A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Volume I Part 16

There are many more lists of the same kind. The above is cited from M. E. LE BLANT (_Tables egyptiennes a Inscriptions grecques_, p. 6, 1875, 8vo.).

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIGS. 101, 102.--Scarabs. Louvre.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIGS. 103, 104.--Funerary amulets. _Oudja_ and _ta_.

Louvre.]

But those who could procure even these slight advantages were still among the favourites of fortune. Many were unable to obtain even this minimum of funeral honours. On the confines of all the great cemeteries, at Thebes as well as at Memphis, corpses are found deposited in the loose sand two or three feet from the surface. Some of these are packed in the leaves of the palm, others are roughly enveloped in a few morsels of linen. They have been hastily dipped in a bath of natron, which has dirtied rather than embalmed them.[156]

Sometimes even these slender precautions have been omitted. Bodies have been found in the earth without vestige of either coffin or linen swathes. The sand seems to have been intrusted with the work of drying them, and they have been found in our days in the condition of skeletons.

[156] See in the interesting work of Mr. H. RHIND (_Thebes, its Tombs and their Tenants_, London, 1862, 8vo.), the chapter headed _A Burial-place of the Poor_.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 105.--Pillow, Louvre.]

On the other hand, the fortunate ones of the world, those who were so easy in their circ.u.mstances in this life that they could place themselves in the same happy condition in the next, spared no expense in anything connected with their burial. They never allowed themselves to be surprised by death, as we so often do. Whether kings or private individuals, they made their preparations while they were still alive, and caused their tombs to be constructed under their own eyes.[157]

Their forethought when living and the piety of relations spared nothing that could add to the beauty and convenience of dwellings which were to be the eternal resting places of their inmates. The palaces of the princes and rich men of Egypt were so lightly built that they have left no traces upon the soil; but many of their tombs have subsisted uninjured to our day, and it is from them that we have obtained our treasures of Egyptian art. All the other nations of the ancient world followed the good example thus set, or rather, to speak more accurately, being all penetrated with similar ideas, they took similar courses without borrowing one from the other. Whenever we moderns have opened any of those ancient tombs which have happily remained intact, we have been met by the same discoveries. Whether it be in Egypt or Phnicia, in Asia Minor, Cyprus or Greece, in Etruria or Campania, the same astonishing sight meets our eyes. The tombs are filled with precious objects and _chefs d'uvres_ of art which their depositors had intended never again to see the light of day.

[157] MARIETTE, _Tombes de l'Ancien Empire_, p. 83. See also the great inscription of Beni-Ha.s.san, the first lines of which run thus: "The hereditary chief ... Khnumhotep ... has made a monument for the first time to embellish his district; he has sculptured his name for ever; he has embellished it for ever by his chamber of Karneter; he has sculptured the names of his household; he has a.s.signed their place. The workmen, those attached to his house, he has reckoned amongst his dependants of all ranks." [BIRCH, _Records of the Past_, vol. xii. p.

67.--ED.] It was, no doubt, in order to conform to the Egyptian custom that Antony and Cleopatra commenced in their lifetime that tomb which Augustus ordered to be finished after their death (SUETONIUS, _Augustus_, 17). "To be laid to rest in the tomb which he had made for himself and furnished with every necessary was the greatest good which the G.o.ds could insure to an Egyptian. In Papyrus IV. at Boulak we find the following phrases: 'Be found with thy dwelling finished in the funerary valley: in every enterprise which thou meditatest _may the morning when thy body shall be hid be present to thee_.'" (From the French of M. MASPERO, _Journal asiatique_, 7th series, t.

xv. p. 165, note 1.)

In modern times, when piety or pride stimulates to the decoration of a tomb, all the care of the architect, the sculptor and the painter is given to the outside, to the edifice which surmounts the actual grave.

The grave or other receptacle for the coffin is as plain and simple in the most sumptuous monuments of our cemeteries as in the most humble.

Our funerary architecture is based upon our belief that the tomb is empty; that the vital part of the deposit confided to it has escaped to rejoin the current of eternal life. Under such conditions the tomb becomes above all things a commemorative structure, a more or less sincere manifestation of the grief of a family or of society at large for the loss of one of its members. As for the narrow pit into which the "mortal coil" is lowered, all that we demand of it is that it should be deep enough and properly closed. Art makes no attempt to illumine its darkness. She leaves to workmen the task of excavation and of building its walls and confines herself to the visible parts of the tomb. The dead within furnishes the pretext for her activity, but it is the admiration of the living that is her real incentive.

