VI.
In the single edition of his great work which appeared during his own lifetime, Winckelmann inserted but a small number of illustrations, and those for ornament rather than for instruction. One of his translators, M. Huber, tells us that their execution gave great dissatisfaction to the author.[35] In our days, on the other hand, those who undertake a work of this kind make use of the great progress which has taken place in engraving and typography, to insert numerous figures in their text, to which they offer an indispensable and animated commentary. Without their help many descriptions and observations might remain unnecessarily obscure and doubtful. When forms are to be defined and compared, mere words, in whatever language spoken or written, can never suffice.
With well chosen phrases we may awake the recollections of others, and give renewed life to any impression which they may have received from some striking natural phenomenon or some fine work of art. Their imaginations will call up for a moment some landscape, picture, or statue which has formerly charmed them. But if we wish to explain the complicated plan of some great building, its design and its proportions, the slightest sketch will be of more use than the longest and most minute descriptions. So it will, if we wish to make clear the characteristics which distinguish one style from another, the Assyrian from the Egyptian, the archaic Greek style from that of the Phidian epoch or of the decadence, an Ionic column from the Erechtheum from one of the same order treated by a Roman architect. Between the contour of a figure from a Memphite bas-relief and that of one from Nineveh, what difference is there? A tenth of an inch more or less, a slight difference in the sweep of a line in order to mark more strongly the junction of the thigh and the knee. If we placed three nude torsos side by side, one of the sixth century, another of the fifth century, and the third of the time of Hadrian, a practised eye would at once assign its true date to each, in accordance with the manner in which the skeleton was indicated under the flesh, and the muscles drawn over it and attached to it. Supposing that the same model had served all three artists, it would show in the one case a lively sentiment of form combined with some dryness and rigidity; in another a freer, larger, and more subtle treatment, and in the third a want of vigour and firmness: but it would be difficult to give by words a clear idea of what caused the difference. Between the contour which satisfies us and that which does not there is hardly the difference of a hair; by leaning a little harder with the chisel the aspect of the one surface might have been made identical with the other. By its double astragali, by the fine chiselling of its gorgerin, by the elegant curve which unites the two volutes, and by the general delicacy of its ornament, a capital from the Erechtheum is distinguished above a Roman Ionic capital; it is at once finer in design and richer in ornamentation: by the side of it a capital from the theatre of Marcellus or the Coliseum would look mean and poor.
The whole history of art consists of the succession of subtle changes like these, and it would be impossible to convey them to the reader by the utmost precision of technical language or the most brilliant and life-like descriptions. The best thing that can be done is to make one's remarks in the presence of the statues, pictures and buildings concerned. But it is rarely that we find ourselves in such favourable conditions for teaching and explaining our ideas. But, in default of the objects themselves, we may at least give the most faithful images of them which can be obtained, and that we shall attempt to do throughout the course of this history.
We shall, then, give a large number of figures, in which absolute accuracy and justice of proportion will be aimed at rather than picturesque effects. It is not very long since, in collections of drawings from antique remains, they were all presented under one aspect, so far as the subtleties of style were concerned. The hand of the engraver spread a technical uniformity over them all in which differences of school and date disappeared, just as the delicate carvings and coloured ornament of the middle ages and the renaissance, which gave to each building an individuality of its own, were reduced to dull monotony by the undiscriminating brush of the whitewasher. It seemed to the artist natural enough to clothe the monuments of the past in the style of his own day—and it required much less care than would have been needed for the successful expression of all the diversities of style in his models. We have now, however, grown more exacting. We demand from the draughtsman who pretends to interpret a work of art the same devotion and the same self-sacrifice as from the writer who is charged with the translation of a work of literature from one language into another—we require him to forget himself, so that we may say of him, as the Latin poet says of his Proteus:
"Omnia transformat sese in miracula rerum."
We require him to change his style with every change of subject, to copy the gesture, the accent, and even the faults of his model; to be Chinese in China, Greek in Greece, and Tuscan when he takes us to Siena or Florence. But we have indicated an ideal which is not often reached. Every one of us has his preferences and natural affinities, every artist his own methods and personal modes of thought. One will be conspicuous for his interpretation of the nobility and purity of the antique, another for his treatment of oriental art or of the elegance of our eighteenth century. But the mere enunciation of the principle is of value, for a great effect follows the praise which those who treat their model with scrupulous and intelligent respect are sure to obtain, and the blame to which they who are less conscientious expose themselves.
Fidelity in interpretation is, in fact, the honesty of the draughtsman; it may become, if carried to a great height, his honour, and even his glory. So far as we are concerned, we demand it from all those who are associated with us in this task; and, so far as existing methods will allow, we shall see that we obtain it. Unless our illustrations had that merit they would obscure the text instead of making it more comprehensible. Our readers would search in vain for the features and characteristics to which we might call their attention, and many of our remarks and theories would become difficult to understand. We should be in the same position as an incompetent barrister who has made a bad choice of witnesses; witnesses who, when in the box, prove either to know nothing or to know only facts which tell against the party who has called them.
Our aim in choosing our illustrations will be to place before our readers good reproductions of most of the objects which are discussed in our text. We shall, of course, be unable to figure everything that is of interest, but we can at least ensure that those figures which we give shall each be interesting in some particular or another. So far as possible, we shall select for illustration such objects as have not previously been reproduced, or have been ill reproduced, or have been figured in works which are difficult of access. We shall sometimes, of course, find it necessary to reproduce some famous statue or some building which is familiar to most people; but even then we shall endeavour to give renewed interest to their beauties by displaying them under some fresh aspect and by increased care in the delineation of their forms. Views in perspective, of which we shall make frequent use, give the general aspect of buildings with much greater truth and completeness than a mere plan, or a picturesque sketch of ruinous remains, or even than an elevation.
Most of the more important perspectives and restorations due to the learned pencil of M. Chipiez will be given in plates separate from the text, as well as the most curious or significant of the works in sculpture or painting to which we shall have to refer. Some of these plates will be coloured. But the majority of our illustrations will consist of engravings upon zinc and wood, which will not, we hope, fall short of their more elaborate companions in honesty and fidelity.
From the earliest Egyptian dynasties and from fabled Chaldæa to imperial Rome, from the Pyramids and the Tower of Babel to the Coliseum, from the Statue of Chephren and the bas-reliefs of Shalmaneser III, to the busts of the Cæsars, from the painted decorations of the tomb of Ti, and the enamelled bricks of Nineveh to the wall-paintings of Pompeii, we shall review in due succession all the forms which the great nations of antiquity made use of to express their beliefs, to give shape to their ideas, to satisfy their instincts for luxury and their taste for beauty, to lodge their gods and their kings, and to transmit their own likenesses to posterity.
We propose to trace and explain the origin of, and to describe, without æsthetic dissertations or excessive use of technical terms, those processes which imply the practice of art; the creation and descent of forms; the continual changes, sometimes slight and sometimes great, which they underwent in passing from one people to another, until, among the Greeks, they arrived at the most happy and complete perfection which the world has seen. We hope, too, by the judicious choice and careful execution of our figures, to give a fair idea of this course of development even to those artists who have neither time nor patience to follow our criticisms and descriptions.
I conceived the plan of this history, of which the first instalment is now submitted to the public, at the time when M. Wallon, who is secretary to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, entrusted me with the inauguration, at the Sorbonne, of the teaching of classic archæology. But before it could be realized two conditions had to be fulfilled. I had to find an associate in the work, a companion who would help me in the necessary labour and study, and I found him among my auditors in those first lectures at the Sorbonne. I had also to find a publisher who would understand the wants of the public and of the critics in such a matter. In this, too, I have succeeded, and I am free to undertake a work which is, I hope, destined to carry far beyond the narrow limits of a Parisian lecture room, the methods and principal results of a science, which, having made good its claims to the gratitude of mankind, is progressing with a step which becomes daily more assured. The task is an arduous one, and the continual discoveries which are reported from nearly every quarter of the ancient world, make it heavier every day. As for my colleague and myself, we have resigned ourselves in advance to seeing omissions and defects pointed out even by the most benevolent critics, but we are convinced that in spite of such imperfections as it may contain, our work will do good service, and will cause one of the aspects of ancient civilization to be better understood. This conviction will sustain us through the labours which, perhaps with some temerity, we have taken upon us. How far shall we be allowed to conduct our history? That we cannot tell, but we may venture to promise that it shall be the chief occupation and the dearest study of all that remains to us of life and strength.
Georges Perrot.
[TO THE READER.]
We have been in some doubt as to whether we should append a special bibliography to each section of this work, but after mature reflection we have decided against it. We shall, of course, consider the art of each of the races of antiquity in less detail than if we had undertaken a monograph upon Egyptian, upon Assyrian, or upon Phœnician art; but yet it is our ambition to neglect no source of information which is likely to be really valuable. From many of the books and papers which we shall have to consult we may reproduce nothing but their titles, but we hope that no important work will escape us altogether, and in every case we shall give references which may be easily verified. Under these circumstances a formal list of works would be a mere repetition of our notes and would only have the effect of giving a useless bulk to our volumes.
Whenever our drawings have not been taken directly from the originals we have been careful to indicate the source from which we obtained them, and we have made a point of borrowing only from authors of undoubted authority. Those illustrations which bear neither an artist's name nor the title of a book have been engraved from photographs. As for the perspectives and restorations supplied by M. Chipiez, they are in every case founded upon the study and comparison of all accessible documents; but it would take too long to indicate in each of these drawings how much has been borrowed from special publications and how much has been founded upon photographic evidence. M. Chipiez has sometimes employed the ordinary perspective, sometimes that which is called axonometric perspective. The difference will be at once perceived.
Egyptologists may, perhaps, find mistakes in the hieroglyphs which occur in our illustrations. These hieroglyphs have been as a rule exactly transcribed, but we do not pretend to offer a collection of texts; we have only reproduced these characters on account of their decorative value, and because without them we could not have the general appearance of this or that monument. It will thus be seen that our object is not affected by a mistake or two in such matters.
We may here express our gratitude to all those who have interested themselves in our enterprise and who have helped us to make our work complete. Our dear and lamented Mariette had promised us his most earnest help. During the winter that we passed in Egypt, while he still enjoyed some remains of strength and voice, we obtained from his conversation and his letters some precious pieces of information. We have cited the works of M. Maspero on almost every page, and yet we have learnt more from his conversation than from his writings. Before his departure for Egypt—whither he went to succeed Mariette—M. Maspero was our perpetual counsellor and referee; whenever we were embarrassed we appealed to his well ordered, accurate, and unbiased knowledge. We are also deeply indebted to M. Pierret, the learned conservateur of the Louvre; not only has he done everything to facilitate the work of our draughtsmen in the great museum, he has also helped us frequently with his advice and his accumulated knowledge. M. Arthur Rhôné has lent us a plan of the temple of the Sphinx, and M. Ernest Desjardins a view of the interior of that building.
The artists who have visited Egypt have helped us as cordially as the learned men who have deciphered its inscriptions. M. Gerome opened his portfolios and allowed us to take three of those drawings, which express with such truthful precision the character of Egyptian landscape from them. M. Hector Leroux was as generous as M. Gerome, and if we have taken but one illustration from his sketch-books it is because the arrangements for this volume were complete before we had the chance of looking through them. M. Brune has allowed us to reproduce his plans of Karnak and Medinet-Abou.
We have had occasion, in the work itself, to express our acknowledgments to MM. J. Bourgoin, G. Bénédite, and Saint-Elme Gautier, who have drawn for us the principal monuments of the Boulak and Louvre Museums. For the architecture we must name M. A. Guérin, a pupil of M. Chipiez, who prepared the drawings under the direction of his master, and M. Tomaszkievicz, whose light and skilful point has so well engraved them. If the process of engraving upon zinc has given results which, as we hope, will satisfy our readers, much of the honour belongs to the untiring care of M. Comte, whose process has been employed; all these plates have been reviewed and retouched by him with minute care. The steel engravings are by MM. Ramus, Hibon, Guillaumot père and Sulpis. In order that the polychromatic decoration of the Egyptians should be rendered with truth and precision in its refined tones and complicated line, we begged M. Sulpis to make use of a process which had almost fallen into disuse from its difficulty and want of rapidity; we mean that which is called aquatint. Our plates II, XIII, and XIV will perhaps convince our readers that its results are superior to those of chromo-lithography, which is now so widely employed.
[A HISTORY OF ART IN ANCIENT EGYPT]
[CHAPTER I.]
THE GENERAL CHARACTER OF EGYPTIAN CIVILIZATION.
§ 1. Egypt's Place in The History of the World.
Egypt is the eldest daughter of civilization. In undertaking to group the great nations of antiquity and to present them in their proper order, in attempting to assign to each its due share in the continuous and unremitting labour of progress until the birth of Christianity, we have no alternative but to commence with the country of the Pharaohs.
In studying the past of mankind, we have the choice of several points of view. We may attempt to determine the meaning and value of the religious conceptions which succeeded one another during that period, or we may give our attention rather to the literature, the arts and the sciences, to those inventions which in time have done so much to emancipate mankind from natural trammels and to make him master of his destiny. One writer will confine himself to a description of manners, and social and political institutions; another to the enumeration and explanation of the various changes brought on by internal revolutions, by wars and conquests; to what Bossuet calls "la suite des empires." Finally, he who has the highest ambition of all will attempt to unite all these various features into a single picture, so as to show, as a whole, the creative activity of a race and the onward movements of its genius in the continual search for "the best." But in any case the commencement must be made with Egypt. It is Egypt that has preserved the earliest attempts of man towards outward expression; it is in Egypt that those monuments exist which contain the first permanent manifestation of thought by written characters or plastic[36] forms; and it is in Egypt that the historian of antique art will find the earliest materials for study.
But, in the first place, we must give some account of the curious conditions under which the people lived who constructed and ornamented so many imposing monuments. We must begin, then, by describing the circumstances and the race characteristics under which this early civilization was developed.
§ 2. The Valley of the Nile and its Inhabitants.
The first traveller in Egypt of which we have any record is Herodotus; he sums up, in an often quoted phrase, the impression which that land of wonders made upon him: "Egypt," he says, "is a present from the Nile."[37] The truth could not be better expressed. "Had the equatorial rains not been compelled to win for themselves a passage to the Mediterranean, a passage upon which they deposited the mud which they had accumulated on their long journey, Egypt would not have existed. Egypt began by being the bed of a torrent; the soil was raised by slow degrees ... man appeared there when, by the slow accumulation of fertile earth, the country at last became equal to his support...."[38]
Other rivers do no more than afford humidity for their immediate borders, or, in very low-lying districts, for a certain narrow stretch of country on each hand. When they overflow their banks it is in a violent and irregular fashion, involving wide-spread ruin and destruction. Great floods are feared as public misfortunes. It is very different with the Nile. Every year, at a date which can be almost exactly foretold, it begins to rise slowly and to spread gently over the land. It rises by degrees until its surface is eight or nine metres above low-water mark;[39] it then begins to fall with the same tranquillity, but not until it has deposited, upon the lands over which it has flowed, a thick layer of fertile mud which can be turned over easily with the lightest plough, and in which every seed will germinate, every plant spring up with extraordinary vigour and rapidity.
Fig. 1.—During the Inundation of the Nile.
Thus nature has greatly facilitated the labour of the Egyptian agriculturist; the river takes upon itself the irrigation of the country for the whole width of its valley, and the preparation of the soil for the autumnal seed-time; it restores the virtue annually taken out of the ground by the crops. Each year it brings with it more fertility than can be exhausted in the twelve months, so that there is a constantly accumulating capital, on both banks of the river, of the richest vegetable earth.
Fig. 2. —Hoeing; Beni-Hassan. (Champollion, pl. 381 bis. [40]
Fig. 3.—Ploughing; from the Necropolis of Memphis.
(Description de l'Égypte, ant. V., pl. 17.)
Thus the first tribes established themselves in the country under singularly favourable conditions; thanks to the timely help of the river they found themselves assured of an easy existence.[41] We know how often the lives of those tribes who live by fishing and the chase are oppressed by care; there are some days when game is not to be found, and they die of hunger. Those who live a pastoral life are also exposed to cruel hardships from the destruction of their flocks and herds by those epidemics against which even modern science sometimes struggles in vain. As for agricultural populations, they are everywhere, except in Egypt, at the mercy of the weather; seasons which are either too dry or too wet may reduce them to famine, for in those distant times local famines were far more fatal than in these days, when facility of transport and elaborate commercial connections ensure that where the demand is, thither the supply will be taken. In Egypt the success of the crops varied with the height of the Nile, but they never failed altogether. In bad years the peasant may have had the baton of the tax-collector to fear, but he always had a few onions or a few ears of maize to preserve him from starvation.[42]
Fig. 4.—Harvest scene; from a tomb at Gizeh. (Champollion, pl. 417.)
The first condition of civilization is a certain measure of security for life. Now, thanks to the beneficent action of the king of rivers, that condition was created sooner in Egypt than elsewhere. In the valley of the Nile man found himself able, for the first time, to calculate upon the forces of nature and to turn them to his certain profit. It is easy then to understand that Egypt saw the birth of the most ancient of those civilizations whose plastic arts we propose to study.
Fig. 5.—The Bastinado; Beni-Hassan. (Champollion, pl. 390.)
Another favourable condition is to be found in the isolation of the country. The tribes who settled there in centuries so remote that they are beyond tradition and even calculation, could live in peace, hidden as it were in a narrow valley and protected on all sides, partly by deserts, partly by an impassable sea. It would perhaps be well to give some idea of the natural features of their country before commencing our study of their art. The terms, Lower-, Middle-, and Upper-Egypt, the Delta, and Ethiopia will continually recur in these pages, as also will the names of Tanis and Sais, Memphis and Heliopolis, Abydos and Thebes, and of many other cities; it is important therefore that our readers should know exactly what is meant by each of these time-honoured designations; it is necessary that they should at least be able to find upon the map those cities which by their respective periods of supremacy represent the successive epochs of Egyptian history.
"Egypt is that country which, stretching from north to south, occupies the north-east angle of Africa, or Libya as the ancients called it. It is joined to Asia by the isthmus of Suez. It is bounded on the east by that isthmus and the Red Sea; on the south by Nubia, the Ethiopia of the Greeks, which is traversed by the Nile before its entrance into Egypt at the cataracts of Syene; on the west by the desert sprinkled here and there with a few oases, and on the north by the Mediterranean. The desert stretches as far north on the west of the country as the Red Sea does on the east.
"It penetrates moreover far into the interior of Egypt itself. Strictly speaking Egypt consists simply of that part of this corner of Africa over which the waters of the Nile flow during the inundation, to which may be added those districts to which the water is carried by irrigation. All outside this zone is uninhabited, and produces neither corn nor vegetables nor trees nor even grass. No water is to be found there beyond a few wells, all more or less exposed to exhaustion in an ever-parching atmosphere. In Upper Egypt rain is an extremely rare phenomenon. Sand and rock cover the whole country, except the actual valley of the Nile. Up to the point where the river divides into several arms, that is to say for more than three-quarters of the whole length of Egypt, this valley never exceeds an average width of more than four or five leagues. In a few districts it is even narrower than this. For almost its whole length it is shut in between two mountain chains, that on the east called the Arab, that on the west the Libyan chain. These mountains, especially towards the south, sometimes close in and form defiles. On the other hand, in Middle Egypt the Libyan chain falls back and becomes lower, allowing the passage of the canal which carries the fertilizing waters into the Fayoum, the province in which the remains of the famous reservoir which the Greek writers called Lake Mœris exist. Egypt, which was little more than a glen higher up, here widens out to a more imposing size. A little below Cairo, the present capital of Egypt, situated not far from the site of ancient Memphis, the Nile divides into two branches, one of which, the Rosetta branch, turns to the north-west, the other, that of Damietta, to the north and north-east.... The ancients knew five others which, since their time, have either been obliterated or at least have become non-navigable.... All these branches took their names from towns situated near their mouths. A large number of less important watercourses threaded their way through Lower Egypt; but as the earth there is marshy, their channels have shifted greatly from age to age and still go on changing. The Nile forms several lagunes near the sea, shut in by long tongues of earth and sand, and communicating with the Mediterranean by openings here and there. The space comprised between the two most distant branches of the river is called the Delta, on account of its triangular form, which is similar to that of a capital Greek delta (Δ)."[43]
At one time the waves of the Mediterranean washed the foot of the sandy plateau which is now crowned by the Great Pyramid; the Nile flowed into the sea at that time slightly to the north of the site upon which Memphis was afterwards built. With the slow passage of time the particles of earth which it brought down from the mountains of Abyssinia were deposited as mud banks upon the coast, and gradually filling up the gulf, created instead wide marshy plains intersected by lakes. Here and there ancient sand ridges indicate the successive watercourses. The never-ceasing industry of its floods had already, at the earliest historic period, carried the mouths of the Nile far beyond the normal line of the neighbouring coasts. The Egyptian priests—whose words have been preserved for us by Herodotus—had a true idea as to how this vast plain had been created, a plain which now comprises twenty-three thousand square kilometres and is continually being added to; but they were strangely deceived when they thought and declared that Menes or Ména, the first of all kings, found almost all Egypt under the waters. The sea, they said, penetrated in those days beyond the site of Memphis, and the remainder of the country, the district of Thebes excepted, was an unhealthy morass.[44] The Delta had, in fact, existed long before the appearance of Menes, and perhaps it may have shown pretty much its present form when the Egyptian race first appeared in the valley of the Nile.[45]
As to the origin of that race, we need not enter at length into a question so purely ethnographical. It is now generally allowed that they were connected with the white races of Europe and Western Asia; the anatomical examination of the bodies recovered from the most ancient tombs, and the study of their statues, bas-reliefs, and pictures, all point to this conclusion. If we take away individual peculiarities these monuments furnish us with the following common type of the race even in the most remote epochs:—
"The average Egyptian was tall, thin, active. He had large and powerful shoulders,[46] a muscular chest, sinewy arms terminating in long and nervous hands, narrow hips, and thin muscular legs. His knees and calves were nervous and muscular, as is generally the case with a pedestrian race; his feet were long, thin, and flattened, by his habit of going barefoot. The head, often too large and powerful for the body, was mild, and even sad in its expression. His forehead was square and perhaps a little low, his nose short and round; his eyes were large and well opened, his cheeks full and round, his lips thick but not turned out like a negro's; his rather large mouth bore an habitually soft and sorrowful expression. These features are to be found in most of the statues of the ancient and middle empires, and in all the later epochs. Even to the present day the peasants, or fellahs, have almost everywhere preserved the physiognomy of their ancestors, although the upper classes have lost it by repeated intermarriage with strangers."[47]
When Mariette discovered in the necropolis at Memphis the famous wooden statue of a man standing and holding in his hand the baton of authority, the peasants of Sakkarah recognised at once the feature and attitude of one of themselves, of the rustic dignitary who managed the corvées and apportioned the taxation. An astonished fellah cried out: "The Sheikh-el-Beled!" His companions took up the cry, and the statue has been known by that name ever since.[48]
Increased knowledge of the Egyptian language has enabled us to carry our researches much farther than Champollion and his successors. By many of its roots, by its system of pronouns, by its nouns of number, and by some of the arrangements of its conjugations, it seems to have been attached to the Semitic family of languages. Some of the idioms of these Semitic tongues are found in Egyptian in a rudimentary state. From this it has been concluded that Egyptian and its cognate languages, after having belonged to that group, separated from it at a very early period, while their grammatical system was still in course of formation. Thus, disunited and subjected to diverse influences, the two families made a different use of the elements which they possessed in common.
There would thus seem to have been a community of root between the Egyptians on the one part and the Arabs, Hebrews, and Phœnicians on the other, but the separation took place at such an early period, that the tribes who came to establish themselves in the valley of the Nile had both the time and the opportunity to acquire a very particular and original physiognomy of their own. The Egyptians are therefore said to belong to the proto-Semitic races.
Fig. 6.—Statue from the Ancient Empire in calcareous stone.
(Boulak.[49]) Drawn by G. Bénédite.
This opinion has been sustained with more or less plausibility by MM. Lepsius, Benfey, and Bunsen, and accepted by M. Maspero.[50] But other critics of equal authority are more impressed by the differences than by the resemblances, which, however, they neither deny nor explain. M. Renan prefers to rank the Copts, the Tuaregs, and the Berbers in a family which he would call Chamitic, and to which he would refer most of the idioms of Northern Africa.[51] A comparison of the languages is, then, insufficient to decide the question of origin.
