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For those wondering where I have been, I was at a family gathering. I just got on Egyptsearch yesterday planning to post more pictures in my “Depictions of Ancient Middle Easterners and Aegeans” thread, but instead I decided to address this guy’s post. I spent all day making these previous posts in dedication to this guy’s opinion about Ancient North Africa. If anyone is interested in seeing brilliant pictures of Ancient Middle Easterners go to this thread.
Carnotaurus sastrei, a medium-sized theropod dinosaur of the abelisaurid family, sprints through the jungles of South America during the Late Cretaceous around 70 million years ago. Equipped with thick tail muscles attached to its thigh bone, Carnotaurus may have been one of the fastest non-avian dinosaurs yet discovered, with a top speed clocking between 30 and 35 miles per hour. This would have helped this predator chase down its prey across the prehistoric landscape.
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This would be a sketchbook doodle of a prehistoric chick in the process of throwing a spear. The spear’s flint head is inspired by those manufactured by the Clovis culture of North America between 11,500 and 11,000 years ago (even if the character herself is obviously not Native American).
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What if some genetic engineering company decided to apply their technology in the market of cosmetics? It’d probably be expensive as hell for their customers, but they could still make a killing with all the genetically modified “upgrades” they’d offer. All the plastic surgeons would be green with envy!
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Portrait of an ancient Egyptian queen, drawn in the distinctive Egyptian style of course. I used a faux Egyptian papyrus illustration on my wall as reference for this, although I did not want to copy it exactly.
quote:Originally posted by Tyrannohotep: What if some genetic engineering company decided to apply their technology in the market of cosmetics? It’d probably be expensive as hell for their customers, but they could still make a killing with all the genetically modified “upgrades” they’d offer. All the plastic surgeons would be green with envy!
LOL when an Imp puts on Kelly Rowland's face. That's how they trick a man into fucking a lizard.
Posts: 27 | From: Rome | Registered: Sep 2019
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The subject of this stylized portrait is Hammurabi, the Amorite warrior king of Babylon who laid down one of the most influential law codes in Middle Eastern history. This time, I tried to emulate the art style of the Babylonians, as well as the Assyrians who would dominate the region of Mesopotamia (now known as Iraq) well after Hammurabi’s time.
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I drew this line art of a woman with a longbow entirely within the Procreate app on my iPad. Not a fan of how wobbly some of the lines turned out, but I am proud to have taken on the challenge nonetheless.
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These would be three female characters’ faces which I drew with cartoon-style proportions (e.g. big eyes). I find the one at the top to be the most seductive, though I also like how the other two came out.
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This sketchbook doodle of an Allosaurus is meant to show the dinosaur’s “cracked”, crocodile-like texture of the facial integument in greater detail. As always, those dots on its snout are meant to represent tiny sensitive bumps like those you find on crocodilians’ faces.
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These two princesses, mounted on their war dinosaurs, are jousting in the jungle that grows between their rival kingdoms. Because if there’s one thing more awesome than a warrior babe riding a dinosaur, it’s two of them fighting one another!
If you don’t recognize the dinosaurs our heroines are riding, they are supposed to be the tyrannosaurid Gorgosaurus and the spike-frilled ceratopsian Styracosaurus.
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Today I'll post a "throwback" artwork I did back in 2017, since the topic of how the earliest European AMH would have looked came up in a recent ES thread.
Sometime around 40,000 years before present, this Upper Paleolithic woman (Homo sapiens) is weathering the wintry cold of Pleistocene Europe. Although she has inherited most of her physical features from her African ancestors around the time they settled Europe, you may notice she has green eyes as foreshadowing for her people’s eventual evolution into modern “white” Europeans.
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This is a facial portrait of Tianyuan Man, an early modern human (Homo sapiens) who would have lived in northeastern China between 42,000 and 39,000 years ago, making him among the first modern humans to occupy the region of East Asia. Identified from 34 bone fragments found in the Tianyuan Cave near modern Beijing, he and his people would have been related to the ancestors of modern Asian and Native American people. Isotope analysis of these remains suggests that Tianyuan Man’s hunter-gatherer community would have eaten a lot of freshwater fish back in their time.
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This T-shirt design stars the Kushite warrior queen Amanirenas, who reigned between 40 and 10 BC and is known for her war against the mighty Roman Empire. A shirt or dress with this printed on would be more than suitable gift for the headstrong woman in your life!
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Deep in the Amazonian rainforest waddles Glyptodon, a herbivorous armadillo as big as a small automobile. These massive armored mammals would have roamed South America until 11,000 years ago, so the first Native Americans to migrate into the continent would have encountered and maybe even hunted them.
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The woman portrayed here represents a population of early Homo sapiens whose remains have been uncovered at the site of Jebel Irhoud in Morocco. Dated to around 300,000 years ago, their fossils may be the oldest assigned to the modern human species thus far. However, the braincases of the Jebel Irhoud people’s skulls have a longer, lower shape than those of humans today, a characteristic considered more “archaic” in paleoanthropology.
