Fig. 49.—The Scribe Chaphré.
Fifth dynasty. Boulak. Limestone.
Egypt, then, had her great convulsions like the rest of the world. She met with disasters, and underwent periods of confusion like those which overtook the nations of the West between the reigns of Trajan and Charlemagne. Wars and invasions, the action and reaction of civilization, had upon her the same influence as upon them, and, in transforming her sentiments and ideas, caused their plastic expression to pass through a series of changes in taste and style. The Theban tomb of the time of Rameses is very different from that of Memphis and the ancient empire; the new empire constructed no buildings like the greater pyramids, but its temples were larger and more magnificent than any of their predecessors. It was the same with sculpture. A cultivated eye has no need to run to inscriptions to enable it to distinguish between works of the ancient and of the middle empire; nor will it confound works created in either of those periods with those of the Sait epoch. The differences are almost as well marked as those which enable archæologists to distinguish a torso of the time of Phidias from one of the school of Praxiteles or Lysippus. These differences it will be our duty to describe hereafter, but our readers may perhaps discover them for themselves if they examine the illustrations to this chapter, which are arranged in chronological order.
Variety is universal in Egypt, local variety as well as that of different periods. Language had its dialects as well as art. The pronunciation of Upper and that of Lower Egypt was quite dissimilar, except in the case of a few letters. In the same way different cities had distinct schools of sculpture and painting, which were distinguished from one another by their traditional methods of conception and execution. Neither under Ousourtesen nor under Rameses, had art the same character in the cities of the Delta, in Memphis, and in Thebes. Among the works in sculpture executed for Rameses II., those of Abydos were more elegant and refined than those of Thebes.
Fig. 50.—The Lady Naï. Wooden statue
from the 19th or 20th dynasty. Louvre.
How, then, are we to explain the error committed by Plato, and by him transmitted to posterity? The explanation is easy. The Greeks visited Egypt too late in its history to form a true judgment. In Plato's time the Egyptians were still trying, by violent but spasmodic efforts, to reconquer the independence which had been destroyed by the successor of Cyrus. But the moment was at hand when even these intermittent struggles were to be abandoned, and they were to finally succumb to sovereigns of foreign blood. Their still brilliant civilization might deceive a passing stranger, but the decadence had commenced—a decadence slow indeed, but none the more remediable.
Some years after the visit of Plato, the two Nectanebos, more especially the second, devoted themselves with energetic ardour to the restoration of the ancient buildings of the country and to the construction of new ones, such as the temple at Philæ. Buildings signed with their name are to be found all over Egypt; but these simultaneous undertakings seem to betray a sense of vanishing power, an uncertainty of the morrow, a feverish activity seeking to deceive itself and to hide its own weakness. Nothing could be more precarious than the political conditions under which this activity was displayed. The independence of the country was maintained by the dearly bought services of Spartan and Athenian mercenaries. Twice already had Persia crushed Egyptian revolts, and she was, perhaps, but watching her opportunity to cast the hordes of Asia upon the unhappy country for a third time. Ill obeyed as he was, the "Great King" could always find troops to take part in the spoiling of a country whose riches had proved so inexhaustible. And if, by any remote chance, the Persians should fail in their enterprise, another and a graver danger would menace the Egyptian monarchy from the rapid growth of the Greek power in the Mediterranean. Since the period of the Persian wars, the language, the literature, the arts, the mythology of Greece, had spread with great rapidity; and the moment might be foreseen when a supremacy founded upon intellectual worth would be confirmed by military triumph and the creation of a vast Hellenic empire. The conquest of Egypt was begun by the Ionian soldiers and merchants who were introduced into the Nile valley by Psemethek; it was bloodlessly completed by the arms of Alexander. For three centuries the Egyptians had been accustomed to see the Greeks freely coming and going among them as merchants, as mercenary officers, as travellers eager for instruction. The latter posed as disciples before the priests of Memphis and Heliopolis, and freely expressed a warmth of admiration which could not fail to flatter the national vanity. The Greeks would be better masters than their rivals from Persia. From them the Egyptians would, at least, obtain good administration and complete freedom in the exercise of their religion in return for their taxes. The Greeks were clear-sighted enough to understand their own interests; they were too philosophical and large minded for any fanatical persecution of, or even hindrance to, the national religion; they were too much of connoisseurs to fail in respect to a form of civilization whose prodigious antiquity they divined, and before which the most eminent among them were ever inclined to bow, like youths before an old man, or a parvenu before the descendant of a long line of kings.
Thus Egypt gradually fell into the hands of strangers after the commencement of the fourth century before Christ. Ethiopians, Assyrians and Persians had by turns overrun the country. Great numbers of the Phœnicians had established themselves in it, and, after the fall of Jerusalem and Samaria, many Jews followed their example. Finally, the Greeks came in by thousands through the breaches which their predecessors had made, penetrating into all parts, and making everywhere felt the superiority of a people who had, by appropriating the useful results obtained in a long succession of centuries by more ancient races, become wealthier, stronger, and better instructed than any of their forerunners.
Thus Egypt lost her power of national rejuvenation, her power of rising again after calamity. She existed on through the centuries by mere force of habit, but she lived no more. Her population was so homogeneous, and her institutions were so solid, that the social conditions of the country could not be changed in a day or even in a century. The teachings of her religion had been established by so long a course of development, and the hands of her artists were so well practised, that the monumental types which had been created in more fertile periods of her history were reproduced until a late date, in a machine-like and instinctive fashion. Imagination was dead, and the best that could be hoped for was the faithful repetition of those forms which the genius of the race had conceived in its last moments of original thought.
Under the Sait princes, under the Psemetheks and Nekau, under Apries and Amasis, Egypt was delivered from her enemies and again became mistress of Syria and of the Island of Cyprus. She thus recovered confidence in herself and in her future, and a period ensued which had an art of its own with distinctive features which we shall endeavour to trace. In the intervals of precarious repose which characterized the Persian domination, the Egyptians had leisure neither to invent nor to improve. They copied, as well as they could, the monuments of the twenty-sixth dynasty. Art became a mere collection of technical precepts, kept together and transmitted in the intercourse of the studio, by instruction and practice; it became a mere matter of routine implying, perhaps, great technical skill, but displaying no sincere and personal feeling. Nature was no longer studied or cared for. Artists knew that the human figure should be divided into so many parts. They knew that in the representation of this or that god a certain attitude or attribute was necessary; and they carved the statues required of them after the traditional recipes. Thus Egyptian art became conventional, and so it remained to the end. So it was in the time of Diodorus. The sculptors whom that historian saw at work in Memphis and Thebes, during the reign of Augustus, carved a statue as a modern mechanic would make the different parts of a machine; they worked with a rapidity and an easy decision more characteristic of the precise workman than of the artist.[89] Thought was no longer necessary to them. The due proportions and measurements had been ascertained and fixed many centuries before their time.