Fig. 7.—The Sheikh-el-Beled. (Boulak.) Drawn by J. Bourgoin.
The people whose physical characteristics we have described and whose idiom we have defined, came from Asia, to all appearance, by the Isthmus of Suez. Perhaps they found established on the banks of the Nile another race, probably black, and indigenous to the African continent.[52] If this were so the new comers forced the earlier occupants of the country southwards without mixing with them, and set themselves resolutely to the work of improvement. Egypt must then have presented a very different sight from its richness and fertility of to-day. The river when left to itself, was perpetually changing its bed, and even in its highest floods it failed to reach certain parts of the valley, which remained unproductive; in other districts it remained so long that it changed the soil into swamp. The Delta, half of it drowned in the waters of the Nile, the other half under those of the Mediterranean, was simply a huge morass dotted here and there with sandy islands and waving with papyrus, reeds, and lotus, across which the river worked its sluggish and uncertain way; upon both banks the desert swallowed up all the soil left untouched by the yearly inundations. From the crowding vegetation of a tropical marsh to the most absolute aridity was but a step. Little by little the new comers learnt to control the course of the floods, to bank them in and to carry them to the farthest corners of the valley, and Egypt gradually arose out of the waters and became in the hand of man one of the best adapted countries in the world for the development of a great civilization.[53]
How many generations did it require to create the country and the nation? We cannot tell. But we may affirm that a commencement was made by the simultaneous establishment at several different points of small independent states, each of which had its own laws and its own form of worship. These districts remained almost unchanged in number and in their respective boundaries almost up to the end of the ancient world. Their union under one sceptre formed the kingdom of the Pharaohs, the country of Khemi, but their primitive divisions did not therefore disappear; the small independent states became provinces and were the foundation of those local administrative districts which the Greeks called nomes.
Fig. 8.—Hunting in the Marshes; from a bas-relief in the tomb of Ti.
Besides this division into districts, the Egyptians had one other, and only one—the division into Lower Egypt, or the North Country (Tomera, or To-meh), and into Upper Egypt, or the South Country (To-res). Lower Egypt consisted of the Delta; Upper Egypt stretched from the southernmost point of the Delta to the first cataract. This division has the advantage of corresponding exactly to the configuration of the country; moreover, it preserves the memory of a period before the time of Menes, during which Egypt was divided into two separate kingdoms—that of the North and that of the South, a division which in later times had often a decisive influence upon the course of events. This state of things was of sufficiently long duration to leave an ineffaceable trace upon the official language of Egypt, and upon that which we may call its blazonry, or heraldic imagery. The sovereigns who united the whole territory under one sceptre are always called, in the royal protocols, the lords of Upper and Lower Egypt; they carry on their heads two crowns, each appropriate to one of the two great divisions of their united kingdom. That of Upper Egypt is known to egyptologists as the White crown, because of the colour which it bears upon painted monuments; that of the North is called the red crown, for a similar reason. Combined with one another they form the complete regal head-dress ordinarily called the pschent. In the hieroglyphics Northern Egypt is indicated by the papyrus; Southern by the lotus.
Fig. 9.—Shadouf; machine for irrigating the land above the level of the canals.
During the Ptolemaic epoch a new administrative division into Upper, Middle, and Lower Egypt was established. The Middle Egypt of the Greek geographers began at the southern point of the Delta, and extended to a little south of Hermopolis. Although this latter division was not established until after the centuries which saw the birth of those monuments with which we shall have to deal, we shall make frequent use of it, as it will facilitate and render more definite our topographical explanations. For the contemporaries of the Pharaohs both Memphis and Thebes belong to Upper Egypt, and if we adopted their method of speech we should be under the continual necessity of stopping the narration to define geographical positions; but with the tri-partite division we may speak of Beni-Hassan as in Middle, and Abydos as in Upper Egypt, and thus give a sufficient idea of their relative positions.
Fig. 10.—The White Crown. Fig. 11.—The Red Crown. Fig. 12.—The Pschent.
§ 3. The Great Divisions of Egyptian History.
In enumerating and analysing the remains of Egyptian art, we shall classify them chronologically as well as locally. The monuments of the plastic arts will be arranged into groups determined by the periods of their occurrence, as well as by their geographical distribution. We must refer our readers to the works of M. Maspero and others for the lists of kings and dynasties, and for the chief events of each reign, but it will be convenient for us to give here a summary of the principal epochs in Egyptian history. Each of those epochs corresponds to an artistic period with a special character and individuality of its own. The following paragraphs taken from the history of M. Maspero give all the necessary information in a brief form.
"In the last years of the prehistoric period, the sacerdotal class had obtained a supremacy over the other classes of the nation. A man called Menes (Menha or Ména in the Egyptian texts) destroyed this supremacy and founded the Egyptian monarchy.
"This monarchy existed for at least four thousand years, under thirty consecutive dynasties, from the reign of Menes to that of Nectanebo (340 years before our era). This interval of time, the longest of which political history takes note, is usually divided into three parts: the Ancient Empire, from the first to the eleventh dynasty; the Middle Empire, from the eleventh dynasty to the invasion of the Hyksos or Shepherds; the New Empire from the shepherd kings to the Persian conquest. This division is inconvenient in one respect; it takes too little account of the sequence of historical events.
"There were indeed, three great revolutions in the historical development of Egypt. At the beginning of its long succession of human dynasties (the Egyptians, like other peoples, placed a number of dynasties of divine rulers before their first human king) the political centre of the country was at Memphis; Memphis was the capital and the burying-place of the kings; Memphis imposed sovereigns upon the rest of the country and was the chief market for Egyptian commerce and industry. With the commencement of the sixth dynasty, the centre of gravity began to shift southwards. During the ninth and tenth dynasties it rested at Heracleopolis, in Middle Egypt, and in the time of the eleventh dynasty, it fixed itself at Thebes. From that period onwards Thebes was the capital of the country and furnished the sovereign. From the eleventh to the twenty-first all the Egyptian dynasties were Theban with the single exception of the fourteenth Xoite dynasty. At the time of the shepherd invasion, the Thebaïd became the citadel of Egyptian nationality, and its princes, after centuries of war against the intruders, finally succeeded in freeing the whole valley of the Nile for the benefit of the eighteenth dynasty, which opened the era of great foreign wars.
"Under the nineteenth dynasty an inverse movement to that of the first period carried the political centre of the country back towards the north. With the twenty-first Tanite dynasty, Thebes ceased to be the capital, and the cities of the Delta, Tanis, Bubastis, Mendes, Sebennytos, and above all Sais, rose into equal or superior importance. From that time the political life of the country concentrated itself in the maritime districts. The nomes of the Thebaïd, ruined by the Ethiopian and Assyrian invasions, lost their influence; and Thebes itself fell into ruin and became nothing more than a rendezvous for curious travellers.
"I propose, therefore, to divide Egyptian history into three periods, each corresponding to the political supremacy of one town or province over the whole of Egypt:—
"First Period, Memphite (the first ten dynasties). The supremacy of Memphis and of the sovereigns furnished by her.
"Second Period, Theban (from the eleventh to the twentieth dynasties inclusive). Supremacy of Thebes and the Theban kings. This period is divided into two sub-periods by the Shepherd dynasties.
"a. The old Theban empire, from the eleventh to the sixteenth dynasties.
"b. The new Theban empire, from the sixteenth to the twentieth dynasties.
"Third Period, Sait (from the twenty-first to the thirtieth dynasties, inclusive). Supremacy of Sais and the other cities of the Delta. This period is divided into two by the Persian invasion:—
"First Sait period, from the twenty-first to the twenty-sixth dynasties.
"Second Sait period, from the twenty-seventh to the thirtieth dynasties."[54]
Mariette places the accession of Ména or Menes at about the fiftieth century before our era, while Bunsen and other Egyptologists bring forward his date to 3,600 or 3,500 B.C. as they believe some of the dynasties of Manetho to have been contemporary with each other. Neither Mariette nor Maspero deny that Egypt, in the course of its long existence, was often partitioned between princes who reigned in Upper and Lower Egypt respectively; but, guided by circumstances which need not be described here, they incline to believe that Manetho confined himself to enumerating those dynasties which were looked upon as the legitimate ones. The work of elimination which has been attempted by certain modern savants, must have been undertaken, to a certain extent, in Egypt itself; and some of the collateral dynasties must have been effaced and passed over in silence, because the monuments still remaining preserve the names of reigning families which are ignored by history.
Whatever may be thought of this initial date, Egypt remains, as has been so well said by M. Renan, "a lighthouse in the profound darkness of remote antiquity." Its period of greatest power was long anterior to the earliest traditions of the Greek race; the reign of Thothmes III., who, according to a contemporary expression, "drew his frontiers where he pleased," is placed by common consent in the seventeenth century, B.C. The Egyptian empire then comprised Abyssinia, the Soudan, Nubia, Syria, Mesopotamia, part of Arabia, Khurdistan, and Armenia. Founded by the kings of the eighteenth dynasty, this greatness was maintained by those of the nineteenth. To this dynasty belonged Rameses II., the Sesostris of the Greeks, who flourished in the fifteenth century. It was the superiority of its civilization, even more than the valour of its princes and soldiers, which made Egypt supreme over Western Asia.
This supremacy declined during the twenty-first and twenty-second dynasties, but, at the same time, Egyptian chronology becomes more certain as opportunities of comparison with the facts of Hebrew history increase. The date of 980, within a year or two, may be given with confidence as that of the accession of Sheshonk I., the contemporary of Solomon and Rehoboam. From that date onwards, the constant struggles between Egypt and its neighbours, especially with Assyria, multiply our opportunities for synchronic comparison. In the seventh century the country was opened to the Greeks, the real creators of history, who brought with them their inquiring spirit and their love for exactitude. After the accession of Psemethek I., the founder of the twenty-sixth dynasty, in 656, our historical materials are abundant. For that we must thank the Greek travellers who penetrated everywhere, taking notes which they afterwards amplified into narratives. It is a singular thing, that even as late as the Ptolemies, when the power of the Macedonian monarchy was fully developed, the Egyptians never seem to have felt the want of what we call an era, of some definite point from which they could measure the course of time and the progress of the centuries. "They were satisfied with calculating by the years of the reigning sovereign, and even those calculations had no certain point of departure. Sometimes they counted from the commencement of the year which had witnessed the death of his predecessor, sometimes from the day of his own coronation. The most careful calculations will therefore fail to enable modern science to restore to the Egyptians that which, in fact, they never possessed."[55]
Even thus summarily stated, these historical indications are enough to show how little foundation there is for the opinion which was held by the ancient Greeks, and too long accepted by modern historians. It was, they said, from Ethiopia that Egyptian civilization had come. A colony of Ethiopian priests from the island of Meroè in Upper Nubia, had introduced their religion, their written characters, their art and their civil institutions into the country. The exact opposite of this is the truth. "It was the Egyptians who advanced up the banks of the Nile to found cities, fortresses, and temples in Ethiopia; it was the Egyptians who carried their civilization into the midst of savage negro tribes. The error was caused by the fact that at one epoch in the history of Egypt the Ethiopians played an important part.
"If it were true that Egypt owed its political existence to Ethiopia, we should be able to find in the latter country monuments of a more remote antiquity, and as we descended the Nile, we should find the remains comparatively modern; but, strangely enough, the study of all these monuments incontestably proves that the sequence of towns, holy places, and tombs, constructed by the Egyptians on the banks of their river, follow each other in such chronological order that the oldest remains, the Pyramids, are found in the north, in Lower Egypt, near the southern point of the Delta. The nearer our steps take us to the cataracts of Ethiopia, the less ancient do the monuments become. They show ever increasing signs of the decadence of art, of taste, and of the love for beauty. Finally, the art of Ethiopia, such as its still existing monuments reveal it to us, is entirely wanting in originality. A glance is sufficient to tell us that it represents the degeneracy only of the Egyptian style, that the spirit of Egyptian forms has been weakly grasped, and that their execution is generally mediocre."[56]
We may condense all these views into a simple and easily remembered formula; we may say that as we mount towards the springs of the Nile, we descend the current of time. Thebes is younger than Memphis, and Meroè than Thebes. The river which Egypt worshipped, and by which the walls of its cities were bathed, flowed from the centre of Africa, from the south to the north; but the stream of civilization flowed in the other direction, until it was lost in the country of the negro, in the mysterious depths of Ethiopia. The springs of this latter stream must be sought in that district where the waters of the Nile, as if tired by their long journey, divide into several arms before falling into the sea; in that district near the modern capital, over which stretch the long shadows of the Pyramids.
§ 4. The Constitution of Egyptian Society—Influence of that Constitution upon Monuments of Art.
During the long sequence of centuries which we have divided into three great periods, the national centre of gravity was more than once displaced. The capital was at one time in Middle Egypt, at another in Upper, and at a third period in Lower Egypt, in accordance with its political necessities. At one period the nation had nothing to fear from external enemies, at others it had to turn a bold front to Asia or Ethiopia. At various times Egypt had to submit to her foreign foes; to the shepherd invaders, to the kings of Assyria and Persia, to the princes of Ethiopia, and finally to Alexander, to whom she lost her independence never again to recover it. And yet it appears that the character and social condition of the race never underwent any great change. At the time of the pyramid-builders, Egypt was the most absolute monarchy that ever existed, and so she remained till her final conquest.
"Successor and descendant of the deities who once reigned over the valley of the Nile, the king was the living manifestation and incarnation of God: child of the sun (Se Râ), as he took care to proclaim whenever he wrote his name, the blood of the gods flowed in his veins and assured to him the sovereign power."[57] He was the priest above all others. Such a form of worship as that of Egypt, required no doubt a large sacerdotal class, each member of which had his own special function in the complicated and gorgeous ceremonies in which he took part; but the king alone, at least in the principal temples, had the right to enter the sanctuary and to open the door of the kind of chapel in which the symbolical representation of the divinity was kept; he alone saw the god face to face, and spoke to him in the name of his people.[58] The pre-eminent dignity of this priestly office did not, however, prevent the king from taking his proper share in war or political affairs generally. The army of scribes and various functionaries, whose titles may still be read upon the most ancient monuments of the country, depended upon him for their orders from one end of the country to the other, and in war, it was he who led the serried battalions of the Egyptian army. The king was thus a supreme pontif, the immediate chief of all civil and military officers; and, as the people believed that his career was directed by the gods with whom he held converse, he became to them a visible deity and, in the words of an inscription, "the representative of Râ among the living." His divinity, begun on earth, was completed and rendered perpetual in another life. All the dead Pharaohs became gods, so that the Egyptian pantheon obtained a new deity at the death of each sovereign. The deceased Pharaohs thus constituted a series of gods to whom the reigning sovereign would of course address himself when he had anything to ask; hence the monuments upon which we find living Pharaohs offering worship to their predecessors.[59]
Fig. 13.—Seti I. in his War-Chariot, bas-relief at Thebes. (Champollion, pl. 297.)
Fig. 14.—Rameses II.
in adoration before Seti.
From Abydos (Mariette).
The prestige which such a theory of royalty was calculated to give to the Egyptian kings may easily be imagined. They obtained more than respect; they were the objects of adoration, of idolatry. Brought up from infancy in this religious veneration, to which their hereditary qualities also inclined them, generation succeeded generation among the Egyptians, without any attempt to rebel against the royal authority or even to dispute it. Ancient Egypt, like its modern descendant, was now and then the scene of military revolts. These were generally provoked by the presence of foreign mercenaries, sometimes by their want of discipline and licence, sometimes by the jealousy which they inspired in the native soldiery; but never, from the time of Menes to that of Tewfik-Pacha, has the civil population, whether of the town or of the fields, shown any desire to obtain the slightest guarantee for what we should call their rights and liberties. During all those thousands of years not the faintest trace is to be discovered of that spirit from which sprung the republican constitutions of Greece and ancient Italy, a spirit which, in yet later times, has led to the parliamentary governments of Christian Europe. The Egyptian labourer or artisan never dreamt of calling in question the orders of any one who might be master for the time. Absolute obedience to the will of a single man—such was the constant and instinctive national habit, and by it every movement of the social machine, under foreign and native kings alike, was regulated.
From the construction of the pyramids of Cheops and Chephren, and the cutting of a new canal between the two seas under Nekau, to the Mahmoudieh canal of Mehemet-Ali and that abortive enterprise, the barrage of the Nile, the only method thought of for obtaining the necessary labour was compulsion.[60] An order is received by the governor, who has it proclaimed from one village to another throughout his province; next day the whole male population is driven, like a troop of sheep, to the workshops. Each man carries a bag or basket which holds his provisions for a fortnight or a month, as the case may be; a few dry cakes, onions, garlic, and Egyptian beans, as the Greeks called the species of almond which is contained in the fruit of the lotus. Old men and children, all had to obey the summons. The more vigorous and skilful among them dressed and put in place the blocks of granite or limestone; the weakest were useful for the transport of the rubbish to a distance, for carrying clay and water from the Nile to the brickmakers, for arranging the bricks in the sun so that they might be dried and hardened.
Fig. 15.—Homage to Amenophis III. (From Prisse.[61])
Under the stimulus of the rod, this multitude worked well and obediently under the directions of the architect's foreman and of skilled artisans who were permanently employed upon the work; they did all that could be done by men without special education. At the end of a certain period they were relieved by fresh levies from another province, and all who had not succumbed to the hard and continuous work, returned to their own places. Those who died were buried in hasty graves dug in the sands of the desert by the natives of their own village.
The massive grandeur of some of the Egyptian monuments is only to be explained by this levy en masse of every available pair of hands. The kings of the ancient empire, at least, were unable to dispose of those prisoners of war captured in myriads, in whole races, by the Assyrian kings, and apparently employed by them in the construction of Nineveh. Now, it is impossible that such works as the Pyramids could have been begun and finished in the course of a single reign by free and remunerated labour, even if it had the help of numerous slaves. Certain arrangements in their design and the marvellously exact execution of the more important details of the masonry, prove that architects of great ability and skilful workmen were, indeed, employed upon those gigantic works; but the great bulk of the task must have required the collective effort of a whole population; of a population devoting themselves night and day to complete the work when once begun, like ants over their subterranean city or bees over their comb.
Fig. 16.—Construction of a Temple at Thebes. (From Prisse.)
Even supposing that history had been silent upon this subject, the architect could easily divine, from these monuments themselves, how they had been constructed. Cast your eyes upon the ruins of the Athenian Acropolis; their dimensions will seem to you small in the extreme if you compare them with the buildings of Egypt and Assyria; on the other hand their workmanship is equally careful throughout; it is as exact and perfect in the concealed parts of the structure as in those which were to be visible, in the structural details as in the ornamental painting and sculpture. By these signs you may recognize at once, that, from its foundation to its completion, the whole work was in the hands of artisans whom long practice had made perfect in their trade, and that each single individual among them had made it a point of honour to acquit himself worthily of the task entrusted to him. In the gangs of docile labourers who succeeded each other in the workshops of Memphis or Thebes, there was, of course, a certain sprinkling of men who had become qualified by experience for the special work upon which they were employed; but the great majority were men suddenly taken from very different occupations, from the oar, the plough, the management of cattle; who therefore could have nothing but their unskilled labour to bestow. To such men as these a great part of the work had perforce to be confided, in order that it might be complete at the required time. In spite of the strictest supervision, the almost religious care in the placing and fixing of masonry, which might be fairly expected from the practised members of a trade guild, could not be ensured. Hence the singular inequalities and inconsistences which have been noticed in most of the great Egyptian buildings; sometimes it is the foundations which are in fault, and, by their sinking, have compromised the safety of the whole building;[62] sometimes it is the built up columns of masonry, which, when deprived by time of their coating of stucco, appear very poor and mean. The infinite foresight and self-respect, the passionate love for perfection for its own sake, which is characteristic of Greek work at its best time, is not here to be found. But this defect was inseparable from the system under which the Egyptian buildings were erected.
Fig. 17.—Columns in the Hypostyle Hall, Karnak.
Fig. 18, 19—Scribes registering the yield of the harvest. From a tomb at Sakkarah. (Boulak, 9-1/2 inches high. Drawn by Bourgoin.)
Fig. 20.—Colossi of Amenophis III. (statues of Memnon) at Thebes.
The absolute and dreaded master whose gesture, whose single word, was sufficient to depopulate a province and to fill quarries and workshops with thousands of men, the sovereign who, in spite of his mortality, was looked up to by his people as one so near akin to the gods as to be hardly distinguishable from them, the high priest and father of his people, the king before whom all heads were bent to the earth; filled with his own glory and majesty the buildings which he caused to spring, as if by magic, from the earth. His effigy was everywhere. Seated in the form of colossal statues in front of the temples, in bas-reliefs upon pylons, upon the walls of porticos and pillared halls, he was represented sometimes offering homage to the gods, sometimes leading his troops to battle or bringing them home victorious. The supreme efforts of architect and sculptor were directed to constructing for their prince a tomb which should excel all others in magnificence and durability, or to immortalizing him by a statue which should raise its head as much above its rivals as the royal power surpassed the power and dignity of ordinary men. The art of Egypt was, in this sense, a monarchical art; and in so being it was the direct expression of the sentiments and ideas of the society which had to create it from its foundations.
Fig. 21.—Scribe registering merchandize. Sakkarah. (9-1/2 inches high. Drawn by Bourgoin.)
After the king came the priests, the soldiers, and the scribes or royal functionaries, each receiving authority directly from the king and superintending the execution of his orders. These three groups formed what we may call the upper class of Egyptian society. The soil was entirely in their hands. They possessed among them the whole valley of the Nile, with the exception of the royal domain. The agriculturists were mere serfs attached to the soil. They cultivated, for a payment in kind, the lands belonging to the privileged classes. They changed masters with the lands upon which they lived, which they were not allowed to quit without the permission of the local authorities.
Their position did not greatly differ from that of the modern fellahs, who cultivate the Egyptian soil for the benefit of the effendis, beys, and pachas or for that of the sovereign, who is still the greatest landowner in the country.
Fig. 22.—Boatmen. Tomb of Ra-ka-pou, 5th dynasty. (Boulak, 16 inches high. Drawn by Bourgoin.)
The shepherds, the fishermen and boatmen of the Nile, the artisans and shopkeepers of the cities were in a similar condition. They lived upon their gains in the same way as the peasant upon the share of the harvest which custom reserved for his use. As a natural consequence of their life in a city and of the character of their occupations, small traders and artisans enjoyed more liberty and independence, more power of coming and going than the agriculturists, although legal rights were the same in both cases. The burden of forced labour must have pressed less heavily upon the latter class, and they must have had better opportunities of escaping from it altogether.
In consequence of a mistaken interpretation of historic evidence, it was long believed that the Egyptians had castes, like the Hindoos. This notion has been dispelled by more careful study of their remains. The vigorous separation of classes according to their social functions, the enforced heredity of professions, and the prohibition of intermarriage between the different groups, never obtained a footing in Egypt. We often find, in Egyptian writings, two members of a single family attached one to the civil service and the other to the army, or the daughter of a general marrying the son of a priest. Nay, it often happens that the offices of soldier and priest, of priest and civil servant, or of civil servant and soldier, are united in the person of a single individual. In families which did not belong to these aristocratic classes there was, in all probability, more heredity of occupation; in the ordinary course the paternal employment fixed that of the children, but yet there was nothing approaching to an absolute rule. The various trades were formed into corporations or guilds, rather than castes in the strict sense of the word. From this it resulted that great natural talents, fortunate circumstances, or the favour of the sovereign could raise a man of the lowest class up to the highest dignities of the state. In the latter days of the monarchy we have an example of this in the case of Amasis, who, born among the dregs of the population, finally raised himself to the throne.[63] Such events were of frequent occurrence in all those oriental monarchies where the will of the sovereign was the supreme and undisputed law. Even in our own days, similar things have taken place in Turkey and Persia to the surprise of none but Europeans. When the master of all is placed so high above his fellow men that his subjects seem mere human dust about his feet, his caprice is quite sufficient to raise the most insignificant of its atoms to a level with the most illustrious.
Fig. 23.—Cattle Drovers. From the tomb of Ra-ka-pou, Sakkarah, 5th dynasty. (Boulak. Drawn by Bourgoin.)
