A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Volume I Part 10

-- 7. _Of the place held in this work by the monuments of the Memphite period, and of the limits of our inquiry._

It will be found that a very large s.p.a.ce in the present work, some may say too large a s.p.a.ce, is devoted to the pre-conventional art of the ancient empire. We had reasons for taking such a course, and reasons that may be easily divined.

This early art is much less known than that of the later epochs. While the great museums of Europe are filled with statues and reliefs from Thebes, or, at least, contemporary with the Theban and Sait dynasties, monuments from the Memphite period are still rare out of Egypt. Thanks to Mariette and Lepsius, Paris and Berlin are not without remarkable examples of the art in question, but it is in Egypt itself, at the Boulak museum, that any detailed study must be made. It is there that the masterpieces of an art whose very existence was unsuspected by Champollion, are to be found; the Chephren, the two statues from Meidoum, the bas-reliefs from the tomb of Ti, and many others of similar style and value. These figures have been drawn for our readers by two skilful artists, MM. Bourgoin and Benedite. They have rendered with fidelity and sincerity more than one object which had never before been reproduced, either by photography or otherwise. A few specimens of these treasures, selected by him who had been the means of bringing them to light and whom we now mourn, were seen at the Universal Exhibitions of 1867 and 1878, but they soon returned to Cairo, and western archaeologists had but slight opportunity to become acquainted with their characteristics.

The art of the early dynasties has thus been practically ignored by those who have never visited Egypt. The lifelike and enthusiastic descriptions of M. Eugene Melchior de Vogue and others have done something to arouse the attention of connoisseurs; but in such a matter the slightest sketch, provided it be correct so far as it goes, is of more value, as a definition of style, than the most picturesque or eloquent writing.

These reflections would by themselves justify our efforts to incorporate in our pages, reproductions of all the more important objects with which the necropolis at Memphis has enriched the museum at Boulak; but we were impelled by other motives also. The extant monuments of the ancient empire are less numerous than those of the Theban and Sait dynasties; they are of comparatively modest dimensions, and, with rare exceptions they all belong to one category, that of works relating to death and burial. They also have a special interest of their own. They enable us to protest, and to give tangible justification for our protestations, against a prejudice which dates back to a remote antiquity; even if all evidence had perished the critic would have no great difficulty in casting doubt upon a.s.sertions which were in themselves extremely improbable, but his task is rendered much easier when he is able to point to existing monuments in support of his contention, and his pleasure is great in seeing the certainty of his critical methods borne out, and Egyptian art replacing itself, as if of its own motion, under the normal conditions of historic development.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 56.--Chephren. Sketched by Bourgoin. See also Fig.

460.]

This volume, then, will treat of the remains of early Egyptian art at a length which would seem at first sight out of due proportion to their number, but later ages will also be represented by a series of monuments, which will bring us down to the Persian conquest. This limit will hardly be over-pa.s.sed in our choice of examples for study, and that for two reasons.

The first is, that at the latter period the evolution of Egyptian art was complete, it had created all that it could and had become a slave to its own past. Disposing under the Ptolemies of all the resources of a great empire, it indeed introduced certain architectural changes which do not seem to have been borrowed from previous buildings, but those changes were of no very great importance and were mostly in matters of detail. In sculpture and painting we can easily see that it abandoned itself to mere copying, to the repet.i.tion of a lesson learnt by rote. Whatever had to be done, was done in accordance with fixed tradition, and one monument only differed from another in the amount of care and manual dexterity bestowed upon it.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 57.--Ti, with his wife and son.]

Our second reason is this, that Egypt was opened to the Greeks in the time of the Sait princes. From the year 650 B.C. onwards, there was constant communication between Ionia and the cities of the Delta. If at any time Greek art borrowed directly from that of Egypt, it was during the second half of the seventh century and the first half of the sixth. By the end of the sixth century, it had become so original and so skilful in the management of its selected methods of expression that it could not have been very receptive to foreign influences.

After the Persian wars such influences would be still more powerless.

