An Artist in Egypt

by Walter Tyndale

FROM 1905 and onwards I spent five long seasons in Upper Egypt. I was engaged during a part of that time in reproducing a series of eighteenth dynasty bas-reliefs for four different museums. By the courtesy of the Antiquities Department I was allowed the use of the hut built by the Egyptian Exploration Fund, when, under the direction of Professor Naville, the excavations of the Mentuhoteb temple at Thebes were begun. I joined the camp during the last season of its work there. I spent a delightful winter in the companionship of four enthusiastic excavators. The exciting finds while Professor Currelly was in charge of the camp, as well as the epoch-making discovery of the tomb of Queen Tyi in the Valley of the Tombs of the Kings, all tend to make the winter of 1905–1906 a memorable one in the annals of Egyptian research. It was an exciting time; but as these events, as well as my own work for the museums, has been given in detail in Below the Cataracts, I propose now to recount some of the incidents which occurred since the Egyptian Exploration Fund broke up their camp to carry on their work at Abydos.

The reproduction of the bas-reliefs in the Hatshepsu temple, which I originally undertook rather as an experiment, brought me numerous commissions from various museums. The work was interesting as well as lucrative; but after some months of it I yearned to get back to my water-colour drawings. I therefore engaged an artist in Paris to come out the following season to assist me. We then had the hut to ourselves, and we turned the antiquities store-room into a studio for such work as we had not to do in the temple itself.

We led the ‘simple life’ here with a vengeance. We slept under the canopy of the starlit heavens; we fed on what our Arab cook could find in the village between us and the cultivated land, supplemented with preserves I had sent out from England; we rose with the sun and retired not very long after it had set. Hatshepsu’s temple rises in terraces a couple of hundred yards from the hut, and the foundations of the newly excavated shrine of Mentuhoteb lie beside it, the former more or less an enlarged copy of its neighbour of twelve centuries earlier date. An amphitheatre of imposing limestone cliffs backs the two ruins and divides us from the Valley of the Tombs of the Kings.

The great Theban necropolis spreads over the desert between us and the cultivation, and stretches some two miles both to the north and to the south of our hut, the vast temple of Medinet Habu being at the southern extremity and the road to the Valley of the Kings at its northern end. In these two to three square miles of broken ground, raised above the limits of the Nile’s overflow, can we read most of what is known of the history of Egypt from the Middle Empire up to the Mohammedan invasion. Little is known from the decline of the twelfth dynasty until the rise of the New Empire some five-and-thirty centuries past. But the story of the renaissance during the eighteenth dynasty, the conquests of the second and the third Rameses, as well as the gradual decline of the empire until the foreign domination, can be read here by the Egyptologist as in an open book. Of the rule of the Tanites, of the Libyans, and of the Ethiopians, we find fewer indications. Some remains remind us of the second renaissance during the late Egyptian period, and we are also reminded of Cambyses and the Persian domination, when we behold the overturned colossal image of Rameses. A beautiful little temple of Nektanebos carries us forward to when the Egyptians came by their own again.

The Ptolemaic façade at Medinet Habu, the beautiful little shrine at Der el-Medineh, and the inner sanctuary of Hatshepsu’s temple remain as examples of the work done under the Ptolemies. If we go a mile beyond Medinet Habu we find a little temple of Isis erected by Hadrian and Antoninus Pius, and bearing the inscriptions of Vespasian, Domitian, and Otho.

The early Christians have left their mark in Hatshepsu’s shrine to Ammon Ra; unfortunately little of their constructive work is seen, but a great many obliterations of beautiful eighteenth dynasty bas-reliefs make us regret their pious zeal. Until recently a partly ruined Christian church stood in the centre of the second court of the Rameses III. temple at Medinet Habu. Misplaced zeal on the part of Egyptologists caused this primitive place of Christian worship to be cleared away so as not to obstruct the view of the earlier building. A broader view of archæology might have spared such an interesting structure.

To settle down to a stay of seven consecutive months in an arid waste, surrounded by tombs and the crumbling remains of a bygone age, might strike the man in the street as holding out a gloomy prospect. The idea that I had not been particularly favoured never entered my head till, after four or five months passed here, I received a visit from a relative. This lady had picked her way on a donkey, through a mile or more of pit tombs, rock tombs and broken mausoleums, on a hot and dusty day, before she reached my hut. After our greetings she remarked, ‘You must be fed up with this place by now.’ She asked me to come and stay, as her guest, in the huge new hotel which we could see from here outlined against the eastern horizon. That I had become an object of pity instead of one to be envied was a new and strange idea to me. To give up my free life in this fine air, surrounded as I was with an infinity of things which filled me with interest, and my only regret being that the days were far too short—to give this up to loaf about the hotel at Luxor amidst a crowd of people whose one object is to kill time—the very thought of it gave me a shudder. I tried to console my kindly intentioned relative that she would think better of my locality when she had seen the beautiful things Hatshepsu’s temple had in store for her.

The beautiful series of reliefs illustrating the expedition to the Land of Punt, the presentation of Queen Aahmes to Ammon Ra and the divine birth of Hatshepsu, all executed during the best period of the eighteenth dynasty, did less to expel the gloomy thoughts of my relation than did the cup of tea which my Arab cook had prepared for her. The frank admission that the chipped and cracked examples of an archaic art did not appeal to her was refreshing, and I began already to have my suspicions as to the genuineness of many exclamations of admiration I had heard.

Early Egyptian art must ever remain as caviare to the masses until they learn that art is not merely a slavish reproduction of some natural objects. They would do well to credit those who have studied it and who assure them that it is in truth a very great art, and that it well repays any intelligent person who approaches it with proper reverence. The absence of perspective and of all foreshortening in these low reliefs shocks the tyro, and he may express himself that the figures must be wrong when an attitude is depicted which it is impossible to hold. The mind, however, soon accepts these conventions and is free to admire the wonderful drawing of the outline, the sense of proportion, and the marvellously suggested modelling in a relief that seldom surpasses the eighth of an inch in thickness. Apart from the purely æsthetic pleasure the eighteenth dynasty work gives us, it is a delight to be carried back to a remote age and to see depicted not only the gods and the kings, but the everyday life, with its joys and its sorrows, of a people who flourished more than three millenniums ago.

The past may seem too remote to awaken much sympathy in many who are always surrounded by the comforts of the present day. But if we enter into the life of the fellaheen who dwell in the villages where desert and cultivation meet, we find much in common between the early Egyptians and this country-folk.