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Somewhere in Africa circa 70-50,000 years ago, a band of early modern humans (Homo sapiens) wanders far and wide in search of new foraging grounds. Their travels might even take them outside the continent, therefore announcing the species’s colonization of the rest of the habitable world.
Although there is evidence of shorter-lived dispersals out of Africa by Homo sapiens before 100,000 years ago, it is the one that took place between 70 and 50 kya to which everyone living outside of Africa today can trace the majority of their ancestry.
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Today I'd like to do a little throwback to this depiction I did of Rama and Sita, the leading man and lady from the Hindu epic known as the Ramayana. Their appearance is supposed to be "Australoid" like that of the Indian subcontinent's aboriginal pre-Aryan inhabitants.
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I did this simple sketchbook doodle of Sekhmet, the Egyptian goddess of war, to kill time at my local library. Drawing women as seen from the back like this can be at once challenging and fun.
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Sekhmet, the Egyptian goddess of war, charges into battle brandishing a pair of nunchaku. I know nunchucks aren’t really an ancient Egyptian weapon, but they’re cool, so who cares?
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These sketches are all themed around Homo erectus, an ancestor of human beings which would have evolved in Africa around two million years ago. They would have been the first hominins to use fire for cooking, although they probably had not developed our capacity for language or art yet. And, while they would have used stone tools, they probably did not make any clothes!
When drawing the full-body view of the female Homo erectus, I was unsure how human or ape-like her body would appear. However, all the online sources I could find said that Homo erectus’s body proportions would have been similar to a modern human’s, so that’s what I went with.
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A little less than two million years ago, a female Homo erectus walks across a grassy field with a stone handaxe in her grip. Handaxes, also known as bifaces, were primitive stone tools that human ancestors such as H. erectus would have used for chopping and cutting substances such as meat, tubers, wood, and bark. They would have been the progenitors to our knives, axes, and bladed weaponry.
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This early Homo sapiens woman has found a doting friend in the form of an African wildcat (Felis lybica) she has adopted.
The historical consensus is that our modern house cats descend from African wildcats that were domesticated in the Middle East during the Neolithic Revolution, about 10,000 years ago. But since these cats are native to Africa, where modern humans first emerged, I wouldn’t be surprised if the friendship between people and cats went even further back. Maybe it was the cat, rather than the dog, that became humanity’s first best friend?
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This is a colored-pencil portrait of the tyrannosaurid Thanatotheristes degrootorum, the fossil remains of which were uncovered from the Foremost Formation in Alberta, Canada. It would have hunted other dinosaurs in the subtropical forests and wetlands of that region between 78 and 77 million years ago, and it seems to have been most closely related to another medium-sized tyrannosaurid called Daspletosaurus.
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This would be Dihya al-Kahina, the Zenata warrior queen who fought the Arab invasion of North Africa, in "chibi" style! I know it's a bit of a weird idea, but I was real hungry for inspiration when I came up with the concept.
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This is a view from the back of Dihya al-Kahina, the Zenata warrior queen of ancient North Africa, which I did with my set of colored pencils.
When I was getting started as an artist, I used to color exclusively with colored pencils before moving on to digital methods. I think digital coloring looks better in general, but there’s still a bit of fun to be had in using old-fashioned media for a change.
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This is a character I designed for a commission I received from a Facebook correspondent, who wanted a new logo for her “Ahosi Beauty” company (it’s named after one of the terms for the warrior women of pre-colonial Dahomey in West Africa). It turned out that she was asking for a much simpler design than this, but I didn’t want my original conception to go to waste. So, here it is for your enjoyment.
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On an overcast day in the Late Jurassic Period around 150 million years ago, these Giraffatitan brancai are browsing for coniferous foliage to satisfy their immense herbivorous appetites. Giraffatitan was a close relative of the North American Brachiosaurus, but it was native to Africa. Even by the standards of Jurassic sauropods, these dinosaurs would have been immense, possibly weighing over 85 tons!
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Amanitore was another one of the Kentakes (ruling queens) of the kingdom of Kush, in what is now northern Sudan. She reigned as co-regent alongside a man named Natakamani between 1 BC and 25 AD. Much of her activity was that of a builder and restorer of temples and other monuments, as Kush would have been recovering from a violent war the Romans fought against her predecessor Amanirenas. Nonetheless, the kingdom returned to prosperity quickly during her reign, with agriculture and the iron industry in particular flourishing.
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This prehistoric huntress might be stalking her prey, or alternatively sneaking past a predator which could hunt her in turn. In the savage world she inhabits, one can never be too wary or too stealthy…
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Time for another throwback piece! This is an illustration I did to symbolize the fact that people of European descent can trace almost a third of their ancestry to migrations out of Africa AFTER the initial “Out of Africa” migrations. I explain how this came to be in my essay “Why Europeans are Almost 1/3 African” (read it on my blog here).
