fandomhigh | Art History, Period 1, Class 2 [1-25]

"I promise," Steve said at the beginning of class, "I will have your syllabus ready next week. I've had a lot on my mind, not that that's an excuse for not doing my work properly. I'm sorry. Now, moving on into today's topic." Steve handed out another packet before he started the lecture. "By 8000 BC--or BCE--agricultural communities were already established in Mesopotamia, and were beginning to be established elsewhere. That is, people had stopped being hunter-gatherer nomads and had become farmers who lived in one place. This was a huge shift. Think about that timeline I gave you last week. It encompassed twelve thousand years of humans wandering around, and then, more or less at the same time...they stopped. Not all of them, of course; some people are nomadic to this day, but a lot of people did, and this new lifestyle kept spreading. Your packet goes into more detail. With this new lifestyle, people had more free time, and more energy to expend on things other than basic survival, and so naturally art flourished and became more complex. So there's a lot more going on, worldwide, but I'll try to hit the high points.

"Mesopotamia, where this all began, was overrun by a series of conquering empires who wanted the really excellent land there--which isn't that excellent now, but you must remember there have been some climate shifts since then and also they've been having a drought for twenty years. Anyway, their art continued to grow and evolve, and a lot of it was religious in nature. In Europe, most of the really interesting stuff was going on in Greece. These were not the Greeks of 'Ancient Greece,' these are the people who were in the Iliad and the Odyssey--the Minoans, the Cycladics, and the Myceneans. They were all eventually run out or mysteriously disappeared, but they left behind some very interesting art and architecture. And in Africa, toward the end of this time period, Egypt solidified into a kingdom and a major power and began producing excellent art and mummifying their dead. The Great Pyramids at Giza were built during this time.

Steve grinned at the class. "Any questions?"

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Nap, pass notes, take notes...

Naomi took detailed notes.

Savannah was taking notes on the lecture.

Hey, this stuff was actually, like, important. Besides, it was really easy for A.J. to do illustrated notes for this class, so he was doing pretty well on the whole playing attention and taking notes thing.

Naminé took notes. Which involved a fair amount of doodling. Luckily, that could be considered on-topic in this class.

Pam took detailed notes, which were absolutely covered with doodles of her classmates in the margins.

Jim had made a good showing by missing last week's class. Now it was time to be serious. Of course, serious for him meant doing stick figure renditions of famous paintings as he remembered them. That's why the Mona Lisa was sitting in the wrong direction, why The Scream guy had Macaulay Culkin hair, and why The Thinker was drawn and not sculpted out of paper.

You look v. serious, said the little note Pam tossed at Jim.

I'm taking this class v. seriously. You try to make me fail with notes. For shame.

I am deeply, deeply shamed, yes.

There was a little drawing of an ashamed-looking Pam on this note.

Jim drew a sheep next to the ashamed-looking Pam. He might later claim that it was a clever pun, but really it was that he couldn't draw much other than a sheep. They're just clouds with eyes, legs, and a tail after all.