A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Volume I Part 14

These beliefs seem to have been common to all ancient peoples during that period of their existence which is lost in the shadow of prehistoric times. From India to Italy all the primitive forms of public and private rights betray their presence. For this fact and its consequences we may refer our readers to the fine work of M. Fustel de Coulange, _La Cite antique_.[124]

[124] Seventh edition, Hachette, 18mo., 1879.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 86.--Stele of the 11th dynasty. Boulak. Drawn by Bourgoin.]

With the progress of centuries and the development of religious thought, more elevated ideas prevailed. The growth of the scientific spirit tended to make the notion of a being suspended between life and death ever more strange and inadmissible. Experience acc.u.mulated its results and it became daily more evident that death not only put an end to the activity of the organs, but that, immediately upon its occurrence, it began to dissolve and decompose their tissues. As time rolled on men must have found it very difficult to believe in a shadow thus placed outside the normal conditions of life, in a something which was not a spirit and yet survived the destruction of its organs.

It would seem then that observation and logical reflection should soon have led to the abandonment of a theory which now appears so puerile; but, even in these scientific times, those whose intellects demand well defined ideas are few indeed.[125] At a period when the diffusion of intellectual culture and the perfection of scientific methods add daily to our acc.u.mulations of positive knowledge, most men allow their souls to be stirred and their actions to be prompted by the vaguest words and notions; how much greater then must the influence of those confused beliefs and baseless images have been in antiquity when but a few rare minds, and those ill provided with means of research and a.n.a.lysis, attempted to think with originality, clearness and freedom.

[125] Mr. Herbert Spencer, in his ingenious and subtle a.n.a.lysis of _primitive ideas_ draws our attention to their frequent inconsistencies and even positive contradictions; but he shows us at the same time that the most highly civilised races in these modern days admit and combine ideas which are logically quite as irreconcilable as those which seem to us so absurdly inconsistent when we think of the beliefs of the ancients or of savage races. Custom renders us insensible to contradictions which we should perceive at once were we removed to a distance from them. (_The Principles of Sociology_, vol. i. pp. 119, 185).

The prestige of this illusion was increased and perpetuated by its intimate connection with several of those sentiments which are most honourable to human nature. Such a worship of the dead surprises and even scandalizes us by its frank materialism, but if we seek for the source of its inspiration and its primitive meaning, we find them in the remembrance of lost objects of affection, in feelings broken by the supreme separation, in the grat.i.tude of children to the parents who gave them birth and nourished their infancy, in the recognition by the living of the blessings which they enjoy through the long and laborious efforts of their ancestors. There was no doubt a perishable element in the funerary ideas of Egypt, an element which the progress of reason was sure to destroy, and we may be tempted to smile when we think of the Greek or Egyptian giving himself the trouble to feed his departed ancestors with blood, milk, or honey, but with all their simplicity, both one and the other were alive to a truth which the revolutionary spirit of our days, with its childish and brutal contempt for the past, is often unable to grasp. They realized the complete solidarity of one human generation with another. Guided by their hearts alone they antic.i.p.ated the results at which modern thought has arrived by close and attentive study of history. From a reasoned out conviction of this truth and its consequences, philosophy now draws the principles of a high morality! but long before our days this idea and the tender, grateful, sentiments which it provoked had been a powerful instrument in the moral improvement of the first-born of civilization and a bond of union for their civil and domestic life.

We have thought it right to dwell upon this worship of the dead and to describe its character at some length, because the beliefs upon which it was based are not to be found so clearly set forth in the art of any other people. Their most complete, clear, and eloquent expression, in a plastic form, is to be seen in the tombs which border the Nile.

And why is this so? It is because the Egyptian industries were already in full possession of their resources at the period when those beliefs had their strongest hold over the minds and feelings of the people. In the case of Greece, art did not arrive at its full development until the worship of the dead had lost its high place in the national conscience. When the Greek genius had arrived, after much striving, at its complete power of plastic expression, the G.o.ds of Olympus had been created for several centuries, and art was called upon to interpret the brilliant polytheism of Homer and Hesiod, to give outward image to those G.o.ds, and to construct worthy dwellings for their habitation.

