Altamira Cave located in Altamira Spain 20,000b.c.e. Images of bison many bison are life – size.

1. Altamira Cave located in Altamira Spain 20,000b.c.e. Images of bison many bison are life – size.

2. Close-ups of bison Altamira cave 20,000 b.c.e. Paintings show amazing naturalism in the depictions of bison. The bison’s joints are shown correctly and anatomy shown accurately. The paint color made from natural substances has remained vibrant because the temperature and moisture level in caves is constant. The caves also protect paintings from the elements.

3. The Hall of Bulls Lascaux Cave, France 18,000 – 15,000 b.c.e. Found in 1939 by French teenagers trying to retrieve a dog that had fallen down a hole. This area is called the hall of bulls because the dominant images are of cattle. Many drawings Are over life- sized. Drawings only show animals in profile and many overlap on top of earlier Depictions. Scale relationships vary greatly between animals.

4. The DeadMan from Lascaux Cave 18,000 – 15,000 b.c.e. Paintings of human beings in pre – Historic art lack the naturalism used In images of animals.

5. Venus of Willendorf 25,000 – 20,000 b.c.e. See also page three of Textbox.

6. MESOPOTAMIA

7. Stair case at Ziggurat of Ur Ziggurats were multiple layered temples that would Occupy the center of a Mesopotamian city. It was walled Off from the town and only the king and priests could Enter it. Offering were left for the gods to enjoy. Ritual Meals were left before the images of gods for the gods’ Consumption. Votive statues

8. At the apogee of its effectiveness, the chariot was overtaken in import­ance by a single element in the chariot system, the horse itself. It has been suggested that the Assyrians themselves were responsible for this revolution. By the eighth century BC, however, selective breeding had produced a horse that Assyrians could ride from the forward seat, with their weight over the shoulders, and a sufficient mutuality had developed between steed and rider for the man to use a bow while in motion. Mutuality, or perhaps horsemanship, was not so far advanced, all the same, that riders were ready to release the reins: an Assyrian bas-relief shows cavalrymen working in

9. The Assyrians used torture spectacles as a warningto any who would oppose them When King Ashurnasirpal (883-859 B.C.) overcame a conspiracy of princes in Syria, for example, he made their punishment a public spectacle and boasted of its brutality: “I built a pillar over against his city gate and I flayed all the chiefs who had revolted, and I covered the pillar with their skin. Some I walled up within the pillar, some I impaled upon the pillar on stakes, and others I bound to stakes round about the pil­lar. ... And I cut the .limbs of the officers, of the royal officers who had rebelled .... Many captives from among them I burned with fire, and many I took as living captives. From some I cut off their noses, their fingers, of many I put out the eyes. I made one pillar of the living and another of the dead, and I bound their heads to tree trunks round about the city. Their young men and maidens I burned in the fire.”

10. Decline of Assyria The power, the terror, and the armed might of the Assyrian empire did not prevent the recurrence of rebellions, and every Assyrian king spent most of his life waging either external or civil wars. Gradually, in the seventh century B.C., the rebels, aided by outside forces, were able successfully to detach pieces of the empire. The most effective group of allies were the Babylonians, whose homeland was in the southern part of Mesopotamia, and the Medes, a nomadic horse-riding people living on the high Persian plateau. Finally, in 612 B.C., the coalition successfully conquered and leveled Nineveh itself. The biblical prophet Ezekiel celebrated the destruction of Israel's oppressors, the Assyrians, by declaring "all of them slain, fallen by the sword which caused terror in the land of the living." The destroyed Assyrian fortress at Nimrud, with remains the city’s ziggurat on the right. All of the Assyrian cities were reduced to this level.