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Mustafa Azemmouri (1500-1539 AD), alternatively known as Estevanico, was an enslaved “Moorish” man from Morocco who is remarkable for being one of the first enslaved individuals of African descent to have stepped on North American soil. In 1527, he came along on a Spanish expedition of conquest that brought him from Florida through Texas all the way to northern Mexico. It was a dangerous venture, with treacherous terrain and conflict with various Native American groups taking their toll on the expeditioners until only Estevanico and three other men were left to complete the journey. On another expedition that lead him to New Mexico, Estevanico died during a confrontation with the local Zuni people, who may have confused him with a malevolent magical being in their religion called the Chaikwana.
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This towering edifice would be a ziggurat, a structure of mudbrick that the Sumerians, Babylonians, and other peoples of ancient Mesopotamia (now Iraq and Kuwait) would erect for use as temples. Together with the pyramids and other tombs of the Nile Valley, these would have been among the earliest examples of monumental architecture anywhere in the world.
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Archaeopteryx lithographica, a feathered dinosaur from the Late Jurassic of Europe, has been touted as one of the earliest birds ever since its fossils were discovered in the 19th century. However, there remains uncertainty over its exact relationship to modern birds, with one study in 2011 suggesting it would have been more closely related to the dromaeosaurid and troodontid dinosaur families than to birds proper. Regardless of its classification, it would have lived as a carnivore or insectivore on what was then an archipelago of islands with a relatively dry climate and low-growing shrubby vegetation.
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With this spunky spearwoman, I wanted to play with a different style of digital rendering than my usual. I rather like how she came out looking like a character from the old “Samurai Jack” cartoon, which I loved as a kid.
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While exploring a mysterious jungle oasis where lifeforms from the Middle Cretaceous Period still persist, this ancient Egyptian expedition has bumped into a hungry Carcharodontosaurus! Will their bronze and copper weaponry be enough to fend off the massive meat-eater? Or will they try to capture the beast for the Pharaoh’s menagerie?
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This would be my interpretation of Mowgli, the Indian "man-cub" from Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book, with his melanistic leopard friend Bagheera. I have to be honest, I remember being disappointed in the story when I read the original Kipling work a few years back, but I do like some of the adaptations it has inspired (such as the live-action remake Disney did in 2016). You could say Mowgli is the Indian prototype for Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan of the Apes.
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When your mission is to take out a rogue Giganotosaurus with only your hunting bow, you might want to invest in some poison for your arrows. And then aim for the brain or the heart!
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Around 1900 BC, an Egyptian expedition has crossed the Mediterranean and is exploring the land that will someday be known as Greece. Unbeknown to them, the native inhabitants are watching them with every bit the same degree of curiosity…
This isn’t meant to represent an actual historical event, but rather a fictional “what if” scenario. That said, the ancient Greeks did have a few legends about Egyptians settling on their shores, and these would be the inspiration behind this artwork.
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Between 68 and 66 million years ago in North America, this Triceratops is chomping away at some low-hanging lianas. I think the hooked beaks and shearing teeth of ceratopsian dinosaurs such as Triceratops would have come in handy for processing fibrous and woody vegetation such as these vines.
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This Moorish warrior is swinging about a formidable scimitar forged of the famously tough and resilient Damascus steel. Despite being named after the Syrian capital city, this type of steel actually originated in India before it spread into the Islamic world.
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This character was originally going to be a random woman with a whip. However, while drawing it, I thought back to how the 2004 Catwoman movie with Halle Berry drew a connection between the character and the ancient Egyptian goddess Bastet. It may not have been that good of a movie, but I can credit it with inspiring me to turn my heroine into an Egyptian version of Catwoman!
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2,500 years ago in the countryside along the Sudanese Nile, these Kushite workmen have harnessed an elephant’s strength to help them carry logs for construction. This is admittedly a speculative scenario on my part, but there is evidence that the people of Kush kept African elephants in stables, possibly for war or ceremonies, at the archaeological site of Musawwarat es-Sufra. It doesn’t seem far-fetched to imagine them using elephants as beasts of burden the way that Indian and Southeast Asian cultures have traditionally used them. Many centuries later, the Belgian imperialists in the Congo would also use native elephants for this purpose for a brief period.
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Night has fallen upon this jungle-swathed region on a moon which orbits a giant gas planet. As you can probably guess, some of the inspiration for this concept comes from fictional jungle moons like Yavin IV in the Star Wars movies and Pandora in James Cameron’s Avatar. I wonder what life would be like on such a moon?
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This is my portrait of Mut, a "Mother Goddess" figure from ancient Egyptian mythology. Her name literally means "mother" in the ancient Egyptian language, and as the wife of the solar/creator god Amun-Ra, she rose to prominence in the national pantheon during the Middle Kingdom. She's also the patron goddess and mentor for my protagonist Itaweret in my upcoming novel "Priestess of the Lost Colony".
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