Fig. 24.—Bakers. From a tomb. (Boulak, 9-1/2 inches high. Bourgoin.)
Fig. 25.—Women at a loom. From a tomb at Beni-Hassan. (Champollion, 381 bis)
Fig. 26.—Netting birds. From a tomb. (Boulak. Drawn by Bourgoin.)
The priests of the highest rank, the generals and officers of the army and the great civil functionaries, while they made no effort to rival the splendour of the royal creations, consecrated steles, images of the deity, and chapels, at their own expense. It was upon their tombs, however, that most of their care was lavished. These tombs furnish numberless themes of great interest to the historian. The tombs of the Memphite kings have not preserved for us anything that can fairly be called sculpture. All that we know of the style and methods of that art in those early times we owe to the burial-places which the members of the governing classes were in the habit of preparing during their lifetime in the necropolis of Memphis. We may say the same of the early centuries of the Middle Empire. The Egypt of the great kings belonging to the twelfth dynasty has been preserved for us upon the tombs of Ameni and Num-Hotep, the governors of the nomes in which they were buried. It is to the burial chambers at Gizeh, at Sakkarah, at Meidoum, and at Beni-Hassan that we must go for complete types of sepulchral architecture at those epochs; to the statues in the recesses of their massive walls and to the bas-reliefs in their narrow chambers, we must turn for those features of early Egyptian civilization which remained for many centuries without material change; by these monuments we are enabled to build up piece by piece a trustworthy representation of the Egyptian people both in their labours and in their pleasures. Finally it is from these tombs of private individuals that the best works of Egyptian artists have been obtained, the works in which they approached most nearly to the ideal which they pursued for so many centuries.
Fig. 27.—Shepherds in the fields. From a tomb at Sakkarah. (Boulak. 8-3/4 inches high. Drawn by Bourgoin.)
Fig. 28.—Winnowing corn. From a tomb at Sakkarah. (Boulak. Drawn by Bourgoin.)
Thanks to these monuments erected at the expense of the great lords and rich burghers of Egypt, thanks also to the climate and to the desert sand which has preserved them without material injury, the art of Egypt appears to us more comprehensive and varied than that of any other nation of which we shall have to treat; than that of Assyria for instance, which represents little but scenes of battle and conquest. A faithful mirror of Egyptian society, it has preserved for us an exhaustive record of the never-ceasing activity which created and preserved the wealth of the country; it has not even neglected the games and various pleasures in which the laborious Egyptian sought for his well earned repose. The king indeed, preserved his first place by the importance of the religious buildings which he raised, by the size of his tomb, and by the number and dimensions of the reproductions of his features; reproductions which show him in the various aspects demanded by the complex nature of the civilization over which he presided. But in the large number of isolated figures, groups, and scenes which have come down to us, we have illustrations of all classes that helped in the work of national development, from the ploughman with his ox, to the scribe crouching, cross-legged, upon his mat, from the shepherd with his flock or the hunter pushing his shallop through the brakes of papyrus, to the directors of the great public works and the princes of the blood who governed conquered provinces or guarded the frontiers of the country at the head of ever faithful armies.
Fig. 29.—Herdsman. From a tomb at Sakkarah, 5th dynasty. (Boulak.)
The art of Egypt resembled that of Greece in being a complete and catholic art, seeing everything and taking an interest in everything. It was sensitive to military glory, and at the same time it did not scorn to portray the peaceful life of the fields. It set itself with all sincerity to interpret the monarchical sentiment in its most enthusiastic and exaggerated form, but while it placed kings and princes above and almost apart from humanity, it did not forget the "humble and meek," on the contrary, it frankly depicted them in their professional attitudes, with all those ineffaceable characteristics, both of face and figure which the practice of some special trade so certainly imparts. Looked at from this point of view Egyptian art was popular, it might even be called democratic, but that such a phrase would sound curious when used in connection with the most absolute monarchy which the world has ever seen.
This absolute power, however, does not seem, speaking generally, to have been put in force in a hard or oppressive manner either by the king himself or by his agents. M. Maspero and others who, like him, live in intimate communion with the ancient Egyptians, declare that they were by no means unhappy. They tell us that the confidences whispered to them in the pictured tomb-houses of Sakkarah and Memphis complain of no misery, from the time of Mena to that of Psemethek, except during a few violent reigns and a few moments of national crisis. The country suffered only on those comparatively rare occasions when the sceptre passed into the hands of an incapable master or into those of some insatiable warrior who thought only of satisfying his own ambition, and sacrificed to the day the resources of the future. Egypt, with her river, her teeming soil and her splendid climate, found life easy as long as she enjoyed an easy and capable administration. She then gave to her princes almost without an effort all they could desire or demand.
It was one of the fundamental principles of Egyptian morality that those who were powerful should treat the poor and feeble with kindness and consideration. Their sepulchral inscriptions tell us that their kings and princes of the blood, their feudal lords and functionaries of every grade, made it a point of honour to observe this rule. They were not content with strict justice, they practised a bountiful charity which reminds us of that which is the chief beauty of the Christian's morality. The "Book of the Dead"—that passport for Egyptians into the other world which is found upon every mummy—gives us the most simple, and at the same time the most complete description of this virtue. "I have given bread to the hungry, I have given water to the thirsty, I have clothed the naked ... I have not calumniated the slave in the ears of his master." The lengthy panegyrics of which some epitaphs consist, are, in reality no more than amplifications of this theme. "As for me, I have been the staff of the old man, the nurse of the infant, the help of the distressed, a warm shelter for all who were cold in the Thebaïd, the bread and sustenance of the down-trodden, of whom there is no lack in Middle Egypt, and their protector against the barbarians."[64] The prince Entef relates that he has "arrested the arm of the violent, used brute force to those who used brute force, showed hauteur to the haughty, and lowered the shoulders of those who raised them up," that he himself on the other hand, "was a man in a thousand, wise, learned, and of a sound and truthful judgment, knowing the fool from the wise man, paying attention to the skilful and turning his back upon the ignorant, ... the father of the miserable and the mother of the motherless, the terror of the cruel, the protector of the disinherited, the defender of those whose goods were coveted by men stronger than themselves, the husband of the widow, the asylum of the orphan."[65]
Fig. 30.—From the tomb of Menofre, at Sakkarah. (Champollion, pl. 408.)
Amoni, hereditary prince of the nome of Meh, talks in the same fashion. "I have caused sorrow to no youth under age, I have despoiled no widow, nor have I repelled any labourer, I have imprisoned no shepherd, I have never taken for the labour gangs the serfs of him who had but five, there have been no paupers, nor has any man or woman starved in my time; for, although there have been years of scarcity, I have caused all the tillable land in Meh to be tilled, from the northern frontier to that of the south, and have made such arrangements and such provision for the people that there has been no famine among them; I have given to the widow and to the married woman alike, and I have never made any distinction between the great and the small in my gifts."[66]
Doubtless these laudatory self-descriptions may be exaggerated in some respects; hyperbole has ever been a favourite figure with the composers of epitaphs, and those of Egypt formed no exception to the rule. As M. Maspero remarks in connection with this question, "The man as he is, often differs very greatly from the man as he thinks he is." But we may safely say that the Egyptian realized some portion of the ideal which he set before himself. If only to obtain admiration and esteem, he would practice, to a certain extent, the virtues of which he boasted. Many signs combine to tell us that the Egyptians of all classes possessed a large fund of tenderness and good-will. The master was often both clement and charitable; the peasant, the servant, and the slave, were patient and cheerful, and that in spite of the fatigue of labours which could never enrich them. In a country so favoured by nature, men had so few wants that they had no experience of all that is implied by that doleful word poverty, with us. The pure skies and brilliant sunshine, the deep draughts of Nile water, and the moments of repose under the shadows of the sycamores, the freshness of the evening bath, the starry night with its reinvigorating breezes, were all enjoyments which the poorest could share.
We need feel no surprise therefore at the vivacity with which one of the most learned of the historians of Egypt, Brugsch-Bey, protests against the common misconception of the Egyptians "as a race grave, serious, morose, exclusive, religious, thinking much of the next world, and little of this; living, in a word, like the Trappists of former days. Are we to believe," he cries, "that this majestic river and the fertile soil through which it flows, this azure sky with its unclouded sun, produced a nation of living mummies, a race of solemn philosophers who looked upon life in this world as a burden to be shuffled off as quickly as possible? Travel over Egypt; examine the scenes painted and sculptured upon the walls of sepulchral chambers; read the inscriptions carved upon stone or traced in ink upon the rolls of papyrus, and you will find yourself compelled to modify the false notions you have imbibed as to the Egyptian philosophers. Nothing could be more cheerful, more amusing or more frank, than the social life of this pleasure-loving people. Far from wishing to die, they prayed to the gods for a long life and a happy old age; they prayed that, 'if possible, they might live to the perfect age of one hundred and ten.' They were addicted to all kinds of pleasures. They drank, they sang, they danced, they were fond of excursions into the country, where the sports of hunting and fishing were specially reserved for the upper class. As a natural effect of this desire for enjoyment, gay conversation and pleasantry which was sometimes rather free, jokes and what we should call chaff, were much in vogue: even their tombs were not sacred from their desire for a jest."[67]
The worst government, the sternest oppression, could never extinguish this natural gaiety; it was too intimately connected with the climate and the natural conditions of the country, conditions which had never changed since the days of Menes. Never were the Egyptians more roughly treated than under Mehemet Ali and the late viceroy; their condition was compared, with justice, to that of the negroes in Carolina and Virginia, who, before the American civil war, laboured under the whips of their drivers, and enjoyed no more of the fruits of their own labour than what was barely sufficient to keep life in their bodies. Torn from their homes and kept by force in the public works, the fellahs died in thousands; those who remained in the fields had to pay the taxes one or two years in advance; they were never out of debt, nominally, to the public treasury, and the rattan of the collector extorted from them such savings as they might make during years of plenty, up to the last coin. But still laughter did not cease in Egypt! Look, for instance, at the children in the streets of Cairo who let out mounts to sight-seeing Europeans. Let the tourist trot or gallop as he will, when he stops he finds his donkey-boy by his side, full of spirits and good humour; and yet perhaps while running behind his "fare" he has been making his midday meal upon a few grains of maize tied up in a corner of his shirt.
Fig. 31.—Water Tournament, from a tomb at Khoum-el-Ahmar. (From Prisse.)
In 1862 I returned from Asia Minor in company with M. Edmond Guillaume, the architect, and M. Jules Delbet, the doctor, of our expedition to Ancyra. We took the longest way home, by Syria and Egypt. At Cairo, Mariette, after having shown us the museum at Boulak, wished to introduce us to his own "Serapeum." He took us for a night to his house in the desert, and showed us the galleries of the tomb of Apis by torchlight. We passed the next afternoon in inspecting those excavations in the necropolis of Sakkarah which have led to the recovery of so many wonders of Egyptian art. The works were carried on by the labour of four hundred children and youths, summoned by the corvée for fifteen days at a time from some district, I forget which, of Middle Egypt. At sunset these young labourers quitted their work and seated themselves in groups, according to their native villages, upon the still warm sand. Each drew from a little sack, containing his provision for two or three weeks, a dry cake; those whose parents were comfortably off had also, perhaps, a leek or a raw onion. But even for such gourmands as those, the repast was not a long one. Supper over, they chattered for a time, and then went to rest; the bigger and stronger among them took possession of some abandoned caves, the others stretched themselves upon the bare earth; but, before going to sleep they sang; they formed themselves into two choirs who alternated and answered one another, and this they kept up to an advanced hour of the night.
Fig. 32.—Mariette's House.
I shall never forget the charm of that night in the desert, nor the weird aspect of the moonlight upon the sea of sand. Were it not that no star was reflected upon its surface, and that no ray scintillated as it does even on the calmest sea, we might have thought ourselves in mid ocean. Sleep came to me reluctantly. While I listened to the alternate rise and fall of the chorus outside, I reflected upon how little those children required; upon the slender wants of their fathers and mothers, who, like them, sink into their nightly sleep with a song upon their lips. I compared this easy happiness with the restless and complicated existence which we should find, at the end of a few days, in the ambitious cities of the West, and I regretted that our year of travel, our twelve months of unrestrained life in the desert or the forest, had come to an end.
§ 5. The Egyptian Religion and its Influence upon the Plastic Arts.
We have still to notice the profoundly religious character of Egyptian art. "The first thing that excites our surprise, when we examine the reproductions of Egyptian monuments which have been published in our day, is the extraordinary number of scenes of sacrifice and worship which have come down to us. In the collection of plates which we owe to contemporary archæologists, we can hardly find one which does not contain the figure of some deity, receiving with impassive countenance the prayers or offerings of a prostrate king or priest. One would say that a country with so many sacred pictures and sculptures, must have been inhabited by gods, and by just enough men for the service of their temples.[68] The Egyptians were a devout people. Either by natural tendency or by force of education, they saw God pervading the whole of their universe; they lived in Him and for Him. Their imaginations were full of His greatness, their words of His praise, and their literature was in great part inspired by gratitude for the benefits which He showered upon them. Most of their manuscripts which have come down to us treat of religious matters, and even in those which are ostensibly concerned only with profane subjects, mythological names and allusions occur on every page, almost at every line."[69]
An examination into the primitive religious beliefs of the Egyptians is full of difficulty. In discovering new papyri, in determining the signification of signs which have been puzzling egyptologists, the inquirer will undoubtedly do good work, and will establish facts which are sure not to lack interest and even importance; but even when documents abound and when every separate word they contain is understood, even then it is very difficult to penetrate to the root of their meaning. A glimpse will be caught of it, I admit, by one of those efforts of inductive divination which distinguish modern research; but even then it will remain to explain the primitive and only half-understood notions of five or six thousand years ago in the philosophical vocabularies of to-day. It is here that the most difficult and irksome part of the task begins. We who represent the old age, or, perhaps, the prime, of humanity, think of these matters and speak of them as abstractions, while the Egyptians, who were children compared to us, thought of them under concrete forms. Their very ideals were material, more or less vague and refined perhaps, but still material. Their only conception of a deity was of a figure larger, more vigorous and more beautiful than mortals; the powers and attributes with which it was endowed were all physical. If we attempt to express their conceptions in abstract terms, we falsify their meaning. We cannot avoid altering it to a certain extent, for exact equivalents are not to be found, and, in spite of all precautions, we give to the confused and childish ideas of ancient religion, a precision which is entirely modern.
Fig. 33.—Amenhotep or Amenophis III. presented by Phré to Amen-Ra; Thebes. (Champollion, pl. 344.)
If, under these reserves, we study the Egyptian theology in its most learned and refined form—namely, that which it attained during the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties—we shall dimly perceive that it implies a belief in the unity of the First Cause of all life. But this belief is obscured behind the numerous gods who are, in fact, emanations from its substance and manifestations of its indefatigable activity. It is in the person of these gods that the divine essence takes form. Each of them has his own name, his own figure, and his own special share in the management of the universe; each of them presides over the production of some particular order of phenomena and insures their regularity. These gods are related to each other as fathers, mothers, and sons. They thus form a vast hierarchy of beings, superior to man, and each enjoying a dignity corresponding to his rank in the series. There is, so to speak, most of divinity in those who are nearest to the "one God in heaven or earth who was not begotten." These deities are divided into groups of three, each group constituting a family, like those of earth, consisting of father, mother, and son. Thus from triad to triad, the concealed god develops his sovereign powers to all eternity, or, to use an expression dear to the religious schools of ancient Egypt, "he creates his own members, which are themselves gods."[70]
How should the science of comparative religion class this form of faith? Should it be called polytheism or pantheism? The answer is, perhaps, not of great importance, and this is hardly the place for its discussion. It is certain that, practically, the Egyptians were polytheists. The Egyptian priests, indeed, had, by dint of long reflection, arrived at the comprehension, or at least at the contemplation, of that First Cause which had started the river of life—that inexhaustible stream of which the Nile with its fertilising waves was the concrete image—in its long journey across time and space. But the devotion of the people themselves never succeeded in mounting above the minor divinities, above those intermediaries in whom the divine principle and attributes became personified and put on the tangibility of body necessary to make them intelligible to childish understandings. So, too, was it with artists, and for still more powerful reasons; as by forms only could they express the ideas which they had conceived. Even in those religions which are most clearly and openly monotheistic and spiritual, such as Christianity, art has done something of the same kind. Aided in secret by one of the most powerful instincts of the human soul, it has succeeded, in spite of all resistance and protestation, in giving plastic expression to those parts of our belief which seem least fitted for such treatment; and it has caused those methods of expression to be so accepted by us that we see nothing unnatural in the representation under the features of an old man, of the first Person of the Trinity,—of that Jehovah who, in the Old Testament, proscribed all graven images with such impartial rigour; who, in the Evangel, described Himself as "the Truth and the Life."
In Egypt, both sculptors and painters could multiply their images to infinity without coming into collision with dogma, without provoking the regrets or censures of its most severe interpreters. Doctrine did not condemn these personifications, even when it had been refined and elaborated by the speculative theologians of Thebes and Heliopolis. In the interior of the temples, there was a small class of mystics who took pleasure in contemplating "the 'One' who exists by his own essential power, the only being who substantially exists." Even then men tried, as they have often done since, to define the undefinable, to grasp the incomprehensible, to perceive the supreme "I am" through the shifting and transparent veil of natural phenomena. But those refined metaphysics never touched and influenced the crowd, and never will. The deity, in order to be perceived by them and to touch their feelings, must have his unity broken; he must, if the expression be admissible, be cut up into morsels for them.
By a process of "abstraction" which is as old as religion itself, the human intelligence is led to consider separately each of the qualities of existence, each of the forces which it perceives to be at work either within man himself or in the exterior world. At first it thinks those forces and qualities are distributed impartially to all creation. It confounds existence with life. Hence the reign of fetishism, when man believes, as young children do, that thought, passion, and volition like his own, are to be found in everything he meets. His own image seems to him reflected as in a mirror with a thousand converging facets, and he is unable to distinguish the real condition of things outside it.
Certain celestial and terrestrial bodies make a particularly strong impression upon his mind by their size, their beauty, by their evil or beneficial effects upon himself. They fill him with more than the average gratitude, admiration, or terror. Driven by the illusion which possesses him, he places the origin of those qualities which seem to him the highest and most important, in the bodies which have made so deep an impression upon his senses; to them he attributes the friendly or hostile influences which alternately excite his desire and his fear. According to circumstances a fetish might be a mountain, a rock or a river, a plant or an animal. It might be those heavenly bodies which exercised much more influence over the life of primitive man than they do over us; it might be the moon and stars, which tempered the darkness of the night and diminished its terrors; it might be the cloud, from whose bosom came rain and thunder; above all, it might be the sun which returned every morning to light and warm the world. Differences of climate and race had their modifying effect, but everywhere one common characteristic is to be found. It was always to some material and visible object that the human intellect referred those forces and qualities which it drew from its own consciousness; forces which, when thus united with something tangible, constituted the first types of those divine beings whom mankind have so long adored, to whom they have turned for ages in their hope and fear.
As the years passed away, man advanced beyond his primitive conceptions. He did not entirely renounce them—we may indeed see reminiscences of them all around us—but he superimposed others upon them which were more complex. His powers of observation, still imperfect though they were, began to insinuate into his mind a disbelief in the activity of inanimate matter, and those objects which were nearest to him, which he could touch with his hand, were the first victims of his disenchantment. Thus began a long course of intellectual development, the result of which we know, although the various stages of its progress are difficult to follow at this distance of time. It appears certain, however, that star worship formed the transition between fetishism and polytheism. Men no longer attributed vital forces and pre-eminent qualities generally to bodies with which they themselves were in immediate contact, to stones and trees; but they found no difficulty in continuing to assign them to those great luminaries whose distance and beauty placed them, so to speak outside the material world. As they gradually deprived inanimate matter of the properties with which they had once gifted it, they sought for new objects to which they might attach those properties. These they found in the stars which shone in the firmament century after century, and knew neither old age nor death; and especially in the most brilliant, the most beneficent, and the most necessary of them all, in that sun whose coming they awaited every morning with an impatience which must once have been mixed with a certain amount of anxiety.
The attributes which awakened intelligence had taken away from the inanimate objects of the world could not be left floating in space. They became gradually and imperceptibly grouped in men's minds around the great luminary of day, and a bond of union was found for the different members of the group by endowing the sun with a personality modelled upon that of man. This operation was favoured by the constitution of contemporary language, by its idioms made up entirely of those images and metaphors which, by their frank audacity, surprise and charm us in the works of the early poets. It commenced with the first awakening of thought, when man endowed all visible nature with the bounding life which he felt in his own veins. No effort of intelligence was required for its commencement or for its prosecution. The sun became a young hero advancing, full of pride and vigour, upon the path prepared for him by Aurora; a hero who pursued his daily path in spite of all obstacle or hindrance, who, when evening came, went to his rest amid all the glories of an eastern sunset, and amid the confidence of all that after his hours of sleep he would take up his eternal task with renewed vigour. He was an invincible warrior. He was sometimes an angry master, whose glance killed and devoured. He was above all the untiring benefactor of mankind, the nurse and father of all life. Whether as Indra or as Amen-Ra, it was the same cry that went up to him from Egypt and Hindostan; the prayers which we find in the Vedas and in the papyri, breathe the same sentiments and were addressed to the same god.[71]
This solar god and the divinities who resemble him, form the transition from the simple fetish to complete deities, to those gods who played such an important part in the Egyptian religion, and attained to their highest and most complete development in the Hellenic mythology. In some respects, the luminous globe of the sun with its compulsory course, belonged to the same category as the material objects which received the first worship of humanity. But its brilliance, its tranquil and majestic movement, and the distance which conceals its real substance from the eye of man, allowed his imagination to endow it with the purest and noblest characteristics which the finest examples of humanity could show; while the phenomena which depend upon its action are so numerous that there was no hesitation in assigning to it qualities and energies of the most various kinds.
This type when once established was used for the creation of other deities, which were all, so to speak, cast in the same mould. As the intellect became more capable of abstraction and analysis, the personality and moral individuality of these gods gradually threw off its astral or physical characteristics, although it never lost all trace of their existence. It resulted that, both in Egypt and in Greece, there were deities who were mere entities, the simple embodiment of some power, some quality, or some virtue. It requires all the subtle finesse of modern criticism to seek out and distinguish the obscure roots which attach these divinities to the naturalistic beliefs of earlier ages. Sometimes absolute certainty is not to be attained, but we may safely say that a race is polytheistic when we find these abstract deities among their gods, such deities as the Ptah, Amen, and Osiris of the Egyptians, and the Apollo and Athenè of the Greeks.[72]
Fig. 34.—Amen or Ammon, from a bronze in the Louvre. Height 22·04 inches.
We may, then, define polytheism as the partition of the highest attributes of life between a limited number of agents. The imagination of man could not give these agents life without at the same time endowing them with essential natural characteristics and with the human form, but, nevertheless, it wished to regard them as stronger, more beautiful and less ephemeral than man. The system had said its last word and was complete, when it had succeeded in embodying in some divine personality each of those forces whose combined energy produces movement in the world or guarantees its duration.
When religious evolution follows its normal course, the work of reflection goes on, and in course of time makes new discoveries. It refers, by efforts of conjecture, all phenomena to a certain number of causes, which it calls gods. It next perceives that these causes, or gods, are of unequal importance, and so it constitutes them into a hierarchy. Still later it begins to comprehend that many of these causes are but different names for one thing, that they form but one force, the application of a single law. Thus by reduction and simplification, by logic and analysis, is it carried on to recognize and proclaim the unity of all cause. And thus monotheism succeeds to polytheism.
Fig. 35.—Ptah,
from a bronze in the Louvre.
Actual size.
In Egypt, religious speculation arrived on the threshold of this doctrine. Its depths were dimly perceived, and it was even taught by the select class of priests who were the philosophers of those days; but the monotheistic conception never penetrated into the minds of the great mass of the people.[73] Moreover, by the very method in which Egyptian mythology described it, it was easily adapted to the national polytheism, or even to fetish worship. The theory of emanations reconciled everything. The different gods were but the different qualities of the eternal substance, the various manifestations of one creative force. These qualities and energies were revealed by being imported into the world of form. They took finite shape and were made comprehensible to the intellect of man by their mysterious birth and generation. It was necessary, if the existence of the gods were to be brought home to mankind, that each of them should have a form and a domicile. Imagination therefore did well in commencing to distinguish and define the gods; artists were piously occupied when they pursued the same course. They gave precision of contour to the forms roughly sketched, and by the established definition which they gave to each divine figure, we might almost say that they created the gods.