The ideas of the ancients on this matter were, as we have seen, very different. They looked upon the tomb as an inhabited house; as a house in which the dead was to lead some kind of existence. Rich men wished their tombs to look well outside, even to the distant spectator, but it was to the inside that their chief attention was turned. They wished to find there all the necessaries, the comforts, the luxuries, to which they had been accustomed during life. So we find that the Egyptians, the Greeks or the Etruscans, were willing enough, when they built their own tombs or those of their relations, to throw a _tumulus_ of earth above it, or, later, a constructed building which was conspicuous at a distance. In those sepulchres which were cut out of the side of a mountain, the fronts were carved with frieze, pediment and columns into the shape of a regularly constructed portico; but the chief object of solicitude to the proud possessor of such a tomb, was its internal furnishing and disposition. For him there was no removal should he be discontented with his lodging. When a man is condemned by illness or accident to keep his room, he takes care to surround himself with everything that he may want. He gathers immediately about him all the comforts and luxuries which he can afford; and death is an illness from which there is no recovery.

Impelled by such ideas as these, the ancients filled their tombs with precious objects and decorated them with sumptuous art, all the more that they seemed well guarded against intrusion for the sake of gain.

Thus the Achaeans of Mycenae (if that be the proper name of those mysterious people) buried, in the sepulchres discovered by Dr.

Schliemann, the innumerable objects of gold and silver which now fill the museum of Athens; thus the tombs of Botia were filled with those marvels of grace and delicate workmanship, the terra cottas of Tanagra; and those of Etruria and Campania with the most beautiful painted vases ever produced by Greek taste.

Ident.i.ty of religious conception thus led, from end to end of the antique world, to funerary arrangements which bore a curious resemblance one to another, so that sepulchral architecture among the ancients had, as a whole, a very different character from that of the moderns. This character is more strongly marked in Egypt than anywhere else, and therefore we have studied it in detail. The general observations to which it has given rise have been made once for all, and we shall not have to repeat them when we describe the funeral customs of other ancient peoples. We shall then confine ourselves to pointing out the slight differences which naturally spring up in the several interpretations of a common belief.

We have still to show how the varying circ.u.mstances of time and place caused the Egyptian tomb to pa.s.s through certain modifications of form and decoration, which, however, were never of so radical a nature as to affect its general appearance and arrangement. Until Egypt became a mere geographical expression and her venerable civilization lost its independence and originality, these latter remained practically unchanged.

--2.--_The Tomb under the Ancient Empire._

Among the tombs which date from the time of the ancient empire, the most interesting to the traveller are, of course, the Pyramids. Long before his arrival at Cairo he sees the summits of those artificial mountains rising into the air above the vapours raised by the sun, and above the dust thrown up by the teeming population of the city. At that distance their peaks seem light and slender from their height above the horizon (Plate I. 2).

The tourist's first visit is paid to the Pyramids, and many an European leaves Egypt without seeing any other ancient building. He thinks that he has qualified himself to discourse upon Egyptian architecture because a few shouting Arabs have landed him, exhausted, upon the topmost stone of the pyramid of Cheops, and have painfully dragged and thrust him along those pa.s.sages of the interior which will ever be among his most disagreeable recollections. During all this his eyes and thoughts are entirely given to the preservation of his own equilibrium, and he sees nothing of the real const.i.tution of the structure he has come to visit.

In spite of the wonderful panorama which repays the fatigues of the ascent, and of the overpowering impression made upon the mind by their colossal ma.s.s, the Pyramids, as we see them to-day are far from being the most complete and interesting of the sepulchral monuments left to us by the early dynasties. The largest and best preserved are not so old as some of the tombs in the necropolis of Memphis, and, royal burying-places as they are, their arrangement and ornamentation are less rich and expressive than those of many sepulchres built by private individuals. Many of the latter, in their comparatively restricted dimensions, answer better to the definition of a tomb suggested to us by our study of the national beliefs.

We shall, therefore, reserve the Pyramids for future treatment, and in our review of the successive forms taken by sepulchral architecture, we shall a.s.sign the first place to those private tombs, dating from the Ancient Empire, which are to be found in the necropolis of Memphis. Notwithstanding a few differences, to which we shall refer hereafter, these tombs, as a whole, can be traced to a single type, of which Lepsius was the first to perceive the interest.[158] This type, which was first clearly brought to light by the many and deep excavations carried out by Mariette, has been known for some years past by the Arab term _mastaba_,[159] which means literally a _bench_, a bench of stone or wood. This name was given by the labourers employed upon the excavations, and seemed well adapted to their long and low shapes, which bear some resemblance to those divans, or ottomans, which are found in every room of an oriental dwelling.

