Of rather later age, perhaps Ptolemaic, was a large wooden coffin that we found; the body and the lid were two equal parts, plainly rectangular; and they lay where some old spoiler had left them, separated, and afterwards buried under a heap of stuff thrown out in digging later tombs. The whole surface of this sarcophagus was stuccoed, inside and outside, top and bottom, and every part of it finely painted and inscribed. The top of the lid had the deities of the district, the hawk, the Osiris-crocodile, and the bennu, with inscriptions; the lower part inside bore other animals, the vulture, the cow, and white hippopotamus; the inside of the lid had the two crocodile-headed Sebeks and the ape; and underneath the lower part, or body, was a long inscription, partly biographical. I had a terrifying experience with this coffin; when I found it much of the stucco was loose, and any amount of trouble was worth while to preserve so beautiful and important an object. I observed in copying it that parts had been waxed, to heighten the colour, and this suggested to me to fasten down the stucco by wax. I tried melting it on with a plate of hot iron, but could scarcely do it without blackening it with smoke. In course of this I poured a layer of wax over the surface; but what was my horror to see as the wax cooled that it contracted into saucer-formed patches, lifting up with it the stucco, and leaving bare wood beneath! To touch these wax patches must irrevocably ruin all hopes of replacing the stucco; so I covered it with sheets of paper, and thought on it for some days, a spectre of dismal failure. I tried in vain to buy a brazier at Medinet; so at last, making a grating of wire, I filled it with red-hot charcoal, and supported it over part of the unlucky coffin. As I watched it, the wax softened, flattened, and dropped exactly into place again; patch after patch settled down, the wax melted and ran in under the stucco; and at last I saw the whole surface completely relaid, and fixed so firmly that even the fearful rattle of an Egyptian railway wagon, in the long journey to Bulak, did not injure it.
But perhaps the greatest success at Hawara was in the direction least expected. So soon as I went there I observed a cemetery on the north of the pyramid; on digging in it I soon saw that it was all Roman, the remains of brick tomb-chambers; and I was going to give it up as not worth working, when one day a mummy was found, with a painted portrait on a wooden panel placed over its face. This was a beautifully drawn head of a girl, in soft grey tints, entirely classical in its style and mode, without any Egyptian influence. More men were put on to this region, and in two days another portrait-mummy was found; in two days more a third, and then for nine days not one; an anxious waiting, suddenly rewarded by finding three. Generally three or four were found every week, and I have even rejoiced over five in one day. Altogether sixty were found in clearing this cemetery, some much decayed and worthless, others as fresh as the day they were painted.
Not only were these portraits found thus on the mummies, but also the various stages of decoration that led up to the portrait. First, the old-fashioned stucco cartonnage coverings, purely Egyptian, of the Ptolemies. Next, the same made more solidly, and with distinct individual differences, in fact, modelled masks of the deceased persons. Then arms modelled in one with the bust, the rest of the body being covered with a canvas wrapper painted with mythologic scenes, all purely Egyptian. Probably under Hadrian the first portraits are found, painted on a canvas wrapper, but of Greek work. Soon the canvas was abandoned,
73. Four Stages of Mummy Decoration.
and a wooden panel used instead; and then the regular series of panel portraits extends until the decline in the third century. All this custom of decorating the mummies arose from their being kept above ground for many years in rooms, probably connected with the house. Various signs of this usage can be seen on the mummies, and in the careless way in which they were at last buried, after such elaborate decoration.
Though only a sort of undertaker’s business, in a provincial town of Egypt, and belonging to the Roman age, when art had greatly declined, yet these paintings give us a better idea of what ancient painting was, and what a high state it must have reached in its prime, than anything yet known, excepting some of the Pompeian frescoes. Mannerism is evident in nearly all of these, and faults may be easily detected; yet there is a spirit, a sentiment, an expression about the better examples which can only be the relic of a magnificent school, whose traditions and skill were not then quite lost. A few indeed of these heads are of such power and subtlety that they may stand beside the works of any age without being degraded. If such was Greek painting still, centuries after its zenith, by obscure commercial artists, and in a distant town of a foreign land, we may dimly credit what it may have been in its grandeur. The National Gallery now begins its history of paintings far before that of any other collection; the finest examples left, after the selection of the Bulak Museum, being now at Trafalgar Square.