you again carved out of living rock there's a tremendous temple of our symbol that was carved duri during the reign of ramses ii and there are the four representations of the pharaoh and as i said to you earlier that the um he built an enormous amount of of temples uh and tombs and he was a builder king he was a conqueror king he was greater than life or indeed he was divine he ruled for something like 70 80 years he lived very long time and so these are the four images of ramses the second they're enormous they may not be of the same they certainly are not of the same quality as uh our diorite figure of uh jaffran from the middle of the third millennium we're here at the end of the second millennium and he ruled as you see from 1279 to 12 30 so 80 minus 10 70 years um the quality is not the same as in the middle of the third millennium but the of course the uh the size is enormous this is also cut through the rock and uh here as it was found when it was all uh when the entrance in fact was covered by sand but then when they gained access there was a lot of scent inside today uh this is the image as you see today and again these great uh statues of remissus ii as osiris as the god osiris line up the the central hallway uh as i said if you're interested uh you can just go online of course and look up uh ramses ii and see the tremendous monuments that he had built all throughout throughout egypt today most of them in fact are destroyed but during the time of cleopatra now that was the first century bc first century not millennium first century bc was the last of the egyptian pharaohs a number of these monuments were restored and new ones built so there's still of course plenty to see in egypt um before the uh before it becomes the end uh the book of the dead that was a very important um tour guide in egypt because when the mummy was packed up and covered all sorts of little figurines were placed between the wrappings that would protect the the dead as the dead travels in the land uh of the dead because there are all sorts of um there are also escapades and all sorts of obstacles uh that one must overcome but also one must know where to go where to get what to do and for that uh the book of the dead was provided this is a very short uh part of it um and here we see uh in white in white linen this is uh this is this is our uh deceased man he is being led by anubis the uh the god of the dead and then his heart is weighed against a feather to see that the heart is light everything is being uh recorded by the by the god taught right here and if he passes the test this is a narrative painting several steps then he is led by horus into the presence of the god osiris and then he is presented to all the other deities so the whole book of the dead is fascinating because it presents uh several steps now i just want to say one thing before the lecture ends and that is just as we looked at um at the inscription in mesopotamia that allowed the uh the scholars to to break the cuneiform so here too napoleon invaded egypt in 1799 and brought with him with him and a small army of scientists and scholars and during their excavations they found uh this tremendous stone that's called the rosetta stone because it was car it was uh found in the town of rosetta in western delta and just as with the inscription in mesopotamia it was clearly seen that it was the same text written in three different languages and it was uh it was written in hieroglyphics right here the demotic script which was later egyptian and greek well at that time every well every educated person could read greek and so this became a key to deciphering hieroglyphics and the man to whom we are eternally grateful and who did that his name is jean-francois champagne who uh died very young as you see the age of 42 uh having spent his um entire adult life completely dedicated to the deciphering of hieroglyphics and to promoting egyptology he really is the founder of the science uh of the scholarship of egypt thank you very much and i'll see you next time