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.
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.
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.
KING KHOUNIATONOU.
Alabaster Canopic head found at Thebes.
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.
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.
KING KHOUNIATONOU.
Cairo Museum.
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.
QUEEN TÎYI (FULL FACE).
Cairo Museum.
QUEEN TÎYI (PROFILE).
Cairo Museum.
PRINCESS OF THE FAMILY OF TÎYI (PROFILE).
Painted wood. Berlin, collection of M. James Simon.
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.
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.
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.
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.
THE HALF-BURIED COLOSSUS OF RAMSES II.
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.
EGYPTIAN JEWELLERY OF THE XIXTH DYNASTY.
The Louvre.
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.
PECTORAL OF RAMSES II.
The Louvre.
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.