Predecessors of Cleopatra

by Leigh North

As the goddess Safekh was the patron deity of libraries we may judge that the king had intellectual tastes, though we know him to have been something of an athlete and a great sportsman. Indeed, it was to this last that he owed his wife, for it was on a hunting expedition that he encountered and fell in love with her. Queen Maut-amua and her daughter-in-law, Ti or Thi, were associated much together, as were Queen Aahotep and her daughter-in-law, Nefertari-Aahmes, though not so generally considered divinities as were the founders of the race.

Maut-a-mua must have been a woman of intellect, capacity and attraction since she was her son’s guardian, and probably regent, and his attachment to her seems to have been strong and enduring. She lived many years after her husband, whose reign was brief, lasting not more than eight or nine years.

The likenesses of these various kings and queens are often found among the wall pictures in the tombs and are reproduced in many of the books on Egypt. The bas-reliefs and statues which decorated temples and tombs were mostly painted. Says Maspero: “That the Egyptians studied from Nature is proved by the facility with which they seized likenesses and drew the appropriate movements of animals. These figures are strange, but they live and have a certain charm.” To paint men brown and women yellow was the rule, but to this there were occasional exceptions. At Sackuarah, in the time of the Fifth Dynasty, the flesh tint of the men is yellow, while at Istamboul, or Abu Simbel, it is red, as also in the tombs of the epoch of Thotmosis IV.

The early Egyptian is said to have had a fine forehead, small, aquiline nose and a well-formed chin. The picture preserved of Queen Maut-a-mua, with the royal asp above her forehead, gives a long, slightly aquiline nose and a small, well-shaped chin. It is rather startling, in turning to her daughter-in-law, Ti, to find this face repeated in a sort of caricature, devoid of beauty. As in most cases, doctors differ as to the amount of reliance that can be placed upon the verisimilitude of the portraits and statues of these various kings and queens that have come down to us. Some authorities maintain that there existed an ideal conventional type, to which the actual bore little or no resemblance, and point out how each is but the modification of the other. Some again claim for them considerable authenticity. Perhaps a middle ground may come nearest to the truth. The conventional type no doubt dominated the painter’s or sculptor’s mind. But when the statues are proved to have been executed in the lifetime of the original it seems likely that some resemblance was aimed at, and the differences that exist go to show this. Also in many cases they belonged to the same family, and may well have had features common to all; as in later times the Hapsburgh jaw was handed down from generation to generation. How hard we have found it to reconcile the picture in the various galleries with the reputation of the charming, beautiful and unhappy Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, and yet doubtless there was a resemblance. How often, too, the photograph of a near and dear friend has an utterly unfamiliar aspect. So that we may fairly admit that even in these ancient times statues and pictures (at least in some cases) a suggestion of the original may remain to us.

The head of Tahutmes IV, which is preserved in a statue or statuette, gives a pleasing face, with an amiable expression. At Luxor, Queen Maut-a-mua appears without the king, but with her son, whose paternity is ascribed to Amen. There is also a picture of the king, smiting some negroes, and behind is a queen called Ai’at who is spoken of as royal daughter, sister and wife, but it is thought this may be intended for an ideograph of the “goddess queen,” Maut-a-mua, as there is no other trace of her. On one private tomb is a picture of Amenophis III and his mother, and there are also various small remains in the way of scarabs, rings, etc. In one of the reliefs in the “Birth Room,” before referred to, the god Amen and the queen are seated upon the hieroglyphic symbol for heaven and supported by the goddesses Selqet and Neith.

King Amenophis III did not resemble his mother. It is quite a different face, with good features and a resolute, though pensive expression. The forehead is high, the eyes full, the nose long but rounded at the end, the upper lip short, and the chin prognathous. He is described as amiable and generous, and showed deference and strong affection both for mother and wife. He seems among the most pleasing of the Egyptian kings. Engaged in wars, devoted to hunting, especially the chase of the lion, which led him far afield, he was yet, as were many of his predecessors, deeply interested in architectural enterprises and the era is noted for the spirit and beauty of its sculpture. Court and colonnade at Karnak were of his building, and on the walls of various apartments are pictures of the coronation of the king and other details of his life.

He is best known to us, and his fame rests chiefly on the marvellous colossi which he erected, “the grandest the world has ever seen.” They are sixty feet high, and when they wore the crown of an Egyptian king, which has since been destroyed, towered seventy feet into the air, a solid block of sandstone. Miss Martineau, a traveller of comparatively modern times, thus describes the impression they made upon her. “There they sit, together yet apart, in the midst of the plain, serene and vigilant, still keeping their untired watch over the lapse of ages and the eclipse of Europe. I can never believe that anything else so majestic as this pair has been conceived of by the imagination of Art, nothing certainly, even in Nature, ever affected me so unspeakably. The pair, sitting alone amid the expanse of verdure, with islands of ruins behind them, grow more striking to us every day. The impression of sublime tranquility which they convey, when seen from distant points, is confirmed by a nearer approach. There they sit, keeping watch, hands on knees, gazing straight forward, seeming, though so much of the face is gone, to be looking over to the monumental piles on the other side of the river, which became gorgeous temples after these throne seats were placed here—the most immovable thrones that have ever been established on the earth.”

It is rarely that the name of an Egyptian sculptor is preserved, but this case is an exception. An inscription records his name and his naturally proud and exultant feelings at the completion of his work. He was called Amen-hotep or Amen-hept, and thus speaks: “I immortalized the name of the king and no one has done the like of me in my works. I executed two portrait statues of the king, astonishing for their breadth and height, their completed form dwarfed the temple tower; forty cubits was their measure: they were cut in the splendid sandstone mountain, on either side the eastern and the western, I caused to be built lightships whereon the statues were carried up the river; they were emplaced in their sublime temple; they will last as long as heaven. A joyful event was it when they were landed at Thebes and raised up in their place.”

The stone is of a yellowish brown color and very difficult to work. Both statues represent the king and stood before a temple which he built, but of which the veriest fragments remain. We are reminded somewhat by the sculptor’s triumphant pæan of the good Un’e, who was minister to Pepi VI and so exulted in his work and position. Fond as Amenophis was of both his mother and his foreign wife, for whose pleasure and diversion he constructed a great lake, neither of them sit beside him or share the honor of so majestic a statue, as we might suppose, especially as regards his wife, would have been the case; he immortalizes himself alone. Two figures of queens, Maut-a-mua and Ti, are, however sculptured at the base of the statues; they measure eighteen feet in height, but appear small beside the colossi. Says one visitor, the surface of the statues was originally beautifully polished. The thrones on which they are seated are covered with sculptures; the god Hapi (the Nile) is weaving together the lotus lily and papyrus plant, implying the rule of the monarch over Upper and Lower Egypt.

Homer calls Amenophis III, the Memnon of the Greeks, “the most stately of living men,” and according to a later legend he was the son of Aurora. It was during the Roman imperial epoch that they were taken for the statues of Memnon, who slew Nestor’s son, Antiochus, in the Trojan war, and was himself slain by Achilles, and to explain the fact that the Trojan hero should thus appear in Egypt a legend was invented. The so-called “vocal Memnon,” the more Eastern of the statues, greeted his mother, Eos, with musical sounds and the morning dews were supposed to be the tears which the goddess shed upon her beloved child. The two statues stood at the end of an avenue of gigantic figures, leading to the temple of Amen, and from the river to the temple, a mile in length, went the Strada Regia, the royal street of Thebes.