Links for Exam I  Art History I

Remember that you don't have to read the entirety of what's on the other side of these links.  In fact, in some cases I've linked you to entire books that can be read online, and I'm sure only the most avid readers among you will pursue them to the end. 

For the rest of you, simply be aware of the issues involved with each link (if any...some links are clearly just for fun), and my few sentences below for each issue case should suffice in that regard.

 

Here's one of the new Upper Paleolithic figurines found in 2003 at a site in Germany.  For more on the discovery, check out this story.

 

 

The Caves of Lascaux - This is a wonderful and informative site put together by the characteristically technophilic French  government with absolutely no expense spared.  The site explains everything from the story of the discovery of the caves in 1940 to their necessary closing in 1963.

 

Mysteries of Çatal Höyük - Here's another funky site (they use a slick and retro comic book theme) covering the renewed excavations at this famous early Neolithic site in Turkey that may be the world's oldest city.  You can learn about the latest discoveries via dozens of sub-pages.  If you have QuickTime VR, you can stroll about the site, too.  There is also the (mostly text only) official site for the current excavations of the Cambridge University team.

 

Google Maps is great free tool that you can use to see many of the sites that we discuss this semester. Follow this link and then look to the northeast of the town of Castlerigg in England to see the Neolithic stone circle that we saw briefly in class.  And, of course, there's the biggest and most famous henge of them all.

 

 

It went away inexplicably for a few years, but now the official British government page on Stonehenge is back in business.

 

Some Tips for Success Get the notes for any missed lecture from several classmates.  There is no substitute for this!  Failure to do so will be costly grade-wise. Use flashcards for every eligible slide ID piece, and learn them all.  You never know which ones will be on it, so you have to know them all. Look at the study guide and this “Links” page now, not the night before the exam.  Several questions will be drawn from this “Links” page, even if little or no mention of those topics was made in class. Reading the chapters in advance of the lectures (as required) should work well for you and reduce the need for cramming. All of this, coupled with a full night’s sleep and a good meal beforehand will serve you well.

 

Here's an article on the famous Warka Vase [Gardner Fig. 2-5] that was looted from the Iraqi Museum in April of 2003, only to return in June of that year...

 

... And here's what it looked like once returned--broken again but still repairable according to this account.  Note this USA Today reporter states that the Warka Vase "is considered one of the world's first sculptures."  Well, it's about 20,000 years newer than the Woman from Willendorf, as we know.  Oh well, it is the USA Today after all...

 

And, a few months later, one of the most important items was recovered.  The Face of a Woman [Gardner Fig. 2-4, sometimes referred to as the Lady of Warka or the  "Mona Lisa of Sumeria"] was found buried in an orchard in Baghdad.  Apparently its most recent owner was planning to sell it on the black market.  

 

The actual count of items missing from the Iraqi Museum is in some dispute, with estimates ranging from 1,000 to 6,000 to a probably inflated initial figure of over 100,000.  U.S. authorities later set the number at 13,500 looted, with about 9,000 still not accounted for. Among those still MIA are some of the Votive Statues from Tell Asmar group, like the one above [Gardner 2-16].

 

 

Here's another cool Google Earth view of one of the monuments we've discussed, the Ziggurat of Ur and the surrounding archaeological site.

 

For those of you who like the nuts-and-bolts information about objects, check out this involved discussion of how the famous Ram in the Thicket (from the Royal Burials at Ur) was taken apart and put back together. 

 

 

For those with a lot of time on their hands and a curiosity about what might have caused a Babylonian to lose his/her hand (or worse!), the complete text of the famous Law Code of Hammurabi [on Gardner Fig. 2-17] is available here online...all 282 laws (in English, not cuneiform).  The KSU Policy Register is kind of a later version of it, and here's a link to the specific entry on plagiarism, a good page to consider before you write a paper for any class here.

   

Write in Cuneiform! - Forget all those years in grad school studying the intricacies ancient alphabets in dusty libraries....just type in your name and see it (well, your initials, at least) appear as virtual reality Babylonian-era cuneiform on a virtual reality piece of clay.  Not to be outdone, the Egyptians are also represented at this same University of Pennsylvania site with this Write Your Name in Hieroglyphs page.   OK, now back to work.

 

Here's a detail of the Cleveland Museum of Art's Assyrian relief, entitled Winged Genie Pollinating Date Palm (from Ashurnasirpal's palace at Nimrud. c. 850 BCE).  Here's the CMA page for this object.  From the picture provided there, see if you can tell from which part of the relief this detail is derived.

 

 

PBS's Nova Online -- "Pyramids: The Inside Story" - This fun site accompanies the Nova special on the pyramids and allows you to interactively explore each pyramid at your own pace. You can also take a crack at deciphering some hieroglyphs.

