Fig. 7.—Portrait of Hesi, circa 3000 b.c., to show the skill displayed even at the beginning of Egyptian history in carving portraits in wood. As a rule they were made in the round and life-size. This funerary portrait cut in low relief in wood is exceptional.
Success after Twenty Centuries
Although these early sculptors had achieved so signal a triumph, the embalmers never abandoned the hope of bringing their art to such a state of perfection as to make of the mummy itself the simulacrum of the deceased. With infinite patience and persistence they experimented through one millennium after another to attain this object. But it was not until the time of the twenty-first dynasty, more than twenty centuries after they first attempted to do it, that they were able to transform the mummy itself into a portrait statue. From the artistic point this represents to us a debasement of æsthetic motive and practice; but to the embalmer it was the culmination of his achievement. But it was also the prelude to the degradation of his art. For the technique became so complex and difficult of execution that failure became a common incident, and to disguise the evidence of such incompetence the practice grew up of paying chief attention to the external appearance of the wrappings rather than to the corpse.
Fig. 8.—The “packed” mummy of a Queen of the Twenty-first Dynasty.
But to us the complicated technique of the embalmers during the twenty-first dynasty appeals rather as ingenious trickery, a tampering with the natural body to give it a spurious and trumpery resemblance to a living being. Judged by our artistic standards there can be no doubt that the ancient Egyptian practice of mummification was seen at its best at the end of the eighteenth dynasty, that is about the time of Tutankhamen. The most successful results are revealed in the mummies of Yuaa and Tuaa and of Seti I (Fig. 3, p. 33), which means that at the time when Tutankhamen was embalmed the craftsmen had the skill and the material resources to make as perfect a mummy as Egyptian ingenuity in the whole of its experience was capable of doing.
But the Egyptian tomb-robbers brought to the attention of the official world many mummies of the earlier part of the eighteenth dynasty, as well as some of those of the nineteenth and twentieth dynasties respectively before and after the culmination of the technical success in or about Tutankhamen’s time which revealed only too clearly certain faults that it seemed desirable to remedy.
The wholesale plundering of the Royal mummies in the twentieth dynasty, and the knowledge acquired by the priests when remedying the damage so inflicted, seem to have been responsible for the rapid transformation of the methods in the twenty-first dynasty. For this experience afforded them a unique opportunity of studying the results and appreciating the defects of their predecessors’ work.
That they profited by this experience is evident from the changes they effected in their technique after they had realized wherein the methods employed during the twentieth dynasty failed to attain the desired aim. For their innovations were directed towards remedying the most obtrusive distortions found in the mummies of the nineteenth and twentieth dynasties. The sunken cheeks were filled out by means of packing them with linen or mud, artificial eyes were inserted, the nose, lips, and ears were protected from distortion by wax plates, and the cheeks were painted. Many other devices were introduced to convert the mummy from a shrunken caricature into a more life-like portrait.
Mummification reached its fullest and most successful development during the six centuries from 1500 b.c. to 940 b.c., which represents the period of the collection of royal mummies in the Cairo Museum. They reveal the ancient Egyptian practice of embalming in its highest perfection, and have provided most of the information we possess of the history of mummification.