History begins with the cities of ancient Sumer, in southern Iraq; it is here that writing was first invented.  But this first writing was used almost exclusively to record financial transactions; and so the visual arts, developed into a disciplined system to promote the power of the rulers of early Mesopotamia, give us access to the beliefs and values would not be put down in writing for many years to come.  These rulers needed to record their military victories and their devotion to their gods, of whom they were mortally afraid.  Here we see the first narrative images, of battles and of religious ritual; and we find images of the priestly kings and their ruling elite, desperate to continuously assure the deity of their unflinching service; and of the megalomania of these rulers, filling their burials with remarkable wealth and human sacrifice.  This lecture will explore the ways in which visual arts of the first civilization give us insights into religion and politics that are almost totally absent from the written record.

In the middle of the 18^th Dynasty, in the period of Egypt’s New Kingdom, a young pharaoh suddenly changed his name to Helper of the Sun, closed the great temples, moved the country’s capital, and declared worship of the Aten, the disc of the Sun, to be the sole state religion.  To promote this radical new order, an astonishing new system of visual art was formulated, apparently at Akenaten’s personal direction, to distinguish the ruler and his family from all that had gone before.  Far from simply being a form of caricature used for propaganda, art of the Amarna period (named after the location of his new capital) is some of the most refined in all of Egyptian history.  In this lecture we will see the grotesque exaggeration of the king’s physical features, contrasting with the beauty of his queen Nefertiti, the role played by their children in public life, and the survival of Akenaten’s new art forms after the old ways were established under his son, Tutankhamen.