Mariette was struck by the fitness of the expression, and used it ever after to designate that particular kind of tomb.

[158] _Briefe aus aegypten_, p. 23 _et seq._ Before the Prussian commission left Middle for Upper Egypt they had studied 130 private tombs, of which the princ.i.p.al ones are figured in the _Denkmaeler_.

[159] Lexicographers do not seem to know the origin of this word; they believe it to be foreign, perhaps Persian.

Mariette will be our constant guide in this part of our study. After having opened many hundreds of these monuments, he published in the _Revue archeologique_, what we may call a _theory of the mastaba_.[160] In all essential matters we shall allow his words to speak for themselves; when he enters into more detail than is necessary for our purpose, we shall content ourselves with epitomizing his descriptions.

[160] Vol. xix. (1869), pp. 1-22 and 81-89.

THE MASTABAS OF THE NECROPOLIS OF MEMPHIS.

The s.p.a.ce over which the monuments which we propose to describe are spread, is on the left bank of the Nile, and extends from _Abou-Roash_ to _Dashour_; it is thus, in all probability, the largest cemetery in the world, being more than fifteen miles in length, and of an average width of from two to two and a half miles.[161] It was, in a word, the burial-place for Memphis and its suburbs, and Memphis seems to have been the largest city of Egypt, and to have boasted an antiquity which only Thinis could rival. Excavations have failed, apparently, to confirm the a.s.sertion of Strabo, who describes the early capital of Egypt as reaching to the foot of the Libyan chain. On the contrary, it seems to have been confined between the ca.n.a.l which is called the _Bahr Yussef_ and the Nile. It would thus have formed a very long and rather narrow city, close upon the river, of which the site may still be traced by the more or less barren hillocks strewn with blocks of granite and fragments of walls, which crop up from the plain between Gizeh and Chinbab. For forty centuries there was a continual procession of corpses from Memphis itself, and probably from towns on the other side of the Nile, such as Heliopolis, to the plateau which lies along the foot of the Libyan chain. The formation of this plateau makes it peculiarly well adapted for the purpose to which it was put.

It consists of a thick bed of soft limestone, covered by a layer of sand which varies in depth from many yards to a few feet according to the inequalities of the ground beneath it.

[161] EBERS (_aegypten_, p. 137) gives this necropolis a length of more than forty-five miles, but in making it extend to Meidoum he seems to be exaggerating.

It was easy, therefore, either to lay bare the rock and to construct the tomb upon it, or to dig the mummy pits in its substance, and the winds might be trusted to quickly cover the grave with sand which would protect it when made. The same sand covered the coffinless corpse of the pauper with its kindly particles. Age after age the dead were interred by millions in this great haven of rest. At first there was plenty of room, and the corpses were strewn somewhat thinly in the sand,[162] but with time economy of s.p.a.ce had to be practised, until at last bodies were squeezed into the narrowest s.p.a.ces between older inhabitants. Sometimes these new comers even intruded into the tombs of those who had gone before them, and that without always troubling themselves to conceal their usurpation by effacing the name of the rightful owner.[163]

[162] Upon the plateau which, at Sakkarah, extends westwards of the stepped pyramid the manner in which the necropolis was developed can be readily seen. In walking eastwards, that is, from the pyramid towards the cultivated land, we pa.s.s a first zone of tombs which date from the Ancient Empire, a second which possesses sculptures of the twenty-sixth dynasty, and a third which dates from the Greek period.

[163] We may quote as an interesting example of such usurpation the Theban tomb first opened by a Scottish traveller, HENRY RHIND, to whose interesting work (_Thebes, its Tombs and their Tenants, Ancient and Present, with a Record of Excavations in the Necropolis_, Longman, 1862, 8vo.) we shall often have to refer. This tomb seems to have been made in the reign of Amenophis III. by a brother and sister whose statues were found in it, but it also contained Sebau, son of Menkara, a high official of the time of the Ptolemies, with his wife and all his family (c. iv.).

The number of tombs was increased to a prodigious extent by the non-employment of those family tombs which, as we shall see, were made use of by the Phnicians, the Greeks, and the Etruscans. The Egyptian sepulchre was a personal appanage. The husband and father of a family admitted into it only his wife and such of their children as died young. The son, when he in turn became the head of a family, built a tomb for himself. Each generation, each human couple marked their pa.s.sage through the world by the erection of a new tomb.

