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History of Art: Ancient to Medieval

60 cards · 🇺🇸 English

Art movements and masterpieces from antiquity through the Middle Ages.

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What are Venus figurines?

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  1. 1What are Venus figurines?
    Small prehistoric statuettes with exaggerated breasts and bellies found worldwide, especially in Europe, usually with small heads, wide hips and tapered legs
  2. 2What is the Venus of Hohle Fels?
    One of the most famous Venus figurines, found in Germany at a UNESCO World Heritage Site with the oldest non-stationary human art (43,000-35,000 BC)
  3. 3What is the Venus of Willendorf made from?
    Limestone with ochre colouring, c. 25,000 BC, 11 cm in height (Natural History Museum, Vienna)
  4. 4Where are the most famous Paleolithic cave paintings located?
    At Lascaux in the Dordogne region of France, depicting animals and dating to the Upper Paleolithic period (c. 38,000–12,000 BC)
  5. 5What is the most accepted theory about cave painting purposes?
    They were part of religious rituals, possibly to evoke hunting success
  6. 6What was the Fertile Crescent?
    A region in the Near East (including Mesopotamia) where important Neolithic developments like early farming and permanent villages first appeared
  7. 7What were ziggurats?
    Large Mesopotamian temples in the form of step pyramids, built with bricks, lintels, and cone mosaic
  8. 8What civilization founded Western civilization?
    The Sumerians, whose political, economic, artistic and architectural traditions laid the foundation
  9. 9What appeared for the first time in Sumer?
    The first city-state (Uruk), first organized religion, first known writing (cuneiforms), first irrigation system, and first vehicles with wheels
  10. 10What are cylinder seals?
    Mesopotamian artifacts engraved with little inscriptions and illustrations
  11. 11What is the Akkadian Empire known as?
    The world's first great empire
  12. 12What is Assyrian art best known for?
    Detailed stone reliefs depicting scenes of court life, religious practice, hunting and epic battles, initially painted in bright colours
  13. 13What greeted visitors entering ancient Babylon?
    The Ishtar Gate, with walls covered in vivid blue glazed bricks and reliefs showing dragons, bulls and lions
  14. 14Who is the Ishtar Gate named after?
    Ishtar, the goddess of war and love
  15. 15What was the capital of the Achaemenid Empire?
    Persepolis (Iran), filled with sculptures showing religious images and people of the empire
  16. 16What characterized Ancient Egyptian art?
    Religious and symbolic art created to honour the pharaoh, emphasizing immortality with monumental structures
  17. 17What are mastaba?
    Egyptian funerary monuments - tombs of rectangular form
  18. 18What types of pyramids were built in Egypt?
    Step pyramids (Saqqarah) and smooth-sided pyramids (Giza)
  19. 19How did Egyptians paint human figures?
    Head and limbs in profile, while torso, hands, and eyes were painted from the front, represented hierarchically (Pharaoh larger than subjects)
  20. 20What materials were used in Egyptian furniture?
    Cedar wood inlaid with ebony and ivory
  21. 21When was the Indus Valley Civilization discovered?
    1922, long after Mesopotamia and Egypt were known
  22. 22What are the major cities of the Indus Valley Civilization?
    Harappa and Mohenjo-daro (Pakistan) and the port city Lothal (Gujarat, India)
  23. 23What are the most numerous Indus Valley artifacts?
    Square and rectangular stamp seals featuring animals (usually bulls) and very short Harappan texts
  24. 24What is the 'Dancing Girl' from Mohenjo-daro?
    A bronze sculpture c. 2400–1900 BC, 10.8 cm in height, now in the National Museum, New Delhi
  25. 25When were the first metal objects produced in China?
    Almost 4000 years ago during the Xia dynasty (c. 2100–1700 BC)
  26. 26What were Shang dynasty bronze vessels used for?
    Religious rituals - elaborate banquets of food and drink for ancestor spirits, with different shapes for wine, water, cereals or meat
  27. 27What is a taotie?
    A commonly used Chinese motif - a stylized face divided into two almost mirror-image halves with nostrils, eyes, eyebrows, jaws, cheeks and horns
  28. 28What makes Sanxingdui bronzes enigmatic?
    They show a mysterious sacrificial religious system unlike anything else in ancient China, discovered in Sichuan province since 1986
  29. 29How many objects were found at Sanxingdui in 1986?
    Over 4000 objects including bronze, jade and gold artifacts
  30. 30What philosophical movements appeared during the Warring States period?
    Confucianism, Daoism, and Legalism

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