Roman murals: 1st - 3rd century AD & Buddhist murals: 5th - 8th century AD

Roman murals: 1st - 3rd century AD

Murals are even more fragile than the walls they are painted on, so it is not surprising that few survive from the days of the Roman empire. The accidents of being covered by ash or sand, or of being originally painted underground, have preserved some examples in Pompeii, Doura-Europos and the Roman catacombs. They are not for the most part very distinguished. But they demonstrate that it is a normal custom, in Roman communities, to decorate walls by painting on the plaster.

It is equally conventional to enliven the floor with mosaics. This remains a relatively minor art form until Christian emperors move mosaic from floors to the walls of churches.

Buddhist murals: 5th - 8th century AD

Monks and pilgrims play an important part in the practice of Buddhism. Both are attracted to caves in remote places. And the profusion of popular stories in Mahayana Buddhism (on topics such as the adventures of Buddha in his previous lives on earth) provides a rich source of material for narrative paintings on the walls of the caves.

Two places suggest more vividly than any others the vitality of Buddhist cave painting from about the 5th century AD. One is Ajanta, a site in India long forgotten until discovered in 1817. The other is Dunhuang, one of the great oasis staging posts on the Silk Road.


At Ajanta there are about thirty architectural spaces cut into a steep cliff flanking a ravine. Some are viharas, or monasteries, with cells for the monks around a central hall. Others are chaityas, or meeting places, with a small central stupa as an object for worship and contemplation.

The paintings range from calm devotional images of the Buddha to lively and crowded scenes, often featuring the seductively full-breasted and narrow-waisted women more familiar in Indian sculpture than in painting. The latest images are from the 8th century, after which the decline of Buddhism in India causes these remote and beautiful places to become gradually abandoned and then entirely forgotten.


Dunhuang, on one of the world's greatest trade routes, is an altogether busier place than Ajanta. Rather than thirty caves, Dunhuang has nearly 500 - known collectively as the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas. The murals span three centuries, from the 5th to the 8th AD. The images in the earlier caves (hollowed from the soft rock, as at Ajanta) show the influence of central Asia and even India - the regions from which Buddhism travels on its way to China - but the later paintings are fully Chinese in style.

Dunhuang, unlike Ajanta, is never lost. But one particular cave is sealed against intruders. Rediscovered in 1899, this cave is found to contain fine examples of Chinese painting on silk and the world's first known printed book.

The Greek classical ideal: 5th - 4th century BC

The Greek classical ideal: 5th - 4th century BC

Greece in the classical period makes the innovations which underlie the mainstream western tradition in art. This is true of both painting and sculpture.

The essential characteristic of classical Greek art is a heroic realism. Painters and sculptors attempt to reveal the human body, in movement or repose, exactly as it appears to the eye. The emphasis will be on people of unusual beauty, or moments of high and noble drama. But the technical ability to capture the familiar appearance of things is an innovation which can later be adapted to any subject.


Ancient Greek authors consider the paintings on the walls of public buildings, particularly temples, to be works of art as magnificent and important as anything created by the sculptors. But the fragility of the medium means that hardly any painting of this kind has survived (the murals unearthed at Vergina in 1977 provide one sensational exception).

We can acquire obliquely some idea of what has been lost. One method is through the designs on Greek vases, which survive in great numbers from the classical period. They represent a skilful and cartoon-like style of Greek drawing, and give some idea of the subjects chosen by Greek painters. But in their own time they are considered the work of craftsmen rather than artists.

It is possible to have a glimpse of early Greek art through Greece's influence on the Etruscans, in central Italy. The style of the pre-classical period in Greece can be seen in the many murals which have survived in Etruscan tombs. These are extremely lively in a stylized manner, very different from the realism of classical Greek art.

A splendid example from the 6th century BC is the inebriated pair of dancers from the Tomb of the Lionesses, in Tarquinia

The Greek style in Pompeii and Egypt

Another way of approaching Greek painting is through later copies. Many have been preserved by the volcanic ash at Pompeii, where one mosaic in particular is considered an accurate version of a large picture of the late 4th century BC - when the classical period in Greece is just giving way to the Hellenistic Age.

It shows, in dramatic detail, a moment in the battle at Issus between Alexander the Great and the Persian king Darius. Even in mosaic (inevitably more stilted than painting), the image suggests the painter's skill in conveying a realistic impression of a very complex scene.

Pompeii is in origin a Greek city, and many of the painters of the murals come from the eastern Mediterranean. But it is also part of the Roman empire. Throughout the Roman world artists strive for this degree of realism - particularly in portraits, the art form which most interests the Romans. Again a historical accident has delivered some striking examples.

