Art and its role in the development of civilization

Greek philosopher Plato said that art is representative of reality

On “Art and its role in Civilizational Development”, Architecture  Marwan Hassan,  Head of the Antiquities Department in Tartous gave a lecture at the Cultural Center in Tartous, in which he emphasized that the Syrian land is rich, since the stone age, in different forms of art that have grown and developed over time.

Hassan pointed out that the primitive man began documenting his daily life and expressing himself through drawings on the walls of the caves in which he lived and through painting animals and hunting scenes.

As people entered the civilized advanced stages, man moved from drawing to symbolic writing, which uses simple letters to express specific forms, Hassan said in his lecture, adding that the Syrian people are the owners of the oldest wall drawings discovered so far in the Middle East and the world. The oldest drawing on a wall built by man dates back to the new stone age. The excavations indicated that the oldest use of colors in decorating the houses in Syria were discovered on the Archaeological site of Al-Mraybet in the Middle Euphrates basin.

Architecture Hassan stated that every historical period in Syria has its own famous drawings and colors, whereby the Phoenicians used the purple-red color which is extracted from the “Morex” shell.

Hassan said  that mosaic art is also a graphic art where the painting is formed by paving a large number of small colored stone pieces so that they are landscapes, geometric shapes, human or animal drawings.

Concerning the art of sculpture, Hassan said that the sculptural art has been known since about 4,500 years BC and this art has been linked since ancient times to architecture and urban organization  and still plays this role.

The art of sculpture is the art that immortalized the civilizational values that played a pivotal role in creating civilization and strengthening our motivation to continue in life and the ability to create new and lasting innovation. In brief, sculpture is the art of eternity.

 He added that through sculpture, we have harvested a lot of information from our predecessors , their civilizations, their thoughts, their ways of life, their costumes and even their food .

 In the field of architecture, Victor Hugo says: (Architecture is the mirror upon which the cultures of the peoples are reflected).

Inas Abdulkareem