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Title: Egyptian Art - Studies
Author: Maspero, G. (Gaston)
Language: English
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EGYPTIAN ART
* * * * * *
_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_
New Light on Ancient Egypt.
Translated by ELIZABETH LEE.
Illustrated. Demy 8vo, cloth. =12/6= net. Cheap Edition
=6/-= net.
Egypt: Ancient Sites and Modern Scenes.
Translated by ELIZABETH LEE.
With Coloured Frontispiece and 16 other Illustrations.
Demy 8vo, cloth. =12/6= net.
LONDON: T. FISHER UNWIN
* * * * * *
EGYPTIAN ART
Studies
BY
SIR GASTON MASPERO
Hon. K.C.M.G., Hon. D.C.L., and Fellow of Queen’S College, Oxford
Member of the Institute of France, Professor at the Collège de France,
Director-General of the Service des Antiquités, Cairo
Translated by Elizabeth Lee
With 107 Illustrations
T. Fisher Unwin
London: Adelphi Terrace
Leipsic: Inselstrasse 20
First published in 1913
(All rights reserved)
PREFATORY NOTE
The following essays were written during a period of more than thirty
years, and published at intervals of varying lengths. The oldest
of them appeared in _Les Monuments de l’Art Antique_ of my friend
Olivier Rayet, and the others in _La Nature_ at the request of Gaston
Tissandier, in the _Gazette des Beaux-Arts_, in the _Monuments Piot_,
and chiefly in the _Revue de l’Art Ancien et Moderne_, where my friend
Jules Comte gave them hospitality. As most of these periodicals do not
circulate in purely scientific circles, the essays are almost unknown
to experts, and will for the greater part be new to them. Indeed, they
were not intended for them. In writing them, I desired to familiarize
the general public, who were scarcely aware of their existence, with
some of the fine pieces of Egyptian sculpture and goldsmiths’ work, and
to point out how to approach them in order to appreciate their worth.
Some, after various vicissitudes, had found a home in the Museums of
Paris or of Cairo, and I wrote the notices in my study, deducing at
leisure the reasons for my criticisms. Others I caught as they emerged
from the ground, the very day of or the day after their discovery, and
I described them on the spot, as it were, under the influence of my
first encounter with them: they themselves dictated to me what I said
of them.
Some persons will perhaps be surprised to find the same ideas developed
at length in several parts of the book. If they will carry their
thoughts back to the date at which I wrote, they will recognize the
necessity of such repetitions. Egyptologists, absorbed in the task of
deciphering, had eyes for scarcely anything except the historical or
religious literary texts; and so amateurs or inquirers, finding nothing
in the works of experts to help them to any sound interpretation of the
characteristic manifestations of Egyptian art, were reduced to register
them without always understanding them, for lack of knowledge of the
concepts that had imposed their forms on them. It is now admitted
that such objects of art are above all utilitarian, and that they
were originally commissioned with the fixed purpose of assuring the
well-being of human survival in an existence beyond the grave. Thirty
years ago, few were aware of this, and to convince the rest, it was
necessary to insist continually on the proofs and to multiply examples.
I might of course have suppressed a portion of them here, but had I
done so, should I not have been reproached, and quite rightly, with
misrepresenting and almost falsifying a passage in the history of the
Egyptian arts? The ideas which govern our present conception did not
at once reach the point where they now are. They came into being one
after the other, and spread themselves by successive waves of unequal
intensity, welcomed with favour by some, rejected by others. I had to
begin over again a dozen times and in a dozen different ways before I
obtained their almost universal acceptation. I was at first laughed at
when I put forward the opinion that there was not one unique art in
Egypt, identical from one extremity of the valley to the other except
for almost imperceptible nuances of execution, but that there were at
least half a dozen local schools, each with its own traditions and
its own principles, often divided into several studios, the technique
of which I tried to determine. In the end the incredulous rallied to
my side, and it would have been bad grace on my part to leave out of
the articles which helped to convert them, at least I hope so, the
repetitions which led to their being convinced.
Besides, I am sure that they will render my readers of to-day the same
service that they rendered formerly to my colleagues in Egyptology.
When they have thoroughly entered into the spirit of the Egyptian
ideas concerning existence in this world and the next, they will
understand what Egyptian art is, and why it is above everything
realistic. The question for Egyptian art was not to create a type of
independent beauty in the person of the individuals who furnish the
principal elements of it, but to express truthfully the features which
constituted that person and which must be preserved identical as long
as anything of him persisted among the living and the dead. But why
should I epitomize here in a necessarily incomplete way ideas which
are amply set forth in the book itself? I shall do better in using
the small space left me in thanking the publishers who have kindly
authorized me to reproduce the illustrations which accompanied my
articles, Jules Comte, the directors of _La Nature_, and my old friends
of the firm of Hachette. They have thus collaborated in this book, and
it will owe a large part of its success to their kindness.
CONTENTS
PAGE
PREFATORY NOTE 5
I
EGYPTIAN STATUARY AND ITS SCHOOLS 17
II
SOME PORTRAITS OF MYCERINUS 36
III
A SCRIBE’S HEAD OF THE IVTH OR VTH DYNASTY 49
IV
SKHEMKA, HIS WIFE AND SON: A GROUP FOUND AT MEMPHIS 55
V
THE CROUCHING SCRIBE: VTH DYNASTY 60
VI
THE NEW SCRIBE OF THE GIZEH MUSEUM 66
VII
THE KNEELING SCRIBE: VTH DYNASTY 74
VIII
PEHOURNOWRI: STATUETTE IN PAINTED LIMESTONE FOUND AT MEMPHIS 79
IX
THE DWARF KHNOUMHOTPOU: VTH OR VITH DYNASTY 85
X
THE “FAVISSA” OF KARNAK, AND THE THEBAN SCHOOL OF SCULPTURE 90
XI
THE COW OF DEÎR-EL-BAHARÎ 106
XII
THE STATUETTE OF AMENÔPHIS IV 120
XIII
FOUR CANOPIC HEADS FOUND IN THE VALLEY OF THE KINGS AT THEBES 126
XIV
A HEAD OF THE PHARAOH HARMHABI 135
XV
THE COLOSSUS OF RAMSES II AT BEDRECHEÎN 140
XVI
EGYPTIAN JEWELLERY IN THE LOUVRE 145
XVII
THE TREASURE OF ZAGAZIG 154
XVIII
THREE STATUETTES IN WOOD 172
XIX
A FRAGMENT OF A THEBAN STATUETTE 178
XX
THE LADY TOUÎ OF THE LOUVRE AND EGYPTIAN INDUSTRIAL SCULPTURE
IN WOOD 183
XXI
SOME PERFUME LADLES OF THE XVIIITH DYNASTY 190
XXII
SOME GREEN BASALT STATUETTES OF THE SAÏTE PERIOD 195
XXIII
A FIND OF SAÏTE JEWELS AT SAQQARAH 201
XXIV
A BRONZE EGYPTIAN CAT BELONGING TO M. BARRÈRE 208
XXV
A FIND OF CATS IN EGYPT 214
INDEX 217
ILLUSTRATIONS
FACING PAGE
THE MYCERINUS OF MÎT-RAHINEH 38
MYCERINUS (REISNER HEAD) 38
ALABASTER STATUE OF MYCERINUS 40
MYCERINUS, HATHOR, AND THE NOME OXYRRHINCHUS 42
MYCERINUS, HATHOR, AND THE NOME CYNOPOLITE 42
MYCERINUS AND HIS WIFE 44
MYCERINUS, HATHOR, AND THE NOME OF THE SISTRUM 46
MYCERINUS AND HIS WIFE (DETAIL) 46
MYCERINUS AND HIS WIFE (DETAIL) 48
SCRIBE’S HEAD 50
SKHEMKA WITH HIS WIFE AND SON 56
CROUCHING SCRIBE 60
THE NEW SCRIBE OF THE GIZEH MUSEUM 66
STATUE OF RÂNOFIR 72
KNEELING SCRIBE 74
PEHOURNOWRI 80
THE DWARF KHNOUMHOTPOU 86
THE WORKS AT KARNAK IN JANUARY, 1906 92
MONTOUHOTPOU V 94
HEAD OF A COLOSSUS OF SANOUOSRÎT 94
SANOUOSRÎT AND THE GOD PHTAH 94
BUST OF THOUTMÔSIS III 96
ISIS, MOTHER OF THOUTMÔSIS III 96
SANMAOUT AND THE PRINCESS NAFÊROURIYA 98
STATUETTE IN PETRIFIED WOOD 100
THEBAN KHONSOU 100
STATUE OF TOUTÂNOUKHAMANOU 100
THE SO-CALLED TAIA 100
RAMSES II 100
RAMSES IV LEADING A LIBYAN CAPTIVE 100
THE PRIEST WITH THE MONKEY 102
OSORKON II OFFERING A BOAT TO THE GOD AMON 104
QUEEN ANKHNASNOFIRIABRÊ 104
MANTIMEHÊ 104
NSIPHTAH, SON OF MANTIMEHÊ 104
HEAD (SAÏTE PERIOD) 104
THE COW OF DEÎR-EL-BAHARÎ IN HER CHAPEL 104
AMENÔTHES II AND THE COW HATHOR 106
AMENÔTHES II AND THE COW HATHOR 106
THE COW HATHOR 108
AN UNKNOWN FIGURE AND THE COW HATHOR 112
PETESOMTOUS AND THE COW HATHOR 114
PSAMMETICHUS AND THE COW HATHOR 116
PSAMMETICHUS AND THE COW HATHOR 118
AMENÔPHIS IV 120
KING KHOUNIATONOU 126
KING KHOUNIATONOU 126
KING KHOUNIATONOU 128
KING KHOUNIATONOU 130
KING KHOUNIATONOU 130
QUEEN TÎYI (FULL FACE) 130
QUEEN TÎYI (PROFILE) 130
PRINCESS OF THE FAMILY OF TÎYI (PROFILE) 132
PRINCESS OF THE FAMILY OF TÎYI (FULL FACE) 132
KING KHOUNIATONOU 132
KING KHOUNIATONOU 134
HEAD OF THE PHARAOH HARMHABI 136
THE HALF-BURIED COLOSSUS OF RAMSES II 140
THE COLOSSUS OF RAMSES II EMERGING FROM THE EARTH 140
EGYPTIAN JEWELLERY OF THE XIXTH DYNASTY 146
GOLD PECTORAL INLAID WITH ENAMEL 146
PECTORAL OF RAMSES II 148
PECTORAL IN SHAPE OF A HAWK WITH A RAM’S HEAD 148
SILVER BRACELETS AND EARRINGS 156
GOLD EARRING FROM THE TREASURE OF ZAGAZIG 156
ONE OF RAMSES II’S BRACELETS (OPEN) 158
ONE OF RAMSES II’s BRACELETS (CLOSED) 158
GOLD CUP OF QUEEN TAOUASRÎT 160
SMALLER OF THE TWO GOLD VASES (FRONT VIEW) 160
SMALLER OF THE TWO GOLD VASES (BACK VIEW) 162
MASS OF SILVER VASES SOLDERED TOGETHER BY OXIDE 162
LARGER OF THE TWO GOLD VASES (FRONT VIEW) 164
LARGER OF THE TWO GOLD VASES (BACK VIEW) 164
THE VASE WITH THE KID 164
ONE OF THE SILVER PATERÆ OF ZAGAZIG (SIDE VIEW) 166
SILVER STRAINER 166
THE BOTTOM OF ONE OF THE ZAGAZIG SILVER PATERÆ 168
STATUETTES IN WOOD 172
THE MOND STATUETTE (FRONT VIEW) 178
THE MOND STATUETTE (PROFILE) 180
THE LADY TOUÎ, STATUETTE IN WOOD 184
STATUETTE IN WOOD 186
STATUETTE IN WOOD 186
PERFUME LADLE 190
PERFUME LADLE 190
PERFUME LADLE 192
PERFUME LADLE 192
PERFUME LADLE 194
GREEN BASALT STATUETTES OF THE SAÏTE PERIOD 196
NECKLACE AMULET 202
VULTURE AMULET 202
GOLD PALM-TREE 202
BOAT OF SOKARIS 202
RAM’S HEAD 202
GOLD HAWK 202
HAWK WITH HUMAN HEAD 202
HAWK WITH RAM’S HEAD 202
VULTURE 202
ISIS WITH THE CHILD 202
CROUCHING NEÎTH 202
MONKEYS WORSHIPPING THE EMBLEM OF OSIRIS 204
VULTURE WITH EXTENDED WINGS 204
HAWK WITH EXTENDED WINGS 204
THE SOUL (FRONT VIEW) 204
THE SOUL (BACK VIEW) 204
BRONZE CAT OF THE SAÏTE PERIOD 208
BRONZE CAT 214
EGYPTIAN ART
I
EGYPTIAN STATUARY AND ITS SCHOOLS[1]
I opened F.W. von Bissing’s work[2] with a certain feeling of
melancholy, for it was a thing that I had hoped to do myself. Ebers
had suggested to Bruckmann, the publisher, that he should entrust the
task to me, and I was on the point of arranging with him when the
preparations for an Orientalist Congress to meet at Paris in 1897
deprived me of the leisure left me by my lectures and the printing
of my “History,” and I was forced to give up the project. Herr von
Bissing, who was less occupied then than I was, consented to hazard
the adventure, and no one could have been better equipped than he
was to carry it through. The seeking of materials, the execution of
typographical _clichés_, the composition of the text and its careful
setting forth exacted eight years of travelling and continuous labour.
Bissing issued the first part at the end of 1905, and five other parts
have quickly followed, forming almost the half of the work, seventy-two
plates folio, and the portions of the explanatory text belonging to the
plates.
I
The title is not, at least as yet, exactly accurate. Egyptian sculpture
includes, in fact, besides statues and groups in alto-relievo,
bas-reliefs often of very large dimensions which adorn the tombs or
the walls of temples. Now Bissing has only admitted statues and groups
to the honours of publication: the few specimens of the bas-reliefs
that he gives are not taken from the ruins themselves, but have been
selected from pieces in the museums, stelæ, or fragments of ruined
buildings. It is then the monuments of Egyptian statuary that he
presents to us rather than those of Egyptian sculpture as a whole.
Having made that statement and thus defined the extent of the field
of action, it must be frankly admitted that he has always made a
happy selection of pieces to be reproduced. Doubtless we may regret
the absence of some famous pieces, such as the Crouching Scribe of
the Louvre or the Cow of Deîr el-Baharî. The fault is not his, and
perhaps he will succeed in overcoming the obstacles which forced him
to deprive us of them. The omissions, at any rate, are not numerous.
When the list printed on the covers of the first part is exhausted,
amateurs and experts will have at their disposal nearly everything
required to follow the evolution of Egyptian statuary from its earliest
beginnings to the advent of Christianity. The schools of the Greek and
Roman epochs, unjustly contemned by archæologists who have written on
these subjects, are not wanting, and for the first time the ordinary
reader can decide for himself if all the artists of the decadence
equally deserve contempt or oblivion. Bissing has attempted a complete
picture, not a sketch restricted to the principal events in art between
the IVth Dynasty and the XXXth. No serious attempt of the kind had
before been made, and on many points he had to open out the roads he
traversed. For the moment he has stopped at the beginning of the Saïte
period; thus we have as yet no means of judging if the plan he has
imposed on himself is carried out to the end with a rigour and firmness
everywhere equal: but a rapid examination of the parts that have
appeared will show that it has been executed with fullness and fidelity.
Four plates are devoted to Archaic Egypt: the two first are facsimiles
of the bas-reliefs that decorate the stele of the Horus Qa-âou, and
the so-called _palette_ of the king we designate Nâr-mer, since
we have not deciphered his name. It is in truth very little, but
the excavations have rendered such poor accounts of those distant
ages that it is almost all that could be given of them; it might,
however, have been worth while to add the statuettes of the Pharaoh
Khâsakhmouî. Notwithstanding the omission, the objects that appear give
a sufficient idea of the degree of skill attained by the sculptors of
those days. The stele of Qa-âou does not, of course, equal that of
the _King-Serpent_[3] which is in the Louvre; it is, however, of a
fairly good style, and the hawk of Horus is nearer to the real animal
than those of the protocol were later. Similarly the scenes engraved
on the _palette_ of Nâr-mer testify to an indisputable virtuosity in
the manner of attacking the stone. The drawing of the persons is less
schematic and their bearing freer than in the compositions of classical
art, but it is evident that the craftsman had as yet no very clear
idea of the way in which to compose a picture and group its elements.
Let us confess, nevertheless, that the bas-reliefs are far superior to
the statues yet known. We possess about half a dozen of them scattered
over the world. Bissing studied one to the exclusion of the others,
the one in the Naples Museum, and it may be thought to be sufficient
if only æsthetic impressions are desired, for nothing could be rougher
or more awkward. The head and face might perhaps pass, but the rest
is ill-proportioned, the neck is too short, the shoulders and chest
are massive, the legs lack slenderness under a heavy petticoat, the
feet and hands are enormous. The defects cannot be ascribed to the
hardness of the material, for the Scribe of the Cairo Museum, which is
in limestone, displays them as flagrantly as the good people in granite
at Naples, Munich, or Leyden. I must not therefore conclude, however,
that they are constant faults with the Thinites: the statuettes of
Khâsakhmouî are of a less heavy workmanship and more nearly approach
that of later studios. That the ruins have rendered only a few that
possess worth does not prove that there may not have been excellent
ones: we must have patience and wait till some happy chance belies the
mediocrity.
The Memphian Empire has furnished thirteen plates, and I doubt if
they are enough. The number of masterpieces, and especially of pieces
which, without possessing claims to perfection, offer interest on some
count, is so large that Bissing could easily have found, in the Cairo
Museum alone, material enough to double the number. Very probably it
was due to the publisher and a question of economy: but all the same I
regret the absence of half a dozen statues that would have made a good
appearance by the side of the Scribe of the Berlin Museum. The chief
species of the period are at least represented by very good examples:
statues of the Pharaoh seated, receiving homage, are represented by two
of the Chephrên of the Cairo Museum; of the Pharaoh standing, by the
Pioupi in bronze; those of private individuals standing and isolated,
or in groups, by the Cheîkh el-Beled of the Gizeh Museum, by the
Sapouî and the Nasi of the Louvre, or by the pair at Munich; those of
individuals seated by the Scribe of Berlin and by one of the Readers
of Cairo. One of the Cairo statues, of mediocre workmanship, is,
however, curious, because it shows us a priest completely nude, by no
means usual, and circumcized, a fact still less usual. Three fragments
preserved at Munich, portions of three stelæ, a complete stele from
the Cairo Museum, an episode borrowed from the tomb of Apouî, of which
Cairo possesses almost an entire wall, provide specimens of bas-reliefs
for the student to study, without, however, permitting him to suspect
the variety of motives and abundance of detail usually met with in
the necropolises of Saqqarah or of Gizeh. Reduced to these elements,
Bissing’s book will make the impression on its readers of a noble art
exalted by inspiration, minute and skilful in the material execution,
but monotonous, and confined in a rather narrow circle of concepts
and forms of expression. It is only fair to add that the book is not
finished and that, thanks to the system employed of double and triple
plates, it is quite easy to insert new documents among those of the
parts that have already appeared. Some of the lacunæ will assuredly
be filled up, and the additions will place us in a better position to
judge the worth of the ancient Memphian school.
The notices of the first Theban Empire are more numerous, and they
render it possible to study the history of statuary during the long
interval that separates the Heracleopolitan period from the domination
of the Shepherd Kings. For the XIth Dynasty, besides the wonderful
statue of Montouhotpou III, there are bas-reliefs or paintings found
at Gebeleîn in the ruins of a temple of Montouhotpou I. Afterwards, we
have, in the XIIth Dynasty itself, the seated statues of Sanouosrît
I, of Nofrît and of Amenemhaît III, the sphinx of Amenemhaît III that
Mariette declared to be the portrait of a Hyksôs king, an admirable
king’s head preserved in the Vienna Museum, and pieces of lesser
interest, among which a curious bas-relief of Sanouosrît I dancing
before the god Mînou at Coptos should be mentioned. For the XIIIth and
following Dynasties, I only see as yet the Sovkhotpou of the Louvre,
the barbarous head of Mît-Fares, and the Sovkemsaouf of Vienna, but we
must wait for the next parts before deciding to what point Bissing has
made use of the rich store of documents available for that period. The
second Theban Empire, so rich in souvenirs of all kinds, offered an
embarrassing choice: the Cairo Museum alone possesses material enough
for two or three volumes, especially since the fortunate excavations
conducted by Legrain at the _favissa_ of Karnak. The subjects in favour
of which Bissing decided have their special importance: they are each
the actual head of a pillar, the type of a series that he could, in
many cases, have reproduced almost entire, so well has chance served
us in the course of these last years. The statues of Amenôthes, of
Thoutmôsis, of the Ramses, of the Harmais are celebrated, and it is
unnecessary to enumerate them one after the other: the reader will
see them again with pleasure as he goes along, and will admire the
marvellous skill with which the photographer has reproduced them, and
the printer has responded to the photographer’s skill. The pictures of
the volume are often perfect, and plates like those of the head of one
of the sphinxes of Amenemhaît III are so successful that in looking at
them we have almost the sensation of the original. In a few, however,
the printing is too heavy and the thickness of the ink has distorted
and coarsened the modelling. As a general rule the larger number of
the defects I have noted are due to this tiresome question of inks. I
know too well from my own experience the difficulties caused by the
obstinacy of the workmen on that point, so I am able to make excuses
for both Bruckmann and Bissing.
II
So much for the illustrations: the portion of the text as yet published
greatly increases their interest, and assures the work permanent
value. It contains information as to the origin of the object, its
migrations, its actual home to-day, its state of preservation and, at
need, the restorations it has undergone: descriptions showing careful
research, and extended bibliographies complete the suggestions made
by the picture, and inform us of previous criticisms. The shortest of
the notices fills two compact quarto columns, and are reinforced by
numerous footnotes; many of them are veritable essays in which the
subject is examined on every side and as exhaustively as is possible.
Vignettes are inserted which exhibit the object in a different light
from that of the plate, or show the reader some of the analogous
motives referred to in the discussion.
Repetition of similar types has sometimes prevented Bissing from
developing his views as a whole, and we are compelled to look under
several rubrics before learning his full opinion. This is a serious
drawback unless it is remedied in the introduction: we shall perhaps
find all the observations brought together there into one system, with
justificatory references to each of the notices in particular.
Bissing’s criticisms are always well justified: they testify to a
mature taste or a sure tact, and there are very few with which experts
would not willingly agree. Here and there, however, I must make some
reservations, for example, with regard to the Chephrên of Gizeh. After
discussing at length Borchardt’s reasons for attributing it to a Saïte
school, and refuting them, Bissing declares that it is perhaps a late
copy of a work contemporary with the Pharaoh. I recently had occasion
to study it closely in order to determine the position in the Museum
best suited to it, and to decide the height of the plinth on which
it should be placed. I went over Borchardt’s arguments and Bissing’s
hypotheses one after the other and came to the conclusion that the
date assigned by Mariette at the moment of its discovery is the only
admissible one. The archæological details belong to the Memphian age,
and the peculiarities of style which Bissing points out, and which
actually exist, are not sufficiently strongly marked to justify its
attribution to a later epoch. I only see in them the divergences which,
in every age, mark works coming from different and perhaps rival
studios. The artists who cut the _doubles_ in diorite destined for the
pyramid of the Pharaoh, did not certainly have the same masters as
those to whom we owe the Chephrên in alabaster and the royal statuettes
of Mitrahineh: the difference of origin sufficiently explains why
they do not resemble each other. I fear that in criticizing certain
sculptures Borchardt and others were governed in spite of themselves
by the ideas that long prevailed on the uniformity and monotony of
Egyptian art. It seemed to them that at one and the same period the
composition and inspiration must always remain identical, and wherever
they did not harmonize, the fact was attributed solely to an interval
in time. But we must accustom ourselves to think that things did not go
differently with the Egyptians than with the moderns. In a city like
Memphis there was more than one studio, and they all possessed their
traditions, their affectations, their style, which distinguished them
from each other, and which are found in their work like a trade-mark.
Some errors of classification will be avoided in the future if we can
be persuaded to recognize that many of the peculiarities that we begin
to note on statues and bas-reliefs may be the mannerisms of the school
to which they belong, and are not always indications of relative age.
The care that Bissing has taken to render what is due to each of the
experts who discovered a piece or spoke of it, deserves the more praise
since many Egyptologists of the present generation have adopted the
attitude of ignoring what has been said or written before them. They
seem to insinuate to their readers that archæology, religion, grammar,
history, nothing indeed that they touch on, has ever been studied
before, and that the bibliography of a subject begins with the first
essay they have devoted to it. Although the past of Egyptology is so
short, it is a difficult subject to know, and it is not surprising
if Bissing has misrepresented some features or ignored others. For
example, he attributes the merit of recognizing in the animal’s
tail that the kings attach to their back, not a lion’s tail but a
jackal’s[4] to Wiedemann; I do not know if I was the first, but I think
that I certainly stated this before Wiedemann.[5] A little farther on,
I regret that Bissing was not acquainted with my notice of the statue
of Montouhotpou in the _Musée Egyptien_:[6] I am curious to know if he
accepts my explanation of the disproportion between the feet, legs, and
bust. It seems to me that it was not intended to be on the same level
as the spectator, but that it ought to be placed in a naos, on a fairly
high platform which could be reached by a staircase in front: seen from
below, foreshortened, the effect of the perspective would redeem the
exaggeration of form and re-establish the balance between the parts.
It seems also that Bissing was not acquainted with the part of the
_Musée_ in which this Montouhotpou is discussed, for he does not refer
to it again with regard to the Amenemhaît III discovered by Flinders
Petrie at Fayoum.[7] Farther on again, it would have been in keeping
to note that Legrain found the debris of a statuette in black granite
in the mud of the _favissa_ at Karnak, which so closely resembles the
admirable Ramses II of Turin that it might almost be the replica or a
sort of original rough model.[8] Unfortunately the head is wanting, but
we have been almost entirely successful in restoring the body: if it is
not by the same sculptor who took such pleasure in modelling the Turin
statue, it comes from the same royal studio. The few differences to be
noted between them arise solely from the inequality of the stature: it
was necessary to simplify certain details or to suppress them in the
smallest of the statues.
These examples show that there is nothing very serious in the omissions
and negligences: we are surprised not that there should be some, but
that among such a mass of references there are not more. I might
perhaps disagree with some of the theories or points of doctrine
Bissing constantly advances, but I will wait to do so until he has
elaborated into a system the elements so abundantly spread through
the notices. But there is one criticism I will make now: he scarcely
mentions the schools into which Egypt was divided, so that we are
tempted to conclude that, like so many contemporary archæologists,
he believes in the existence of one sole school, which worked in an
almost uniform manner over the whole of Egypt at one time. It is,
however, certain that there were always several schools on the banks
of the Nile, each of which possessed its traditions, its designs, its
method of interpreting the costume or the pose of individuals, the
works of which have a sufficiently special physiognomy to admit of
their being easily separated into their different groups. Here, again,
it seems to me that sometimes varieties of execution which are the
result of the teaching are taken to be signs of age, and that pieces
which are contemporary within a few years, but which proceed from
distinct schools, are spread over centuries. I have not discovered
Bissing in such errors: his natural insight and his knowledge of the
monuments preserved him from making them. I wish, however, that he had
touched on the matter more definitely than he has, and, after letting
it be seen in several places that he admits the existence of those
schools, he should have defined their characteristics in accordance
as the progress of his book brought their work before the reader. He
has briefly touched on the matter in regard to the sphinxes of Tanis
and the statue of Amenemhaît III, but he might, for example, have
seized the opportunity of the Montouhotpou in order to demonstrate the
tendencies of Theban art at its birth; he could have followed them in
their evolution, and the Amenôthes I of Turin might perhaps have served
to teach us how those tendencies were developed or modified between the
beginning of the first Theban Empire and that of the second. A passage
in the notice of the so-called Hyksôs sphinxes leads me to hope that he
will do this for the Tanite school in regard to the celebrated _Bearers
of offerings_: I greatly wish that I may not be disappointed in my hope.
III
As far as I can judge there were at least four large schools of
sculpture in the valley of the Nile: at Memphis, Thebes, Hermopolis,
and in the eastern part of the delta. I have attempted farther on to
sketch the history and define the principal characteristics of the
Theban school;[9] I shall only refer to it as far as it is necessary to
make clear in what it is distinguished from the three others.
And to begin with, it is probable that the first of those in date,
the Memphian, is merely the prolongation and continuation of a
previous Thinite school. If I compare the few objects of real
art that have come to us from the Thinites with parallel works
of which the necropolises of Gizeh, Saqqarah and the Fayoum have
restored to us so many examples, I am struck by the resemblances in
inspiration and technique that exist between the two. We have no
statues originating from Thinis itself, but the stelæ, the amulets
in alto-relievo, the fragments of minute furniture discovered in the
tombs of Omm-el-Gaâb find their exact counterpart in similar pieces
that come from the excavations of Abousîr-el-Malak or of Meîdoum and
from the sub-structure of Memphian residences. I think I see that at
the beginning there were mediocre workmen in the plain of the Pyramids
capable, however, of sculpturing, ill or well, a statue of a man
seated or standing: to those men I attribute the statue No. 1 in the
Cairo Museum, the Matonou (Amten) of Berlin, the Sapouî (Sepa) of the
Louvre, and a few other lesser ones. The same defects are to be seen
in all: the head out of proportion to the body, the neck ungraceful,
the shoulders high, the bust summarily rough-hewn and without regard to
the dimensions of each part, the arms and legs heavy, thick, angular.
Their roughness and awkwardness compared with the beautiful appearance
of the two statues of Meîdoum, which are almost contemporary with them,
would astonish us if we did not think that the latter, commissioned
for relatives of Sanofraouî, proceed from the royal workshops. The
transference of the capital to Memphis, or rather to the district
stretching from the entrance into the Fayoum to the fork of the delta,
necessarily resulted in impoverishing Thinis-Abydos; the stone-cutters,
architects, statuaries, and masons accompanied the court, and planted
the traditions and teaching of their respective fatherlands in their
new homes. According to what is seen in the tombs of Meîdoum, the
latest Thinite style, or rather the transition style of the IIIrd
Dynasty, presents exactly the same characteristics as the perfect style
of the IVth, Vth, and VIth Dynasties, but with a less stiff manner.
The pose of the persons and the silhouettes of the animals are already
schematized and encircled in the lines which will enclose them almost
to the end of Egyptian civilization, but the detail is freer, and keeps
very close to reality. The tendency is perceived only in the roundness
and suppleness that prevails from the time of Cheops and Chephrên.
The Memphites sought to idealize their models rather than to make a
faithful copy of them, and while respecting the general resemblance,
desired to give the spectator an impression of calm majesty or of
gentleness. Their manner was adopted at Thinis by a counter-shock, and
it may be said that from the IVth to the XXVIth Dynasty Abydos remained
almost a branch of the Memphian school, which, however, grew out of it.
The productions only differ from those of the Memphites in subordinate
points, except during the XIXth Dynasty, when Setouî I and Ramses
II summoned Theban sculptors there, and for some years it became,
artistically, a fief of Thebes.
If we would indicate in one word the character of this Thinito-Memphian
art, we should say that it resides in an idealism of convention as
opposed to the realism of Theban art. Thanks to the fluctuations of
political life which alternately made Memphis and Thebes the capitals
of the whole kingdom, the æsthetics of the two cities spread to the
neighbouring towns, and did not allow them to form an independent
art: Heracleopolis, Beni-Hassan, Assiout, Abydos took after Memphis,
while the Saîd and Nubia, from Denderah to Napata, remained under the
jurisdiction of Thebes. An original school arose, however, in one
place, and persisted for a fairly long time, in Hermopolis Magna, the
city of Thot. We observe there, from the end of the Ancient Empire,
sculptors who devoted themselves to expressing with a scrupulous
naturalism, and often with an intentional seeking after ugliness,
the bearing of individuals and the movement of groups. We should
observe with what humour they interpreted the extremes of obesity and
emaciation in man and beast, in the two tombs called _the fat and the
lean_. The region where they flourished is so little explored that
it is still unknown how long their activity practised a continuous
style: it was at its best under the first Theban Empire, at Bercheh,
at Beni-Hassan, at Cheîkh-Saîd, but the period at which it seems to
me to be most in evidence was at the end of the XVIIIth Dynasty,
under the heretic Pharaohs. When Amenôthes IV founded his capital
of Khouîtatonou, if, as is probable, he settled some Theban masters
there, he would certainly have utilized the studios of Hermopolis.
The scenes engraved on the tombs of El-Tell and El-Amarna are due to
the same spirit and the same teaching as those of the _fat and lean_
tombs; there are similar deformations of the human figure bordering
on caricature, the same suppleness and sometimes the same violence
in the gestures and attitudes. In a number of portraits the Theban
importation prevails, but the cavalcades, processions, royal audiences,
popular scenes, must be attributed to the Hermopolitans, for their
inspiration and execution present so striking a contrast to those of
analogous pictures that adorn the walls of Louxor or Karnak. The fall
of the little Atonian Dynasty stopped their activity; deprived of the
vast commissions which opened a new field for their enterprise, they
fell back into their provincial routine, and we have not yet enough
documents to tell us what their successors became in the course of the
centuries.
In the delta two fairly different styles may be seen from the
beginning. In the east, at Tanis and in its neighbourhood, there is,
at the beginning of the first Theban Empire, a veritable school, the
productions of which possess such an individual physiognomy that
Mariette did not hesitate to attribute them to the Shepherd Kings:
since the works of Golenischeff it is known that the so-called Hyksôs
sphinxes are of Amenemhaît III, and that they belong to the second half
of the XIIth Dynasty. This Tanite school is perpetuated through the
ages; it was still flourishing under the XXIst and XXIInd Dynasties,
as is proved by the fine group of bearers of offerings in the Cairo
Museum. The predominant features are the energy and harshness of the
modelling, especially of the human face: its masters have copied a
type, and modes of coiffure belonging, as Mariette formerly pointed
out, to the half-savage populations of Lake Menzaleh, the _Egyptians in
the marshes_ of Herodotus. It seems to me that their manner is still
to be noted in the Græco-Roman period in the statues of princes and
priests that we have in the Cairo Museum: the technical skill, however,
is less than in the sphinxes and the bearers of offerings. The centre
and west of the delta, on the other hand, came under the influence
of Memphis, as far as we can judge from the rare existing fragments
belonging to the Ancient Empire. Under the Thebans the dependence is
clear, and all that comes from those regions differs in nothing from
what we have from the Memphian necropolises. Only in the Ethiopian
period, and under the influence of the successors of Bocchoris, is a
Saïte school revealed to us, which, borrowing its general composition
from the Memphian school, comes closer to nature and impresses an
individual stamp on certain elements of the human figure that until
then had been handled in a loose, so to say, an abstract fashion.
The modelling of the face is as full of expression as in the fine
works of the Theban school, but with greater finish and less harsh
effects; the ravages of old age, wrinkles, crows’-feet, flabbiness of
flesh, thinness, are all reproduced with a care unusual in preceding
generations; the skull, indeed, is so minute in detail that it might
almost be called an anatomical study. This impulse towards skilled
realism, begun by instinct in the heart of the school, became
accentuated and accelerated by contact with the Hellenes, who from the
time of Psammetichus I swarmed in the provinces of the delta. Certain
bas-reliefs of Alexandria and Cairo, the date of which is assigned to
the reign of Nectanebo II, which I should like to place in that of
one of the first Ptolemies,[10] may be regarded as extant witnesses
of a kind of composite art analogous to that which was developed two
centuries later at Alexandria or at Memphis, and of which the Cairo
Museum possesses some rare examples.
It should be clearly understood that I do not claim to put the complete
result of my study of the schools, the presence of which in Ancient
Egypt is now confirmed, in these few lines. I am only anxious to
point out the part played by them in historic times, and the errors
into which those who have written the history of Egyptian art without
suspecting their existence, or without taking into consideration what
we do know of them, have fallen. Bissing does not ignore them, and is
doubtless waiting to criticize them in his Introduction. He has so much
material that it will be easy for him to rectify my hypotheses, and to
confirm them where necessary; in that way his book will gain by being
no longer a mere collection of monuments each described as an isolated
piece, but a veritable treatise on sculpture, or at least on Egyptian
statuary.
I shall be sincerely sorry if he fails in that particular, but even
so, I should feel it right to declare that he has come honourably
out of an enterprise in which he had no predecessors. The few plates
that I inserted a quarter of a century ago in the _Monuments de
l’Art Antique_, and the notices contained in the parts of the _Musée
Egyptien_ that have already appeared, afforded both experts and
amateurs a foretaste of the surprises that Egypt has in store in the
matter of art; they have been too few, and have related to subjects
too scattered in point of time, to produce a body of doctrine. But
here, on the contrary, nearly two hundred pieces are available,
classified according to the order of the Dynasties, and for the most
part unpublished, or better reproduced than in the past. Each will
be accompanied by an analysis in which the researches previously
connected with it will be set forth and discussed; for the first
time Egyptologists and the general public will have the artistic and
critical apparatus required for judging the value of the principal
pieces of Egyptian statuary before their eyes and in their hands. Those
who know the amount of the literature existing on Egyptology, and how
scattered it is, can easily imagine the patience and bibliographical
_flair_ that Bissing must have needed for gathering from libraries
the information so generously scattered on every page of his notices.
But that was only the least part of his task; the appreciation of
the objects themselves demanded of him an ever alert attention and a
continuous tension of mind which would promptly have exhausted a man
less devoted to the minutiæ of artistic observation. In other branches
of the science, the materials have for the most part been so often and
so repeatedly kneaded that nearly always half of the work has been
already done; here, nothing of that sort exists, and in many cases
Bissing has dealt with objects that he was the first to know, and of
which no previous study had been attempted. That he is sometimes weary,
and that here and there his opinions may be controverted, he willingly
confesses. But what surprises me is how very rarely it is necessary to
upset them, even partially.
I hope then that we shall not have to wait too long for the completion
of this admirable work. May I venture to add that after the present
edition, which is an _édition de luxe_, a popular edition would be
welcome? Egyptologists like myself are condemned to pay such large sums
for our books that the price of these “Denkmäler” does not alarm us,
but the fact has greater importance for others. A reproduction in a
smaller _format_, and less expensive, would greatly help to spread the
knowledge of Egyptian art among classes of readers whom the book in its
present form will not reach.
