A History of Art in Ancient Egypt, Vol. 1 (of 2)

by Georges Perrot; Charles Chipiez

The second Theban Empire may be studied under very different conditions. The architects of that epoch excelled all their predecessors in the skill with which they used their materials, and the artistic ability with which they laid their plans. In a word, they realized the ideal towards which Egyptian builders had been tending for many centuries, and their genius is still to be seen in buildings which, even in their ruin, charm by the grandeur of their conception and the finish of their execution.

In the century which saw the construction of the great temples of Abydos, of Karnak, and of Luxor, the architect who was charged with the building of the royal tombs could dispose of all the resources of an empire which stretched from the southern boundaries of Ethiopia to Damascus and Nineveh. He would have fulfilled the wishes of neither prince nor people had he not found means to give an amplitude and a beauty to those tombs which should stand a comparison with the sumptuous edifices which the same kings had erected, in another part of the city, in honour of the great deities of the country.

The simple and massive forms of the pyramid did not lend themselves to success in such an enterprise. They afforded no opportunity for the happy combinations of horizontal and vertical lines, for the contrasts of light and shadow and splendour of decoration which distinguished the epoch. The experience of the Middle Empire proved that it was better to make a fresh departure than to attempt to foist upon the pyramid a class of ornament which was destructive to the simplicity in which so much of its grandeur consisted. The highest expression of the new form of art was in the temple, the development of which was rather in a horizontal than in a vertical direction; in the long avenues of sphinxes, in the pylons and colossal statues of the kings, in porticoes and forests of columns. The problem, therefore, was to embody some of these elements in the design of the tomb. For this purpose it was necessary to give increased dimensions and greater importance to a part of the royal sepulchre which had been hitherto comparatively neglected. The funerary chapel had to be expanded into a temple in miniature, into a temple where the king, who had rejoined the deities from whom he was descended, could receive the homage and worship of his people.

The exploits of these princes, which were greater than anything of which Egypt had to boast in the whole of its glorious past, must have helped to suggest the temple form of their tombs. To this form the general movement of the national art also pointed, and to give it effect nothing more was required than the separation of the chapel from the tomb proper, to which previous tradition had so closely allied it. The situation of the sepulchre, after Thebes had become a populous city and the real capital of Egypt, was no longer a matter of question. It was in the rocky flanks of the Libyan chain that all its inhabitants sought that asylum for their dead which the inhabitants of Memphis found upon the eastern edge of the desert. The Libyan chain to the west of Thebes offers no platform like that of the necropolis of Memphis. Its cliffs and intersecting ravines offer no sites for constructed works; hence the ordinary form of Theban tomb is the speos, or the pipe, which is but an exaggerated form of the speos.

Like the chief men among his subjects, the sovereign loved to take his last repose in the immediate neighbourhood of the city in which he had dwelt during his life, in which the streets had so often resounded to the cries of triumph which greeted his return from some successful campaign, or had seen him pass in some of those long processions which are figured upon the walls of Medinet-Abou ([Fig. 172]).[239] His tomb was a cavern like that of his subjects. Fashion and the physical conditions of the country governed him as well as his inferiors in rank. From the reign of Seti I. onwards, the kings chose for their place of sepulture the wild and deserted valley in which Belzoni found the tomb of that conqueror. In the time of the Ptolemies it contained the bones of no less than forty Egyptian monarchs. It would be difficult to imagine any site better calculated for the isolation and concealment of the mummy than this valley, where the rocks split and crumble under the sun, and the sand blown hither and thither by the winds from the desert fills up every crevice in the cliffs.

Fig. 172.—Rameses III. conducting a religious procession,
at Medinet-Abou. (Wilkinson, iii., pl. 50.)

Nothing could be easier than to mask the entrance in such a place, but, on the other hand, no constructed building of any importance was possible except at a great expenditure of time and labour.[240]

But the plain at the foot of the range offered all that the architect could wish. It was still within the district consecrated to the dead, and yet its level surface presented no obstacles to an unlimited extension of any buildings which might be placed upon it.