In prehistoric Europe and in the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Aegean, art and architecture were bound up with matters of human survival--both in this life and the next--and with social and religious rituals. Most of the surviving art of these ancient civilizations played a public role, leaving little room for representations of individual insight or personal identity. Art was often used as an instrument of power and persuasion, as images of rulers portrayed -- and reinforced -- their divine authority. Cave paintings, megalithic stone circles, ziggurats, temples and pyramids, as well as carved vases and painted scrolls for the dead -- all provided ancient peoples with the means to define their place in the cosmos and to implore their many deities.

In ancient art, Nature plays a role that is crucial in one respect and minor in another. Except in Egyptian tomb decorations and Aegean wall paintings, the natural world is rarely used as a setting for human action or pleasure. But the life force and power of nature, as embodied in particular birds and animals--such as the bull, serpent and vulture--as well as in fruits and grains, is widespread. The rituals depicted in both sacred and secular art represent the might of deities and rulers alike.

As agricultural surpluses enabled city life to develop in the fertile valleys of the Euphrates, the Tigris, the Nile, and the Jordan, priests and kings concentrated the greatest architectural effort on their temples, ziggurats, palaces, and pyramids. As these civilizations flourished, others developed in India and China which remained, however, unknown to the West until many centuries later. Meanwhile, as the great polytheistic civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt declined, the Semitic Jews, whose artistic heritage was not physically monumental, embraced monotheism, a spiritual force so powerful that it would transform the thought and art of the Near East