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

by Georges Perrot; Charles Chipiez

Such crude notions as this can no longer be upheld. M. Marriette protests in the following almost indignant terms against certain utterances of M. Renan which seemed to him to imply the same doctrine. "M. Renan loves[86] to represent ancient Egypt as a sort of China, walled in and fortified against the exterior world, immovable, old even in its infancy, and arrived by a single spring at a degree of civilization which it never surpassed. He looks upon the country as a great plain, green indeed and fertile, but without accidents of contour to break the monotony of the landscape. And yet Egypt had periods of grandeur and decadence more marked than those of other countries. Her civilization went through all the different phases; it went through many complete transformations, it had its sudden moments of brilliancy and its epochs of eclipse. Its art was not so stationary as to prevent us from writing its history. The influence of Egypt was felt from Mesopotamia to the equator. Thothmes, in a word, was no Chinaman. Egypt perished because in attacking foreign nations she provoked a reaction which was fatal to her."[87]

Now that we are enabled to contrast the statues of the Ptolemaic period with those of the pyramid builders, we find nothing surprising in Mariette's language; but even before these means of study were open to us, criticism should have cast more than doubt upon the assertions of Plato; it should have appealed from a theory which was at variance with all historical analogies to the monuments themselves to tell the truth, to those monuments which were best known and understood. Was it likely, was it possible, that such a people as that which created these monuments, should remain for more than forty centuries unaffected by the law of continual, even if almost insensible, change? What right have we thus to place Egypt and China apart from the rest of humanity? There are, it is true, some peoples who are more attached than others to traditional customs and ancient institutions; they are more conservative, to use the modern phrase. But, although their evolution is a slower process, it is there; our eyes cannot perceive any movement in the small hand of a watch, but yet it does move exactly in the same fashion as that which marks the seconds. Upon the banks of the Peiho as upon those of the Nile, upon the whole surface of our planet, man is not; he becomes, to borrow one of the favourite expressions of German philosophy. History can admit no exception to this law either for China or Egypt. In the cases of both those countries there is a certain illusion, which is to be explained by our ignorance. We are not well enough acquainted with them to grasp the different periods of their political and social, their artistic and literary development. For one who is too far off or very short-sighted the details of the most varied landscape become obliterated or confused; waste land and smiling fields are blended together; hollows and hillocks lose the vigour of their contours.

China, as we have said, does not enter into our purview; and as for Egypt, the deeper we penetrate into her history the more are we convinced that her long career was troubled by moments of crisis similar to those which have come to other human societies. The narratives of the Greek historians give us reason to suspect that it was so, and the monuments which have been discovered insist upon the same truth, and compel us to accept it. For certain epochs these are very abundant, beautiful, and varied. Afterwards they become rare and clumsy, or altogether wanting; and again they reappear in great numbers and in their full nobility, but with a different general character. These contrasts and temporary eclipses occur again and again. How, then, can we doubt that here, as elsewhere, there were alternations of grandeur and poverty, of periods of conquest and expansion and epochs of civil war or of defeat by foreign invaders? May we not believe that through the clouds which obscure the causes of such changes we may catch glimpses of those periods of decadence and renascence which, following one upon the other, exhausted in the end the genius of the race?

Let us take a single example—the most striking of all. "After the sixth dynasty all documents cease; they are absolutely wanting until the eleventh, the first of the Middle Empire. This is one of those sudden interruptions in the history of Egypt which may be compared to the temporary disappearance of those curious rivers which run partly underground."[88]

Fig. 47.—Statue from the Ancient Empire, in limestone. Boulak. Drawn by Bourgoin.

When historians, living as long after our nineteenth century as we do after the epochs of Memphite and Theban supremacy in Egypt, come to treat the history of the past, they will perhaps look upon the ages which rolled away between the fall of Græco-Roman civilization and the revival of learning in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as no longer than that which divided the ancient from the middle empire of Egypt, or the latter from the dynasties of Thebes. In the distant future men will know, in a vague fashion, that between the fall of Rome and the discovery of printing, or that of America, there were great movements among the nations, and an apparent recoil of civilization; but memory and imagination will leap without effort over the gap, over that period which we call the Middle Ages. The Roman empire will seem to touch our modern civilization, and many of the differences which strike us so strongly will be imperceptible. They will perceive that we had a new religion and new inventions, but they will take more account of the resemblances than of the differences. Our languages, manners, laws, and forms of government will seem to them continuations of those of Greece and Rome. In that which we call antiquity, and in Christian Europe, they will find similar literary habits and standards of criticism, the same judicial nomenclature, the same terms for monarchy, empire, and republic, the same titles for kings and Cæsars. These different civilizations are like star clusters. To us who are among them they seem distinct enough, but to generations which are divided from them by a vast space of time they will seem to form but one nebulous body.

Fig. 48.—Woman kneading dough. Statuette from the Ancient Empire, in limestone.
Drawn by Bourgoin.