Reading skills - HORSES IN ART

     The earliest-known illustrations of horses are cave drawings, and horses are among the animals found on the roofs and walls of caves at Lascaux in south France, portrayed in brown, red and black in very natural and lively pictures, in spite of the fact the art of drawing had not developed much in that ancient period.

     The Lascaux cave drawings are about 40,000 years old. Try to think what that means in terms of our own date A.D. We have not yet reached a mere 2 thousand A.D., and the Lascaux artist lived 40 thousand years ago! In that tremendous span of time between them and us, mankind has been depicting horses in many forms of art (for art does not only mean painting, but includes architecture, sculpture and so on, down to the smallest kinds of decoration, such as designs on coins). And these forms of art have appeared in a variety of styles in many different lands through all the great civilisations, periods which were many thousands of years later than the cave men, but most of them so long ago that we call them the ancient civilisations - for example, Egyptian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Greek, all many years before Christ. There were also the great oriental (eastern) civilisations, such as the Persian and the Chinese. All these peoples left relics of the horse in art.

     The Egyptians, who built the mighty pyramids and the sphinxes, included horses in the many scenes of hunting and warfare with which they decorated walls and various objects such as Tutankhamun's ceremonial fan and the wooden coffer found in his tomb when it was discovered in 1922 in the Valley of the Kings. The Pharaoh in his war chariot above is taken from this coffer*, and Tutankhamun, who became king when nine years old and died when nineteen, must often have hunted in a chariot like this. Notice the splendid trappings of the horses. And look at Pharaoh. The Egyptians had a rule that in paintings and relief sculptures - raised sculptures on a flat surface - human shoulders must always face forward, and the eye must be drawn in full even in a side face.

coffer - large chest (dežė, skrynia)

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