Fig. 36.—Osiris,
from a bronze in the Louvre.
Height 22·8 inches.
Their task was, in one sense, more difficult than that of the Greek artists. When newly born Greek art first began to make representations of Greek deities, the work of intellectual analysis and abstraction had already come to a state of maturity which it never reached in Egypt. The divinities were fewer in number and consequently more fixed and decided in their individual characteristics. The Egyptian polytheism was always more mixed, more strongly tinged with fetishism than that of Greece. Even in those centuries in which the ideas of the Egyptian people were most elevated and refined, the three successive stages, which are always found in the development of religious life, co-existed in the mind of the nation. A few more or less isolated thinkers were already seeking to formulate monotheism. The élite of the nation—the king, the priest, and the military class—were adoring Amen and Ptah, Khons or Khonsu, Mouth, Osiris and Horus, Sekhet, Isis, Nephtis and many other divinities; all more or less abstract in their nature, and presiding over special phenomena. As for the lower orders of the people, they knew the names of these deities and associated themselves with the great public honours which were paid to them; but their homage and their faith were more heartily rendered to such concrete and visible gods as the sacred animals, as the bulls Apis and Mnevis, the goat of Mendes, the ibis, the hawk, &c. None of the peculiarities of Egyptian civilization struck Greek travellers with more amazement than this semiworship of animals.[74]
Fig. 37.—The goddess Bast.
(From a bronze in the Louvre.
Actual Size.)
Later theology has succeeded in giving more or less subtle and specious explanations of these forms of worship. Each of these animals has been assigned, as symbol or attribute, to one of the greater deities. As for ourselves we have no doubt that these objects of popular devotion were no more than ancient fetishes. In the long prehistoric centuries, while the Egyptian race was occupied in making good its possession of the Nile valley and bringing it into cultivation, imagination deified these animals, some for the services which they rendered, others for the terror which they inspired; and it was the same with certain vegetables.
We find traces of this phenomenon, which at first seems so inexplicable, among the other races of antiquity, but it is nowhere else so marked as it is in Egypt. When Egypt, after being for three centuries subject to the influence and supremacy of the Greek genius, had lost all but the shadow of its former independence and national life; when all the energy and intellectual activity which remained to it was concentrated at the Greco-Syrian rather than Egyptian Alexandria, the ancient religion of the race lost all its highest branches.[75] The aspirations towards monotheism took a form that was either philosophical and Platonic or Christian; and as for the cultivated spirits who wished to continue the personification of the eternal forces of the world and of the laws which govern them, these laws and forces presented themselves to their minds in the forms which had been figured and described by the sculptors, painters, and writers of Greece. They accepted, without hesitation or dispute, the numbers and physical characteristics of the divine types of Greece. From end to end of the habitable earth, as the Greeks boasted, the gods of the Hellenic pantheon absorbed and assimilated all those of other nationalities; within the boundaries of the Roman Empire, at least, its polytheism became a kind of universal religion for civilized humanity, and was adopted by nations of the most diverse origin and language. The lower classes alone, who read neither Homer nor Hesiod and were unable to admire the statues of the Greek sculptors, were kept free from the powerful and softening influence of poetry and art. They guarded with obstinacy the ancient foundations of their early faith, and in the void left by the disappearance of the national gods, their primitive beliefs seem to have put on a new life and to have enjoyed a restored prestige. Thus we may see, in forest clearings, the ancient but still vigorous stumps of great trees which have been felled send out fresh shoots to renew their youth.
This persistence, this apparent recrudescence of fetishism made itself felt in Egypt alone. It amazed and scandalized both pagans and Christians during the early centuries of Christianity. They mocked at a people who "hardly dared to bite a leek or an onion; who adored divinities which grew in their own gardens,"[76] and a god which was nothing but a "beast wallowing on a purple carpet."[77] Guided by a more critical knowledge of the past, we are now better able to understand the origin of these beliefs and the secret of their long duration. We are enabled to account for them by that inexperience which falsifies all the judgments of infancy, in the race as well as in the individual; we see that they are the exaggeration of a natural sentiment, which becomes honourable and worthy of our sympathy when it is addressed to the useful and laborious helpers of man, to domestic animals, for instance, such as the cow and the draught ox.
It would be interesting to know why these beliefs were so curiously tenacious of life in Egypt; perhaps the reason is to be found in the prodigious antiquity of Egyptian civilization. That civilization was the oldest which the world has seen, the least remote from the day of man's first appearance upon the earth. It may therefore be supposed to have received more deeply, and maintained more obstinately, those impressions which characterize the infancy of men as well as of mankind. Add to this, that other races in their efforts to emerge from barbarism, were aided and incited by the example of races which had preceded them on the same road. The inhabitants of the Nile Valley, on the other hand, were alone in the world for many centuries; they had to depend entirely upon their own internal forces for the accomplishment of their emancipation; it is, therefore, hardly surprising that they should have remained longer than their successors in that fetish worship which we have asserted to be the first stage of religious development.[78]
Fig. 38.—Painted bas-relief.
Boulak. (Drawn by Bourgoin.)
This stage must never be forgotten, if we wish to understand the part which art played in the figuring of the Egyptian gods. In most of the types which it created it mixed up the physical characteristics of man and beast. Sometimes the head of an animal surmounts the body of a man or woman; sometimes, though more rarely, the opposite arrangement obtains. The Sphinx, and the bird with a human head which symbolizes death, are instances of the latter combination. The usual explanation of these forms is as follows. When men began to embody for the eye of others the ideas which they had formed of the divine powers, they adopted as the foundation for their personifications the noblest living form they knew, that of man. In the next place they required some easy method for distinguishing their imaginary beings one from another. They had to give to each deity some feature which should be peculiar to him or her self, and should allow of his being at once identified and called by his own name. The required result was obtained in a very simple manner, by adding to the constant quantity the human figure, a varying element in the heads of different animals. These the fauna of Egypt itself afforded. In the case of each divinity, the particular animal was selected which had been consecrated to it, which was its symbol or at least its attribute, and the head or body, as the case might be, was detached in order to form part of a complex and imaginary being. The special characteristics of the animal made use of were so frankly insisted upon that no confusion could arise between one deity and another. Even a child could not fail to see the difference between Sekhet, with the head of a cat or a lioness, and Hathor, with that of a cow.
We do not refuse to accept this explanation, but yet we may express our surprise that the Egyptians, who were able, even in the days of the ancient empire, to endow the statues of their kings with so much purity and nobility of form, were not disgusted by the strangeness of such combinations, by their extreme grotesqueness, and by the disagreeable results which they sometimes produced. A certain beauty may be found in such creations as the Sphinx, and a few others, in which the human face is allied to the wings of a bird, and the trunk and posterior members of the most graceful and powerful of quadrupeds. But could any notion be more unhappy than that of crowning the bust of a man or woman with the ugly and ponderous head of a crocodile, or with the slender neck and flat head of a snake?
Fig. 39.—Sekhet. Louvre. (Granite. Height 0·50 metres.)
Every polytheistic nation attacked this problem in turn, and each solved it in its own manner. The Hindoos multiplied the human figure by itself, and painted or carved their gods with three heads and many pairs of arms and legs, of which proceeding traces are to be found among the Western Asiatics, the Greeks, and even the Latins. The Greeks represented all their gods in human form, and yet by the delicacy of their contours and the general coherence of their characterization, they were enabled to avoid all confusion between them. With them, too, costume and attributes helped to mark the difference. But even where these are absent, our minds are never left in doubt. Even a fragment of a torso can be at once recognized at sight as part of a statue of Zeus, of Apollo, or of Bacchus, and a head of Demeter or Hera would never be confounded with one of Artemis or Pallas.
Fig. 40.—Isis-Hathor. Louvre.
(Bronze. Actual size.)
It may be said that the artists of Egypt were lacking in the skill necessary for all this, or that they generalized their forms to such a degree as to leave no scope for such subtle differences. But, in fact, we find in their oldest statues a facility of execution which suggests that, had they chosen, they could have expressed anything which can be expressed by the chisel. That they did not do so, we know. They contented themselves with plastic interpretations so rough and awkward that, perhaps, we should rather seek their explanation in some hereditary predisposition, some habit of thought and action contracted in the infancy of the race and fortified by long transmission.
Fig. 41.—A Sphinx; in rose granite. Thirteenth dynasty. Louvre. Drawn by Saint-Elme Gautier.
We have already spoken of that which we believe to be the cause of the peculiar forms under which the Egyptians figured their deities, namely, the fetish worship, which was the earliest, and for many centuries the only, form of religion which they possessed. That worship had struck its roots so deeply into the souls of the people, that it could not be torn up even when a large part of the nation had gradually educated itself to the comprehension of the highest religious conceptions. Its practices never fell into total neglect, and its influence was so far maintained that during the decadence of the nation it again became the ruling faith, so that foreign observers were led to believe that the Egyptian religion began and ended in the adoration of plants and sacred animals. The eyes and the imagination being thus educated by immemorial custom, it is not surprising that even the most cultivated section of the people should have seen nothing offensive in the representation of their gods sometimes under the complete form of an animal (Horus is often symbolized under the likeness of a hawk), sometimes as composite monsters with human bodies and animal heads.
Fig. 42.—Touaris. Boulak.
(Drawn by G. Bénédite.)
Take, for a moment, the bird to which we have just alluded. The hawk, like the vulture, plays an important part in Egyptian art. The vulture symbolizes Maut, the spouse of Amen. It furnishes the sign by which her name is written, and sometimes, as the symbol of maternity, its head appears over the brow of the goddess, its wings forming her head-dress. The goddess Nekheb, who symbolizes the region of the South, is also represented by a vulture.[79] So it is with the ibis. It supplies the character by which the name Thoth is written, and that god is figured with the head of an Ibis. The part played by these birds in the representation of the gods, both in the plastic arts and in writing, is to be explained by the sentiments of gratitude and religious veneration of which they were the objects, sentiments which were the natural outcome of the practical services which they rendered to mankind.
Fig. 43.—Rannu
(from Wilkinson).
When the early fathers of the nation first established themselves upon the banks of the Nile, they found invaluable allies in those energetic birds of prey, and the alliance has been continued to their latest descendants. After the annual inundation the damp earth was overrun by toads and frogs, by snakes and lizards and all kinds of creeping things. Fishes, left by the retreating flood in pools which were soon dried up by the blazing sun, perished, and, decomposing, rendered the air noisome and malarious. In addition to this there were the corpses of wild and domestic animals, and the offal of every kind which accumulated round the dwellings of the peasantry and rapidly became putrid under the sun of Egypt. If left to decompose they would soon have bred a pestilence, and in those days human effort was not to be reckoned upon in the work of sanitation. To birds of prey, then, was assigned the indispensable work of elimination and transformation, an office which they yet fill satisfactorily in the towns and villages of Africa. Thanks to their appetite and to the powerful wings which carried them in a twinkling to wherever their presence was required, the multiplication of the inferior animals was kept within due limits, and decomposing matter was recalled into the service of organic life. Had these unpaid scavengers but struck work for a day, the plague, as Michelet puts it, would soon have become the only inhabitant of the country.[80]
Fig. 44.—Horus; from a bronze in the Posno collection. (Height 38 inches.)
The worship of the hawk, the vulture, and the ibis, had, then, preceded by many centuries that of the gods who correspond to the personages of the Hellenic pantheon. Rooted by long custom in the minds of the people, it did not excite the ire of the wise men of Heliopolis or Thebes. The doctrine of emanation and of successive incarnations of the deity, permitted their theology to explain and to accept anything, even those things which at a later epoch seemed nothing more than the grossest creations of popular superstition. These objects of veneration were therefore enabled to maintain their places by the side of the superior gods, to represent them in written characters and in plastic creations, and, in the latter case, to be blended with the forms of man himself. To us, accustomed as we are to the types created by Greek anthropomorphism, these figures are surprising; but to the Egyptians they seemed perfectly natural, for they offered the characteristic features of the animals which they had loved, respected, and adored ever since the birth of their civilization.
Fig. 45.—Thoth. Louvre.
Enamelled clay.
Actual size.
It is difficult for us to see things with the same eyes as the contemporaries of Cheops or even of Rameses; to enter into their ideas and sentiments so as to feel with them and to think with their brains. Let us attempt to do so for a moment; let us make one of those intellectual efforts which are demanded from the historian, and we shall then understand how it was, that the Egyptians were not offended by a combination of two classes of forms which, to us, seem so differently constituted and so unequal in dignity. The deity took the form of an animal and revealed himself in it, just as he took that of a man, or of a statue which he was supposed to animate, and to which he was attached. In one of his most curious and most penetrating essays, M. Maspero explains that the sacred animal was—like the king, the son of Amen; like the statue fashioned by the hands of a sculptor—the manifestation of the deity, the strength and support of his life, his double, to use an expression dear to the Egyptians. At Memphis, Apis repeated and constantly renewed the life of Ptah; he was, in a word, his living statue.[81]
Egyptian art was, then, the faithful and skilful interpretation of the ideas of the people. What the Egyptians wished to say, that they did say with great clearness and a rare happiness of plastic expression. To accuse them, as they have been sometimes accused, of a want of taste, would be to form a very narrow conception of art, to sin against both the method and the spirit of modern criticism. This latter seeks for originality and admires it, and all art which is at once powerful and sincere arouses its interest. We do not, however, wish to deny that their conception of divinity is less favourable to the plastic arts than the anthropomorphism of the Greeks. No more simple method of distinguishing one god from another could well be imagined than that of giving to each, as his exclusive property, the head of some well-known animal; the employment of such an unmistakable sign rendered the task of the artist too easy, in giving him assurance that his meaning would be understood at a glance without any particular effort on his part.
Fig. 46.—Sacrifice to Apis,
from Mariette.
The value of an artistic result is in proportion to the difficulty of its achievement. The Greek sculptor had nothing beyond the bodily form and the features of man with which to give a distinct individuality to each god and goddess of his mythology; he was therefore obliged to make use of the most delicate and subtle distinctions of feature and contour. This necessity was a great incentive to perfection; it drove him to study the human form with a continuous energy which, unhappily for himself, was not required of the Egyptian sculptor or painter. Art and religion have ever been so closely allied that it was necessary that we should give some account of the original characteristics of the Egyptian beliefs, but we shall make no attempt to describe, or even to enumerate, the chief divinities of the Egyptian pantheon; such an attempt would be foreign to the purposes which we have in view. We have, however, already mentioned most of the chief deities of Egypt, and we shall have occasion to draw the attention of our readers to others, in speaking of the tombs and temples, the statues and bas-reliefs, of the country. Now, each of these gods began by being no more than the local divinity of some particular nome or city. As a city grew in importance, so did its peculiar god, and sometimes it came about that both a dynasty of kings and a divinity were imposed upon Egypt by the power of what we may call their native city. In the course of time a number of successive deities thus held the supreme place, each of whom preserved, even after his fall, some of the dignity which he had acquired during his period of supremacy.
The two first dynasties, the authors of Egyptian unity, had their capital in the nome of Abydos, the nome which contained the tomb of Osiris; and it was in their reign that, from one end to the other of the Nile valley, spread the worship of that god; of that Osiris who, with Isis, seemed to Herodotus to be the only deity whom all the Egyptians combined to adore.[82] Under the following dynasties, whose capital was Memphis, Ptah rose into the first place; but, as if by a kind of compromise, his dignity is combined with that of the great god of Abydos under the names of Ptah-Osiris and Ptah-Sokar-Osiris. Toum, the chief deity of Heliopolis, never rose above the second rank because Heliopolis itself was neither a royal city nor even the birthplace of any powerful dynasty. During all this period we hear nothing of Amen, the local deity of Thebes; his name is hardly to be found upon any monument earlier than the eleventh dynasty, but, with the rise of the Theban empire he began to be a conspicuous figure in Egypt. During the domination of the Hyksos, their national deity, Soutekh or Set, overshadowed the ancient divinities of the soil; but the final victory of Thebes under Ahmes I. installed Amen as the national god, and we shall see hereafter what magnificent temples were raised in his honour by the kings of the brilliant Theban dynasties. His successor would no doubt have been Aten, the solar disc, had Tell-el-Amarna, the new capital of Amenophis IV., and the worship which was there inaugurated, enjoyed a less ephemeral existence; but Thebes and Amen soon regained their supremacy. Again, when the Egyptian centre of gravity was transported to the Delta, the local deities of the district, and especially Neith, conquered the first place in the religious sentiments of the people. Under the Persians they returned to Amen, as to the protector who could give back to the nation its former independence and power. Under the Ptolemies, Horus and Hathor were in the ascendant, and later still, under the Roman emperors, the worship of the Isis of Philæ became popular and was prolonged in that island sanctuary until the sixth century of our era.
The movement of religious thought in Egypt was very different from what we shall find in Greece. We find no god, like that of the Hellenes, whose pre-eminence dates back to the remote origin of the Aryan race, a pre-eminence which was never menaced or questioned;[83] we find no Zeus, no Jupiter, whose godhead was conceived from century to century in an ever larger and more purified spirit, until at last it was defined in the famous hymn of Cleanthe as that "which governed all things according to law." We have pointed out how greatly the Greek artists profited by their efforts to endow the piety of their countrymen with an image of this great and good being, which should be worthy of the popular faith in him as the father of gods and men. The Egyptian artist could find no such inspiration in a long succession of gods, no one of whom succeeded in concentrating supreme power in his hands. No such ideal existed for them as that which the popular conscience and the genius of the national poets created in the lord of Olympus. Neither Thebes nor Sais could give birth to a Phidias; to an artist who should feel himself spurred on by the work of all previous generations to produce a masterpiece in which the highest religious conception, to which the intelligence of the race had mounted by slow degrees, should be realized in visible form.
§ 6. That Egyptian Art did not escape the Law of Change, and that its History may therefore be written.
It may be well, before embarking upon the study of Egyptian architecture, sculpture, and painting, to dispel a prejudice which in spite of recent discoveries still exists in some minds; we mean, the belief in the immobility of Egyptian art. This mistake is a very ancient one. The Greeks were the first to make it, and they transmitted their error to us. In regard to this we must cite the famous passage of Plato[84]:—"Long ago they appear to have recognized the very principle of which we are now speaking—that their young citizens must be habituated to forms and strains of virtue. These they fixed, and exhibited patterns of them in their temples; and no painter or artist is allowed to innovate upon them, or to leave the traditional forms and invent new ones. To this day no alteration is allowed, either in these arts or in music, at all. And you will find that their works of art are painted or moulded in the same forms that they had ten thousand years ago—(this is literally true and no exaggeration)—their ancient paintings and sculptures are not a whit better or worse than the work of to-day, but are made with just the same skill."
This strange assertion was long accepted without question even in modern times. We need not go back to the archæologists of the last century, whose credulity is to be accounted for by their lack of materials for the formation of a better judgment. In 1828 in his first lecture at the Bibliothèque Royale, Raoul-Rochette turned his attention to Egypt. He had before his eyes, in the Parisian museums and in the Description de l'Égypte, works which dated from the finest periods of the Theban dynasties, although the still more ancient monuments which now form the glory of the Boulak Museum were not yet discovered; he might have perceived and pointed out the difference between the statues of Ousourtesen, Thothmes, and Rameses on the one hand, and those of the Sait epoch; still more should he have remarked upon the characteristics which distinguish the monuments of independent Egypt from those which were erected under the Ptolemies and the Roman emperors. What he did say, however, and say with consummate confidence was: "From the first of the Pharaohs to the last of the Ptolemies, the art of Egypt never varied."[85]
Such crude notions as this can no longer be upheld. M. Marriette protests in the following almost indignant terms against certain utterances of M. Renan which seemed to him to imply the same doctrine. "M. Renan loves[86] to represent ancient Egypt as a sort of China, walled in and fortified against the exterior world, immovable, old even in its infancy, and arrived by a single spring at a degree of civilization which it never surpassed. He looks upon the country as a great plain, green indeed and fertile, but without accidents of contour to break the monotony of the landscape. And yet Egypt had periods of grandeur and decadence more marked than those of other countries. Her civilization went through all the different phases; it went through many complete transformations, it had its sudden moments of brilliancy and its epochs of eclipse. Its art was not so stationary as to prevent us from writing its history. The influence of Egypt was felt from Mesopotamia to the equator. Thothmes, in a word, was no Chinaman. Egypt perished because in attacking foreign nations she provoked a reaction which was fatal to her."[87]
Now that we are enabled to contrast the statues of the Ptolemaic period with those of the pyramid builders, we find nothing surprising in Mariette's language; but even before these means of study were open to us, criticism should have cast more than doubt upon the assertions of Plato; it should have appealed from a theory which was at variance with all historical analogies to the monuments themselves to tell the truth, to those monuments which were best known and understood. Was it likely, was it possible, that such a people as that which created these monuments, should remain for more than forty centuries unaffected by the law of continual, even if almost insensible, change? What right have we thus to place Egypt and China apart from the rest of humanity? There are, it is true, some peoples who are more attached than others to traditional customs and ancient institutions; they are more conservative, to use the modern phrase. But, although their evolution is a slower process, it is there; our eyes cannot perceive any movement in the small hand of a watch, but yet it does move exactly in the same fashion as that which marks the seconds. Upon the banks of the Peiho as upon those of the Nile, upon the whole surface of our planet, man is not; he becomes, to borrow one of the favourite expressions of German philosophy. History can admit no exception to this law either for China or Egypt. In the cases of both those countries there is a certain illusion, which is to be explained by our ignorance. We are not well enough acquainted with them to grasp the different periods of their political and social, their artistic and literary development. For one who is too far off or very short-sighted the details of the most varied landscape become obliterated or confused; waste land and smiling fields are blended together; hollows and hillocks lose the vigour of their contours.
China, as we have said, does not enter into our purview; and as for Egypt, the deeper we penetrate into her history the more are we convinced that her long career was troubled by moments of crisis similar to those which have come to other human societies. The narratives of the Greek historians give us reason to suspect that it was so, and the monuments which have been discovered insist upon the same truth, and compel us to accept it. For certain epochs these are very abundant, beautiful, and varied. Afterwards they become rare and clumsy, or altogether wanting; and again they reappear in great numbers and in their full nobility, but with a different general character. These contrasts and temporary eclipses occur again and again. How, then, can we doubt that here, as elsewhere, there were alternations of grandeur and poverty, of periods of conquest and expansion and epochs of civil war or of defeat by foreign invaders? May we not believe that through the clouds which obscure the causes of such changes we may catch glimpses of those periods of decadence and renascence which, following one upon the other, exhausted in the end the genius of the race?
Let us take a single example—the most striking of all. "After the sixth dynasty all documents cease; they are absolutely wanting until the eleventh, the first of the Middle Empire. This is one of those sudden interruptions in the history of Egypt which may be compared to the temporary disappearance of those curious rivers which run partly underground."[88]
Fig. 47.—Statue from the Ancient Empire, in limestone. Boulak. Drawn by Bourgoin.
When historians, living as long after our nineteenth century as we do after the epochs of Memphite and Theban supremacy in Egypt, come to treat the history of the past, they will perhaps look upon the ages which rolled away between the fall of Græco-Roman civilization and the revival of learning in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as no longer than that which divided the ancient from the middle empire of Egypt, or the latter from the dynasties of Thebes. In the distant future men will know, in a vague fashion, that between the fall of Rome and the discovery of printing, or that of America, there were great movements among the nations, and an apparent recoil of civilization; but memory and imagination will leap without effort over the gap, over that period which we call the Middle Ages. The Roman empire will seem to touch our modern civilization, and many of the differences which strike us so strongly will be imperceptible. They will perceive that we had a new religion and new inventions, but they will take more account of the resemblances than of the differences. Our languages, manners, laws, and forms of government will seem to them continuations of those of Greece and Rome. In that which we call antiquity, and in Christian Europe, they will find similar literary habits and standards of criticism, the same judicial nomenclature, the same terms for monarchy, empire, and republic, the same titles for kings and Cæsars. These different civilizations are like star clusters. To us who are among them they seem distinct enough, but to generations which are divided from them by a vast space of time they will seem to form but one nebulous body.
Fig. 48.—Woman kneading dough. Statuette from the Ancient Empire, in limestone.