II
SOME PORTRAITS OF MYCERINUS[11]
It has long been a debatable question if the Egyptian statues of kings
and private individuals can be regarded as faithful portraits or as
merely approximate to their originals. No one has ever denied that
their authors desired to make them as like as possible, but we hesitate
to believe that they succeeded in doing so. The air of uniformity lent
them by the repeated employment of the same expressions and the same
postures encouraged the notion that, judging themselves incapable of
exactly transcribing the details of bodily form or physiognomy proper
to each individual, the sculptors decided that such details were not
necessary for the kind of service to which the statues were destined:
they considered that the task entrusted to them was sufficiently
fulfilled if the soul or the _double_ for which these statues provided
an imperishable body recognized in them enough of the perishable body
to enable them to attach themselves to it without hurt in the course of
their posthumous existence. The study of the monuments has dissipated
those doubts. Any one who has carefully handled one of the Saïte
heads, the skull and face of which present such clearly individual
characteristics, must acknowledge that so many details noted with such
felicitous care indicate an absolute intention of transmitting the
exact appearance of the model to posterity. And if, proceeding forward,
we reach the second Theban period, we shall soon, thanks to the chances
which have delivered to us the well-preserved corpses of about fifty
princes and princesses, recognize the success with which the royal
studios perpetuated in stone the effigies of their contemporaries. The
profile of Setouî I photographed in his coffin would coincide line for
line with that of his bas-reliefs of Karnak or Abydos were it not for
the thinness resulting from embalmment. Let us go back eight or ten
centuries and see how the master sculptors of the first Theban period
treated their Pharaohs. The statues of Amenemhaît III and of Sanouosrît
have so personal a note that we should be wrong to imagine they could
be anything but a sincere, almost a brutal likeness. The two Chephrên
of the Cairo Museum were not long ago alone in suggesting to us the
conviction that the Memphian times yielded nothing in this matter of
resemblance to ages farther removed from us; the recent discovery of
ten statues of Mycerinus prevents any further doubt.
Most of them have not left Egypt. The first that came to us was
acquired by purchase in 1888, with four statuettes of Naousirrîya,
of Mankahorou, of Chephrên, and perhaps of Cheops. According to the
information collected at the time by Grébaut, they were found together,
two or three weeks before, by fellahs of Mît-Rahineh under the ruins of
a little brick building situated at the east of what was formerly the
sacred lake of the temple of Phtah at Memphis. That was certainly not
their original place; they had probably each adorned first the funerary
chapel annexed to the pyramid of its sovereign: their transference to
the town and their reunion in the place where they were discovered are
not earlier than the reign of the last Saïtes or the first Ptolemies.
It was then, in fact, that hatred of foreign domination having exalted
the love of all that was peculiarly Egyptian in the eyes of the people,
reverence for the glorious Pharaohs of former ages revived: their
priesthoods were reorganized, and they again received the worship
to which centuries of neglect had disaccustomed them. None of our
figures are life-size, and the Mycerinus in diorite, which is not one
of the smallest, is scarcely 21⅛ inches in height. It is enthroned
on a cubical block with the impassibility that the Chephrên has made
familiar to us; the bust is stiff, the arms rest on the thighs, he
looks straight before him, his face expressionless, as was imposed on
Pharaoh by etiquette, while the crowd of courtiers and vassals filed
past at his feet: if his name, engraved on the sides of his seat to the
right and left of his legs, had not told who he was, we should have
guessed it from his bearing. The composition, although not the best
imaginable, is good: but the head makes a poor effect in relation to
the torso, a defect always at first ascribed to the heedlessness of the
sculptor. But it is to be noted that the face somewhat recalled that of
two of the other Pharaohs, a fact to be explained by the relationship,
the second, Chephrên, being the father of Mycerinus, and the third,
probably Cheops, his grandfather. That is a reason for presuming
that they are portraits, but are they authentic portraits? Several
Berlin Egyptologists whose natural ingenuity encouraged them to revise
Mariette’s criticisms on art, thought to discern in certain details of
the costume and ornamentation a proof that if they were not figures
of pure imagination, they were at least copies of ancient originals
freely executed under one of the Saïte Dynasties, and their theory,
although opposed by experts who had a longer experience, disconcerted
the majority. It was soon upset by facts, but, as often happens, the
consequences deduced from it survived by force of habit. Many of us
feared for some years after to be asserting too much, to declare openly
that our Mycerinus was what we had entitled him on the faith of his
inscription, the real Mycerinus.
[Illustration: THE MYCERINUS OF MÎT-RAHINEH.
Diorite. Cairo Museum.]
[Illustration: MYCERINUS (REISNER HEAD)
Alabaster. Cairo Museum.]
We did not do so until 1908, when Reisner and his Americans, excavating
at Gizeh round about the third pyramid, brought to light monuments that
with the best will in the world no one could assign to any other epoch
than that of Mycerinus. It seems that the fame of piety which popular
story ascribed to him was not wholly unmerited, at least as far as
his own divinity is concerned, for with the elements of a voluminous
funerary equipment in all kinds of stones, the workmen brought out
of the ruins of the chapel, fragments of a multitude of statues in
alabaster, schist, limestone, and rare breccia. Among them were some
unfinished or scarcely shaped out, for the sovereign having died while
they were being fashioned, the works, according to Oriental custom, had
been immediately interrupted and the workshops abandoned in confusion.
The statues which were already finished and set up in their places were
overturned at some unknown period, perhaps when Saladin dismantled
the pyramids to build the new ramparts and citadel of Cairo, and the
fragments were so ill-treated that an enormous number of them have
disappeared. Out of a hundred baskets of debris collected by the
Americans, they found at most, besides five or six intact heads, enough
to put together, almost completely, two alabaster statues. The best of
the heads is in the Cairo Museum, and it has sufficient resemblance to
our statuette for us to have no hesitation in recognizing Mycerinus,
even if the place whence it comes did not help us to guess it. The
statue that the find brought us is seated, but the block on which
it is sculptured is not perpendicular to its base, so that it leans
slightly backward. On the other hand, the two arms being cut between
the armpit and the hip, the accident makes it appear at first glance
as if the bust is too narrow for its height. But, and this is the
important point, the head is small, so small that the head-dress, in
spite of its size, is not sufficient to correct the bad effect of this
disproportion between its smallness and the amplitude of the shoulders.
The fault is not to be ascribed to the artist’s ignorance and lack of
skill, as is probably done. He was not, it must be admitted, a man of
talent, but he knew his business, and proved it by the general quality
of his work. The harmony between the trunk and the leg, the muscles
of the chest, the texture of the costume, the modelling of the knee
and calf, conform to the æsthetics of the time; the foot and ankle
are particularized with the virtuosity of a craftsman skilled in all
the subtleties of his calling. So, now, returning to the statuette
of Mît-Rahineh, the technique of which shows it to proceed not from
a different school but from a different studio, we shall find a
difficulty in imagining that two sculptors would each have fallen
into so great an error, if they had not seen it themselves in their
model. Since their statues are microcephalous, Mycerinus must have been
microcephalous almost to deformity.
[Illustration: ALABASTER STATUE OF MYCERINUS.
Cairo Museum.]
The search among the beds of fragments of stone was continued. A few
weeks before it was finished, at the end of May, 1908, it produced
four groups in schist, the testimony of which fully confirmed that
of the alabaster statues. The disposition is the same, with very
slight divergences, which do not sensibly modify the aspect of the
pieces. Three persons stand side by side against a slab 17 to 23
inches high. Mycerinus is in the middle, his left foot advanced, the
waist-cloth fluted on the loins, and on his forehead the white cap of
the kingdom of Upper Egypt. He always has a goddess on his right, a
Hathor moulded in the sleeveless smock open on the chest, and on her
hair the short wig and the _coufieh_. On the top of this head-dress
she wears her two cow’s horns and the solar disk. In one of the groups
she is walking, her arms hanging down and her hands laid flat on her
thighs; in the second, she embraces him with her left arm and presses
against him; in the third she holds his right hand in her left. The
last of the figures is sometimes a woman, sometimes a man: the man, who
is shorter by a third than his companions, walks forward swinging his
arms; the two women are at rest, and one of them puts her right arm
round the king’s waist, in symmetry with the Hathor on the left. They
are geographical entities, nomes, and the standards on their heads tell
us their names: the two women personify the nomes of Sistrum and the
Dog, the man that of Oxyrrhinchus. The fragments of schist under which
they were buried assuredly belong to other groups now destroyed, but
how many of them were there in the beginning? The decorative theme of
which they formed part is one of which the intention is grasped at the
first glance, but if we needed a commentary to explain it, the brief
legends at the base would provide the material. They inform us, in
fact, that our Hathor is the lady of the Canton of the Sycomore, and
that the nome of the Dog, that of the Sistrum, that of Oxyrrhinchus,
bring the sovereign all the good things of their territory. Mycerinus,
in his quality of king of the Saîd and of the delta, had a right to
tribute during his life, and to offerings after his death from the
whole country, and on the other hand, Hathor, lady of the Sycomore, is
the patron of dead Osirians in the Memphian province where the palaces
and tombs of the Pharaohs are. It was natural then that she should
serve as the introducer of the delegates of the nomes when they came to
pay their tribute to the common master. With rich private individuals,
the operation was symbolized on the walls of the funerary chapels by
long processions of men or women in bas-relief, each of whom incarnated
one of the domains charged with the upkeep of the tomb. Here it was
expressed in even a more concrete fashion by two series of groups in
rondo-bosso, which were probably developed on the walls in one of the
court-yards of the temple of the pyramid. The four which have escaped
destruction belonged to the series of the Saîd, as is proved by their
names and the head-dress of the sovereign, but those of the delta could
not have been omitted without causing regrettable privations to the
_double_ in his life beyond the tomb; there were then about forty in
all, as many as there were nomes in the whole of Egypt.
[Illustration: MYCERINUS, HATHOR, AND THE NOME OXYRRHINCHUS
Schist. Cairo Museum.]
[Illustration: MYCERINUS, HATHOR, AND THE NOME CYNOPOLITE
Schist. Cairo Museum.]
The excellence of those that have survived fills us with regret for
those that are lost. At the instant they emerged from the earth, they
preserved something of their primitive colouring, but contact with the
air and light speedily deprived them of it, and only traces remain
on the chest, at the neck, wrists, waist, places protected by the
customary ornaments of people of high rank. The gold-leaf with which
the necklaces and bracelets were decorated was stolen in times of
antiquity, but the thicker layers of paint on which they were placed
preserve their contours fairly exactly. It would be easy for us to
restore to the whole the aspect it had when fresh and new--a light
yellow complexion for the women, and red-brown for the men, black hair,
blue or white head-dresses, white crowns, and garments relieved by
the tawny brilliance of the jewels. In pieces where everything is so
minutely calculated for reality, it is scarcely probable that anything
is the effect of chance or of lack of skill; if then the sovereign’s
head is too small it is because it was so in reality. In fact, the
lack of proportion with the rest of the body is less perceptible here
than in the isolated statues, and it is not perceptible at the first
glance: but it is soon recognized when the sovereign is compared with
his two companions. Not only are their heads larger and more massive
than his, but it would seem that the sculptor desired to accentuate the
inequality between them by a trick of his craft: he has perceptibly
narrowed their shoulders, and the contrast between the small head that
surmounts the vast shoulders of Mycerinus with the two large heads that
weight the narrow shoulders of the acolytes, emphasizes the deformity
that the placing together of three figures on the same level had almost
concealed. Study of the schists leads to the same conclusion as that
formed of the alabasters. It is the real Mycerinus that contemporaries
have bound themselves to transmit to posterity, and they have spared no
details which were naturally calculated to make us better acquainted
with him. We have only to analyse their works to see him stand before
us in his habit as he lived. He was tall, robust, slender, with long
legs, powerful shoulders surmounted by a small face, an athlete with
the head almost of a child. In addition, projecting eyes, big ears, a
short nose, the tip turned up, a sensual mouth with full lips, a chin
receding under the artificial beard; the expression of the face is
benevolent, even weak. In vain has the sculptor stiffened the backbone
and the neck, thrown out the chest, stretched the biceps, clenched
the fist, and immobilized the features into a hieratic gravity: he
has not succeeded in inculcating the sovereign majesty that makes
our Chephrên the ideal Pharaoh, the equal of the gods. He has the
sanctimonious appearance of a private individual of good family, but
his general bearing is below his condition. We could easily point to a
dozen statues, his neighbours in the Cairo Museum, that of Rânafir, for
instance, which have a more exalted appearance and a prouder mien.
[Illustration: MYCERINUS AND HIS WIFE.
Schist. Boston Museum.]
And the new schist group that Reisner discovered during the winter
of 1909 has not made any change in our opinion necessary. This time
Mycerinus is represented with his wife; the lower portions of the two
figures had not received the final polish when death intervened, but
those of the upper part were finished and are admirable. Mycerinus
wears the head-dress of the ordinary _claft_, which squarely frames the
face, and his features are those with which we have become familiar
in the statues described above; eyes starting from his head, a fixed
expression, turned up nose, a large, loose mouth, the lower lip
protruding, the physiognomy of a man of the middle class straining to
appear dignified. The queen does not appear much more noble, but in
looking at her we are disposed to think that she had more intelligence
and vivacity. We should not say that she was exactly smiling, but
a smile has just passed over her face, and traces of it remain on
her lips and in her eyes. She has beautiful round cheeks, a little
turned-up nose, a full chin, full lips cleft from top to bottom by a
strongly marked furrow: a determined expression shows itself between
her narrow, heavy eyelids. She resembles her husband, a fact that is
not surprising, since unions between brothers and sisters were not
only tolerated but commanded by custom; there is thus every chance
that the couple were born of the same father and mother; she has only
a greater appearance of strength than he has. Custom exacted that,
when a husband and wife were associated in a group, they should not
be placed side by side on a level of absolute equality, but that the
woman should be given a posture or merely a gesture implying a state of
more or less affectionate dependence on the husband; she crouched at
his feet, her chest against his knees, or her arm was round his waist
or his neck, as if she had no trust except in his protection. Here the
queen’s gesture is in conformity with convention, but the manner of
its execution contradicts the intention of submission: she leans less
against the Pharaoh than she draws him close to her, and looks as if
she is protecting him at least as much as he is protecting her. She is
his equal in height, and even if she is more slender than he is, as is
proper to her sex, her shoulders are as robust. Does it mean that the
sculptor has attributed to her the massive shoulders of a man? Not at
all: but following the example of his colleagues in the triads, he has
cheated a little in order to dissimulate the defect of his model. As
doubtless he would not have liked to show a deformed Pharaoh, and as he
might not alter features which, after all, were those of a god, he has
made the deformity less visible by taking away from the shoulders what
was wanted in order to establish a sort of apparent equilibrium between
the parts, and so we are brought back by a fresh detour to the point
to which the examination of the alabasters and triads had led us. Let
us once more conclude that the effigies of the Memphian Pharaohs and
their subjects were real portraits of the personages they claimed to
reproduce.
[Illustration: MYCERINUS, HATHOR, AND THE NOME OF THE SISTRUM.
Schist. Cairo Museum.]
[Illustration: MYCERINUS AND HIS WIFE (DETAIL).
Schist. Boston Museum.]
They were real, but not realistic unless there was special necessity.
I have repeatedly attempted to define the two chief schools of
Egyptian sculpture, the Theban and the Memphian. From the beginning
the Theban school tends to copy the model brutally, as it was at the
moment when it was portrayed. Take the statues of Sanouosrît I or of
Sanouosrît III, which lately came to the Cairo Museum. The family
likeness between all of them is indubitable, but, according as they
come from a Theban or Memphian studio, the features which constitute
the complete resemblance are noted in such divergent ways that at the
first glance we are inclined to think that it scarcely exists. The
Thebans scrupulously marked the thinness of the cheeks, the hardness
of the eye, the harshness of the mouth, the heaviness of the jaw, and
have exaggerated rather than diminished those points. The Memphians
do not neglect them, but have treated them in a more merciful manner,
and, from the haggard faces in which the rival school took pleasure,
have brought out the happy smiling expression that its own traditions
ascribed without exception to all the Pharaohs. We cannot institute
comparisons of that kind for the epoch of Mycerinus: the Theban school,
if, as is probable, it was then in existence, still sleeps buried
beneath the ruins, and we know nothing belonging to it to place by the
side of the Memphian. It is sufficient, however, to walk through the
rooms of the Cairo Museum reserved for it to be convinced that if the
Cheîkh-el-Beled, the Chephrên statues, the royal couple of Meîdoum,
the Rânafir statues are portraits and likenesses, they are at the
same time idealized portraits according to the formula, the influence
of which we have seen in the monuments of the XIIth Dynasty. Whatever
the models presented that was too pronounced, was softened in order to
give them the serene bearing fitting the imperishable bodies of such
noble and respectable persons. They only departed from this routine
when there were monstrosities, the entire suppression of which would
have been fraught with danger for the immortality of the subject, as
in the case of the two dwarfs in the Cairo Museum; but it is not quite
certain if even in those cases some modification of the ugliness has
not been contrived. What has happened to Mycerinus renders it probable:
have we not seen, in fact, that the artist exerted his ingenuity to
dissimulate the disturbing exiguity of the head by an artifice? And he
must often have taken similar liberties, although we have no actual
means of proving it. I will venture to assert it of Chephrên, although
almost the half of one of his two statues, that in green serpentine, is
a restoration by Vassalli. For if we compare their profiles, we notice
that that of the serpentine statue is weaker than that of the diorite
statue: the eye is smaller and the chin less authoritative, the tip
of the nose recedes a little, and there is a slight resemblance with
Mycerinus. The lofty dignity which I noted just now as appearing in
the father in contrast to the son may be the result of the Memphians’
determination to idealize their subjects so as to make each of them an
almost abstract type of the class to which they belonged.
As might be expected, the alabasters of Mycerinus are a long way from
equalling the schists. Indeed, whenever we find statues of a person in
different materials, it is seldom that those most difficult to work
in are not also the best. Petrie concluded that in all periods Egypt
had a school of sculpture in limestone and soft stones, and one in
granite and hard stones. But who would think of classifying modern
sculptors in different schools according as they used bronze or marble?
In Egypt, as in later times, the instruction given to learners prepared
them to practise the complete calling, whatever the special branch to
which they later confined themselves might be, but as the handling of
certain stones required a more extended practice, care was taken in the
workshops to entrust them to the most expert. That is evidently what
happened in the case of Mycerinus. His alabasters are certainly very
estimable; but those to whom we owe them were not skilled virtuosi,
and if they acquitted themselves of their task honourably, they only
produced ordinary work. Those who executed the schists were much more
skilled. I will not venture to assert that they entirely triumphed over
their material: the bodies of princes and gods sculptured in matter
so unyielding and of so gloomy a tone present a rigidity of contour
which we feel as keenly as we do the lack of colour which would enliven
them. They almost repel any one who sees them for the first time, but
the repulsion once overcome, they reveal themselves as perfect of
their kind. The artist has done what he wished with the ungrateful
material, and has handled it with the same suppleness as if he had been
kneading the most ductile clay. The women are especially remarkable
with their full round shoulders, their small breasts placed low, the
belly strong and well designed, the thighs full and graceful, the legs
vigorous, one of the most elegant types created by Memphian Egypt. It
does not equal the diorite Chephrên, nor the Cheîkh-el-Beled, nor the
Crouching Scribe, nor the lady of Meîdoum, but it is not so far removed
from them, and few pieces take so high a rank in the work of the old
Memphian school.
[Illustration: MYCERINUS AND HIS WIFE (DETAIL).
Schist. Boston Museum.]
III
A SCRIBE’S HEAD
OF THE IVTH OR VTH DYNASTY
(_The Louvre_)
The inventories give no indication of the origin of this head. So
little was its source suspected that for a long time it was believed to
be of Peruvian work: M. de Longpérier with his usual tact restored it
to its rightful place in the Egyptian series.[12] At the first glance
the style is seen to be that of the ancient Memphian Empire: it has
evidently been detached from a statue found in one of the necropolises
of Saqqarah. The absence of the plinth and the parts which usually bear
the inscription prevents us from knowing the name of the individual it
represents, a scribe contemporary, or very nearly, with the celebrated
Crouching Scribe. A narrow and somewhat receding forehead, a long
prominent eye slightly drawn up towards the temples, snub-nose, thin
nostrils, accentuated cheekbones, thin cheeks, large mouth with full
lips, a firm rounded chin, do not make a flattering portrait but
certainly an exact one. The material is the excellent limestone of
Tourah painted bright red: the technique shows delicacy and skill rare
even at that period of admirable artists.
Almost all the statues of mere private individuals come from temples
or tombs. The right of setting up a statue in the temples belonged
exclusively to the king; so the greater number of those we have offer
a special formula: “_Granted as a favour_ on the part of the king to a
son of so and so,”[13] sometimes too the favour is qualified as _great_
or _very great_. It was then by some exceptional title, in reward of
services rendered, or by a caprice of royalty, that an Egyptian was
authorized to place his portrait in a temple, whether of his native
city or of some other town, to the god for whom he professed a special
devotion. The great feudal lords, who all more or less aspired to
possess royal rights, sometimes took the liberty of setting up a statue
of themselves without the preliminary permission of Pharaoh; but in
spite of these usurpations of the royal prerogative, the number is
relatively small. Civil wars, foreign invasions, the ruin of towns, the
destruction of idols by the Christians, contributed to make private
statues coming from temples rare in our museums.[14]
[Illustration: SCRIBE’S HEAD.
The Louvre.]
But, on the other hand, those that come from cemeteries are very
numerous. Every tomb that was somewhat cared for in the ancient or
new empire contained several which represented the defunct alone, or
accompanied by the principal members of his family. They were not
always placed in the same spot: in the IVth Dynasty they were sometimes
placed in the outer court, in the open air, sometimes also in the
chapel, where on certain days the family celebrated the worship of the
ancestor. Most often they were imprisoned in a narrow chamber, with a
lofty ceiling, something like a corridor, and for that reason called
_Serdâb_ by the Arabs. Sometimes the _Serdâb_ is lost in the masonry
and does not communicate with any of the other chambers. Sometimes it
is connected with the funerary chapel by a sort of quadrangular pipe,
so small that a hand can scarcely be inserted.[15] The priests would
burn incense near the orifice, pour libations, present offerings,
murmur prayers, and everything was supposed to penetrate to the little
apartment. Some of these _Serdâb_ contained one or two statues at
most, others would contain twenty. Some are in wood or hard stone,
but the greater number are in painted limestone. Seated or standing,
crouching or in the attitude of walking, they all claim to be
portraits--portraits of the dead man, of his wife, of his children, of
his servants. If they were more often found in places where they would
have been visible, their presence would be explained by the pleasure
members of a family would feel in seeing the features of those they
had loved. But they are generally walled up for all eternity in hidden
corners where no one would ever penetrate: we must seek other reasons.
The Egyptians formed a somewhat coarse idea of the human soul. They
regarded it as an exact reproduction of the body of each individual,
formed of a substance less dense than flesh and bones, but susceptible
to the sight, feeling, and touch. The _double_, or to call it by the
name they gave it, the _ka_, was subject, though in a lesser degree
than its terrestrial type, to all the infirmities of our life: it
drank, ate, clothed itself, anointed itself with perfumes, came and
went in its tomb, required furniture, a house, servants, an income. A
man must be assured beyond the tomb of the possession of all the wealth
he had enjoyed in the world, under penalty of being condemned to an
eternity of unspeakable misery. His family’s first obligation towards
him was to provide him with a durable body; they therefore mummified
his mortal remains to the best of their ability, and buried the mummy
at the bottom of a pit where it could only be reached with the greatest
difficulty. The body, however, in spite of the care taken in preparing
it, only very remotely recalled the form of the living person. It was,
besides, unique and easily destroyed: it could be broken, methodically
dismembered, and the pieces scattered or burnt. If it disappeared, what
would become of the _double_? For its support statues were provided,
representing the exact form of the individual. Effigies in wood,
limestone, hard stone, bronze, were more solid than the mummy, and
there was nothing to prevent the manufacture of any number of them
desired. One body was a single chance of durability for the _double_:
twenty gave it twenty chances. And that is the explanation of the
astonishing number of statues sometimes found in one tomb. The piety of
the relatives multiplied the images, and consequently the supports, the
imperishable bodies, of the _double_ would, by themselves alone, almost
assure him immortality.[16]
Both in the temples and hypogeums, the statues of private persons
were intended to serve as a support to the soul. The consecration
they received animated them, so to speak, and made them substitutes
for the defunct: the offerings destined for the other world were
served to them. The tomb of a rich man possessed a veritable chapel
to which a special body of priests was attached, formed of _hon-ka_
or _priests of the double_. At the sacramental festivals the _priests
of the double_ performed the necessary rites, they looked after the
upkeep of the edifice and administered its revenues. The statues of the
towns themselves demanded particular care. Indeed, the clergy of the
temple in which they were placed claimed their part in the advantages
derived from ancestor worship: veritable acts of donation were drawn
up in their favour, in which were specified the part they were to
play in the ceremonies, the quantity of the offerings that fell to
their share for the service rendered, the number of days in the year
consecrated to each statue. “Agreement between Prince Hapi-T’aufi and
the _hour-priests_ of the temple of Anubis, master of Siout, in regard
to one white loaf that each must give to the statue of the prince,
under the hand of the _ka-priest_, the 18th Thot, the day of the
festival of _Ouaga_,[17] and also the gifts which every tomb owes to
its lord; afterwards in regard to the ceremony of kindling the flame,
and the procession that they ought to make with the _ka-priest_ while
he celebrates the service in honour of the defunct, and that they march
to the north corner of the temple on the day of kindling the flame. For
that Hapi-T’aufi gives the _hour-priests_ a bushel of corn from each of
the fields belonging to the tomb, the firstfruits of the harvest of
the prince’s domain, as each commoner in Siout is accustomed to do from
the firstfruits of his harvest, for every peasant always makes a gift
from the firstfruits of his harvest to the temple.”[18] The ceremonial
is set out in detail, and the monument tells us how, and under what
conditions, a dead person is fed in Egypt. The loaves, meat and corn
were placed in front of the statue by the priests: thence they reached
the gods, who, after taking their part, transmitted the rest to the
_double_.
We now understand why the statues that do not represent gods are always
and uniquely portraits as exact as the artists could render them. Each
was a stone body; not an ideal body in which only beauty of form or
expression was sought, but a real body in which care should be taken
neither to add nor take away anything. If the body of flesh had been
ugly, the body of stone must be ugly in the same way, otherwise the
_double_ would not find the support it needed. The statue from which
the head preserved in the Louvre was broken off was, undoubtedly, the
faithful portrait of the individual whose name was engraved on it: if
the realism of the expression is somewhat brutal, it is the fault of
the model, who had not taken care to be handsome, and not that of the
sculptor, who would have been guilty of a sort of impiety if he had
altered the physiognomy of his model in the least detail.
IV
SKHEMKA, HIS WIFE AND SON
A GROUP FOUND AT MEMPHIS
(_The Louvre_)
Skhemka lived at Memphis at the end of the Vth Dynasty. He was attached
to the administration of the domains, and was buried in the necropolis
of Saqqarah. His tomb, discovered by Mariette during the excavations of
the Serapeum, furnished three pretty statues to the Louvre.[19] I knew
the group reproduced here at a time when the coating that covered it
had suffered very little; the galleries of Europe possess nothing to be
compared with it for finish of execution.
I shall not say much of the principal personage: he possesses all the
qualities and all the defects to which we are accustomed in the work of
the sculptors of the Ancient Empire. The modelling of the torso, arms,
and legs is excellent, of the foot mediocre, of the hands execrable;
the head lives, alive and intelligent under the large wig, with its
rows of braids one above the other, which frames it. The two accessory
statues are charming in design and composition. On the left Ati, the
dead man’s wife, stands leaning against the back of the seat embracing
her husband’s leg. The face and limbs are painted yellow in accordance
with a convention almost always respected in Egypt.[20] A layer of
bright red denotes the tan that the sun lays on the men’s skin; the
light yellow reproduces the more delicate shade induced by the indoor
life of the women. The hair, parted over the forehead, falls in two
masses alongside the cheeks. The sleeveless dress is open in front, and
the opening extends in a point to between the two breasts: the stuff
exactly follows the lines of the body, and the skirt ends a little
above the ankle. The position of the breasts is indicated by a special
design; all the rest from the waist to the feet is embroidered with
ornaments in colour, imitating the network of glass beads to be seen
in the museums.[21] A necklace with two rows and bracelets complete
the costume. On the right, Knom, son of Skhemka and Ati, serves as a
pendant to his mother: he is naked except for a necklace round the
bottom of his neck and a little square amulet that falls on his chest.
The grace and charm of the figures cannot be too much admired. Although
of small dimensions, the artist has endowed them with the physiognomy
and features suited to their age with as much exactness as if he
had been dealing with a colossus. The firm flesh and rounded but
muscular limbs of the woman in her prime, and the chubby flesh and soft
limbs of the child, are treated equally happily. The mother’s face has
a smiling charm, the son’s a naïve and wondering grace: the Egyptian
chisel did not often work with so much intelligence and lightness.
[Illustration: SKHEMKA WITH HIS WIFE AND SON.
Limestone. The Louvre.]
The gesture with which each of the two small people embraces the leg
of the big one is not an artifice of composition, a simple way of
attaching the subordinate elements of the group to the principal one.
It is often to be found in turning over the plates of Lepsius’s fine
work.[22] The inscriptions repeatedly state of the wife that “she loved
her husband,” and the artists reveal it in action. Seated or standing
by his side, she puts her hand on his shoulder or her arm round his
neck; crouching or kneeling, she leans against him, her breast pressed
against his leg, her cheek leaning against his knee. And it is not only
in the privacy of the home that she treats him with this affectionate
abandon, but in public, before the servants or the assembled vassals,
while he is inspecting his lands and reviewing his possessions.[23]
In the same way it is rare to find a personage without his children,
“who love him,” at his feet or by his side, from the little, naked
long-haired boy, like Knom, to the grown-up sons and married daughters.
To sum up, the sculptor to whom we owe the Louvre monument has carved
in stone a scene of contemporary life. He shows us Skhemka, Ati, and
Knom grouped as they were every day: and what is conventional in his
work is not the grouping of the three people, but the disproportion in
stature between the husband and wife, and between the mother and son.
But here, again, he is only conforming to a prevailing tradition of
his art. In all the tombs of every period, the master of the hypogeum
is generally of the height of the wall, while servants, friends, sons,
and wives are only of the height of one of the rows. The king, in
the warlike paintings of the temples, is of colossal size, while the
others, friends or enemies, beside him, look like a crowd of pigmies.
In that case we might imagine that the difference in size showed only
the difference of rank, but the explanation does not suffice elsewhere.
A slave married for her beauty preserved something of the inferiority
of her former condition; a princess of the blood royal, united in
marriage to a private individual, did not therefore renounce her royal
rank. If inequality of stature corresponded to inequality of rank,
the sculptor would have made the first smaller and the second bigger
than her husband. They did not, however, do that: slave or princess,
they gave the wife a stature sometimes equal but more often lower than
that of the husband.[24] Thus the treatment does not show social
distinction; the woman was legally on the same level as the man. If
the master of the tomb is alone in his height, it is merely because he
alone is at home in the tomb, and it was desired to show in him the one
master, the personage who must be protected against the dangers of the
other world: so he was designed of large size, as we underline a word
in a sentence in order to emphasize it.
In fact, the sculptor, in modelling his work, thought of the
necessities of the life beyond the tomb. Skhemka’s wife living might be
superior to Skhemka by fortune or birth, and so take precedence of him;
before the dead Skhemka she was only a subordinate personage. Egyptian
theology supposed, it would seem, that the wife was as indispensable
to the man after as during life, and that is why she is represented by
his side on the walls of his tomb; but, as she is only an accessory
there, the sculptor and the painter are free to treat her as they
understand the matter. If the husband demanded it, they gave both the
same stature, seated them on the same seat, made no sort of difference
between them. But if he expressed no wish, they could either suppress
her altogether or relegate her to the background and give her the
dimensions of her son, as they did with Ati, in order that she may lean
against the seat on which her husband is enthroned.
V
THE CROUCHING SCRIBE
VTH DYNASTY
(_The Louvre_)
He was found by Mariette in the tomb of Skhemka in 1851, during the
soundings which preceded the discovery of the Serapeum. He is now
in the Louvre, in the centre of the “Salle civile” of the Egyptian
Gallery, surrounded by show-case tables. His attitude, in conjunction
with the unfortunate place assigned him, makes him look like a fellah
dealer in antiquities seated in the midst of his goods, patiently
waiting for customers. The red paint, which was perfect when he was
brought to the Louvre, has worn off in places with the coating on
which it was applied, and so the whity colour of the limestone shows
through here and there; the cross light from the two windows falls on
him in such a way as almost to efface the modelling of the shoulders
and chest: ordinary visitors, for whom there is nothing to mark it,
scarcely look at it, and pass it by in complete indifference to the
fact that one of the masterpieces of Egyptian sculpture is before them.
[Illustration: CROUCHING SCRIBE.
The Louvre.]
Does he represent the great lord in whose tomb he was found? Other
statues that entered the Louvre with his bear the name of Skhemka and
pass for the faithful portrait of that personage.[25] If, as their
careful composition leads us to believe, that claim is justified, the
Crouching Scribe was only one of the numerous relatives or servants
named in the inscriptions of the chapel. The people of the Ancient
Empire had the custom of shutting up in the _Serdâb_,[26] by the side
of the statue of the dead person, those of other individuals belonging
to his family or his household. They are mourners, both men and women
crouching down, one hand hanging or cast on the ground about to pick
up the dust in sign of mourning, the other held in front of the face
and plunged into the hair;[27] women who crush the grain on the stone;
servants who thrust their arm into an amphora, probably to coat it with
pitch before pouring in the beer or wine. Ours is a scribe: his legs
bent under him and placed flat on the ground in one of those positions
familiar to Orientals, but almost impossible for Europeans, the bust
upright and well-balanced on the hips, the head raised; reed in hand,
and the sheet of papyrus spread over his knees, he still waits, at
an interval of 6,000 years, for his master to resume the interrupted
dictation. The paintings in the contemporary tombs tell us a hundred
times rather than once what he is preparing to write. In order to
sustain himself in the other world, the great Egyptian lord received on
appointed days the offerings due to him from the domains attached to
his tomb: one was to bring bread, one meat, others wine, cakes, fruit.
It was quite a big piece of bookkeeping, identical with that usual in
his lifetime. The scribes of flesh and blood entered the real revenues
as they came in; the scribe of stone rendered the same service to the
master of stone whom he attended for ever.
We cannot say that our scribe was handsome in his lifetime, but the
truth and vigour of his portrait compensates largely for what he lacks
in beauty. The face is almost square, and the strongly accentuated
features indicate a man in his prime; the large mouth with thin
lips is slightly raised at the corners and almost disappears in the
prominent muscles that frame it; the cheeks are rather hard and bony;
the ears are thick and heavy, and stand out awkwardly from the head;
and the low brow is crowned with coarse, short hair. The eye is well
opened, and owes its special vivacity to an artifice of the ancient
sculptor. The stone in which it is set has been cut away and the
hollow filled with black and white enamel; a bronze mounting marks
the edges of the eyelids, while a little silver nail[28] fastened
under the crystal at the bottom of the eyeball receives the light,
and reflecting it, simulates the pupil of a real eye. It is difficult
to imagine the striking effect that this combination may produce in
certain circumstances. When Mariette cleared out the tomb of Râhotpou
at Meîdoum, the first ray of light which entered the tomb, that had
been closed for 6,000 years, fell on the forehead of two statues
leaning against the wall of the _Serdâb_, and made the eyes sparkle
so brilliantly that the fellahs threw down their tools and fled in
terror. Recovered from their fear, they wanted to destroy the statues,
persuaded that they contained an evil genius, and were only prevented
from doing so at the point of the pistol. More than one statue of the
Ancient Empire, intact at the moment of its discovery, was mutilated
for the same reason that nearly proved fatal to those of Meîdoum. In
the bad light in which the Crouching Scribe is placed, the eyeball does
not shine with a sufficiently strong sparkle, but it really does seem
to have life in it and to follow the visitor with its look.
The rest of the body is equally full of expression. The flesh hangs a
little, as is fitting with a man of a certain age whose occupations
prevent exercise. The arms and back are good in detail; the lean bony
hands have fingers of a greater length than is usual; the rendering
of the knee is minute and exact in a way rarely found elsewhere in
Egyptian art. The whole body is, so to speak, governed by the animation
of the physiognomy, and under the influence of the same feeling of
expectation that dominates it: the muscles of the arm, bust, and
shoulder are only partly at rest, ready at the first signal to resume
the task that has been begun. No work better refutes the reproach of
stiffness usually made in regard to Egyptian art. Let us add that it
is unique in Europe, and that we must go to Boulaq for pieces fine
enough to sustain comparison without disadvantage. But it is not enough
to possess a masterpiece, it is still more important to preserve it.
In its present position the Crouching Scribe runs more risks than
formerly in Egypt. The thousands of years spent buried beneath the sand
in a hypogeum on the tableland of Saqqarah thoroughly dried up the
limestone of which it is made. Transported to our damp climate, and
submitted to its sudden changes of temperature, it is only too much
exposed to deterioration. It should not have been installed without
protection and naked, so to say, in the centre of a room, between
two large doors always open, round about which there are perpetual
draughts. The curators at Turin have placed the fine limestone statue
of Amenôphis I possessed by the Museum in a tightly closed glass cage,
and to that protection is due the fact that the Pharaoh has preserved
its epidermis and colour intact; the expense is not so great that the
Louvre would be impoverished by authorizing a similar proceeding. The
demotic inscriptions of the Serapeum are carefully placed under glass,
and the precaution is praiseworthy, although it makes the study of them
impossible; it is then high time to take similar precautions with the
Scribe. The damp has already acted on it a little; the red coating has
been loosened and has fallen away in some places. If the mechanical
work of destruction is allowed to proceed it will soon be in the same
condition as the three statues of Sapouî and his wife, and the Louvre
will have lost one of the finest pieces of sculpture Egypt has given us.
