(a) The Ante-monumental.
(b) The Pyramidal.
(c) The Hieratic.
(d) The Ptolemaic.
A. These four epochs of art-development resemble layers in the earth’s crust. Whilst with other nations the remnants of art are mere skeletons, colourless frames of an extinct social organism, with the Egyptians we have art in all its different phases, with the dried flesh and the scarcely-faded colours, embalmed like a mummy. Life and death were with them so closely allied, that we may say, their life was a continual death, and their death was everlasting life.
The spiritual conceptions of the Egyptians, which might have served to enable us to understand their art thoroughly, were lost with their sacred books, of which, with one exception, we have merely the titles. Plato considered them 10,000 years old in his time. They consisted of:—
1. The two books of the Chanter—like the Vedas and the Zend-Avesta containing hymns in honour of the gods, and a code of laws like those of Manû.
2. The four astronomical books of the Horoskopus; treating of fixed stars, and of solar and lunar conjunctions, making the sun the centre, round which we revolve.
3. The ten books of the Hierogrammatist, or the Sacred Scribe, treating of the art of writing, which was: hieroglyphic (sacred), hieratic (a kind of hieroglyphic tachygraphy—short-hand writing, used by priests only), and enchorial or demotic, used by the people. These books contained, further, the elements of cosmography and geography; tablets, on which the high-roads of the earth were marked; astronomical records, mentioning, according to Diogenes Laertius, 373 solar and 832 lunar eclipses, referring thus to a period of 48,863 years; a chorography of Egypt, and the delineation of the course of the sacred Nile; an inventory of each temple, of the landed property of the priests, and a treatise on weights and measures.
4. The ten ceremonial books of the Stolists, which were entirely devoted to religious worship, containing the ordinances as to ‘the first-fruits, and the sacrificial stamp, sacrifices, prayers, processions,’ and the like. No human sacrifices were offered up from at least 3000 years B.C.
5. The ten books of the prophets, consisting of thirty-six sections, called the hieratic writings, with which the prophets, the first order of the priests, were entrusted. A description of the deities, regulations for the education of the priests, and general laws formed their contents.
The oldest books of law, were attributed to Hermes (Toth), implying, that the first germ of an hierarchical organisation of society sprung from the sacred songs, and that law was entirely based upon the religious conceptions of the secret forces of nature by which man had been impressed. Like the Code of Manû, which took its origin in the Vedas, or the Laws of Zoroaster based on the Zend-Avesta, or the injunctions of Confucius founded on the holy records and songs of by-gone ages, the Egyptian laws took their origin in the first poetical feelings of awakened humanity, excited by the mysteries of nature under the rule of an incomprehensible first cause.
6. The six books of the Dead. The only books still extant, written in hieroglyphs, and divided by Lepsius into 165 sections. The first fifteen chapters form a distinct and connected whole, with the superscription: ‘Here begin the Sections of the glorification in the Light of Osiris.’