All the _mastabas_ belong to the period of the Memphite empire. Those who built them were able to give free play to their fancies, and to develop the structure, both above and below ground, both in arrangement and in decoration, to any extent they pleased. We may therefore look upon them as the freest, the most spontaneous, and the most complete expression of the ideas formed by the men of that remote age concerning death and the life beyond the grave.

The mastabas of Sakkarah will receive most of our attention, and in describing them we shall often have occasion to quote the words of Mariette.[164] Those which are to be found in the more northern part of the necropolis, in the neighbourhood of the Great Pyramid, differ only in unimportant details from those at Sakkarah. The general appearance now presented by these monuments may be guessed from the sketch which M. Bourgoin has sent us of the tomb of Sabou (Fig. 106).

The other mastabas figured by us have all been more or less restored.

[164] MARIETTE (_Voyage dans la haute egypte_, p. 32) thought that the word Sakkarah was an ancient name derived from _Socharis_, a Memphite form of _Osiris_.

"The _mastaba_ is a ma.s.sive structure, rectangular on plan, with four faces of plain walling, each being inclined at a stated angle towards their common centre. This inclination has led some people to a.s.sert that it is nothing more than an unfinished pyramid. Such an idea is refuted, however, by the fact that the divergence from the perpendicular is in some cases so slight that, were the walls prolonged upwards, their ridges, or _aretes_, would not meet for some eight or nine hundred yards. The mastaba might be more justly compared to the s.p.a.ce comprised between two horizontal sections of an obelisk, supposing the obelisk to have an oblong base.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 106.--Actual condition of a mastaba. The tomb of Sabou. Drawn by Bourgoin.]

"The major axis of the rectangle upon which these structures are planned, always runs due north and south, and at the pyramids of Gizeh, the necropolis of the west, they are arranged upon a symmetrical plan so as to resemble a chess board on which all the squares are strictly oriented.[165] The more carefully built mastabas are oriented according to the true astronomical north. All the others show the same intention, and, in those instances where an error of a few degrees is to be discovered, it is to be clearly attributed to carelessness on the part of the builder, a common fault in these tombs, and not to a difference of intention. We often find that the northern face is not strictly parallel to the southern, nor that on the west to that on the east.

[165] The way in which the mastabas were arranged with respect to each other is well shown in plates xiv. and xviii. of Lepsius's first volume (map of the pyramids of Gizeh and panorama taken from the summit of the second pyramid).

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 107.--Three mastabas at Gizeh. Perspective view, after the plan of Lepsius. (_Denkmaeler_, vol. i. pl. 24.)]

"Although not varying much from true orientation, the mastabas of Sakkarah are not arranged with the symmetry which distinguishes those on the south and west of the Great Pyramid.[166] They are sprinkled about in a rather haphazard fashion. Here we find them well inters.p.a.ced and there actually placed one upon another. It follows that the chess-board arrangement which is so conspicuous at Gizeh is not here to be noticed. Even at Sakkarah there were streets between the rows of tombs, but they are so irregularly placed, and they are often so narrow, many of them being nothing more than blind alleys, that the inexperienced visitor may well fancy himself in a maze.

[166] The general aspect of this city of the dead, and the regularity of its monuments, made a great impression upon the members of the "Inst.i.tut d'egypte." The following are the words of JOMARD (_Description_, vol. v. p. 619): "From the top of the building one sees an infinite quant.i.ty of the long rectangular structures extending almost to the Pyramids. They are carefully oriented, and exactly aligned one with another. I counted fourteen rows of them, in each direction, on the west of the Great Pyramid, and as many on the east, making nearly four hundred in all. The sand under which many of them are buried leaves their forms easily distinguishable." Since the time of Jomard many of the mastabas have been changed by the excavations into mere formless heaps of _debris_, and yet the general arrangement can still be clearly followed.

"The Sakkarah mastabas are built either of stone or brick.

"The mastabas of stone are of two kinds: those of a very hard blue siliceous limestone and those of a softer chalky limestone which is found upon the spot. This latter stone was used for the Stepped Pyramid. The tombs upon which it was used seem to be much the oldest in the necropolis; they are also the least rich and important.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 108.--Restoration of part of the Necropolis of Gizeh.]

"Our general notion of Egyptian architecture would lead us to look for the use of huge stones in these mastabas, and, in fact, certain important monuments, such as the _Mastabat-el-Faraoun_, and parts of important monuments, such as the Temple of the Sphinx and the pa.s.sages and chambers of the greater pyramids, were constructed of very large blocks. But the Sakkarah architects were more modest. Apart from the ceilings, architraves and other places where big stones were necessary, the blocks are of an average height of about half a yard, with a proportionate length and thickness.