Timeline of Western Art, from Prehistoric to Ancient: Art History 101

A brief history of the beginning of the art world

Art is universal across all cultures. Creativity is in every corner of the globe, is essential to every civilization, and spans up to 100,000 years of human history.

We can roughly organize periods of art into six categories:

1. Prehistoric

2. Bronze Age

3. Iron Age

4. Medieval

5. Renaissance

6. Modern & Contemporary

This 3-part Substack series will serve as an introduction to a portion of world art, combining two categories in each article. Entire textbooks have been written on each of these categories, so I won’t cover literally everything (for now). I like the 80/20 rule.

We can however place every movement in its proper context. A brief overview of what they're like, how they fit together into human history, how influence crosses borders, etc. I’ll link a few resources for further reading.

Note: I’ll cover American and Asian art in the future. For now we’ll focus on Europe, Africa, and the Near East. These are more interconnected.

Let’s start with the very origins of art and culture.

Prehistoric Art

The earliest known art dates back over 70,000 years ago: the Blombos cave drawings. Humans made “crayons” of rock and clay. Coincidentally, Homo sapiens developed basic language around this time (thought to emerge between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago). As art and communication developed, humans developed the capacity for culture.

Art became more complex over the next tens of thousands of years. Beads, cave paintings, symbolic artifacts, etc. Humans spread out by both land and sea, and the world’s small population meant there wasn’t much cross-cultural contact. Most of what we see is universal.

Cave paintings are typically 15,000 to 40,000 years old. The famous Lascaux cave paintings date back to around 17,000 years ago. The earliest ones are in places like Italy’s Fumane Cave, Spain’s El Castillo Cave, and in multiple Indonesian caves from 35,000 to 40,000 BC.

(Autist note: Dating and attribution are tricky, because Neanderthals and Denisovans also figured out art. For example, Maltravieso Cave in Spain. Its cave paintings are older than estimates for the arrival of humans in Europe. Denisova Cave included the world’s oldest needle alongside jewelry at least 50,000 years old. And stone tools even predate humanity; for example, ancestors like Homo habilis. The Stone Age began millions of years ago, although it’s divided into different eras.)

We’re a species of builders. We love making stuff.

The famous “Venus figurines” are often around 25,000 years old. They fall within the same time period as cave painting activity.

We discovered most of the world’s oldest pottery in East Asia. Xianrendong Cave and Yuchanyan Cave held work that dates back as far as 20,000 years ago.

What’s interesting is that so much early art is decorative. Even as humanity struggled for survival, they had the time and willpower to make jewelry and paint. It contributed nothing to our survival (unlike pottery, which is necessary and practical).

The Neolithic Revolution

Humans began transitioning from hunter-gatherers to agricultural societies around 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. The Natufian culture for example. Also see: the Holocene epoch and Younger Dryas. As free time increased, and people became attached to specific areas, early foundations of art and writing (proto-writing) increased in tandem. We largely abandoned caves and petroglyphs (outdoor rock carvings and paintings) became more common.

Villages, towns, and temples followed. We get detailed carvings along with elaborate megalithic structures like in Göbekli Tepe (9000 BC), the temples at Malta (3600 BC), and Stonehenge (3000-2400 BC).

Give men access to giant rocks and we’ll stack them. It’s just natural.

This step is important for the relief carvings (around rock instead of in rock) in some of these works. Not just the architectural and technological advancements.

One of the earliest cities is Çatalhöyük in modern-day Turkey. Constructed as early as 7500 BC, the dense settlement housed over 6,000 people. It had no streets and people accessed homes by rooftop. Many homes were decorated with paintings and sculpture, including one of the world’s oldest landscape paintings (of an erupting volcano). It became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2012.

The world’s oldest major city is thought to be Uruk (in Mesopotamia) dating back to ~4000 BC. It likely held over 40,000 people at its height. The “Fertile Crescent” region of the Middle East flourished early on, due to ease of agriculture and access to the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. A food surplus is essential for civilizations to develop.

Uruk eventually transitioned from a collection of small farming villages into a complex unified city. They created government administration, a standing military, political and religious systems, and more. This same process would happen throughout the world, including famous cities like Athens. Centralization had benefits.

The first coherent writing systems (cuneiform and hieroglyphics) emerged around 3500-3000 BC.

By 3000 BC, the global population was thought to be at 50 million people.

With advancements in technology and culture, the Stone Age transitioned to the Bronze Age, and the invention of writing ended the Prehistoric era.

Ancient Art and the Bronze Age

Cultural evolution exploded alongside widespread farming and the evolution of cities. This included metalworking, tapestries, wall art, temples, monuments, and social classes. The start of the Bronze Age is usually given as 3300 BC, although it varies by region.

The Near East: Mesopotamian & Egyptian Art 

Mesopotamia encompasses several cultures as part of The Fertile Crescent. In the modern era it’s largely the region of Iraq and Syria.

Sumer is our source for the world’s oldest known literature, the Epic of Gilgamesh, dating back to 2100 BC and written in cuneiform. The Great Ziggurat of Ur was completed around 2000 BC. Sumerian ships traveled the Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea to trade with others, importing and exporting some cultural elements.

To the north rose Mesopotamia’s arguably first empire: the Akkadians, known for Sargon of Akkad (2334-2279 BC) who overtook the Sumerians. The empire came to an end in 2154-2147 BC. Their grip on the peoples of the area wasn’t tight enough, there were arguments over succession, and invaders hit the Akkadians. Sargon’s sons weren’t the ruler he was.