Sculptors, painters, and architects still worked indeed, at the decoration of the tomb. They strove to give it beauty of shape and arrangement, and to adorn its walls with bas-reliefs and pictures; they designed for it those vases and terra cottas which, in our own day, have been found in thousands in the cemeteries of Greece and Italy, but all this was only a subordinate use of their talent. Their ambition was to build temples, to model statues of Zeus, Pallas, and Apollo. On the other hand, those distant ages in which primitive and childish ideas of religion prevailed, had no art in which to manifest their beliefs with clearness and precision.

It was otherwise in the valley of the Nile. A well provided industry and an experienced art laid themselves out to interpret the popular beliefs and to defend the dead against final dissolution, or the agonies of hunger and thirst. Egypt did not differ from other nations in its opinions upon the mystery of death. In the infancy of every race the same notions on this matter are to be found, and in this respect the only difference between the Egyptians and the rest of the world is very much to the credit of the former; they rapidly attained to a degree of civilization which was only reached by other races after their religious development was comparatively mature. Thanks to this advantage, they were enabled to push their ideas to consequences which were not to be attained by tribes which were little less than barbarous, and they had no difficulty in expressing them with sufficient force and precision.

It remains for us to show the use which the Egyptians made of their superiority in doing more honour to their dead, in guarding them more safely against the chances which might shorten the duration or destroy the happiness of their life in the tomb. The fulfilment of this duty was, as the Greek travellers rightly affirmed, their chief pre-occupation. Their sepulchral architecture was, of all their creations, the most original and the most characteristic of their genius, especially in the forms which we find in the cemeteries of the Ancient Empire. In the time of the New Empire, at Thebes, it is less complete and h.o.m.ogeneous. In the latter the arrangement and decoration do not spring, as a whole, from a unique conception; we find traces in it of new hypotheses and novel forms of belief. These do not supersede the primitive ideas; they are added to them, and they bear witness to the restless efforts made by human thought to solve the problem of human destiny. These apparent contradictions and hesitations are of great interest to the student of the Egyptian religion, but from the art point of view the Memphite tombs are more curious and important than those of later date. They have the great merit of being complete in their unity both of artistic form and of intellectual conception.

They are the offspring of a single growth, and are perfect in their clear logical expression. And again, they are the type of all the later tombs, of those at Abydos, at Beni-Ha.s.san, and at Thebes.

Certain details, indeed, are modified, but the general disposition remains the same to the end. We shall, therefore, find the ruling principle of Egyptian sepulchral architecture most clearly laid down in the cemeteries of Gizeh and Sakkarah.

The first and most obvious necessity for the obscure form of life which was supposed to commence as soon as the tomb had received its inmate, was the body. No pains, therefore, were spared which could r.e.t.a.r.d its dissolution and preserve the organs to which the _double_ and the soul might one day return.[126] Embalming, practised as it was by the Egyptians, rendered a mummy almost indestructible, so long, at least, as it remained in the dry soil of Egypt. On the warm sands of Sakkarah and close to the excavations from which the fellahs of the _corvee_ were returning at the end of their day's labour, we--my travelling companions and myself--stripped a great lady of the time of Ramses of the linen cloths and bandages in which she was closely enveloped, and found her body much in the same condition as it must have been when it left the workshop of the Memphite embalmer! Her black hair was plaited into fine tresses; all her teeth were in place between the slightly contracted lips; the almond-shaped nails of her feet and hands were stained with henna. The limbs were flexible and the graceful shapes but little altered under the still firm and smooth skin, which, moreover, seemed to be still supported by flesh in some parts. Had it not been for its colour of tarred linen or scorched paper, and the smell of naphtha which arose from the body and from the numberless bandages which were strewn about, we might have shared the sentiment attributed to Lord Evandale in Theophile Gautier's brilliant _Roman de la Momie_; with an effort of good-will we could almost sympathise with those emotions of tenderness and admiration which were excited in the breast of the young Englishman at the sight of the unveiled charms of that daughter of Egypt whose perfect beauty had once troubled the heart of the proudest of the Pharaohs.[127]

[126] The texts also bear witness to the ideas with which the complicated processes of embalming were undertaken. See P.

