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

by Georges Perrot; Charles Chipiez

When the whole of the fertile plain was at their disposal, why should they have chosen a site where no vegetation could be reared without the help of the sakyeh and the shadouf? Why should they, of their own free will, have built their dwellings close to those cliffs in the Libyan chain which give off at night the heat they have absorbed from the sun during the day? The buildings of Medinet-Abou are immediately at the foot of the hill Gournet-el-Mourraï, which detaches itself from the chain near the southern extremity of the Theban necropolis, and thrusts itself forward, like a cape into the sea, towards the outer limits of the cultivated ground.

We should not have looked for a palace in such a situation. We may add that the site of the pavilion is not large enough to accommodate the household of a king. It is closely circumscribed by the temple of Thothmes and its propylæa on the right, and by that of Rameses at the back, so that its dimensions would have seemed even more insignificant than they are in comparison with those gigantic fabrics. The greatest width of the pavilion is not more than about 80 feet and its greatest depth than 72, and the small court which almost cuts the building into two parts (see Fig. [6]) occupies a good third of the surface inclosed by these measurements. Taken altogether, the three stories could not have contained more than about ten chambers, some of which were rather closets than anything more ambitious. In spite of the comparative simplicity of modern domestic arrangements a middle-class family of our day would be cramped in such a dwelling. How then could a Pharaoh, with the swarm of idlers who surrounded him, attempt to take up his residence in it?

What, then, are we to call the little edifice which stands in front of the temple of Rameses II.? Is it a temple raised by the conqueror in his own honour? If we examine the bas-reliefs which decorate it both within and without, we shall see that it thoroughly deserves the name of Pavillon Royal which the French savants gave to it. The personality of Rameses fills it from roof to basement. In the interior we find him at home, in his harem, among his wives and children. Here one of his daughters brings him flowers of which he tastes the scent; there we see him playing draughts with another daughter, or receiving fruit from the hands of a third, whose chin he playfully caresses. Upon the external walls there are battle scenes. Aided by his father, Amen, Rameses overthrows his enemies. With wonderful technical precision the sculptor has given to each figure its distinguishing costume, weapons, and features. The triumph of the king is complete; none of his adversaries can stand before him.

May we not seek the explanation which the arrangements of the building fail to suggest, in this perpetual recurrence of the royal image, figured in all the public and private occupations in which the life of the monarch was passed? The way in which it pervades the whole structure ought to be enough to convince us that the pavilion, like the adjoining temple, is nothing but a monument to his prowess. It is an ingenious and brilliant addition to the public part of the tomb, to the cenotaph. In other buildings of the same kind the temple, with its courts and pylons, is everything; but here, as if to distinguish his cenotaph from those of his predecessors and to impress posterity with a higher notion of his power and magnificence, Rameses has chosen to add a building which groups happily with it and serves as a kind of vestibule. It is difficult to say whence he borrowed the form of this unique edifice. Perhaps from one of the numerous pavilions which went to make up a pharaonic palace. Such, however, was not the opinion of Mariette, who discusses the question more than once. His final opinion was as follows: "The general architectural lines of this pavilion of Rameses, especially when seen from some distance, agree with those of the triumphal towers (migdol) which are represented in the bas-reliefs of Karnak, Luxor, the Ramesseum, and Medinet-Abou. These towers were erected on the frontiers of the country by the Egyptian monarchs, where they served both as defensive works and as memorials of the national victories. The royal pavilion of Medinet-Abou was, therefore, a work of military rather than of civil architecture."[7] The warrior-king par excellence could not have preserved his memory green in the minds of his subjects by any more characteristic monument.[8]

But whether it is to be considered a palace or a fortress, this is the proper place to study the details of this curious edifice. It forms, indeed, part of an assemblage of funerary buildings, and its situation is immediately in front of a temple, facts which might suggest that its arrangements ought to have been discussed in an earlier chapter. But these arrangements are in fact imitated from those of the ordinary dwellings of the living. Its economy is not that of either tomb or temple. The superposition of one story upon another is found in neither of those classes of buildings but it is found both in military and domestic architecture. So, too, with the mode of lighting the various apartments. The darkness of the tomb is complete, the illumination of the temple is far from brilliant, in its more sacred parts it is almost as dark as the tomb. Prayers could be said to Osiris without inconvenience by the scanty daylight which found its way through the narrow doorway of the sepulchral chapel, but the active pleasures of life required a broader day. We find, therefore, that the pavilion was lighted by windows, real windows, and some of them very large. Nothing is more rare, in the buildings which have come down to us from the pharaonic epochs, than such windows; but then most of those buildings are either tombs or temples. Civil architecture in Egypt had to fulfil pretty much the same requirements as in other countries. It was, therefore, obliged to employ the means which have been found necessary in every other country and at every other period.

Fig. 10.—Brackets in the courtyard of the Royal Pavilion.

The employment of the window is not the only structural peculiarity in the pavilion of Medinet-Abou: upon the walls which surround the small court, and between the first and second stories, there are carved stone brackets or consoles, supporting flat slabs of stone. It has sometimes been asserted that these brackets formed supports for masts upon which a velarium was stretched across the court. But neither in engravings nor in photographs have we been able to discover the slightest trace of the holes which would be necessary for the insertion of such masts.

But, leaving their purpose on one side, we must call attention to the curious sculptures which are interposed between the upper and lower slabs of these brackets. They are in the shape of grotesque busts, resting upon the lower slab and supporting the upper one with their heads. In the wall above a kind of framed tablet is inserted.[9] In these figures, which are now very much worn and corroded by exposure, we have a repetition of those prisoners of war which occur frequently upon the neighbouring bas-reliefs in similar uncomfortable positions. Such a motive is entirely in place in a building which, by the general features of its architecture, seems a combination of fortress and triumphal arch.