Historical
examination of creativity
Ancient Egypt:-
Daily life
Most ancient Egyptians were farmers tied to the
land. Their dwellings were restricted to immediate family members, and were
constructed of mud-brick designed to remain cool in the heat of the day. Each
home had a kitchen with an open roof, which contained a grindstone for milling
flour and a small oven for baking the bread. Walls were painted white and could
be covered with dyed linen wall hangings. Floors were covered with reed mats,
while wooden stools, beds rose from the floor and individual tables comprised
the furniture.
The ancient Egyptians placed a great value on
hygiene and appearance. Most bathed in the Nile and used a pasty soap made from
animal fat and chalk. Men shaved their entire bodies for
cleanliness; perfumes and aromatic ointments covered bad odors and soothed
skin. Clothing was made from simple linen sheets that were bleached white, and
both men and women of the upper classes wore wigs, jewelry, and cosmetics.
Children went without clothing until maturity, at about age 12, and at this age
males were circumcised and had their heads shaved. Mothers were responsible for
taking care of the children, while the father provided the family's income.
The ancient Egyptians maintained a rich cultural
heritage complete with feasts and festivals accompanied by music and dance.
Music and dance were popular entertainments for
those who could afford them. Early instruments included flutes and harps, while
instruments similar to trumpets, oboes, and pipes developed later and became
popular. In the New Kingdom, the Egyptians played on bells, cymbals,
tambourines, drums, and imported lutes and lyres
from Asia. The sistrum was a rattle-like musical instrument that
was especially important in religious ceremonies.
The ancient Egyptians enjoyed a variety of leisure
activities, including games and music. Senet,
a board game where pieces moved according to random chance, was particularly
popular from the earliest times; another similar game was mehen, which had a circular gaming board. Juggling and ball games were popular with children, and wrestling is also
documented in a tomb at Beni Hasan. The wealthy members of ancient
Egyptian society enjoyed hunting and boating as well.
The excavation of the workers' village of Deir el-Madinah has resulted in one of the most thoroughly
documented accounts of community life in the ancient world that spans almost
four hundred years. There is no comparable site in which the organisation,
social interactions, working and living conditions of a community were studied
in such detail.
The ancient Egyptians produced art to serve
functional purposes. For over 3500 years, artists adhered to artistic
forms and iconography that were developed during the Old Kingdom, following a
strict set of principles that resisted foreign influence and internal change.
These artistic standards—simple lines, shapes, and flat areas of color combined
with the characteristic flat projection of figures with no indication of
spatial depth—created a sense of order and balance within a composition. Images
and text were intimately interwoven on tomb and temple walls, coffins, stelae,
and even statues. The Narmer Palette, for
example, displays figures that can also be read as hieroglyphs. Because of the
rigid rules that governed its highly stylized and symbolic appearance, ancient
Egyptian art served its political and religious purposes with precision and
clarity.
Ancient Egyptian artisans used stone to carve
statues and fine reliefs, but used wood as a cheap and easily carved
substitute. Paints were obtained from minerals such as iron ores (red and yellow
ochre’s), copper ores (blue and green), soot or charcoal (black), and limestone
(white). Paints could be mixed with gum Arabic as a binder and pressed into cakes, which could be
moistened with water when needed.
Pharaohs used reliefs
to record victories in battle, royal decrees, and religious scenes. Common
citizens had access to pieces of funerary art, such as shabti statues and books of the dead, which they believed
would protect them in the afterlife. During the Middle Kingdom, wooden or clay
models depicting scenes from everyday life became popular additions to the
tomb. In an attempt to duplicate the activities of the living in the afterlife,
these models show labourers, houses, boats, and even military formations that
are scale representations of the ideal ancient Egyptian afterlife.
Despite the homogeneity of ancient Egyptian art,
the styles of particular times and places sometimes reflected changing cultural
or political attitudes. After the invasion of the Hyksos in the Second
Intermediate Period, Minoan-style frescoes were
found in Avaris. The most striking example of a politically driven
change in artistic forms comes from the Amarna period, where figures were
radically altered to conform to Akhenaten's revolutionary religious ideas.
This style, known as Amarna art, was quickly and thoroughly
erased after Akhenaten's death and replaced by the traditional forms.
Historical
development:-
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'Egyptian language'
in hieroglyphs |
The Egyptian language is a northern Afro-Asiatic language
closely related to the Berber and Semitic languages. It has the second longest history of any
language (after Sumerian), having been
written from c. 3200 BC to the Middle Ages and remaining as a spoken
language for longer. The phases of Ancient Egyptian are Old Egyptian, Middle Egyptian (Classical Egyptian), Late Egyptian, Demotic and Coptic. Egyptian
writings do not show dialect differences before Coptic, but it was probably
spoken in regional dialects around Memphis and later Thebes.
Ancient Egyptian was a synthetic language, but it
became more analytic later on. Late
Egyptian develops prefixal definite and indefinite articles, which replace
the older inflectional suffixes. There is a change from the older
verb–subject–object word order to object. The Egyptian hieroglyphic, hieratic, and demotic scripts were eventually replaced by the
more phonetic Coptic alphabet. Coptic is
still used in the liturgy of the Egyptian
Orthodox Church, and traces of it are found in modern Egyptian Arabic.