Drawn by Bourgoin.
Fig. 49.—The Scribe Chaphré.
Fifth dynasty. Boulak. Limestone.
Egypt, then, had her great convulsions like the rest of the world. She met with disasters, and underwent periods of confusion like those which overtook the nations of the West between the reigns of Trajan and Charlemagne. Wars and invasions, the action and reaction of civilization, had upon her the same influence as upon them, and, in transforming her sentiments and ideas, caused their plastic expression to pass through a series of changes in taste and style. The Theban tomb of the time of Rameses is very different from that of Memphis and the ancient empire; the new empire constructed no buildings like the greater pyramids, but its temples were larger and more magnificent than any of their predecessors. It was the same with sculpture. A cultivated eye has no need to run to inscriptions to enable it to distinguish between works of the ancient and of the middle empire; nor will it confound works created in either of those periods with those of the Sait epoch. The differences are almost as well marked as those which enable archæologists to distinguish a torso of the time of Phidias from one of the school of Praxiteles or Lysippus. These differences it will be our duty to describe hereafter, but our readers may perhaps discover them for themselves if they examine the illustrations to this chapter, which are arranged in chronological order.
Variety is universal in Egypt, local variety as well as that of different periods. Language had its dialects as well as art. The pronunciation of Upper and that of Lower Egypt was quite dissimilar, except in the case of a few letters. In the same way different cities had distinct schools of sculpture and painting, which were distinguished from one another by their traditional methods of conception and execution. Neither under Ousourtesen nor under Rameses, had art the same character in the cities of the Delta, in Memphis, and in Thebes. Among the works in sculpture executed for Rameses II., those of Abydos were more elegant and refined than those of Thebes.
Fig. 50.—The Lady Naï. Wooden statue
from the 19th or 20th dynasty. Louvre.
How, then, are we to explain the error committed by Plato, and by him transmitted to posterity? The explanation is easy. The Greeks visited Egypt too late in its history to form a true judgment. In Plato's time the Egyptians were still trying, by violent but spasmodic efforts, to reconquer the independence which had been destroyed by the successor of Cyrus. But the moment was at hand when even these intermittent struggles were to be abandoned, and they were to finally succumb to sovereigns of foreign blood. Their still brilliant civilization might deceive a passing stranger, but the decadence had commenced—a decadence slow indeed, but none the more remediable.
Some years after the visit of Plato, the two Nectanebos, more especially the second, devoted themselves with energetic ardour to the restoration of the ancient buildings of the country and to the construction of new ones, such as the temple at Philæ. Buildings signed with their name are to be found all over Egypt; but these simultaneous undertakings seem to betray a sense of vanishing power, an uncertainty of the morrow, a feverish activity seeking to deceive itself and to hide its own weakness. Nothing could be more precarious than the political conditions under which this activity was displayed. The independence of the country was maintained by the dearly bought services of Spartan and Athenian mercenaries. Twice already had Persia crushed Egyptian revolts, and she was, perhaps, but watching her opportunity to cast the hordes of Asia upon the unhappy country for a third time. Ill obeyed as he was, the "Great King" could always find troops to take part in the spoiling of a country whose riches had proved so inexhaustible. And if, by any remote chance, the Persians should fail in their enterprise, another and a graver danger would menace the Egyptian monarchy from the rapid growth of the Greek power in the Mediterranean. Since the period of the Persian wars, the language, the literature, the arts, the mythology of Greece, had spread with great rapidity; and the moment might be foreseen when a supremacy founded upon intellectual worth would be confirmed by military triumph and the creation of a vast Hellenic empire. The conquest of Egypt was begun by the Ionian soldiers and merchants who were introduced into the Nile valley by Psemethek; it was bloodlessly completed by the arms of Alexander. For three centuries the Egyptians had been accustomed to see the Greeks freely coming and going among them as merchants, as mercenary officers, as travellers eager for instruction. The latter posed as disciples before the priests of Memphis and Heliopolis, and freely expressed a warmth of admiration which could not fail to flatter the national vanity. The Greeks would be better masters than their rivals from Persia. From them the Egyptians would, at least, obtain good administration and complete freedom in the exercise of their religion in return for their taxes. The Greeks were clear-sighted enough to understand their own interests; they were too philosophical and large minded for any fanatical persecution of, or even hindrance to, the national religion; they were too much of connoisseurs to fail in respect to a form of civilization whose prodigious antiquity they divined, and before which the most eminent among them were ever inclined to bow, like youths before an old man, or a parvenu before the descendant of a long line of kings.
Thus Egypt gradually fell into the hands of strangers after the commencement of the fourth century before Christ. Ethiopians, Assyrians and Persians had by turns overrun the country. Great numbers of the Phœnicians had established themselves in it, and, after the fall of Jerusalem and Samaria, many Jews followed their example. Finally, the Greeks came in by thousands through the breaches which their predecessors had made, penetrating into all parts, and making everywhere felt the superiority of a people who had, by appropriating the useful results obtained in a long succession of centuries by more ancient races, become wealthier, stronger, and better instructed than any of their forerunners.
Thus Egypt lost her power of national rejuvenation, her power of rising again after calamity. She existed on through the centuries by mere force of habit, but she lived no more. Her population was so homogeneous, and her institutions were so solid, that the social conditions of the country could not be changed in a day or even in a century. The teachings of her religion had been established by so long a course of development, and the hands of her artists were so well practised, that the monumental types which had been created in more fertile periods of her history were reproduced until a late date, in a machine-like and instinctive fashion. Imagination was dead, and the best that could be hoped for was the faithful repetition of those forms which the genius of the race had conceived in its last moments of original thought.
Under the Sait princes, under the Psemetheks and Nekau, under Apries and Amasis, Egypt was delivered from her enemies and again became mistress of Syria and of the Island of Cyprus. She thus recovered confidence in herself and in her future, and a period ensued which had an art of its own with distinctive features which we shall endeavour to trace. In the intervals of precarious repose which characterized the Persian domination, the Egyptians had leisure neither to invent nor to improve. They copied, as well as they could, the monuments of the twenty-sixth dynasty. Art became a mere collection of technical precepts, kept together and transmitted in the intercourse of the studio, by instruction and practice; it became a mere matter of routine implying, perhaps, great technical skill, but displaying no sincere and personal feeling. Nature was no longer studied or cared for. Artists knew that the human figure should be divided into so many parts. They knew that in the representation of this or that god a certain attitude or attribute was necessary; and they carved the statues required of them after the traditional recipes. Thus Egyptian art became conventional, and so it remained to the end. So it was in the time of Diodorus. The sculptors whom that historian saw at work in Memphis and Thebes, during the reign of Augustus, carved a statue as a modern mechanic would make the different parts of a machine; they worked with a rapidity and an easy decision more characteristic of the precise workman than of the artist.[89] Thought was no longer necessary to them. The due proportions and measurements had been ascertained and fixed many centuries before their time.
Fig. 51.—Ouah-ab-ra, 26th dynasty. Louvre. Grey granite, height 37 inches.
But research must still precede discovery. We admit that a day arrived when convention was supreme in Egyptian art, but it could not have begun with convention any more than the arts of other nations. We must here define the terms which we shall have occasion to employ. Every work of art is an interpretation of nature. Let us take the example of the human figure. In the works of a single period and of a single people, it is always full of striking similarity; and yet two original artists never look at it with the same eyes. One will look at it in certain aspects and will bring out certain qualities, which another, although his contemporary and fellow-countryman, will leave in the obscurity of shadows. One will devote himself to the beauty of form, another to the accidents of colour or the expression of passion and thought. The original remains the same, although its interpretations are so various. And these varieties become still more marked when we compare the arts of different races or of different periods—the art of Egypt with that of Assyria or Greece, antique art with that of modern times.
On the other hand, the great resemblance which the arts of a single time and country bear to each other, is accounted for by the fact that their creators look upon the external facts of life through a glass, if we may put it so, tinted with the colours of the national genius. They bring to their study of an eternal model the same transient prejudices, the same preoccupations, the same desires. And yet among those highly gifted races where art holds or has held a lofty place, groups of artists are formed, either successively or simultaneously, which we call schools. Each of these groups professes to make a fresh reference to nature, to interpret her works more faithfully than its predecessors, and to draw from them typical forms which shall be more expressive of the real desires and sentiments of the public for which it caters. Between the works of these different schools, there are, however, many similarities, which are to be explained by the identity of race and belief. There are also diversities which are caused either by different conditions or by the influence of some master spirit. Wherever these schools spring up, art lives, moves, and progresses. But sooner or later comes a time when this ardour comes to an end, and exhaustion takes its place. The civilization to which it belongs becomes old and languid, and its creative power ceases like the imperceptible sinking of a flood. Now, it often happens that just before this period of lassitude, in the last days of reproductive strength and healthy maturity, a rich and brilliant school springs up, which interprets the characteristic sentiments of the civilization to which it belongs, with the greatest vigour and by admirably selected means. If such an interpretation be found satisfactory at all points, why should a better be sought for at the risk of choosing a worse? This question is but a confession of impotence on the part of those who ask it. From that moment convention will be supreme, and convention in the sense of an artificial set of rules which will release the artist from his obligation of continual reference to nature.
Fig. 52.—Sculptor at work upon an arm, Thebes. (Champollion, pl. 180.)
Such a revolution is not the work of a day. Art requires time thus to inclose itself in mere mechanical dexterity. As a nation grows old, its art, like its literature, continually becomes more and more conventional. Every great period or school leaves to the generations that come after it types which have made a vivid impression upon taste and imagination. As time goes on these types become more numerous and more brilliant, and their prestige increases until it becomes little less than tyranny. Society can only escape from its thrall at the expense of some great religious or philosophical revolution, or by the infusion of new blood from without. And these changes western civilization had to undergo in the early centuries of our era, in the establishment of Christianity, the invasion of the barbarians, and the fall of the Roman Empire.
Thanks to the peculiar circumstances of the country, Egyptian society was enabled to maintain the originality of its genius and the vitality of its institutions with unusual success. After each period of internal commotion or foreign invasion, the Egyptians set themselves to renew the chain of their national traditions. In spite of the foreign elements which had been received among them, the great mass of the people remained the same down to the latest days of antiquity. Heterogeneous constituents were absorbed by the nation without leaving any apparent trace. The ideas which the people had formed for themselves of the ultimate destiny of humanity were developed, indeed, and in successive ages varied slightly in general colour, but in none of their variations did they give rise to a new religion, as Brahmanism gave birth to Buddhism.
As often as a new dynasty of kings succeeded in driving out the foreign conqueror and in re-establishing the unity of the kingdom, so often was there a complete restoration. The aim which they had in view was ever to restore, in all its parts, a régime which was founded upon national pride. Enjoying a civilization which for ages had been alone in the world, it was in its full and glorious past that Egyptian society found the ideal to which it clung in spite of all obstacles and misfortunes. Its gaze was turned backwards towards those early sovereigns who seemed transfigured by distance, but whose presence in the memory kept alive the perpetual worship which had been vowed to them.
Fig. 53.—Sculptor carving a statue, Thebes. (Champollion, pl. 180.)
Every restoration is inspired by a more or less blind and superstitious reverence for the past. This has often been asserted in connection with politics and religion, and the assertion is equally true in respect to art. Each of those dynasties to which Egypt owed its political restoration, set themselves to repair the temples which had been destroyed, and to replace upon their pedestals the statues of gods or ancestors which had been overthrown. When new temples and new statues were to be erected, the first idea of the artists employed was to study the ancient monuments and to try to equal them. As long as Egypt preserved her vitality, the wants of the present and external influences no doubt had their effect in introducing certain changes, both in the arrangement of her buildings, and in the modelling, movement, and expression of the statues which adorned them. Ancient types were not servilely copied, but the temptation to borrow from them a point of departure, at least, for new attempts at progression, was too strong to be resisted. It was necessary that all buildings and statues should be in harmony with the remains which subsisted from previous ages, and from this it resulted that each new creative effort began by imitating what had gone before. The 'school' in process of foundation accepted on trust the architectural disposition left by its predecessor, as well as its methods of looking at nature. And this is equivalent to saying that, from its first moment, it must have been conventional in a certain degree.
This conventionality must have increased at every fresh renascence, because each new development had its own processes to transmit to posterity as well as those of its ancestors. After each recoil or pause in the progress of art, the weight of the past must have seemed heavier to those who attempted to revive the onward movement. On the one hand, the more ancient of the traditional elements had acquired, by their constant and often repeated transmission, a prestige and authority which placed them above discussion; on the other, the legacy of admitted principles and processes was continually increasing, until it became a source of embarrassment to the artist, and of destruction to his liberty. When at last the decadence of the race had advanced so far that all initiative power and independence of thought had disappeared, the time arrived when convention was everything, like one of those elaborate rituals which regulate every word, and even gesture of the officiating priest. When Plato visited Egypt, the schools of sculpture were nothing more than institutions for teaching pupils, who were remarkable for docility and for dexterity of hand, to transmit to their successors an assemblage of precepts and receipts which provided for every contingency and left no room for the exercise of fancy or discretion.
At that very time Greek art was progressing with a power and rapidity which has never been rivalled. To the school of Phidias, a school established in that Athens which yet possessed so many works of the archaic period, had succeeded those of Praxiteles and Scopas. The Greeks found means to improve, or at least to innovate, upon perfection itself. Plato did not, and could not, perceive, in his hasty journey through the Egyptian cities, that they too had seen their periods of change, their different schools and developments of style, less marked, perhaps, than those of Greece, and certainly less rapid, but yet quite perceptible to the practised observer. We are now in a better position to estimate these differences. Monuments have been brought before our eyes such as Plato never saw; namely, the statues of the ancient empire which were hidden for so many ages in the thickness of walls or in the depths of sepulchral pits. Even now these statues have not reached the age of ten thousand years so persistently attributed by the Greek philosopher to the early works which he did see, works which seemed to him exactly the same as those which were being made in his presence. But although the statues of the early empire were then no more than some thirty centuries old, Plato could not have helped seeing, if he had seen them at all, that they were quite distinct from the works which the sculptors of Nectanebo had in progress, always supposing that he looked at them with reasonable attention. The art of the pyramid builders, an art which possesses in a very high degree certain qualities for which the Egyptians have been too commonly refused credit, is known to us chiefly through the excavations of Mariette and the contents of the Boulak museum. But even before Cheops, Chefren, and their subjects had risen from their tombs, the historian might have divined by analogy, and described by no very bold conjecture, the essential characteristics of Egyptian art during its first centuries. Whether we speak of an individual, of a school, or of a people, every artistic career which follows its natural course and is not rudely broken through, ends sooner or later in conventionality, in that which is technically called mannerism. But mannerism is never the beginning of art. Art always begins by humble and sincere attempts to render what it sees. Its awkwardness is at first extreme and its power of imitation very imperfect. But it is not discouraged; it tries different processes; it takes account now of one, now of another aspect of life; it consults nature incessantly and humbly, taking note of her answers and modifying its work in obedience to their teaching. This teaching is not always rightly understood, but it is ever received with docility and good faith.
Fig. 54.—Artist painting a statue, Thebes. (Champollion, pl. 180.)
Every work which bears the marks of frank and loyal effort is interesting; but the moment in an artistic career which gives birth to real chefs d'œuvre is towards the end of that period, when the eye has become sure, and the hand sufficiently well practised, for the faithful interpretation of any model whose beauty or original expression may have caught the fancy. Success is then achieved, always provided that the model is never lost sight of or studied with anything short of passionate devotion. But the time comes when this devotion is relaxed. The artist thinks that such constant reference to nature is no longer required when he has made his final choice between the different methods which his art employs. In devoting himself to the reproduction of certain features for which he has a marked preference, he has himself produced types which he thenceforward takes pleasure in repeating, as if they were in themselves an epitome of nature's infinite diversity.
In the case of Egypt, even those discoveries which carry us back farthest do not enable us to grasp, as we can in the case of Greece, the first attempts at plastic expression, the first rude efforts of the modeller or painter; but they carry us to the end of that period which, in the case of other countries, we call archaic; and above all they transport us into the centre of the epoch which was to Egypt what the fifth century was to Greece, namely, the age of perfection. The Egyptian people had already lived so long and worked so hard that they could not free their work from certain common and irrepressible characteristics. In the plastic arts and in poetry they had their own style, and that style was both individual and original in an extraordinary degree. This style was already formed, but it was not yet robbed of its vitality by indolent content or petrified by mannerism; it had neither renounced its freedom nor said its last word.
Fig. 55.—Isis nursing Horus. Ptolemaic bronze; in the Louvre. Height, 19 inches.
§ 7. Of the place held in this work by the monuments of the Memphite period, and of the limits of our inquiry.
It will be found that a very large space in the present work, some may say too large a space, is devoted to the pre-conventional art of the ancient empire. We had reasons for taking such a course, and reasons that may be easily divined.
This early art is much less known than that of the later epochs. While the great museums of Europe are filled with statues and reliefs from Thebes, or, at least, contemporary with the Theban and Sait dynasties, monuments from the Memphite period are still rare out of Egypt. Thanks to Mariette and Lepsius, Paris and Berlin are not without remarkable examples of the art in question, but it is in Egypt itself, at the Boulak museum, that any detailed study must be made. It is there that the masterpieces of an art whose very existence was unsuspected by Champollion, are to be found; the Chephren, the two statues from Meidoum, the bas-reliefs from the tomb of Ti, and many others of similar style and value. These figures have been drawn for our readers by two skilful artists, MM. Bourgoin and Bénédite. They have rendered with fidelity and sincerity more than one object which had never before been reproduced, either by photography or otherwise. A few specimens of these treasures, selected by him who had been the means of bringing them to light and whom we now mourn, were seen at the Universal Exhibitions of 1867 and 1878, but they soon returned to Cairo, and western archæologists had but slight opportunity to become acquainted with their characteristics.
The art of the early dynasties has thus been practically ignored by those who have never visited Egypt. The lifelike and enthusiastic descriptions of M. Eugene Melchior de Vogüé and others have done something to arouse the attention of connoisseurs; but in such a matter the slightest sketch, provided it be correct so far as it goes, is of more value, as a definition of style, than the most picturesque or eloquent writing.
These reflections would by themselves justify our efforts to incorporate in our pages, reproductions of all the more important objects with which the necropolis at Memphis has enriched the museum at Boulak; but we were impelled by other motives also. The extant monuments of the ancient empire are less numerous than those of the Theban and Sait dynasties; they are of comparatively modest dimensions, and, with rare exceptions they all belong to one category, that of works relating to death and burial. They also have a special interest of their own. They enable us to protest, and to give tangible justification for our protestations, against a prejudice which dates back to a remote antiquity; even if all evidence had perished the critic would have no great difficulty in casting doubt upon assertions which were in themselves extremely improbable, but his task is rendered much easier when he is able to point to existing monuments in support of his contention, and his pleasure is great in seeing the certainty of his critical methods borne out, and Egyptian art replacing itself, as if of its own motion, under the normal conditions of historic development.
Fig. 56.—Chephren.
Sketched by Bourgoin.
See also Fig. 460.
This volume, then, will treat of the remains of early Egyptian art at a length which would seem at first sight out of due proportion to their number, but later ages will also be represented by a series of monuments, which will bring us down to the Persian conquest. This limit will hardly be over-passed in our choice of examples for study, and that for two reasons.
The first is, that at the latter period the evolution of Egyptian art was complete, it had created all that it could and had become a slave to its own past. Disposing under the Ptolemies of all the resources of a great empire, it indeed introduced certain architectural changes which do not seem to have been borrowed from previous buildings, but those changes were of no very great importance and were mostly in matters of detail. In sculpture and painting we can easily see that it abandoned itself to mere copying, to the repetition of a lesson learnt by rote. Whatever had to be done, was done in accordance with fixed tradition, and one monument only differed from another in the amount of care and manual dexterity bestowed upon it.
Our second reason is this, that Egypt was opened to the Greeks in the time of the Sait princes. From the year 650 B.C. onwards, there was constant communication between Ionia and the cities of the Delta. If at any time Greek art borrowed directly from that of Egypt, it was during the second half of the seventh century and the first half of the sixth. By the end of the sixth century, it had become so original and so skilful in the management of its selected methods of expression that it could not have been very receptive to foreign influences. After the Persian wars such influences would be still more powerless. In the Ptolemaic era the state of things was reversed; Greece imposed her language, her literature, her religious conceptions and their visible symbols upon the whole eastern world. Even then the art of Egypt could defend, and even perpetuate itself, by the power of custom and of a tradition which had been handed down through so many centuries, but the day was past when it could provoke imitation.
Fig. 57.—Ti, with his wife and son.
As for the indirect borrowings of forms and motives which Greece received from Egypt through the Phœnicians, their transmission had come to an end before the Persian conquest, even before the time of Psemethek. Egypt was represented, either immediately or through the imitative powers of the Syrian manufacturers, in the first textiles, jewels, and vases of clay or metal, carried by the Sidonian merchants to the savage ancestors of the Greeks. In this roundabout manner she had probably more influence over Greece than in their periods of more direct communication. The rays kindled upon her hearth, the earliest of civilization, fell upon the Hellenic isles as refracted rays, after passing through the varied media of Chaldæa, Assyria or Phœnicia.
Thus if we wish thoroughly to understand Greece, we must start from Memphis and go through Babylon and Nineveh, Tyre and Sidon. But Greece will be the aim of our voyage, and Egypt will interest us less on her own account than on account of that unique and unrivalled people who inherited her inventions and discoveries, and made them the foundation for a productiveness in which are summarized all the useful labours of antiquity. Egyptian art will be followed by us down to the moment in which it lost its creative force and with it its prestige. We shall rarely have occasion to speak of the Ptolemaic remains of Egyptian art. Now and then we shall go to them for examples when any particular detail which we desire to mention has not been preserved for us by earlier monuments, but even then we shall require to have good reasons for believing that such detail did in fact originate in the creative periods of the national history.
The Egypt of the Pharaohs has not even yet been entirely explored. Are we to believe that the splendid edifices reared in the cities of the Delta, and especially at Sais, by the twenty-sixth dynasty, have perished to the last stone? We are loth to think that it is so, but no remains have yet been discovered. Some day, perhaps, well directed excavations may bring to light the temples which Herodotus so greatly admired; and who knows but that we may find in them more than one of those motives and arrangements which at present are only known to exist in the buildings of the Ptolemies and of the Roman emperors?
[CHAPTER II.]
PRINCIPLES AND GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF EGYPTIAN ARCHITECTURE.
§ 1. Method to be Employed by us in our Study of this Architecture.
In the enterprise which we have undertaken the study of oriental art is but an introduction to that of Greece. Without an attentive examination of its remains we should be unable to distinguish the original elements in the work of the Greek genius from those which it borrowed from other nations. We must pass in review the whole artistic production of several great nations who occupied a vast surface of the globe, and whose fertility was prolonged through a long course of centuries, but we shall not attempt to describe singly the great buildings of Egypt and Assyria, of Persia and Phœnicia, as such an attempt would perhaps cause us to lose sight of the main object of our work.
Our task is no easy one. While limiting our study in the fashion which has been described, we must not fail to extend our purview to every fact which may help to justify the comparison which we propose to institute between the arts of Greece and those of the nations by whose teachings she profited. There is but one road to success in this double task. We must devote the greatest possible care to our study of the details in question, and then give the general results of that study; we must make ourselves thoroughly acquainted with all the phenomena, but must confine our exposition to the general laws which governed them, such as our minute inquiries have presented them to us. No circumstantial description need, therefore, be looked for in these pages even in the case of the most important and famous buildings of Egypt. No monograph upon any tomb or temple will be found, but we shall ourselves have examined many tombs and temples; we shall, to speak figuratively, have taken them to pieces, and by means of the knowledge acquired we shall endeavour to make our readers acquainted with the notions of the Egyptians upon sepulchral and religious architecture, and with the changes which those conceptions underwent in the course of centuries.
Thus, for example, we have explored the pages of Lepsius[90] and Prisse d'Avennes[91] for information relating to the sepulchres of the first six dynasties, and further researches have been made on the spot expressly for the present work, but we shall not give any descriptions or illustrations of those works individually; we shall merely use them for an ideal restoration of the characteristic tombhouse of the ancient empire. We may, perhaps, for this purpose, make a more particular reference to one or two sepulchres which are in unusually good preservation, but only for the sake of giving firm definition to the type and to its main variations.
