ABSTRACT
The relationship between early Greek art and Egyptian art has been a subject of learned debate since classical antiquity itself (Pliny Naturalis historia VII.205; XXXV.15–16). Each year brings forth fresh studies in which adherents of Greek originality and Egyptian influence cross swords. The purpose of this chapter is not to resolve those debates, which are probably not as such capable of solution in the terms they are generally set up: in Bietak’s (2001) recent edited volume addressing the Egyptian influences on the development of Greek monumental architecture, some contributors (e.g. Gebhard) argue there are no grounds for seeing an Egyptian contribution, whilst others (e.g. Sinn) argue that the developments are inconceivable without just such influences. Still less do I intend to offer a synthetic survey of the relevant data: one recent collection of aegyptiaka in archaic Greece ran to some 3,000 pages and included more than 5,000 items (Skon-Jedele 1994). Instead, I explore the way the question of the relationship between Greek and Egyptian art has been framed in modern art history writing, and how different frames might allow us to write different stories about the development of art in the eastern Mediterranean world from ca. 800–500 BC. I examine how ethnic models of art, and orientalist epistemologies, have shaped and continue to shape the writing of the history of early Greek art, and in particular the role attributed to Egyptian ‘influences’ in such development. I suggest, as an alternative frame, exploring the relationship between Greece and Egypt in the archaic period in terms of recent archaeological theories of world systems and materialization strategies. I consider four key categories of art production in early Greece: bronze sculpture, faience, marble sculpture and monumental temple architecture. The highly variable articulation of these media with technical, stylistic and iconographic traditions in Greece and Egypt call into question the meaningfulness of a unified category of ‘Greek art’ in the archaic period. ‘Greek’ art, like ‘Greece’ itself, was very much in the making (cf. Osborne 1996) in the period from 800–500 BC. Its characteristic features are perhaps best understood in terms of the adaptation of transnational models of monumental self-assertion, and the tools of ideological materialization associated with them, to the particular political contexts of a network of Greek states increasingly closely incorporated into a wider eastern Mediterranean state system.