In the Ptolemaic era the state of things was reversed; Greece imposed her language, her literature, her religious conceptions and their visible symbols upon the whole eastern world. Even then the art of Egypt could defend, and even perpetuate itself, by the power of custom and of a tradition which had been handed down through so many centuries, but the day was past when it could provoke imitation.

As for the indirect borrowings of forms and motives which Greece received from Egypt through the Phnicians, their transmission had come to an end before the Persian conquest, even before the time of Psemethek. Egypt was represented, either immediately or through the imitative powers of the Syrian manufacturers, in the first textiles, jewels, and vases of clay or metal, carried by the Sidonian merchants to the savage ancestors of the Greeks. In this roundabout manner she had probably more influence over Greece than in their periods of more direct communication. The rays kindled upon her hearth, the earliest of civilization, fell upon the h.e.l.lenic isles as refracted rays, after pa.s.sing through the varied media of Chaldaea, a.s.syria or Phnicia.

Thus if we wish thoroughly to understand Greece, we must start from Memphis and go through Babylon and Nineveh, Tyre and Sidon. But Greece will be the aim of our voyage, and Egypt will interest us less on her own account than on account of that unique and unrivalled people who inherited her inventions and discoveries, and made them the foundation for a productiveness in which are summarized all the useful labours of antiquity. Egyptian art will be followed by us down to the moment in which it lost its creative force and with it its prestige. We shall rarely have occasion to speak of the Ptolemaic remains of Egyptian art. Now and then we shall go to them for examples when any particular detail which we desire to mention has not been preserved for us by earlier monuments, but even then we shall require to have good reasons for believing that such detail did in fact originate in the creative periods of the national history.

The Egypt of the Pharaohs has not even yet been entirely explored. Are we to believe that the splendid edifices reared in the cities of the Delta, and especially at Sais, by the twenty-sixth dynasty, have perished to the last stone? We are loth to think that it is so, but no remains have yet been discovered. Some day, perhaps, well directed excavations may bring to light the temples which Herodotus so greatly admired; and who knows but that we may find in them more than one of those motives and arrangements which at present are only known to exist in the buildings of the Ptolemies and of the Roman emperors?

CHAPTER II.

PRINCIPLES AND GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF EGYPTIAN ARCHITECTURE.

-- 1.--_Method to be Employed by us in our Study of this Architecture._

In the enterprise which we have undertaken the study of oriental art is but an introduction to that of Greece. Without an attentive examination of its remains we should be unable to distinguish the original elements in the work of the Greek genius from those which it borrowed from other nations. We must pa.s.s in review the whole artistic production of several great nations who occupied a vast surface of the globe, and whose fertility was prolonged through a long course of centuries, but we shall not attempt to describe singly the great buildings of Egypt and a.s.syria, of Persia and Phnicia, as such an attempt would perhaps cause us to lose sight of the main object of our work.

Our task is no easy one. While limiting our study in the fashion which has been described, we must not fail to extend our purview to every fact which may help to justify the comparison which we propose to inst.i.tute between the arts of Greece and those of the nations by whose teachings she profited. There is but one road to success in this double task. We must devote the greatest possible care to our study of the details in question, and then give the general results of that study; we must make ourselves thoroughly acquainted with all the phenomena, but must confine our exposition to the general laws which governed them, such as our minute inquiries have presented them to us.

No circ.u.mstantial description need, therefore, be looked for in these pages even in the case of the most important and famous buildings of Egypt. No monograph upon any tomb or temple will be found, but we shall ourselves have examined many tombs and temples; we shall, to speak figuratively, have taken them to pieces, and by means of the knowledge acquired we shall endeavour to make our readers acquainted with the notions of the Egyptians upon sepulchral and religious architecture, and with the changes which those conceptions underwent in the course of centuries.

Thus, for example, we have explored the pages of Lepsius[90] and Prisse d'Avennes[91] for information relating to the sepulchres of the first six dynasties, and further researches have been made on the spot expressly for the present work, but we shall not give any descriptions or ill.u.s.trations of those works individually; we shall merely use them for an ideal restoration of the characteristic tombhouse of the ancient empire. We may, perhaps, for this purpose, make a more particular reference to one or two sepulchres which are in unusually good preservation, but only for the sake of giving firm definition to the type and to its main variations.

