This important date is set, not very definitely, somewhere between 10,000 B.C. and 2,000 B.C. Its noticeable results were merriment and feast-making. At these feasts the fool, who was not yet a wit, won the laughter of the guests by his idiocy, or, often by his deformity. The wise fool is a later development.
But at these feasts also appeared the bards or rhapsodists, who entertained the company by chanting or reciting stories and jokes.
These are called the artists of the ear as the rock painters are called the artists of the eye. And with them language grew in beauty and power. They were living books, the only books then extant. For writing came slowly and was a clumsy affair at best for a long period. The Bards sang and recited and so kept alive folk-tales and jests that remain to this day.
Writing, like most of the inventions of man served every other purpose before that of humor.
At first it was only for accounts and matters of fact. In Egypt it was used for medical recipes and magic formulas. Accounts, letters, name lists and itineraries followed; but for the preservation of humorous thought writing was not used. That was left to the bards, and of course, to the caricaturists.
Therefore, Egyptian art usually presents itself in solemn and dignified effects with no lightness or gayety implied.
Yet we are told by Sir Gardner Wilkinson, the early Egyptian artists cannot always conceal their natural tendency to the humorous, which creeps out in a variety of little incidents. Thus, in a series of grave historical pictures on one of the great monuments at Thebes, we find a representation of a wine party, where the company consists of both sexes, and which evidently shows that the ladies were not restricted in the use of the juice of the grape in their entertainments; and, as he adds, “the painters, in illustrating this fact, have sometimes sacrificed their gallantry to a love of caricature.” Among the females, evidently of rank, represented in this scene, “some call the servants to support them as they sit, others with difficulty prevent themselves from falling on those behind them, and the faded flower, which is ready to drop from their heated hands, is intended to be characteristic of their own sensations.” Sir Gardner observes that “many instances of a talent for caricature, are observable in the compositions of the Egyptian artists, who executed the paintings of the tombs at Thebes, which belong to a very early period of the Egyptian annals. Nor is the application of this talent restricted always to secular subjects, but we see it at times intruding into the most sacred mysteries of their religion.”
A class of caricatures which dates from a very remote period, shows comparisons between men and the particular animals whose qualities they possess.
As brave as a lion, as faithful as a dog, as sly as a fox or as swinish as a pig,—these things are all represented in these ancient caricatures.
More than a thousand years B.C. there was drawn on an Egyptian papyrus a cat carrying a shepherd’s crook and driving a flock of geese. This is but one section of a long picture, in which the animals are often shown treating their human tyrants in the manner they are usually treated by them.