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Islamic, ancient Egyptian, and ancient Greek art collections

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You are supervising the docents who will be conducting tours and answering questions during a local festival, and you want them to become familiar with artworks from different eras. You ask them to use the below websites to find museums that feature exhibits or permanent collections of Islamic, ancient Egyptian, and ancient Greek/Etruscan/Roman art. Choose one specific work from each category for a total of three works. Compare and contrast the three works, explaining how they fit into the context of their time period and culture.

http://www.metmuseum.org/
http://www.british-museum.ac.uk/
http://www.lacma.org/
http://www.artic.edu/aic/

I apologize but I am truly confused and/or lost with this course as I do not understand art interpretation or the subject matter so any assistance or guidance would be very much appreciated.

This is my opinion after researching information:

Art is a form of expression in some sort by the individual - based in many different forms and aspects. Today people utilize their feelings, emotions and thoughts to create pieces for display or sale. However, in the ancient times art had a different meaning. Depending on the era/time it was spiritual, symbolic or religious based and/or was not meant for resale but symbolic purposes so to speak. Unfortunately all pieces were not salvageable from these eras. For instance, burial art is the majority of what was left over the Etruscans. Thus, burial art I feel should be my main point of focus. This leads to the following:

The Greeks influenced the Etruscans in pottery and religion before the Romans rose to power. Once the Romans became a Republic they expanded and conquered both the Etruscans and Greeks taking much of the burial customs from both. Thus, the Romans somewhat absorbed cultures. However, the Egyptians are much older culture wise than the other and are known for elaborate burial rights with gold sarcophagi, urns with food and the dead slaves and pets with them in the tombs. However, the Greeks did have communications with the Egyptians but it was the Romans that finally took over the Egyptian empire and again the gods from both cultures were absorbed along with funeral customs. As for Islamic funeral are they had a huge amount of contact with both the Egyptians "who they ruled for a short time as Pharaohs" and the Greeks who they battled with in the legendary wars such as the ones depicted in the movie "Alexander" and the Romans as well especially the Eastern Empire or Byzantine Empire once the Western Empire fell to the many barbarian tribes "Goths, Huns, Vandals, etc" So in short I feel to formulate this piece properly focus should be on art work that is burial related because it is a common thread and one that follows each culture. As the key is that they all influenced each other in this area.

***But I am having difficulty locating art of this form for the eras in question. I have found items that have been located in burials such as coins, pictures over tombs depicting the faces the buried but what is considered art and what is considered treasure or is it all art since what we consider art is different or alters from that period??? I have located urns (which are attached) for some eras but not other works and/or burial art and/or how they relate to their specific periods.

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Solution Summary

Comparison of artifacts from Islamic, ancient Egyptian, and ancient Greek/Etruscan/Roman art collections.

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You have chosen burial artifacts specifically to compare and contrast. This is a good idea to narrow down the type of artifacts that you will be examining. You don't want to compare paintings with burial artifacts after all!

I have provided links in the attached file for Islamic and Ancient Egyptian burial artifacts that you could use for this assignment. A couple are not from the above listed websites, so if you are not allowed to use those then don't. There is one link for at least one artifact for each of the Islamic and ancient Egyptian

Now that the artifacts you need for the assignment have been located, you next need to compare and contrast the three works, explaining how they fit into the context of their time period and culture. This is a relatively simple task, since the artifacts have a description next to them about the cultural beliefs ...

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