Classification is necessary, whether one describes it with slight annoyance as “typically German” or accepts it quite pragmatically as a welcome aid: dividedepochsby art historians , and with good reason.
Art itself, as an active creative process, is “a little” older than art history; more precisely, it is quite likely to have been involved in the very process of becoming human.
Art History of Antiquity in the Kaleidoscope Kunstplaza
The emergence of the first "Homo" is traditionally linked to the use of stone tools (pebble tools). This is now highly controversial in relation to the distinction between humans and apes, and tools suitable for making art are found in both human and ape hands: Homo began using tools 2.6 million years ago, and apes probably did as well.
The results are impressive even with monkeys, at least when the tool is a paintbrush – compare for yourself whether you think it's fair that these pictures: www.affenbrut.de/galerie-shop cost between €160 and €240, while this sculpture (incidentally, a monkey): www.focus.de costs €24 million.
In any case, art has most likely existed for much longer than we have been told about it. New radiocarbon dating has just revealed that the oldest surviving works of art in the world – jewelry, figurative art with mythic-symbolic imagery, and musical instruments from the Geißenklösterle cave in the Swabian Alps – are up to 43,000 years old, considerably older than the previously assumed 40,000 years.
Have even older art been found elsewhere in the world? You will find out, after all, the first epoch of art history, the prehistory and early history of art , begins in 600,000 BC.
1. Epoch of art history: Art of prehistory and early history
600,000 BC to the first advanced civilizations around 3100 BC.
In very broad terms: Every work of art that was created before writing was developed belongs to the prehistory and early history of art.
Video recording: The origin and function of art in primitive society
2. Period of art history: Art of antiquity
Once a high culture has formed somewhere, early history comes to an end, and antiquity begins.
The leap from prehistory and early history to the history of antiquity is not only significant in art history: with the first advanced civilizations, prehistory becomes world history, the world history of humankind.
It's actually illogical, since the origin of Homo sapiens , the anatomically modern human as we still exist today, is dated in anthropology (the study of humans) to 200,000 BC. Anthropologists, taking a primarily biological-anatomical approach, determined that some "homos" at that time exhibited a set of characteristics that defined them as "Homo sapiens".
Sapiens is Latin for understanding, wise, intelligent, clever, reasonable. These characteristics were seen in upright walking, shorter and smaller teeth, later onset of puberty, a larger brain and thus the first cultural and social achievements, etc. etc.
Historians evidently see things a little differently, dating the actual history of humankind to the beginning of the first advanced civilizations. The crucial clue as to why this is so lies in the characteristics that, from a historian's perspective, define an advanced civilization:
A high culture is a social order that develops a more complex culture than its predecessors and neighbors, with the following characteristics:
Planned agriculture (irrigation, storage, trade)
Cities as centers of trade and power (fertile location, trading hub, military security, organizational unit)
Political organization of society with a centralized administrative system (planning, hierarchy, government, legal and administrative system, military)
Division of labor, social classes with specialization
Production of sophisticated artistic achievements (writing, music, visual arts, architecture)
Development of sciences, unified calendar system, religion
All of these factors combined lead to the development of a shared way of thinking and feeling in such a society
An important prerequisite is the development of a writing system, without which everything just mentioned would not be possible
Only with writing is recording possible, and so it is only logical that for historians the (dark) early history ends as soon as a high culture formed somewhere.
If antiquity begins with the emergence of a high culture, then antiquity would have to begin at different times in different parts of the world. And that is indeed the case, at least with regard to the beginning of "antiquity in a broader sense.".
Surprisingly for all those who see the “cradle of human culture” in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia: the oldest advanced civilization may have been in Europe: the pre-Indo-European Chalcolithic Danube civilization, also called Old Europe, is dated from around 5000 BC.
However, the crucial drawback is that this civilization has not left behind any interpretable written sources; whether the Vinča symbols represent a script or merely symbols used to artistically decorate objects is disputed.
The oldest advanced civilizations in Asia and Africa are well documented:
From around 4000 BC, the first advanced civilizations arose in Mesopotamia, the land between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers (today Syria + Iraq, a bit of Türkiye, Iran + Kuwait)
The beginning of the Egyptian high culture on the Nile is placed around 4000 BC
From around 3500 BC, the Elam people in Khuzestan (present-day Iran) achieved remarkable cultural accomplishments
From around 2900 BC, the city of Mari in Mesopotamia took over the rule (today Tell Hariri in Syria and in the midst of being looted by terrorists)
From around 2800 BC, the Indus Valley Civilization (also called the Harappan Civilization after its main excavation site) flourished in India along the Indus River
From around 2800 BC, Ebla rose to become a city-state and cultural center (today the Tell Mardikh excavation site in northern Syria, 55 km SW of Aleppo, is also currently being destroyed)
From around 2340 BC, the Akkadian Empire, with its capital Akkad along the Tigris River, developed into the first organized territorial state in human history
The Oasis or Oxus culture reached its peak around 2200 BC (in Central Asia, in the area of the Karakum Desert in Turkmenistan/Afghanistan)
From around 2000 BC, the Erlitou culture along the Hung He (Yellow River) in the Chinese province of Henan rose to a high cultural level
In America, they were a little later (at least with regard to the transmission of records; we only assume this applies to “culture in real life”):
From around 3000 BC, the Maya brought a great deal of culture to the area of Mexico and Guatemala
The city of Caral in Peru (Valle de Supe near Lima) had its main period of prosperity from around 2900 BC
From around 1500 BC, the Olmecs on the Gulf Coast of Mexico achieved remarkable cultural accomplishments.