In comparing it with the statues of Skhemka that we have already
described,[29] we are led to ask why the statue of a subordinate
person should be so superior to that of his master. The Egyptians
knew nothing of what we term art and the artist’s profession: their
sculptors were persons who cut stone with more or less skill, but whose
work, always subordinated to the plan of a building, or to theological
considerations, did not possess the absolute value belonging to the
least important statue of classical antiquity or of modern times.
The effigy of an individual was placed in his tomb, not because it
was beautiful, but because it represented him and served as a support
to his _double_. The question of skill or artistic feeling was a
subordinate one, and we find twenty statues of the same person, some of
which are of finished workmanship and others coarse sketches: whether a
masterpiece or not, the stone body equally served its purpose. Skhemka
fell into the hands of a merely conscientious workman, his scribe into
those of a highly skilled craftsman. I imagine that they cared little
enough if the sculptor brought more or less talent to his task: so long
as the resemblance was there, they asked for nothing more.
VI
THE NEW SCRIBE OF THE GIZEH MUSEUM[30]
The excavations undertaken by M. de Morgan in the northern part of the
necropolis of Saqqarah have recently brought to light a mastaba in fine
white stone, near the tomb of Sabou, a little to the east of Mariette’s
old house. No architectural façade or chapels accessible to the living
were found, only a narrow corridor that plunges into the masonry from
north to south with 5° deviation to the east. The walls had been
prepared and made smooth to receive the usual decoration, but when the
mason had completed his task, the sculptor, it would seem, had no time
to begin his. None of the sketches with the chisel or brush customarily
found in the unfinished tombs of all periods are to be seen. Two large
stelæ, or, if it is preferred, two niches in the form of doors, had
been prepared in the right-hand wall, and a statue stood in front of
each in the same spot where the Egyptian workmen had placed them on the
day of the funeral. The first represents a man seated squarely on a
stool, wearing the loin-cloth, and on his head a wig with rows of small
curls one above the other.
[Illustration: THE NEW SCRIBE OF THE GIZEH MUSEUM.
Painted limestone.]
The bust and legs are bare; the fore-arms and hands rest on the knees,
the right hand closed with the thumb sticking out, the left flat with
the tips of the fingers reaching beyond the hem of the loin-cloth. So
far as may be judged from a photograph, the general style is somewhat
weak; but the detail of the knee, the structure of the leg and foot,
are carefully rendered, the chest and back stand out by the excellent
modelling, the head, weighted as it is by the coiffure, is attached
to the shoulder with an easy and not ungraceful vivacity. The face is
not in good relief, and has a sheepish expression, but the mouth is
smiling, and the eyes of quartz and crystal have an extraordinarily
gentle expression. Taken altogether it is a very good piece of Egyptian
portraiture, and would be a valuable addition to any museum.[31]
The new scribe was crouching in front of the second stele.[32] He
measures in height almost the same as his colleague in the Louvre, and
sufficiently resembles him to permit both being described in almost
similar terms. The legs are bent under and are flat on the ground,
the bust upright and well balanced on the hips, the head raised, the
hand armed with the reed, and in its place on the open papyrus sheet;
they are both waiting at an interval of 6,000 years for the master
to resume the interrupted dictation.[33] The professional gesture
and attitude are reproduced with a truth that leaves nothing to be
desired: it is not only a scribe whom we have before us, it is the
scribe as the Egyptians knew him from the beginning of their history.
The skill with which the sculptors have brought out and co-ordinated
the general features belonging to each class of society is largely
responsible for the impression of monotony produced by their works on
modern spectators. That impression is lessened and nearly effaced, if
we look a little more closely and see how carefully the sculptors have
noted and reproduced the details of form and bearing that make up the
physiognomy proper to each of the individuals who live in the same
social surroundings or practise the same profession. Our two scribes do
not cross their legs in identical fashion; he of the Louvre puts the
right leg in front, he of Gizeh the left. There is no fixed choice, and
children at first tuck their legs under without thought of preference
for one or the other; soon they acquire a habit which makes them keep
to the position once adopted, and in the East to-day you find people
who put either the left or right leg in front, and just a few who put
either one or the other indifferently. The Louvre scribe flattens out
the hand that holds the reed, the man of Gizeh sinks down, and his back
is slightly bent. This shows the habit of the individual, and is not a
question of age, for a glance at the two statues shows that the Gizeh
scribe is younger than his colleague of the Louvre: he is not out of
the thirties, while the other is certainly over forty.
Indeed, the age of the two men is an important point of which we must
not lose sight, if we desire to judge soberly the real value of the two
works. I have heard archæologists, when comparing them, regret that the
scribe of Gizeh does not show the same abundance of carefully studied
anatomical detail as the scribe of the Louvre; that therein lies the
real inferiority of the first, whether it was that the sculptor was
less conversant with the anatomy of the human body than with that
of the face, or that time had pressed, and he had contented himself
with giving his subject the conventional body that for the most part
sufficed in funerary statues. The care, as I have pointed out, with
which the small details of the attitude are expressed shows that the
reproach is undeserved, and that the artist has worked to give a
portrait complete from top to toe, and not only to reproduce a head on
a conventional body. The roundness of the form preserves the appearance
of the original, and shows, realistically, the age the subject was at
the time of his death, or at least at the period of life at which his
relatives desired to have a portrait of him. In the best facsimile
something of the delicacy of the monument itself must be lost, and in
spite of the great care taken in engraving it, its original aspect is
not entirely preserved. I think, however, that in looking closely at it
there can still be seen in many places the artistic, supple workmanship
by which the chisel expressed the delicacy and vigour of the model.
The most vigorous fellah of our day, when young and in good health,
has apparently slender muscles that do not stand out: like those of
the porters of Boulaq, one of whom without aid moved a stone statue
of nearly the same height as himself, and yet had hands and calves
like those of a woman, that looked of slight strength and incapable of
continuous effort. The knotty and twisted excrescences to be seen on
the arms, back, or chest of our athletes were rarely found in Egyptians
of ancient race, at least in youth. The ancient sculptor rightly noted
that physiological trait of his people. He had a young man before him:
so he evolved from the limestone a young Egyptian body in which the
play of the muscles is hidden beneath the skin, and is only betrayed
by a number of touches manipulated with knowledge and discretion. If,
like his colleague who sculptured the Louvre scribe, he had had to
portray a person of ripe age, he would not have exerted himself to
bring out the flabbiness of the flesh and the heaviness of its folds,
to execute all the pleasant work of the chisel which so well reproduces
the depredations of age in a rich sedentary man of fifty. In short, he
worked differently because he had a different subject.
There is no sort of inscription on either statue to inform us
of the name and characteristics of its original, who must have
been a person of some importance: a large tomb invariably meant a
considerable fortune, or a high post in the administrative hierarchy
which compensated for mediocrity of fortune. It might also be that
Pharaoh, desiring to reward services rendered him by some one in his
_entourage_, granted him a statue, a stele, an entire tomb built by
the royal architects at the expense of the Treasury.[34] It is certain
that our anonymous scribe held high rank in his lifetime, but to what
Dynasty did he belong? He so closely resembles the scribe of the Louvre
that he was evidently his contemporary: he must then have lived at the
end of the Vth Dynasty, and we reach a similar result if we compare him
with the other statues preserved at Gizeh. It is of the style of the
statues of Ti and of Rânofir, especially of the last two. One of them,
which formerly was No. 975 in the Boulaq Museum, is full of dignified
feeling.[35] Rânofir is standing, his two arms pressed against his
body, one leg in advance, in the attitude of a prince who is looking at
his vassals march past him. Whoever has seen him cannot fail to observe
how much he resembles our new scribe. Firstly, the head-dress is the
same; they both have the head framed, so to speak, in a bell-mouthed
wig. The hairs or fibres of which it is made were gummed, as is the
case to-day with the hair of certain African tribes. The hair is
carefully smoothed on the forehead and the top of the head, and being
parted on the cranium, hangs down and forms a kind of dark case round
the face which accentuates the ruddy tint of the flesh. The modelling
of the torso, the muscling of the arms, are treated in the same way
in both statues, and the dignified expression which characterizes the
physiognomy of Rânofir relieves the somewhat commonplace features of
the new scribe. Those are all facts that are not to be noted in other
portraits of our personages. The seated statue that I first described
possesses the general aspect of the individual, and undoubtedly
represents him; but the technique and feeling differ, since it is
necessarily that of a different sculptor. It is the same with Rânofir.
The statue of him numbered 1049 in the Boulaq Museum lacks the high
dignity we admire in No. 975. It is so heavy, so expressionless,
that it almost seems to be another Egyptian. The difference in the
workmanship proves that two artists were commissioned to execute
statues of the same man. The identity of workmanship, on the other
hand, compels us to recognize the same hand in the statue No. 975 of
Rânofir and in that of our new scribe: the two works proceeded almost
at the same time from one studio.
[Illustration: STATUE OF RÂNOFIR.
Cairo Museum.]
It would be interesting to find out if, among the statues in the
museums, there are others that may be related to these and have a
common origin. I do not so far know any, but I ought to add to what
I have said the indication of a special sign by which they can be
distinguished. The Egyptians were accustomed to paint their statues
and bas-reliefs, and the colours in which they clothed them were more
varied, and more subject to change, than is generally recognized. We
are used to see only a red-brown tone for the flesh, and they certainly
employed it very often; they did not, however, employ that tone only,
and men’s faces are occasionally coloured in a very different way. The
colouring of statue No. 975 and of the new scribe differs from the
usual manner. That of statue No. 975 has grown paler since Rânofir
left his tomb and became exposed to the light, but that of the Gizeh
scribe is still fresh, and resembles as faithfully as possible the
yellow complexion bordering on red of the modern fellah. The greater
number of archæologists who occupy themselves with Egyptian art neglect
facts of this kind. During my stay in Egypt I have endeavoured to bring
them out, and it is in co-ordinating them systematically that I have
been able to verify the existence, either at Memphis itself or in the
ancient village of Saqqarah, of two principal studios of sculptors and
painters to which customers of the later periods of the Vth Dynasty
entrusted the task of decorating the tombs and carving the funerary
statues.
Each had its special style, its traditions, its models, from which it
did not willingly depart. Commissions were divided between them in
unequal proportions, according to whether it was a question of isolated
statues or of bas-reliefs. I do not remember observing sensible
differences of style in the pictures that cover the walls of the same
mastaba: for that kind of work application was made to one or the other
studio, and it alone undertook the commission. For the statues, on the
contrary, recourse was had to both at the same time: the task, thus
divided, was more quickly accomplished, and there was more chance that
it would be finished by the day of the funeral. I do not mean to state
that there were then only the two studios of which I speak: I think
I have found traces of several others, but they perhaps enjoyed less
vogue, or the chances of excavation have not so far been favourable to
them.
To sum up, we may say, without the risk of being taxed with
exaggeration, that the art of the Ancient Empire counts another
masterpiece. It was a gift of happy chance to M. de Morgan in his first
serious excavations as earnest of good fortune: it is of good augury
for the future, and, as he is not a man to let a chance slip once he
holds it, and since he has the material means and the money required
for methodical exploration, we may hope for further finds without long
delay.
VII
THE KNEELING SCRIBE
VTH DYNASTY
(_Boulaq Museum_)
If he had not been dead for 6,000 years, I should swear that I met
him six months ago in a little town of Upper Egypt. It was the same
commonplace round face, the same flattened nose, the same full mouth,
slightly contracted on the left by a foolish smile, the same banal
expressionless physiognomy: the costume alone was different and
prevented the illusion from being complete. The loin-cloth is no longer
in fashion, and neither is the large wig; except the fellahs when at
work, no one now goes about with bare legs and torso. Some follow
fairly closely the custom of Cairo, and wear the too small tarbouche,
the stiff stambouline, the European starched shirt, but without a
cravat, black or crude blue trousers, shoes with cloth gaiters. Others
keep to the turban, long gown, wide trousers, and red or yellow
morocco leather babouches. But if his clothes have changed since the
Vth Dynasty, his deportment has remained perceivably identical. The
modern secretary, after delivering his papers to his master, crosses
his hands over his chest or his stomach in the fashion of the ancient
scribe; he no longer kneels while waiting, but assumes the humblest
attitude imaginable, and if his costume did not hide it, we should
recognize the suppleness that characterizes the Boulaq statue in the
movement of his shoulders and spine. His chief finishes reading the
papers, affixes his seal to this one or that, writes a few lines across
another, and throws the sheets on the ground: the secretary picks them
up, and returns to his office without offence at the cavalier manner
in which his work is given back to him. Indeed, is it to be expected
that a moudir, a man receiving a large salary, would take the trouble
to stretch out his arm to meet the hand of a mere ill-paid employee?
In fact, he treats his subordinates as his superiors treat him; his
subordinates, in their turn, act in a similar way towards theirs, and
so things go on right down the ladder, and no one dreams of objecting.
[Illustration: KNEELING SCRIBE.
Cairo Museum.]
Our scribe was one of those to whom the papers were thrown more often
than to others. He occupied a somewhat low place in the hierarchy, and
no bond attached him to the great families of his period. If he is
kneeling, it is that the sculptor has represented him in one of his
ordinary attitudes during the hours of work; he has also drawn his
portrait with the fidelity and jovial good humour adopted by artists
in portraying scenes of everyday life. The man has just brought a
roll of papyrus or a tray laden with papers; kneeling in the approved
manner, the bust well-balanced on the hips, the hands crossed, the back
bowed, the head slightly bent, he waits until his master has finished
reading. Does he think? Scribes felt some secret apprehension when
appearing before their masters. The rod played a large part in the
discipline of the offices. An error in the addition of an account, a
word omitted in copying a letter, an instruction misunderstood, an
order awkwardly executed, and the blows fell. Few employees escaped
flogging. If they did not deserve it, it would be inflicted on
principle: “That young fellow requires a beating. He obeys when he is
flogged!”[36] The sculptor has admirably transferred to the stone the
expression of resigned uncertainty and sheepish gentleness with which
the routine of an entire life spent in service had endowed the model.
The mouth is smiling, for such is the demand of etiquette, but there
is no joy in the smile. The nose and cheeks grimace in unison with the
mouth. The two big enamel eyes, surrounded with bronze, have the fixed
expression of a man who is vaguely waiting, without looking attentively
at anything or concentrating his thought on a definite object. The
face lacks intelligence and vivacity. After all, the profession did
not exact great alertness of mind. The formulas of administration were
simple and of little variety, the arithmetic was not complicated; it
was possible to get on easily with memory and industry, and so, without
much trouble, to earn sufficient to purchase a good funerary statue.
Our statue was found at Saqqarah[37] in a tomb of somewhat mediocre
appearance. Neither the name nor filiation of the man informs us under
what king or Dynasty he vegetated; but in comparing him with the statue
of Rânofir[38] we are able to assign him his place in the series.
First, both our scribe and Rânofir wear a wig of a form somewhat rare
at that period; the hair, parted from the centre of the brow, is drawn
back in a mass behind the ears and hangs down straight round the neck.
Our scribe, instead of the red complexion usually attributed to men’s
faces, is painted light yellow, very like those of women. Rânofir shows
the same peculiarity, an unusual one under the Ancient Empire. I do
not think it could have been mere caprice on the part of the artist. A
scribe, forced to live always in his office as women do in their homes,
would have a less sunburnt skin than his colleagues who worked in the
open air: the yellow colour of the limestone would thus be a sort of
professional sign, and would correspond with a lighter complexion in
the original. The titles of Rânofir prove that he lived under the last
reigns of the Vth Dynasty,[39] and in placing the kneeling scribe
at the same period, we are sure of not being much in error. I have
preferred to base my opinions on purely archæological grounds, but I
think an examination of the style of the two statues would carry the
connection still farther: the way in which the neck is attached to the
shoulders, and particularly the way in which the hands are treated,
is almost identical in the two cases. I do not know if I am mistaken,
but I have almost persuaded myself that the statue of Rânofir and that
of the kneeling scribe come from the same studio, and are perhaps the
fruit of the same chisel. I do not despair of finding other monuments
of a similar origin, and of reconstituting in part the work of one of
the masters of which the tombs of Memphis have preserved the various
productions, but without preserving their names.
The execution is very careful: unfortunately the limestone in which the
scribe is cut was too soft, and it is worn away in places. The knees
have suffered most, and it is a great pity, for we can see by what
is left of them how careful the artist has been with the modelling.
The arms are not divided from the bust, the hands are heavy, the feet
long, but the play of the muscles of the chest and neck is well noted.
In short, it is an estimable work of a conscientious sculptor who
thoroughly understood his vocation.
VIII
PEHOURNOWRI
STATUETTE IN PAINTED LIMESTONE FOUND AT MEMPHIS
(_The Louvre_)
Mariette found the statuette by chance when searching the Serapeum.
It had formerly been taken from the pit in which it was shut up and
thrown amid the rubbish of the great sphinx avenue that leads to the
tomb of Apis. The individual was named Pehournowri; he was cousin
royal, and fulfilled functions that I do not know how to define.
Nothing in the inscription helps us to conjecture with what king he
claimed relationship, but its style proves that he lived under the Vth
Dynasty. That he was of mature age is indicated by the plenitude of
form, by the fine proportions and the benevolent and benign aspect.
A short wig, a necklace, a loin-cloth scarcely reaching the knees,
completes his costume. His statue is not one in front of which we
naturally pause when walking through a museum. I do not think that
during the thirty years it has been in the Louvre it has attracted the
attention of any one except experts in Egyptology. Not that it lacks
merit: the modelling is exact, the execution skillful and delicate, the
expression frank and successful, but the pose differs very slightly
from that which hundreds of other artists have given to hundreds of
other statues. The careless visitor who passes from one seated man to
a second, and then to many others, does not think of looking for the
details of execution that distinguish them. He thinks that when he has
seen one or two he has seen all, and departs with the idea that the
chief attribute of Egyptian art is monotony.
Egyptian sculptors did not greatly vary the pose of their sitters.
Sometimes they represented them standing and walking, one leg in
advance of the other, sometimes standing, but motionless, with the feet
together, sometimes sitting on a seat or a stone pedestal, sometimes
kneeling, more often crouching, the chin against the knees like the
fellahs of to-day, or the legs flat on the ground like the scribe of
the Louvre.[40] The details of arrangement and costume may be modified
_ad infinitum_, but the attitude is nearly always regulated by the
six types I have enumerated. Some modern critics attribute this fact
to the inexperience of the sculptors, others to the inflexibility of
certain hieratical rules. But having seen not only the few incomplete
pieces to be found in Europe, but also the monuments still existing in
Egypt, I cannot admit those reasons. Everywhere in the bas-reliefs of
the temples and tombs a multiplicity of gestures or attitudes are to
be seen which show to what point the artists could, when they pleased,
diversify the human figure: the peasant bends over the hoe, the joiner
leans over his bench, the scribe stoops over his paper, the dancers,
girls and men, twist and balance their bodies, the soldiers brandish
their lances or march in time, as naturally as possible. And the
sculptors even reproduced positions in their statues very different
from those we are accustomed to see at the Louvre: the kneeling woman
who is grinding her corn, the baker who is kneading the dough, the
slave who coats the amphora with pitch before pouring in the wine, the
crouching mourner of Boulaq,[41] are all composed and modelled with
a lightness of action and a perfection of expression that leaves no
doubt as to the skill of the artist. It is true that hieratical rules
existed, and no one will dispute that fact, but they were reserved for
matters of religion and for those alone. They exacted, for instance,
that Amon must always, in every case, have the attributes, costume, and
attitude proper to the god, but they in no wise ordered that all men
were to be confined to one of the five attitudes I have just described.
The freedom of composition to which the large historical pictures of
the temples or the domestic scenes of the tombs testify, does not agree
with what we are told concerning the inflexibility of the hieratical
rules.
[Illustration: PEHOURNOWRI.
The Louvre.]
I shall not now touch on the statues of kings or divinities: I shall
have an opportunity later of treating them at leisure. Those of private
individuals represent for the most part persons of rank, great nobles,
people of the court, officers, magistrates, priests, employees of
birth or fortune; they come from nearly all the cemeteries, and are
portraits of the man for whom the tomb was hollowed out or of people
of his house. The master stands in an attitude of command, or sits
like Pehournowri, and he could only have one or the other of those
attitudes. The tomb is, in fact, his private house, where he rests
from the fatigues of life, as he used to do in his terrestrial home.
A soldier when at home does not carry his arms, a magistrate does not
wear his robe: soldier or magistrate, the insignia of the profession
are laid aside when he returns home. Thus the master of the tomb
always wears his civil costume, and leaves the marks of his profession
at the door.
Then, also, the accessible part of his dwelling has a special
destination which regulates the pose of the statues: it is, in fact,
his reception-room, where on certain days the family assembled to
present the offerings to him, in more prosaic words, to dine with
him. Whether his statue was visible in one of the open chambers or
invisible in the _Serdâb_,[42] it was his substitute. It is sufficient
to look at the neighbouring bas-reliefs to discover what were the
official attitudes of the dead man in the tomb. He was present at
the preliminaries of the sacrifice, the sowing and the harvest, the
rearing of the cattle, fishing, hunting, the execution of crafts, and
he saw all the works carried out for the _eternal dwelling_: he was
then standing, one foot in advance, head erect, hands hanging down, or
armed with the staff of command. Elsewhere, one after the other, the
different courses of the meal are served him, cakes, wines, canonical
meats, fruits which he needs in the world of the dead: then he is
seated in an armchair alone or with his wife. The sculptor employed for
his statues the two positions he has in the paintings: standing, he
receives the homage of his vassals; seated, he takes part in the meal.
And in the same way the statues which embody the members of the family
and of the household have likewise the attitude suited to their rank
and occupation. The wife is sometimes standing, sometimes sitting on
the same seat as her husband, or on a separate one; sometimes, as in
life, crouching at his feet. The son wears the costume of childhood, if
the statue was carved while he was still a child, or the costume and
attitude of his office if he was an adult. The acting scribe crouches,
the roll spread on his knees, as if he was writing from dictation or
reading from an account-book.[43] The slave grinds the corn, the bakers
knead the dough, the cellarers pitch their amphoras, the mourners
lament and tear their hair as it was their duty to do in the world
above; each individual is occupied according to his condition. The
social hierarchy followed the Egyptian after death, and it regulated
the pose of the statue after, as it had regulated that of the model
before, death. Up to a certain point it is the same to-day, and he who
carves the statue of a printer is careful not to attribute to him the
action and costume of a miner or a sailor. These statues, shut up in
the tomb, formed a sort of tableau in which each person held for ever
the pose characteristic of his rank or his profession. The artist was
free to vary the detail and regulate the accessories according to his
fancy, but he could not change the general disposition without injuring
the utility of his work.
At bottom, it is with the statues of Ancient Egypt as with the pictures
of saints of the Italian schools. The painters had to treat their
subject on lines from which they could not depart without falsifying
or disfiguring it. Bring sixty or eighty St. Sebastians together
in a room: how many of those who saw them would escape the boredom
that infallibly results from constant repetition? When the tenth St.
Sebastian was reached only a few professional artists would not have
already gone away. I am supposing, too, that only choice pictures
had been collected in which the qualities of a master are easily
recognized. If, on the contrary, there had been collected at random
all the available St. Sebastians without first eliminating the bad
pictures, the finest St. Sebastians in the world, lost in the crowd,
would be likely to attract no more attention from the public than the
Crouching Scribe or the other masterpieces of Egyptian sculpture in
the Louvre. The hypothesis appears absurd, because no one will easily
admit that any one could have the idea of making such a collection. I
agree so far as modern or ancient works, the value of which is known,
are concerned; but Egyptian Museums have so far always been classified
as depôts of archæological objects, not as art galleries. Each statue
is a scribe, a god, a king; it is the scribe Hor of the XIXth Dynasty,
or the scribe Skhemka of the Vth, or the king Sovkhotpou, wearing
the head-dress of the pschent, and that is all. The trumpery scribes
and the scribes that emanate from the hands of a master are confused
under the same rubric, and no mark is placed to distinguish the good
from the bad. Pehournowri is a scribe, Ramke a second scribe, Rahotpou
a third scribe, just as the St. Sebastian of such or such a great
Italian master and the St. Sebastians of the Epinal pictures are two
St. Sebastians: the public which is not warned, and which has no more
interest in one scribe than in another, passes on without looking.
The impression of monotony is produced by the perpetual repetition
of the same types and by the method of classification adopted in the
museums. If it was decided to do for Egypt what has been done for
Greece and Rome, to separate the productions of art and the objects of
archæology, people’s opinion would be promptly modified. The impression
of monotony would not wholly disappear, because the number of types
studied by the Egyptian sculptors was not sufficiently numerous: it
would be lessened and would no longer blind the crowd to the real
beauty and perfection that reside in Egyptian sculpture.
IX
THE DWARF KHNOUMHOTPOU
(VTH OR VITH DYNASTY)
(_Boulaq Museum_)
The charming person who left us this statue is known, since the
Exhibition of 1878, by the name of the Superintendent of the Cooks;
his title in the inscription on the pedestal indicates a keeper of the
wardrobe. In his lifetime he doubtless enjoyed some notoriety, since he
had one of the fine tombs of Saqqarah for himself alone, but we know
nothing of his history. His name was Khnoumhotpou, a name later made
illustrious by a prince of Minieh under the XIIth Dynasty: his place of
burial proves that he was born at the end of the Vth or beginning of
the VIth Dynasty.
He was a dwarf, and a very small dwarf. The statue is scarcely a foot
in height, and the dimensions of the head show that it was probably
half the natural size. It reproduces the characteristics proper to
dwarfs without exaggerating them. The head, of a suitable size, is
long-shaped and flanked by two large ears. The expression of the
face is heavy and stupid, the eyes narrow and raised at the temples,
and the mouth wide and ill-formed. The chest is strong and well
developed, but the artist has employed his ingenuity in vain in order
to dissimulate the hind-quarters by covering them with a vast white
petticoat; notwithstanding, we feel that the torso is not in proportion
to the arms and legs. The stomach forms a round projection, and the
hips recede in order to counterbalance the stomach. The thighs only
exist in a rudimentary state, and the whole individual, mounted as he
is on little deformed feet, seems about to fall face downwards on the
ground. The flesh was painted red, the hair black, but the colour has
peeled off or been effaced in places. The two legs were broken formerly
at the ankle, then stuck on again when the statue was transported to
the Museum. It is very possible that the accident happened during the
execution of the statue, for the limestone used by the Egyptians is so
fragile that the sculptor did not venture to detach the arms from the
body: too hard a blow of the mallet while freeing the legs may have
caused the unfortunate fracture that spoils the bottom of the monument.
Khnoumhotpou is, so far, the only dwarf that has come to light who is a
nobleman. Similar dwarfs were not lacking in Egypt, but they nearly all
belonged to the class of jugglers and buffoons. The Pharaohs and the
princes of their court bestowed the same affection on these deformed
creatures as did Christian or Mussulman kings in mediæval times; their
household would not have been complete without two or three of them
of an aspect more or less grotesque. Ti possessed one that figures by
her in her tomb: the poor wretch holds in his right hand a kind of
large wooden sceptre terminated by a model of a human hand, and leads
a greyhound almost as tall as himself in a leash. Elsewhere dwarfs
are represented crouching on a stool at the feet of their masters, by
the side of the favourite monkey or dog. We know from the pictures
of Beni-Hassan that two of them belonged to the prince of Minieh’s
suite; one, despite his small size, does not lack elegance, but the
other enjoys with the exiguity of his stature the pleasure of being
club-footed. The Egyptian heaven did not escape the prevailing mania
any more than the court of the Pharaohs, and it included several
dwarfs, of whom two at least had an important rôle: Bîsa, who presided
over arms and the toilet, and the Phtah, who for a long while has,
without reason, been called embryonic Phtah.[44] Perhaps Knoumhotpou
joined to his functions of keeper of the wardrobe the office of court
buffoon; perhaps he was of noble birth, and preserved by his origin
from the disagreeables to which his brethren of low extraction were
exposed.
[Illustration: THE DWARF KHNOUMHOTPOU.
Cairo Museum.]
But we have no need to know what he was: merely in leaving us his
portrait, he has rendered signal service to science. Let us recall the
part played by the statues of the tombs in the theological conceptions
of the Egyptians: they were the indispensable support of the _double_,
the body without which the soul of the dead person could not exist
in the other world. It might be thought that in passing from life in
this world to that beyond the tomb, the people to whom beauty had been
chary might not have been sorry to assume a new appearance; if we are
to be re-born, it is better to be re-born less ugly. The care that
poor Khnoumhotpou has taken to reach us deformed shows that the old
Egyptians did not hold our views on the subject: they desired to remain
always as nature created them at the moment of conception. It was not
absence of coquetry on their part, but necessity: their idea of the
soul compelled them so to act. From the moment that their personality
was indissolubly bound up with the existence of the body, the first
condition imposed on them for remaining identical with themselves after
death, as before, was to preserve their earthly form intact. In order
that the Khnoumhotpou who dwelt in the hypogeum of Saqqarah might not
be a different being from the Khnoumhotpou who walked through the
streets of Memphis, it was necessary that his disincarnated _double_
should find there the support of a statue of a dwarf. Give him the fine
proportions of Ti or Rânofir, the proud bearing and haughty mien of the
Cheîkh-el-Beled, even the more common type of the Crouching Scribe,
he would not have known what to do. His substance, poured, so to
speak, into the exiguous and deformed mould of the dwarf, could never
have adapted itself to the new mould into which the artist would have
tried to cast it. Khnoumhotpou beautified would no longer have been
Khnoumhotpou; his tomb, without the statue of a dwarf, would only have
sheltered a double and a support strangers to each other.
It was then the likeness, and the absolute likeness, that the artist
had to seek to reproduce, and the seriousness and scrupulousness with
which he rendered the deformity of his model is thus explained. The
Egyptians were scoffers by nature, and liked to mingle the comic with
the serious, not only in literature but in the arts. To take only
one example: the painter who, at Thebes, pictured the interment of
Nofrihotpou, has drawn, by the side of the large boats laden with
mourners and all the apparatus of grief, the contortions of two
sailors whose shallop was brutally struck by the oars of the funerary
barque. If the sculptor who chiselled Khnoumhotpou had been free to
follow his natural inclination, he would probably have exaggerated
certain features and given the unfortunate creature a slightly absurd
physiognomy. His religious conscience would not permit him to risk
anything of the kind: a statue uglier than nature would have been as
inconvenient to the soul of the original as a statue more beautiful
than nature. A body of stone identical at all points with the body
of flesh was what the Egyptian demanded, and that is exactly what
the sculptor fashioned for the little Khnoumhotpou. We see here that
what we call the question of art is subsidiary: a stone-cutter who
understood his business sufficed for all that was required.
It must not, however, be concluded from what precedes that I regard
the portrait of Khnoumhotpou as the work of a mere artisan. It has
been too often repeated that statuary in Egypt was a mechanical craft;
sculptors were taught to fashion arms, legs, heads, and torsos, and
to join them, according to the formula, in imitation of two or three
models always the same. That opinion, repeated by the Greeks, is fairly
difficult to uphold in the presence of the statue of Knoumhotpou; it
might be possible to set up patterns for bodies of ordinary formation,
but all varieties of deformed bodies could not possibly be foreseen.
The unknown master whose work we have at Boulaq proceeded in exactly
the same manner as a modern sculptor, the necessities of whose work
confronted him with a deformed model: he produced a work of art, not
the task of a mechanic.
X
THE FAVISSA OF KARNAK AND THE THEBAN SCHOOL OF SCULPTURE[45]
I
A large pool among the ruins, and at the southern end two batteries
of _chadoufs_, one on top of the other, working to exhaust the water
continually renewed by the infiltrations. On the banks are blocks and
muddy statues, round which half-naked workmen are busily occupied,
beams, levers, coils of rope, and the beginnings of a Decauville line;
remains of storied walls dominate the workshops, and the modern village
of Karnak stands out clearly on the horizon beyond their irregular tops.
When the first Ptolemies decided at the beginning of the third century
B.C. to restore the Theban temple of Amon, they found it encumbered
with _ex-votos_. Everywhere, in the halls, the corridors, the
court-yards, there were stelæ, stone statues, little wooden or bronze
figures, sacred or royal insignia, heaped up one on the other, and in
such quantities that there was no space for new ones. It was a legacy
of extinct Dynasties or of noble families who had died out, to whom the
Pharaohs had granted the privilege of consecrating their image in the
house of the god, and to sell or destroy any of them would have been
to commit sacrilege.[46] They were dealt with according to the custom
of the contemporary peoples: a vast pit was dug between the seventh
pylon and the hypostyle hall, and then they were buried pell-mell in
holy ground. Twenty centuries later, in 1883, hastily made soundings
revealed the richness of the site to me, but, lacking money, I could
not venture to undertake anything. It was not until 1901, when the
regular progress of clearing away brought the workmen to the spot, that
I advised M. Legrain to dig more deeply than usual, so that nothing
which was hidden beneath the earth might escape observation. The
excavations yielded just what I had foreseen, royal colossi in granite,
limestone, sandstone which were restored to their ancient places along
the pylon; a little below came fragments of a fine limestone building
of Amenôthes I that Thoutmôsis III had used for banking up when he
enlarged the temple; and at the very bottom, at a depth of over six,
twelve, fourteen yards, what none of us had thought of, an intact
_favissa_ in which hundreds of statues and small objects awaited in the
mud the hour of their deliverance.
For four years M. Legrain has been exploring the spot foot by foot,
and I think he has succeeded in entirely emptying it. We must now draw
up the inventory of the treasures it has bestowed on us. The greatest
benefit conferred by them is assuredly on political history. All epochs
are not represented in equal abundance--the first Theban Empire is, so
to speak, merely mentioned, and the two great Dynasties of the second
are represented only by about a hundred pieces--but from the fall of
the Ramessides to the Persian conquest the series of the high priests
of Amon reappears almost complete, with their wives, sons, brothers,
the children or latest descendants of their brothers, and from the day
when the male line failed, the princesses who inherited its rights,
with the noble persons who wielded the power in their name. However,
the large find all at once of statues and inscriptions serves not only
to give information about the revolution that transformed the military
kingdom of Thebes into a theocracy, but also furnishes documents for
the study of the progress of art during the twenty centuries and more
that the revolution took. The artistic merit of the objects is very
unequal, and many of them are only interesting to the archæologist;
some, however, stand out distinguished above the mass, and take their
rank worthily beside the best known productions of Egyptian art. As
they come from the same temple, and have been erected by different
members of the same families, it is natural to see in them the work of
one school, established at Thebes in far-off antiquity. Indeed, a unity
of character common to all is easily discerned, which, perpetuating
itself without notable change from generation to generation, fixes
undeniable affinities of conception and technique.
[Illustration: THE WORKS AT KARNAK IN JANUARY, 1906.]
II
Setting aside a few stelæ in which the arrangement is bad and the
composition coarse,[47] the most ancient monuments we possess of that
school are those discovered by Carter and Naville between 1900 and
1906 in the tomb of Montouhotpou V at Deîr-el-Baharî. The bas-reliefs
of the chapel belonging to the pyramid are as correct in design and
as firm in touch as the fine Memphian bas-reliefs of the Vth or VIth
Dynasty; but the relief is more accentuated, the outline bolder and
freer, the man more thick-set, and more firmly placed on the ground,
the woman of a more slender figure, with larger hips and a more ample
bosom. The statue of the king which is in the Cairo Museum[48] was
cut in the sandstone with a bold, firm chisel. The feet and knees
are thick, the hands massive, the bust indicated in summary fashion,
the face boldly modelled. The colour is harsh, the flesh black, the
costume white, the cap red, according to the ritual of the ceremonies
for which it was destined; the whole has an aspect of barbarism, but
a premeditated barbarism, having regard to the religious effect to be
produced. If a Memphian sculptor had treated a similar subject, he
would not have failed to harmonize the lines and soften the colour:
unconsciously he would have fused its type with the softer type
of human physiognomy that prevailed in his school, at the risk of
enfeebling its energy. The Theban sculptor, on the contrary, exerted
himself above all to reproduce the truth as it revealed itself to him,
and that preoccupation is dominant to the end with all of his school.
They sought the likeness with the intention of exaggerating rather than
of softening the individual features of the subject, and in order to
attain it, did not shrink from roughness of execution nor violence of
colour: they often fell into barbarism, but scarcely ever into banality.
When, under the XIIth Dynasty, Thebes became one of the capitals of
Egypt, its kings sometimes employed local artists, sometimes called
in sculptors imbued with the Memphian tradition from Heracleopolis
or the Fayoum. Chance has preserved for us two colossal heads, one of
Sanouosrît I (Ousirtasen),[49] discovered by Mariette in the ruins of
Abydos, the other of Sanouosrît III, extracted by M. Legrain from the
pit at Karnak. The handicraft is excellent in both cases, and seldom
has this unpromising stone been worked with greater skill, but the
inspiration of the whole is different. Here are two persons of the
same race, and the general resemblance is sufficient to set aside any
doubt: for if it were not there, we should be tempted to see in each
a sovereign of a different Dynasty. The first belongs to a school
inspired by the Memphian tradition: the sculptor has idealized or, if
preferred, symbolized his model, and has given it the short full oval,
the smiling good-humoured face that the school adopted for official
statues of the Pharaohs. The second, on the other hand, copied the
features without softening a single one; the face is long and thin,
the brow narrow, the cheek-bones prominent, the jaw bony and heavy. He
has hollowed the cheeks, surrounded the nose with two deep furrows,
tightened the lower lip and projected it into a contemptuous pout; he
has realized a strong work, whereas the other, penetrated by opposite
principles, has only evolved from the stone an agreeable composition,
but one lacking individuality.
[Illustration: MONTOUHOTPOU V.
Painted sandstone.]
[Illustration: HEAD OF A COLOSSUS OF SANOUOSRÎT.
Pink granite.]