PIERRET, _Le Dogme de la la Resurrection_, &c., p. 10. "It was necessary that no member, no substance, should be wanting at the final summons; resurrection depended on that." "_Thou countest thy members which are complete and intact._" (Egyptian funerary text.) "Arise in To-deser (the sacred region in which the renewal of life is prepared), thou august and coffined mummy.

Thy bones and thy substance are re-united with thy flesh, and thy flesh is again in its place; thy head is replaced upon thy neck, thy heart is ready for thee." (Osirian statue in the Louvre.) The dead took care to demand of the G.o.ds "_that the earth should not bite him, that the soil should not consume him_." (MARIETTE, _Feuilles d'Abydos_.) The preservation of the body must therefore have been an object of solicitude at the earliest times, but the art of embalming did not attain perfection until the Theban period. Under the ancient empire men were content with comparatively simple methods. Mariette says that "more examples would have to be brought together than he had been able to discover before the question of mummification under the ancient empire could be decided. It is certain, first, that no authentic piece of mummy cloth from that period is now extant; secondly, that the bones found in the sarcophagi have the brownish colour and the bituminous smell of mummies.

"Not more than five or six inviolate sarcophagi have been found.

On each of these occasions the corpse has been discovered in the skeleton state. And as for linen, nothing beyond a little dust upon the bottom of the sarcophagus, which might be the _debris_ of many other things than of a linen shroud." (_Les Tombes de l'Ancien Empire_, p. 16.)

[127] Pa.s.sALACQUA gives the following description of the mummy of a young woman which he discovered at Thebes: "Her hair and the rotundity and surprising regularity of her form showed me that she had been a beauty in her time, and that she had died in the flower of her youth." He then gives a minute description of her condition and ornaments, and concludes by saying that "the peculiar beauty of the proportions of this mummy, and its perfect preservation, had so greatly impressed the Arabs themselves that they had exhumed it more than once to show to their wives and neighbours." (_Catalogue raisonne et historique des Antiquites decouvertes en egypte_, 8vo. 1826.)

In order that all the expense of embalming should not be thrown away, the mummy had to be so placed that it could not be reached by the highest inundations of the river. The cemeteries were therefore established either upon a plateau surrounded by the desert, as in the case of Memphis and Abydos, or in the sides of the mountain ranges and in the ravines by which they were pierced, as at Thebes and Beni-Ha.s.san. In the whole valley of the Nile, no ancient tomb has been discovered which was within reach of the inundation at its highest.[128]

[128] RHIND describes several mummy-pits in the necropolis of Thebes which receive the water of the Nile by infiltration; but, as he himself remarks, this is because those who dug them did not foresee the gradual raising of the valley, and, consequently, of the level attained in recent ages by the waters of the Nile. It is doubtless only within the last few centuries that the water has penetrated into these tombs. (_Thebes, its Tombs and their Tenants_, p. 153.)

The corpse was thus preserved from destruction, first by careful and scientific embalming, secondly by placing its dwelling above the highest "Nile." Besides this we shall see that the Egyptian architects made use of many curious artifices of construction in order to conceal the entrance to the tomb, and to prevent the intrusion of any one coming with evil intentions. All kinds of obstacles and pitfalls are acc.u.mulated in the path of the unbidden visitor, with a fertility and patient ingenuity of invention which has often carried despair into the minds of modern explorers, especially in the case of the pyramids.

Mariette was fond of saying that there are mummies in Egypt which will never, in the strictest sense of the word, be brought to light.

But in spite of all this pious and subtle foresight, it sometimes happened that private hate or, more often, the greed of gain, upset every calculation. Enemies might succeed in penetrating to the sepulchres of the dead, in destroying their bodies, and thus inflicting a second death worse than the first; or a thief might drag the corpse from its resting place, and leave it naked and dishonoured upon the sands, that he might, with the greater ease, possess himself of the gold and jewels with which it had been adorned.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 87.--Mummy case from the 18th dynasty. Boulak.]