By this analytical method of treatment we shall be enabled to give an account, which shall be at once accurate and not too long, of the constructive processes employed by the Egyptians, of the general aspect of their buildings, and of the modifications enforced by the decorative forms of which they made use. We shall be enabled to see how far those forms were decided by natural conditions, by ancient tradition, or by special wants. We shall thus include in a single chapter all that relates to principal or accessory openings, to doors and their construction, to those loftily placed windows which were calculated to give so little light. In another chapter we shall discuss the column and its capital; we shall describe the variations produced by time and materials upon its proportions and its entasis. Each assertion will be justified by reference to characteristic examples. In this matter our only difficulty will be an embarras de richesse, a difficulty of choice among the vast number of remains still existing of ancient Egypt from the time of Menes to that of the Persian conquest.
In order to avoid repetition and to put before the reader ideas which he will have no difficulty in assimilating, we shall push our work of analysis and generalization farther still. Before we embark upon the study of any special class of buildings we shall endeavour to define the general and unchanging characteristics of Egyptian architecture as a whole; characteristics which were fixed by the idiosyncracy of the race, by its beliefs and social customs, by the nature of the climate, and of the materials of which the architect could dispose. We shall do the same for Assyria and Chaldæa, for Persia and Phœnicia, for each, indeed, of the nationalities which are to be considered in our history.
These theoretical chapters will be illustrated in the same fashion as the others, except that the illustrations will partake of the generalized and abstract character of the text which they accompany. In most cases they will be simple diagrams composed for the express purpose of illustrating the definitions or descriptions to which they belong. They will each refer to some essential element in the national architecture, to some element which is not peculiar to any one edifice more than another, but is to be found in all those which have similar aims and are constructed of the same materials. Such elements are above and outside such accidental variations as may be found in details of plan or ornament; they form part of the substantial inner constitution of the arts of Egypt and Chaldæa, and make their originality indisputable.
§ 2. General Principles of Form.
The external forms of Egyptian edifices are pyramidoid; in other words, the outward surfaces of their walls affect the form of a trapezium. Thus if we prolong these surfaces vertically we find that they unite at last in a point, in the case of square buildings ([Fig. 58]), and in a ridge in those which are oblong in plan ([Fig. 59]).[92] A square building will sometimes end in a ridge, or aréte, when the principal façade and the corresponding one in its rear are vertical, the other two being inclined.
Horizontal lines predominate over inclined or vertical lines, and buildings, therefore, tend to develop in length and depth rather than in height. To this general rule, however, the pylons afford exceptions.
Fig. 58.—Square building.
The terminations of their edifices were also horizontal. There was no necessity for sloping roofs, as, away from the immediate proximity of the sea, it hardly ever rains in Egypt. Moreover, the natural conformation of the country had its influence upon the creations of its inhabitants. The unforeseen and sudden variations, the contrasts of hill and plain, which we find in a mountainous country like Greece, are here unknown. Lower Egypt is a verdant plain, intersected by canals, and stretching from the sea to the desert; in Upper and Middle Egypt the lazy river is accompanied throughout its journey from south to north by two long chains of hills, the Arab chain and the Libyan, whose summits form an almost unbroken line. Between these aspects of nature and the works of man which they enframe, there is a striking general sympathy.[93]
Fig. 59.—Rectangular and oblong building.
The peculiar character of Egyptian architecture is owing to its lateral extension, and to those wide-spreading bases and foundations which suggest the inclination of the superincumbent walls. In looking at one of these buildings, we feel that it is capable of infinite extension horizontally, and that but one of its dimensions, that of height, is limited by its essential forms. These characteristics give a look of sturdy power to Egyptian architecture which is peculiar to itself, and suggests an idea of unbounded durability.[94]
Fig. 60.—The Libyan chain, above the necropolis of Thebes.
An appearance of incomparable gravity, of solemnity, is also stamped upon it by the small number of openings for the admission of light of which it makes use, and also by their arrangement. Compared to our modern architecture, in which windows play such an important part, that of Egypt is prison-like in its gloom; but, in consequence of its rare openings and their small size, it presents more imposing walls than any other style.
One of the essential arrangements of Egyptian architecture is shared by many other countries, that of the portico, by which we mean an alternation of voids and solids in certain well defined proportions, either for ornamenting the exterior and providing a covered way, or for dividing the halls of the interior and supporting their roofs.
Fig. 61.—General appearance of an Egyptian Temple.[95]
The relation between voids and solids in any style of architecture is one of the most vital characteristics.
In the case of Egypt this relation gives rise to the following remarks:
1. Supports of the same kind and of the same diameter may have very different heights in one and the same building ([Fig. 62]).
Fig. 62.—Temple of Khons, at Thebes.
(Description de l'Égypte, t. iii., pl. 55.)
Fig. 63.—Temple of Khons, Thebes. (Descr. de l'Égypte, t. iii., pl. 55.)
Fig. 64.—Temple of Khons, Thebes. (Descr. de l'Égypte, t. iii., pl. 55.)
In a single edifice supports of different kinds but of the same diameter, have no fixed proportions, one to the other. A column with a lotus capital may be higher than one with a bell-shaped termination, and vice versâ ([Figs. 63 and 64]), while, again in a single building, we may find these two differently shaped columns equal to each other both in average diameter and in height ([Fig. 65]).
Fig. 65.—From the second court of Medinet-Abou, Thebes.
(Description, t. ii., pl. 6.)
2. The spaces, or voids, between columns of one size and similar design, may vary considerably ([Fig. 66]), and the entablatures which they support may differ greatly in height ([Fig. 66]).
Fig. 66.—Ramesseum, Thebes.
(Description de l'Égypte, t. ii., pl. 28.)
The proportional combinations of these elements are such that they cannot be methodically classified, and in this the architecture of Egypt is distinguished from that which we call classic. In Greek art there is a modulus which determines the quantitative relation of forms to each other, and fixes a mutual and invariable interdependence. This modulus is found in the diameter of the column, and the standard of proportion which is based upon it is called a canon. In Egypt, as in other countries, there must have been a certain connection between the diameter of a column and its height, but there was no approach to that rigid and immutable law which had its effect upon every detail of a Greek temple. The modulus, in Egyptian art, was used with such freedom, and gave rise to such varied proportions, that we may say that no canon existed. The elementary forms of an Egyptian edifice had so little dependence upon the modulus that we need not take it into consideration, and, in this sense, the art of Egypt was not mathematical, like that of Greece.
Fig. 67.—The Egyptian Gorge or Cornice.
Finally, all Egyptian buildings are crowned by the same entablature, an architrave and the moulding which is called the Egyptian gorge ([Fig. 67]).[96] An architectural member, the plain quadrangular architrave, is invariably inserted between this termination and the upper extremity of the voids and points of support.
THE ARAB CHAIN FROM NEAR KENEH
THE PYRAMIDS FROM OLD CAIRO
§ 3. General Principles of Construction.—Materials.
In studying a natural architecture and in attempting to assign reasons for its particular characteristics, many circumstances have to be taken into consideration. The innate genius of the race, the physical and moral conditions of its development, the perfection of its civilization, the spirit of its religion, and the ardour of its faith; none of these must be forgotten, but some of them act in such a complex fashion that they are extremely difficult to follow. In its aspirations towards the infinite and the eternal, the Egyptian religion raised from the surface of the earth many buildings which varied as greatly in form and aspect as they did in date and situation. The climatic conditions of the world have changed but little since the beginning of the historic period, and every nation has to take them into the first consideration in deciding upon its own architectural forms and principles. We have here a problem whose data do not vary, and yet its solutions have not always been the same even in a single country. Without ever being absolutely incorrect, they attached themselves now to one principle, now to another, and so gave much variety to the appearance of successive buildings under one sky and destined for similar uses.
As for the materials employed, we cannot go so far as to say that their different properties absolutely determined the characteristics of Egyptian building in advance. Stone, the chief of all materials, can lend itself to forms of great variety in principle; and so, too, can brick and wood. But although no material can narrowly confine a skilful architect, there are, nevertheless, certain systems and constructions which are only possible with those which possess certain properties.
To give but a single example, neither the hypo-style halls of Egypt and Persepolis, nor the Greek temples, with their architraves resting upon widely spaced columns, with the coffered roofs of their porticos, and their decorative and expressive sculpture, could have been carried out in brick. In stone, or rather in marble, alone, could the typical temple, such as the Parthenon, have been realised; without such a material the Greeks could never have created that incomparable ensemble whose different parts are so intimately allied one with another, in which the richest decoration is in complete unity with the constructive forms which it accentuates and embellishes. Brick could never have led to the invention or employment of these forms. Those who try to imitate them in any such material have to make up for its deficiencies by various ingenious devices. The joints between the bricks have to be hidden under stucco, the mouldings and carved ornaments of stone have to be replaced, as in the temple of the Deus Rediculus, by moulded terra cotta ([Fig. 68]). The result is sometimes pleasing enough, especially by the surprise which it causes. Santa Maria delle Grazie, at Milan, is a masterpiece of its kind, thanks to the skill and tact displayed by Bramante in the management of the burnt clay which was the only material afforded him by the plains of Lombardy; but where Bramante succeeded, less skilful artists have failed. They have demanded effects from brick which it was unable to give, with a profound discord between form and matter as a result.
Fig. 68.—Capital and entablature of the temple
of the Deus Rediculus at Rome.[97]
Of all the causes which modify the forms of architecture and determine its character, the most important is the nature, the genius, if we may say so, of the materials used. So, before we can arrive at a correct judgment of the rules and principles of any style, we must begin by appreciating and describing the materials of which it disposes. We never forget this in the case of sculpture, still less should we do so in the case of architecture, where the material is still more despotic.
The materials made use of by the Egyptians were granite,[98] sandstone,[99] and limestone.[100] A softer stone, namely alabaster, was often employed for lining.[101]
Sandstone and limestone, especially the latter, are used nearly everywhere; granite is of less frequent occurrence and suggests an important observation.
Granite is not a sedimentary, stratified rock like limestone; it is a material compacted in great masses, to a depth or, to speak more accurately, in a volume which is practically unlimited; the dimensions of the stones which may be cut from these masses are therefore infinite to all intents and purposes.[102]
The Egyptians also made use of both burnt and unburnt brick.
The employment of these different materials gave birth to what we may call "dressed construction," that is, construction the elements of which are squared upon each face and put into close juxtaposition one with another.
Concrete or pisé, compressed, as in the pylons, between moulds or caissons of woodwork, was also made use of by the Egyptians. This material gave rise to what we may call compact construction.
Again, although trees, except the palm, were rare enough in the valley of the Nile, the Egyptians built also in wood, by which a third kind of construction, called construction by assemblage, in which the elementary units were held together by being introduced one into another, was obtained.
In a few buildings of the latter class metal seems to have been employed, sometimes in the construction, sometimes for lining, and sometimes for outward decoration.
§ 4. Dressed Construction.
The constructive elements which enter into the composition of this first class of buildings are stone and brick.
In the first place, these elements are horizontal or vertical.
The horizontal elements constitute the planes, as they cover the voids by horizontal superposition.
They consist of courses and architraves.
The courses form the walls. They are arranged in horizontal bands, with vertical and sometimes sloping joints. The separate stones are often bound together upon their horizontal surfaces by dovetails or tenons of wood. The blocks made use of in this form of construction are usually of large dimensions, but the Egyptians also made use of small stones or rubble, lined on the exterior by large flat ones which concealed the meanness of the material behind them.[103] ([Fig. 70].)
Various peculiarities of construction which are comparatively seldom met with will be noticed when we come to describe the monuments in which they are to be found.
Architraves were stone beams used to bridge over the voids and to support the covering of the building, which latter was composed of long and heavy slabs.
The vertical elements support the architraves and combine them one with another. These vertical supports vary greatly in size. Those of small or medium dimensions are monoliths; others are composed of many courses of stone one upon another, courses which in this case take the name of drums.
Fig. 69.—The Egyptian "bond."
Upon exterior surfaces, supports take various forms of development which may all be referred to the type which we have defined, namely, the portico. In the interiors the form of support is a logical consequence of the material employed. Whenever the stones which form the roof are too small to bridge over the whole of the space comprised within two walls, they must be made to rest upon intermediate supports; and this necessity springs up in every building of any importance. This very elementary combination fulfils all the requirements of circulation. The number of supports depends upon the number of rows of the flat stones which form the roof. They are sometimes multiplied to such an extent that they remind us of that planting arrangement in our gardens which we call a quincunx.
Fig. 70.—Double-faced wall.
We cannot, however, affirm that the number of supports is invariably decided by the length of the architraves, or of the roofing stones. Some very long monoliths are supported at regular intervals, lest they should break with their own weight or with that put upon them. The walls, architraves, and vertical supports are always far stronger than the mere weight of the roof would require.
Figs. 71, 72.—Elements of the portico.
The following woodcut shows the arrangement of supports, architraves and roof. These simple arrangements constitute a complete system of construction which, belonging exclusively to Egypt, has had results upon which we cannot too strongly insist. Both roof and architraves being horizontal, all the pressure upon the walls is vertical. There is no force tending to thrust the walls outwards nor to affect the immobility of the supports.
Fig. 73.—Egyptian construction, epitomized by Ch. Chipiez.
Consequently, if the proportions of the vertical and horizontal elements of a building, that is to say, its sections, have been skilfully determined, there is in the building itself no latent cause of disruption; its equilibrium is perfect, and can only be destroyed by external physical causes, by long exposure to the weather, by earthquakes, or by the hand of man.[104]
We see then that the first impression caused by the external lines of the architectural monuments of Egypt is confirmed and explained by further study. They are built, as said the Pharaohs themselves, "for eternity." Stability, in a word, in its highest and most simple form is the distinguishing characteristic, the true originality, of Egyptian architecture.
This character is most strongly marked in stone buildings, but it is by no means absent from those built of materials created by human industry. Works in brick form the transition between the construction that we have described and that which we call compact. A stone roof is not often found, and the termination is generally a terrace in which wood is the chief element. In some cases the secondary parts of such edifices, and sometimes the whole of them, are covered in by brick vaults, and maintained by walls of a sufficient thickness.
Although the use of monoliths for roofing purposes was general in Egypt, it must not be thought that the architects of that country were ignorant of the art of covering voids with materials of small size, that is to say, of building vaults. There are numerous examples of Egyptian vaults, some of them of great antiquity, and, moreover, the Egyptian builders constructed their vaults after a method of their own. In spite of the facilities which they afforded, they played, however, but a secondary rôle in the development of art. They were never used in the buildings to which greater importance was attached; they are introduced chiefly in out-of-the-way corners of the building, and in the substructures of great monumental combinations. This method of construction, being confined within such narrow limits, never resulted in Egypt in an architectural system;[105] neither did it give birth to any of those accessory forms which spring from its use.
Egyptian vaults may be divided into two great categories, according to the method of their construction.
1. Off-set vaults. These vaults are composed of courses off-set one from another, and with their faces hollowed to the segment of a circle. ([Fig. 74].)
Fig. 74.—Element of
an off-set arch.
Fig. 75.—Arrangement of the courses
in an off-set arch.
If the face of those stones which, in the form of inverted steps, are turned to the void which has to be covered, be cut into the line of a continuous curve, the superficial appearance of a segmental arch or barrel vault will be obtained; but this appearance will be no more than superficial, the vault will be in fact a false one, because, in such a construction, all the stones which enframe the void and offer to the eye the form of a vault, are really laid horizontally one upon another, and their lateral joints are vertical. ([Fig. 76].) When the units of such vaults are properly proportioned they are stable in themselves, and they have no lateral thrust.
Fig. 76.—Off-set semicircular arch.
2. Centred vaults. These are true vaults. They are composed of voussoirs, whose lateral joints are oblique, and radiate towards one centre or more. ([Figs. 77, 78, and 79].)
Fig. 77.—Voussoir.
Fig. 78.—Arrangement of voussoirs.
This method of construction is very convenient because it enables the builder to utilize constructive units of very small dimensions, such as bricks. But this advantage has a corresponding drawback. These voussoirs thrust one against another and tend towards disintegration. They are not stable in themselves, and in order to give them stability they must be kept in place by surrounding them with opposing forces which will effectually prevent their setting up any movement in the structure of which they form a part. This function is fulfilled by the wall in Egyptian architecture, which is consequently very thick, but the radiating arch never arrived at such a development in Egypt as to lead to the adoption of any contrivance specially charged with the maintenance of vaults in a state of proper rigidity. The Egyptians not only employed the semicircular arch; they made use, in a few instances, of the pointed form, and many of their underground buildings have roofs cut out of the rock in the form of a segmental vault. The fact that these sepulchral chambers affected the aspect of vaulted halls, can only be explained by the supposition that a similar construction was common in the dwellings of the living.[106]
Fig. 79.—Semicircular vault.
§ 5. Compact Construction.
Fig. 80.—Granaries,
from a bas-relief.
The methods employed in what we may call compact construction permit the use, in considerable quantities, of moulded clay mixed with chopped straw. This material was used in buildings which were homogeneous; it was poured into a mould formed by planks, which was raised as the work progressed and the mixture dried. But the material had little strength, and was far inferior to those modern concretes which have the density and durability of the hardest stone. The Egyptians do not seem to have been acquainted with concrete proper, and unburnt bricks did not differ essentially from pisé. Such bricks, when placed one upon another after being imperfectly dried, combined, under the influence of the weather and their own weight, into one homogeneous mass so that the separate courses became undistinguishable. This latter fact has been frequently noticed in Assyria, by those who had to cut through the thickness of walls in the process of excavation.
Fig. 81.—Modern pigeon house,
Thebes.
If voids have to be covered in pisé, one of those self-supporting curves which we have described under the name of vaults, must be made use of, and the vault must be constructed over a centring of wood. But we have no evidence that the Egyptians could carry the art of construction to this point in pisé. On the contrary, we have good reason to believe that they generally made use of this material for the quiescent body of the edifice alone, and that voids were mostly covered with stone or wood. In a word, the Egyptians did not carry the use of artificial material far enough to form a complete system based upon it. They made great use of it, but only in a strictly limited fashion. It is only found in certain well-defined parts of buildings, which were never of any very great interest from an artistic point of view ([Fig. 80]). It deserved to be mentioned, if only for the frequency of its use in Egypt, in the private architecture of both ancient and modern times ([Fig. 81]), but it need not detain us longer.
§ 6. Construction by Assemblage.
Carpentry, or construction by assemblage, played a considerable part in ancient Egypt, but, as may easily be understood, few traces of it are to be found in our day. Those edifices which were constructed of wood have, of course, all perished; but, in spite of their disappearance, we can form a very good idea of their aspect and of the principles of their construction. In the most ancient epoch of Egyptian art, the people took pleasure in copying, in their stone buildings, the arrangements which had characterised their work in wood; besides which, their paintings and reliefs often represent buildings of the less durable material. The constructive principles which we have next to notice, have thus left traces behind them which will enable us to describe them with almost as much accuracy as if the carpenters of Cheops and Rameses were working before our eyes.
We need not insist upon the characteristics which distinguish assembled construction from masonry or brickwork. The different parts of the former are, of course, much more intimately allied than in buildings constructed of large stones. Supports of dressed stone truly fixed with the plumb line are perfectly stable of themselves.
In both Egypt and Greece we often come upon a few columns still standing upright amid their desolate surroundings, and announcing to the traveller the site of some city or famous temple which has been long destroyed. But wooden supports have little thickness in comparison with their height, and the material of which they are formed, being far less dense than stone, cannot maintain itself in place by its own weight. It is the same with wooden architraves. The heaviest beams of wood will not keep their places when simply laid one upon another, and are in that matter far inferior to those well dressed stones which, in so many ancient walls, have resisted change with neither tenons nor cement to help them.
As a general principle, when wood has to be employed to the best advantage, and endowed with all the solidity and resisting power of which it is capable, the separate pieces must be introduced one into another ([Fig. 82]). But even when thus combined and held in place by mechanical contrivances, such as bolts and nails, they will never form a homogeneous and impenetrable mass like brick or stone. By such methods an open structure is obtained, the voids of which have afterwards to be filled up by successive additions, and these additions often take the form of what we call panels.
We may look upon the different faces of a wooden building as separate pieces of construction which should be put together upon the ground before being combined with each other. This process, though not always made use of in practice, is at least the most logical method for those who wish to make the best use of their materials. But even when thus put together, one of these single faces has not much more stability than each of its constituent elements. In order to form a rigid and stable whole, the several faces must be allied by reciprocal interpenetration at the angles.
It was necessary to call attention once for all to these general characteristics of wooden construction, because we shall hereafter have occasion to examine the forms and motives which stone architecture borrowed from wood in the case of other people besides the Egyptians. We must now determine the particular characteristics offered by the material in Egypt, as they may be learnt in the representations to which we have already referred.
Fig. 82.—Elements of wooden construction.
When a wall has to be built of wood so as neither to warp nor give way, it is necessary to make use of a certain number of oblique members. This is one of the elementary rules of the carpenter's art, and to form an idea how it was applied in our own country it is enough to cast an eye over any of the wooden buildings of the middle ages or of the renaissance. The Egyptians were not ignorant of the advantages conferred by the use of these oblique members because they employed them frequently in their furniture; but they seem never to have introduced them into the construction of their buildings. All joints are there made at a right angle. They were probably led to reject oblique lines by their unwillingness to break in upon the simple harmony of vertical and horizontal lines which is the distinguishing principle of all their architecture. Thus self-deprived of a valuable resource, they were driven to the discovery of some other means of giving the required cohesion and stability to their walls. This requirement they thought they had fulfilled in exaggerating the points of connection between the vertical and horizontal members, which were thus brought into more intimate relation than would in these days be thought necessary.[107] The consequence of this was that their wooden buildings presented much the same closed appearance ([Fig. 83]) as we have already noticed in their stone constructions; and, moreover, as every joint was made at right angles, the pyramidal form was entirely absent.
Fig. 83.—Wooden building (first system), composed by Charles Chipiez.[108]
But the Egyptians also made use of wood for buildings very different from those to which we have hitherto alluded. Those were closed; but we have now to speak of another system, of one which, by contrast, might be called an open system of construction. The edifices upon which it was employed were generally of small size, and in this respect resembled those which we have described, but they were distinguished by a different system of carpentering. We know them only by the figured representations which have come down to us, for they were little calculated to outlast the centuries ([Fig. 84]). This second system lends itself as little as the first to pyramidal and kindred forms; horizontal lines, also, were in it of but secondary importance. Composed of a few vertical members bound together at the top, such a building was allied to the portico type which has already been described. This method of carpentry seems to have been used only for subordinate buildings; but yet it should not be passed by in silence. It was frequently used for the construction of light decorative pavilions, and it had a set of principles which are as susceptible of definition as those of the most ambitious architecture.
Fig. 84.—Wooden building (second system), composed by Charles Chipiez.
Metal must have entered into the construction of these pavilions. It may have furnished either the horizontal or the vertical members, and it is certain that it was partly used for the roofs.
In all wooden structures the roof must also be of wood, because the light walls which are proper to the material could not support the great weight of a flat stone covering, still less could they stand up against the combined weight and thrust of a stone or brick vault, which would destroy them in very summary fashion.
§ 7. Decoration.
We have hitherto described Egyptian architecture according to the general character of its forms and principles of construction; we must now attempt to give a true idea of its method of decoration. This may be described in a very few words. For the decoration of the vast surfaces, either plain or curved, which their style of architecture placed at their disposal, the Egyptians made use of paint. They overlaid with a rich system of colour the whole inside and outside of their buildings, and that with no desire to accentuate, by a carefully balanced set of tones, the great constructive lines, contours and mouldings, nor with any wish to produce merely a complicated, polychromatic ornamentation. Groups of figures borrowed from the animal and vegetable kingdoms form its chief constituents. In these picture decorations, man is seen in every attitude or vocation, side by side with birds, fishes and quadrupeds, and with those composite forms which have been created by himself to represent his gods.
Intaglio and bas-relief often lend their help to the ornament. Images and explanatory inscriptions are sometimes cut in the stone, sometimes modelled in slight relief; but in either case all figures are distinguished by their proper colour as well as by the carved or modelled outlines.
