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

by Georges Perrot; Charles Chipiez

This double had to be installed in a lodging suitable to its existence, had to be surrounded by objects which it had used in its former state, had to be supplied with the food which was necessary for the sustenance of its life. And all these things it obtained from the piety of its relations, who, on fixed days, brought them to the threshold of the good dwelling or the eternal dwelling, which were the phrases used by the Egyptians.[117] By these offerings alone could the hungry and thirsty phantom which had replaced the living man be kept alive. The first duty of the survivors was to take care that this dependent existence should not be extinguished by their neglect, to provide food and drink for the support, if we may use such a phrase, of the precarious life of the dead, who would otherwise be irritated against them and use the almost godlike power attributed to his mysterious condition for the punishment of his ungrateful posterity.[118]

This conception is not peculiar to Egypt. The double of the Egyptian sepulchral records corresponds exactly to the εἴδωλον[119] of the Greeks and the umbra of the Latins. Both Greeks and Latins believed that when the funeral rites had been duly accomplished, this image or shadow entered upon the possession of a subterranean dwelling and began a life which was no more than the continuation of that in the light.[120] The dead thus remained in close relation with the living, on the one hand by the nourishment which they received, on the other by the protection which they afforded; even in the funeral repast they took their parts, in the strictest sense of the word, in the eating and drinking.[121] They looked impatiently forward to these supplies because, for a moment, they awoke their dormant thoughts and feelings and gave them glimpses of the true life, the life above ground and in the sunshine.[122] If they were kept waiting too long they became angry and revenged themselves upon those who had caused their sufferings. Woe to the family or city which was not careful to interest the dead in its stability and thus to associate them with its prosperity![123]

These beliefs seem to have been common to all ancient peoples during that period of their existence which is lost in the shadow of prehistoric times. From India to Italy all the primitive forms of public and private rights betray their presence. For this fact and its consequences we may refer our readers to the fine work of M. Fustel de Coulange, La Cité antique.[124]

Fig. 86.—Stele of the 11th dynasty. Boulak. Drawn by Bourgoin.

With the progress of centuries and the development of religious thought, more elevated ideas prevailed. The growth of the scientific spirit tended to make the notion of a being suspended between life and death ever more strange and inadmissible. Experience accumulated its results and it became daily more evident that death not only put an end to the activity of the organs, but that, immediately upon its occurrence, it began to dissolve and decompose their tissues. As time rolled on men must have found it very difficult to believe in a shadow thus placed outside the normal conditions of life, in a something which was not a spirit and yet survived the destruction of its organs.

It would seem then that observation and logical reflection should soon have led to the abandonment of a theory which now appears so puerile; but, even in these scientific times, those whose intellects demand well defined ideas are few indeed.[125] At a period when the diffusion of intellectual culture and the perfection of scientific methods add daily to our accumulations of positive knowledge, most men allow their souls to be stirred and their actions to be prompted by the vaguest words and notions; how much greater then must the influence of those confused beliefs and baseless images have been in antiquity when but a few rare minds, and those ill provided with means of research and analysis, attempted to think with originality, clearness and freedom.

The prestige of this illusion was increased and perpetuated by its intimate connection with several of those sentiments which are most honourable to human nature. Such a worship of the dead surprises and even scandalizes us by its frank materialism, but if we seek for the source of its inspiration and its primitive meaning, we find them in the remembrance of lost objects of affection, in feelings broken by the supreme separation, in the gratitude of children to the parents who gave them birth and nourished their infancy, in the recognition by the living of the blessings which they enjoy through the long and laborious efforts of their ancestors. There was no doubt a perishable element in the funerary ideas of Egypt, an element which the progress of reason was sure to destroy, and we may be tempted to smile when we think of the Greek or Egyptian giving himself the trouble to feed his departed ancestors with blood, milk, or honey, but with all their simplicity, both one and the other were alive to a truth which the revolutionary spirit of our days, with its childish and brutal contempt for the past, is often unable to grasp. They realized the complete solidarity of one human generation with another. Guided by their hearts alone they anticipated the results at which modern thought has arrived by close and attentive study of history. From a reasoned out conviction of this truth and its consequences, philosophy now draws the principles of a high morality! but long before our days this idea and the tender, grateful, sentiments which it provoked had been a powerful instrument in the moral improvement of the first-born of civilization and a bond of union for their civil and domestic life.

We have thought it right to dwell upon this worship of the dead and to describe its character at some length, because the beliefs upon which it was based are not to be found so clearly set forth in the art of any other people. Their most complete, clear, and eloquent expression, in a plastic form, is to be seen in the tombs which border the Nile. And why is this so? It is because the Egyptian industries were already in full possession of their resources at the period when those beliefs had their strongest hold over the minds and feelings of the people. In the case of Greece, art did not arrive at its full development until the worship of the dead had lost its high place in the national conscience. When the Greek genius had arrived, after much striving, at its complete power of plastic expression, the gods of Olympus had been created for several centuries, and art was called upon to interpret the brilliant polytheism of Homer and Hesiod, to give outward image to those gods, and to construct worthy dwellings for their habitation. Sculptors, painters, and architects still worked indeed, at the decoration of the tomb. They strove to give it beauty of shape and arrangement, and to adorn its walls with bas-reliefs and pictures; they designed for it those vases and terra cottas which, in our own day, have been found in thousands in the cemeteries of Greece and Italy, but all this was only a subordinate use of their talent. Their ambition was to build temples, to model statues of Zeus, Pallas, and Apollo. On the other hand, those distant ages in which primitive and childish ideas of religion prevailed, had no art in which to manifest their beliefs with clearness and precision.