It was only from around 1250 AD that the Inca brought high culture back to the continent, mainly in the area of present-day Peru and Chile
From around 1350 AD, the Aztecs, starting from the area around Mexico City, also culturally dominated the surrounding areas
Only Australia and Antarctica are missing from the “map of ancient art” . They are indeed absent from the areas that gave rise to the first advanced civilizations.
Aborigines around 50,000 years ago , one of the last stages in the great spread of Homo sapiens from Africa. The Aborigines did not develop a high culture, but rather had some bad luck with the land they settled and had to cope with an ice-age-like cold period around 20,000 years ago.
Those who constantly nearly freeze to death have no time for advanced civilization; by the time they had recovered and multiplied, the Europeans had already arrived (late 18th century), and that brought an end to the indigenous culture for the time being. A recent genetic study revealed that around 4,000 years ago, large numbers of Indians migrated to Australia; they may have given Australia dingoes, but they didn't bring it an advanced civilization.
Even though Antarctica was once called Terra australis (which was thought to be a huge southern continent, a precise counterweight to the landmasses of the northern hemisphere), there is of course nothing to be found here in terms of high culture; as I said, freezing and culture don't go together (and there were no humans there before 1911).
In a narrower sense, historians simply begin antiquity with the emergence of the first writings, around 3200 BC, independently of each other in Mesopotamia and in ancient Egypt.
Speaking of writing: There's still room for future discoverers here. As with the Danube civilization, it's also debated whether the Indus Valley Civilization truly qualifies as a high culture, due to its writing system. The longest known Indus script inscription comprises 26 characters, and while this is reminiscent of our alphabet in terms of the number of symbols, no discernible logic has yet been found.
Since the first publications in the 1920s, researchers made little progress in deciphering the Indus script until the turn of the millennium, which is why, in a healthy act of resistance, it was initially excluded from the repertoire of conventional writing.
Until 2009, when a computer-assisted study insisted that its logical structure indicated a script, but it too failed to decipher it.
This remains true to this day; the Indus script with its triangles, circles with cross-like symbols, plant-like images, animal symbols and other enigmatic signs is still as mysterious today as when it was discovered – a real case for a highly gifted nerd with knowledge of mathematics, statistics, analytics, art history, the grammar of several languages and probably a bit more.
The art history of antiquity is further subdivided, traditionally as follows:
Ancient art – according to venerable art historians, not every high culture produced it; they use this term exclusively for the artworks of the “ancient Greeks” and the “ancient Romans”.
Ancient Egyptian art – is then what was produced in Egypt at that time in terms of art, thus also an early high culture in the Mediterranean region, but on the non-European side, that “was not considered so”.
The art of the ancient Near East is the third major category of ancient art, encompassing the art of all cultures/high cultures in the ancient Near East. Without a uniform definition of space and time period, the term "ancient Near East" includes Mesopotamia, Persia (Iran), Anatolia (the Near Eastern part of Turkey), and the Levant (the "Orient" on the eastern Mediterranean coast, i.e., the present-day states of Israel, Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan, and Syria).
For historians in the West, this antiquity in the narrower sense ends with the beginning of the Middle Ages, and in the East with the Islamic conquests, around 500 to 700 AD.
And for the traditional European historian, it ended before the gates of the Mediterranean; all of Africa below the Sahara, Asia from its northernmost points, America before Columbus, and something as exotic as Oceania (Australia and the like) were not subjects of his study.
How could it be otherwise? Expeditions into these areas were (if conceivable at all) a lifetime achievement; those who returned had many adventures to tell; stories with the potential to become legends, but not for ongoing investigation by scientists.
Today, thanks to the internet and transportation technology, we have a few more possibilities and can peek beyond the edge of this ocean (the lenses for this have also been invented in the meantime), and in the “little rest of the world” we still have some discoveries ahead of us, artistic and other…
In art, the classification of artists and artworks into stylistic periods occurs. These are based on common characteristic features of the artworks and cultural products of an era.
The division into eras serves as a tool for structuring and classifying works and artists within a temporal framework and a cultural-historical event.
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