The contrast between the two methods is less striking in the
bas-reliefs than in the statues. Among the fragments used by Thoutmôsis
III for filling up is a square pillar emanating from a limestone
building of Sanouosrît I. The Pharaoh is seen on one of the
sides accompanied by Phtah. They are there, the sovereign and the
god, face to face, breathing each other’s breath, according to the
etiquette of greeting between persons equal in rank. The style greatly
resembles that of the Memphian school, but when examined more closely,
peculiarities of the Theban school are to be distinguished. The
contours are firmly fixed, the relief is less flat, and consequently
the shadows less thin, and thus the outline of the figures stands out
more strongly against the background than in the pictures of Gizeh
or Saqqarah: a Memphian would perhaps have displayed more elegance,
but would have remained true to convention. The scenes engraved on
the other three sides also present the characteristics of Theban art,
and it is a pity that the fragment is so far unique. If the rest of
the temple was decorated in the same happy fashion, the XIVth Dynasty
encouraged at Thebes a work comparable to the finest of the XVIIIth or
XIXth on the porticoes of Deîr-el-Baharî, in the sanctuary of Gournah,
and in the Memnonium erected by Setouî I at Abydos.
[Illustration: SANOUOSRÎT AND THE GOD PHTAH.
Fine sandstone.]
III
It is with the statues of the XVIIIth Dynasty discovered at Karnak
by M. Legrain as with those of the XIIth: directly we look at them
we notice distinctive signs of the school, with modifications that
are explained when we consider the position of Thebes at that period.
The favourite residence of the Pharaohs and permanent seat of their
government, its prosperity was continually increased by the booty
gained in Syria or Ethiopia, and as wealth increased, so did the taste
for building. Not only did the kings never tire of embellishing the
city, but, following their example, private individuals built sumptuous
palaces and tombs there. For so much activity a large supply of artists
was needed: studios multiplied, sculptors came from all parts of the
country to supplement the few Theban sculptors. Those strangers did
not join the local school without exercising some influence on it: it
was subdivided into several branches, each of which, while preserving
a common ground of precepts and habits, soon assumed its personal
physiognomy. We already know two or three of them, but how many must
there have been during the three centuries that the Dynasty lasted, all
the work of which is lost for us or confused with the mass?
[Illustration: BUST OF THOUTMÔSIS III.
Grey Schist.]
I like to attribute to the same studio, besides a certain number
of pieces recently acquired by the Cairo Museum, three of the best
fragments extricated by M. Legrain from the _favissa_, the Thoutmôsis
III, the Isis, and the Sanmaout. The Thoutmôsis III is in a very supple
schist that allows the most delicate chiselling, and no engraving
can do justice to the delicacy of the modelling: the play of the
muscles is discreetly noted, but with extraordinary sureness, and, the
imperceptible shadows it produces varying in proportion as we walk
round the figure, the aspect of the physiognomy seems to change from
moment to moment. Isis was not of royal birth, and perhaps came from
one of the lower strata of society: five-and-twenty years ago her
existence was not suspected, and the Karnak statue in pink granite
is the first portrait we have of her. It is through her, however,
that Thoutmôsis III possesses the features by which he differs from
his predecessors, the large aquiline nose, wide-opened, almost
protruding eyes, full mouth, rounded face. The heavy wig he wears
made the sculptor’s task difficult; so much the greater then is the
merit in conceiving a work before which we pause, even by the side of
the preceding one. It contains all the characteristics of the Theban
school, the seeking after the personal expression, the sincerity of
the rendering, the width of the shoulders and, as a set-off, the
intentional smallness of the waist between the ample breasts and broad
hips. Study of the composition compels us to attribute it to the
same studio, if not to the same artist to whom we owe the statue of
Thoutmôsis III. I think the same about the group representing Sanmaout
and the little princess Nafêrourîya whose steward he was: nothing could
be less conventional than the free, firm gesture with which he holds
the child, or the posture of trusting abandon with which she leans
against his breast. The frankness of the movement well harmonizes with
the spiritual gentleness of the face and the smile that animates the
eyes and the full lips. Sanmaout was Queen Hachopsouîtou’s major-domo,
and his sovereign had authorized him to erect his statues in the temple
of Amon. After examining those that remain to us, it cannot be doubted
that they all come from one of the royal studios, most probably the one
whence came later the statues of Thoutmôsis and his mother Isis.
[Illustration: ISIS, MOTHER OF THOUTMÔSIS III.]
And we have direct proof that the Theban sculptors of that period tried
above everything to make sure of the likeness. They drew their subject
over and over again before definitely making the rough sketch, and the
dry climate of Egypt has preserved many of their cartoons. Cartoon
is not exactly the term, since they used fragments of limestone for
their studies, but the word _ostraca_ by which they are designated
is not much better, and, further, is only intelligible to expert
Egyptologists. Hundreds of them have found their way to the Cairo
Museum, and they show the attempts of the artist, his hesitations
and corrections, the variations of his thought and of his hand, down
to the moment when he became absolute master of his model. More than
once, too, the chances of excavation have brought the model itself to
light, and provided us with the means of comparing the portrait with
the original. That is the case with Thoutmôsis III. His mummy was found
in 1881 in the _favissa_ of Deîr-el-Baharî and is exhibited with the
others in the Gallery of Sovereigns in the Cairo Museum. The face has
certainly greatly changed in course of mummification, and the shrunken
flesh, the sunken eyes, the flattened nose, and the discoloured
skin make him very different from what he was formerly. But if the
superficies has changed, what is beneath has endured: if we compare the
profile of the face with the mask of the statue, we must admit that
they are identical, with the addition of the life, the expression of
which was perpetuated by the sculptor.
[Illustration: SANMAOUT AND THE PRINCESS NAFÊROURÎYA.
Black granite.]
Let us skip a century and a half, and transport ourselves to the
last years of the Dynasty: they have bequeathed us several pieces
that must be related to a common origin: the fine woman’s head that
Mariette called Taia, the Khonsou and the Amon of Harmhâbi,[50] the
Toutânoukhamanou, and perhaps also the statuette in petrified wood
extracted from the _favissa_ by Legrain in 1905. Is not a portrait
of Aî to be recognized there? It is broadly treated despite its
restricted dimensions, but the unfortunate material employed did not
allow the artist to go far as regards execution: the likeness remains
uncertain. But it preserves the mark of the school, and various details
in the nose, mouth, the cut of the eyes, the inset of the eyebrows,
lead me to think that we shall probably be right in attributing
it to the group of artists to whom we owe the Khonsou and the
Toutânoukhamanou. I am certain that they come from the same hand, and
an instant’s examination will prove it. The two figures might almost be
superimposed: the eye is hollowed out in an identical amount in both,
the attachment of the nose is similar, and so is the way of slightly
inflating the nostrils and of dilating the middle of the lips and
compressing the corners. The physiognomy has something ailing in it,
but the indications of ill-health, the obliquity and bruised appearance
of the eyes, the thinness of the cheeks and neck, the prominence of
the shoulder-bones, are more perceptible in the Khonsou than in the
Toutânoukhamanou; we might say that the model of the Khonsou, if it
is not Toutânoukhamanou at a more advanced age, had a more visible
tendency to consumption. A doctor should study them both: he alone
could decide, if, as I imagine, they represent a sick man, and possibly
he could, according to the external aspect of the subject, establish
the exact diagnosis of the disease.
The similarities are less marked in the head called Taia, and they are
not at once noticeable in the engraving: but they are clear to those
who have studied the originals. In a slighter degree all the details
I have noted in Khonsou and Toutânoukhamanou are there: the queen is
not a sick woman, but the different parts of her face are treated
in the same way, and the hand which sculptured them is that which
so delicately chiselled the portraits of the god and the Pharaoh,
its contemporaries. Even when only the queen was known, her strange
physiognomy greatly excited the imagination of scholars. Mariette, who
discovered her, thought her a stranger to Egypt; he identified her
with Tîyi, the wife of Amenôthes III, and declared her to be Syrian,
Hittite, Armenian, and his opinion long prevailed. We know now that
her date is at least a quarter of a century after Tîyi, and that she
represents the wife or mother of Harmhâbi, one of the Pharaohs who
succeeded the heretical sovereigns of the XVIIIth Dynasty. And in fact
the portraits of Tîyi that have recently emerged from the earth have
no point of likeness with that of Mariette’s queen. They present a
woman of a thin bony type, with heavy jaw and long depressed chin, a
low receding forehead, the physiognomy of the Pharaoh Khouniatonou with
which the bas-reliefs and statues of El-Amarna have familiarized us. By
the form and expression of her face our queen is allied to the family
of Harmhâbi or Toutânoukhamanou: the resemblance of her statue to those
of Legrain would sufficiently prove it, if further proof were required.
And now, when the two groups I have just described have been compared,
it is easily admitted that the inspiration and technique of the second
proceed directly from the inspiration and technique of the first. Taste
fluctuated during the five or six generations that divide them, and
the caprices of fashion have influenced the execution: but the general
characteristics remain unchanged, and their persistence allows us once
again to assert the continuity of the school.
[Illustration: STATUETTE IN PETRIFIED WOOD.]
[Illustration: THEBAN KHONSOU.
Granite.]
[Illustration: STATUE OF TOUTÂNOUKHAMANOU.
Red granite.]
[Illustration: THE SO-CALLED TAIA.
White limestone.]
[Illustration: RAMSES II.
Alabaster. Turin Museum.]
[Illustration: RAMSES IV LEADING A LIBYAN CAPTIVE.
Grey granite.]
IV
It maintained its flourishing condition during the XIXth Dynasty, and
the _favissa_ has restored to us works that yield in nothing to those
of the preceding age. In my opinion the best is a mutilated statue of
Ramses II, so like the big Turin statue in pose and execution that it
might be the first rough draft of it, or the exact smaller copy. A few
pieces of the XXth Dynasty are worthy of esteem without rising far
above mediocrity, as in a little group in granite of Ramses VI bringing
a Libyan prisoner to the god Amon: the bearing of the victorious
Pharaoh does not lack pride, the constrained posture of the barbarian
is skillfully noted, and the movement of the miniature lion that glides
between the two is interpreted with the customary naturalness of the
Egyptians when they portray animals.[51] I prefer the priest with the
monkey, or, to give him his name, Ramses-Nakhouîti, the chief prophet
of Amon. In a crouching posture, with calves and thighs flat on the
ground, a roll spread out before him across his legs, bewigged and
petticoated, uncomfortable in his robes of ceremony, with an air of
abstraction he meditates, or silently recites prayers to himself. A
little hairy cynocephalus perches on his shoulders, and looks at him
over his head: it is the god Thot who is revealed in this unusual
position, and it was difficult to co-ordinate the beast and the man in
a manner that should be neither absurd nor simply ugly. The sculptor
has come out with honour. The priest slightly bends his neck, but we
feel that the beast does not weigh on him: the monkey on his part half
shrinks behind the head-dress, and the deep frown of his face prevents
the mischievous effect that the countenance of an animal above a human
face might have produced. Like the group of Ramses VI, it bears the
imprint of the school, but with notable differences of technique: if
the first was sculptured in one of the royal studios, the second comes
from another studio of which the origin can be indicated.
We know how, about a century after the death of Ramses III, the
pontiffs of Amon made themselves masters of the whole of the Thebaïd:
while a new Dynasty established itself at Tanis in the eastern delta,
they exercised supreme authority over Southern Egypt and Ethiopia,
sometimes with the title of high-priest, sometimes with that of king,
and their sacerdotal house was the seat of their government. We do
not know the exact site, but we learn from an inscription that it
was situated near the seventh pylon, not far from the spot where the
_favissa_ was dug out. It is probable that their relatives obtained
the privilege from them, at the moment they assumed domination, of
erecting their statues in the temple. The court-yard between the
seventh pylon and the hypostyle hall contains only a small number of
_ex-votos_: they chose it as the place in which to consecrate their
monuments, and filled it in the course of generations. What has come
down to us does not include all they erected in their own name or to
the memory of those they loved. Many statues were seized or destroyed
during civil or foreign wars, but when the Macedonians conquered the
land enough remained for more than five hundred to be thrown into the
_favissa_. A large number of artists must have been needed to execute
so many commissions, and, besides its royal studio, Thebes long
possessed one or several pontifical studios. To one of those must be
assigned the man with the monkey, and nearly all the statues after the
fall of the Ramessides. For the most part they have a real value, and
scarcely yield to the old royal works, such as the limestone statuette
of Orsorkon II, who drags himself along the ground and offers a boat
to his god, the fragments of which have disappeared. We are forced to
confess, however, that many are, if not bad, of no interest for the
history of art.
[Illustration: THE PRIEST WITH THE MONKEY.]
The usual posture did not lend itself to elegance. They are nearly all
crouching, the thighs up to the chest, the arms crossed on the knees:
what advantage was to be obtained from an attitude that reduced a man
to a mere packet surmounted by a head? Where the model departed from
the hieratical posture, the qualities of the school are revealed. The
Ankhnasnofiriabrê en Hathor has a somewhat strained gracefulness: it
would almost bear comparison with the Amenertaîous so much admired by
Mariette, if it were not leaning against a big ugly pillar. Perhaps
the contrast between the slender waist and the inflated bust and belly
is too marked in the Ankhnas, but the composition of the head is
irreproachable. It is nearly always so at that epoch: if the sculptors
sometimes neglected the bodies or interpreted them ill, they cared
lovingly for the heads. Fine portraits may be counted by the score
among the statues found in the _favissa_. I shall only give two here,
that of Mantimehê and his son, Nsiphtah, who lived under Taharkou and
Psammetichus I. Thebes was then under a curious government. When the
male descendants of the priests failed, the power, and those sacerdotal
functions that could be exercised by women, passed into the hands
of the princesses: one of them was elected, who, wedded to the god
in a mystic marriage, henceforth enjoyed the right of living free as
she pleased. To assist them in the government, these _pallacides_ of
Amon had major-domos, who often filled with them a similar rôle to
that of the chief minister with the queens of Madagascar before the
occupation of the island by the French. Mantimehê and his son are
the best known of these persons, and the artists to whom the care of
sculpturing their portraits was entrusted would certainly be the best
among those of the sacerdotal studio. It is, in fact, nature itself,
and no master of a former age could have expressed better or with a
bolder chisel the bustling vulgarity of the father and the aristocratic
inanity of the son. The second Saïte period and the beginning of the
Greek period are almost entirely unrepresented in the _favissa_; under
the Persians, distress was too general for artistic matters to be
thought of, and the Macedonian rule had only just been consolidated
when the common pit was dug. A granite head, of hasty workmanship but
dignified appearance, shows, however, that the Theban studio followed
the movement that prevailed in the schools of Lower Egypt, and that,
doubtless under the influence of Greek models, it gave attention to
details hitherto neglected: the skull is studied with a greater care
for accuracy, and also the slight accidents of the physiognomy, the
furrows of the forehead, the lines between the eyes and at the rise of
the nose, the falling in or puffing out of the cheeks, the play of the
muscles round the nostrils and mouth. The sculptor desired to note in
his work not only the broad lines of the face, but the small details
that characterize the individual and determine his personality.
[Illustration: OSORKON II OFFERING A BOAT TO THE GOD AMON.]
[Illustration: QUEEN ANKHNASNOFIRIABRÊ.]
[Illustration: MANTIMEHÊ.]
[Illustration: NSIPHTAH, SON OF MANTIMEHÊ.]
[Illustration: HEAD (SAÏTE PERIOD).]
[Illustration: THE COW OF DEIR-EL-BAHARÎ IN HER CHAPEL.]
V
It is a long time since I undertook to distinguish, under the apparent
uniformity with which Egypt is reproached, the varieties of composition
and conception that may serve for the recognition of schools, and,
in the work of the schools, for that of particular studios. I have
not found it difficult to show how the Memphian manner differs from
the Theban, nor what distinguishes both from that which flourished at
Hermopolis, Tanis, Saïs; but for the lack of sufficiently numerous
documents, I had not succeeded in marking out the development of one
same school through a long series of centuries. The find at Karnak gave
me the materials I lacked, and since M. Legrain has been exploiting
it, I have not ceased to search in it for information on that point.
I have obtained much there, sometimes, it is true, of varying value,
and I have still much to learn both about the most ancient periods and
about certain moments of transition in more recent periods. I believe,
however, the results already obtained are sufficiently important and
significant to compel us to remodel the history of Egyptian art. I have
not ventured to do that here, but, short as the present essay is, it
may clearly be seen to what results it has led me. I have confirmed
the fact that the characteristics of Theban art were those I thought
I recognized at the beginning of my studies: I then rapidly noted the
stages that the art passed through from the moment that Thebes awoke to
political life almost to that when it ceased to exist as a great city.
XI
THE COW OF DEIR-EL-BAHARÎ[52]
At two o’clock in the afternoon of February 12, 1906, while Naville
was finishing his lunch, a workman came running up to tell him that
the top of a vault was beginning to emerge from the earth. For several
days certain indications had led him to think that a discovery was at
hand: he went to the spot and at once saw in the mound of sand that
dominated the back porticoes of the temple of Montouhotpou a spectacle
that filled him with joy. The vault was almost half dug out; under it,
in the shade, an admirable cow extended her neck, and seemed to look
about her curiously. A few hours’ work sufficed to set her completely
free. She was intact, but a little figure leaning against her breast
had had its face crushed in distant ages, and the violence of the
blows had caused a crack in the head and shoulders that compromised
its solidity. The chamber that sheltered the cow was built in a
hollow of the rock with slabs of sculptured and painted sandstone.
The semicircular ceiling did not present the usual regular vault with
converging keystones and surfaces; it was composed of a double row of
bent blocks cut in quarters of a circle and buttressed one against
the other at their upper end. It was painted dark blue with yellow
five-pointed stars scattered over it to represent the sky. The three
vertical partitions were decorated with religious scenes: on the one at
the back Thoutmôsis III worships Amonrâ, lord of Thebes, and on the two
sides he makes an offering to Hathor, who is no other than the very cow
shut into the vault.
[Illustration: AMENÔTHES II AND THE COW HATHOR.
(From the right-hand side of the group.)]
[Illustration: AMENÔTHES II AND THE COW HATHOR.
Three-quarters view.]
She was still half buried when some ten inquisitive persons turned
their kodaks on her, thus despoiling Naville, and disputing among
themselves the pleasure of being the first to photograph her. In the
evening nothing else was talked of in the Louxor hotels, and the
tourists did not fail to make up parties to go and admire her the next
day. The fellahs, on their side, related the most marvellous tales. She
had breathed noisily just at the moment that the light of day touched
her, and had shivered in all her limbs. She had directed such a look
on the workman who had perceived her that he broke his leg with an
awkward blow of his axe. She was not, as she seemed to be, of stone,
but of fine gold, disguised by Pharaoh’s magicians in order to keep
off treasure-seekers: a few formulas repeated at a fixed hour with the
prescribed fumigations and rites, a little dynamite, and after the
explosion the fragments would be transformed into ingots of metal. And
as if the sorcerers were not sufficient, dealers in antiquities prowled
about in the vicinity. Doubtless she was too heavy for them to think
of carrying her off whole, but would they have found it very difficult
to detach the head and decamp with it during the night, in spite of
the vigilance of our guards or with their complicity? Unscrupulous
amateurs are never far to seek, ready to pay heavily for a stolen
object, provided they believe it to have an artistic or archæological
value, and the certainty of gaining hundreds of pounds in case of
success largely compensates the honest brokers of Louxor for the petty
annoyance of disbursing a few pence by way of fine or of undergoing
a week’s imprisonment if they are caught in the act. I should have
preferred to leave the monument in its ancient place, but it would have
been tempting fortune, and the only means of saving it was to send it
to Cairo. I entrusted the matter to M. Baraize, one of our engineers,
and he carried it out extremely well: in less than three weeks he had
dismantled the blocks, packed up the cow, and transported the cases
by train across the Theban plain. The chapel is now rebuilt in a good
position at the end of one of the rooms of the Cairo Museum, but the
goddess is not hidden in darkness as at Deîr-el-Baharî. She stands at
the entrance, her body in the full light, the hinder parts a little
under the vault: she comes forth from her house and shows herself
freely to visitors, from the snout to the end of the tail.[53]
[Illustration: THE COW HATHOR.
Cairo Museum.]
II
Our wonder is at first aroused by the mixture she presents of
conventional mysticism with realism. The front view shows only the
head surrounded by accessories, the significance of which is only
appreciated by those who are learned in religious matters. At the top
of the composition, between the tall horns in form of a lyre, the
usual head-dress of goddess-mothers, is the solar disk flanked
by upstanding feathers and stamped with an inflated uræus. This
scaffolding of emblems without thickness and almost without consistence
would run the risk of being broken by the slightest blow if it was not
supported, and so it rests on two tufts of aquatic plants, the stalks
of which, rising from a socket near the hoofs, spring up right and
left of the legs; flowers alternating with buds bend over the back of
the neck and form a fan-shaped support behind the disk and feathers.
Under the snout, and as if framed by the vegetation, is the statuette
of a man standing, his back to the cow’s chest. As I said, the face is
mutilated, the flesh black; he stretches out his hands, palms downward,
in front of him with a gesture of submission, as if avowing himself
the humble servant of Hathor: by the uræus of the crown and the stiff
petticoat spread in a triangle in front of the thighs, we guess him to
be a Pharaoh. He is found again in a less punctilious attitude under
the right flank of the statue. He is kneeling, naked, and his flesh
is red; he presses the teat between his hands, and drinks greedily of
the sacred milk. If we may believe the cartouche engraved between the
lotuses, the two figures, the black and the red, are one and the same
sovereign, Amenôthes II of the XVIIIth Dynasty, and perhaps that is
the case. But it was Thoutmôsis III who built the chapel, and it is
he that the artists have represented twice over, praying in front of
the cow and sucking the udder. It would be strange if, after erecting
the sanctuary, he should have omitted to provide it with his goddess.
It is more probable that the cow was commissioned by him, and shut up
there by his order, but without dedication or cartouche: he considered
doubtless that the neighbouring bas-reliefs would constitute sufficient
title-deeds. Later, Amenôthes II, wishing to associate himself with
his father’s act of piety, and noticing an empty space behind the
coiffure, inscribed his name there.
Such a complexity of figures and attributes does not tend to make
the appreciation of the work easy for us, and we have also to add
the prescriptions of the ritual to the conventions of the craft from
which Egyptian artists were never free, at least when stone was their
material: the belly, tail, legs, all the lower parts of the group, are
enclosed in a stone partition which spoils the effect even while it
preserves them from the chances of breakage. And yet, despite defects
that shock a sculptor of our time, one glance suffices to reveal the
extraordinary beauty of the work. The head differs from that of our
European cows, but it is a question of race, and whoever has seen the
Soudanese cow of the present day will easily distinguish its features
in the Hathor of Deîr-el-Baharî: the fullness of the brow, the subtle
modelling of the temples and cheeks, the gentle widening out of the
snout, the suppleness of the nostrils, and the smallness of the mouth.
Such accuracy of detail will delight the naturalist, but it might be
feared that it would harm the artistic value of the whole. That is not
the case at all, and if at a distance the physiognomy seems to have
only an expression of gentleness and meditative somnolence, as soon as
we go near it assumes an air of intelligent attention. The eye seems
to grow larger and to follow the visitor who arrives, the snout to
contract and palpitate, as if to scent out. The sculptor, instead of
following the tradition and polishing the stone as highly as possible,
has respected the fine furrows of the chisel, and the light playing
on them gives at moments the illusion of a shudder running over the
skin. The body is of equally accurate composition, the chest narrow,
shoulders thin, spine long and saddle-backed, leg long and slender,
the thigh sinewy, the haunches prominent, the udder only slightly
developed. The hinder part is worked with an incredible fidelity.
Contrary to custom, the coat is red-brown, darker on the back, lighter,
of a tawny shade that becomes white, on the belly; it is speckled with
black spots, like flowers with four petals, which we should consider
artificial, if there were not animals of Soudanese origin in the
Egyptian herds of to-day that show similar markings. By those spots
they recognize among the heifers of the year the one in which Hathor
has deigned to become incarnated, and which must be worshipped as long
as she remains on earth.
III
She was, above all, the divinity of the dead. The buildings scattered
about that corner of the necropolis were not exclusively consecrated
to the gods of the living; they were the chapels attached to royal
tombs, some of which, like that of Montouhotpou, were contiguous to the
tomb, while others, like that of Queen Hachopsouîtou, for example, were
relegated to the other side of the mountain, in the Bibân-el-Molouk.
The sovereigns were sometimes praying and bringing offerings to
the gods, sometimes associated with them and taking part in their
sacrifices. Hathor, ruler of the West and lady of the heaven, had
become by a concourse of ideas, the reasons of which can be understood,
the mistress of souls and _doubles_: she played thus a part of great
importance in places where the worship of her vassals was celebrated.
Walk through the halls of the large terraced temple and you will find
her repeatedly with the figure and posture assumed by her in the
oratory discovered by Naville: she is the foster-mother whose milk
Thoutmôsis and Hachopsouîtou are greedily imbibing. The suckling of the
sovereign was not a mere metaphor of language, realized and transcribed
on stone, but a material act borrowed from the customs of Egyptian law,
and the final formality of the ceremonies of the adoption. The woman
who had no son to perpetuate her memory, and desired to have one, after
reading the preliminary passages, had to offer one of her breasts,
in all probability the right, to the youth or man she had chosen; he
would press the teat between his lips for a few seconds, and by this
pretence of feeding would become to her as a son. Among half civilized
peoples where this custom prevails, it is not required that the woman
has been or is still married: only, the young girl who acquires a child
by this method covers her breast with a thin stuff before going through
the ceremony. If, then, Thoutmôsis III, or by usurpation Amenôthes II,
was represented kneeling under the right teat of the Hathor, he wished
thereby to prove that she was his divine mother, and the complacent
manner in which she yields him her milk sufficiently shows that she
admitted the legitimacy of his claim.
[Illustration: AN UNKNOWN FIGURE AND THE COW HATHOR.]
But these are only half the ideas expressed by the group, and it
remains for us to determine the meaning of the flowering lotuses which
stand at the right and left. As sovereign of the West and of the lands
in which the dead sojourned, she assumed different forms according to
the provinces. In the North the people imagined her under the aspect of
one of those fine sycamores which grow in the midst of the sand on the
borders of the Libyan Desert, rendered green and thick by the hidden
waters sent them by the infiltrations of the Nile. The mysterious
path which leads to the shores of the West brings the _doubles_
to her feet; as soon as they are arrived, the divine soul, lodged in
the trunk, thrust out the half or the whole of her body, and offered
them a vase full of pure water and a tray filled with loaves. If they
accepted her gifts--and they could scarcely refuse them--they confessed
at once that they were her vassals; they were no longer authorized to
return to the living, but the regions of the world beyond the tomb
would open to them. In the nomes of the Saîd where she was imagined to
be a cow, she haunted a fertile marsh situated on the slopes of the
Libyan mountains; whenever a _double_ came to its edge she stretched
forth her head from among the herbage to meet him, and claimed his
homage, and when he had paid it, she allowed him to enter the realms of
the funereal gods. The 186th Chapter[54] of the “Book of the Dead,” a
very favourite one with devout persons under the second Theban Empire,
initiates us into this myth, and the vignette that precedes it shows
us the scene as the Egyptians conceived it: the red or yellow slopes
of the mountain, the tufts of aquatic plants, the cow conferring with
the defunct. The Pharaoh who commissioned our group--or rather the
sculptor who executed it--combined the idea common to all with the
royal concept of the adoption by the goddess, and he expressed the
result therefrom as completely as the processes of his art permitted.
He reduced the marsh to two slender clusters of lotus, and marked the
two chief points of the adoption by means of two little royal figures
and their attributes. The first, as we have seen, wears the costume of
the Pharaohs and has black flesh; standing upright under the animal’s
snout, it faces the spectator. Amenôthes II has just arrived in front
of the cow and addressed to her the prayer in which he conjures her
to aid him in his journey in search of the everlasting cities; his
colour indicates that he is still the slave of death, but the goddess
has already enrolled him among her adherents, and presents him to the
universe as her well-beloved son. That formality over, he slips through
the verdure, kneels down, and crushing the teat in his hand, greedily
puts his lips to it. That is the final rite of the adoption, and also
the pledge of his return to normal existence. Scarcely has he swallowed
the first mouthfuls of milk than life enters his veins; the artist has
represented him naked as a new-born infant, and painted his flesh red,
the colour of the living.
IV
The two forms of Hathor welcoming the dead are not each confined to the
province in which it was born. They gradually spread over the whole
country, not without experiencing diverse fortunes. Hathor in the tree
was reserved for papyri, stelæ, and bas-reliefs. The first idea was
scarcely suitable for statuary, and the cleverest sculptor would have
been embarrassed to derive a large tree from the stone, a goddess lost
in the branches, a person in prayer before the tree and before the
goddess. But it lent itself to painting, and some of the vignettes in
which it is expressed in the excellent copies of the “Book of the Dead”
or on the walls of the Theban hypogeums, show us the admirable way in
which the designers of the new empire used it. Nothing could be more
varied or skilful than the relations they establish between the woman
and the sycamore on the one hand and the dead person on the other. He
is sometimes accompanied by his soul, a big hawk with human head
and arms, which mimics his slightest gestures: while the _double_
receives the elixir of youth in his clasped hands, the soul turns a
runnel aside for his own benefit, and greedily drinks from it. Colour
adds its charm to the composition, and the replicas of the subject to
be seen at Cheîkh Abd-el-Gournah in the hypogeums of the XVIIIth and
XIXth Dynasties would obtain a place of honour in our museums, if it
was permitted to detach them and mount them in separate panels.
[Illustration: PETESOMTOUS AND THE COW HATHOR.]
Hathor in the marshes was entirely suited to the ordinary conditions of
sculpture, and if in some places serious difficulties were presented,
I have indicated how the Theban masters overcame them. She provided a
fairly frequent theme for the studios, and the Cairo Museum possesses
three examples. They are smaller than the Deîr-el-Baharî group, and
do not unite the two concepts of the adoration and the adoption.
Consequently the lotus is wanting and the dedicatory figure at the
cow’s udder. They are the affair of simple private persons who had
no right to proclaim themselves children of the goddess. If they had
attempted to touch the breast of Hathor they would have usurped one of
the privileges of royalty; they appear then only once in each group,
standing or crouching in front of the chest. In one, which is in grey
schist and measures nearly four and a half feet long, the donor has
lost his head and neck, and he lifts up a table of offerings with
both hands in front of him; the cow also is decapitated.[55] No trace
of inscription is to be seen on the pedestal, but the composition is
that of the first Saïte period. The piece, although not the most
mediocre that could be found, lacks originality; it is the work of a
skilful journeyman who had no personal inspiration, and only knew how
to apply the formulas of the school conscientiously. The second group
is in yellowish limestone. It measures not quite three feet in length
and has suffered more than the preceding one.[56] Not only has the
animal’s head been destroyed, but its tail and one of its hind legs
have vanished. The man is mutilated to the point that only one of his
feet remains to prove to us that he was kneeling. He bore a table of
offerings. An inscription engraved on the edge of the pedestal informs
us that he was called Petesomtous, and the name, together with the
style, takes us back to the Saïte period, perhaps to the period of the
Persian domination. The composition is, besides, sufficiently rough,
and it would not deserve any attention if the interest of the subject
did not compensate for its insignificance as a work of art.
[Illustration: PSAMMETICHUS AND THE COW HATHOR.
Three-quarters view.]
The third was celebrated from the moment of its discovery. It is
in green schist, slightly over three feet in length, and under it
in height. It was found by Mariette at Saqqarah, fifty years ago,
in the tomb of a certain Psammetichus, a contemporary of the first
Nectanebo.[57] It was accompanied by two fine statues of Osiris and
Isis,[58] which are the glory of the Cairo Museum, and we owe them
for a certainty to the same artist. The posture of the cow is the
same as that of Deîr-el-Baharî; like her, the head-dress is formed of
the solar disk with the uræus surmounted by two long feathers, but a
_monaît_ fastened round the neck by its chain lies flat on the spine.
Psammetichus stands under the head, his back to the chest, his hands
hanging down over the apron, with the same gesture of submission as
that of Amenôthes II. Besides his name and protocol, the inscriptions
contain a prayer for his happiness, addressed to the benevolent Hathor.
The hardness of the material has prevented the sculptor from completely
freeing the fragile parts: the cow’s legs and belly are sunk in the
stone, as are the back and feet of the man; the head-dress is supported
by a semi-cone set in the back of the neck, and the ears are reinforced
by a pad which doubles their thickness. The sculptor, embarrassed by
the necessity of preserving masses of superfluous material, had the
ingenious idea of treating the lower limbs as a bas-relief. He has
designed them on each side of the panel that supports the belly, so
that Hathor has two chest profiles and a double supply of legs. He
has so cleverly arranged this superabundance of legs that it is not
noticeable at a first glance, and some effort of thought is required
to make sure that it exists. But despite these eccentricities the work
is of rare perfection. Never has such hard stone been manipulated
with greater suppleness; the outlines have a harshness that all the
virtuosity of the execution has not been able to prevent, but the
modelling of the bodies and the faces, both of the animal and of the
man, is of unparalleled delicacy, and the whole breathes serenity
mingled with melancholy. It is, as a piece of animal sculpture, the
best that has come down to us in Saïte art.
V
Nevertheless, it loses when compared with the schist group of the time
of Amenôthes II. The mythological element is less predominant, and
the head gains by not being framed by two tufts of aquatic plants:
but if the religious convention is less encumbering, the artistic
convention and the conventions of the studio come out in a much more
apparent fashion. The Saqqarah group belongs to the Memphian school,
and, as with nearly all the products of that school, the form has
something artificial and impersonal. Hathor is a symbolic cow, the
half-abstract type of Egyptian cows, a type that in the eyes of the
Memphians realized the ideal of the earthly or sacred cow: she has
the elegance, but also the softness and the rather insipid meekness,
which distinguishes the human figures. The Hathor of Naville, on
the contrary, belongs to the Theban school, and possesses the
characteristics that I have described above.[59] The royal studio
whence it came was governed by the theological laws, and was forbidden
to modify in any way the types that, in the course of ages, had been
determined on for revealing the concepts of popular tradition or
learned dogma, but it tried to keep their expression as near to life
as the rites authorized. The artist who produced the Memphian Hathor
chose a pattern from his cartoons, and translated it into stone without
troubling to correct the banal purity by imitating a beast of the
sacred herd. The sculptor to whom we owe the Theban Hathor, on the
contrary, while preserving the ritual arrangement of the parts and
the accumulation of the symbols, has placed them on a real cow,
on the cow, perhaps, that for the moment incarnated the goddess in
the neighbouring temple of Queen Hachopsouîtou. Imagine her without
the emblematic surroundings he was compelled to give her--the heavy
head-dress, the lotus tufts, the two statuettes of the Pharaoh--and you
will have the good motherly creature who goes peaceably to pasture,
and, as she goes, observes everything with her eye, inquisitive and
dreamy at the same time. Neither Greece nor Rome has left us anything
that can be compared with it; we must go to the great sculptors of
animals of our own day to find an equally realistic piece of work.
[Illustration: PSAMMETICHUS AND THE COW HATHOR.
From the right-hand side of the group.]
XII
THE STATUETTE OF AMENÔPHIS IV
(_The Louvre_)
The statuette originally formed part of a group. The lower part has
been fairly skilfully restored in modern times: the upper comes
from the Salt collection,[60] and, like most of the objects of that
collection, was found at Thebes. It represents Amenôphis IV of the
XVIIIth Dynasty, the first in date of the Pharaohs we are accustomed to
name the heretic kings.
In making only a cursory examination we are struck by the ways in
which it differs from the royal statuettes that have come down to us.
The Pharaohs are usually seated with the head erect, the bust firm,
in a posture of stiff dignity which did not lack grandeur. Here the
royal stiffness has almost wholly disappeared. The head leans slightly
forward, the bust sinks down, it seems as if the body, powerless to
hold itself up, is going to slip off the seat; the abandon of the
posture is in entire harmony with the character of the person. The back
is slightly rounded, the hips are larger than are suitable for a man,
the belly and chest inflated; the breasts are round like those of a
woman, the puffed-out torso is wrinkled in folds of fat, the face
is weak and good-natured. In all that, the artist has set aside the
æsthetic rules usual in Egypt. If it were not for the awkward angle
formed by the arm that holds the sceptre and the whip, and the bad
execution of the hand that rests on the left thigh, his work might be
quoted as an excellent specimen of what a conscientious sculptor could
do at the best moments of Theban art between Thoutmôsis III and Setouî
I.
[Illustration: AMENÔPHIS IV.
The Louvre.]
I do not believe that in the long series of Pharaohs there is a prince
who has been so badly treated by contemporary scholars as he has been,
and about whom they have allowed greater rein to their imagination. At
first, the roundness of his body and the exaggeration of his breast
caused him to be taken for a woman: for a long time Champollion
characterized him as a queen, and was only convinced of his error
with difficulty. Later, Mariette thought he recognized in him the
exterior signs of a eunuch. Contemporary monuments assign him a wife
and children, and we can find a way of reconciling this embarrassing
posterity with the new theory. It suffices to suppose that, after
having been married and become the father of four daughters, he went
to war with one of those African tribes that have preserved to this
day the custom of castrating their prisoners: having fallen into their
hands, he would have left them as we see him. Some Egyptologists have
accused him of being an idiot, the more moderate only regard him as a
fanatic. Born of a foreign mother, the white Taîa, brought up by her
to worship Canaanitish deities, he had scarcely ascended the throne
before he wished officially to replace the worship of Amon by that of
the solar disk, whose Egyptian name, Aton, perhaps reminded him of the
Syrian name Adoni or Adonaï. This story is well imagined, but to me it
seems more than doubtful. Two proofs have been advanced concerning the
foreign origin of Taîa: the pink colour of her cheeks and the curious
form of the names used in her family. The flesh of Egyptian women was
always painted pale yellow: if Taîa is pink, it is because she was
fairer than they, and consequently of exotic birth. The argument was
specious, but it is not permissible to repeat it to-day. For it has
been discovered that in the time of Amenôphis II and Amenôphis III
the artists for some years employed pink tones for the flesh of their
personages, both men and women, and the confirmation of that fact takes
away any value from the reasoning deduced from Taîa’s colour. Taîa has
pink flesh in the monuments because the fashion of the day required
that she should so have it, and not because she possessed the fair
complexion of the northerner. As to the names of the members of her
family, Iouaa, Touaa, they do not seem to me to be Asiatic. Doubtless
they are not constructed in the Theban manner, but they are found, and
many like them, in the tombs of the Ancient Empire. Far from proving
a Canaanitish or Libyan extraction, they take us back to the oldest
periods of the history of Egypt and denote a Memphian or Heliopolitan
origin.
