Egyptian Art: Studies

by G. Maspero

In the delta two fairly different styles may be seen from the beginning. In the east, at Tanis and in its neighbourhood, there is, at the beginning of the first Theban Empire, a veritable school, the productions of which possess such an individual physiognomy that Mariette did not hesitate to attribute them to the Shepherd Kings: since the works of Golenischeff it is known that the so-called Hyksôs sphinxes are of Amenemhaît III, and that they belong to the second half of the XIIth Dynasty. This Tanite school is perpetuated through the ages; it was still flourishing under the XXIst and XXIInd Dynasties, as is proved by the fine group of bearers of offerings in the Cairo Museum. The predominant features are the energy and harshness of the modelling, especially of the human face: its masters have copied a type, and modes of coiffure belonging, as Mariette formerly pointed out, to the half-savage populations of Lake Menzaleh, the Egyptians in the marshes of Herodotus. It seems to me that their manner is still to be noted in the Græco-Roman period in the statues of princes and priests that we have in the Cairo Museum: the technical skill, however, is less than in the sphinxes and the bearers of offerings. The centre and west of the delta, on the other hand, came under the influence of Memphis, as far as we can judge from the rare existing fragments belonging to the Ancient Empire. Under the Thebans the dependence is clear, and all that comes from those regions differs in nothing from what we have from the Memphian necropolises. Only in the Ethiopian period, and under the influence of the successors of Bocchoris, is a Saïte school revealed to us, which, borrowing its general composition from the Memphian school, comes closer to nature and impresses an individual stamp on certain elements of the human figure that until then had been handled in a loose, so to say, an abstract fashion. The modelling of the face is as full of expression as in the fine works of the Theban school, but with greater finish and less harsh effects; the ravages of old age, wrinkles, crows’-feet, flabbiness of flesh, thinness, are all reproduced with a care unusual in preceding generations; the skull, indeed, is so minute in detail that it might almost be called an anatomical study. This impulse towards skilled realism, begun by instinct in the heart of the school, became accentuated and accelerated by contact with the Hellenes, who from the time of Psammetichus I swarmed in the provinces of the delta. Certain bas-reliefs of Alexandria and Cairo, the date of which is assigned to the reign of Nectanebo II, which I should like to place in that of one of the first Ptolemies,[10] may be regarded as extant witnesses of a kind of composite art analogous to that which was developed two centuries later at Alexandria or at Memphis, and of which the Cairo Museum possesses some rare examples.

It should be clearly understood that I do not claim to put the complete result of my study of the schools, the presence of which in Ancient Egypt is now confirmed, in these few lines. I am only anxious to point out the part played by them in historic times, and the errors into which those who have written the history of Egyptian art without suspecting their existence, or without taking into consideration what we do know of them, have fallen. Bissing does not ignore them, and is doubtless waiting to criticize them in his Introduction. He has so much material that it will be easy for him to rectify my hypotheses, and to confirm them where necessary; in that way his book will gain by being no longer a mere collection of monuments each described as an isolated piece, but a veritable treatise on sculpture, or at least on Egyptian statuary.

I shall be sincerely sorry if he fails in that particular, but even so, I should feel it right to declare that he has come honourably out of an enterprise in which he had no predecessors. The few plates that I inserted a quarter of a century ago in the Monuments de l’Art Antique, and the notices contained in the parts of the Musée Egyptien that have already appeared, afforded both experts and amateurs a foretaste of the surprises that Egypt has in store in the matter of art; they have been too few, and have related to subjects too scattered in point of time, to produce a body of doctrine. But here, on the contrary, nearly two hundred pieces are available, classified according to the order of the Dynasties, and for the most part unpublished, or better reproduced than in the past. Each will be accompanied by an analysis in which the researches previously connected with it will be set forth and discussed; for the first time Egyptologists and the general public will have the artistic and critical apparatus required for judging the value of the principal pieces of Egyptian statuary before their eyes and in their hands. Those who know the amount of the literature existing on Egyptology, and how scattered it is, can easily imagine the patience and bibliographical flair that Bissing must have needed for gathering from libraries the information so generously scattered on every page of his notices. But that was only the least part of his task; the appreciation of the objects themselves demanded of him an ever alert attention and a continuous tension of mind which would promptly have exhausted a man less devoted to the minutiæ of artistic observation. In other branches of the science, the materials have for the most part been so often and so repeatedly kneaded that nearly always half of the work has been already done; here, nothing of that sort exists, and in many cases Bissing has dealt with objects that he was the first to know, and of which no previous study had been attempted. That he is sometimes weary, and that here and there his opinions may be controverted, he willingly confesses. But what surprises me is how very rarely it is necessary to upset them, even partially.

