Ancient Mediterranean

What this unit covers

The topics below follow the published Art History course framework for Unit 2. This unit is worth 15% of the exam, so budget your time against that rather than against how long the unit takes to teach.

Lessons in this unit

• The Ancient Near East & Egypt15 min · 3 objectivesDescribe how Mesopotamian and Egyptian art served rulership, religion, and the afterlife · Explain the conventions of Egyptian representation: hierarchy of scale, composite pose, and canon of proportions · Analyze how monumental architecture expressed political and divine power
• Greece, Etruria & Rome15 min · 3 objectivesTrace the Greek development from Archaic rigidity to Classical contrapposto to Hellenistic drama · Compare Etruscan and Roman approaches to the human figure, death, and portraiture · Explain Roman architectural innovations — the arch, concrete, and the dome — and their civic functions

Every term in Unit 2

All 24 terms we publish for Ancient Mediterranean, with definitions. Reading them through is the fastest way to find the ones you cannot define — then drill those in cram mode until you can produce them without the prompt.

White Temple and its ziggurat

Uruk, Sumer, c. 3500–3000 BCE, mud brick. Raised on a platform so the temple met the sky; the bent-axis approach forced worshippers to walk around before entering, controlling the experience of arrival.

Palette of King Narmer

Predynastic Egypt, c. 3000–2920 BCE, greywacke. Establishes the Egyptian canon: hierarchic scale, registers, composite view, and the king shown twice to unify Upper and Lower Egypt.

Statues of votive figures, Square Temple at Eshnunna

Sumerian, c. 2700 BCE, gypsum and shell. Oversized eyes fixed in permanent attention — the figures stand in for the worshipper, praying continuously in their absence.

Standard of Ur

Sumerian, c. 2600–2400 BCE, wood inlaid with shell and lapis. War and peace on opposite faces, read in registers bottom to top, with the king enlarged. Narrative before writing could carry it.

Great Pyramids and Great Sphinx

Giza, Egypt, c. 2550–2490 BCE, cut limestone. Tombs for Menkaure, Khafre and Khufu. Aligned to the cardinal points; the shape may model the sun's rays or a stairway for the king's ascent.

King Menkaure and queen

Egypt, c. 2490–2472 BCE, greywacke. Rigid frontality, left foot forward, arms at sides, uncarved back slab — Egyptian sculpture is made for eternity, not for movement.

Code of Hammurabi

Babylon, c. 1792–1750 BCE, basalt. Relief at the top shows Shamash handing Hammurabi the rod and ring; the laws below are therefore divinely authorized, not merely royal.

Temple of Amun-Re and Hypostyle Hall

Karnak, Egypt, c. 1550 BCE and later, cut sandstone. A forest of columns with clerestory lighting. Added to across centuries, so it records dynastic ambition as much as religion.

Akhenaton, Nefertiti, and three daughters

Amarna, Egypt, c. 1353–1335 BCE, limestone. Elongated skulls, heavy hips, intimate family posture — a deliberate break from the canon under a king who also broke from the gods.

Tutankhamun's tomb, innermost coffin

Egypt, c. 1323 BCE, gold with inlay. Nemes headdress, crook and flail, false beard. Its survival is an accident of a small, quickly sealed tomb, not a measure of the king's importance.

Lamassu, citadel of Sargon II

Assyria, c. 720–705 BCE, limestone. A guardian with five legs — four when seen from the side, at rest when seen from the front. Composition solves a viewing problem.

Athenian Agora

Greece, c. 600 BCE onward. The civic center: market, law court, meeting ground. Its openness is the physical form of participatory government.

Anavysos Kouros

Archaic Greece, c. 530 BCE, marble. Egyptian rigidity loosening — the archaic smile, weight still evenly distributed. A grave marker, not a portrait.

Peplos Kore

Acropolis, c. 530 BCE, marble with traces of paint. Named for a garment she may not wear; the surviving paint is a reminder that Greek marble was never white.

Niobides Krater

Classical Greece, c. 460–450 BCE, red-figure. Figures placed at different heights on an implied landscape — an early attempt at spatial depth on a curved surface.

Doryphoros (Spear Bearer)

Polykleitos, c. 450–440 BCE, Roman marble copy of bronze. Contrapposto and a mathematical canon of proportion. The body as a solved problem.

Acropolis: Parthenon

Iktinos and Kallikrates, 447–424 BCE, marble. Doric with Ionic elements, and full of optical refinements — entasis, curved stylobate, inward-leaning columns — so it LOOKS regular rather than is.

Grave stele of Hegeso

Athens, c. 410 BCE, marble. A woman choosing jewelry, framed by pediment and pilasters. Grief rendered as quiet domestic order.

Great Altar of Zeus and Athena

Pergamon, c. 175 BCE, marble. Hellenistic drama: deep undercutting, violent diagonals, figures spilling onto the stairs so the viewer joins the battle.

Head of a Roman patrician

Republican Rome, c. 75–50 BCE, marble. Veristic — wrinkles and sagging flesh recorded deliberately, because age signified experience and public authority.

Augustus of Prima Porta

Early Empire, early 1st century CE, marble. Polykleitan proportions, idealized youth, and a breastplate narrating a diplomatic victory. Propaganda dressed as classicism.

Colosseum

Rome, 70–80 CE, stone and concrete. Superimposed orders — Doric, Ionic, Corinthian — over a concrete barrel-and-groin-vaulted substructure. Roman engineering wearing Greek clothes.

Pantheon

Rome, 118–125 CE, concrete with stone facing. A coffered dome whose diameter equals its height from the floor, so the interior contains a perfect sphere. The oculus is the only light source.

Ludovisi Battle Sarcophagus

Late Empire, c. 250 CE, marble. Bodies compressed into a writhing mass with no groundline or depth — order dissolving as the empire does.

What examiners penalize here

• **Hierarchy of scale** (bigger = more important) and the **composite view** are two of the most testable Egyptian and Near Eastern conventions. When a prompt asks how an image conveys power or status, name the convention and say what it communicates — that is the analysis the rubric rewards.

Practice Art History

Our practice bank is drawn from across the whole course rather than filtered to one unit, which is closer to how the exam asks anyway — it will not tell you which unit a question is testing.

Questions about this unit

All 10 units of AP Art History

1. Unit 1 · Global Prehistory
2. Unit 2 · Ancient Mediterranean
3. Unit 3 · Early Europe & Colonial Americas
4. Unit 4 · Later Europe & Americas
5. Unit 5 · Indigenous Americas
6. Unit 6 · Africa
7. Unit 7 · West & Central Asia
8. Unit 8 · South, East & Southeast Asia
9. Unit 9 · The Pacific
10. Unit 10 · Global Contemporary