Ice Age figurines still count among humanity’s oldest art
Paint containers from Middle Stone Age South Africa may reach one hundred thousand years back. Carved Swabian Jura figurines and flutes fall between about forty-three thousand and thirty-five thousand BCE. Europe’s famed cave galleries, from Lascaux onward, span roughly thirty-eight thousand to twelve thousand BCE.
Art history tracks human-made objects valued for visual form across spiritual, narrative, decorative, or functional roles—from painting and sculpture to newer media such as video and games. Narratives may spotlight masterpiece chronologies or fold in folk and material culture studied beside anthropology. Prehistoric work includes African decorative artifacts and possible paint pots to one hundred thousand years ago, plus widespread Venus figurines such as Hohle Fels and Willendorf with exaggerated torsos and often faceless heads.
In the ancient Near East, fourth-millennium Mesopotamia saw early cities, writing, brick ziggurats, and cylinder seals. Sumer is credited with pioneering city-states, hierarchical religion, cuneiform, irrigation, and wheeled vehicles; Akkad built an early empire. Assyrian palaces later covered walls with once-colored reliefs of court, hunt, and battle. Sixth-century Babylon greeted visitors at the glazed Ishtar Gate; Persia’s Persepolis broadcast imperial power in sculpture and audience halls.
Egypt raised mastabas, pyramids, and temple avenues under a religion of immortality, painting bodies in composite profile-and-frontal views scaled by rank. The Indus or Harappan civilization (c. 2400–1900 BCE) left stamp seals, terracotta figures, and rare bronzes across Pakistan and northwest India. Chinese metalwork began almost four thousand years ago in the Xia period; Shang and Zhou courts later cast ritual bronzes for ancestral banquets. Sanxingdui pits excavated since 1986 yielded over four thousand objects, including oversized bronze heads and a towering human statue unlike Anyang’s Shang style.
Source: History of art
