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

by Georges Perrot; Charles Chipiez

Such a belief is astonishing to us; it demands an effort of the imagination to which we moderns are in no way equal. We have great difficulty in realising a state of mind so different from what ours has become after centuries of progress and thought. Those early races had neither a long enough experience of things, nor a sufficiently capable power of reflection to enable them to distinguish the possible from the impossible. They did not appreciate the difference between living things and those which we call inanimate. They endowed all things about them with souls like their own. They found no more difficulty in giving life to their carved and painted domestics, than to the mummy or statue of the deceased, or to the phantom which they called the double. Is it not natural to the child to take revenge upon the table against which he hurts himself, or to speak tenderly to the doll which he holds in his arms?

Fig. 99.—The tomb of Ti;
women, representing the lands of the deceased,
carrying the funeral gifts.

This power to endow all things with life and personality is now reserved for the poet and the infant, but in the primitive days of civilization it belonged to all people alike. Imagination had then a power over a whole race which in our days is the gift of great poets alone. In the efforts which they made to forestall the wants of the helpless dead, they were not content with providing the food and furniture which we find upon the walls. They had a secret impression that these might be insufficient for wants renewed through eternity, and they made another step upon the way upon which they had embarked. By a still more curious and still bolder fiction than those which had gone before, they attributed to prayer the power of multiplying, by the use of a few magic sentences, all objects of the first necessity to the inhabitants of the tomb.

Every sepulchre has a stele, that is to say, an upright stone tablet which varied in form and place in different epochs, but always served the same purpose and had the same general character. Most of these steles were adorned with painting and sculpture; all of them had more or less complicated inscriptions.[146] In the semicircle which forms the upper part of most of these inscribed slabs, the dead person, accompanied by his family, presents offerings to a god, who is usually Osiris. Under this an inscription is carved after an unchanging formula: "Offering to Osiris (or to some other deity, as the case may be) in order that he may give provision of bread, liquid, beef, geese, milk, wine, beer, clothes, perfumes, and all good and pure things upon which the god subsists, to the ka of N..., son of M...." Below this the defunct is often shown in the act of himself receiving the offerings of his family. In both divisions the objects figured are looked upon as real, as in the wall decorations. In the lower division they are offered directly to him who is to profit by them; in the upper, the god is charged to see that they are delivered to the right address. The provisions which the god is asked to pass on to the defunct are first presented to him; by the intervention of Osiris the doubles of bread, meat and drink pass into the other world to nourish the double of man. But it was not essential for the gift to be effective that it should be real, or even quasi-real; that its image should even be given in paint or stone. The first-comer could procure all things necessary for the deceased by their enumeration in the proper form. We find therefore that many Egyptians caused the following invocation to passing strangers, to be engraved upon their tombs:

"Oh you who still exist upon the earth, whether you be private individuals, priests, scribes, or ministers entering into this tomb, if you love life and do not know death, if you wish to be in favour with the gods of your cities and to avoid the terrors of the other world, if you wish to be entombed in your own sepulchres and to transmit your dignities to your children, you must if you be scribes, recite the words inscribed upon this stone, or, if not, you must listen to their recital: say, offering to Amen, master of Karnak, that he may give thousands of loaves of bread, thousands of jars of drink, thousands of oxen, thousands of geese, thousands of garments, thousands of all good and pure things to the ka, or double, of the prince Entef."[147]

Thanks to all these subtle precautions, and to the goodwill with which the Egyptian intellect lent itself to their bold fictions, the tomb deserved the name it received, the house of the double. The double, when thus installed in a dwelling furnished for his use, received the visits and offerings of his friends and relations; "he had priests retained and paid to offer sacrifices to him; he had slaves, beasts of burden, and estates charged with his support. He was like a great lord sojourning in a strange country and having his wants attended to by intermediary officials assigned to his service."[148]

This analogy between the house and the tomb is so complete that it embraces details which do not seem very congruous. Like the house of the living, the tomb was strictly oriented, but after a mystic principle of its own.

As soon as the Egyptian began to think he perceived the most obvious of the similarities between the sun's career and that of man. Man has his dawn and his setting. Man grows from the early glimmerings of infancy to the apogee of his wisdom and strength; he then begins to decline and, like the magnified evening sun, ends by disappearing after his death into the depths of the soil.

In Egypt the sun sets every evening behind the Libyan chain; thence he penetrates into those subterranean regions of Ament across which he has to make his way before the dawn of the next day. The Egyptian cemeteries were therefore placed on the left bank of the Nile, that is, in the west of the country. All the known pyramids were built in the west, and there we find all the more important "cities of the dead," the necropolis of Memphis and those of Abydos and Thebes. A few unimportant groups of tombs have indeed been found upon the eastern bank; but these exceptions to a general rule are doubtless to be explained by a question of distance. For any city placed near the eastern border of the wider parts of the Nile valley, a burying-place in the Libyan chain would be very inconvenient both for the transport of the dead, and for the sepulchral duties of the survivors.[149]