It will thus be seen that Egyptian decoration is distinguished by the intimate and constant alliance of two elements which are often separated in that of other races. The first is the employment of colour to give variety to surfaces and to distinguish different members of the architecture by the opposition of tones. The second is the employment of colour for the representation of life, for which purpose every surface is seized upon, whether the face of a wall, or the round shaft of a column. The decorator is not satisfied to use colour to give force to the lines of a building and to increase its general effect; he also makes use of it to interpret, to multiply, and to immortalize the ideas which float through his own brain. A building thus ornamented presents us with a series of pictures embodied in its own constitution. From cornice to foundation, upon wall and column, it is covered with an unending series of wall paintings, which, like a gorgeous tapestry, envelop and embellish it without hiding any of the details of its construction.
The polychromatic decoration of the Egyptians is to be explained, like that of the Assyrians, of the Greeks, of the Italians, and of all other southern nations, by the quality and quantity of their daylight and the way in which it affected their visual organs. The more intense the light, the more pleasure does the eye receive from strength and variety of colour. The science of optics gives us an explanation of this fact, but at present we are concerned only with the fact itself, which is a matter of daily experience. It is notorious that the colours of birds and butterflies, and of the petals of flowers, become brighter and gayer in exact proportion as we near the equator and leave the pole;[109] the same rule holds good with the habitations of mankind, with his clothes and furniture, which become more brilliant in colour, and more audaciously abrupt in their transitions from one hue to another. Delicate shades of difference are imperceptible by an eye blinded with the southern sun; it sees nothing but the simplest, strongest, and frankest colour notes to the exclusion of all half-tint.[110]
Under a burning and never clouded sun, objects of a neutral colour do not stand out against their background, and their shadows lose a part of their value, "comme dévorées par la diffusion et la réverbération d'une incomparable lumière."[111] In Egypt, a column, a minaret, a dome, hardly seem to be modelled as they stand against the depths of the sky. All three seem almost flat. The warm and varied hues with which polychromatic decoration endows buildings help us to distinguish them in such situations from the ground upon which they stand, and to accentuate their different planes. They also compensate, in some degree, for the absence of those strong shadows which elsewhere help to make contours visible. Attention is drawn to the dominant and bounding lines of an architectural composition by contrasts of tint which also serve to give force to wall paintings and bas-reliefs.
Polychromy is thus a help to our eyes in those countries where a blinding light would otherwise prevent us from appreciating the structural beauties of their architecture. It is by no means peculiar to Egypt, but that country was the first to employ it upon rich and vast undertakings, she employed it more constantly and more universally than any other people, and she carried it to its logical conclusion with a boldness which was quite unique.
The Egyptian habit of sprinkling figures over every surface without regard to its shape, its functions, or those of the mass to which it belonged, was also peculiar to themselves. Upon the round shaft of the column, upon the bare expanse of the wall, these figures were multiplied and developed to an extent which was limited only by the length of the wall or the height of the column. They were generally painted in bands of equal height, separated one from another by a narrow fillet which indicated the plane upon which the groups of figures had a footing. There is no visible connection between the bands of figures and the structures which they ornament; right and left, above and below, they spread over every surface and pay no attention to the joints and other structural accidents by which they are seamed ([Fig. 85] and [Pl. III].).
It may be said that these joints were invisible until the passage of centuries had laid them bare by destroying the stucco which, especially where sandstone or limestone was used, once veiled the surface of the bare walls.[112] Doubtless this is true; but even in a climate such as that of Egypt, the architect could not believe that a thin coat of plaster would endure as long as the massive walls upon which he laid it. We have here a great contrast in principle between the decoration and the architecture of Egypt. In the latter the chief, if not the only aim, seems to have been to make sure of absolute stability, of indefinite duration; and yet these eternal walls are lined with a rich decoration which is spoiled by the fall of a piece of plaster, which is injured by the unavoidable settlings of the masonry and destroyed by the slightest earthquake! Of this we need give but one conclusive instance. Our third plate reproduces that admirable portrait of Seti I., which is the wonder of the temple at Abydos. This beautiful work in relief is sculptured upon the internal faces of four unequal stones in the wall of one of the rooms. The joints may be distinguished, but as yet they have not opened sufficiently to do much damage to the artistic beauty of the work; but it cannot be denied that the preservation of the royal effigy would have been much more certainly assured if the sculptor had chosen a single stone to work upon, instead of a built-up wall which so many causes would help to destroy.
When Egyptian buildings were new and their colour fresh, this method of decoration must have given them a most fascinating brilliancy. Whether the pencil alone were employed to trace the designs upon the smooth walls, or whether its powers were supplemented by the work of the chisel, these figures, which succeeded each other in thousands upon every wall and pillar, mingled with inscriptions which were in themselves pictures, and dressed in the most vivid colours, must have at once amused the eye and stirred the brain by the variety of their tints and of the scenes which they represented. But in spite of its breadth and vivacity the system had two grave defects.
The first was the fragility of the plaster surface upon which it was displayed. This surface may be compared to a tapestry stretched over the whole interior of the building, and, to continue the comparison, when once any portion of the plaster coat became detached from the wall, there was nothing left but the ground or reverse of the stuff.[113] The design and colour may still be distinguished or divined, but there is a great difference between painted ornament which is subject to such damage and a woven hanging at any time before the threads of the woof have been discoloured and entirely worn out. The other defect in the system, is its uniformity. It is monotonous and confused in spite of all its richness. It suffers from the absence of that learned balance between plain and decorated surface which the Greeks understood so thoroughly. In the Greek temples, sculptured figures had the more importance in that the eye of the spectator was drawn forcibly to them by the very limitation of the space reserved for them. They were cut from separate blocks of marble, which, though carefully and skilfully allied with the architecture which they were meant to adorn, did not form an integral part of it. Such figures ran no risk of being cut in two by the opening of the joints between the stones. Although marvellously well adapted to the places for which they were intended, and closely allied to the architecture by their subject as well as their material shape, they yet preserved a life and individuality of their own. To take decorative art as a whole, the Greeks did not make use of so many figures as the Egyptians, but they knew better how to economize the sources of effect, and to preserve their works against the destructive action of time.
Fig. 85.—Seti I. striking prisoners of war with his mace.
Karnak, Thebes. (Champollion, Pl. 294.)
J. Sulpis del.
KARNAK
BAS-RELIEFS IN THE GRANITE CHAMBERS
To Egypt, then, belongs the credit of having been the first to discover the obligation imposed upon the architect by the sunlight of the south—to accentuate the main lines of his edifice by means of colour. She thoroughly understood how to make different tones distinguish between the various parts of a structure and defend its contours against the effect of a dazzling light. On the other hand, she went too far when she covered every surface, without choice or stint, with her endless figure processions. Such a decoration was only rendered possible by the use of a material which compromised its durability; and that is not her only shortcoming. She failed to understand the value of repose and the absolute necessity of contrast; she failed to perceive that by multiplying figures to infinity, she lessened their effect and made them a fatigue to the eye and the intellect.
[CHAPTER III.]
Sepulchral Architecture.
§ 1. The Egyptian Belief as to a Future Life and its Influence upon their Sepulchral Architecture.
The most ancient monuments which have yet been discovered in Egypt are the tombs; they have therefore a right to the first place in our sketch of Egyptian architecture.
In every country the forms and characteristics of the sepulchre are determined by the ideas of the natives as to the fate of their bodies and souls after life is over. In order to understand the Egyptian arrangements, we must begin then by inquiring into their notions upon death and its consequences; we must ask whether they believed in another life, and in what kind of life. We shall find a complete answer to our question in the collation of written texts with figured monuments.
In the first period of his intellectual development, man is unable to comprehend any life but that which he experiences in his own person. He is as yet unable to observe, to analyse or to generalize. He does not perceive the characteristics which distinguish him from things about him, and he sees nothing in nature but a repetition of himself. He is therefore incapable of distinguishing between life such as he leads it and mere existence. He dreams of no other way of being than his own. As such is the tendency of his intellect, nothing could be more natural or more logical than the conception to which it leads him in presence of the problem offered to him every time that a corpse descends into the grave. M. Maspero has so thoroughly understood the originality of the solution adopted by the Egyptians that we cannot do better, in attempting to explain the hypothesis, at once gross and subtle, to which they had recourse for consolation, than borrow his rendering of the texts which throw light upon this subject, together with some of the reflections which those texts suggested to him.[114]
J. Sulpis del. et sc.
SETI I
BAS-RELIEF AT ABYDOS
Were we to affirm that during thousands of years no change took place in the ideas of the Egyptians upon a future life, we should not be believed, and, as a fact, those ideas underwent a continual process of refinement. Under the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties, during those centuries when the limits of Egyptian empire and Egyptian thought were carried farthest afield, we find traces of doctrines which offer notable variations, and even, when closely examined, actual contradictions. These are successive answers made during a long course of time to the eternal and never-changing enigma. As they became more capable of philosophic speculation the Egyptians modified their definition of the soul, and, by a necessary consequence, of the manner in which its persistence after death must be understood, and as always happens in such a case, these successive conceptions are super-imposed one upon another; the last comer did not dethrone its predecessor but became inextricably blended with it in the popular imagination.
We refer all those who wish to follow minutely this curious development of the Egyptian intellect to the subtle analysis of M. Maspero. That historian has applied himself to the apprehension of every delicate shade of meaning in a system of thought which has to be grasped through the veil thrown around it by extreme difficulties of language and written character, but at the same time he has never attempted to endow it with a precision or logical completeness to which it had no claim. By well chosen comparisons and illustrations he enables us to understand how the Egyptian contented himself with vague notions, and how he managed to harmonize ideas which seem to us inconsistent.
We shall not enter into those details. We shall not seek to determine the sense which the Egyptians attached, after a certain period, to the word bâi,[115] which has been translated soul, nor the distinction between it and khou, luminousness, which the soul seems to have enveloped like a garment. We shall not follow the soul and its internal light in its subterranean journey across Ament, the Egyptian Hades, to which it entered by a cleft, Pega, to the west of Abydos, which was the only portal to the kingdom of the shades; nor shall we accompany them in the successive transformations which made them acquainted with every corner of the earth and sky in the infinite series of their becomes (to use the Egyptian expression); what we have to do is to trace out the most ancient of their religious conceptions, the conception which, like the first teachings of infancy, was so deeply engraved upon the soul and intellect of the race as to exercise a much stronger influence than the later more abstract and more philosophical theories, which were superimposed upon it. In this primitive conception we ought to find the determining cause of the Egyptian form of tomb. Its constitution was already settled in the time of the ancient Empire, and, from the Memphite dynasties until the end, it remained unchanged in principle. In this constitution we shall find embodied the essential idea adopted by the Egyptians when they first attempted to find some eternal element in man, or, at least, some element which should resist the annihilation of death for a period much longer than the few days which make up our mortal life.
The Egyptians called that which does not perish as the dying man draws his last sigh, the ka, a term which M. Maspero has rendered as the double. "This double was a duplicate of the body in a matter less dense than that of the body, a projection, coloured but aërial, of the individual, reproducing him feature for feature, a child if coming from a child, a woman if from a woman, and a man if from a man."[116]
This double had to be installed in a lodging suitable to its existence, had to be surrounded by objects which it had used in its former state, had to be supplied with the food which was necessary for the sustenance of its life. And all these things it obtained from the piety of its relations, who, on fixed days, brought them to the threshold of the good dwelling or the eternal dwelling, which were the phrases used by the Egyptians.[117] By these offerings alone could the hungry and thirsty phantom which had replaced the living man be kept alive. The first duty of the survivors was to take care that this dependent existence should not be extinguished by their neglect, to provide food and drink for the support, if we may use such a phrase, of the precarious life of the dead, who would otherwise be irritated against them and use the almost godlike power attributed to his mysterious condition for the punishment of his ungrateful posterity.[118]
This conception is not peculiar to Egypt. The double of the Egyptian sepulchral records corresponds exactly to the εἴδωλον[119] of the Greeks and the umbra of the Latins. Both Greeks and Latins believed that when the funeral rites had been duly accomplished, this image or shadow entered upon the possession of a subterranean dwelling and began a life which was no more than the continuation of that in the light.[120] The dead thus remained in close relation with the living, on the one hand by the nourishment which they received, on the other by the protection which they afforded; even in the funeral repast they took their parts, in the strictest sense of the word, in the eating and drinking.[121] They looked impatiently forward to these supplies because, for a moment, they awoke their dormant thoughts and feelings and gave them glimpses of the true life, the life above ground and in the sunshine.[122] If they were kept waiting too long they became angry and revenged themselves upon those who had caused their sufferings. Woe to the family or city which was not careful to interest the dead in its stability and thus to associate them with its prosperity![123]
These beliefs seem to have been common to all ancient peoples during that period of their existence which is lost in the shadow of prehistoric times. From India to Italy all the primitive forms of public and private rights betray their presence. For this fact and its consequences we may refer our readers to the fine work of M. Fustel de Coulange, La Cité antique.[124]
Fig. 86.—Stele of the 11th dynasty. Boulak. Drawn by Bourgoin.
With the progress of centuries and the development of religious thought, more elevated ideas prevailed. The growth of the scientific spirit tended to make the notion of a being suspended between life and death ever more strange and inadmissible. Experience accumulated its results and it became daily more evident that death not only put an end to the activity of the organs, but that, immediately upon its occurrence, it began to dissolve and decompose their tissues. As time rolled on men must have found it very difficult to believe in a shadow thus placed outside the normal conditions of life, in a something which was not a spirit and yet survived the destruction of its organs.
It would seem then that observation and logical reflection should soon have led to the abandonment of a theory which now appears so puerile; but, even in these scientific times, those whose intellects demand well defined ideas are few indeed.[125] At a period when the diffusion of intellectual culture and the perfection of scientific methods add daily to our accumulations of positive knowledge, most men allow their souls to be stirred and their actions to be prompted by the vaguest words and notions; how much greater then must the influence of those confused beliefs and baseless images have been in antiquity when but a few rare minds, and those ill provided with means of research and analysis, attempted to think with originality, clearness and freedom.
The prestige of this illusion was increased and perpetuated by its intimate connection with several of those sentiments which are most honourable to human nature. Such a worship of the dead surprises and even scandalizes us by its frank materialism, but if we seek for the source of its inspiration and its primitive meaning, we find them in the remembrance of lost objects of affection, in feelings broken by the supreme separation, in the gratitude of children to the parents who gave them birth and nourished their infancy, in the recognition by the living of the blessings which they enjoy through the long and laborious efforts of their ancestors. There was no doubt a perishable element in the funerary ideas of Egypt, an element which the progress of reason was sure to destroy, and we may be tempted to smile when we think of the Greek or Egyptian giving himself the trouble to feed his departed ancestors with blood, milk, or honey, but with all their simplicity, both one and the other were alive to a truth which the revolutionary spirit of our days, with its childish and brutal contempt for the past, is often unable to grasp. They realized the complete solidarity of one human generation with another. Guided by their hearts alone they anticipated the results at which modern thought has arrived by close and attentive study of history. From a reasoned out conviction of this truth and its consequences, philosophy now draws the principles of a high morality! but long before our days this idea and the tender, grateful, sentiments which it provoked had been a powerful instrument in the moral improvement of the first-born of civilization and a bond of union for their civil and domestic life.
We have thought it right to dwell upon this worship of the dead and to describe its character at some length, because the beliefs upon which it was based are not to be found so clearly set forth in the art of any other people. Their most complete, clear, and eloquent expression, in a plastic form, is to be seen in the tombs which border the Nile. And why is this so? It is because the Egyptian industries were already in full possession of their resources at the period when those beliefs had their strongest hold over the minds and feelings of the people. In the case of Greece, art did not arrive at its full development until the worship of the dead had lost its high place in the national conscience. When the Greek genius had arrived, after much striving, at its complete power of plastic expression, the gods of Olympus had been created for several centuries, and art was called upon to interpret the brilliant polytheism of Homer and Hesiod, to give outward image to those gods, and to construct worthy dwellings for their habitation. Sculptors, painters, and architects still worked indeed, at the decoration of the tomb. They strove to give it beauty of shape and arrangement, and to adorn its walls with bas-reliefs and pictures; they designed for it those vases and terra cottas which, in our own day, have been found in thousands in the cemeteries of Greece and Italy, but all this was only a subordinate use of their talent. Their ambition was to build temples, to model statues of Zeus, Pallas, and Apollo. On the other hand, those distant ages in which primitive and childish ideas of religion prevailed, had no art in which to manifest their beliefs with clearness and precision.
It was otherwise in the valley of the Nile. A well provided industry and an experienced art laid themselves out to interpret the popular beliefs and to defend the dead against final dissolution, or the agonies of hunger and thirst. Egypt did not differ from other nations in its opinions upon the mystery of death. In the infancy of every race the same notions on this matter are to be found, and in this respect the only difference between the Egyptians and the rest of the world is very much to the credit of the former; they rapidly attained to a degree of civilization which was only reached by other races after their religious development was comparatively mature. Thanks to this advantage, they were enabled to push their ideas to consequences which were not to be attained by tribes which were little less than barbarous, and they had no difficulty in expressing them with sufficient force and precision.
It remains for us to show the use which the Egyptians made of their superiority in doing more honour to their dead, in guarding them more safely against the chances which might shorten the duration or destroy the happiness of their life in the tomb. The fulfilment of this duty was, as the Greek travellers rightly affirmed, their chief pre-occupation. Their sepulchral architecture was, of all their creations, the most original and the most characteristic of their genius, especially in the forms which we find in the cemeteries of the Ancient Empire. In the time of the New Empire, at Thebes, it is less complete and homogeneous. In the latter the arrangement and decoration do not spring, as a whole, from a unique conception; we find traces in it of new hypotheses and novel forms of belief. These do not supersede the primitive ideas; they are added to them, and they bear witness to the restless efforts made by human thought to solve the problem of human destiny. These apparent contradictions and hesitations are of great interest to the student of the Egyptian religion, but from the art point of view the Memphite tombs are more curious and important than those of later date. They have the great merit of being complete in their unity both of artistic form and of intellectual conception. They are the offspring of a single growth, and are perfect in their clear logical expression. And again, they are the type of all the later tombs, of those at Abydos, at Beni-Hassan, and at Thebes. Certain details, indeed, are modified, but the general disposition remains the same to the end. We shall, therefore, find the ruling principle of Egyptian sepulchral architecture most clearly laid down in the cemeteries of Gizeh and Sakkarah.
The first and most obvious necessity for the obscure form of life which was supposed to commence as soon as the tomb had received its inmate, was the body. No pains, therefore, were spared which could retard its dissolution and preserve the organs to which the double and the soul might one day return.[126] Embalming, practised as it was by the Egyptians, rendered a mummy almost indestructible, so long, at least, as it remained in the dry soil of Egypt. On the warm sands of Sakkarah and close to the excavations from which the fellahs of the corvée were returning at the end of their day's labour, we—my travelling companions and myself—stripped a great lady of the time of Ramses of the linen cloths and bandages in which she was closely enveloped, and found her body much in the same condition as it must have been when it left the workshop of the Memphite embalmer! Her black hair was plaited into fine tresses; all her teeth were in place between the slightly contracted lips; the almond-shaped nails of her feet and hands were stained with henna. The limbs were flexible and the graceful shapes but little altered under the still firm and smooth skin, which, moreover, seemed to be still supported by flesh in some parts. Had it not been for its colour of tarred linen or scorched paper, and the smell of naphtha which arose from the body and from the numberless bandages which were strewn about, we might have shared the sentiment attributed to Lord Evandale in Theophile Gautier's brilliant Roman de la Momie; with an effort of good-will we could almost sympathise with those emotions of tenderness and admiration which were excited in the breast of the young Englishman at the sight of the unveiled charms of that daughter of Egypt whose perfect beauty had once troubled the heart of the proudest of the Pharaohs.[127]
In order that all the expense of embalming should not be thrown away, the mummy had to be so placed that it could not be reached by the highest inundations of the river. The cemeteries were therefore established either upon a plateau surrounded by the desert, as in the case of Memphis and Abydos, or in the sides of the mountain ranges and in the ravines by which they were pierced, as at Thebes and Beni-Hassan. In the whole valley of the Nile, no ancient tomb has been discovered which was within reach of the inundation at its highest.[128]
Fig. 87.—Mummy case
from the 18th dynasty.
Boulak.
The corpse was thus preserved from destruction, first by careful and scientific embalming, secondly by placing its dwelling above the highest "Nile." Besides this we shall see that the Egyptian architects made use of many curious artifices of construction in order to conceal the entrance to the tomb, and to prevent the intrusion of any one coming with evil intentions. All kinds of obstacles and pitfalls are accumulated in the path of the unbidden visitor, with a fertility and patient ingenuity of invention which has often carried despair into the minds of modern explorers, especially in the case of the pyramids. Mariette was fond of saying that there are mummies in Egypt which will never, in the strictest sense of the word, be brought to light.
But in spite of all this pious and subtle foresight, it sometimes happened that private hate or, more often, the greed of gain, upset every calculation. Enemies might succeed in penetrating to the sepulchres of the dead, in destroying their bodies, and thus inflicting a second death worse than the first; or a thief might drag the corpse from its resting place, and leave it naked and dishonoured upon the sands, that he might, with the greater ease, possess himself of the gold and jewels with which it had been adorned.
The liability of the mummy to accident had to be provided against. The idea of the unhappy condition in which the double would find itself when its mummy had been destroyed, led to the provision of an artificial support for it in the shape of a statue. Art was sufficiently advanced not only to reproduce the costume and ordinary attitude of the defunct and to mark his age and sex, but even to render the individual characteristics of his physiognomy. It aspired to portraiture; and the development of writing allowed the name and qualities of the deceased to be inscribed upon his statue. Thus identified by its resemblance and its inscriptions it served to perpetuate the life of the double, which was in continual danger of dissolution or evaporation in the absence of a material support.
The statues were more solid than the mummy, and nothing stood in the way of their multiplication. The body gave but one chance of duration to the double; twenty statues represented twenty chances more. Hence the astonishing number of statues which are sometimes found in a single tomb. The images of the dead were multiplied by the piety of surviving relations, and consequently the double was assured a duration which practically amounted to immortality.[129]
Fig. 88.—Man and his wife in the style of the 5th dynasty.
Calcareous stone. From the Louvre.
We shall see that a special recess was prepared in the thickness of the built up portion of the tomb for the reception of wooden or stone statues, so that they might be kept out of sight and safe from all indiscreet curiosity. Other effigies were placed in the chambers of the tomb or the courts in front of it. Finally, we know that persons of consideration obtained from the king permission to erect statues in the temples, where they were protected by the sanctity of the place and the vigilance of the priests.[130]
Fig. 89.—Sekhem-ka, his wife Ata, and his son Khnem,
in the style of the 5th dynasty.
Limestone. From the Louvre.
From the point of view of the ancient Egyptians such precautions were by no means futile. Many of these effigies have come down to us safely through fifty or sixty centuries and have found an asylum in our museums where they have nothing to fear but the slow effects of climate and time. Those which remain intact may therefore count upon immortality. If the double required nothing to preserve it from annihilation but the continued existence of the image, that of Chephren, the builder of the second great pyramid, would be still alive, preserved by the magnificent statue of diorite which is the glory of Boulak, and thanks to the durability of its material, it would have every chance of lasting as long as the world itself. But, unhappily for the shade of Pharaoh, this posthumous existence which is so difficult of comprehension to us, was only to be prolonged by attention to conditions most of which could not long continue to be observed.
Fig. 90.—Stele of Nefer-oun. Boulak.
It was entirely a material life. The dead-alive had need of food and drink, which he obtained from supplies placed beside him in the tomb,[131] and afterwards, when these were consumed, by the repasts which took place periodically in the tomb, of which he had his share. The first of these feasts was given upon the conclusion of the funeral ceremonies,[132] and they were repeated from year to year on days fixed by tradition and sometimes by the expressed wish of the deceased.[133] An open and public chamber was contrived in the tomb for the celebration of these anniversaries. It was a kind of chapel, or, perhaps, to speak more accurately, a saloon in which all the relations and friends of the deceased could find room. At the foot of the stele upon which the dead man was represented sacrificing to Osiris, the god of the dead, was placed a table for offerings, upon which the share intended for the double was deposited and the libations poured. A conduit was reserved in the thickness of the wall by which the odour of the roast meats and perfumed fruits and the smoke of the incense might reach the concealed statues.[134]
Fig. 91.—Preparation of the victims and arrival of funeral gifts, 5th dynasty.
