Egypt's pharaohs expected to become gods in the afterlife. To prepare for the next world they erected temples to the gods and massive pyramid tombs for themselves—filled with all the things each ruler would need to guide and sustain himself in the next world.

Pharaoh Khufu began the first Giza pyramid project, circa 2550 B.C. His Great Pyramid is the largest in Giza and towers some 481 feet (147 meters) above the plateau. Its estimated 2.3 million stone blocks each weigh an average of 2.5 to 15 tons.

Khufu's son, Pharaoh Khafre, built the second pyramid at Giza, circa 2520 B.C. His necropolis also included the Sphinx, a mysterious limestone monument with the body of a lion and a pharaoh's head. The Sphinx may stand sentinel for the pharaoh's entire tomb complex.

The third of the Giza Pyramids is considerably smaller than the first two. Built by Pharaoh Menkaure circa 2490 B.C., it featured a much more complex mortuary temple.

However, Roman art owes a significant debt to the Greeks. Although the Romans conquered the Greeks in the Battle of Corinth in 146 B.C.E., the military victory was not accompanied by cultural submission. Instead, elite Romans clamored for reproductions of famed marble sculptures by skilled Greek artists like Praxiteles. Most Roman sculptors, though, never achieved such fame. Their copies were often left unsigned due to the low-class status of the artisans and the general preference among Romans for works by Greek masters.Today, many of the most iconic Greek sculptures survive only as Roman reproductions.

The Romans left their own mark on sculpture by taking portraiture to an unprecedented level of verism and creating vast public works projects depicting complex mythologies and military victories. Starting with Augustus, the first emperor, Roman leaders started to use statues as propaganda; these works, usually made in marble or bronze, frequently idealized their bodies and emphasized (often fictional) connections to great military commanders of the past. Many artifacts and artworks survive from the Roman era. These are the seven sculptures essential to understanding the empire’s vast contributions to the history of art.

During the 11th and 12th centuries, figurative sculpture was revived as architectural reliefs became a hallmark of the later Romanesque period. Figurative sculpture was based largely on manuscript illumination and small-scale sculpture in ivory and metal. Most Romanesque sculpture is pictorial and biblical in subject.

The use of valuable materials is a constant in medieval art; until the end of the period, far more was typically spent on buying them than on paying the artists, even if these were not monks performing their duties. Gold was used for objects for churches and palaces, personal jewellery and the fittings of clothes, and—fixed to the back of glass tesserae—as a solid background for mosaics, or applied as gold leaf to miniatures in manuscripts and panel paintings. Many objects using precious metals were made in the knowledge that their bullion value might be realized at a future point—only near the end of the period could money be invested other than in real estate, except at great risk or by committing usury.

Even these basic materials were costly: when the Anglo-Saxon Monkwearmouth-Jarrow Abbey planned to create three copies of the bible in 692—of which one survives as the Codex Amiatinus—the first step necessary was to plan to breed the cattle to supply the 1,600 calves to give the skin for the vellum required.^[8]

Paper became available in the last centuries of the period, but was also extremely expensive by today's standards; woodcuts sold to ordinary pilgrims at shrines were often matchbook size or smaller. Modern dendrochronology has revealed that most of the oak for panels used in Early Netherlandish painting of the 15th century was felled in the Vistula basin in Poland, from where it was shipped down the river and across the Baltic and North Seas to Flemish ports, before being seasoned for several years.^[9]

Art in the Middle Ages is a broad subject and art historians traditionally divide it in several large-scale phases, styles or periods. The period of the Middle Ages neither begins nor ends neatly at any particular date, nor at the same time in all regions, and the same is true for the major phases of art within the period.^[10] The major phases are covered in the following sections.