Books Recommended: Champollion, Monuments de l’Egypte et de la Nubie. Choisy, L’art de bâtir chez les Egyptiens. Flinders-Petrie, History of Egypt; Ten Years Digging in Egypt, 1881–91. Jomard, Description de l’Egypte, Antiquités. Lepsius, Denkmäler aus Aegypten und Aethiopien. Mariette, Monuments of Upper Egypt. Maspero, Egyptian Archæology. Perrot and Chipiez, History of Art in Ancient Egypt. Prisse d’Avennes, Histoire de l’art égyptien. Reber, History of Ancient Art. Rossellini, Monumenti del Egitto. Wilkinson, Manners and Customs of Ancient Egyptians.
LAND AND PEOPLE. As long ago as 5000 B.C., the Egyptians were a people already highly civilized, and skilled in the arts of peace and war. The narrow valley of the Nile, fertilized by the periodic overflow of the river, was flanked by rocky heights, nearly vertical in many places, which afforded abundance of excellent building stone, while they both isolated the Egyptians and protected them from foreign aggression. At the Delta, however, the valley widened out, with the falling away of these heights, into broad lowlands, from which there was access to the outer world.
The art history of Egypt may be divided into five periods as follows:
I. The Ancient Empire (cir. 4500?-3000 B.C.), comprising the first ten dynasties, with Memphis as the capital.
II. The First Theban Monarchy or Middle Empire (3000–2100 B.C.) comprising the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth dynasties reigning at Thebes.
The Hyksos invasion, or incursion of the Shepherd Kings, interrupted the current of Egyptian art history for a period of unknown length, probably not less than four or five centuries.
III. The Second Theban Monarchy (1700?-1000 B.C.), comprising the eighteenth to twentieth dynasties inclusive, was the great period of Egyptian history; the age of conquests and of vast edifices.
IV. The Decadence or Saitic Period (1000–324 B.C.), comprising the dynasties twenty-one to thirty (Saitic, Bubastid, Ethiopic, etc.), reigning at Sais, Tanis, and Bubastis, and the Persian conquest; a period almost barren of important monuments.
(Periods III. and IV. constitute together the period of the New Empire, if we omit the Persian dominion.)
V. The Revival (from 324 B.C. to cir. 330 A.D.) comprises the Ptolemaic or Macedonian and Roman dominations.