The liability of the mummy to accident had to be provided against. The idea of the unhappy condition in which the _double_ would find itself when its mummy had been destroyed, led to the provision of an artificial support for it in the shape of a statue. Art was sufficiently advanced not only to reproduce the costume and ordinary att.i.tude of the defunct and to mark his age and s.e.x, but even to render the individual characteristics of his physiognomy. It aspired to portraiture; and the development of writing allowed the name and qualities of the deceased to be inscribed upon his statue. Thus identified by its resemblance and its inscriptions it served to perpetuate the life of the _double_, which was in continual danger of dissolution or evaporation in the absence of a material support.

The statues were more solid than the mummy, and nothing stood in the way of their multiplication. The body gave but one chance of duration to the _double_; twenty statues represented twenty chances more. Hence the astonishing number of statues which are sometimes found in a single tomb. The images of the dead were multiplied by the piety of surviving relations, and consequently the _double_ was a.s.sured a duration which practically amounted to immortality.[129]

[129] MASPERO, _Conference_, p. 381.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 88.--Man and his wife in the style of the 5th dynasty. Calcareous stone. From the Louvre.]

We shall see that a special recess was prepared in the thickness of the built up portion of the tomb for the reception of wooden or stone statues, so that they might be kept out of sight and safe from all indiscreet curiosity. Other effigies were placed in the chambers of the tomb or the courts in front of it. Finally, we know that persons of consideration obtained from the king permission to erect statues in the temples, where they were protected by the sanct.i.ty of the place and the vigilance of the priests.[130]

[130] MASPERO, _Notes sur differentes Points de Grammaire et d'Histoire_, p. 155. (In the _Recueil de Travaux relatifs a la Philologie et a l'Archeologie egyptienne et a.s.syrienne_, vol.

i.)

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 89.--Sekhem-ka, his wife Ata, and his son Khnem, in the style of the 5th dynasty. Limestone. From the Louvre.]

From the point of view of the ancient Egyptians such precautions were by no means futile. Many of these effigies have come down to us safely through fifty or sixty centuries and have found an asylum in our museums where they have nothing to fear but the slow effects of climate and time. Those which remain intact may therefore count upon immortality. If the _double_ required nothing to preserve it from annihilation but the continued existence of the image, that of Chephren, the builder of the second great pyramid, would be still alive, preserved by the magnificent statue of diorite which is the glory of Boulak, and thanks to the durability of its material, it would have every chance of lasting as long as the world itself. But, unhappily for the shade of Pharaoh, this posthumous existence which is so difficult of comprehension to us, was only to be prolonged by attention to conditions most of which could not long continue to be observed.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 90.--Stele of Nefer-oun. Boulak.]

It was entirely a material life. The dead-alive had need of food and drink, which he obtained from supplies placed beside him in the tomb,[131] and afterwards, when these were consumed, by the repasts which took place periodically in the tomb, of which he had his share.

The first of these feasts was given upon the conclusion of the funeral ceremonies,[132] and they were repeated from year to year on days fixed by tradition and sometimes by the expressed wish of the deceased.[133] An open and public chamber was contrived in the tomb for the celebration of these anniversaries. It was a kind of chapel, or, perhaps, to speak more accurately, a saloon in which all the relations and friends of the deceased could find room. At the foot of the stele upon which the dead man was represented sacrificing to Osiris, the G.o.d of the dead, was placed a table for offerings, upon which the share intended for the _double_ was deposited and the libations poured. A conduit was reserved in the thickness of the wall by which the odour of the roast meats and perfumed fruits and the smoke of the incense might reach the concealed statues.[134]

[131] Jars, which seem to have been once filled with water, are found in many tombs of all epochs. Different kinds of dates are also found, together with the fruit of the sycamore, corn, cakes, &c. See the _Catalogue_ of Pa.s.sALACQUA, pp. 123, 151, and elsewhere. Quarters of meat have also been found in them, which are easily recognised by their well-preserved bones.

