The other pateræ resemble these as far as the technique and decoration are concerned: they evidently came from the same workshop and belonged to one owner. Were they for daily use or only for ornament? It would seem that they were not fashioned for a definite use: at least they do not recall the shapes seen on the monuments in the hands of guests at a banquet or of priests in the sacrifices. They were hung on the walls of halls, or placed on sideboards on fête-days, and if they were given to the guests, it was not simply for them to eat or drink out of. Filled with fresh water or clear wine, it was a sort of miniature lake, in the centre of which the point of the gold hat rose like an islet: the landscape and figures, seen through the transparent medium, stood out on the flat background with peculiar vivacity, and were effaced or deformed at pleasure when the liquid was disturbed. It is not so long since we were pleased with similar puerilities, and Orientals do not disdain them to-day: the pateræ were, perhaps, toys rather than objects of real utility. I shall not say the same of the silver strainers, the forms of which are elegant but not overladen with ornament, and evidently intended for use. A wide opened funnel, a plaque at the bottom pierced with tiny little holes—the handle alone testifies to any artistic attempt—an open papyrus flower, the petals of which, bent over the stem, lean on the rim of the funnel. It is a useful implement for kitchen or cellar, well adapted to its end, easy to keep clean, in a word practical, a thing in truth that the pateræ are not.
V
It is clear, then, that the interest of the find is great in itself on account of the number and beauty of the objects. Until now the greater part of the goldsmiths’ work we possess was of the Ptolemaic period, and those that could be attributed with certainty to the Pharaonic period possessed no characteristics that permitted us to judge the skill of the Egyptians. The pictures on the walls of tombs or temples authorize our belief that it was very skilful, but the conventions of their designs are still so ill-defined that there is not always agreement about their interpretation. It is even necessary to ask if certain motives figuring outside a vase ought not to be taken as belonging to the decoration of the inside. We now have a sufficient number of their works to justify our conjecture, and to declare in all sincerity that the goldsmiths were in no way inferior to the sculptors, at least so long as the second Theban Empire lasted.
THE BOTTOM OF ONE OF THE ZAGAZIG SILVER PATERÆ.
These objects were found on the site of ancient Bubastis, and the presence of the cats of the goddess Bastît on several of them, as well as the name of Tamaî, the Cat, that is on the chief vase, seem to point that they were made in the place that has restored them to us. It is true that Tamaî was a singing-girl of Neîth, living in the enclosed space before the temple of Neîth, and that might be a counter-indication, at least so far as these objects are concerned. Setting aside the question of origin, which is too uncertain, we may ask if they are really Egyptian by inspiration, or if there is not a risk in examining them more closely of the discovery of proofs of some foreign influence. For about a quarter of a century, now, Assyria, Chaldæa, Asia Minor, Crete and the Egyptian islands have become better known to us, and the scholars who have studied those places have not been slow to despoil Egypt in their favour: it is too often sufficient for an object or an artistic design frequently occurring on Egyptian monuments to be found in those places at once to attribute to them the original invention or ownership. I cannot help thinking that many of these claims are not legitimate, and that in a more general way it is exceedingly rash in the case of a civilization so complex and distant in its beginnings as that of Egypt at the time of the second Theban Empire, to claim the ability to discern all the elements it borrowed from outside. We know how rapidly the peoples of the Nile assimilate the foreigner: in ancient times, it was with the arts as with men, and forms of architecture, of drawing, of industrial production, transplanted among them, either quickly disappeared and left no trace, or yielded to the conditions of the country, and became so completely fused with the taste of its environment that it is now scarcely possible to distinguish the foreign from the native. I believe that Egypt certainly accepted exotic types; but the lands with which she had relations did not abstain from imitating her, and from the most distant ages. She gave to others at least as much as she received from them, and in many cases where the question of filiation has recently been determined against her, it would be well to suspend that judgment, if not to upset it.
In this case, I imagine that it will not enter any one’s mind to dispute that the bracelets of Ramses II and the chalice of Taouasrît are Egyptian pure and simple. The two gold vases and the two silver jugs present no foreign characteristic: the gold kid is of the same family as the goats sculptured fifteen or twenty centuries earlier in the Memphian bas-reliefs, standing on their hind legs and nibbling at a bush. The pateræ, it is true, resemble the Phœnician gold and bronze cups so often found in the Euphrates districts and in the lands on the shores of the Mediterranean: but no one has refused to admit that they were imitations of Egyptian models, and perhaps a more impartial examination would lead archæologists to restore some of them at least to Egypt. At any rate, the treasure of Zagazig shows us what those models ought to be: the Phœnicians were not unmindful of them and respected the general arrangement, even if they often modified the detail. One element only in the scenes of the two rows may be exotic: the female sphinx with the strange locks of hair, if we choose to see in her a derivative of the griffin rather than a fantastic deformation of the male sphinx of a former age. But even so, it must not be forgotten that the griffin belongs to the ancient national foundations like the oxen and gazelles, goats, dogs, leopards seen by its side: its presence would only prove—if its form was so characteristic that we could not refuse to believe it an incongruity—that it was borrowed from the arts of Syria or Chaldæa by some artist tired of always using the traditional types of his country.
XVIII
THREE STATUETTES IN WOOD
(The Louvre)
The three little wooden figures reproduced here are of Theban origin, and represent persons who lived under the conqueror-kings of the XVIIIth and XIXth Dynasties.
The first was found in the Salt collection, purchased by Champollion at Leghorn in 1825, which forms the basis of the Louvre collection.[77] It is a young woman in a long clinging dress trimmed with a band of embroidery in white thread running from top to bottom. She wears a gold necklace of three rows and gold bracelets. On her head is a wig, the hair of which hangs down to the rise of the breast; the wig is kept in place by a large gilded band simulating a crown of leaves arranged points downwards. The right arm hangs down beside the body, and the hand held an object, probably in metal, which has disappeared; the left arm is folded across the chest, and the hand clasps the stem of a lotus, the bud pointing between the breasts. The body is supple and well-formed, the breast young, straight, slight, the face broad, and smiling with something of softness and vulgarity. The artist was unable to avoid heaviness in the arrangement of the coiffure, but he has modelled the body with an elegant and chaste delicacy; the dress follows the form without revealing it indiscreetly, and the gesture with which the young woman presses the flower against her is natural. The statuette is painted dark red, except the eyes and the embroidery, which are white, and the wig, which is black: the bracelets, the necklace, and the bandeau are of a yellow gold identical with the small book exhibited in the glass case marked Z in the “Salle civile.”[78]