If, as everything indicates, Taîa is not a foreigner, we no longer have
any cause to seek beyond Egypt for the motives that made Amenôphis
IV decide to proscribe the worship of Amon. In fact, the religion of
Aton that he professed is indigenous in its formulas and ceremonies.
Aton is the solar disk, the shining globe lighted every morning in
the east in order to be extinguished every evening in the west; for
some theologians it was the visible body in which Râ, the solar god
_par excellence_, was the soul; for others the actual god, and not the
shining manifestation of the god. The Theban priesthood had adopted the
first theory, which better harmonized with its monotheistic tendencies,
and it had developed it to the utmost: it had fused together all the
forms of the divinity, and only recognized in it the aspects, the
diverse conditions of one and the same being who was the soul of the
Sun, Amonrâ. The schools of Memphis and Heliopolis, older than those of
Thebes, had remained more closely attached to the ancient polytheism,
and interpreted its doctrines in a more material sense. A fact that,
so far, no one has ever brought forward, proves incontestably that the
worship rendered by Amenôphis IV to Aton was connected with that of the
sun as practised at Heliopolis: the high priest of Aton, the supreme
head of the royal religion, bore the same official name and the same
titles as that of Râ at Heliopolis.
If, however, the monuments tell us that the worship of Aton was a
form of the most ancient worship of Râ, they do not so far assist us
to determine the points of detail in which it differed. The solar
disk of Amenôphis IV, the supreme god Aton, is recognized by the rays
terminating in hands that he darts on the earth: the hands brandish the
anserated cross, and bring life to everything that exists. I am not
sure that Amenôphis IV invented this imagery: I like to think that in
that, as in everything, he was bound to follow tradition. The prayers
that accompany the figure of the god, the ceremonies celebrated in his
name, are all Egyptian; they present that character of seriousness and
sometimes of licence to be observed at Denderah, and in all the places
where the sombre myth of dead Osiris does not rule. The bas-reliefs
that have preserved its physiognomy for us might serve as an
illustration for the picture drawn by Herodotus of the great festival
of Bubastis.
Having said that, it may be asked what motives impelled Amenôphis IV
to deny the gods of his fore-fathers and to embrace a Heliopolitan
religion. It should be noted at once that his father, Amenôphis
III, had already set the example of a special affection for solar
worships other than that of Amon: we may then believe that Amenôphis
IV as a child was brought up in particular devotion for Râ, and that
later, a natural result of his early education, he was desirous of
imposing his favourite deity on his subjects. But I do not think that
religious faith was the sole, or even the principal reason of his cruel
persecution of the priests and partisans of Amon; politics probably
were chiefly responsible. Amon was, above all, the patron of Thebes:
he had made the greatness of the Theban Dynasties, and they, in their
turn, had exalted him above all his compeers. The conquests in Syria
and Ethiopia had not been without benefit for Egypt in general, but
they had been specially advantageous to Amon; the greater part of
the booty had passed into his coffers, his priests filled the public
offices, and his chief prophet was the highest personage of the empire
after the reigning sovereign. Had there been under Thoutmôsis IV an
attempt similar to that which delivered the last Ramessides to the
pontiffs of Amon and which raised Hrihor to the throne? I do not know;
but I believe the desire to counterbalance their power weighed heavily
in the favour shown by Amenôphis III to other divinities, and that a
definite wish to overturn not only Amon, but especially his clergy,
induced Amenôphis IV to thrust Aton into the first rank. He did not
recoil from any means that would lead to success. As the destiny of
Amon was indissolubly bound up with that of Thebes, so long as Thebes
was the capital, Amon and his priests would keep the supremacy.
Amenôphis IV, after changing his name, which was a profession of faith
in the excellence of Amon, for that of Khounaton, “splendour of Aton,”
founded a new capital which he called the city of Aton; he installed
there a new priesthood which he richly endowed, and then erased the
name of Amon from all the monuments throughout Egypt and even at
Thebes. But the worship of Amon had its roots too deeply implanted in
the land, and his priests were too powerful, for the king to prevail
against them. When he was dead, his successors gave up the struggle:
Aton returned into obscurity, his city was deserted, and the name of
the king, proscribed by sacerdotal hatred, vanished with the buildings
on which it had been engraved.
His attempt was not without influence on art. The necropolis of
El-Amarna has told us the names of two of the sculptors who helped
to adorn the city during its brief existence. Their works are
distinguished from earlier ones by a greater freedom of composition,
and particularly by greater realism in the reproduction of the persons.
The Amenôphis IV of the Louvre does honour to their talent; it is the
more valuable since their works, treated with great ferocity by the
Theban reaction, have become very rare. We have a certain number of
bas-reliefs more or less mutilated, but very few statues; that of the
Louvre is, so far, a unique work of its kind.
XIII
FOUR CANOPIC HEADS FOUND IN THE VALLEY OF THE KINGS AT THEBES[61]
Among the principal objects discovered by Theodore Davis in 1907 in the
Valley of the Kings, in the secret chamber where the heretic Pharaoh
Khouniatonou was buried with an equipment partly consisting of objects
that had belonged to his mother, Tîyi, there are four alabaster Canopic
jars of a rare perfection even for that period of perfect execution.
The body of the jar is a little longer than is usual, slender at the
base, bulging out at the top, with a polish at once unobtrusive and
pleasing to the eye. An inscription had been engraved on it, and so far
as may be judged by the place it occupied, was the ordinary dedication
to the deities protecting the entrails; but it has been effaced, then
the place smoothed over, and tinted with the colour of the surrounding
part. The touching up is accomplished with so much skill that we can
only here and there, beneath the transparence of the glazing, guess
at a few marks of the old writing. The four lids are in the form of
a human head, a very refined head framed in the short wig with close
rows of little flat locks of hair: a golden uræus, now vanished, stood
on the forehead. As the face is beardless, and the whole of the
equipment except the coffin bears the name of Tîyi, the Canopic jars
have been attributed to the queen. I do not share that opinion; I
maintain that they belonged to the Pharaoh, and that we should see his
authentic portrait in them.
[Illustration: KING KHOUNIATONOU.
Alabaster Canopic head found at Thebes.]
[Illustration: KING KHOUNIATONOU.
Alabaster Canopic head found at Thebes.]
No one who has seen the four heads side by side will doubt that they
represent one and the same person. The insignificant differences to be
noticed between them are caused by unimportant technical details, or by
breakages in the stone, or by the action of damp, or the different way
in which time has treated the materials of which the eyes were formed.
The eyebrows consist of a fillet of blue enamel encrusted on the edge
of the arch, and the eye, properly so-called, is also designated by
a blue fillet, which includes a cornea in white limestone, relieved
with red at the corners, and an iris of black stone. In some, the
eyebrow is gone. In others the iris has fallen, leaving blind one or
both the eyes, or, the whole having been displaced, the eye has been
brought forward as if the person was suffering from the beginning of
an exophthalmic goître. Very different expressions of countenance are
the result, but under them all the same face is quickly recognized: a
longish oval, rather thin at the bottom, a somewhat narrow forehead, a
straight nose, thin where it joins the face and turned up at the end
almost like Roxelana’s, delicate wide-opened nostrils, the sides thin
and nervous, a short upper lip, a small but full mouth, a bony chin,
pointed and heavy, joined to the neck by a rather harsh line. None
of the heads have been entirely respected by time, and one of them
has lost its nose, but by good luck, rare in archæology, the best in
composition is also that which has suffered least: if the enamel of
the eyelids is wanting, the eyes are intact and the epidermis without
scratches. I do not think that there exists in the Egyptian sculpture
of that period a more energetic or living physiognomy: the mouth is
closed as if to retain the words that desire to escape, the nostrils
are inflated and palpitate, the eyes look keenly and frankly into
those of the visitor. With age, the alabaster has taken on the dull
complexion of the great Egyptian ladies, always protected by the veil,
which the sun can never burn. So that it is not surprising that many
should have felt in looking at them that they were heads of a woman,
and, knowing the circumstances of the discovery, imagined that they saw
the most celebrated woman there had then been in the Egyptian Empire,
the queen-dowager Tîyi.
[Illustration: KING KHOUNIATONOU.
Alabaster Canopic head found at Thebes.]
Strictly speaking, that is quite possible, for on the one hand the
head-dress and necklace into which the neck fits are common to both
sexes, and on the other, the features, more accentuated than is usual
with a woman, are not so to the point of only fitting a man; directly,
however, they are compared with those of the portraits of Tîyi, we are
bound to confess that the resemblance is slight. Two types of these
have come down to us. In the first, which is by far the most frequent,
her face was remodelled and symbolized in the studios of Thebes in
accordance with the customary formula for queens. The colossal group
of Medinet Habou, recently transported to the Cairo Museum, offers,
perhaps, the best example. There, following the regulations, Tîyi is
furnished with a round, regular face, almond-shaped eyes, good cheeks,
straight nose, smiling mouth, and normal chin: there is something about
her which prevents us from confusing her with the other princesses
of her era, but she has preserved none of the peculiarities that
compose her actual physiognomy. That is no longer the case with the
most individual of the specimens of the second type, the soapstone head
that Petrie discovered at Sinaï, which is now in the Cairo Museum.
The right wing of the wig is wanting, and the nose has been crushed
by an unfortunate blow on the left nostril, without, however, losing
anything of its essential form; a cartouche engraved on the front of
the head-dress tells us the name, and at the first glance the portrait
gives the impression of a good likeness. It is not flattering. If we
are to believe it, Tîyi presented the racial characteristics of the
Berbers or of the women of the Egyptian desert: small eyes puckered
at the temples, a nose with a broad tip and contemptuous nostrils, a
heavy, sulky mouth with turned-down corners, the lower lip dragged back
by a receding chin like that of a semi-negress: the receding chin alone
forbids us to identify her with the original of our Canopic jars. They
have certainly a family likeness, and it could not be otherwise, for if
I am right it is a question of mother and son, but variations are to be
noted in the son which remove him from the type so clearly revealed in
Petrie’s statuette. That type, on the contrary, is preserved intact in
the admirable head in painted wood which has passed into the collection
of Herr Simon of Berlin. We might even say that it is exaggerated,
and that the eyes are more oblique, the cheek-bones more prominent,
the nose more aggressive, the smiling muscles more sharply evident,
the mouth and chin closer to that of a negress. I believe it to be
one of Tîyi’s granddaughters who became queen after the fall of the
Heretic Dynasty: her head-dress, which was originally that of a private
person, was afterwards modified to receive the insignia of royalty.
Was she married to Harmhâbi, to Ramses, or to Setouî I? The deviation
between the group to which she belongs and that of the Canopic jars is
sufficiently great to force us to give up the idea that they represent
one person. In addition, our Canopic sculptures possess only one uræus
on the forehead, as is customary with kings, while the others have
the double uræus which then begins to be the etiquette with queens.
That rule has exceptions, and therefore I shall not deduce too strict
conclusions from it: but the absence of the second uræus is not less a
somewhat strong presumption in favour of the opinion that our Canopic
heads are those of a man and not of a woman.
[Illustration: KING KHOUNIATONOU.
Cairo Museum.]
[Illustration: KING KHOUNIATONOU.
Alabaster Canopic head found at Thebes.]
If, however, they are portraits of a man, the circumstances of their
discovery compel us to declare that he must be the king Khouniatonou;
but how are we to be convinced of this when we remember the grotesque
silhouette that the sculptors of El-Amarna have given him? To believe
them, he would have been physically a sort of degenerate, tall, weakly,
with hips and chest like a woman’s, a neck without consistency, an
absurd head, a flat, almost non-existent forehead, an enormous nose,
an ugly mouth, a massive chin.[62] He seems to have liked these
caricatures, and his friends, imitating him from a desire to flatter
him, altered more or less the shape of their own bodies in order that
they might resemble that of his. Documents of different origins prove,
however, that he was not, or had not always been, the queer figure that
is attributed to him. The Louvre alone possesses two such witnesses.
The first, which came to the Museum in its early days, is a charming
statuette in yellow soapstone. The king is seated, but he has lost the
bottom of the legs, which a modern restorer has skilfully replaced.
He wears the _coufeh_ with hanging ends, the bust is bare; in
his right hand he holds the hooked staff and the sacred whip emblems
of royalty; the left hand is indolently stretched over the thigh. The
body is young, the muscling supple and thick, and although he sinks
down a little, he has not the squat attitude we know so well. The face
and neck are somewhat slender, and contain the characteristics that,
exaggerated later, lent themselves almost naturally to caricature. It
is, in fact, the effigy of the young king sculptured at Thebes at the
time when he was only Amenôphis IV, but when he demanded that he should
be represented as he was, or as he saw himself, without reference to
the conventional type of the Pharaoh. In the second piece, a statue of
which only the head and shoulders remain, he is some years older. He
is armed for war, and his neck, too slender, has bent under the weight
of the helmet, as if thenceforth incapable of supporting it. It is the
profile of the bas-reliefs of El-Amarna with the rounded spine and the
particular curve that projects the head forward; the forehead, nose and
mouth only differ from those of the statuette in that they are thinner.
A plaster mask in the Cairo Museum which Petrie considers to have
been moulded on the corpse immediately after the sovereign’s death,
but which is undoubtedly a studio model, testifies to a condition of
physiological degeneracy that did not before exist. It presents the
emaciated features of the bas-reliefs and their bony texture, it is
true, but without their extreme exaggerations. When it was question
of a statue, the sculptor forbade himself the liberties that his
colleagues, commissioned to decorate the tombs, allowed themselves
with the master: he represented him just as he was at the moment, and
the physiognomy was sufficiently original for him to be certain of
always deriving from it a work that would force the attention of the
spectators.
[Illustration: QUEEN TÎYI (FULL FACE).
Cairo Museum.]
[Illustration: QUEEN TÎYI (PROFILE).
Cairo Museum.]
[Illustration: PRINCESS OF THE FAMILY OF TÎYI (PROFILE).
Painted wood. Berlin, collection of M. James Simon.]
[Illustration: PRINCESS OF THE FAMILY OF TÎYI (FULL FACE).
Painted wood. Berlin, collection of M. James Simon.]
And now let us compare each of these pieces with our Canopic heads.
The profile of Khouniatonou helmeted is not as strong as theirs,
due perhaps to the contusions undergone by the surface of the stone
during a long sojourn in a damp soil where saltpetre was abundant,
but each of the elements may be superposed and adjusted, forehead,
nose, eyes, mouth, chin, in an absolutely satisfying manner: it
merely seems that the artist of the Canopic heads saw his model in
better health than that of the statue. The resemblance, although less
complete, with the statuette of yellow soapstone is still apparent.
No unprejudiced observer with the series in front of him can come to
any other conclusion than that we have in it portraits of one and
the same man. Leaving out the slight differences due to the chisel,
there is no more deviation between the group of statues and the best
of our heads than there is between that and the three found with it.
There is divergence in one point only: in the two statues the head
bends and leans forward more or less; in the Canopic jars it is erect
without weakness. A moment’s reflection will show that it could not
be otherwise. However greatly we are moved by the beauty of the work,
we must not forget that our four heads belong, not to art pure and
simple, but to industrial art, and that their purpose imposed special
rules on the master who chiselled them. They were prosaic lids for
the receptacles in which the entrails of the Pharaoh were placed, and
it was necessary that the median axis of the vase properly so-called
should coincide exactly with that of the lid. There was a question
of equilibrium to be managed between the two constituent elements of
the Canopic jar; the sculptor must straighten the neck of his
model, and consequently correct the impression of lassitude given by
the statues, by an appearance of vigour. If we examine the portraits
of Khouniatonou and his successors in company of a physician, certain
anatomical details that at the first glance we did not trouble
about--the depression of the temples, the obliquity of the eyes, the
contraction of the sides of the nostrils, the pinching of the mouth,
the attenuation of the neck--assume an etiological value that the
archæologist was far from suspecting. Dr. Baÿ, studying the faces of
Khouniatonou, Touatânkhamânou, and Harmhâbi with me, diagnosed symptoms
of consumption more or less advanced. If Khouniatonou died of the
disease when thirty years old, we need not be greatly surprised.
[Illustration: KING KHOUNIATONOU.
The Louvre.]
I do not insist upon this kind of research, in which I am not
competent, and I leave it to the reader to decide if I have or have
not proved the identity of the person represented by our four heads
to be that of Khouniatonou, the heresiarch. One of them at least is a
masterpiece, and the others possess qualities that assure them a high
place in the estimation of connoisseurs, but to which of the great
Egyptian schools ought we to attribute them? We may hesitate between
two: the Theban, to which most of the artists who filled the royal
laboratories then belonged, and the Hermopolitan, in the province
of which was El-Amarna, the favourite residence of the sovereign.
It was certainly the latter school that worked at the hypogeums and
sculptured the pictures. We find in them its defects: harsh, rough
composition, a tendency to caricature the human form and to multiply
comic episodes; but also its good qualities: suppleness, movement,
life, freedom of execution. The few figures in alto-relievo that have
escaped destruction, those, for instance, that accompany two of the
large front stelæ, are of the same style as the bas-reliefs, but we
do not find in them any of the characteristics that we have noted as
proper to the monuments of the Louvre or to our Canopic jars. Just
as the others show an unfinished, worn aspect, these are carefully
finished in the least details: it is the perfect chiselling and high
polish of the Theban masters and their strong, dignified way of posing
the figure and expressing the physiognomy of the model. Whoever has
seen the statues of Thoutmôsis III, Amenôthes II, the so-called Taîa,
and Touatânkhamânou in the Cairo Museum will not doubt for a moment
that our four heads are from the hands of persons belonging to the same
school: they belong to the Theban school, and more particularly, I
think, to that portion of the Theban school which, a few years later,
decorated the temple of Gournah, the Memnonium of Abydos, and the
hypogeum of Setouî I.
[Illustration: KING KHOUNIATONOU.
Fragment of a stone statue. The Louvre.]
XIV
A HEAD OF THE PHARAOH HARMHABI
(_Boulaq Museum_)
The whole is composed of about ten pieces, collected in 1860 in one
of the halls of the temple of Karnak, and put together with plaster,
for good or ill, by one of the workmen belonging to the Museum. The
cementing was not always done with rigorous accuracy, and one of the
largest fragments, that which forms the centre of the head-dress, is
slightly out of the perpendicular. Last year I tried to remedy the
awkwardness of the restorer, but without success; if an attempt was
made to separate the badly joined pieces, there would be a risk of
reducing them to powder. But the irregularities in the joining are
sufficiently slight not to injure the general aspect. In its present
condition it is just the mutilated bust of a king with the uræus and
the double crown on the brow; the broken object that leans against the
left side is the end of a staff of office, terminated with a ram’s
head, the emblem of Khnoum or Theban Amon. If we would form some idea
of what the body was like, it is sufficient to look at any of the
statues with the insignia that adorn the museums, that of Ramses II at
Boulaq[63] or of Setouî I in the Louvre.[64] The king was standing,
with his back against a sort of pillar covered with inscriptions,
and holding the staff in his hand: as he looked in certain religious
ceremonies when he escorted the ark of Amon-Râ through the halls and
court-yards of the temple. What remain of the hieroglyphic legends do
not give any name. Mariette was tempted to recognize it as Menephtah,
son of Ramses II,[65] but he has not anywhere explained the motives
that led him to that identification. The lugubrious tone of the black
granite spoils the first impression, but an examination, even if only a
superficial one, soon reveals the subtlety of the work. The head, under
the enormous pschent, is full of charm and delicacy. The face is young,
with an expression of gentle melancholy rare among the Pharaohs of the
great Theban period. The nose is straight, thin, and well attached to
the forehead; the long eye turns up at the temples. The wide, full
lips, somewhat tightened at the corners as if for smiling, are boldly
cut with sharply defined edges. The chin is scarcely rendered heavy by
the weight of the artificial beard. Every detail is treated with as
much skill as if the sculptor had been manipulating a soft stone like
limestone, and not one of the materials that offer all the obstacles
possible to the chisel. The sureness of the execution is carried so
far that the spectator forgets the difficulty of the work in order to
think solely of its intrinsic value. It is a pity that Egyptian artists
did not sign their works: the name of the master to whom we owe this
deserves to have come down to us.
[Illustration: HEAD OF THE PHARAOH HARMHABI.
Black granite.]
It remains to see who was the king whose portrait he has transmitted
to us. When a Pharaoh ascended the throne, the sculptors of the city
where he then was, Memphis, Thebes, Tanis, or another, hastened to make
a certain number of copies of his portrait, full face or in profile;
these were immediately sent into the provinces, in order that his
face might be everywhere substituted for that of the former sovereign
on the buildings in course of erection. Thus in the Boulaq Museum we
have several series of royal heads, some discovered at Tanis,[66]
some in the Fayoum,[67] others at Memphis,[68] which show what was
the procedure in such a case. The type, once carefully fixed, did not
change during the whole of the reign. Ramses II, who was nearly a
hundred years old when he died, after reigning for sixty-seven years,
kept the features of a young man even to his latest monuments. The
rule contains numerous exceptions, especially when it is a question
of statues commissioned in one of the capitals of the country, and
executed by artists who could see their subject at close quarters and
register the changes time produced in his face. Of the two Chephrên
exhibited at Boulaq, one is young and smiling,[69] the other old and
saddened by age.[70] But if there are examples of sovereigns who,
ascending the throne early, were sometimes represented as they were at
different periods of their life, I know of none who were rejuvenated
by the sculptors when they reached the throne at a late age. The head
of the statue with which we are here concerned is that of a young man,
almost a youth, and that is sufficient for me to rule out Menephtah.
Menephtah was fifty at least when he succeeded his father,[71] and his
portrait, as it is to be seen at Karnak, does not in any way resemble
the personage whose image is preserved in the Boulaq statue. The other
princes of the XIXth and XXth Dynasties, Setouî II, Siphtah Menephtah,
Amenmeses, Setinakht, of whom we have only a few poor portraits, have
no more claim to be commended than their great predecessors Setouî
I or Ramses II: the disturbed times in which they lived scarcely
admitted of works of careful composition. Like Menephtah, Ramses
I was too old at his accession, and besides, we have his portrait
at Gournah. And, moreover, the style of the piece recalls at first
sight that of the Turin statues belonging to the XVIIIth Dynasty,
and then we must eliminate _a priori_ a certain number of statues
of which we possess the exact description. Neither Ahmôsis I, nor
the Thouthmôsis, nor the Amenhotpou have anything in common with our
personage; and for even a stronger reason we cannot recognize in him
the characteristic physiognomy of Khounaton and Aî. Proceeding from one
exclusion to another, we come to restrict the choice to three princes,
Touatânkhâmonou, Sânakht, and Harmhabi. Sânakht had only an ephemeral
reign; Touatânkhâmonou has only left us insignificant monuments;
Harmhabi, on the contrary, appears to have been one of the most
important sovereigns of his time. A young man at the accession, he
restored the temples of Amon despoiled by his heretic predecessors, and
re-established the Egyptian power that had been weakened for a moment
in Syria and Ethiopia. Last year and this year I cleared away the
rubbish from two of the pylons he had built and decorated at Karnak;
his portrait was sculptured on them numerous times, and the outlines
are sufficiently well preserved for us to see in the king of the
bas-reliefs the original of the Boulaq bust. I attribute the statue of
which Mariette found the remains to Harmhabi, the Armaïs of the Greeks.
In conclusion, I may observe that the fragments, when carefully
examined, show no trace of having been broken by a hammer; the statue
was not destroyed by the hand of man, the case with a certain number
of the monuments at Karnak. The great earthquake of the year 27 B.C.,
which put the temple of Amon almost into the condition in which we see
it, brought down the ceilings of the halls; all the objects underneath
were injured by the blocks or architraves then violently thrown to the
ground and crushed under the weight of the ruins. Our Harmhabi did not
escape the common lot: it needed Mariette’s great patience to restore
the little we possess of him.
XV
THE COLOSSUS OF RAMSES II AT BEDRECHEÎN[72]
Ramses II, Sesostris, having restored the portions of the great
temple of Phtah at Memphis, which bordered the sacred lake on the
west and south, had colossi erected in front of the doors, destined
to perpetuate his memory and his features for all “who should come
after him on the earth, priests, magicians, scribes,” and who should
recite a prayer to the gods on his behalf. The sacristans appointed
as guides to the profane, and the dragomans who act as showmen of the
wonders of Egypt, never fail to draw the tourist’s attention to these
statues; it gives them an opportunity to relate some amusing story like
those collected by Herodotus and transmitted to us by him as authentic
history. One day Darius I wished to consecrate his image in the
neighbourhood, but the high priest opposed his purpose: “Sesostris,” he
said, “has conquered all the nations that obey you, and the Scythians
to boot, on whom you never succeeded in inflicting much harm. There
is then no reason why your monument should be placed by the side of
that of a Pharaoh whom you have neither surpassed nor equalled!” When
Memphis fell and became Christian, the fame of the colossi died away.
When it perished and its temple of Phtah was dismantled stone by
stone to serve for the building of Cairo, they were thrown down, and
for the most part cut up into grindstones, whence they passed into the
lime-kiln. One of them, however, thrown from its pedestal and lying
face downwards on the ground, was covered with rubbish, and preserved
from destruction by that happy chance. Brought to light by Caviglia
at the beginning of the nineteenth century, it had the good luck to
please travellers, and owed it to them to have escaped the mania for
destruction that possesses the fellahs.
[Illustration: THE HALF-BURIED COLOSSUS OF RAMSES II.]
[Illustration: THE COLOSSUS OF RAMSES II EMERGING FROM THE EARTH.]
All Europeans in turn who have visited Egypt have admired it. It lies
along the side of the path under the palm-trees of Bedrecheîn at the
bottom of a muddy ditch. At the period of the inundation, water fills
it and covers the statue for some weeks; then it gradually reappears,
the shoulder and the leg first, then the bust and face, until it is
all high and dry again in its hole. Its Pharaoh was standing, walking,
the arms close against the sides. The name of Ramses II is to be read
on the cartouche engraved on the buckle of the waistband that fastened
his petticoat. Nitre has destroyed one side of the face and body, but
what remains suffices to show the excellence of the work. The profile
is that of the young Ramses, with low forehead, large aquiline nose,
rather a large mouth, and a haughty expression. The base is at some
distance off, and farther away still, to the south, a smaller colossus
in wood, débris of walls, and fragments of statues point out the
position of ancient chambers. The palm forest which flourishes on the
site harasses excavation and prevents us from reconstituting the plan.
The building or group of buildings that our colossus adorned went
along the south bank of the sacred reservoir on which the mysteries of
Phtah and the Memphian gods were celebrated on the canonical days. In
spite of the long period of time, alluvial matter has not succeeded
in entirely filling the lake. The place is marked by a noticeable
depression, and the earth which fills it, instead of being planted with
date-trees, is sown with corn; it is like a square basin the edges of
which are drawn downwards from the surrounding ground. The rise of
the river partly restores the original aspect of the spot, but the
setting of porticoes and pylons which framed it has vanished; it is
replaced by clumps of big trees, under which is situated the village of
Tell-el-Khanzîr.
It seems that Mohammed-Ali formerly gave Ramses II to England; the
fact is not exactly proven, and to admit it definitely a more serious
authority than that of one or several of the “Travellers’ Guides to
Egypt” would be required. The English have not availed themselves of
the doubtful tradition to remove the colossus: they were satisfied
to set it up again. They did not succeed at the first attempt, and
two trials made by Messrs. Garwood and Anderson failed ignominiously
enough. General Stephenson, who long commanded the army, was more
successful. He first had the ambitious project of setting the statue on
its feet again, but as the subscription opened for that purpose did not
produce sufficient money, he contented himself with raising it up above
the level of the inundation. The operations, conducted by Major Arthur
Bagnold, of the Engineers, were begun on January 20, 1887.[73] Having
drawn off the water, he applied eight lifting jacks of differing force
along the body: the effort was directed alternately to the head and
the feet: as soon as the whole mass was raised a little more than a
foot and a half, huge beams were slipped underneath, and the hollow was
filled up with broken potsherds collected in the ruins of the ancient
city, reduced to tiny pieces and beaten so as to form a compact bed.
The work was finished on April 16th. The colossus now lies on its back,
the face to the sky. A pent-house shelters the head; a thick brick wall
surrounds it and protects it from the gaze of the inquisitive crowd.
Its guardian dwells beside it in a small two-roomed house where Major
Bagnold installed him, and he only shows it to visitors on payment of
two Egyptian piastres: it costs about sixpence to see it at the bottom
of the new funnel in which it is plunged. The “Service des Antiquités”
employs a portion of the tax in keeping it in good condition. Another
Ramses in granite and a stele of Apries found in the neighbourhood were
afterwards placed there, and complete the little open air museum.
The Arabs call the colossus _Abou’l-Hol_, the father of the Terror,
like the great Sphinx. I do not know what they think now that it is
under lock and key in its enclosure, but they were really frightened of
it when it was, so to speak, at large. The ancient Egyptians believed
that statues, human and divine, were animated by a spirit, a _double_,
detached from the soul of the person they represented. The _double_
ate, drank, even spoke at need, and pronounced oracles; it has survived
the religion and civilization of the ancient people, but the changes
that have taken place around it seem to have soured its character.
It plays evil tricks on those who approach its hiding-place, injures
them, at need even kills them: Arab writers have a thousand tales
of persons who suffered because they imprudently attacked a monument
and the spirit that guards it. The means of rendering the _Afrite_
powerless is to destroy, if not the whole statue, at least its face:
that is why so many Pharaohs have their noses broken or faces damaged.
The spirit of Ramses II walked in the palm forest at night, and it was
therefore imprudent to venture in the vicinity at twilight. Every time
that I was obliged to go that way at sunset, my donkey-boy mumbled
prayers and urged on his beast. One evening when I asked him if he was
afraid of some _Afrite_, he entreated me to keep silence, assuring
me that it was ill to speak of such things, and that if I persisted
some accident would happen to me. In fact, my donkey stumbled in the
middle of the forest and threw me against the trunk of a palm-tree: if
the donkey-boy had not caught me and averted the blow, I should have
smashed my head. From that time, whenever there was talk of the danger
in speaking disrespectfully of the spirit that lives in the statue,
what had happened to me was always quoted. The whole of Egypt is full
of analogous superstitions, the greater number of which are derived
from the ancient beliefs, and have been transmitted from generation
to generation from the time of the Pharaohs, the builders of the
Pyramids.[74]
XVI
EGYPTIAN JEWELLERY IN THE LOUVRE[75]
So much has appeared in the newspapers about the treasure unearthed
at Dahchour last year by M. de Morgan, that every one in Europe knows
the number, form, and richness of the objects it comprises; but among
those who have described and justly praised them, how many--I do not
say Englishmen or Germans, but Frenchmen alone--know that the Louvre
possesses a collection of the finest Egyptian jewellery? Mariette was
fortunate enough twice in his life to find a number of magnificent
ornaments of great artistic value on the royal mummies, at the Serapeum
in the tomb of the Apis buried in the reign of Ramses II by the care
of one of the sons of the conqueror, Khâmoîsît, high-priest of Phtah,
and regent of the kingdom for his father, and at Thebes in the coffin
of a queen of the XVIIIth Dynasty, Ahhotpou I, who in her lifetime was
the daughter, sister, wife, and mother of Pharaohs. Mariette, artist
as he was, very skilfully brought out the interest of his discovery,
and the admirable idea it gave of the goldsmiths of the seventeenth
and fourteenth centuries B.C., but he went no further. He had brought
to light so many monuments of importance for the study of political
history and of civilization, that he never had time to dwell much
on the secondary result of his works. The jewellery of Ahhotpou is
preserved in the Boulaq Museum, where thousands of tourists admire it
every winter; that of the Serapeum is placed in the Louvre, and usually
obtains only an absent-minded glance from the few visitors who traverse
the solitudes of the Charles X Museum.
It fills several compartments of a glass case that stands in the centre
of the historic hall. At first we note a large gold mask, unfortunately
damaged, and grouped near it gold chains with five and eight strands
of extraordinary suppleness and perfection; amulets of various shapes
in felspar, red and green jasper, and cornelian; scarabs, a buckle,
an olive, a little column, in the name of Khâmoîsît. A little farther
on a second series from the same source includes pieces, if not in
themselves more finished, more curious and more attractive to a modern
eye; the Lord Psarou, who was present with the prince at the funeral of
an Apis, did honour to the mummy of the sacred bull. I imagine that the
greater number of our contemporaries have but vague notions regarding
the way in which the Egyptians wore jewels. Men or women, their costume
at first was summary enough: the men protected their loins with a cloth
which scarcely reached the knee and left the bust entirely bare; the
women crept inside a clinging smock which reached the ankle, went up to
the pit of the stomach, disclosed the breast, and was kept in place by
two straps over the shoulders. Jewellery served partly to hide what the
stuff left uncovered, at least with the women. A necklace of several
rows encircled the neck and came down to the rise of the breasts; large
rings were round the wrists, the upper part of the arm, and the
lower part of the leg. The hair, or rather the wig, clothed the back
and half the shoulder; a square plaque suspended by a chain of beads
or a leather strap hung down below the necklace into the space between
the two breasts. That is what we call the pectoral. It often looks like
the façade of a temple, surrounded by a torus, and surmounted by a
curved cornice; portraits of gods or sacred emblems were crowded on the
surface, and inscriptions scattered everywhere tell us the name of the
owner, accompanied generally by pious formulas.
[Illustration: EGYPTIAN JEWELLERY OF THE XIXTH DYNASTY.
The Louvre.]
[Illustration: GOLD PECTORAL INLAID WITH ENAMEL.]
The buckle of Psarou must have served to fasten the linen waistband
which confined the loin-cloth, or the band which went round the head
and kept the head-dress in place. His pectoral is one of the richest
that has come down to us. It is fashioned in a plaque of green basalt,
polished and sculptured with a precision that is astonishing when we
remember how imperfect were the tools at the disposal of the Egyptians.
The central scarab is in very high relief against the flat background,
and the fidelity of the modelling is marvellous: the smallest details
of the head and corslet are rendered with almost scientific truth.
The two women who seem to worship it on the right and left are Isis
and Nephthys, the two sisters of Osiris. The contours of their bodies
are cut in the gold leaf that frames the scarab. Another pectoral of
which I give a reproduction is of less delicate workmanship, but the
technique presents interesting peculiarities. It has openings cut in
it, and the design of the parts is obtained by partitions of a very
supple gold, in which are set the scarab and the coloured glass which
relieve the uprights and cornice of the naos. The scarab is in lapis
lazuli, the dress of the goddesses in brilliant gold, engine-turned to
simulate the stripes of the stuff. The mystical meaning of this design
would not escape any educated Egyptian. The scarab represents the heart
and life of man, where life resides; it is the amulet which ensures
to each man, living or dead, the ownership of his heart. That is why
it was given to wealthy mummies, if not to all mummies: sometimes it
was stuck on to the skin of the corpse with bitumen at the rise of the
neck; sometimes it was set in the centre of a pectoral, lost in the
thickness of the swathings over the chest. As every Egyptian, when he
left this world, was assimilated to Osiris and became Osiris himself,
the heart and the scarab passed as the heart and scarab of Osiris, over
which Isis and Nephthys watched, as they had watched over Osiris; hence
the figures of the two goddesses. They warmed the heart with their
hands, they recited the formulas that prevented it from perishing,
they kept off evil spirits and the magicians who might have seized it
for their dark purposes. Religion provided the artists with a subtle
motive of decoration; while they never went far beyond the primary
idea, they varied its detail and expression with much skill. The women
are sometimes standing, sometimes seated or kneeling; they extend their
arms in front of them, or lift them to their foreheads like mourners,
or let them hang down in token of grief; the scarab rests on a boat
or a lotus flower or an altar, instead of floating in air, as in the
jewel of the Serapeum. Comparative study of all the scenes would prove
once again the Egyptians’ fertility of imagination and their skill in
ringing the changes on the most hackneyed subjects.
[Illustration: PECTORAL OF RAMSES II.
The Louvre.]
[Illustration: PECTORAL IN SHAPE OF A HAWK WITH A RAM’s HEAD.
The Louvre.]
The pectoral in the centre belonged to Ramses II himself, or, at
least, was executed by his order, and as a personal gift in honour of
the Apis that was buried: the cartouche name _Ousirmârî_ is placed
just below the frieze, and serves, so to speak, as a centre for the
composition that fills the inside of the frame. There is first a hawk
with a ram’s head, with spread wings which curve in order to frame the
cartouche: in his claws he holds the seal, the emblem of eternity.
Lower, a large uræus and a vulture spread their wings and enfold both
the hawk and the cartouche in mutual protection. Two _Tats_ symbolize
eternity, and fill up the empty spaces in the decoration in the two
lower corners. The hawk with the ram’s head represents the soul of the
sun, the uræus and the vulture are the patron deities of the South and
the North: together they defend throughout the whole universe the king
whose name stands between their wings, and, by the intermediary of the
king, the dead man whose mummy wears the jewel.
Here again the figures are designed in panels of gold encrusted with
coloured pastes or small pieces of cut stones. The whole is rich,
elegant, harmonious. The three principal motives grow in proportion
as they descend to the lower part of the picture, according to an
admirably calculated progression. The cartouche with its dull gold
occupies the centre; below it the hawk forms a first band of iridescent
tones, the lines of which, slightly curved back, correct the stiffness
of the long sides of the cartouche; the uræus and vulture, one pair of
wings seems to serve for both, envelop the hawk and the cartouche in a
semicircle of enamels, the tones of which pass from red and green to
dark blue, with a boldness and a feeling for colour that does honour
to the taste of the workman. If the general aspect makes an impression
of heaviness, it is not his fault; the form of the jewel imposed
by religious tradition is so rigid in itself that no combination
can correct the effect beyond a certain point. The rectangular or
square frame, the cornice at the top, the two rams’ heads which fit
in below the cornice, form a squat and massive whole. To fill the
interior suitably, it is impossible to avoid adding to the heaviness;
in manipulating the empty spaces a slender and narrow appearance is
procured, as in one at least of the pectorals of Dahchour. The type
of the jewels has its origin in the same ideas or notions whence
Egyptian architecture and sculpture are derived: it is monumental,
and seems to have been conceived for the use of gigantic beings. The
usual dimensions of the pectoral are too enormous for the adornment of
ordinary men and women. They only come into their own on the breasts
of the Theban colossi: the immensity of the stone body on which their
image is sculptured lightens them and seems to bring out their exact
proportions.
Sometimes the Egyptians left aside the square form bequeathed to them
by their ancestors; the sacred bird left his cage when he could.
