In the colossal sculptures on the facades of the great temples, where complex perspective and foreshortening would interfere with the architectural effect, the hand in which the mace or weapon is held appears to be mainly determined by the direction to which the figure looks. At Ipsamboul, as shown in Monuments de l’Egypte, Pl. 11, Rameses grasps with his right hand, by the hair of the head, a group of captives of various races, negroes included, while he smites them with a scimitar or pole-axe, wielded in his left hand; but an onlooker, turned in the opposite direction, holds the sword in his right hand. This transposition is more markedly shown in two scenes from the same temple (Pl. 28). In the one Rameses, looking to the right, wields the pole-axe in the near or right hand, as he smites a kneeling Asiatic; in the other, where he looks to the left, he holds his weapon again in the near, but now the left hand, as he smites a kneeling negro. On the same temple soldiers are represented holding spears in the near hand, right or left, according to the direction they are looking (Pl. 22); and swords and shields are transposed in like manner (Pl. 28). The same is seen in the siege scenes and military reviews of Rameses the Great, on the walls of Thebes and elsewhere. The evidence is misleading if the primary aim of architectural decoration is not kept in view. In an example from Karnac—appealed to in proof that the Egyptians were a left-handed people,—where Thotmes III. hold his offering in the extended left hand, his right side is stated to be towards the observer. Nor are similar examples rare. Thoth and other deities, sculptured in colossal proportions, on the Grand Temple of Isis, at Philæ, as shown by Du Camp, in like manner have their right sides towards the observer, and hold each the mace or sceptre in the extended left hand. But on turning to the photographs of the Great Temple of Denderah, where another colossal series of deities is represented in precisely the same attitude, but looking in the opposite direction, the official symbols are reversed, and each holds the sceptre in the extended right hand. Numerous similar instances are given by Wilkinson; as in the dedication of the pylon of a temple to Amun by Rameses III., Thebes (No. 470); the Goddesses of the West and East, looking in corresponding directions (No. 461), etc.
Examples, however, occur where the conventional formulæ of Egyptian sculpture have been abandoned, and the artist has overcome the difficulties of perspective; as in a remarkable scene in the Memmonium, at Thebes, where Atmoo, Thoth, and a female (styled by Wilkinson the Goddess of Letters) are all engaged in writing the name of Rameses on the fruit of the Persea tree. Though looking in opposite directions, each holds the pen in the right hand (Wilkinson, Pl. 54 A). So also at Beni Hassan, two artists kneeling in front of a board, face each other, and each paints an animal, holding the brush in the right hand. At Medinet Habou, Thebes, more than one scene of draught-players occurs, where the players, facing each other, each hold the piece in the right hand. Similar illustrations repeatedly occur.
Among another people, of kindred artistic skill, whose records have been brought anew to light in recent years, their monumental evidence appears to furnish more definite results; while the curiously definite reference in the Book of Jonah leaves no room to doubt that among the ancient Ninevites it was recognised that at the earliest stage when voluntary action co-operated with the rational will, a specific hand was habitually in use. That the ancient dwellers on the Euphrates and the Tigris were a right-handed people appears to be borne out by their elaborate sculpture, recovered at Kourjunjik, Khorsabad, Nimroud, and other buried cities of the great plain. The sculptures are in relief, and frequently of a less conventional character than those of the Egyptian monuments, and are consequently less affected by the aspect and position of the figures. The gigantic figure of the Assyrian Hercules—or, as supposed, of the mighty hunter Nimrod,—found between the winged bulls, in the great court of the Palace of Khorsabad, is represented strangling a young lion, which he presses against his chest with his left arm, while he holds in his right hand a weapon of the chase, supposed to be analogous to the Australian boomerang. On the walls of the same palace the great king appears with his staff in his right hand, while his left hand rests on the pommel of his sword. Behind him a eunuch holds in his right hand, over the king’s head, a fan or fly-flapper; and so with other officers in attendance. Soldiers bear their swords and axes in the right hand, and their shields on the left arm. A prisoner is being flayed alive by an operator who holds the knife in the right hand. The king himself puts out the eyes of another captive, holding the spear in his right hand, while he retains in his left the end of a cord attached to his victim. Similar evidence abounds throughout the elaborate series of sculptures in the British Museum and in the Louvre. Everywhere gods and men are represented as “discerning between their right hand and their left,” and giving the preference to the former.
It has been already shown that in languages of the American continent, as in those of the Algonquins and the Iroquois, the recognition of the distinction between the right and left hand is apparent; and on turning to the monuments of a native American civilisation, evidence similar to that derived from the sculptures of Egypt and Assyria serves to show that the same hand had the preference in the New World as in the Old. In the Palenque hieroglyphics of Central America, for example, in which human and animal heads frequently occur among the sculptured characters, it is noticeable that they invariably look towards the left, indicating, as it appears to me, that they are the graven inscriptions of a lettered people who were accustomed to write the same characters from left to right on paper or skins. Indeed, the pictorial groups on the Copan statues seem to be the true hieroglyphic characters; while the Palenque inscriptions correspond to the abbreviated hieratic writing. The direction of the profile was a matter of no moment to the sculptor, but if the scribe held his pen or style in his right hand, like the modern clerk, he would as naturally draw the left profile as the penman slopes his current hand to the right. In the pictorial hieroglyphics, reproduced in Lord Kingsborough’s Mexican Antiquities, as in other illustrations of the arts of Mexico and Central America, it is also apparent that the battle-axe and other weapons and implements are most frequently held in the right hand. But to this exceptions occur; and it is obvious that there also the crude perspective of the artist influenced the disposition of the tools, or weapons, according to the action designed to be represented, and the direction in which the actor looked. Such are some of the indications which seem to point to a uniform usage, in so far as we can recover evidence of the practice among ancient nations; while far behind their most venerable records lie the chronicles of palæolithic ages: of the men of the drift and of the caves of Europe’s prehistoric dawn.
So far, then, it seems to be proved that not only among cultured and civilised races, but among the barbarous tribes of both hemispheres,—in Australia, Polynesia, among the Arctic tribes of our northern hemisphere at the present day, and among the palæolithic men of Europe’s post-pliocene times,—not only has a habitual preference been manifested for the use of one hand rather than the other, but among all alike the same hand has been preferred. Yet, also, it is no less noteworthy that this prevailing uniformity of practice has always been accompanied by some very pronounced exceptions. Not only are cases of exceptional facility in the use of both hands of frequent occurrence, but while right-handedness everywhere predominates, left-handedness is nowhere unknown. The skill of the combatant in hitting with both hands is indeed a favourite topic of poetic laudation, though this is characteristic of every well-trained boxer. In the combat between Entellus and Dares (Æn. v. 456), the passionate Entellus strikes now with his right hand and again with his left—
Præcipitemque Daren ardens agit æquore toto,
Nunc dextra ingeminans ictus, nunc ille sinistra.
But the more general duty assigned to the left hand is as the guard or the shield-bearer, as where Æneas gives the signal to his comrades, in sight of the Trojans (Æn. x. 261)—
Stans celsa in puppi; clipeum cum delude sinistra
Extulit ardentem.