The dry sand of Egypt has preserved many superb paintings, placed in coffins from the 1st century AD. They are known as Fayyum portraits, from the place where most of them have been discovered. Painted in encaustic, a medium using hot wax, they give an intimate and moving glimpse of some of the men and women of Roman Egypt.

first civilization

The Egyptian style: from 3100 BC
The first civilization to establish a recognizable artistic style is Egypt. This style follows a strange but remarkably consistent convention, by which the feet, legs and head of each human figure are shown in profile but the torso, shoulders, arms and eye are depicted as if from the front.

By this means, it has to be admitted, the artist is able to tackle each separate feature from the easiest angle. It is a convenient convention, and it is used both in paintings and in low-relief sculptures. Often the two are combined, with paint applied to the lightly sculpted figures

The paintings in Egyptian tombs and temples usually depict the incidents which will occur during the journey of the dead into the next world. The practical purpose is to provide the sacred details required for this journey, in the form of images and hieroglyphs.

In the great temple of Ramses II at Thebes, for example, one image shows his queen, Nefertari, being gently taken by the hand by the goddess Isis. The inscription says: 'Words spoken by Isis - Come, great king's wife Nefertari, beloved of Mut, without fault, that I may show thee thy place in the sacred world'. Similarly helpful paintings are later buried with rich Egyptians in the standard form of papyrus scroll known as the Book of the Dead - introduced in the New Kingdom, from the 16th century BC..

Minoan art: c.1600 BC

While the Egyptian skill in painting was reserved mainly for tombs and temples, the Aegean civilization on the northern side of the Mediterranean makes much use of painted murals in the living rooms of the rich and mighty.
A fresco of about 1600 BC in the royal palace at Knossos, in Crete, develops the island's link with the cult of the bull. Two bullfighters flank the charging creature while an acrobat vaults over it.
The island of Thera is at this time a thriving colony of Crete. In about 1525 BC it is suddenly submerged in volcanic ash in an eruption of the local volcano. Archaeological excavations on the island (also known as Santorin) have unearthed some remarkably well preserved rooms, lived in by the richer inhabitants of Thera more than 3500 years ago. These rooms are lavishly decorated with murals.
One room has on its walls a range of fanciful mountains, of a kind later more familiar in Chinese painting. The Minoan tradition introduces landscape as a subject of art

Cave paintings: from 31,000 years ago

He art of our species
If Neanderthal man created any form of art, no traces of it have yet been found. But with the arrival of modern man, or Homo sapiens sapiens, the human genius for image-making becomes abundantly clear.
In the recesses of caves, people begin to decorate the rock face with an important theme in their daily lives, the bison and reindeer which are their prey as Ice Age hunters. And sculptors carve portable images of another predominant interest of mankind - the swelling curves of the female form, emphasizing the fertility on which the survival of the tribe depends.

Cave paintings: from 31,000 years ago

Prehistoric cave paintings have been discovered in many parts of the world, from Europe and Africa to Australia. Africa has some of the earliest paintings and rock engravings to have been securely dated. Nearly 30,000 years old, they are discovered in 1969 on the rock face in a cave near Twyfelfontein in Namibia. But the most numerous and the most sophisticated of prehistoric paintings are on the walls of caves in southwest France and northern Spain.

About 150 painted caves have been discovered in this region. Perhaps the most startling of all are the paintings in Chauvet Cave, found as recently as 1994 and thought to be as much as 31,000 years old. But far better known, as yet, are the glories of Altamira and Lascaux.

The walls and ceilings of these caves are covered in paintings, with shades of red, brown, yellow and black created from powdered minerals, probably mixed with animal blood and fat. The subjects are mainly the animals of the chase - bison, wild cattle, horses and deer. Many of the paintings are deep in the caves, in dark recesses.

The painters do their work by the light of saucer-like stone lamps, burning animal fat. The charcoal wick of one of the lamps at Lascaux has been carbon-dated to about 17,000 years ago. The same process has dated objects found at Altamira to some 13,000 years ago. Around this period cave art in other European sites also reaches its peak.

Why do hunter-gatherers paint images of large animals on the walls of caves? The evidence of tribal societies in more recent times makes it certain that the purpose is not merely decorative. Religion and magic are the context, but no one knows the precise motive.
There is no lack of theories. It has been argued that the magic is to aid the hunters in the chase; or that it is to increase the herds of wild animals; or that these images, in the innermost recesses of a mysterious and holy place, are to help the shaman into the state of trance which is essential for his priestly work. Speculation may be endless, but the appeal of this early human art is eternal.
When humans first form settled communities, paintings again play a prominent part in religious life. A good example is the early neolithic town of catal huyuk, from about 6000 BC. Many of the houses so far excavated appear to be shrines. Their walls are painted with a wide range of subjects, including hunting scenes, a picture of vultures setting about human corpses, and even an elementary landscape.