[90] _Denkmaeler aus aegypten und aethiopien_ (from drawings of the expedition sent into Egypt in 1842, which remained there till 1845), 12 vols. folio. Berlin, no date.

[91] _Histoire de l'Art egyptien d'apres les Monuments depuis les Temps les plus recules jusqu'a la Domination romaine_, 2 vols. Paris, Arthus Bertrand, 1878. The text (1 vol. 4to.), published after the death of Prisse, has this great inconvenience, that it is not always easy to distinguish what belongs to the editor, M. Marchandon de la Faye, from the contributions of Prisse, who was one of the most practical and experienced of egyptologists. The papers, sketches, and drawings left by Prisse became the property, in 1880, of the Bibliotheque Nationale; when they are cla.s.sified and published we shall probably find among them several interesting doc.u.ments; we have only been able hurriedly to look through them, when the ill.u.s.trations to this work were already prepared. It is desirable that a complete inventory of these collections should be made as soon as possible.

By this a.n.a.lytical method of treatment we shall be enabled to give an account, which shall be at once accurate and not too long, of the constructive processes employed by the Egyptians, of the general aspect of their buildings, and of the modifications enforced by the decorative forms of which they made use. We shall be enabled to see how far those forms were decided by natural conditions, by ancient tradition, or by special wants. We shall thus include in a single chapter all that relates to princ.i.p.al or accessory openings, to doors and their construction, to those loftily placed windows which were calculated to give so little light. In another chapter we shall discuss the column and its capital; we shall describe the variations produced by time and materials upon its proportions and its entasis.

Each a.s.sertion will be justified by reference to characteristic examples. In this matter our only difficulty will be an _embarras de richesse_, a difficulty of choice among the vast number of remains still existing of ancient Egypt from the time of Menes to that of the Persian conquest.

In order to avoid repet.i.tion and to put before the reader ideas which he will have no difficulty in a.s.similating, we shall push our work of a.n.a.lysis and generalization farther still. Before we embark upon the study of any special cla.s.s of buildings we shall endeavour to define the general and unchanging characteristics of Egyptian architecture as a whole; characteristics which were fixed by the idiosyncracy of the race, by its beliefs and social customs, by the nature of the climate, and of the materials of which the architect could dispose. We shall do the same for a.s.syria and Chaldaea, for Persia and Phnicia, for each, indeed, of the nationalities which are to be considered in our history.

These theoretical chapters will be ill.u.s.trated in the same fashion as the others, except that the ill.u.s.trations will partake of the generalized and abstract character of the text which they accompany.

In most cases they will be simple diagrams composed for the express purpose of ill.u.s.trating the definitions or descriptions to which they belong. They will each refer to some essential element in the national architecture, to some element which is not peculiar to any one edifice more than another, but is to be found in all those which have similar aims and are constructed of the same materials. Such elements are above and outside such accidental variations as may be found in details of plan or ornament; they form part of the substantial inner const.i.tution of the arts of Egypt and Chaldaea, and make their originality indisputable.

-- 2.--_General Principles of Form._

The external forms of Egyptian edifices are _pyramidoid_; in other words, the outward surfaces of their walls affect the form of a _trapezium_. Thus if we prolong these surfaces vertically we find that they unite at last in a point, in the case of square buildings (Fig.

58), and in a ridge in those which are oblong in plan (Fig. 59).[92] A square building will sometimes end in a ridge, or _arete_, when the princ.i.p.al _facade_ and the corresponding one in its rear are vertical, the other two being inclined.

[92] _Lois generales de l'Inclinaison des Colonnes dans la Construction des Temples grecs de l'Antiquite_, dedicated to his Majesty, Otho I., by CHARLES VILLEROI, engineer. Athens, 1842, 8vo.

Horizontal lines predominate over inclined or vertical lines, and buildings, therefore, tend to develop in length and depth rather than in height. To this general rule, however, the pylons afford exceptions.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 58.--Square building.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 59.--Rectangular and oblong building.]