[132] MASPERO, _etudes sur quelques Peintures funeraires_, in the _Journal Asiatique_, May-June, 1880, p. 387, _et seq._

[133] In one of the great inscriptions at Beni-Ha.s.san, recently translated anew both by M. Maspero and Professor Birch, Chnoumhotep speaks thus: "I caused to prosper the name of my father. I completed the existing temples of the Ka. I served my statues at the great temples. I sacrificed to them their food, bread, beer, water, vegetables, pure herbs. My priest has verified (I chose a priest for the Ka,--Maspero). I procured them from the irrigation of my work-people (I made him master of fields and slaves,--Maspero). I ordered the sepulchral offerings of bread, beer, cattle, fowl, in all the festivals of Karneter, at the festivals of the beginning of the year, the opening of the year, increase of the year, diminution of the year (little year,--Brugsch and Maspero), close of the year, at the great festival, at the festival of the great burning, at the festival of the lesser burning, the five intercalary days, at the festival of bread making (of the entry of grain,--Maspero) at the twelve monthly and half monthly festivals, all the festivals on the earth (plain), terminating on the hill (of Anubis). But should my sepulchral priest or men conduct them wrongly may he not exist, nor his son in his place."--BIRCH, _Records of the Past_, vol. xii. p. 71.--ED.

[134] In each opening of the serdab in the tomb of Ti, at Sakkarah, people, probably relatives of the deceased, are represented in the act of burning incense in a contrivance which resembles in form the ???at????? of the Greek monuments.

(MARIETTE, _Notice des princ.i.p.aux Monuments de Boulak_, p. 27, note 1.)

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 91.--Preparation of the victims and arrival of funeral gifts, 5th dynasty. Height of each band, 13-1/2 inches.

Boulak. Drawn by Bourgoin.]

The Egyptians did not trust only to the piety of their descendants to preserve them from a final death by inanition in their neglected tombs. At the end of a few generations that piety might grow cold and relax its care; besides, a family might become extinct. All those who could afford it provided against such contingencies as these by giving their tombs what we now call a perpetual foundation. They devoted to the purpose the revenues of some part of their property, which was also charged with the maintenance of the priest or priests who had to perform the ceremonial rites which we have described.[135] We find that, even under the Ptolemies, special ministers were attached to the sepulchral chapel of Cheops, the builder of the great pyramid.[136] It may seem difficult to believe that a "foundation" of the ancient empire should have survived so many changes of _regime_, but the honours paid to the early kings had become one of the national inst.i.tutions of Egypt. Each restoring sovereign made it a point of duty to give renewed life to the worship of those remote princes who represented the first glories of the national history.

[135] See the paper by M. MASPERO upon the great inscription at Siout, which has preserved for us a contract between Prince Hapi-Toufi and the priests of Ap-Motennou, by which offerings should be regularly made to the prince's statue, which was deposited in a temple at Siout. (_Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archaeology_, vol. vii. pp. 1-32.)

[136] It was the same in the case of a still older king, Seneferu, the founder of the fourth dynasty. (DE ROUGe, _Recherches sur les Monuments que l'on peut attribuer aux six premieres Dynasties de Manethon_, p. 41.)

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 92.--Table for offerings. Louvre.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 93.--Another form of the table for offerings.

Boulak.]

Besides which there were priests attached to each necropolis, who, for certain fees, officiated at each tomb in turn. They were identified by Mariette upon some of the bas-reliefs at Sakkarah. Their services were retained much in the same way as ma.s.ses are bought in our days.[137]

[137] _Tombes de l'Ancien Empire_, p. 87.

The same sentiment led to the burial with the dead of all arms, clothes, jewels, and other objects of which they might have need in the next life. We know what treasures of this kind have been obtained from the Egyptian tombs and how they fill the cases of our museums.

But neither was this habit peculiar to Egypt. It was common to all ancient people whether civilized or barbarous. Traces are to be found even in the early traditions of the h.e.l.lenic race of a time when, like those Scythians described by Herodotus,[138] the Greeks sacrificed, at the death of a chief, his wives and servants that they might accompany him to the next world. When she began to reveal herself in the arts Egypt was already too far civilized for such practices as these; thanks to the simultaneous development of science, art and religion, she found means to give the same advantages to her dead without permitting Scythian cruelties. Those personal attendants and domestic officers whose services would be so necessary in another life, were secured to them at a small expense; instead of slaying them at the door of the tomb, they were represented upon its walls in all the variety of their occupations and in the actual moment of labour. So too with all objects of luxury or necessity which the _double_ would wish to have at hand, as for instance his food and drink.[139]

[138] HERODOTUS, iv. 71, 72.