Height of each band, 13-1/2 inches. Boulak. Drawn by Bourgoin.
The Egyptians did not trust only to the piety of their descendants to preserve them from a final death by inanition in their neglected tombs. At the end of a few generations that piety might grow cold and relax its care; besides, a family might become extinct. All those who could afford it provided against such contingencies as these by giving their tombs what we now call a perpetual foundation. They devoted to the purpose the revenues of some part of their property, which was also charged with the maintenance of the priest or priests who had to perform the ceremonial rites which we have described.[135] We find that, even under the Ptolemies, special ministers were attached to the sepulchral chapel of Cheops, the builder of the great pyramid.[136] It may seem difficult to believe that a "foundation" of the ancient empire should have survived so many changes of régime, but the honours paid to the early kings had become one of the national institutions of Egypt. Each restoring sovereign made it a point of duty to give renewed life to the worship of those remote princes who represented the first glories of the national history.
Fig. 92.—Table for offerings. Louvre.
Besides which there were priests attached to each necropolis, who, for certain fees, officiated at each tomb in turn. They were identified by Mariette upon some of the bas-reliefs at Sakkarah. Their services were retained much in the same way as masses are bought in our days.[137]
Fig. 93.—Another form
of the table for offerings.
Boulak.
The same sentiment led to the burial with the dead of all arms, clothes, jewels, and other objects of which they might have need in the next life. We know what treasures of this kind have been obtained from the Egyptian tombs and how they fill the cases of our museums. But neither was this habit peculiar to Egypt. It was common to all ancient people whether civilized or barbarous. Traces are to be found even in the early traditions of the Hellenic race of a time when, like those Scythians described by Herodotus,[138] the Greeks sacrificed, at the death of a chief, his wives and servants that they might accompany him to the next world. When she began to reveal herself in the arts Egypt was already too far civilized for such practices as these; thanks to the simultaneous development of science, art and religion, she found means to give the same advantages to her dead without permitting Scythian cruelties. Those personal attendants and domestic officers whose services would be so necessary in another life, were secured to them at a small expense; instead of slaying them at the door of the tomb, they were represented upon its walls in all the variety of their occupations and in the actual moment of labour. So too with all objects of luxury or necessity which the double would wish to have at hand, as for instance his food and drink.[139]
A custom which would seem to have established itself a little later may be referred to the same desire; we mean the habit of placing in the tomb those statuettes which we meet with in such vast numbers after the commencement of the second Theban Empire.[140] Mariette obtained some from tombs of the twelfth dynasty, and the sixth chapter of the Book of the Dead, which is engraved upon them, seems to be one of the most ancient. Egyptologists are now inclined to believe that the essential parts of this ritual date back as far as the Memphite period.
Fig. 94.—Labourers heaping up ears of corn, from a tomb at Gizeh.
(Description de l'Égypte.)
These statuettes are of different sizes and materials. As a rule they do not exceed from eight to twelve inches, but there are a few which are three feet or more in height. Some are in wood, some in limestone, and some in granite, but as a rule they are made of that kind of terra cotta which, when covered with green or blue enamel, has been called Egyptian porcelain. They are like a mummy in appearance; their hands are crossed upon the breast and hold instruments of agriculture such as hoes and picks, and a sack meant for grain hangs from their shoulders. The meaning of all this is to be sought in the Egyptian notions of a future life; it is also explained by the picture in chapter XC. of the Ritual, which shows us the dead tilling, sowing and harvesting in the fields of the other world. The texts of the Ritual and of certain inscriptions call these little figures oushebti or answerers from the verb ousheb, to answer. It is therefore easy to divine the part attributed to them by the popular imagination. They answered to the name traced upon the tomb and acted as substitute for its tenant in the cultivation of the subterranean regions.[141] With the help of the attendants painted and sculptured upon the walls they saved him from fatigue and from the chance of want. This is another branch of the same old idea. In his desire to take every precaution against the misery and final annihilation which would result from abandonment, the Egyptian thought he could never go too far in furnishing, provisioning and peopling his tomb.
Figs. 95, 96.—Sepulchral statuettes, from the Louvre.
The ingenuity of their contrivances is extraordinary. Food in its natural state would not keep, and various accidents, might, as we have shown, lead to the death of the double by inanition. It was the same with furniture and clothes; the narrow dimensions of the tomb, moreover, would forbid the accumulation there of everything which its sombre tenant might desire. On the other hand the funerary statuettes were made of the most indestructible materials and the bas-reliefs and paintings were one with the thick walls of stone or living rock. These have survived practically unaltered until our day. We visited the tomb of Ti a short time after its chambers had been opened and cleared. It was marvellous to see how form and colour had been preserved intact and fresh under the sand, and this work which was four or five thousand years old seemed to be but lately finished. By the brightness of their colours and the sharp precision of their contours these charming reliefs had the effect of a newly struck medal. Such scenes from the daily life of the people continued to be figured upon Egyptian tombs from the old empire to the new. When their study and comparison were first begun different explanations were put forward. Some believed that they were an illustrated biography of the deceased, a representation of his achievements or of those over which he had presided during the course of his mortal life; others saw in them an illustration of his future life, a setting forth of the joys and pleasures of the Egyptian Elysium.
Both these interpretations have had to give way before the critical examination of the pictures themselves and the decipherment of their accompanying inscriptions. It was soon perceived, through comparisons easily made, that these scenes were not anecdotic. On a few very rare occasions they seem to be connected with circumstances peculiar to the inhabitant of the tomb. There are a few steles and tombs upon which the dead man seems to have caused his services to be described, with the object, no doubt, of continuing in the next world his career of honour and success in this. Such an inscription is so far biographical, and a similar spirit may extend to the decorations of the stele and walls of the tomb. As an example of such narrative epigraphs we may cite the long inscription of Ouna, which gives us the life of a sort of grand-vizier to the two first Kings of the sixth dynasty;[142] also the inscriptions upon the tombs of those feudal princes who were buried at Beni-Hassan. In the latter there are historical representations as commentaries upon the text. Among these is the often reproduced painting of a band of Asiatic emigrants bringing presents to the prince and demanding, perhaps, a supply of wheat in return, like the Hebrews in the time of Jacob.
Fig. 97.—Vignette from a Ritual upon papyrus,
in the Louvre. Chap. XC., 20th dynasty.
But all this is exceptional. As a rule the same subjects occur upon the tombs again and again, in the persistent fashion which characterizes traditional themes. The figures by which the flocks and herds and other possessions of the deceased were numbered are too great for literal truth.[143] On the other hand the pictured tradesmen and artificers, from the labourer, the baker, and the butcher up to the sculptor, seem to apply themselves to their work with an energy which excludes the notion of ideal felicity. They, one and all, labour conscientiously, and we feel that they are carrying out a task which has been imposed upon them as a duty.
For whose benefit do they take all this trouble? If we attempt to enter into the minds of the people who traced these images and compare the pictured representations with the texts which accompany them, we shall be enabled to answer that question. Let us take by chance any one of the inscriptions which accompany the scenes figured upon the famous tomb of Ti, and here is what we find. "To see the picking and pressing of the grape and all the labours of the country." Again, "To see the picking of the flax, the reaping of the corn, the transport upon donkeys, the stacking of the crops of the tomb." Again, "Ti sees the stalls of the oxen and of the small animals, the gutters and water-channels of the tomb."
It is for the dead that the vintage takes place, that the flax is picked, that the wheat is threshed, that oxen are driven into the fields, that the soil is ploughed and irrigated. It is for the supply of his wants that all these sturdy arms are employed.
We shall leave M. Maspero to sum up the ideas which presided at the construction of the Egyptian tomb, but first we must draw our readers' notice to the fact that he, more than once, alludes to a conception of the future life which differs somewhat from the early Egyptian notions, and belongs rather to the Second Theban Empire and its successors.
Fig. 98.—Arrival in Egypt of a company of Asiatic emigrants
(Champollion, pls. 362, 393).
Fig. 98, Continued.—Arrival in Egypt of a company of Asiatic emigrants
(Champollion, pls. 362, 393).
"The scenes chosen for the decoration of tomb walls had a magic intention; whether drawn from civil life in the world or from that of Hades, they were meant to preserve the dead from danger and to insure him a happy existence beyond the tomb.... Their reproduction upon the walls of the sepulchre guaranteed the performance of the acts represented. The double shut up in his σύριγξ[144] saw himself going to the chase upon the surrounding walls and he went to the chase; eating and drinking with his wife, and he ate and drank with her; crossing in safety the terrible gulfs of the lower world in the barque of the gods, and he crossed them in safety. The tilling, reaping, and housing on his walls were for him real tilling, reaping, and housing. So, too, the statuettes placed in his tomb carried out for him under magic influence all the work of the fields, and, like the sorcerer's pestle in Goethe's ballad, drew water for him and carried grain. The workmen painted in his papyri made shoes for him and cooked his food; they carried him to hunt in the deserts or to fish in the marshes. And, after all, the world of vassals upon the sides of the sepulchre was as real as the double for which they laboured; the picture of a slave might well satisfy the shadow of a master. The Egyptian thought that by filling his tomb with pictures he insured the reality of all the objects, people, and scenes represented in another world, and he was thus encouraged to construct his tomb while he was yet alive. Relations, too, thought that they were doing a service to the deceased when they carried out all the mysterious ceremonies which accompanied his burial. The certainty that they had been the cause of some benefit to him consoled and supported them on their return from the cemetery where they had left their regretted dead in possession of his imaginary domain."[145]
Such a belief is astonishing to us; it demands an effort of the imagination to which we moderns are in no way equal. We have great difficulty in realising a state of mind so different from what ours has become after centuries of progress and thought. Those early races had neither a long enough experience of things, nor a sufficiently capable power of reflection to enable them to distinguish the possible from the impossible. They did not appreciate the difference between living things and those which we call inanimate. They endowed all things about them with souls like their own. They found no more difficulty in giving life to their carved and painted domestics, than to the mummy or statue of the deceased, or to the phantom which they called the double. Is it not natural to the child to take revenge upon the table against which he hurts himself, or to speak tenderly to the doll which he holds in his arms?
Fig. 99.—The tomb of Ti;
women, representing the lands of the deceased,
carrying the funeral gifts.
This power to endow all things with life and personality is now reserved for the poet and the infant, but in the primitive days of civilization it belonged to all people alike. Imagination had then a power over a whole race which in our days is the gift of great poets alone. In the efforts which they made to forestall the wants of the helpless dead, they were not content with providing the food and furniture which we find upon the walls. They had a secret impression that these might be insufficient for wants renewed through eternity, and they made another step upon the way upon which they had embarked. By a still more curious and still bolder fiction than those which had gone before, they attributed to prayer the power of multiplying, by the use of a few magic sentences, all objects of the first necessity to the inhabitants of the tomb.
Every sepulchre has a stele, that is to say, an upright stone tablet which varied in form and place in different epochs, but always served the same purpose and had the same general character. Most of these steles were adorned with painting and sculpture; all of them had more or less complicated inscriptions.[146] In the semicircle which forms the upper part of most of these inscribed slabs, the dead person, accompanied by his family, presents offerings to a god, who is usually Osiris. Under this an inscription is carved after an unchanging formula: "Offering to Osiris (or to some other deity, as the case may be) in order that he may give provision of bread, liquid, beef, geese, milk, wine, beer, clothes, perfumes, and all good and pure things upon which the god subsists, to the ka of N..., son of M...." Below this the defunct is often shown in the act of himself receiving the offerings of his family. In both divisions the objects figured are looked upon as real, as in the wall decorations. In the lower division they are offered directly to him who is to profit by them; in the upper, the god is charged to see that they are delivered to the right address. The provisions which the god is asked to pass on to the defunct are first presented to him; by the intervention of Osiris the doubles of bread, meat and drink pass into the other world to nourish the double of man. But it was not essential for the gift to be effective that it should be real, or even quasi-real; that its image should even be given in paint or stone. The first-comer could procure all things necessary for the deceased by their enumeration in the proper form. We find therefore that many Egyptians caused the following invocation to passing strangers, to be engraved upon their tombs:
"Oh you who still exist upon the earth, whether you be private individuals, priests, scribes, or ministers entering into this tomb, if you love life and do not know death, if you wish to be in favour with the gods of your cities and to avoid the terrors of the other world, if you wish to be entombed in your own sepulchres and to transmit your dignities to your children, you must if you be scribes, recite the words inscribed upon this stone, or, if not, you must listen to their recital: say, offering to Amen, master of Karnak, that he may give thousands of loaves of bread, thousands of jars of drink, thousands of oxen, thousands of geese, thousands of garments, thousands of all good and pure things to the ka, or double, of the prince Entef."[147]
Thanks to all these subtle precautions, and to the goodwill with which the Egyptian intellect lent itself to their bold fictions, the tomb deserved the name it received, the house of the double. The double, when thus installed in a dwelling furnished for his use, received the visits and offerings of his friends and relations; "he had priests retained and paid to offer sacrifices to him; he had slaves, beasts of burden, and estates charged with his support. He was like a great lord sojourning in a strange country and having his wants attended to by intermediary officials assigned to his service."[148]
This analogy between the house and the tomb is so complete that it embraces details which do not seem very congruous. Like the house of the living, the tomb was strictly oriented, but after a mystic principle of its own.
As soon as the Egyptian began to think he perceived the most obvious of the similarities between the sun's career and that of man. Man has his dawn and his setting. Man grows from the early glimmerings of infancy to the apogee of his wisdom and strength; he then begins to decline and, like the magnified evening sun, ends by disappearing after his death into the depths of the soil.
In Egypt the sun sets every evening behind the Libyan chain; thence he penetrates into those subterranean regions of Ament across which he has to make his way before the dawn of the next day. The Egyptian cemeteries were therefore placed on the left bank of the Nile, that is, in the west of the country. All the known pyramids were built in the west, and there we find all the more important "cities of the dead," the necropolis of Memphis and those of Abydos and Thebes. A few unimportant groups of tombs have indeed been found upon the eastern bank; but these exceptions to a general rule are doubtless to be explained by a question of distance. For any city placed near the eastern border of the wider parts of the Nile valley, a burying-place in the Libyan chain would be very inconvenient both for the transport of the dead, and for the sepulchral duties of the survivors.[149]
Each morning sees the sun rise as youthful and ardent as the morning before. Why then should not man, after completing his subterranean journey and triumphing over the terrors of Ament, cast off the darkness of the tomb and again see the light of day? This undying hope was revivified at each dawn as by a new promise, and the Egyptians followed out the analogy by the way in which they disposed their sepulchres. They were placed in the west of their country, towards the setting sun, but their doors, the openings through which their inmates would one day regain the light, were turned to the east. In the necropolis of Memphis, the door of nearly every tomb is turned to the east,[150] and there is not a single stele which does not face in that direction.[151] In the necropolis of Abydos, both door and stele are more often turned towards the south, that is towards the sun at its zenith.[152] But neither at Memphis, at Abydos, nor at Thebes is there a tomb which is lighted from the west or presents its inscription to the setting sun.[153] Thus, from the shadowy depths where they dwell, the dead have their eyes turned to that quarter of the heavens where the life-giving flame is each day rekindled, and seem to be waiting for the ray which is to destroy their night and to rouse them from their long repose.[154]
Fig. 100.—Lid of the coffin of Entef, 11th dynasty. Louvre.
The ideas and beliefs which we have described were common to all Egyptians, irrespective of class. When he felt his last hour approaching, the humble peasant or boatman on the Nile was as anxious as Pharaoh himself to insure the survival of his double and to guard against the terrors of annihilation:
. . . . Mais, jusqu'en son trépas,
Le riche a des honneurs que le pauvre n'a pas.
Those who, when alive, had to be content with a hut of earth or of reeds, could not, when dead, expect to have a tomb of stone or brick, a habitation for eternity; they could not look for joys in the other world which they had been unable to procure in this. So that such tombs as those which most fully embodied the ideas we have described must always have remained the exclusive privilege more or less of the governing classes. These consisted of the king, the princes and nobles, the priests, the military chiefs, and functionaries of every kind down to the humblest of the scribes attached to the administration. As for those Egyptians who did not belong to this aristocracy, they had to be content with less expensive arrangements. The less poor among them at least took measures to be embalmed and to be placed in a coffin of wood or papier-mâché, accompanied by scarabs and other charms to protect them against malignant spirits. The painted figures upon the coffin also helped to keep off evil influences. If they could afford it they purchased places in a common tomb, where the mummies were heaped one upon the other and confided to the care of priests who performed the funerary rites for a whole chamber at once.[155] It was the frequent custom to put with the dead those pillows of wood or alabaster which the Egyptians seem to have used from the most ancient times for the support of their heads in sleep. This contrivance, which does away with the necessity for continually rearranging their complicated head-dress, is still used by the Nubians and Abyssinians.
Figs. 101, 102.—Scarabs. Louvre.
Figs. 103, 104.—Funerary amulets. Oudja and ta. Louvre.
But those who could procure even these slight advantages were still among the favourites of fortune. Many were unable to obtain even this minimum of funeral honours. On the confines of all the great cemeteries, at Thebes as well as at Memphis, corpses are found deposited in the loose sand two or three feet from the surface. Some of these are packed in the leaves of the palm, others are roughly enveloped in a few morsels of linen. They have been hastily dipped in a bath of natron, which has dirtied rather than embalmed them.[156] Sometimes even these slender precautions have been omitted. Bodies have been found in the earth without vestige of either coffin or linen swathes. The sand seems to have been intrusted with the work of drying them, and they have been found in our days in the condition of skeletons.
Fig. 105.—Pillow, Louvre.
On the other hand, the fortunate ones of the world, those who were so easy in their circumstances in this life that they could place themselves in the same happy condition in the next, spared no expense in anything connected with their burial. They never allowed themselves to be surprised by death, as we so often do. Whether kings or private individuals, they made their preparations while they were still alive, and caused their tombs to be constructed under their own eyes.[157] Their forethought when living and the piety of relations spared nothing that could add to the beauty and convenience of dwellings which were to be the eternal resting places of their inmates. The palaces of the princes and rich men of Egypt were so lightly built that they have left no traces upon the soil; but many of their tombs have subsisted uninjured to our day, and it is from them that we have obtained our treasures of Egyptian art. All the other nations of the ancient world followed the good example thus set, or rather, to speak more accurately, being all penetrated with similar ideas, they took similar courses without borrowing one from the other. Whenever we moderns have opened any of those ancient tombs which have happily remained intact, we have been met by the same discoveries. Whether it be in Egypt or Phœnicia, in Asia Minor, Cyprus or Greece, in Etruria or Campania, the same astonishing sight meets our eyes. The tombs are filled with precious objects and chefs d'œuvres of art which their depositors had intended never again to see the light of day.
In modern times, when piety or pride stimulates to the decoration of a tomb, all the care of the architect, the sculptor and the painter is given to the outside, to the edifice which surmounts the actual grave. The grave or other receptacle for the coffin is as plain and simple in the most sumptuous monuments of our cemeteries as in the most humble. Our funerary architecture is based upon our belief that the tomb is empty; that the vital part of the deposit confided to it has escaped to rejoin the current of eternal life. Under such conditions the tomb becomes above all things a commemorative structure, a more or less sincere manifestation of the grief of a family or of society at large for the loss of one of its members. As for the narrow pit into which the "mortal coil" is lowered, all that we demand of it is that it should be deep enough and properly closed. Art makes no attempt to illumine its darkness. She leaves to workmen the task of excavation and of building its walls and confines herself to the visible parts of the tomb. The dead within furnishes the pretext for her activity, but it is the admiration of the living that is her real incentive.
The ideas of the ancients on this matter were, as we have seen, very different. They looked upon the tomb as an inhabited house; as a house in which the dead was to lead some kind of existence. Rich men wished their tombs to look well outside, even to the distant spectator, but it was to the inside that their chief attention was turned. They wished to find there all the necessaries, the comforts, the luxuries, to which they had been accustomed during life. So we find that the Egyptians, the Greeks or the Etruscans, were willing enough, when they built their own tombs or those of their relations, to throw a tumulus of earth above it, or, later, a constructed building which was conspicuous at a distance. In those sepulchres which were cut out of the side of a mountain, the fronts were carved with frieze, pediment and columns into the shape of a regularly constructed portico; but the chief object of solicitude to the proud possessor of such a tomb, was its internal furnishing and disposition. For him there was no removal should he be discontented with his lodging. When a man is condemned by illness or accident to keep his room, he takes care to surround himself with everything that he may want. He gathers immediately about him all the comforts and luxuries which he can afford; and death is an illness from which there is no recovery.
Impelled by such ideas as these, the ancients filled their tombs with precious objects and decorated them with sumptuous art, all the more that they seemed well guarded against intrusion for the sake of gain. Thus the Achæans of Mycenæ (if that be the proper name of those mysterious people) buried, in the sepulchres discovered by Dr. Schliemann, the innumerable objects of gold and silver which now fill the museum of Athens; thus the tombs of Bœotia were filled with those marvels of grace and delicate workmanship, the terra cottas of Tanagra; and those of Etruria and Campania with the most beautiful painted vases ever produced by Greek taste.
Identity of religious conception thus led, from end to end of the antique world, to funerary arrangements which bore a curious resemblance one to another, so that sepulchral architecture among the ancients had, as a whole, a very different character from that of the moderns. This character is more strongly marked in Egypt than anywhere else, and therefore we have studied it in detail. The general observations to which it has given rise have been made once for all, and we shall not have to repeat them when we describe the funeral customs of other ancient peoples. We shall then confine ourselves to pointing out the slight differences which naturally spring up in the several interpretations of a common belief.
We have still to show how the varying circumstances of time and place caused the Egyptian tomb to pass through certain modifications of form and decoration, which, however, were never of so radical a nature as to affect its general appearance and arrangement. Until Egypt became a mere geographical expression and her venerable civilization lost its independence and originality, these latter remained practically unchanged.
§ 2. The Tomb under the Ancient Empire.
Among the tombs which date from the time of the ancient empire, the most interesting to the traveller are, of course, the Pyramids. Long before his arrival at Cairo he sees the summits of those artificial mountains rising into the air above the vapours raised by the sun, and above the dust thrown up by the teeming population of the city. At that distance their peaks seem light and slender from their height above the horizon ([Plate I. 2]).
The tourist's first visit is paid to the Pyramids, and many an European leaves Egypt without seeing any other ancient building. He thinks that he has qualified himself to discourse upon Egyptian architecture because a few shouting Arabs have landed him, exhausted, upon the topmost stone of the pyramid of Cheops, and have painfully dragged and thrust him along those passages of the interior which will ever be among his most disagreeable recollections. During all this his eyes and thoughts are entirely given to the preservation of his own equilibrium, and he sees nothing of the real constitution of the structure he has come to visit.
In spite of the wonderful panorama which repays the fatigues of the ascent, and of the overpowering impression made upon the mind by their colossal mass, the Pyramids, as we see them to-day are far from being the most complete and interesting of the sepulchral monuments left to us by the early dynasties. The largest and best preserved are not so old as some of the tombs in the necropolis of Memphis, and, royal burying-places as they are, their arrangement and ornamentation are less rich and expressive than those of many sepulchres built by private individuals. Many of the latter, in their comparatively restricted dimensions, answer better to the definition of a tomb suggested to us by our study of the national beliefs.
We shall, therefore, reserve the Pyramids for future treatment, and in our review of the successive forms taken by sepulchral architecture, we shall assign the first place to those private tombs, dating from the Ancient Empire, which are to be found in the necropolis of Memphis. Notwithstanding a few differences, to which we shall refer hereafter, these tombs, as a whole, can be traced to a single type, of which Lepsius was the first to perceive the interest.[158] This type, which was first clearly brought to light by the many and deep excavations carried out by Mariette, has been known for some years past by the Arab term mastaba,[159] which means literally a bench, a bench of stone or wood. This name was given by the labourers employed upon the excavations, and seemed well adapted to their long and low shapes, which bear some resemblance to those divans, or ottomans, which are found in every room of an oriental dwelling. Mariette was struck by the fitness of the expression, and used it ever after to designate that particular kind of tomb.
Mariette will be our constant guide in this part of our study. After having opened many hundreds of these monuments, he published in the Revue archéologique, what we may call a theory of the mastaba.[160] In all essential matters we shall allow his words to speak for themselves; when he enters into more detail than is necessary for our purpose, we shall content ourselves with epitomizing his descriptions.