Mariette found two of these simplified pectorals at the Serapeum, both
of which represent a hawk: the first has its ordinary head and bends
its wings back, the other has assumed the ram’s head and keeps its
wings straight. It has the same wealth and the same elegance of line
as in the other objects of similar source, but the motive, rid of the
enamelled frame in which it was stifled, possesses more charm and is
better suited to humanity. The execution is wonderful, and the ram’s
head, in particular, surpasses in suppleness of workmanship all that is
so far known. It is cut in a little ingot of pure gold, but it is not
the material that is of most value: the old chaser knew how to model
it broadly, and has given it as faithful an expression as if he had cut
it life-size in a block of granite or limestone. It is no longer, as
everywhere else, industrial art: it is art pure and simple. Mariette,
and he understood, considered that he had never come across anything
approaching this among the Egyptian jewellery he had seen. The gold
ring also belongs to Ramses II. The two little horses who prance on
the bezel were celebrated in history. They were called _Nourit_ and
_Anaîtis-contented_, and were harnessed to the royal chariot on the day
of the battle of Qodshou, when Ramses II charged in person the Khitas
who had surprised him. The Pharaoh remembered the service they rendered
him on that memorable occasion. The chiselling, although not so good as
that of the hawk with the ram’s head, is very fine: it reproduces very
boldly the particular attributes of Egyptian horses, their exaggerated
mane, rather thin body, slightly swollen extremities. It is true that
the rings, as a rule, are not adorned with subjects in such strong
relief: the bezel is composed of a scarab or a metal cartouche turning
on a pivot, sometimes engraved with the name of the wearer of the
jewel, but more often with a pious formula or a series of symbols of
obscure meaning by way of inscription. The larger number of the rings
we see in the museums belonged to mummies, and are amulets that give
the dead man some sort of power over the inhabitants of the other
world: a small number only were used by their owners in their lifetime.
They are seals, affixed to deeds like our stamps, just as we affix
our signature. They are in every material: gold, electron, silver,
bronze, copper, enamel, even in wood, according to the wealth of the
individual; some are veritable masterpieces of engraving, but many
possess no more artistic value than the common copper seals bought
ready prepared at our stationers’.
The largest of these jewels passed through so many hands before
reaching the Louvre that they have sensibly suffered: the panels are
warped or even broken, the enamels or encrusted plaques are here
and there worn off. The Dahchour jewellery, coming direct from the
excavation, has preserved an appearance of freshness which has not
a little contributed to increase the admiration of the public: the
objects seem scarcely to have left the hands of the goldsmith who
fashioned them, and the surprise we experience in finding them still so
fresh after more than four thousand years renders us indulgent towards
the imperfections that a close examination soon reveals. Their extreme
antiquity, and quite rightly, counts for much in the appreciation they
receive. It is indeed strange to confirm that from the twenty-fifth
century B.C. the Egyptians had carried the technique of precious metals
and the art of making jewellery to a very high degree of perfection.
This was, of course, already known, for it is not infrequent to find
rings, fragments of necklaces, isolated pectorals, some of which
perhaps go back to the Ancient Empire, while others belong to the Roman
period or betray Byzantine influence: our museums possess them by tens,
and there is scarcely a private collection that has not a certain
number of them. But these isolated objects do not attract the attention
of the public; to rouse its curiosity it is necessary that some happy
chance should bring to light a considerable treasure in which specimens
of all the types usually collected piece by piece are placed together.
Fortunately, these finds are not so rare as might be imagined: if
Gizeh can boast of possessing the substance of Dahchour and the queen
Ahhotpou, the Berlin Museum has the admirable ornaments that Ferlini
obtained from one of the Ethiopian pyramids; the Leyden Museum and the
British Museum shared the spoils of one of the Antouf kings of the XIth
Dynasty; and the Louvre carefully preserves the jewels of the Serapeum,
the most beautiful of all.
XVII
THE TREASURE OF ZAGAZIG[76]
I
Once more chance has served us well. Workmen who were making a railway
embankment on the site of ancient Bubastis discovered, on September 22,
1906, a real treasure of jewellery and Egyptian goldsmiths’ work in the
ruins of a brick house. They hoped to profit by the find themselves,
but one of our watchmen had seen them; he took no action, however, at
the moment, for fear of being ill-treated: the next day he reported
the matter to the native inspector, Mohammed Effendi Chabân, who at
once put the police on their track and informed his chief, Mr. Edgar,
inspector-general of the antiquities in the provinces of the delta.
Investigations were made in likely places, while the police searched
the workmen’s houses and recovered some of the pieces that had been
carried off. Several that escaped them fell later into the hands of a
dealer in Cairo: a gold strainer, three undecorated silver phials, a
large chased gold ring which strengthened the neck of a silver vase,
fragments of silver cups, all, except the gold ring, of no artistic
value. The two most valuable, a silver vase with a goat in gold as
handle and a gold goblet in the form of a half-opened lotus, were
seized at the house of the fellahs, Moursi Hassaneîn and Es-Sayed Eîd,
before they had sold them to a local Greek _bakal_. He immediately
claimed them of us as his personal property that, failing our
unfortunate interference, he would have acquired for ready money. As no
reply was vouchsafed to his summons, he went to law with us. The affair
dragged on for some weeks, during which Mr. Edgar had the railway works
carefully watched. At last, on October 17th, a workman with a blow of
his pick-axe laid bare several fragments of silver vases: he tried to
conceal them, but our _ghafirs_ prevented him, and the search proceeded
under the protection of the police: the objects lay in a heap, gold
between two layers of silver; the same evening they were in safety.
The work was carried out so quickly that nothing was lost, and there
was no reason for any one to contest our right to the windfall. To
bring this story to an end, I may add that on November 4th the court of
Zagazig found the two fellahs guilty of theft, and condemned them to
imprisonment and to pay half the costs. But the _bakal_ still persisted
in his claim, and rumour soon spread among the natives that he had
gained his suit in the Court of Appeal: we had been forced to deliver
up to him the objects of the litigation under penalty of a considerable
fine for each day of delay. The dealers never hesitate to spread lies
of this sort among the people: they thereby enhance their prestige with
the fellahs, and uphold them in the notion that they have nothing to
fear from the “Service des Antiquités.”
The treasure safe, we had to take note of the condition in which it
reached us. At the first glance, two very different series were
perceived: one, which comprised the jewellery and the gold or silver
vases of most skilful workmanship, went back to the XIXth Dynasty; the
other was composed exclusively of silver plate, the coarseness of which
betrayed a much more recent period. Although it was all found at two
separate times, and in two places somewhat distant from each other,
did it originally form one collection? As we have seen, the whole made
a heap among the débris of two or three jars which were themselves
broken in the course of centuries under the continuous pressure of
the earth; the objects seemed to have been heaped up irregularly,
the most valuable in the middle, the others forming a bed above and
below. We had even still adhering to a large fragment of pottery a stem
partly of hardened mud and partly of metal, in which we recognized
on a precipitate of less ancient earrings and bracelets, the remains
of several Pharaonic goblets. How can it be explained that relics of
such different epochs should be found in the same place? Many of them
are intact, but others have purposely been clipped or broken, and the
fragments melted down; they are also mixed with plates of pliant silver
and with ingots coming from goldsmiths’ workshops like those that still
exist. We know what happens not only in Egypt but in European countries
when peasants dig up treasure while ploughing their land: they take
it to a jeweller, who buys it of them by weight, throws it into the
melting-pot, scarcely ever troubling about the loss thus caused to
art or science, and transforms it into modern horrors. It is to some
adventure of the sort that we owe the possession of our find. A fellah
who lived, I imagine, during the time of the Roman domination, found in
the ruins near Zagazig, if not at Zagazig itself, silver objects which
he sold to a native goldsmith who destroyed some of them for the
needs of his craft, and kept the others either to give to a collector
or to use himself in the same way as the first lot when that should
be exhausted. Did local sedition or the sack of the city by a hostile
army compel him to hide his property in two different places? His
goods, once hidden under the earth, were not again drawn forth, and we
received them from him, almost without an intermediary, sixteen months
ago.
[Illustration: SILVER BRACELETS AND EARRING.]
[Illustration: GOLD EARRING FROM THE TREASURE OF ZAGAZIG.]
II
I will say nothing of the rubbish of his own fabrication. The types
are already those of present-day Egypt, and we could easily swear that
most of them were manufactured for sale to the fellahs, at most, twenty
years ago: earrings in the form of pendants or oblong rings, to the
lower part of which eight or ten metal beads are soldered in bunches;
rings with flat bezels, ornamented or left plain for a name to be
engraved; bracelets formed of a simple reed of silver foil, thinned at
each end and covered with a network of lozenges fixed by two or three
marks hollowed out by the chisel and lacking elegance, the ends, cut
off straight, nearly meet when the piece is finished, but they do not
join, and so facilitate the putting of the bracelet on the wrist. It
is the honest work of a man who did not spare his material, but only
knew just enough of his craft to please easily satisfied customers;
the taste of the good people of Bubastis who bought these things was
not of a discriminating sort, or they may have found their market only
in the people’s quarters. There are much better things of the kind in
the Cairo Museum, and if the new-found treasure had only yielded such
objects, it would have been at once despatched to the _salle de vente_
for the delight of tourists.
The contrast is striking as soon as we pass to what comes down from
the Pharaonic age. Not that it can be placed among the best we know
in that kind. The age of Ramses II is already marked by a less sure
taste than that of the ages that preceded it, and I cannot compare it
with the Dahchour objects nor with those of Queen Ahhotpou. One of the
necklaces is the common breastplate of five rows of little tubes in
stone and enamel, decorated with a fringe of gold egg-shaped ornaments
encrusted with coloured stone. Another necklace, also of gold, with its
eight rows of bottle-shaped pendants hanging to little chains of tiny
beads, would be somewhat out of keeping with the others if that was
its original form, but the parts had been separated, and we remounted
them ourselves in order to preserve them with less risk of loss. Five
lenticular earrings are formed of two convex gold pellicles closed at
the circumference and joined by a border of filigree, stamped in the
centre with a rosette, the leaves of which are grouped round a gold
or enamel button; a gold tube soldered to the inside and grooved in
the furrow of a screw passed through the lobe, and was fastened to an
invisible button which, pressed against the flesh, kept the jewel in
its place. There was also a bracelet in minute particles of metal and
enamel, like those of Ahhotpou and the princesses of Dahchour, but only
the clasp has come down to us, a sliding clasp of a most primitive
character, with no value except for the gold. The best thing in the
series was undoubtedly the pair of gold and lapis lazuli bracelets on
which may be read the cartouche name Ousimares--Osymandyas--of Ramses
II.
[Illustration: ONE OF RAMSES II’S BRACELETS (OPEN).]
[Illustration: ONE OF RAMSES II’S BRACELETS (CLOSED).]
They form two circular portions of nearly equal size, joined by two
hinges, the first turning on a fixed axis, the second a movable bolt
taken away when the bracelet was opened. The back part is a mere plate
of polished gold about 1½ inches broad, on which eight twists and eight
fillets are laid side by side. The twists and fillets alternate, and
the ends are bordered with a thin strip parallel to the hinge. On it
are placed two rows of minute particles of metal soldered together,
and kept in place by two flat double-twisted little chains. The front
portion is expanded to the middle, where it is just over 2 inches in
height. At the hinges it is edged by a row of egg-shaped ornaments
set between two flat chains, and along the curves by a twist flanked
by two fillets. A second frame, included in the first, is of a more
complicated design: a double _motif_ of little beads and chains goes
round the curves, but on the side of the fixed hinge the cartouche
name of Ramses II is to be seen, and on the side of the movable hinge
two bands of beads and filigree lozenges on a plain background. In the
space thus reserved the goldsmith had traced the silhouette of a group
of ducks lying flat, by means of a line of beads and a thin thread.
The two bodies, which are packed together so as to be combined in one,
are formed of a piece of lapis lazuli, cut and highly polished. The
ends of the bodies are imprisoned in a gold sheath decorated with a
covering of small knobs and lozenges; the tails are joined together,
and simulate a fan; they are of lapis, striped with threads of gold to
mark the separation of the feathers. Another gold sheath, of similar
workmanship, envelops the chest; the two necks escape with a bold
movement, and the two heads, twisting round, lie symmetrically on the
back of the creatures. Between them and the frame is a smooth ribbon in
sharp zigzags on a seed-plot of granules. The whole effect is rather
heavy, and it would have been better if the artist had shown a more
sober taste; but having stated so much, it is clearly seen that his
work was conceived with a perfect understanding of decoration and a
mastery of all the secrets of the art.
All the methods that he so well manipulated may be found in the work
of the goldsmiths of contemporary Egypt, especially in that of those
who, living in remote villages, have come less under European influence
than their colleagues in the cities. The models they copy are never
of so delicate an imagination or so skilled an execution; but we note
for the most part the same devices and the same decorative parts of
which we note the employment here; lozenges, zigzags, simple twisted
cords, double-plaited small chains, rounded mallets, threads, filigrees
in lines or in seeds. The ingots are beaten, stretched, fashioned,
polished on the same little anvil. The granules are blown as formerly
in charcoal powder, and the skill with which they are put together and
soldered to obtain the desired designs is as great as in the time of
the Pharaohs. In that, as in many other industries, the Egypt of to-day
has inherited from the Egypt of the past, and we have only to look at
the artisans in their shops to learn how the subjects of Ramses II set
about their work.
III
The gold and silver vases are some years later than the bracelets.
On one of them, indeed, may be read the name of Taouasrît, a
great-granddaughter of Ramses II who married successively Siphtah and
Setouî II, and who enjoyed her hour of celebrity in the last days
of the XIXth Dynasty. It is a half-opened lotus, mounted on its
stem. The calyx of the flower is formed of thin gold-leaf, not lined,
sharply cut at the outer edge. The stalk is smooth except where the
cartouche is engraved: it expands and flattens out at the bottom to
form a foot, and the widening is decorated with folioles, kept in place
by three circular bands. The lines are sufficiently harmonious, but
the execution is poor, and the object would scarcely deserve a brief
mention in our catalogue if the royal name did not assign it a definite
date: here the artistic yields to the archæological value.
[Illustration: GOLD CUP OF QUEEN TAOUASRÎT.]
[Illustration: SMALLER OF THE TWO GOLD VASES (FRONT VIEW).]
It is otherwise with the gold vases that accompany it. They are of
medium size, and the smallest of them all measures only about 3 inches
from bottom to top; but the harmony of the proportions makes them
perfect models of the kind of plate that appeared at banquets on the
sideboards or tables of the rich. The bowl is rounded, and surmounted
by a straight neck almost as high as the bowl itself, the upper edge of
which curves slightly outwards. The front is decorated with a traced
ornament simulating that of one of the large necklaces in lotus petals
with which the Egyptians adorned themselves on fête-days. The two
bands with which it was fastened to the neck fall undulating on the
right and left, and two cats--the two cats of the goddess worshipped
at Bubastis--look at them inquisitively, with attentive eye, distended
back, quivering tail, straight ears, as if asking to play with them.
A lotus escapes below, and on the slopes of its corolla two geese
glide flapping their wings. The neck is divided into three equal rows,
separated by flat cords: first a wreath of lotus buds points downwards,
joined together by a band of threads, one on top of the other; then a
row of egg-shaped fruits, and lastly a band of round florets hollowed
in the centre and the hollow encircled with points like stamens. There
is neither handle nor holder, but a small barrel, through which a gold
ring was passed and by which the object could be hung up, was fastened
by three rivets to the lotus buds on the side opposite to that of the
necklace. The barrel is of bluish faïence set in a gold mount with
a terminal flower. It shows signs of wear and is dented in several
places, but none of the blows it suffered have seriously injured it: it
is as perfect as at the moment it issued new from the shop. The choice
of motives is elegant, the grouping irreproachable, the composition
bold and a little summary: the artist seems to have worked quickly,
but he possessed such mastery of his craft that the rapidity of the
fabrication in no way injured the charm of the work.
[Illustration: SMALLER OF THE TWO GOLD VASES (BACK VIEW).]
[Illustration: MASS OF SILVER VASES SOLDERED TOGETHER BY OXIDE.]
The second vase is larger, for it measures about 4½ inches in height;
if the shape is similar, the detail of the decoration is very
different. The bottom is flat, and the outer surface is filled by
a lotus, drawn so as to cover it entirely. The bowl is not smooth,
but three-fourths of it are covered with a regular bossage, which
gives it the appearance of an enormous symbolic ear of _dourah_. The
method employed to produce it is not repoussé work properly so-called,
hammered from the inside to the outside. The general network was
first very lightly traced on the metal; then the rounds were outlined
with a blunt instrument and hammered into a furrow, which, pressing
down the metal round them, left them themselves in relief. The neck
was finished by an almost imperceptible rim, obtained by turning the
upper edge of the gold plaque outwards. There are four rows instead
of the three of the small vase: at the top the line of buds, then
lotuses head downwards, with alternate bunches of grapes or undefined
flowers hanging between them, then centred florets, and then fruits.
The suspensory ring is fastened to the band of petals by a _motif_ in
shape of a calf. The beast lies on its belly, the tail folded over the
back; the head, turning to the right, is extended and raised, as if to
look over the edge of the neck. It seems to have been chiselled in the
solid metal, and not engrafted, and then finished with the graver. It
is treated broadly, with a sure touch and the knowledge of animal form
that is peculiar to the Egyptians; it may be placed beside the couchant
calves that serve as perfume caskets and are masterpieces of sculpture
in wood: it will lose nothing by the comparison. The whole presents the
same characteristics as the preceding vase, and when closely examined
we are soon convinced that it comes from the same workshop; indeed,
there is little risk of mistake if we attribute both to the same artist.
[Illustration: LARGER OF THE TWO GOLD VASES (FRONT VIEW).]
[Illustration: LARGER OF THE TWO GOLD VASES (BACK VIEW).]
It is the same with the two silver jugs which accompany the two
gold vases: they have a common origin, and an equal importance for
oriental toreumatology. One of them, unfortunately, was broken, and
we do not possess all the pieces; but we have enough to be sure that
it resembled the one that has come to us intact. The bowl is covered
to two-thirds of its height with longitudinal rows of fruits, sitting
one on the other like the scales of a pine cone. Here again it is not
ordinary repoussé work, but the outline of each scale has been marked
round and the metal then pressed down from outside to inside. The
smooth belt which lies between the embossing and the rise of the neck
carries round the whole of the vase a single line of hieroglyphics
expressing a wish for the eternal life and prosperity of the royal
cupbearer, Toumoumtaouneb, then a vignette and the owner in worship
before a goddess, who is pacific and Egyptian on the perfect vase, but
bellicose and foreign on the broken vase, armed with lance and buckler.
Toumoumtaouneb was a person of importance in his time: not only was he
entitled chief cupbearer, but he is proclaimed the king’s messenger in
all barbarous lands, and he doubtless brought back his pious regard for
the bellicose goddess from one of his journeys in Syria. That is the
only exotic element found in the decoration of the two vases. The top
of the neck is ornamented with a rim of light gold. It has two rows
of subjects, one on top of the other: episodes of hunting or fishing.
A fragment of the broken vase shows a troop of wild horses running
towards a marsh with lotuses, where birds are flying. The intact
vase is unfortunately encrusted in places with oxide, which obscures
the detail of the scenes: we distinguish outlines of boats, tufts of
aquatic plants, men drawing nets or shooting arrows, beasts at full
gallop; in the upper row there are imaginary trees with palm-leaves or
volutes, among which griffins fight with lions. If we do not owe the
silver vases to the same artist who fashioned the gold vases, he was at
least endowed with the same admirable skill. He has greatly simplified
the outline of his figures, but the lines are firm, even, sunk in the
metal with the precision of a master: the craft had no secrets from
him. But that is not the chief merit of his work: twenty others would
have been capable of so much among the goldsmiths who worked for the
king and the great nobles. What specially distinguishes it is the
originality of the design he chose for the handle, and the manner in
which he treated it. A kid, attracted by the fumes of the wine
contained in the vase, had climbed the bowl, and boldly standing on
its hind feet, the legs strained, the spine rigid, the knees leaning
against two gold calyxes which spring horizontally from the silver
face, the muzzle pressed against the moulding, he looks greedily over
the edge: a ring passing through the nostril serves for hanging up the
vase. The body is hollow and has been fashioned in two pieces stamped
out, and the two halves soldered together longitudinally and touched
up with the graver. The horns and ears are inserted: a triangular
hole was introduced in the middle of the forehead. The material
technique is excellent, but the conception is even superior to the
technique: nothing could be truer than the movement that inspires the
little creature, nor more ingenious than the expression of greediness
emanating from the whole of the body.
[Illustration: THE VASE WITH THE KID.
(About 6¼ inches in height.)]
Representations of many similar vases may be seen on the monuments
of the Theban Dynasties, with foxes, leopards, and human beings for
handles, and we had asked ourselves if they really existed anywhere
except in the imagination of the painters of the hypogeums. There is
now no manner of doubt that they were faithful reproductions of models
used by the Egyptians, or by the nations with whom the Egyptians had
relations either in war or in commerce. Shall we ever find one of
the large table épergnes which show scenes of conquest, with trees,
animals, statuettes of negroes or Asiatics in gold or in enamel? They
contained such a large amount of metal that they would have been cast
into the melting-pot at some moment of want, but we await the chance
that may give us depôts similar to that of Zagazig: I do not think,
however, that we shall find pieces of a finer inspiration or of a more
harmonious composition than that of the vase with the kid.
IV
The silver pateræ have suffered much. Hurriedly piled up in the
receptacle where they were hidden, the oxide bound them solidly
together, and we have not yet succeeded in separating them all. It
has besides eaten into them in so thorough a fashion that we have
only ventured to clean two or three: it is doubtful if we shall ever
risk touching the rest. It is a misfortune common to most of the
silver objects found in Egypt: under the influence of the annual
infiltrations, the organic acids, of which the subsoil of the ancient
cities is composed, attack them and eat them away without truce or
mercy. If the metal was of suitable thickness we might hope that the
surface only was injured and the core of the metal unharmed, but most
often they consist of a leaf of metal of extreme thinness, which
quickly decomposes. Thus the object only endures at all thanks to the
oxide crust, and if that support was removed it would be resolved into
dust and tiny fragments.
[Illustration: ONE OF THE SILVER PATERÆ OF ZAGAZIG (SIDE VIEW).]
[Illustration: SILVER STRAINER.]
Only one of the pateræ is almost intact. It measures just over 6 inches
in diameter and about 5½ inches in height. It is flat at the bottom
and the sides are slightly inflated at the base; they are decorated at
the top with a gold border fastened to the rim by rivets. Two small
decorated plates in chased gold are furnished with rings which hold a
little gold rod that, bent in three, serves to suspend it. Four large
gold rounds are placed flat on the rim opposite the handle. The side
is smooth, with a single line of hieroglyphics on the outside--a kind
wish, on the parvis of the temple of Neîth, for the owner, the
singing-girl of Neîth, Tamaî, “the Cat.” It is silver leaf, stamped
out in a curve, the two ends of which have been joined without any
appreciable overlapping and then soldered together. The bottom is also
formed of silver leaf, which is fastened to the lower edge of the
sides and divided into two concentric rows. In the centre is a sort of
umbilicus, with a gold flat-rimmed hat decorated by a line of rounded
beads of metal and several lines of little chains. The row nearest the
centre is slightly lower; on it may be seen water full of fish, with
tufts of lotus here and there. A little papyrus boat, occupied by a
naked shepherd and a calf, floats amid the patches of green; birds fly
about, and two nude figures of young women--the same who, modelled in
wood, provided the sculptors of the period with a charming design for
perfume ladles--swim side by side in order to gather flowers. A flat
space and a line of tiny rounds separate the pool from a hunting-ground
that four conventional palm-trees planted at equal distance divide
into the same number of distinct compartments. Two winged sphinxes
with women’s heads stand on either side of one palm, the paw raised
and stretched out as if to pull down the dates: two symmetrical pairs
of goats leap at the other palms to browse on them. Between these
groups, animals run madly about, a wild ox chased by a leopard, hares
and gazelles by foxes, dogs, or wolves. The figures of the middle row
are of repoussé work of so feeble a character that we should almost
say they are engraved on the metal: those of the outer row are of a
stronger repoussé, and then gone over again and finished with the
graver.
The other pateræ resemble these as far as the technique and decoration
are concerned: they evidently came from the same workshop and belonged
to one owner. Were they for daily use or only for ornament? It would
seem that they were not fashioned for a definite use: at least they
do not recall the shapes seen on the monuments in the hands of guests
at a banquet or of priests in the sacrifices. They were hung on the
walls of halls, or placed on sideboards on fête-days, and if they were
given to the guests, it was not simply for them to eat or drink out of.
Filled with fresh water or clear wine, it was a sort of miniature lake,
in the centre of which the point of the gold hat rose like an islet:
the landscape and figures, seen through the transparent medium, stood
out on the flat background with peculiar vivacity, and were effaced or
deformed at pleasure when the liquid was disturbed. It is not so long
since we were pleased with similar puerilities, and Orientals do not
disdain them to-day: the pateræ were, perhaps, toys rather than objects
of real utility. I shall not say the same of the silver strainers,
the forms of which are elegant but not overladen with ornament, and
evidently intended for use. A wide opened funnel, a plaque at the
bottom pierced with tiny little holes--the handle alone testifies to
any artistic attempt--an open papyrus flower, the petals of which, bent
over the stem, lean on the rim of the funnel. It is a useful implement
for kitchen or cellar, well adapted to its end, easy to keep clean, in
a word practical, a thing in truth that the pateræ are not.
V
It is clear, then, that the interest of the find is great in itself
on account of the number and beauty of the objects. Until now the
greater part of the goldsmiths’ work we possess was of the Ptolemaic
period, and those that could be attributed with certainty to the
Pharaonic period possessed no characteristics that permitted us to
judge the skill of the Egyptians. The pictures on the walls of tombs
or temples authorize our belief that it was very skilful, but the
conventions of their designs are still so ill-defined that there is not
always agreement about their interpretation. It is even necessary to
ask if certain motives figuring outside a vase ought not to be taken
as belonging to the decoration of the inside. We now have a sufficient
number of their works to justify our conjecture, and to declare in all
sincerity that the goldsmiths were in no way inferior to the sculptors,
at least so long as the second Theban Empire lasted.
[Illustration: THE BOTTOM OF ONE OF THE ZAGAZIG SILVER PATERÆ.]
These objects were found on the site of ancient Bubastis, and the
presence of the cats of the goddess Bastît on several of them, as
well as the name of Tamaî, the Cat, that is on the chief vase, seem
to point that they were made in the place that has restored them to
us. It is true that Tamaî was a singing-girl of Neîth, living in
the enclosed space before the temple of Neîth, and that might be a
counter-indication, at least so far as these objects are concerned.
Setting aside the question of origin, which is too uncertain, we may
ask if they are really Egyptian by inspiration, or if there is not a
risk in examining them more closely of the discovery of proofs of some
foreign influence. For about a quarter of a century, now, Assyria,
Chaldæa, Asia Minor, Crete and the Egyptian islands have become better
known to us, and the scholars who have studied those places have not
been slow to despoil Egypt in their favour: it is too often sufficient
for an object or an artistic design frequently occurring on Egyptian
monuments to be found in those places at once to attribute to them the
original invention or ownership. I cannot help thinking that many of
these claims are not legitimate, and that in a more general way it is
exceedingly rash in the case of a civilization so complex and distant
in its beginnings as that of Egypt at the time of the second Theban
Empire, to claim the ability to discern all the elements it borrowed
from outside. We know how rapidly the peoples of the Nile assimilate
the foreigner: in ancient times, it was with the arts as with men,
and forms of architecture, of drawing, of industrial production,
transplanted among them, either quickly disappeared and left no trace,
or yielded to the conditions of the country, and became so completely
fused with the taste of its environment that it is now scarcely
possible to distinguish the foreign from the native. I believe that
Egypt certainly accepted exotic types; but the lands with which she had
relations did not abstain from imitating her, and from the most distant
ages. She gave to others at least as much as she received from them,
and in many cases where the question of filiation has recently been
determined against her, it would be well to suspend that judgment, if
not to upset it.
In this case, I imagine that it will not enter any one’s mind to
dispute that the bracelets of Ramses II and the chalice of Taouasrît
are Egyptian pure and simple. The two gold vases and the two silver
jugs present no foreign characteristic: the gold kid is of the same
family as the goats sculptured fifteen or twenty centuries earlier in
the Memphian bas-reliefs, standing on their hind legs and nibbling at
a bush. The pateræ, it is true, resemble the Phœnician gold and bronze
cups so often found in the Euphrates districts and in the lands on the
shores of the Mediterranean: but no one has refused to admit that
they were imitations of Egyptian models, and perhaps a more impartial
examination would lead archæologists to restore some of them at least
to Egypt. At any rate, the treasure of Zagazig shows us what those
models ought to be: the Phœnicians were not unmindful of them and
respected the general arrangement, even if they often modified the
detail. One element only in the scenes of the two rows may be exotic:
the female sphinx with the strange locks of hair, if we choose to see
in her a derivative of the griffin rather than a fantastic deformation
of the male sphinx of a former age. But even so, it must not be
forgotten that the griffin belongs to the ancient national foundations
like the oxen and gazelles, goats, dogs, leopards seen by its side:
its presence would only prove--if its form was so characteristic that
we could not refuse to believe it an incongruity--that it was borrowed
from the arts of Syria or Chaldæa by some artist tired of always using
the traditional types of his country.
XVIII
THREE STATUETTES IN WOOD
(_The Louvre_)
The three little wooden figures reproduced here are of Theban origin,
and represent persons who lived under the conqueror-kings of the
XVIIIth and XIXth Dynasties.
The first was found in the Salt collection, purchased by Champollion at
Leghorn in 1825, which forms the basis of the Louvre collection.[77]
It is a young woman in a long clinging dress trimmed with a band of
embroidery in white thread running from top to bottom. She wears a gold
necklace of three rows and gold bracelets. On her head is a wig, the
hair of which hangs down to the rise of the breast; the wig is kept
in place by a large gilded band simulating a crown of leaves arranged
points downwards. The right arm hangs down beside the body, and the
hand held an object, probably in metal, which has disappeared; the
left arm is folded across the chest, and the hand clasps the stem of
a lotus, the bud pointing between the breasts. The body is supple and
well-formed, the breast young, straight, slight, the face broad,
and smiling with something of softness and vulgarity. The artist was
unable to avoid heaviness in the arrangement of the coiffure, but he
has modelled the body with an elegant and chaste delicacy; the dress
follows the form without revealing it indiscreetly, and the gesture
with which the young woman presses the flower against her is natural.
The statuette is painted dark red, except the eyes and the embroidery,
which are white, and the wig, which is black: the bracelets, the
necklace, and the bandeau are of a yellow gold identical with the small
book exhibited in the glass case marked Z in the “Salle civile.”[78]
[Illustration:
La Dame Naî Prêtre Officier en costume demi civil
STATUETTES IN WOOD.
The Louvre.]
Two inscriptions engraved on the pedestal, and then painted yellow,
inform us of the name of the woman, and of that of the individual who
dedicated the statue. One on the front runs thus:
(A) ADORATION TO PHTAH
SOKAR-OSIRI,[79] GREAT GOD, PRINCE
OF ETERNITY, TO WHOM ARE GIVEN ALL KINDS OF GOOD
THINGS AND PURE THINGS, TO THE DOUBLE OF THE
PERFECT LADY NAÎ OF THE TRUE PERFECT VOICE.
The other is engraved on the right side, and runs:
(B) IT IS HER BROTHER WHO MAKES HER NAME TO LIVE,
THE SERVANT PHTAH-MAÎ.
From other monuments we know more than one Egyptian of the name
Phtah-Maî, and more than one lady Naî: but none of them has any claim
to be identified with our two personages. Phtah-Maî is not a noble: he
filled a very humble post, that of a page attached to a noble, or a
subordinate employé of a temple or of a court of justice. But the charm
of the monument he devoted to the memory of his sister is only the more
remarkable.
The personage in the middle is a priest, standing, wearing the short
wig with little locks of hair in rows one above the other. The bust
is bare, and his only garment is a long skirt falling half way down
the leg, spread out in front into a sort of pleated apron. In his two
hands he bears a sacred insignia consisting of a ram’s head surmounted
by the solar disk, and forming an ægis, the whole set into a staff
of fairly large dimensions: the attitude is one of repose. The third
figure, on the contrary, is full of movement and activity. It is an
officer in semi-military costume of the time of Amenôphis III or of
his successors: a small wig, a clinging smock with sleeves, a short
loin-cloth tightly girded over the hips and scarcely descending to the
middle of the thigh, decorated in front with a small piece of stuff
standing out, pleated lengthwise. These two statuettes are painted
dark red with the exception of the wig, which is black, of the cornea
of the eyes, which is white, and the insignia of the priest, which is
yellow. The old pedestal has disappeared, and with it the name. Like
the limestone and wooden statues of large dimensions, these formed
part of the funerary equipment: they were the supports of souls in
miniature, and served as a body for the double of the model and _kept
alive the name_ of a person who had been loved or well known. There
are a large number of them in the museums, and nearly all are of the
same epoch. Neither the Ancient nor the Middle Empire made them--Saïte
art preferred hard stone: the wooden statuettes that I have so far seen
are of the second Theban period, and belong to the XVIIIth, XIXth, and
XXth Dynasties.
Some of them, if not all, were used for purposes that seem strange to
us. Several had little rolls of papyrus fastened to their pedestal or
their body, ordinary letters that the writers sent to one another;
one possessed by the Leyden Museum is an adjuration addressed _to the
perfect soul of the lady Ankhari_ by her still living husband:[80]
“What fault have I committed against thee that I should be reduced
to the miserable condition in which I find myself? What have I done
to justify this attack on me, if no fault has been committed against
thee? From the time I became thy husband until this day, what have I
done against thee that I should conceal? What shall I do when I have
to bear witness to my conduct in regard to thee, and shall appear with
thee before the tribunal of the dead, addressing myself to the cycle of
the infernal gods, and thou wilt be judged after this writing, which
is in words uttering my complaint in regard to what thou hast done.
What wilt thou do?” The general tone of the piece is, as is clear, one
of complaint and accusation. The husband laments about “the miserable
condition to which he is reduced,” three years after he has become a
widower; then he relates the incidents of his conjugal life in order to
show the ingratitude he has received for his trouble and care. “When
thou becamest my wife, I was young, I was with thee, I did not desert
thee, I caused no grief to thy heart. Now so I acted when I was young;
when I was promoted to high dignities by Pharaoh, I did not desert
thee; I said: ‘Let them be mutual between us!’ and as everybody who
came saw me with thee, thou didst not receive those whom thou didst
not know, for I acted according to thy will. Now, here it is, thou
hast not satisfied my heart and I shall plead with thee, and the true
will be distinguished from the false.” He dwells on and reminds her of
his kindnesses: “I have never been found acting brutally to thee like
a peasant who enters other people’s houses.” When she died, during
an eight months’ absence occasioned by his service with Pharaoh, “I
did what was seeming for thee: I lamented thee greatly with my people
opposite my dwelling, I gave stuffs and swathings for thy burial, and
for that purpose had many linen cloths woven, and I omitted no good
offering I could make thee.”[81] The poor man does not state clearly
the nature of the troubles from which he suffered. Perhaps he imagined
that his wife tormented him in the form of a spectre; perhaps, what
after all comes to the same thing in the belief of an Egyptian, he
was attacked by diseases and overwhelmed with infirmities that he
attributed to the malignity of the dead woman. We are reminded of
the strange actions that the Icelanders of the Middle Ages practised
against ghosts. The administration set on foot the whole cortège of
officials and the whole of its legal code to bring the accusation,
judge and condemn the dead who persisted in haunting the house in
which they had lived. The records of the causes are extant and
testify to the gravity that presided over this strange procedure. The
Leyden papyrus certainly relates to an affair of the kind. A husband,
addressing his wife’s soul, summons her to suspend persecutions that
are in no way justified, under pain of answering for her conduct before
the infernal jury. If she did not heed this preliminary advice, the
matter would be brought later before the tribunal of the gods of the
west and pleaded: the papyrus would serve as a piece of convincing
evidence, and then “the true would be distinguished from the false.”
There was one difficulty to be overcome: how was the summons to be sent
to her? The Egyptians were never embarrassed when it was a question of
communicating with the other world. The husband read the letter in the
tomb, then fastened it to a figure of the woman. Thus she could not
fail to receive the adjuration as she received the funerary banquet, or
the effect of the prayers that assured her happiness beyond the tomb.
The preoccupations of art held only a subordinate place in statues like
those of the lady Naî and her two companions: the religious idea was
predominant, and it was religion which gave the monument its meaning.
XIX
A FRAGMENT OF A THEBAN STATUETTE[82]
The excavations undertaken by Mr. Mond on the eastern slope of the
hills of Cheîkh-Abd-el-Gournah, in one of the richest of the Theban
cemeteries of the XVIIIth and XIXth Dynasties, have already given
several valuable monuments to the “Service des Antiquités”; and nothing
surpasses or even equals the fragment illustrated here. The statuette
to which it belongs was broken in the middle. The hips and legs have
disappeared, as well as the right arm, and the plinth against which
the back leaned; Mr. Mond eagerly sought the missing pieces among the
residue of his find, but in vain; they were not forthcoming, and were
doubtless either destroyed in ancient times, or carried off by some
amateur during the nineteenth century. The fragment that remains to
us measures nearly a foot in length and about 4½ inches across the
shoulders; there is nothing in the lines by which one can determine
whether the person it represents was seated or standing. I am inclined
to think that, according to the custom of the time, the attitude
resembled that of the little lady Touî in the Louvre,[83] standing, the
feet nearly on the same level, the right arm hanging down, the head
erect, with the wig of ceremony, and the dress of great holidays.
[Illustration: THE MOND STATUETTE (FRONT VIEW).]