The Sumerian and Akkadian cultures effectively unified over time, and the Akkadian Empire is sometimes said to have been succeeded by a Neo-Sumerian Empire. After a period of turmoil, the Babylonian Empire came to prominence.

Babylon, in central Mesopotamia, is best known for King Hammurabi who reigned from 1792 to 1750 BC. He conquered most of Mesopotamia and introduced the Code of Hammurabi. Upon his death, however, the empire fell apart. Subsequent rulers were weaker, the area was tough to defend, and independent city-states like Assyria chafed under external rule.

One nail in Babylonia’s coffin was invasion by the Hittites (from modern-day Turkey) in 1595-1531 BC, although it made a comeback from 626-539 BC until it was overthrown by the Persians (the Achaemenid Empire) and later conquered by Alexander The Great in 332 BC. More on that later.

Assyrian art is among the most complex of early civilizations. Their main city (Assur) was an important trade hub which grew out of an Akkadian city-state. This gave Assyrian culture a fantastic platform upon which to build, including access to the region’s greatest artisans. They reworked a lot of old Babylonian literature too.

Assyrian art is both combination and culmination of Sumerian, Akkadian, and Babylonian art, as well as other cultures from the region (plus invading cultures and trade partners).

There are other cultures in ancient Mesopotamia, but for the sake of brevity, I’ll move on for now. We can revisit the topic later.

Egyptian art is what everyone is familiar with, partly since Egypt’s apex outshines Mesopotamian art. Intricate glyphs, painting, papyrus, monuments, jewelry, sarcophagi, etc. We all know what this looks like. It’s good stuff. Egypt had more influence on/from the Mediterranean and Mesopotamian kingdoms than Sub-Saharan Africa. There are many reasons behind this, so I’ll probably write an entire article on Egypt later.

The Bronze Age more or less coincides with the Egyptian Old Kingdom (2686-2181 BC) to the New Kingdom (1550-1069 BC) periods, which had tremendous influence. The Great Pyramid of Giza (the first of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World) and Great Sphinx were both constructed around 2600-2500 BC.

Sub-Saharan African Art

African art is divided along several cultural and regional lines. North Africa, for example, has Mediterranean influences, unlike West and South. Areas heavily differ and you’ll find variety everywhere, which makes sense given the sheer size of the continent.

Sub-Saharan African art is fairly under-studied, especially between 10,000 BC and 1,000 AD. Prehistoric art is well-documented as part of “Out of Africa” theories, as mentioned above. Otherwise, prior to Africa’s Bronze Age and Iron Age, we don’t have much information. Most art was created with natural materials (like wood) which decayed and vanished over time.

The Nok culture (in modern-day Nigeria) is thought to have discovered iron forging between 1000 and 500 BC.

Mediterranean Art and Early Europe

Greece is widely called “the birthplace of Western civilization.” Human habitation goes back as far as 210,000 years ago. We can see the full human timeline, from the Stone Age to the Agricultural Revolution.

Early farming cultures in Europe included the Vinča culture (5700-4500 BC), known for its small figurines and copper smelting. An early example of potential writing was found on a wooden tablet dating to 5202 BC (Dispilio Tablet).

Major civilizations include the Aegean trio: Cycladic, Minoan, and Mycenaean, active from around 3200 BC until the end of the Bronze Age.

The Minoan culture, based out of Crete, is especially notable as “the first advanced civilization in Europe.” They had complex stonework and jewelry, a class of art-enthusiast aristocrats, and their architecture included frescoes and indoor plumbing. Unfortunately, their buildings haven’t held up well over time. And after their civilization declined, it wasn’t even “discovered” until 1878. The Minoans used limestone, gypsum, clay, and wood as primary building materials. Earthquakes and invasions also ravaged Crete.

Yet Minoan quality is undeniable and stands on par with the more famous Egyptian culture. Minoan stonework was precise enough that multi-story buildings could be put up without using mortar. The Palace of Knossos covered 3-5 acres and had over 1,000 rooms. There’s at least one example of a flushable toilet in their surprisingly complex system of indoor plumbing.

We get the “minotaur” labyrinth myth from this region.

The city of Troy, known for its role in The Iliad and The Odyssey, dates back to 3000-2500 BC. There are several “versions” of Troy excavated in multiple archeological layers, so we aren’t 100% sure which one is the city of legend.

The Mediterranean was always a flashpoint of cross-cultural contact. It connects southern Europe, northern Africa, and the Middle East. You can see this influence in the art of each culture, as they traded ideas. The empires of Alexander The Great, and later the Roman Empire, gave rise to even more intermingling as these cultures connected under unifying forces.

The End of the Bronze Age

There was a sudden period of upheaval known as the Bronze Age Collapse in 1200 BC. Historians don’t agree on a singular cause for this. It was likely a combination of factors, including a legendary “Sea People” wreaking havoc in the Mediterranean.

This aftermath isn’t well documented and the period is called the “Greek Dark Ages” by historians. This era ended in 776 BC with the first Olympic Games, created by Hercules according to one myth.

Despite these “dark ages,” the Mediterranean came back bigger than ever. We’ll have more to discuss in the follow-up to this article.

The Assyrians were the biggest winners during the collapse and they have the most consistent records of the time period. They eventually expanded to “empire” status, even conquering Egypt, and covered much of the Near East at its height.

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