The terminations of their edifices were also horizontal. There was no necessity for sloping roofs, as, away from the immediate proximity of the sea, it hardly ever rains in Egypt. Moreover, the natural conformation of the country had its influence upon the creations of its inhabitants. The unforeseen and sudden variations, the contrasts of hill and plain, which we find in a mountainous country like Greece, are here unknown. Lower Egypt is a verdant plain, intersected by ca.n.a.ls, and stretching from the sea to the desert; in Upper and Middle Egypt the lazy river is accompanied throughout its journey from south to north by two long chains of hills, the Arab chain and the Libyan, whose summits form an almost unbroken line. Between these aspects of nature and the works of man which they enframe, there is a striking general sympathy.[93]

[93] Egyptian landscape is well characterised in these lines of M. CH. BLANC, taken from the _Voyage de la Haute egypte_ (p.

116): "Pour le moment, notre plaisir se borne a regarder un paysage simple, monotone, mais grand par sa simplicite meme et par sa monotonie. Ces lignes planes qui s'allongent et se prolongent sans fin, et qui s'interrompent un instant pour reprendre encore leur niveau et se continuer encore, impriment a la nature un caractere de tranquillite qui a.s.soupit l'imagination et qui apaise le cur. Par une singularite peut-etre unique au monde, les varietes qui viennent rompre de distance en distance la vaste uniformite de la terre egyptienne se reproduisent toujours les memes." [We have refrained from translating this piece of word painting, lest its suggestive rhythm should vanish in the process.--ED.]

The peculiar character of Egyptian architecture is owing to its lateral extension, and to those wide-spreading bases and foundations which suggest the inclination of the superinc.u.mbent walls. In looking at one of these buildings, we feel that it is capable of infinite extension horizontally, and that but one of its dimensions, that of height, is limited by its essential forms. These characteristics give a look of st.u.r.dy power to Egyptian architecture which is peculiar to itself, and suggests an idea of unbounded durability.[94]

[94] Similar notions are expressed by M. CH. BLANC in his _Grammaire des Arts du Dessin_ (Book i. ch. viii.). "The wide-spreading base is the distinguishing characteristic of the Egyptian monuments. Wall, pier, and column, all the constructive members of Egyptian architecture, are short and thick set. To add to this appearance of solidity the relative size of the base is increased by that tendency towards the pyramid which is to be found in every Egyptian building. The pyramids of Memphis, one of them the greatest building upon earth, stand upon enormous bases. Their height is far less than their largest horizontal diameter. The pyramid of Cheops, for instance, is 233 metres along one side of its base, and only 146 in height, _i.e._, its base is to its height as 8 to 5. All Egyptian monuments, even the most lofty, are more remarkable for the ground they cover than for their height [except the monoliths!--ED.], and this extension of their bases gives them an appearance of absolutely eternal durability."

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 60.--The Libyan chain, above the necropolis of Thebes.]

An appearance of incomparable gravity, of solemnity, is also stamped upon it by the small number of openings for the admission of light of which it makes use, and also by their arrangement. Compared to our modern architecture, in which windows play such an important part, that of Egypt is prison-like in its gloom; but, in consequence of its rare openings and their small size, it presents more imposing walls than any other style.

One of the essential arrangements of Egyptian architecture is shared by many other countries, that of the _portico_, by which we mean an alternation of voids and solids in certain well defined proportions, either for ornamenting the exterior and providing a covered way, or for dividing the halls of the interior and supporting their roofs.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 61.--General appearance of an Egyptian Temple.[95]]

[95] This ill.u.s.tration has been compiled in order to give a general idea of the more persistent characteristics of the Egyptian temple.

The relation between voids and solids in any style of architecture is one of the most vital characteristics.

In the case of Egypt this relation gives rise to the following remarks:

1. Supports of the same kind and of the same diameter may have very different heights in one and the same building (Fig. 62).

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 62.--Temple of Khons, at Thebes. (_Description de l'egypte_, t. iii., pl. 55.)]