 

 

 

 Just type in "Pyramids, Egypt" in the search box in  Google Maps.  Then choose the "Satellite" view and zoom in.  Zoom out again and head about 9 miles southeast to see Saqqara and the Imhotep's Stepped Pyramid of King Djoser. 

You'll see how the Nile is now several miles to the east of the site, and how crowded the area now is in between.

 

 

Here's a guy with a very cool job -- Zahi Hawass (in his standard red shirt), the secretary general of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, posing a few years ago at the Great Pyramid with a guy who used to have a very cool job.  You may have seen Dr. Hawass on TV (he loves to talk on TV, the more sensational the show the better).  Here's a link to Dr, Hawass' official site, entitled "The Plateau." 

 

 

Dr. Hawass was also behind the recent and rather sensational CAT scan of the mummy of King Tut, in conjunction with the new blockbuster exhibition of many of his tomb artifacts that are currently touring the United States.  One of the teams to examine the mummy determined that he may have looked like this.  For more information, check out www.kingtut.org

 

Egyptian officials are very aware of the lack of space and the age of the display cases in the famed Egyptian Museum in Cairo, and there are plans to build a colossal and very modern (and very expensive) museum to house all of this near the pyramids, to be called the GEM or "Grand Egyptian Museum".  You can track the progress of the design and building of this museum on this official website.  Note the colossal statue of Ramses II on the far right....

 

...it was packed up and moved a few years ago (it had been in the midst of Cairo's traffic and smog for decades) and is now on site near the pyramids, waiting to be a part of the new museum.  This was no easy task, as you might imagine.

 

Here's a link to the fine PBS website for their "Egypt's Golden Empire" series that has aired a few times.  From it, you can go to special pages on some of the important New Kingdom pharaohs for this exam, like Hatshepsut, Amenhotep IV / Akhenaten, Tutankhamen, and, of course, Ramses the Great.

 

Tips for Success in all of Your Classes:    Go to class—be on time and sit in front. Students need to understand that college is very different from high school. What worked in high school may not work at Kent State. Success demands more study time than some students realize.   Plan all free time—don’t let the day just happen.      Form study groups with people in all classes—study together, share notes, encourage each other.    Adult students with multiple responsibilities and priorities should make school one of those top priorities.    Get at least seven hours of sleep, eat healthy foods and exercise regularly for stress reduction. Study and review notes daily. Don't wait until the last minute to study for an exam: cramming does not work for most students.    Take advantage of tutoring and other support services (Academic Success Center, Supplemental Instruction, test review sessions, teaching assistants/graduate assistants, course Web sites and other campus resources).

 

The Theban Mapping Project - Dr. Kent Weeks' excellent site, and getting better all the time.  It is packed with detailed information on just about everything of interest on the West Bank of the Nile at Thebes, and also has funky new QuickTime VR stuff. 

Dr. Weeks is of course the fellow that discovered the extensive Tomb of the Sons of Ramesses II (seen here and also known as KV5) in the 1990s.  KV5 has its own section within, as does every other tomb in the valley....

 

...but, still too new to appear on the Theban Mapping Project site is this recent discovery of a tomb (KV 63) near that of King Tut's (KV 62) that somehow was overlooked for all these years.  It didn't yield any pharonic burials, but it was a rather unexpected find. 

Anyway, the find was not made by Dr. Weeks, but instead was made by a team headed by Dr. Otto Schaden of the University of Memphis, TN.  Of course, Dr. Schaden didn't make the official announcement to the media this past February. that was done by Dr. Hawass, with Dr. Schaden playing second fiddle.

 

Dr. Hawass also makes an appearance in this recent story on the so-called mummy of Nefertiti.  According to Dr. Hawass, It seems that the sensational special on the Amarna Period Queen that aired on the Discovery Channel in 2003 jumped the gun.  It appears that the mummy they proposed to be that of the great Nefertiti can't possibly be so because of one nagging problem.

 

 

An Egyptian Mummification - Here's a slightly creepy site that illustrates how the Egyptians made a mummy by describing how modern doctors made their own using a fresh cadaver several years ago (1994).  This old man from Baltimore has become "Mumab I" and is on the beginning of his long journey through the afterlife, sans brain of course.

 

The PBS Nova folks also have an informative and entertaining site on Egyptian Obelisks, complete with a Shockwave game in which you can try to raise your little virtual obelisk. You may remember that they had a Nova show several years ago in which a team of modern experts and laborers tried to carve and erect an obelisk without success.  If you saw this episode this past summer, you know that they made some progress in re-creating the daunting task that the Egyptian engineers had in positioning these awesome structures.