The material employed by the sculptor is limestone of the kind the
inscriptions describe as the _fine white stone of Tourah_, but thick
beds of it extend along the sides of the valley of Egypt from the
environs of Cairo to the defiles of Gebeleîn. It abounds in the Theban
plain, and although it is too split and cracked in every sense to be
of any use for building purposes, it is admirably suited for designs
of restricted dimensions, such as those of our statuette. It was most
probably carved in the stone of Cheîkh-Abd-el-Gournah itself, perhaps
in one of the blocks extracted at the time of hollowing out the tomb
for which it was destined. It forms an excellent substance, supple
and firm at the same time, and subserves with an inimitable docility
the boldest and the most delicate strokes of the chisel; the grain of
marble, crystalline and almost metallic, makes the sensation on the eye
of a rigid envelope in which the subject is, as it were, imprisoned,
while limestone, softer and richer, better reproduces the elasticity
of the surface of flesh and the free play of the muscles under the
skin. Our statuette had been illuminated in accordance with custom,
but it bears only imperceptible traces of painting and has the natural
colour of old limestone, a tone between cream and yellowed ivory, which
recalls the paleness of Egyptian women. The detail of the clothing
and ornaments which was due to the brush has vanished, and is only
indicated on the border of the mantle by faint tooling. It has thus
lost its archæological value, but has gained an aspect of refinement
wanting in works where the colour has been preserved intact.
The young woman who has thus left us her portrait lived under the XIXth
Dynasty, at a time when fashion imposed enormous head-dresses and
scanty clothing on its votaries. An almost transparent linen covers the
left shoulder, then crosses the chest and is knotted under the right
armpit, concealing the rest of the costume; the left hand is freed
from it and clasps a lotus stem, the flower reaching to the hollow
between the breasts. The bust has not yet attained its plenitude, but
the breasts are well shaped and well separated, but so slight that
they scarcely make any impression on the linen; the lines of the arm,
shoulder, and neck indicate thinness. The artist has well understood
the characteristics of the dawn of womanhood, and the discreet fashion
in which he permits us to guess the slender grace beneath the garment
is that of a master craftsman, but it is in the head and face that he
shows the full measure of his talent. The head is fitted into a wig
of complicated structure which yields nothing in size to the majestic
peruke of Louis XIV. A double ribbon running from the forehead to the
back of the neck divides the hair into two equal masses, which are
themselves divided into volutes of little waved locks, each formed of
two thin tresses, twisted together at the extremity. The whole forms
a stiff heavy fabric which, unskilfully interpreted, would make the
piece ugly, no matter how successful in the other parts. Our sculptor
has made no change in the general arrangement--his model would not have
permitted it--but he has adjusted the parts with such happy ingenuity
that the monster wig, instead of overpowering the face, acts as a frame
to it and sets it off.
[Illustration: THE MONO STATUETTE (PROFILE).]
It is of the purest Egyptian type, not the heavy, brutal type which
predominates in the Memphian age and among the fellahs to-day, but
an elegant refined type of which numerous examples are provided by
statuettes of all periods. The forehead appears to be rather low, but
we cannot be sure if it was so by nature, or if it is the wig which
conceals its height. The eyes are long, almond-shaped, slanting towards
the temple, widely opened. The eyelids are drawn clearly, almost
sharply, and meet at an acute angle both at the inner corner and at the
outer commissure. The globe of the eye is rather prominent, the pupil
was added with the brush, and a sort of greyish tone vaguely marks the
place. The eyebrows are a flattened bow, thin and regular. The nose
is attached to the superciliary arcade by a fairly accentuated curve;
it is straight, thin, rounded at the end, with delicate nostrils.
The lower part of the face is thick-set, and of so firm a cut that
with age--if age ever came--it would have become hard. The lips are
full, thick, edged the whole length, split in the middle: they are
pressed together as if to keep back a smile. The whole face changes in
character and almost in century, according to the angle from which it
is looked at. Seen from the front it is round and full, with neither
superabundance nor softness of flesh: it is the little middle-class
girl of Thebes, pretty, but common in form and expression. Seen from
the side between the hanging pieces of the wig, as if between two long
ringlets falling on the shoulders, it assumes a malicious, roguish
expression not ordinarily usual in Egyptian women: it might be one of
our contemporaries who from caprice or coquetry had put on the ancient
coiffure.
Who was she in her lifetime, and what was her name? The fragment
which represents her was found at the bottom of a funerary pit, in
the court-yard of the tomb of Menna, and Menna flourished under the
XIXth Dynasty. Was she one of his wives, or daughters, or sisters? The
inscription which might have told us is heaven knows where, and it will
be a great piece of good fortune if it is ever found.
XX
THE LADY TOUÎ OF THE LOUVRE AND EGYPTIAN INDUSTRIAL SCULPTURE IN
WOOD[84]
The little lady Touî, who entered the Louvre last year, was in her
lifetime a singer in the service of Amon. The title gives rise to doubt
and scarcely permits us to determine to what class of society she
belonged. The singers in the service of Amon were of all ranks, some
married, others free. They were all bound to serve the god; they shook
before him the sistrum that kept off spirits, or wielded the magic
whip, the _monaît_, with which they beat the air to keep off with heavy
blows the evil beings who floated invisible in it. The most humble
were of easy morals, and the series of licentious vignettes in the
Turin Museum leaves no room for doubt regarding the kind of life they
led. They were the servants of the temple; they placed their bodies at
the free disposal of their master Amon, and whoever addressed them in
his name would not meet with refusal. In the Græco-Roman period the
high-priest chose a young girl of rare beauty from among the richest
and noblest families of Thebes and solemnly dedicated her. She became
the chief singer, and shared the life of her companions of lower origin
as long as youth lasted; when she was past the age of child-bearing
she retired, and an honourable marriage allowed her to end her days
amid the respect of all. The lady Touî’s position seems to have been
less curious. The wives of priests or those of citizens affiliated to
the different brotherhoods of Amon formed associations of _singers_ who
appeared in the temples on days of festival or at the hours fixed for
certain ceremonies: they only accepted the duty of playing the sistrum
or of plying the whip, leaving to the others the rest of the function.
Touî doubtless had a husband and children somewhere in Thebes. In
an Egyptian tale[85] the heroine, Tboubouî, daughter of a priest of
Bastît, replies to the lover who is importuning her: “I am pure, I am
no wanton.” Touî might say the same to us if, trusting to her title, we
confused her with the common _singing-girls_, who yielded their bodies
to all.
[Illustration: THE LADY TOUÎ, STATUETTE IN WOOD.
The Louvre.]
The statuette that represents her may deservedly rank as one of the
best works which have recently emerged from Theban soil. She stands
upright in the hieratical attitude of repose, one foot in advance, the
head fixed, the right arm hanging by her side, the left arm across the
chest, holding the sacred whip, the _monaît_, folded up. She wears the
ceremonial costume, a long robe with sleeves, narrow, crossed in front,
edged with a heavy, stiff fringe, a broad necklace round the neck; on
her head the immense wig fashionable among the Thebans in the eleventh
and tenth centuries B.C., numerous little tresses gathered together at
the ends into two or three, and finished off with tassels or little
curls. The effect was fairly ugly: it lent heaviness to the top of the
figure, diminished the size of the face, cramped the neck, concealed
the fall of the shoulders and the rise of the breasts, broke the
equilibrium of the body. But the anonymous artist who made the portrait
of the lady Touî has derived an almost fortunate advantage from this
deplorable head-dress: he has treated it as a sort of background which
sets off the face, neck, and chest. The lateral tufts of hair frame
the features without making them too heavy, and the close-fitting coif
at the top is placed on the skull without appearing to crush it. The
slender, healthy forms of the body are rendered in remarkable fashion,
and the modelling of the belly and legs shows itself under the clinging
stuff with a precision that is in no way brutal. In looking at it we
certainly recognize more than one defect: the figure lacks suppleness
and the face expression; the wood is cut harshly and with an almost
puerile detail. The whole, however, pleases by some indescribable
simple and chaste charm: the Louvre was perfectly right to acquire it,
even if more money was expended than is usual on Egyptian objects of
such small size.
Its use is easy to determine; it is a miniature _statue of the double_
shut up in the tombs of the Memphian period. A statue was not within
the reach of everybody: only the rich could procure one, and people of
moderate means were obliged to content themselves with little figures
of less cost. The population of priests, _servants_, _singing-girls_,
heads of the works who lived round the sanctuary of Amon or in the
temples of the necropolis, had many pretensions to luxury with slender
resources: their tombs are filled with objects which pretend to be
what they are not, and veritably deceive the eye, destined to give
the dead the illusion of opulence; massive wooden vases painted to
represent alabaster or granite vases, rings and jewels in glass or
enamel that appear to be gold rings and jewels, furniture in common
wood, varnished, speckled, veined, to simulate furniture in rare woods.
The lady Touî belonged to that half-needy class, and had to substitute
statuettes of carved and polished wood for limestone or sandstone
statues. All the museums in Europe have similar ones, and through
Champollion, the Louvre possessed the lady Naî,[86] who sustains
comparison very well with her new comrade. Egyptian sculptors had
acquired veritable mastery in this subordinate form of sculpture, and
there are pieces of singular charm among those that have reached us.
Take, for instance, the little girl and the woman I have chosen almost
at hazard in one of the cases of the Turin Museum. The little girl is
standing, one foot in advance, the arms hanging down, naked according
to the custom of Egyptian children, with a necklace, and a belt which
loosely surrounds the loins, short plaited hair with a tress falling
over the ears. The material is less precious than with the lady Touî,
and the work less thorough, but has the slim delicacy of a little
Egyptian girl of eight or ten years old ever been better expressed?
It is an exact portrait, in costume and figure, of the little Nubian
girls of the Cataract before the age of puberty obliges them to wear
clothes; it is their thin chest, slender hips, clearly cut, delicate
thigh, their bearing, hesitating and bold at the same time, the roguish
expression of their features.
[Illustration: STATUETTE IN WOOD.
Turin Museum.]
[Illustration: STATUETTE IN WOOD.
Turin Museum.]
The other statuette represents a well-developed woman standing on a
round pedestal without a scrap of clothing or veil, but very proud of
her head-dress, and especially of her big earrings. She touches the
right one with her hand and makes it stand out a little in order
to show it, or to assure herself that the jewel is very becoming; the
head is big, the shoulders thin, the chest narrow, and the sculptor
was embarrassed to render the movement of the arms; but the eyes are
so wide open, the smile so contented, the expression of the whole so
intelligent, that we can easily excuse that defect.
Men were as well treated as women by this art fostered by persons of
small means. Scribes of subordinate rank, old retired officers, retail
merchants, or men at the head of small industrial concerns, all of
whom swarmed in the poorer quarters, felt as strongly as their wives,
in default of the stone statue, the need of acquiring a wooden image
which would show what they had been like in their lifetime. There
were as many artists as they wished to model them in the attitude
they preferred, in their everyday costume or in that of fête-days,
bearing and likeness guaranteed. Those found in the tombs in the early
years of the nineteenth century form a veritable gallery, most varied
and curious, of the different types prevailing from the thirteenth
to the ninth century B.C. in Thebes and its environs among the lower
middle-class.[87] Some had been soldiers, and wear the light petticoat
bulging at the waist of the Egyptian foot-soldier; others had spent
their lives scribbling in a Government office; the greater number
belonged to one of the funerary professions, guardians of mummies,
decorators of hypogeums, hewers of tombs, sacristans or priests of a
low order employed in the minor offices of burials or commemorative
rites. They proudly exhibit their insignia: they carry long staves
crowned with sacred emblems--the human head of Hathor, the hawk’s
beak of Horus--and everything in their attitude betrays the pride and
satisfaction of knowing themselves so fine and so important. Their
bearing reveals what the inscriptions usually placed on the pedestal
of their statuettes confirm: “It is I, Khâbokhni, the Servant of the
‘True’ Place,” he who poured the libations, or who, at the canonical
hours, distributed a portion of bread, flowers, and fruits to each
of the dead entrusted to his care. The Egyptians were admirable in
observation and full of satirical humour: I would not swear that, in
impressing this character of naïve vanity on their works, the sculptors
were not yielding to the temptation of discreetly amusing themselves at
the expense of their sitters.
Study of these small monuments is too much neglected. By considering
the colossi of granite or sandstone, the heroic statues and the
ceremonial groups, we are inclined to recognize only qualities of
grandeur and immobile majesty in Egyptian art; the wooden statuettes
show how, on occasion, it could display charm and wit. Most of them
are the products of chance, commercial pieces, prepared in advance
for the needs of customers, of which a large assortment was always
kept in reserve. The family desiring to offer one to one of its dead
came to get it at the fairest price, and something was sold, more or
less well done according to the sum that was spent; the choice being
made, the piece was adapted to its definitive destination by engraving
on the pedestal, or on the back, the names which transformed the
anonymous doll into a body for the double of a particular individual.
They were artisans who sculptured these images, or rather manufactured
them for the undertakers of funerals. Their education was so complete
and their hand so practised that they rarely fell very low; their
average productions are of honest composition and sufficiently true in
feeling. When they were given enough time or commissioned to take great
care with a piece of work, those who combined natural talent with the
routine of their craft produced work of real value--the statuettes of
the lady Touî, of the little girl and the woman in the Turin Museum,
and many others hidden from the public in the cupboards of our museums.
XXI
SOME PERFUME LADLES OF THE XVIIITH DYNASTY
(_The Louvre_)
It is not without reason that these objects are called perfume ladles.
The Egyptians used them, in fact, for making either essences, pomades,
or the various coloured pigments with which both men and women painted
the cheeks, lips, eyelids and underneath the eyes, the nails and
palms of the hand. The form and decoration vary in accordance with
the epochs. At the time of the Ramessides, between the fourteenth and
twelfth centuries B.C., fashion introduced Syrian manufactures into
Egypt; later, under the Bubastis and under the Ethiopian kings of the
XXVth Dynasty, some Chaldæan or Ninevite manufactures came in. The five
ladles illustrated here are purely Egyptian in origin and style. The
designs were generally borrowed from the fauna and flora of the valley.
The first has by way of handle a young girl lost among the lotuses,
who is gathering a bud; a tuft of stems from which two full-blown
flowers escape attach the handle to the bowl, the oval of which has its
rounded part outside and the point inside. In the second, the young
girl is framed by two stems of lotus flowers and papyrus, and walks
along playing a long-handled guitar. The next ladle substitutes a
bearer of offerings for the musician, and the fourth has the musician
standing on a boat sailing among the reeds. The last takes the form
of a slave, half bent under an enormous sack. Nothing could be better
than the general design of the decoration. The artisans brought as much
conscience and skill to its execution as the sculptors gave to their
colossal statues. The physiognomy and age of the four young girls are
well characterized. The girl who plucks the lotuses is an _ingénue_:
that state is shown by her carefully plaited hair and her pleated
skirt. Theban ladies wore long skirts, and this is only turned up high
to facilitate walking among the reeds without soiling its edges. The
two musicians, on the contrary, belong to the lower class; one has
only a belt round her hips, the other a short petticoat, carelessly
fastened. The bearer of offerings has the tress of hair falling over
the ear, as was the custom with children, and her belt is her sole
garment. She is one of the slender, slim young girls of whom many may
be seen among the fellahs on the banks of the Nile, and her nudity
does not prevent her from belonging to a respectable family: children
of both sexes only began to wear clothes at the age of puberty.
Lastly, the slave, with his thick lips, flattened nose, bestial jaw,
low forehead, sugar-loaf head, is evidently a caricature of a foreign
prisoner; the brutish, conscientious way in which he lifts his heavy
burden, the angular prominences of the body, the type of the head, the
arrangement of the different parts, remind us of the general aspect of
some terra-cotta grotesques that come from Asia Minor.
[Illustration: PERFUME LADLE.
The Louvre.]
[Illustration: PERFUME LADLE.
The Louvre.]
All the details of nature grouped round and framing the principal
subject, the exact form of the flowers and leaves, the species of the
birds, are very accurate, and sometimes betray wit. Of the three ducks
that the bearer of offerings has tied by their claws, and which hang
over her arm, two are resigned to their fate and go swinging along, the
neck stretched out, the eye wide open; the third lifts its head up and
flutters its wings. The two water-fowl perched on the lotuses listen
at ease, the beaks on their crops, to the lute-player who is passing
near them; experience has taught them that they need not disturb
themselves for songs, and that a young girl is only to be feared if
she is armed. In the bas-reliefs, the sight of a bow or a boomerang
throws them into confusion, just as to-day that of a gun scatters the
crows. The Egyptians knew the habits of the animals who lived in their
land, and took pleasure in minutely observing them. Observation became
instinctive with them, and they gave a striking air of reality to the
least of their productions.
The bowl of the ladles is generally oval. It is edged by a running
decoration between two lines, a waving line, or a more or less
accentuated denticulation. The cavity made in the slave’s burden is of
irregular shape, and the thick border is decorated with lightly carved
flowers and foliage. It was a perfume box rather than a ladle, for
the little hole in the lower part, near the prisoner’s shoulder, held
the hinge of the lid, now lost. The fifth ladle is in the shape of a
quadrangular trough. The bottom, set in four rectangular mouldings, is
covered with waving lines simulating water; the edges represent the
banks of the lake and are covered with aquatic scenes. On the right,
amid the flowers and lotus buds, a little personage is catching birds
with a net; on the left, another is fishing from a boat. They are both
summarily indicated, but are not the less full of life. It is a
miniature reproduction on a wooden ladle of the great scenes of fishing
and bird-catching which are painted in the tombs and the temples.
[Illustration: PERFUME LADLE.
The Louvre.]
[Illustration: PERFUME LADLE.
The Louvre.]
The objects are in wonderful preservation. A lid is lost, a lotus
branch is broken behind the girl who is gathering flowers, one of the
feet of the bearer of offerings is missing. Otherwise they are intact,
and might have just come from the hands of the craftsman. The wood is
of a very fine grain, marvellously adapted to the needs of the chisel.
It has never been painted, but has become darkened with time. The
original colour must have been the golden yellow seen in the cracks of
some pieces of thin wood found in the tombs. None of the ladles show
any signs of wear: they seem to have been deposited new in the tomb
near the dead person, who preserved them new until our day. Like the
rest of the funerary equipment, they were intended for use in the other
world. The lists of offerings mention antimony powder and green paint
among the things sent to the _double_ on festival days: the perfume
ladles and boxes were as necessary in the tomb as they had been on
earth.
I do not think that any survive which we can with certainty attribute
to the time of the Pyramids: but the bas-reliefs of the Memphian tombs
show us the joiners at work, and do not allow us to doubt that the
trade in small wooden objects was very flourishing at that period.
Under the great Theban Dynasties, Egypt exported them by thousands;
imitated in Phœnicia, or even transported directly by the Phœnicians to
the Mediterranean coasts, they transmitted the forms of Oriental art to
the West. It is probable that Theban production--the only one known to
us by dated monuments found in the tombs--entirely ceased, or at least
became almost insignificant, when the greatness of Thebes declined
from the tenth century _B.C._ They were still manufactured at Memphis
and in the important cities of the Delta until the Ptolemies and the
Cæsars. Recent specimens are somewhat rare, and present considerable
differences from those of Theban manufacture. As it was exactly this
Memphian art that almost exclusively supplied the Phœnician market from
the time of Sheshonq, it is vexing that examples are not more abundant:
as we do not possess sufficient, we cannot accurately judge what their
influence was on the arts of the Mediterranean.
The five objects I have been discussing come from the Salt collection.
The Theban tombs where they were found were exploited and emptied at
the beginning of the nineteenth century by collectors and dealers; it
is difficult to find any like them in Egypt now, and those that are
discovered are very inferior to these in delicacy and quality.
[Illustration: PERFUME LADLE.
The Louvre.]
XXII
SOME GREEN BASALT STATUETTES OF THE SAÏTE PERIOD
These statuettes were cut in greenish basalt of fine grain, loved by
the artists of the New Empire and the Saïte Period above all other
stones. They formed part of the Salt collection, and are now exhibited
in the Louvre.
The first represents a Pharaoh, as is proved by the serpent that rises
above his forehead and the hawk’s head that terminates the dagger
passed through his belt. He is standing, and walking quickly, the head
erect on his shoulders, and slightly bent forward in the attitude of a
man who is looking attentively at the point towards which he is going;
the arms are not detached from the body, and hang down along the bust
and the thigh. The composition is excellent, highly finished in spite
of the hardness of the material, and the detail is rendered as freely
as on the colossi of the Theban Period.
The face has a particular character which struck Egyptologists long
since; it is short, wide at the height of the eyes, rounded at the
bottom. The eye is long, prominent, surmounted by strong curved
eyebrows, marked where they join on the forehead by two deep vertical
furrows. The nose is aquiline, short, thick at the end, flanked by
two nostrils the outside walls of which seem to be somewhat thin. The
mouth is widely opened and protrudes; full lips, short chin receding
a little under the shadow of the lips. On his return from his journey
in Egypt, M. de Rougé was struck by the resemblance of this statuette,
till then lying forgotten in the corner of a cupboard, with the
portraits of the Shepherd Kings discovered at Sân by Mariette. Dévéria
cleverly reproduced it in two plates in the _Revue archéologique_.[88]
He asserted what M. de Rougé had admitted as a mere hypothesis: that
it was the portrait of a Shepherd King, and that it belonged to the
disturbed period which immediately preceded the XVIIIth Dynasty. I
must confess that these conclusions do not appear to me to be sound.
The long list of Pharaohs includes many sovereigns whose faces present
characteristics very different from those usually attributed to the
Egyptian race, and yet who, all the same, were Egyptians born and bred.
Without entering into the discussion, I will content myself with saying
that several of those who reigned at periods relatively late, Taharqa
(XXVth Dynasty) or Hakori (XXIXth Dynasty) for example, bear a singular
likeness to the sovereign of our statuette in the structure and
expression of the face. I cannot be certain here that it is a question
of one of them, but the general composition reminds me of the style of
the Saïte Period more than of that of the Theban. Without asserting
anything, I am inclined to believe that our Pharaoh lived in the last
centuries of Egyptian independence.
[Illustration: GREEN BASALT STATUETTES OF THE SAÏTE PERIOD.
The Louvre.]
The second fragment is evidently Saïte; the somewhat harsh precision
of the modelling, the heaviness of the head-dress, the roundness
of shoulders and chest, sufficiently prove it. It is broken too high
up for us to determine if it belonged to a standing statue like the
Pharaoh, or a crouching figure like the third monument. It is a perfect
type of the middle-class Egyptian, developed in width rather than in
height.
The shoulders are soft and flabby; the smiling insignificance of the
features, the sinking down of the trunk on the hips and the head on
the shoulders, are just what we should expect in one of the scribes
who led sedentary lives in offices, amid piles of documents, of whom
some bas-reliefs exaggerate the obesity with an evident intention of
caricature. The inscription engraved on the base tells us that he was
named Aî, son of Hapi, and that besides his sacerdotal functions he
possessed the dignity of director of the two store-houses of the money.
The Turin papyrus informs us of the nature of his office. The financial
system of Egypt rested on an entirely different principle from ours:
coins not being yet invented, or only lately come into use at the Saïte
Period, the payment of taxes and of the officials, the transactions
of the State with private individuals, or of private individuals with
each other, were valued and settled in kind. Every Egyptian owed the
Treasury, according to his profession and his fortune, so many fish
if he was a fisherman, so many bushels of grain or head of cattle if
he was an agriculturist; the whole was duly received, registered, and
stored by scribes who, in their turn, put aside for the Pharaoh what
would keep, and used what was perishable for the daily disbursements.
Silver and gold were articles of exchange in the same way as stuffs
or oxen; Pharaoh brought them back in quantities from his expeditions
abroad, and received them from his subjects as the equivalent of their
share of the tax. Gold and silver circulated in powder, in sachets
that contained a definite weight, in thin rings, in the form of
couchant oxen, of half-oxen, of ox or gazelle heads, of jars full or
empty, in curious shapes that generally were of no use in daily life,
and which consequently were only, in spite of their artistic value,
a sort of metallic reserve for the rich. The two store-houses or the
double house of the money formed the treasury in which Pharaoh stored
the quantities of gold and silver that belonged to him: taking into
account the value attached to these metals, the directors of these
establishments must have occupied a fairly high rank in the Egyptian
hierarchy.
But for all that, we must not take the manuscript spread over Aî’s
knees and that he is attentively reading for an account-book, or a
document relating to his business. The portion of the scroll that he
holds in his right hand, placed flat on his knees, is divided into
vertical columns, which, cut by horizontal lines, presents a sort of
chequered surface, the squares of which are not all of the same size.
Each of the larger ones contains the name of an object, and each of the
smaller a number. It is the list of the gifts composing the banquet
offered to the dead person on the day of burial and during the funeral
ceremonies. In the tombs both of the Ancient and the New Empire it is
highly developed, and comprises the most varied materials: clear or
coloured waters, beers of different kinds, wines of four vintages,
seven or nine of the choice pieces of the victim, cakes of all sorts,
essences, cosmetics, stuffs. On the scroll of our scribe where the
space was restricted the list is shortened, and we only find the actual
necessities: water, beer, some meat, a little perfume. It is to that
of the tombs what the usual dinner of a middle-class family is to the
ceremonial banquet of a noble; nevertheless, our scribe reads it
with evident satisfaction: it is the menu of his meals for eternity,
and, however scanty others may deem it, he probably considers it more
pleasurable than that of his terrestrial dinners. We have here the
natural development of the ideas that the Egyptians had of the other
world. From the moment that the _double_ was to feed materially, they
sought to assure it the food of which it had need. The formulas of the
stelæ which mention bread, wine, meat, deciphered by the first comer,
secured the provisioning of the _double_; all that had been desired
for him in reciting it would be assured him in the other world by
virtue of the magic words. For lack of a passer-by to accomplish this
pious duty, it occurred to them to place statues in the tomb which
seemed to repeat for ever a written list held on their knees; this
simulation of a perpetual reading was more than sufficient to nourish
for ever the simulacrum of a man. Here, it is the defunct himself who
renders himself this good office; elsewhere it is a friend, a scribe, a
favourite servant.
The study of these three little monuments brings out very happily one
of the qualities of Egyptian art: the skill with which the least of
artists, in reproducing in a sometimes realistic manner the portrait
of individuals, understood how to seize the physiognomy and bearing
characteristic of their craft or of their social rank. Compare the
submissive and sheepish face of the crouching scribe with the bold
carriage and imperious head of the Pharaoh: the contrast is striking.
With the scribe, all the muscles are relaxed; the whole body is bent,
as with a man accustomed to obey and resigned to endure everything from
his superiors. With the Pharaoh, the modelling is firm, the figure
upright, the mien haughty; we feel that here is a person accustomed
from childhood to walk upright in the midst of bowed backs. It is
unfortunate that the legend has disappeared with the lower part of
the second statuette; comparing it with several other monuments in
the Louvre, it reminds me of several priests of the Saïte Period. The
hardness in the eye and the corners of the lips is the same, the same
furrow surrounds the nostril and the mouth, the outer walls of the nose
are compressed in a similar fashion; in spite of the loss of the name
and titles, I am tempted to think that the individual who bears on
his face in so high a degree the peculiarities of the Egyptian priest
belonged to the sacerdotal caste.
XXIII
A FIND OF SAÏTE JEWELS AT SAQQARAH[89]
As soon as I returned to my old post, I resumed the excavations of
the pyramids at the point where I had left them in 1886. I had then
made a systematic search of the entrance into the funerary vaults:
it was now necessary to seek out the exterior chapels, the caves,
the secondary pyramids or the mastabas, which, shut in by a walled
enclosure, completed the burial-place. At the end of November, 1899, I
placed workmen round Ounas, and as I found it impossible to direct the
operations myself with the requisite care, I entrusted the surveillance
of them to M. Alexandre Barsanti, the curator-restorer of the Museum,
with detailed instructions. The campaign then begun was only ended in
the last days of May, 1900, and the account of it will be published
elsewhere. I now wish to draw the attention of amateurs and scholars to
the discovery of a mass of Saïte jewels.
The progress of the clearing away revealed the existence of a series of
intact tombs at the south of the pyramid. The last of those that had
been opened belonged to a very high personage named Zannehibou, in his
lifetime commandant of the king’s boats. The mummy, a block of shining
bitumen, was at once recognised as a very rich one. At the height of
the face it had a large gold mask which fitted on the front part of the
head like the _cartonnage_ case usual with mummies of the second Saïte
Period. It had a broad necklace round its neck of beads of gold and of
green felspar or of lapis lazuli mounted with gold thread, and fastened
to it were numerous amulets, also of gold. Below the necklace, on the
chest, an image of the goddess Nouît, in gold, spread its wings. A
network of gold and felspar hung down to the hip, and from the image of
the Nouît to the ankles might be read, on a long band of gold-leaf, the
usual inscriptions in relief: the name of the dead man, his filiation,
with short formulas of prayer. Two gold figures of Isis and Nephthys
were sewn on the chest, two leaves of gold cut as sandals were fitted
to the soles of the feet; a silver plaque with a line engraving of a
mystic eye for the incision whence the entrails had been extracted,
gold cases for the twenty fingers and toes, completed this magnificent
decoration. Everything that with the lower classes of the same period
would have been in cardboard, or gilded paste, or enamelled clay, was
pure gold and fine stones with Zannehibou. The find, estimated by
weight alone, would be valuable, but what gave it inestimable worth
was the delicate and artistic workmanship of the greater number of the
objects. A few of them, like the sandals and the finger-cases, are only
worth the raw metal; the rest are the work of veritable artists. The
inscriptions of the legs, the winged Nouît, the Isis and the Nephthys,
the mask, are stamped, and although the mask and the two goddesses were
miserably crushed by the lid when the sarcophagus was closed, the
mould of hard stone which was used to fix them was so delicately cut
that the best-preserved pieces, the winged Nouît, for instance, may be
quoted as the highest degree of perfection that could be attained by
that process. The amulet in shape of a necklace is only a leaf cut with
the chisel, on which a chapter of the “Book of the Dead” is engraved
with the graving needle. The vulture amulet is a small, thin plaque, on
one side of which the stamped figure of a vulture with spread wings has
been stuck, while on the other the chapter of the “Book of the Dead”
has been engraved, as with the necklace. It is all of good workmanship,
but in the amulets hanging on the real necklace of the mummy the
goldsmith has surpassed himself.
[Illustration: NECKLACE AMULET. VULTURE AMULET.]
[Illustration: GOLD PALM-TREE. BOAT OF SOKARIS.]
[Illustration: RAM’S HEAD. GOLD HAWK. HAWK WITH HUMAN HEAD. HAWK WITH
RAM’S HEAD.]
[Illustration: VULTURE. ISIS WITH THE CHILD. CROUCHING NEÎTH.]
They are extraordinarily small, and in order to show the detail I
have had the illustrations made twice the actual size, a proceeding
that weakens the contours and the modelling. To realize their beauty
it is necessary to have held them in the hand. The palm-tree, which
has lost some leaves, is a unique object, more curious than elegant,
but the mystic boat which is beside it, unique also so far, is a
prodigy of delicate chiselling. It is the boat of the god Sokaris,
a boat of most archaic construction, and which was already used for
the accomplishment of the sacred rites under the Thinite Dynasty. The
belly is broad and round, the stern rather heavy, but the bows very
light and much decorated. It rests on a sort of side-ladder of beams
and ropes, which is itself built on to a sledge: it was pulled along
in the public ceremonies by means of a rope put through a hole made
in the curved front of the sledge. The decoration and the equipage
are most curious. On the bow is a gazelle’s head with straight horns
turned to the interior, and along the prow a row of divergent plates
of thin metal, the use of which is not very clear: it is as if the
carcase of the gazelle was opened and showed the ribs fixed on the
spine. At the back, to terminate the poop, there is a ram’s head with
curved horns. In the middle, on an oblong rectangular pedestal, a hawk
proudly perches; behind him are the four oar-rudders, two on each side;
in front of him six little hawks ascend in procession, two by two,
towards the gazelle’s head, led by a Nile fish placed edgeways on its
ventral fin. For the moment I will not attempt to explain the meaning
of these emblems, but what we can never grow tired of admiring is the
cleverness with which the craftsman has grouped these widely differing
elements into an harmonious whole, and especially the extraordinary
skill with which he worked his metal. His gazelle’s head, a mere
fraction of an inch in size, is of as proud a bearing as if it were
of natural size: everything is exact, intelligent; the curve of the
forehead, the flattening of the snout, the expression of the face, even
to the natural pout of the creature. Each of the six hawks preserves
its individual physiognomy, and the fish itself, reduced in size as it
is, has the exact shape of the big Nile perch, and not that of any sort
of fish.
Similar qualities are to be seen in the neighbouring pieces, in
the ram’s head, the ordinary hawk, the hawk with a human head, and
that with a ram’s head, and in the vulture. The seated Isis who
nurses her child on her lap and the crouching Neîth have their usual
characteristics of resignation and gentleness, and at the same time
the simplicity of line that lends so dignified an air to the smallest
Egyptian figures. It has all been chiselled out of the ingot itself,
and the detail cut with so minute a point that we ask where the artisan
could have obtained it.
[Illustration: MONKEYS WORSHIPPING THE EMBLEM OF OSIRIS.]
[Illustration: VULTURE WITH EXTENDED WINGS. HAWK WITH EXTENDED WINGS.]
[Illustration: THE SOUL (FRONT VIEW).]
[Illustration: THE SOUL (BACK VIEW).]
Tiny lions addorsed or couchant, tiny mystic eyes, tiny monkeys
worshipping the emblem of Osiris, tiny vultures, and tiny hawks
extending their wings, each piece claims careful examination, and would
by itself alone bring joy to the heart of a collector. The masterpiece
of the series is, however, the _soul_, the hawk with a human head,
enamelled body and wings, of which both back and front views are here
reproduced. The back follows the usual manner, small rods of bent gold,
curved, soldered on to a gold plaque and encrusted with thin plates
of felspar to simulate feathers; but on the other side, the body,
wings, and claws are modelled with the new purpose of reproducing the
natural form of the bird. The little human head is a marvel of somewhat
weak gracefulness: the eyes are well open, the mouth is smiling, the
nostrils actually palpitate, the ear is cut out and is hollowed broad
and high as is customary, and there is nothing, even to the wrinkles
of the neck and the roundness of a double chin, that does not clearly
stand out under the reflection of the gold. Here again, it is all
chiselled by a master-hand, with a sureness I have only found in the
hawk with a ram’s head in the Louvre,[90] with which this _soul of
Gizeh_ may be compared.
The circumstances of the discovery would not have informed us of the
date, if the style of the jewels had not done so. It is Saïte art
with its lightness, suppleness, somewhat arch charm, its almost too
high relief. A tendency is felt in the direction of the exaggerated
roundness of the Ptolemies, and, in fact, a note furnished by M.
Chassinat permits us to fix the time at which Zannehibou lived. He
belonged to the family of a certain Psammetichus, whose tomb is near
his, which an inscription in the Louvre found by Mariette in the
Serapeum places at the beginning of the fifth century, during the last
years of the reign of Darius I. If, as is likely, he was the grandson
of that Psammetichus, he died at the end of the fourth century, just
when the Saïte kings were resuming their superiority over the Persians,
at most, a hundred years before the Macedonian conquest. The goldsmiths
who fashioned his ornaments had probably seen Greek jewels, and had
perhaps already felt Hellenic influence: in that way the almost
Ptolemaic characteristics of the collection are explained. We know that
Saïte jewels are very rare; the Louvre alone possesses any that are
out of the ordinary run: the two necklace fastenings in form of a ship
bought by M. G. Bénédite a few years ago. The mummy of Zannehibou has
filled up the lacuna in the Gizeh series, and thanks to it, we now know
that the goldsmith’s art yielded in nothing to the other arts at the
time of the last Egyptian renaissance. Let us add that these jewels,
although found on a mummy and made for it, are not, as is too often the
case, jewels of the dead, pleasing in colour and design, but too weakly
mounted to stand the wear and tear if worn by a living person. Like the
jewels of Ramses II in the Louvre,[91] like those of Queen Ahhotpou at
Gizeh, they are real jewels, identical at all points, except perhaps in
the choice of subjects, with the jewels worn every day.
Such is the find that made a happy termination to our Saqqarah
campaign. All the pieces were covered with bitumen, and it is no slight
merit to M. Barsanti that he should have discovered them and separated
them one after the other. Several pits, equally untouched, await us at
the same spot under fifteen or eighteen yards of sand, and I have a
good hope that next year’s excavations may have as glad surprises for
us as those of this year.
XXIV
A BRONZE EGYPTIAN CAT BELONGING TO M. BARRÈRE[92]
This fine bronze cat was purchased at Cairo in 1884 by M. Barrère,
then agent and consul-general of France in Egypt. It belongs to the
innumerable family of cats which suddenly came forth from the ruins
of Tell Bastah in 1878, and were, in a few years, scattered over the
whole world. It measures 1 foot 4⅛ inches in height, and if not the
largest found at that time, it is at least bigger than the average.
But its size is not its chief merit: the Egyptians, who were the
first to tame the cat, studied it so closely that they expressed its
characteristics with extraordinary excellence. M. Barrère’s cat is
firmly seated on her hind-quarters, looking straight in front of her,
in the satisfied attitude of an animal which has done its duty and has
nothing to reproach itself with. The wooden pedestal to which it was
attached is wanting, but the metal tenon which fastened it is still
in its place, and the body is in a perfect state of preservation. It
was moulded in one piece round a core of sand that has disappeared,
then touched up with the burin and the file, and then polished; it has
not suffered from its long sojourn in the earth, and we can judge its
qualities or its defects as clearly as if it had been made yesterday.
It is a fine piece, of very sure design and careful execution. The
artist was not afraid to multiply the details, and he has simplified
the surfaces; but the force of the line, the robust and vigorous
character of the execution, make his work a piece of the first rank. It
is wonderful to note the intelligent skill with which he has expressed
the characteristics and physiognomy of the race. The haunch is broad
and round, the back supple, the neck slender, the head delicate, the
ear straight; it is the Egyptian cat in all its elegance, as we can
still see it among the fellahs, for crossing with foreign species has
not altered it.
[Illustration: BRONZE CAT OF THE SAÏTE PERIOD.
Barrère Collection.]
