![]() When the tomb-owner and his wife and family were represented as sitting in front of a giant feast, with vessels of wine or beer and fowl and legs of beef stacked high in front of them, it was Heka that restored them to reality in the afterlife. Heka, the Egyptian word for magical power, provided additional dimensions to the two-dimensional paintings and reliefs on the walls of temples and tombs. Magic was a vital aspect of existence, permeating every area of life, just as the River Nile brought life-giving black silt to fertilise the ground annually. The themes of beauty and functionality were therefore established long before the philosophy of William Morris (“Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.”) The art of ancient Egypt, beginning with the uniting of the two lands in 3100 BCE, also seems mysterious and magical, yet was essentially functional.Įgypt was long credited as having been given “nine measures of magic” at the dawn of time, leaving all other cultures only one tenth to share between them. They are not static art works they were probably the focal point of other activities, using fire along with sound and movement to create a collaborative experience that would contribute to a sense of community and magical control over the environment. What was their meaning? Why were they created? After two centuries of research, investigators now believe the European cave paintings, and corresponding early art from all over the world, represent the strivings of the human imagination to comprehend its environment. The oldest cave art, recently discovered, is Indonesian, and dates back over 40,000 years.īeautiful, mysterious and clearly the work of talented artists, the cave paintings captured the imagination of the public. Old beliefs regarding time and space were falling into the abyss the universe was unimaginably vast, the earth unimaginably old, and humans had been creating art for thousands of years. As the antiquity of these works began to be appreciated, the effect was shocking. Even greater glories were to come with the discoveries of the magnificent paintings of Altamira and Lascaux, which depicted animals such as bison and horses that looked as fresh and vibrant as if they were created days earlier. In fact, Mayor had recorded the first examples of Palaeolithic art. ![]() Then, in 1833, a French physician named François Mayor discovered and made drawings of some engraved and decorated antlers which were attributed immediately to the Celts, since this was a period of great interest in the pre-Roman peoples of western Europe, most of whom were designated "Celtic". People had been finding worked stone arrowheads and spearheads for centuries, often attributing them to the work of supernatural beings such as fairies or speculating that they fell from the sky when there was a thunderstorm. The artefacts of the Palaeolithic were not entirely unknown. The Greeks laid the foundations of art as we understand it, or so it was argued. The art of earlier civilisations such as ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, even though intriguing and highly developed, was viewed as more primitive than that of Hellenic culture. Until the 1830s, art was considered to be the invention of civilised humans, beginning with the Greeks, falling into barbarism with the Dark Ages at the end of the Roman Empire, and re-emerging with the Renaissance. ![]() ![]() It is sobering to remember that the magnificent art of the Palaeolithic, which represents the oldest form of human creativity, has been known for just two centuries. Our ability to visualise and create is thousands of years old. ![]()
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