The so-called royal pavilion of Medinet-Abou is a complete puzzle in its development of plan and assumed connection with other structures; it can only be held to prove that some private buildings were of several stories. Other peculiarities here noticeable are windows framed by lintels and jambs of enormous blocks, and rounded battlements above a projecting cornice.
Egyptian sculptures and wall-paintings often represent the interiors of well-to-do private houses and of palaces; they show the plans of dwellings and adjoining vegetable-gardens so well that the very products of the latter can be distinguished; but, though these plans designate the separate rooms and their entrances, it is still impossible to comprehend the general arrangement of a normal house, or its exterior appearance. The views of the interiors, with their slim columns and narrow entablatures, with a system of perspective which shows things above one another instead of behind one another, with their evident misrepresentations and constructive impossibilities, must have stood in very much the same relation to the Egyptian reality as the fictitious architecture of the Pompeian wall-decorations does to the buildings of the Greeks and Romans. The architectural details introduced by the painter served only as a frame for the figures or for the contents of the store-rooms which he represented.
It may be concluded that, when private dwellings were more pretentious than the single room necessary to provide the most imperative shelter, columns were not excluded from them; and, from the absence of any remains of these supports, it is probable they were of wood. The ruins and rubbish of sun-dried bricks, which compose the overthrown cities hitherto excavated, show that the great majority of dwellings were no more than low hovels.
Even palaces seldom went beyond a series of small chambers, and thus did not present an important architectural problem. This is illustrated by the gigantic labyrinth, famed in so many fables of antiquity, and somewhat known by the excavations of Lepsius in the Fayoum. (Fig. 27.) A great number of small chambers are here grouped in three rectangular wings around an oblong space, which was probably divided into several courts. The walls remaining do not show that geometrical regularity of arrangement described by Herodotos, Strabo, Diodoros, and Pliny, but a really labyrinthic aggregate of small chambers, the destination of which is not clear. The pyramid which closes the fourth side of the square is alone of monumental importance. It seems possible that, instead of one or more palaces, we have here the remains of some city. It is certainly wrong to connect the work with the Dodecarchia (twenty-sixth dynasty, 685 to 525 B.C.): the twelve pretenders would hardly have united to erect a common monument. In the list of Manetho, Amenophis III., the sixth king of the twelfth dynasty, is mentioned as the founder, a notice corroborated by inscriptions discovered on the site.
That the private buildings were so unimportant in comparison with the religious architecture of Egypt is explained by the excessive subjugation of the people to a monastic ritual, and by the favorable character of the Egyptian climate. It is necessity that prompts invention, and Egypt, with its ever-cloudless sky and constant temperature, required no protection against the inclemency of the weather; the climate did not force man to spend his days within doors, nor did it destroy the lightest shelter. In the absence of rain, the most primitive horizontal ceiling was sufficient. According to the religious conceptions of the Egyptian, it was more important for him to prepare a permanent house for his death-sleep—he had more at heart the protection of his corpse than of his living body. Thus thousands of graves have been preserved, while science cannot find a single dwelling remaining to betray even the general character of Egyptian domestic architecture. To these considerations it must be added that the dwellings stood in the valley of the Nile, and have been subjected to annual inundations which have formed a considerable alluvial deposit, while the graves were almost without exception situated upon the changeless cliffs that border on the desert.
The architecture of Egypt was practised in a manner to show almost no historical development—with the sculpture this is the case in still greater degree. The most ancient carved remains, which with reasonable security may be assigned to the fifth dynasty, show the formal system, retained during the subsequent twenty centuries, as already perfected. Even at that early date the network of lines, which the Egyptian sculptors (more as mechanics than as artists) followed down to the time of the Ptolemies, was already calculated and introduced as a canon.
Besides figures of the gods, the sculpture of Egypt is rich in the images of kings, queens, and prominent subjects; and in such portraits the observation of the living model, of the peculiarities of character which lead to the differences of exterior appearance, would seem to be a natural consequence. But as the individual disappeared in the mass of the Egyptian people, so the appreciation of individuality was almost wholly lacking in the Egyptian artist. Sculptors and painters worked without the least desire for pre-eminence in ability and distinction, without thought of perpetuating their names, and the work they produced expressed these faults. As Brunn truly remarks, we can look upon whole rows of Egyptian sculptures without a question ever arising in our minds as to the authorship of this or that work, without observing that one is superior to the others, or that any were much above manufactures. The work became what the artist felt himself personally to be—a mere link in a monotonous chain. The result of this is that the statues generally represent an entirely abstract human being—not an absolute ideal, for that can hardly be said to exist in any art, but a type of the Egyptian race, well understood and unalterably repeated. As soon as the art had to a certain degree mastered the normal appearance of the human body, it contented itself therewith and came to a standstill. The peculiarities in the living model or in the attributed characters of the deities were rarely considered by the artist, who only distinguished by attributes what should be otherwise expressed; he did not attempt to show the effect of the mind upon the outer being, and thus to give to sculpture its true importance.