As in many early societies, such as Minoan Crete, the bull is here a sacred animal. Bulls' heads and horns project aggressively from the walls and altars of the temple chambers of Catal Huyuk.

Global cooling: from 1.7 million years ago

Global cooling: from 1.7 million years ago

It is about a million years ago that our ancestors, in the form of Homo erectus, first move out of Africa. At that time the planet is undergoing a series of slow but fairly drastic temperature changes, in a long sequence of glacial periods (also known as ice ages) interspersed with warmer spells. There have been fluctuations of this sort in the earth's climate since about 1.7 million years ago and they are still continuing.
We are at present some 10,000 years from the end of the last glacial period, and perhaps a little more than 20,000 years from the beginning of the next.
Each glacial period provides stimulating challenges for early humans. Islands become accessible as new territories, in some places because deep channels freeze and in others because the general drop in the level of the ocean (from water piling up on high ground as ice) results in a new land bridge.
Changes in vegetation, caused by the advancing or retreating ice caps, create new environments in which some species face extinction and others find improved opportunities.
Almost the entire span on earth of Homo erectus falls within this period of intermittent ice ages. His ability to adapt to the changing conditions must have been a large part of his success in spreading throughout the world. That adaptability is in part the result of greater thinking power. Over a span of a million years, from early African fossil skulls to those in China and Java, the braincase of Homo erectus shows on average a 25% increase in size. (Both Peking man and Java man date from about 500,000 years ago.)
This increase in intelligence no doubt leads to intermittent but important improvements in the way humans carry out the main everyday tasks on which life depends - hunting animals and gathering edible plants.

The use of fire

The use of fire: from more than 400,000 years ago

Homo erectus must have been much helped by his taming of fire. This has probably happened by about 500,000 years ago - the date of the so-called Peking Man, a version of Homo erectus whose traces in north China are generally believed to show evidence of the use of fire. A much earlier date, of more than a million years ago, has been claimed for burnt fragments of animal bones found in a cave at Swartkrans in South Africa.

Evidence at both these sites is disputed among scholars, but there is a consensus - from other locations in Europe and Asia - that Homo erectus is certainly using fire 400,000 years ago.


At this early stage embers are borrowed (from a volcanic source, or a fire caused by lightning) and then are carefully tended, for it is not yet possible for humans to create a flame. The use of fire for cooking greatly increases the variety of food available to humans, just as its heat in winter extends their habitat.

It is not known how much of the diet of these early people is achieved by gathering fruits and berries, or scavenging dead animals. But hunting must have contributed some part of it. Fragments have survived of sharpened wooden spears, unlikely to have been used exclusively against other men. One such point, hardened in a flame, has even been found between the ribs of an elephant.



In or out of an ice age, clothing of some kind is also a necessity for early humans living as far north of Peking. Together with speech, clothes have become almost a defining human characteristic: no animal wears any, no modern human wears absolutely none.

Unlike bones and stone tools, skin and fur do not easily survive in the ground. So it is impossible to put a date on man's first experiments with costume. However, the bones of large animals at human sites prove that they were butchered and eaten, and stone tools were well suited to the scraping of skins. It seems inconceivable that Peking Man did not from time to time, on a cold night, wrap some simple form of fur cloak around his shoulders.


Neanderthal man: from 230,000 years ago

Around 250,000 years ago Homo erectus disappears from the fossil record, to be followed in the Middle Palaeolithic period by humans with brains which again have increased in size. They are the first to be placed within the same genus as ourselves, as Homo sapiens ('knowing man').

By far the best known of them is Neanderthal man -- named from the first fossil remains to be discovered, in 1856, in the Neander valley near Dusseldorf, in Germany. The scientific name of this subspecies is Homo sapiens neanderthalensis.



The Neanderthals are widely spread through Europe and the Middle East, and they thrive for an extremely long period (from about 230,000 to 35,000 years ago). Bones of animals of all sizes, up to bison and mammoth, and sophisticated stone tools are found with their remains.

Yet almost everything about them seems uncertain and controversial.


There is inconclusive evidence that the Neanderthals may have buried their dead (in one case, it has been suggested, even with flowers on the corpse). If they did have burial customs, that implies religion. Yet they have left no other trace of it.

There are skeletons of Neanderthals who lived for several years after serious injury, suggesting a social cohesion strong enough to protect the weak. But if they were so advanced socially, it seems odd to us that they should have left no art, decoration or jewellery. On the other hand a recent discovery of a Neanderthal flute surprised archaeologists, suggesting a more advanced level of culture than had been suspected.


It may be that the sense of uncertainty about Neanderthal man stems largely from our own eagerness to find early reflections of ourselves. It is perhaps only the lack of clear answers in that context which seems to blur Homo sapiens neanderthalensis.

Looked at in a different perspective, as small groups of interdependent humans subsisting in very difficult circumstances, the Neanderthals are an unprecedented success story.


