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

by Georges Perrot; Charles Chipiez

§ 3. Construction.

In spite of the bad quality of Egyptian timber the earliest efforts at construction made by the ancestors of the people were made in wood. Their dwellings cannot have been very unlike those which the traveller even yet encounters in Nubia. These are cabins with walls formed of palm branches interlaced and plastered over with clay and straw. Their roofs are branches or planks from the same tree laid horizontally across. In Lower Egypt, upon the borders of Lake Menzaleh, the huts of the people are formed of long and thick faggots of reeds. Wherever wood was abundant and the rain less to be feared than the heat of the sun, the first dwelling was a hut of branches. The manufacture of bricks required a good deal more patience, calculation, and effort, than to plant a few boughs in the soil and weave them together.

We do not mean to pretend that earth, either in the form of bricks or pisé, did not very soon come into use when men began to form shelters for themselves, but it seems certain that wooden construction was developed before any other. It was the first to aim at ornament, and to show anything which could be called a style. This is proved by the fact that the most ancient works in stone have no appropriate character of their own; they owe such decorative qualities as they possess to their docile imitation of works in the less durable material.

We may take the sarcophagus of Mycerinus as an example of this. That sarcophagus had a short but adventurous career after its discovery by Colonel Howard Vyse in 1837. It was then empty, but in a state of perfect preservation, with the exception of the lid, which was broken, but could be easily restored. The precious relic was removed from the pyramid and embarked, together with the wooden coffin of the king, on board a merchant ship at Alexandria. On her voyage to England the ship was wrecked off Carthagena, and the sarcophagus lost. The coffin floated and was saved. Happily the sarcophagus had been accurately drawn, and we are enabled to give a perspective view of it compiled from Perring's elevations (Fig. [34]).

From its appearance no one would guess that this sarcophagus was of basalt. The whole of its forms were appropriate to wooden construction alone. Each of its longer sides was divided into three compartments by four groups of minute pilasters, slight in salience, and crowned by a kind of entablature formed of four transverse members which were unequal in length and relief. The lower parts of the three compartments consist of a kind of false door with very complicated jambs. Above this there are deeply cut hollows with cross bars, suggesting windows, and still higher a number of fillets run along the whole length of the sarcophagus. The little pilasters are separated by narrow panels, which terminate in an ornament which could readily be cut in wood by the chisel, viz., in that double lotus-leaf which is so universally present in the more ancient tombs.

The ends of the sarcophagus were similar to the sides, except that they had only one compartment. The corners and the upper edge, exclusive of the lid, are carved into a cylindrical moulding which resembles the rounded and tied angles of a wooden case. The upper member of the whole, a bold cornice, is the only element which it is not easy to refer to the traditions of wooden construction.[54]

The first idea suggested by the design of this sarcophagus is that of a large wooden coffer. When we come to look at it a little more closely, however, the imitations of doors and windows and other details incline us to believe that its maker was thinking of reproducing the accustomed aspect of a wooden house. In that case we should have in it a reduction of a building belonging to the closed category of assembled constructions. It is by the study of imitative works of this kind and by comparing with one another the forms originally conceived by carpenters and joiners, and afterwards employed in stone architecture, that, in our chapter upon the general principles of Egyptian construction, we were enabled to attempt a restoration which may be taken as a type of the early wooden architecture (Fig. [83], vol. i.).

Fig. 34.—The Sarcophagus of Mycerinus. Drawn in perspective from Perring's elevations.

The foregoing observations may be applied with equal justice to the sarcophagus of Khoo-foo-Ankh figured on pp. 183, 184, vol. i. It is of the same period, and displays the same arrangement of panels and fillets, the same lotus-leaf ornament, and the same imitation of a barred window. There is no cornice or gorge at the top, but the upper part of the flat sides is decorated with the perpendicular grooves which are found in the hollow of the cornice elsewhere. In wood this ornament, which was well adapted to add richness to the cornice by the shadows which it cast, could easily be made with a gouge; so that even if the gorge itself was not borrowed from wooden construction its ornamentation may well have originated in that way.