I hope then that we shall not have to wait too long for the completion of this admirable work. May I venture to add that after the present edition, which is an édition de luxe, a popular edition would be welcome? Egyptologists like myself are condemned to pay such large sums for our books that the price of these “Denkmäler” does not alarm us, but the fact has greater importance for others. A reproduction in a smaller format, and less expensive, would greatly help to spread the knowledge of Egyptian art among classes of readers whom the book in its present form will not reach.

II
SOME PORTRAITS OF MYCERINUS[11]

It has long been a debatable question if the Egyptian statues of kings and private individuals can be regarded as faithful portraits or as merely approximate to their originals. No one has ever denied that their authors desired to make them as like as possible, but we hesitate to believe that they succeeded in doing so. The air of uniformity lent them by the repeated employment of the same expressions and the same postures encouraged the notion that, judging themselves incapable of exactly transcribing the details of bodily form or physiognomy proper to each individual, the sculptors decided that such details were not necessary for the kind of service to which the statues were destined: they considered that the task entrusted to them was sufficiently fulfilled if the soul or the double for which these statues provided an imperishable body recognized in them enough of the perishable body to enable them to attach themselves to it without hurt in the course of their posthumous existence. The study of the monuments has dissipated those doubts. Any one who has carefully handled one of the Saïte heads, the skull and face of which present such clearly individual characteristics, must acknowledge that so many details noted with such felicitous care indicate an absolute intention of transmitting the exact appearance of the model to posterity. And if, proceeding forward, we reach the second Theban period, we shall soon, thanks to the chances which have delivered to us the well-preserved corpses of about fifty princes and princesses, recognize the success with which the royal studios perpetuated in stone the effigies of their contemporaries. The profile of Setouî I photographed in his coffin would coincide line for line with that of his bas-reliefs of Karnak or Abydos were it not for the thinness resulting from embalmment. Let us go back eight or ten centuries and see how the master sculptors of the first Theban period treated their Pharaohs. The statues of Amenemhaît III and of Sanouosrît have so personal a note that we should be wrong to imagine they could be anything but a sincere, almost a brutal likeness. The two Chephrên of the Cairo Museum were not long ago alone in suggesting to us the conviction that the Memphian times yielded nothing in this matter of resemblance to ages farther removed from us; the recent discovery of ten statues of Mycerinus prevents any further doubt.

Most of them have not left Egypt. The first that came to us was acquired by purchase in 1888, with four statuettes of Naousirrîya, of Mankahorou, of Chephrên, and perhaps of Cheops. According to the information collected at the time by Grébaut, they were found together, two or three weeks before, by fellahs of Mît-Rahineh under the ruins of a little brick building situated at the east of what was formerly the sacred lake of the temple of Phtah at Memphis. That was certainly not their original place; they had probably each adorned first the funerary chapel annexed to the pyramid of its sovereign: their transference to the town and their reunion in the place where they were discovered are not earlier than the reign of the last Saïtes or the first Ptolemies. It was then, in fact, that hatred of foreign domination having exalted the love of all that was peculiarly Egyptian in the eyes of the people, reverence for the glorious Pharaohs of former ages revived: their priesthoods were reorganized, and they again received the worship to which centuries of neglect had disaccustomed them. None of our figures are life-size, and the Mycerinus in diorite, which is not one of the smallest, is scarcely 21⅛ inches in height. It is enthroned on a cubical block with the impassibility that the Chephrên has made familiar to us; the bust is stiff, the arms rest on the thighs, he looks straight before him, his face expressionless, as was imposed on Pharaoh by etiquette, while the crowd of courtiers and vassals filed past at his feet: if his name, engraved on the sides of his seat to the right and left of his legs, had not told who he was, we should have guessed it from his bearing. The composition, although not the best imaginable, is good: but the head makes a poor effect in relation to the torso, a defect always at first ascribed to the heedlessness of the sculptor. But it is to be noted that the face somewhat recalled that of two of the other Pharaohs, a fact to be explained by the relationship, the second, Chephrên, being the father of Mycerinus, and the third, probably Cheops, his grandfather. That is a reason for presuming that they are portraits, but are they authentic portraits? Several Berlin Egyptologists whose natural ingenuity encouraged them to revise Mariette’s criticisms on art, thought to discern in certain details of the costume and ornamentation a proof that if they were not figures of pure imagination, they were at least copies of ancient originals freely executed under one of the Saïte Dynasties, and their theory, although opposed by experts who had a longer experience, disconcerted the majority. It was soon upset by facts, but, as often happens, the consequences deduced from it survived by force of habit. Many of us feared for some years after to be asserting too much, to declare openly that our Mycerinus was what we had entitled him on the faith of his inscription, the real Mycerinus.

THE MYCERINUS OF MÎT-RAHINEH.

Diorite. Cairo Museum.