She is Bastît, a goddess of good family, the worship of whom flourished
especially in the east of the delta, and she is very often drawn or
named on the monuments, although they do not tell us enough of her
myths or her origin. She was allied or related to the Sun, and was now
said to be his sister or wife, now his daughter. She sometimes filled
a beneficent and gracious rôle, protecting men against contagious
diseases or evil spirits, keeping them off by the music of her sistrum:
she had also her hours of treacherous perversity, during which she
played with her victim as with a mouse, before finishing him off with
a blow of her claws. She dwelt by preference in the city that bore her
name, Poubastît, the Bubastis of classical writers. Her temple, at
which Cheops and Chephrên had worked while they were building their
pyramids, was rebuilt by the Pharaohs of the XXIInd Dynasty, enlarged
by those of the XXVIth; when Herodotus visited it in the middle of
the fifth century B.C., he considered it one of the most remarkable
he had seen in the parts of Egypt through which he had travelled. It
stood in the centre of the city, at the end of the market-place. It
was bordered by two canals, each 100 feet wide and shaded by trees;
they flowed without joining, one on the right, the other on the left
of the building, almost making it an artificial island. Travellers
before entering it looked over the enclosure, even into the exterior
court-yards, for Bubastis had undergone the fate of many of the large
cities of Egypt; in the course of ages the ground became raised in
such a way that the foundations of recent houses were on a higher
level than those of the temple. A big wall, decorated with pictures
like the outer wall of the temple of Edfou, enclosed the temenos. The
fêtes of Bastît attracted pilgrims from all parts of Egypt, as at the
present day those of Sidi Ahmed el-Bedaouî draw people to the modern
fair of Tantah. The people of each village crowded into large boats
to get there, men and women pell-mell, with the fixed intention of
enjoying themselves on the journey, a thing they never failed to do.
They accompanied the slow progress of navigation with endless songs,
love songs rather than sacred hymns, and there were always to be found
among them flute players and castanet players to support or keep time
to the voices. Whenever they passed by a town, they approached the bank
as near as they could without landing, and then, while the orchestra
redoubled its noise, the passengers threw volleys of insults and coarse
remarks at the women standing on the bank; they retorted, and when
they had exhausted words, they pulled up their petticoats and behaved
indecently by way of reply. Herodotus was told that 700,000 persons,
equal numbers of men and women, not reckoning little children, went
thus every year to Bubastis. Entry into the temple did not calm them,
far from it. They sacrificed a great number of victims with a sincere
and joyous piety; then they drank deeply from morning to evening, and
from evening to morning, as long as the festival lasted: more wine was
consumed in a few days than in all the rest of the year put together.
The greater number of the pilgrims, before returning home, left a
souvenir of their visit at the feet of Bastît. It was a votive stele
with a fine inscription, and a picture showing the donor worshipping
his goddess; or a statuette in blue or green pottery, or if they were
wealthy, in bronze, silver, or sometimes gold: the goddess would be
standing, seated, crouching with a woman’s body and a cat’s head, a
sistrum or an ægis in her hand. During the Greek period the figures
were in bronze or in painted and gilded wood surmounted by a cat’s
head in bronze. Many were life-size and modelled with elaborate art;
they had eyes of enamel, a gilded necklace round the neck, earrings,
and amulets on the forehead. It sometimes happened that when a cat
he particularly venerated died in his house, the pilgrim embalmed it
according to the rites: he took the mummy with him, and, arrived at
Bubastis, shut it up in one of the figures he offered. These various
objects, at first placed anywhere in the temple, would quickly have
filled it, if some remedy had not been found. They were piled up
provisionally at the end of one of the secondary chambers, then thrown
outside, and there encountered diverse fortunes. I do not think I am
calumniating the Egyptian priests in saying that it must have been a
great grief to them to part with so many precious gifts without trying
to derive some honest profit from them. The gold and silver figures did
not endure; they quickly went into the melting-pot, and few emerge from
the ruins, but the bronze and copper were so abundant that there would
have been little to gain in melting down the cats. So they sorted out
the heap of bronzes, and while they kept some, the finest, doubtless,
or those that bore inscriptions, they sold the rest to new generations
of pilgrims, who, in their turn, offered them in due form. However
frequently this was done, the influx was considerable, and they were
forced to rid themselves quickly of the pieces that had at first been
kept in reserve. They shut them up in cellars, or in pits dug expressly
for them, veritable _favissæ_ similar to those of classical times;[93]
they accumulated by thousands, large and small, in wood and in bronze,
some intact and fresh as when just made, others already out of shape,
rotten, oxidized and of no value. The places of concealment were soon
forgotten, and the stuff in them reposed there beyond the reach of men
until the day when the chances of excavation brought it to light.
One of them restored M. Barrère’s cat. It is not possible to determine
the period at which it was buried: the persons who found it were
seekers of nitreous manure, or dealers in antiquities who took good
care not to divulge the circumstances and the site of their discovery.
But judging from the roundness of certain forms and the aspect of
the bronze, we recognize the style of the second Saïte Period, and
the piece is to be attributed either to the Nectanebos, or the first
Ptolemies, in a general way to the fourth century B.C. or the beginning
of the third century B.C. It was the time when the worship of Bastît
and her subordinate forms, Pakhît, Maît, was most popular, the period
when, near Speos-Artemidos, the most extensive cemetery of cats in
Egypt was established. The execution is pure Egyptian, and in no way
betrays any Greek influence.
XXV
A FIND OF CATS IN EGYPT[94]
It was announced in the English newspapers, and the French followed
suit, that a ship had recently reached London and disembarked 180,000
mummies of Egyptian cats. For a long time manufacturers of different
nationalities have been accustomed to seek out the burying grounds of
animals throughout Egypt, and to export the bones to Europe, where
they are used as manure. A few years ago a necropolis full of monkeys
was sent to Germany to manure beet-root fields. It seems that the
cats of this year were discovered near Beni-Hassan; they were piled
up at hazard in a sort of cavern, into which a fellah in search of
antiquities was the first to penetrate. In fact, at some distance to
the south of the hypogeums of Beni-Hassan, in the place called by
geographers Speos-Artemidos, is a chapel hollowed out in the rock, and
consecrated by the kings of the XVIIIth and XIXth Dynasties to a local
goddess, a woman’s body with a cat’s or lion’s head, called Pakhît.
The depôt recently exploited was found there, and the cats which
reposed in it must have lived in the vicinity, under the protection
of their cousin, the goddess. Cemeteries of the same kind existed
wherever a divinity of a feline type was worshipped, lion, tiger,
or cat. The most celebrated was at Bubastis, in the delta, where the
seekers of antiquities cleared away the rubbish about thirty-seven
years ago.[95] The mummies of cats were buried there in _favissæ_,
deep pits, some merely wrapped in swathings, others enclosed in little
coffins reproducing the image of the animal. Some of these coffins
are entirely of wood covered with white stucco, gilded, painted in
bright colours; some are in bronze, others have the body in wood and
the head in bronze, with gold rings in their ears and encrustations of
gold on the forehead and in the eyes. Statuettes of cats of different
sizes, portraits of the goddess Bastît with a cat’s head, or of the god
Nofirtoumou, are mingled with the mummies. Thence come the thousands of
bronze cats, big and little, with which all the antiquaries of Europe
and Cairo were so abundantly provided from 1876 to 1888. The important
cat illustrated here, and who lives now in one of the glass cases in
the “Salle divine” of the Louvre, is a perfect type of the species,
long, slender in the back, broad in the hind-quarters, with a delicate,
well-set head, rings in the ears, a necklace round the neck, and a
little scarab on the top of the head; the artist who modelled it has
rendered excellently and truthfully the supple bearing and the bold
physiognomy of his original.
[Illustration: BRONZE CAT.
The Louvre.]
The cats represented on the monuments, or the mummies of which are
found in Egypt, were not of the same race as our domestic cat. Scholars
have studied them and are unanimous--Virchow, too, recently--in
recognizing them as the _Felis maniculata_ and the _Felis chaus_. Egypt
had tamed a few individual ones, but had not domesticated the whole
species. They are sometimes to be seen on the bas-reliefs solemnly
seated near their masters. It is commonly asserted that they were
used for hunting birds in the marshes, and Wilkinson quotes in support
a fairly large number of mural paintings where they stalk through the
reeds, routing out little birds. I confess that this interpretation
does not seem to me to be correct. Where others claim to recognize
animals ready for the chase and acting on behalf of man, I only see
animals, tame or not, on marauding bent and scouring the bushes for
their own purposes; just as our domesticated cat chases the sparrows in
our gardens and destroys the nests in our parks without any advantage
to his master. Egyptian artists, very acute observers of what was going
on around them, reproduced their cats’ expeditions, as they noted other
picturesque details of the life of nature.
If we examined the 180,000 cats--neither more nor less--we should
probably come upon a fairly large proportion of ichneumons. In Egypt
the ichneumon and the cat were always associated; wherever there are
mummies of cats it may be safely assumed that mummies of ichneumons are
not far off. Cats or ichneumons, I hope the whole of them will not be
used to manure the ground, but that some fine specimens may be chosen
for the museums of antiquities and of natural history: in sparing a
few hundreds, agriculture will not lose much, and science will gain
considerably. The origin of our tom-cat has long been under discussion;
some refer it to Egypt, others to Europe. It would be a pity not to
profit by such an invasion of Egyptian cats, and to try to obtain a
definite solution of the question.
FOOTNOTES
[1] From the _Journal des Savants_, 1908, pp. 1–17.
[2] F.W. von Bissing, “Denkmäler Ægyptischer Skulptur.” Text, 4to;
portfolio of plates, fol.; Bruckmann, Munich, 1906–8.
[3] It may also be asked if the stele of the King-Serpent is an
original or a restoration of the time of Setouî I.
[4] Bissing, II. _Plate with the name of King Athotis_, note 6.
[5] I even noted the existence of one of these tails in wood in the
Marseilles Museum (_Catalogue_, p. 92, No. 279).
[6] _Musée Egyptien_, vol. ii., Pl. IX-X and pp. 25–30.
[7] Ibid., vol. ii., Pl. XV, pp. 41–45.
[8] Maspero, _Guide to the Cairo Museum_, 1906, pp. 156–7, No. 550.
[9] _Revue de l’Art Ancien et Moderne_, 1906, vol. x., pp. 241–52,
337–48; cf. Chap. X. of the present volume.
[10] _Musée Egyptien_, vol. ii., pp. 90–2.
[11] From the _Revue de l’Art ancien et moderne_, 1912, vol. xxxi., pp.
241–54.
[12] It is mentioned for the first time in Emmanuel de Rougé’s
_Catalogue_, 1855, under No. 6; it is placed on the mantelpiece in the
“Salle civile.”
[13] See good examples in Mariette, “Karnak,” Pl. VIII.
[14] This is no longer true since the discovery of the _favissa_ at
Karnak. The Cairo Museum possesses some hundreds of statues of private
individuals from the Theban temple of Amon (1912).
[15] Mariette, “Sur les tombes de l’Ancien Empire qu’on trouve à
Saqqarah,” 1912, pp. 8–9.
[16] On this theory see Lepage-Renouf, “On the True Sense of an
important Egyptian Word,” in the _Transactions of the Society of
Biblical Archæology_, vol. iv., pp. 494–508, and Maspero, “Mémoires
du Congrès des Orientalistes de Lyon,” vol. i., and _Bulletin de
l’Association scientifique de France_ (1878), No. 594, pp. 373–84.
[17] One of the Egyptian festivals of the dead.
[18] For complete translation of the contract see the _Transactions of
the Society of Biblical Archæology_, vol. vii., pp. 1–9.
[19] The Skhemka group was catalogued for the first time by E. de
Rougé, “Notice sommaire des Monuments égyptiens,” 1855, pp. 50–51,
under the number S. 102. The other two statues of the same person
possessed by the Museum are both entered under the number S.103. One is
in granite, the other in painted limestone.
[20] There are exceptions only in the middle of the XVIIIth Dynasty,
when men and women, and especially women, are painted light pink or
flesh colour.
[21] The pretty painted bas-relief of the tomb of Seti I in the Louvre
(E. de Rougé, “Notice des principaux monuments,” p. 35, B. 7) shows in
large the arrangement of the glass beads on the stuff.
[22] Cf., _e.g._, Lepsius, “Denkmäler,” ii., 47_b_, 74_e_, where the
woman crouching in front of her husband puts her arm round his leg.
[23] Here are some references to plates in Lepsius where the husband
and wife are represented side by side in different positions. The woman
of low stature crouches behind her seated husband (“Denkmäler,” ii.,
71_b_); the wife and husband, both of heroic stature, are seated on
the same armchair, and the wife puts her right arm round her husband’s
neck (“Denkmäler,” ii., 10_b_, 24, 25_b_, 41_b_, 42_a_-_b_, 75_a_,
etc.); the wife of low stature stands in front of her husband, who is
of heroic stature (“Denkmäler,” ii., 38_b_); she stands behind him and
puts her arm round his left arm (“Denkmäler,” ii., 27, 33_a_), or she
puts her arm round his waist (“Denkmäler,” ii., 38_a_); and lastly, the
husband and wife, of the same stature, are standing, the wife behind
her husband and putting her arm round his neck (“Denkmäler,” ii., 13,
20–1, 29_b_, 32, 34_b_, 40_b_, 43_b_, 46, 58_a_, 59_b_), or separated
from him (“Denkmäler,” ii., 73, etc.).
[24] Thus in Lepsius (“Denkmäler,” ii., 74_e_), where the noble
Senotmhît, surnamed Mihi, is seated, of heroic stature, while his wife,
Khontkaous, is represented crouching and of low stature, although she
is a legitimate daughter of the king. In another part of the tomb
(Lepsius, “Denkmäler,” ii., 73) the same persons are represented
standing side by side and of heroic stature, while their children are
of ordinary stature.
[25] See the preceding chapter, pp. 55–59.
[26] See Chapter III, p. 51.
[27] We know now (1912) that the figures described by Mariette as
mourners are cooks, who held the spit in one hand and with the other
protected their faces from the heat of the brazier where the chickens
were roasting.
[28] In examining the eye of the Cheîkh-el-Beled closely, I found that
there was no silver nail in it, but that the luminous spangle was
produced by a scrap of polished ebony placed under the crystal; it
should be the same with the eyes of the Crouching Scribe.
[29] Cf. pp. 55–59.
[30] This article was published in two slightly different forms in the
_Gazette des Beaux-Arts_, 3rd period, 1893, vol. ix., pp. 265–70, and
in the _Monuments Piot_, 1894, vol. i., pp. 1–6: I have combined them
for this volume.
[31] The statue is described in the “Visitor’s Guide to the Cairo
Museum,” 2nd edition, 1912, p. 58, No. 142.
[32] Maspero, “Visitor’s Guide,” 2nd edition, 1912, pp. 57–8, No. 141.
[33] Cf. p. 61.
[34] Cf. what has already been said regarding statues of private
individuals erected by the favour of the Pharaoh, p. 40.
[35] Maspero, “Visitor’s Guide to the Boulaq Museum,” p. 28, and now
“Visitor’s Guide to the Cairo Museum,” 2nd edition, 1912, p. 73, No.
227.
[36] The expression is borrowed from a letter of the _Papyrus
Anastasis_, No. 3. Its position in the Egyptian context leads me to
believe that it was an often-quoted proverb. The idea is repeated in
different forms in the scribes’ correspondence: “Work, or you will
be beaten.” “When the scribe reaches the age of manhood, his back is
broken by the blows he has received.”
[37] Mariette, “Notice des principaux monuments du Musée de Boulaq,”
6th edition, 1876, p. 235, No. 769: “Memphis. Saqqarah--limestone II, 1
foot 2 inches--kneeling figure. His hands crossed on his legs. His eyes
are of mosaic work and formed of several stones curiously combined.”
The statue of the kneeling scribe figures in a group in Plate XX of
Mariette’s work, “Album du Musée de Boulaq,” containing 40 plates,
photographed by MM. Délié and Béchard, with explanatory text edited by
Auguste Mariette-Bey. Cairo, Mourès et Cie, 1871, fol.
[38] Mariette, “Notice des principaux monuments du Musée de Boulaq,”
6th edition, 1876, p. 216, No. 582. The Boulaq Museum possesses a
second statue of the same person (_ibid._, p. 93, No. 28), but of a
less fine execution than the statue No. 582. Cf. what is said of the
two statues on pp. 70–73 of this volume.
[39] Mariette, “Notice,” p. 217: “The sum of the qualities, and study
of the inscriptions on the base of the monument, leave no doubt as
to the epoch to which it belongs. Rânofir evidently lived under the
Ancient Empire. His titles bring him near the Vth Dynasty.” The study
of the inscriptions leads me to be more certain than Mariette was.
Rânofir undoubtedly lived at the end of the Vth Dynasty.
[40] See pp. 60–65.
[41] He is a cook, as I mentioned on p. 61, note 27.
[42] See p. 51.
[43] See p. 61.
[44] See the curious study of Dr. Parrot, “Sur l’origine d’une des
formes du dieu Phtah,” in the “Recueil de travaux relatifs à la
philologie et à l’archéologie égyptiennes et assyriennes,” vol. ii.,
pp. 129–33.
[45] Published in the _Revue de l’Art ancien et moderne_, 1906, vol.
xx., pp. 247–52, 337–48.
[46] See pp. 50–51.
[47] See, _e.g._, the stelæ described or referred to in Maspero, “Guide
to the Cairo Museum,” 1903, pp. 73–5, 94–5, 96, etc.
[48] Already published in the _Musée Egyptien_, vol. ii., Pl. IX-X, pp.
25–30.
[49] The head was reproduced by Rougé-Banville, “Album photographique,”
Nos. 111–12; cf. Mariette, “Monuments divers,” Pl. XXI, _a_, _b_, _c_,
and p. 299; the whole is reproduced in the _Musée Egyptien_, vol. ii.,
Pl. XIII, and pp. 34–5.
[50] See article on this group by Legrain in the _Musée Egyptien_, vol.
ii., pp. 1–14 and Pl. I-IV.
[51] The head of the Pharaoh, which was stolen at the moment of
discovery, has been found since this article appeared, and purchased by
the Cairo Museum, 1912.
[52] Published in the _Revue de l’Art ancien et moderne_, 1907, vol.
xxii., pp. 5–18.
[53] She is noted in the “Livre d’entrée” under No. 38575 and the
chapel under No. 38576.
[54] Naville, “Das Thebanische Todtenbuch,” vol. i., Pl. CCXXII.
[55] It comes from Tell Tmai, and is entered in the “Livre d’entrée”
under No. 38930, and in the “Guide to the Museum,” 3rd English edition,
under No. 461, p. 164.
[56] No. 38932 in the “Livre d’entrée”; cf. “Notice des principaux
monuments du Musée de Gizeh,” 1893, p. 86, and No. 683 of Borchardt’s
unpublished catalogue. The monument comes from Saqqarah.
[57] “Guide to the Cairo Museum,” 3rd edition, pp. 331–33, No. 1020;
“Livre d’entrée,” No. 38927.
[58] “Guide to the Cairo Museum,” 3rd edition, p. 330, Nos. 1018, 1019;
“Livre d’entrée,” Nos. 38928, 38929.
[59] See the _Revue_, 1906, vol. xx., pp. 241–52, and pp. 337–46; and
pp. 90–105 of the present volume.
[60] It was catalogued by Champollion in his “Notice descriptive des
monuments égyptiens du Musée Charles X,” Paris, 1827, p. 55, No. 11.
[61] Published in the _Revue de l’Art ancien et moderne_, 1910, vol.
xxviii., pp. 241–52.
[62] See pp. 120–125.
[63] Mariette, “Notice des principaux monuments du Musée de Boulaq,”
6th edition, 1876, p. 300, No. 100 C.
[64] E. de Rougé, “Notice sommaire des monuments égyptiens,” 3rd
edition, 1864, p. 34, A. 21. The British Museum possesses a replica of
this statue.
[65] Mariette, “Notice,” 1st edition, 1864, p. 184, No. 17; and 6th
edition, 1876, p. 92, No. 22.
[66] Mariette, “Notice,” 6th edition, p. 221, Nos. 638–48; Maspero,
“Guide du Visiteur au Musée de Boulaq,” 1883, pp. 100–3.
[67] Mariette, “Notice,” 6th edition, p. 221, Nos. 649–51; Maspero,
“Guide,” p. 101.
[68] Mariette, “Notice,” 6th edition, p. 221, Nos. 623–37.
[69] Mariette, “Notice,” 6th edition, pp. 212–13, No. 578; Maspero,
“Guide,” p. 75, No. 396.
[70] Mariette, “Notice,” 6th edition, p. 239, No. 792.
[71] Maspero, “Letter to M. Gustave d’Eichtal on the circumstances
of the history of Egypt which favoured the exodus of the Hebrew
nation,” in the _Comptes Rendus de l’Académie des Inscriptions et
Belles-Lettres_, 1873, pp. 37–8.
[72] Published in _La Nature_, 1892, vol. lix., pp. 161–3.
[73] Major Arthur Bagnold published an account of them, with three
drawings by Wallis and a few sketches, “An account of the manner in
which two Colossal Statues of Rameses II at Memphis were raised,” in
the _Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archæology_, vol. x., p.
452 _et seq._
[74] I have related many examples of this belief in spirits inhabiting
the ancient monuments in “Egypt: Ancient Sites and Modern Scenes,”
1910, chap. xv., p. 155. I have collected many more, and hope one day
to have an opportunity of publishing them.
[75] Published in _La Nature_, 1894, vol. lxiii., pp. 230–4.
[76] Extract from the _Revue de l’Art ancien et moderne_, 1908, vol.
xxiii., pp. 401–12, and vol. xxiv., pp. 29–38.
[77] Champollion, “Notice descriptive des monuments égyptiens du Musée
Charles X,” 1827, 8vo, describes the object as follows: “85. _Hard
wood_. A woman named Naï, standing, dressed in a long fringed tunic,
hair plaited. The statuette was dedicated by her brother, Phtah-Maï,
auditor of justice,” pp. 68–9. Now the little figure is numbered 37; it
is in case A of the “Salle civile” (first shelf).
[78] Cf. E. de Rougé, “Notice des principaux monuments,” p. 82.
[79] SOKARI (Σώχαρις of the fragment of Cratinus the Younger,
“Fragm. Comicor. græcorum,” edition Didot) was the god of the dead
at Memphis, as Osiris was at Abydos; so they were soon identified
one with the other, Sokar-Osiri, and with Phtah, _Phtah-Sokari_,
_Phtah-Sokar_-Osiri. Here the scribe, who first took the three sacred
names as belonging to one same god whom he qualified as Prince of
Eternity in the singular, later regarded them as belonging to three
different gods, and used the plural pronoun, SE, variant of SEN: “to
whom THEY give” instead of “to whom HE gives.”
[80] The figure to which it was fastened is reproduced in Leemans,
“Egyptian Monuments in the Museum of Antiquities of Holland at Leyden,”
Part I, Pl. XXIV; cf. Chabas, “Notice sommaire des papyrus égyptiens,”
p. 19.
[81] The facsimile of the text is in Leemans, “Monuments,” Part II, Pl.
CLXXXIII-CLXXXIV, and is translated and annotated in Maspero, “Etudes
égyptiennes,” vol. i., pp. 145–59.
[82] Extract from the _Revue de l’art ancien et moderne_, 1905, vol.
xvii, p. 403.
[83] See the Chapter on the little lady Touî, pp. 183–189.
[84] Published in _La Nature_, 1895, vol. lii., pp. 211–14.
[85] “The Adventure of Satni-Khamois with the Mummies,” in G. Maspero,
“Les contes populaires de l’Egypte ancienne,” 4th edition, p. 146.
[86] See pp. 172–174.
[87] See Chapter XVIII, pp. 172–177.
[88] _Revue archéologique_, April, 1861, vol. iii., 2nd series.
[89] Printed in the _Revue de l’Art ancien et moderne_, 1900, vol.
viii., p. 353.
[90] See p. 150.
[91] See Chapter XVI., p. 145.
[92] Published in the _Revue de l’Art ancien et moderne_, 1902, vol.
xi., p. 377.
[93] See Chapter X.
[94] Published in _La Nature_, 1890, vol. xxxv., pp. 273–4.
[95] See pp. 212–213.
INDEX
A
Abousîr-el-Malak, excavations of, 29
Abydos, 30, 31, 37;
Memnonium of, 95, 134;
ruins of, 94
Adoni (Adonaï), 122
Ahhotpou I, 145, 146, 158
Ahhotpou, Queen, 152, 158, 206
Ahmôsis I, 138
Aî, 138;
portrait of, 98
Aî, son of Hapi, 197, 198
Alexandria, bas-reliefs of, 33
Amenemhaît III, 26, 32;
sphinx of, 22, 23;
statue of, 22, 28, 37
Amenertaîous, 103
Amenhotpou, 138
Amenmeses, 138
Amenôphis II, 122
Amenôphis III, 122, 124, 174
Amenôphis IV, 120, 122, 123, 124, 125, 131
Amenôphis, statue of, 64
Amenôthes I, 91
Amenôthes II, 109, 112, 113, 117, 118, 134
Amenôthes IV, 31
Amenôthes, statue of, 22, 28
Amon, 81, 101, 102, 104, 121, 122, 124, 125, 135, 183, 184, 185;
priests of, 92;
temple of, 90, 97, 137
Amon of Harmhabi, 98
Amonrâ, 107, 123
Amonrâ, ark of, 136
Anderson, 142
_Ankhari_, _the lady_, 175
Ankhasnofiriabrê en Hathor, 103
Ankhnas, 103
Antouf kings, the, 153
Anubis, temple of, 53
Apis, 146, 149;
tomb of, 79, 145
Apouî, tomb of, 21
Apries, 143
Armaïs, 139
Asia Minor, 169, 191
Assiout, 31
Assyria, 169
Ati, 56, 58, 59
Aton (Amon), 121, 122, 123, 124, 125
Atonian Dynasty, fall of the, 31
B
Bagnold, Major Arthur, 142, 143
Baraize, M., 108
Barrère, M., 208, 212
Barsanti, M. Alexandre, 201, 206
Bastît, the goddess, 184, 209, 212, 213, 215;
her festival at Bubastis, 210, 211
Baÿ, Dr., 133
Bedrecheîn, 141
Bénédite, M., 206
Beni-Hassan, 30, 31, 87, 214
Berbers, the, 129
Bercheh, 31
Berlin Museum, 152;
_Scribe_ of the, 20, 21
Bibân-el-Molouk, 111
Bissing, F.W. von, 17, 18, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 34, 35
Bocchoris, 33
“Book of the Dead,” 113, 114, 203
Borchardt, 24, 25
Boulaq Museum, 63, 70, 71, 81, 85, 86, 135, 137, 138, 145, 146
British Museum, 153
Bruckmann, 17, 23
Bubastis, 124, 154, 157, 161, 190, 210, 211, 215
C
Cairo, 39, 108, 154, 179, 208, 215
Cairo Museum, the, 21, 22, 29, 32, 33, 39, 44, 46, 47, 93, 96, 98,
108, 114, 115, 116, 128, 129, 131, 134, 157;
_Scribe_ of the, 20
Carter, 92
Caviglia, 141
Chaldæa, 169, 171
Champollion, 121, 172, 186
Chassinat, M., 206
Cheîkh-Abd-el-Gournah, 115, 178, 179
Cheîkh el-Beled, statue of the, 21, 46, 48, 88
Cheîkh-Saîd, 31
Cheops, 30, 209;
statuette of, 37, 38
Chephrên, 30, 44, 46, 47, 48, 137, 209;
statuette of, 37, 38
Chephrên, statues of the, 21, 24, 37
Coptos, 22
Cow, the, of Deîr-el-Baharî, 18, 106, 117
Crete, 169
Crouching Scribe, the, 18, 48, 49, 60, 61, 63, 64, 65, 84, 88
D
Dahchour, 145, 150, 152, 158
Darius, 140, 206
Davis, Theodore, 126
Decauville, 90
Denderah, 31, 123
Deîr-el-Baharî, 92, 108, 110, 115;
_favissa_ of, 98;
porticoes of, 95
Dévéria, 196
Dog, nome of the, 41
_Double_, the, 51, 52, 53, 54, 111, 115, 143, 193, 198
E
Ebers, 17
Edfou, temple of, 210
Edgar, Mr., 154, 155
Egypt, financial system of ancient, 197, 198
Egyptian cats, 208, 209, 214, 215, 216
Egyptian jewellery, 145–153, 201–207
Egyptian Scribes, 61, 62, 63, 67, 68, 69, 74, 75, 76, 77, 199, 200
Egyptian statuary, 17–35
El-Amarna, bas-reliefs of, 131;
necropolis of, 31, 125, 133;
sculptors of, 130;
statues of, 100
El-Tell, tombs of, 31
Es-Sayed Eîd, 155
Ethiopia, 95, 102, 124, 139
Ethiopian pyramids, the, 153
Euphrates, 170
Europe, 215, 216
F
Fayoum, the, 26, 29, 94, 137
Ferlini, 153
G
Garwood, 142
Gebeleîn, 22, 179, 214
Germany, 214
Gizeh, 39, 95
Gizeh Museum, 21, 24, 66, 68, 70, 152, 206
Gizeh, necropolis of, 21, 29
Gold and silver vases and cups, 160–8
Golenischeff, 32
Gournah, 138
Gournah, temple of, 95, 134
Grébaut, 37
Greece, 119
H
Hachopsouîtou, Queen, 97, 111, 112, 119
Hakori, 196
Hapi-T’aufi, Prince, 53
Harmais, statues of the, 22
Harmhâbi, 100, 130, 133, 135, 138, 139
Hathor, the goddess, 41, 42, 109, 110, 111, 112, 114, 115, 117, 118, 187
Heliopolis, 123
Hellenes, the, 33
Heracleopolis, 30, 94
Hermopolis, 28, 31, 105
Herodotus, 32, 124, 140, 210, 211
Hor, the scribe, 84
Horus, 188
Horus Qa-âou, stele of the, 19
Hrihor, 124
Hyksôs king, portrait of a, 22
I
Icelanders and ghosts, 176
Iouaa, 122
Isis, 97, 116, 147, 148, 202, 204
Isis, statue of, 96
K
Karnak, 31, 37, 105, 138, 139;
_favissa_ of, 22, 26, 90, 94, 95, 96;
modern village of, 90;
temple of, 135
Khâbokhni, 188
Khâmoîsît, high priest of Phtah, 145, 146
Khâsakhmouî, the Pharaoh, 19, 20
Khitas, the, 151
Khnoum, 135
Khnoumhotpou, the dwarf, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89
Khonsou, 98, 99
Khounaton, 125, 138
Khouniatonou, 31, 100, 126, 130, 133
Kings, Valley of the, 126
_King-Serpent_, stele of the, 19
Knom, 56, 58
L
Leghorn, 172
Legrain, M., 22, 26, 91, 94, 95, 96, 98, 100, 105
Lepsius, 57
Leyden, 20
Leyden Museum, 153, 175
Leyden papyrus, the, 177
Libyan Desert, the, 112
Libyan Mountains, the, 113
Longpérier, M. de, 49
Louis XIV, peruke of time of, 180
Louvre, the, 18, 21, 22, 49, 54, 55, 58, 60, 64, 67, 68, 70, 79, 80,
84, 125, 130, 134, 136, 145, 146, 152, 153, 172, 178, 183,
185, 186, 195, 200, 205, 206, 215
Louxor, 31, 107
M
Macedonians, the, 102
Madagascar, queens of, 104
Maît, 213
Mankahorou, statuette of, 37
Mantimehê, 103, 104
Mariette, 22, 24, 32, 38, 55, 60, 62, 66, 79, 94, 98, 100, 103, 116,
121, 136, 139, 145, 150, 151, 196, 206
Matonou (Amten), statue of, at Berlin, 29
Medinet Habou, 128
Mediterranean, the, 171, 194
Meîdoum, 46, 48, 62, 63;
excavations of, 29, 30
Memphian Empire, the, 20
Memphis, 25, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 37, 55, 72, 78, 79, 88, 123, 137, 140
Menephtah, 136, 138
Menna, 182
Menzaleh, Lake, 32
Minieh, prince of, 85, 87
Mînou, the god, 22
Mît-Fares, 22
Mît-Rahineh, 24, 37, 39
Mohammed-Ali, 142
Mohammed Effendi Chabân, 154
Mond, Mr., 178
Montouhotpou, 111
Montouhotpou, statue of, 26
Montouhotpou I, temple of, 22, 106
Montouhotpou III, statue of, 22
Montouhotpou V, tomb of, 92
_Monuments de l’Art Antique_, 34
Morgan, M. de, 66, 73, 145
Moursi Hassaneîn, 155
Munich, 20, 21
_Musée Egyptien_, the, 26, 34
Mycerinus, statues of, 36, 37, 38, 39, 41, 43, 44, 46, 47, 48
N
Nafêrourîya, 97
Naî, the lady, 173, 174, 177, 186
Naousirrîya, statuette of, 37
Napata, 31
Naples Museum, the, 20
_Nâr_-mer, _palette_ of, 19
Nasi, statue of, 21
Naville, 92, 106, 107, 111, 118
Nectanebo I, 116
Nectanebo II, 33
Neîth, 204;
temple of, 167, 169
Nephthys, 147, 148, 202
Nile, the, 27, 112, 170;
valley of the, 28
Nofirtoumou, the god, 215
Nofrihotpou, funeral of, 88
Nofrît, statue of, 22
Nonît, the goddess, 202
Nsiphtah, 103
Nubia, 31
O
Omm-el-Gaâb, tombs of, 29
Osiris, 116, 123, 147, 148, 205
Osorkon II, statuette of, 103
_Ostraca_, 98
Ounas, 201
Ousimares (Osymandyas), 158
_Ousirmârî_, 149
Oxyrrhinchus, 41
P
Pakhît, 213, 214
Pehournowri, statuette of, 79, 84
Perfume ladles described, 190–3
Persian Conquest, the, 91
Persians, the, 104
Petesomtous, 116
Petrie, Flinders, 26, 47, 129, 131
Phœnicia, 193
Phœnicians, the, 171
Phtah, 87, 95, 141, 145, 173;
temple of, 37, 140
Phtah-Maî, 173, 174
Pioupi, bronze statue of, 21
Poubastît (Bubastis), 209
Psammetichus, 116, 117, 206
Psammetichus I, 33, 103
Psarou, 146, 147
Pyramids, plain of the, 29
Q
Qodshou, battle of, 151
R
Râ, the solar god, 123, 124
Rahotpou, the scribe, 84;
tomb of, 62
Ramessides, the, 91, 103, 124
Ramke, the scribe, 84
Ramses, 130;
statues of the, 22
Ramses I, 138
Ramses II, 30, 136, 137, 138, 140, 141, 142, 144, 145, 148, 151, 158,
159, 160, 170, 206;
statues of, 26, 101, 135
Ramses III, 102
Ramses VI, 101, 102
Ramses-Nakhouîti, 101
Rânofir, 44, 46, 88;
statue of, 70, 71, 72, 77, 78
_Readers_, statue of the, at Cairo, 21
Reisner, 39, 44
Rome, 119
Rougé, M. de, 196
Roxelane, 127
S
Sabou, tomb of, 66
Saîd, the, 31, 113
St. Sebastian, paintings of, 83, 84
Saïs, 105
Saïte jewels, 201
Saladin, 39
Salt Collection, the, 120, 194
Sân, 196
Sânakht, 138
Sanmaout, statue of, 96, 97
Sanouosrît I, statue of, 22, 46;
bas-relief of, 22, 37;
(Ousirtasen), 94, 95
Sanouosrît III, 94;
statue of, 46
Sapouî (Sepa), statue of, in the Louvre, 21, 29, 64
Saqqarah, necropolises of, 21, 29, 49, 55, 63, 66, 76, 85, 88, 95;
village of, 72
Sculpture in wood, 172–4, 183–9
Scythians, the, 140
Serapeum, the, 55, 60, 64, 79, 145, 146, 148, 150, 153, 206
_Serdâb_, the, 51, 60, 62
“Service des Antiquités,” the, 143, 155, 178
Sesostris, 140
Setinakht, 138
Setouî I, 30, 37, 95, 121, 130, 138;
hypogeum of, 134;
statue of, 135
Setouî II, 138, 160
Shepherd Kings, the, 22, 32;
portraits of, 196
Sheshonq, 194
Sidi Ahmed el-Bedaouî, 210
Simon, Herr, of Berlin, 129
Sinai, 129
Siout, 54
Siphtah, 160
Siphtah Menephtah, 138
Sistrum, nome of the, 41
Skhemka, the scribe, 55, 56, 58, 59, 60, 64, 65, 84
Sokaris, boat of the god, 203
Sovkemsaouf, 22
Sovkhotpou, the king, 22, 84
Speos-Artemidos, cemetery of cats at, 213, 214
Sphinxes, the so-called Hyksôs, 28, 32
Stephenson, General, 142
Sycomore, Canton of the, 41
Syria, 95, 124, 139, 164, 171
T
Taharkou, 103
Taharqa, 196
Taîa, 98, 99, 121, 122, 134
Tamaî, singing-girl of Neîth, 167, 169
Tanis, 32, 102, 105, 137;
sphinxes of, 28
Tantah, fair of, 210
Taouasrît, 170
Tboubouî, 184
Tell Bastah, ruins of, 208
Tell-el-Khanzir, 142
Thebaïd, the, 102
Theban Empire, the, 21, 22, 28, 32
Thebes, 28, 30, 31, 88, 92, 93, 95, 105, 120, 123, 124, 125, 128, 131,
137, 145, 181, 183, 187
Thebes, government of, 103, 104
Thinis, 30
Thinis-Abydos, 29
Thinites, the, 20, 29
Thot, city of, 31
Thoutmôsis, 138
Thoutmôsis, statue of, 22
Thoutmôsis III, 91, 94, 96, 97, 98, 107, 109, 112, 121, 134
Thoutmôsis IV, 124
Ti, 88;
statue of, 70
Tîyi, 126, 127, 128, 129
Tîyi, wife of Amenôthes III, 100
Touaa, 122
Touî, the lady, 178, 183, 184, 185, 186, 189
Toumoumtaouneb, the royal cupbearer, 164
Tourah, limestone of, 49, 179
Toutânkhamânou, 133, 134, 138
Toutânoukhamanou, 98, 99, 100
Turin Museum, 64, 183, 186, 189
Turin papyrus, the, 197
U
Upper Egypt, 41
V
Vassalli, 47
Vienna Museum, 22
Virchow, 215
W
Wiedemann, 26
Wilkinson, 216
Z
Zagazig, 154, 155, 156, 165, 171
Zannehibou, 201, 202, 206
The Gresham Press, UNWIN BROTHERS, LIMITED WOKING AND LONDON.
* * * * * *
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