Egyptian Art: Studies

by G. Maspero

The other statuette represents a well-developed woman standing on a round pedestal without a scrap of clothing or veil, but very proud of her head-dress, and especially of her big earrings. She touches the right one with her hand and makes it stand out a little in order to show it, or to assure herself that the jewel is very becoming; the head is big, the shoulders thin, the chest narrow, and the sculptor was embarrassed to render the movement of the arms; but the eyes are so wide open, the smile so contented, the expression of the whole so intelligent, that we can easily excuse that defect.

Men were as well treated as women by this art fostered by persons of small means. Scribes of subordinate rank, old retired officers, retail merchants, or men at the head of small industrial concerns, all of whom swarmed in the poorer quarters, felt as strongly as their wives, in default of the stone statue, the need of acquiring a wooden image which would show what they had been like in their lifetime. There were as many artists as they wished to model them in the attitude they preferred, in their everyday costume or in that of fête-days, bearing and likeness guaranteed. Those found in the tombs in the early years of the nineteenth century form a veritable gallery, most varied and curious, of the different types prevailing from the thirteenth to the ninth century B.C. in Thebes and its environs among the lower middle-class.[87] Some had been soldiers, and wear the light petticoat bulging at the waist of the Egyptian foot-soldier; others had spent their lives scribbling in a Government office; the greater number belonged to one of the funerary professions, guardians of mummies, decorators of hypogeums, hewers of tombs, sacristans or priests of a low order employed in the minor offices of burials or commemorative rites. They proudly exhibit their insignia: they carry long staves crowned with sacred emblems—the human head of Hathor, the hawk’s beak of Horus—and everything in their attitude betrays the pride and satisfaction of knowing themselves so fine and so important. Their bearing reveals what the inscriptions usually placed on the pedestal of their statuettes confirm: “It is I, Khâbokhni, the Servant of the ‘True’ Place,” he who poured the libations, or who, at the canonical hours, distributed a portion of bread, flowers, and fruits to each of the dead entrusted to his care. The Egyptians were admirable in observation and full of satirical humour: I would not swear that, in impressing this character of naïve vanity on their works, the sculptors were not yielding to the temptation of discreetly amusing themselves at the expense of their sitters.

Study of these small monuments is too much neglected. By considering the colossi of granite or sandstone, the heroic statues and the ceremonial groups, we are inclined to recognize only qualities of grandeur and immobile majesty in Egyptian art; the wooden statuettes show how, on occasion, it could display charm and wit. Most of them are the products of chance, commercial pieces, prepared in advance for the needs of customers, of which a large assortment was always kept in reserve. The family desiring to offer one to one of its dead came to get it at the fairest price, and something was sold, more or less well done according to the sum that was spent; the choice being made, the piece was adapted to its definitive destination by engraving on the pedestal, or on the back, the names which transformed the anonymous doll into a body for the double of a particular individual. They were artisans who sculptured these images, or rather manufactured them for the undertakers of funerals. Their education was so complete and their hand so practised that they rarely fell very low; their average productions are of honest composition and sufficiently true in feeling. When they were given enough time or commissioned to take great care with a piece of work, those who combined natural talent with the routine of their craft produced work of real value—the statuettes of the lady Touî, of the little girl and the woman in the Turin Museum, and many others hidden from the public in the cupboards of our museums.

XXI
SOME PERFUME LADLES OF THE XVIIIth DYNASTY
(The Louvre)

It is not without reason that these objects are called perfume ladles. The Egyptians used them, in fact, for making either essences, pomades, or the various coloured pigments with which both men and women painted the cheeks, lips, eyelids and underneath the eyes, the nails and palms of the hand. The form and decoration vary in accordance with the epochs. At the time of the Ramessides, between the fourteenth and twelfth centuries B.C., fashion introduced Syrian manufactures into Egypt; later, under the Bubastis and under the Ethiopian kings of the XXVth Dynasty, some Chaldæan or Ninevite manufactures came in. The five ladles illustrated here are purely Egyptian in origin and style. The designs were generally borrowed from the fauna and flora of the valley. The first has by way of handle a young girl lost among the lotuses, who is gathering a bud; a tuft of stems from which two full-blown flowers escape attach the handle to the bowl, the oval of which has its rounded part outside and the point inside. In the second, the young girl is framed by two stems of lotus flowers and papyrus, and walks along playing a long-handled guitar. The next ladle substitutes a bearer of offerings for the musician, and the fourth has the musician standing on a boat sailing among the reeds. The last takes the form of a slave, half bent under an enormous sack. Nothing could be better than the general design of the decoration. The artisans brought as much conscience and skill to its execution as the sculptors gave to their colossal statues. The physiognomy and age of the four young girls are well characterized. The girl who plucks the lotuses is an ingénue: that state is shown by her carefully plaited hair and her pleated skirt. Theban ladies wore long skirts, and this is only turned up high to facilitate walking among the reeds without soiling its edges. The two musicians, on the contrary, belong to the lower class; one has only a belt round her hips, the other a short petticoat, carelessly fastened. The bearer of offerings has the tress of hair falling over the ear, as was the custom with children, and her belt is her sole garment. She is one of the slender, slim young girls of whom many may be seen among the fellahs on the banks of the Nile, and her nudity does not prevent her from belonging to a respectable family: children of both sexes only began to wear clothes at the age of puberty. Lastly, the slave, with his thick lips, flattened nose, bestial jaw, low forehead, sugar-loaf head, is evidently a caricature of a foreign prisoner; the brutish, conscientious way in which he lifts his heavy burden, the angular prominences of the body, the type of the head, the arrangement of the different parts, remind us of the general aspect of some terra-cotta grotesques that come from Asia Minor.

PERFUME LADLE.

The Louvre.

PERFUME LADLE.