Like Homo erectus before them, they seem to slip fairly suddenly out of the fossil record. About 35,000 years ago has been the conventional date for their demise, but recent finds of Neanderthal bones in Croatia suggest that they survived until 28,000 years ago. By that time they have long shared parts of the globe with anatomically modern humans.



Homo sapiens sapiens: from 90,000 years ago

The first traces of modern humans are now dated tentatively as far back as 90,000 years ago in the Middle East. In Europe, where they first appear about 35,000 years ago, they are known as Cro-Magnon from the place in the Dordogne, in France, where remains of them are first discovered in a cave in 1868.

With Cro-Magnon man there begins the sudden development of art, which seems to be one of the defining characteristics of modern man. Cro-Magnon culture provides the paintings in such famous sites as Chauvet, Lascaux and Altamira.


The humans of Cro-Magnon, and their predecessors in other parts of the world, are anatomically almost identical with people today. They differ in being taller and more muscular; some of their skeletal remains reveal (contrary to modern preconceptions) a larger brain than today's average. They are classed, with us, as Homo sapiens sapiens ('knowing knowing man').

The repetition does not imply doubly knowing. It is merely a method sometimes used in the binomial system of taxonomy to identify the central species in a genus. Thus Troglodytes troglodytes is the common wren, Bufo bufo the common toad, and Homo sapiens sapiens the common man.


Before following the development of modern humans from the Upper Palaeolithic period, about 35,000 years ago (and we are at this point more than 99.999% of the way through the story so far of the universe), there is one crucial turning point which has not been charted. The creation of stone tools goes back more than 2 million years; the use of fire at least 500,000; clothing cannot be dated, but must have been adopted in colder regions not long after animals with hide or fur were first scavenged and butchered.

But what of the most distinctive human quality of all? What of speech?

Words on the brain: from 1 million years ago?

All social animals communicate with each other, from bees and ants to whales and apes, but only humans have developed a language which is more than a set of prearranged signals.

Our speech even differs in a physical way from the communication of other animals. It comes from a cortical speech centre which does not respond instinctively, but organises sound and meaning on a rational basis. This section of the brain is unique to humans.


When and how the special talent of language developed is impossible to say. But it is generally assumed that its evolution must have been a long process.

Our ancestors were probably speaking a million years ago, but with a slower delivery, a smaller vocabulary and above all a simpler grammar than we are accustomed to.

HISTORY OF STONAGE MAN

The use of tools:
It is a commonplace that humans are distinguished from other creatures by a technological ability, and man has often been described as a tool-using animal. The distinction is not entirely valid. Some animals do use tools. Chimpanzees are the most often quoted example, stripping a twig to plunge it into an anthill and then eating the tasty termites which cling to the end of it.

A more modern example of tool-using is that of crows living in a walnut avenue in the Japanese town of Sendai. The walnuts are too hard to crack. So the crows have taken to dropping them on a pedestrian crossing where they are crushed by the passing traffic. When it is the pedestrians' turn, the crows fly in to bear off the fragments.

But there is a difference between using a tool which comes to hand, however improbably, and fashioning one for a purpose. Shaping a tool for cutting or scraping (two basic and useful functions) is a difficult task. Such a tool must be made of a hard material, and the hardest material easily available on the surface of the earth is stone. But how does one shape a stone without tools?

The history of human technology begins with the discovery of how to give stone a cutting edge. The type of stone found most suitable for the purpose is flint.
Stone tools: from 2.5 million years ago

The human discovery that round nodules of flint can be split and chipped to form a sharp edge is extremely ancient. Tools made in this way have been found in Africa from about 2.5 million years ago. Gradually, over the millennia, in an extremely slow version of an industrial revolution, new and improved techniques are developed for striking off slivers of stone.
Variations in the flints found with fossil remains (differing both in the method by which flakes are chipped from the core, and in the range of shapes created) are used by anthropologists as one way of assigning human skeletal remains to specific groups or periods.

The predominant use of stone as the material for tools has caused this period to be known as the Stone Age. It represents by far the greatest part of human history, spanning more than 2 million years to a time only a few thousand years ago.

The Stone Age includes all human development up to the point which one might describe as the beginning of civlization. It has inevitably proved too loose a term and has been much subdivided.
Global cooling: from 1.7 million years ago

It is about a million years ago that our ancestors, in the form of HOMO erectus, first move out of Africa. At that time the planet is undergoing a series of slow but fairly drastic temperature changes, in a long sequence of glacial periods (also known as ice ages) interspersed with warmer spells. There have been fluctuations of this sort in the earth's climate since about 1.7 million years ago and they are still continuing.

We are at present some 10,000 years from the end of the last glacial period, and perhaps a little more than 20,000 years from the beginning of the next.