A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Volume II Part 3

[33] These trees must have been planted in large terra-cotta pots, such as are still used in many places for the same purpose.

-- 4. _Military Architecture._

The Ancient Egyptians have left us very few works of military architecture, and yet, under their great Theban princes, more than one fortress must have been built outside their own country to preserve their supremacy over neighbouring peoples. In the later periods of the empire fortresses were erected in the Delta and in the upper gorges of the Nile, but, unfortunately such works were always carried out in brick and generally in crude brick. The Egyptian architect had at hand in great abundance the finest materials in the world, except marble, and yet they were used by him exclusively for the tomb and the temple.

When it was a question of providing an indestructible dwelling for the dead, and so of perpetuating the efficacy of the funeral prayers and offerings, "eternal stone" was not spared; but when less important purposes had to be fulfilled they were content with clay. Baking bricks was a more rapid process than quarrying and dressing stone, and if the house or fortress in which they were used had comparatively slight durability, it was easy enough to replace it with another.

Th crude bricks, dried simply in the sun, became disintegrated with time and fell into powder; the kiln dried bricks were carried off from the ruins of one building to be used in another. The few piers or fragments of wall which remain are confused and shapeless. A few blocks of stone, sometimes even a single chip of marble, is enough to enable us to tell the history of a building which has been long destroyed. Such a chip may be the only surviving fragment of the edifice to which it belonged, but it preserves the impression of the chisel which fashioned it, that is of the taste and individuality of the artist who held the chisel. We have nothing of the kind in the case of a brick. Bricks were almost always covered with a coat of stucco, so that nothing was required of them beyond that they should be of the right size and of a certain hardness. It is only by their inscriptions, when they have them, that the dates of these bricks can be determined; when they are without them they tell us nothing at all about the past. Sometimes a brick structure presents, from a distance, an imposing appearance, and the traveller approaches it thinking that he will soon draw all its secrets from it. But after carefully studying and measuring it he is forced to confess that he has failed.

It has no trace of decoration, and it is the decoration of an ancient building which tells us its age, its character, and its purpose.

Stone, even when greatly broken, allows mouldings to be traced, but bricks preserve nothing; they are as wanting in individual expression as the pebbles which go to make a shingly beech.

Even if it had come down to us in a less fragmentary condition, the military architecture of Egypt would have been far less interesting than that of Greece. The latter country is mountainous; the soil is cut up by valleys and rocky hills; the Greek towns, or, at least, their citadels, occupied the summits of rocky heights which varied greatly in profile and alt.i.tude. Hence the military architecture of the country showed great diversity in its combinations. In Egypt the configuration of the soil was not of a nature to provoke any efforts of invention or adaptation. All the cities were in the plain.

Fortified posts were distinguished from one another only by the greater or less extent, height, and thickness of their walls. We shall, however, have to call attention to the remains of a few defensive works which, like those established to guard the defiles of the cataracts, were built upon sites different enough from those ordinarily presented by the Nile valley. In these cases we shall find that the Egyptian constructors knew how to adapt their military buildings to the special requirements of the ground.

Egyptian cities seem always to have been surrounded by a fortified _enceinte_; in some cases the remains of such fortifications have been found, in others history tells us that they existed. At Thebes, for instance, no traces have, so far as we know, been discovered of any wall. Homer's epithet of _hundred-gated_ (??at?p????) may be put on one side as evidence, because the Greek poet did not know Egypt. He described the great metropolis of the Empire of the South as he imagined it to be. The Homeric epithet is capable also of another explanation, an explanation which did not escape Diodorus,[34] it may have referred, not to the gates of the city, but to the pylons of the temples, and should in that case be translated as "_Thebes of the hundred pylons_" instead of hundred gates. We have better evidence as to the existence of fortifications about the town in the descriptions left to us by the ancient historians of the siege of Ptolemy Physcon: the city could not have resisted for several years if it had been an open town. It was the same with Memphis. On more than one occasion, during the Pharaonic period as well as after the Persian conquest, it played the part of a fortress of the first cla.s.s. It was the key of middle Egypt. It even had a kind of citadel which included almost a third of the city and was called the _white wall_ (?e????

te????).[35] This name was given, as the scholiast to Thucydides informs us, "because its walls were of white stone, while those of the city itself were of red brick." The exactness of this statement may be doubted. The Egyptians made their defensive walls of a thickness which could only be attained in brick. It seems likely therefore that these walls consisted of a brick core covered with white stone. An examination of the remains of Heliopolis suggested to the authors of the _Description de l'egypte_ that the walls of that city also were cased with dressed stone. They found, even upon the highest part of the walls, pieces of limestone for which they could account in no other way.

[34] DIODORUS, i. 45, 6.

[35] THUCYDIDES, i. 104. Cf. HERODOTUS, iii. 94, and DIODORUS, xi. 74. After the Persian conquest it was occupied by the army corps left to ensure the submission of the country.

Nowhere else is there anything to be discovered beyond the remains of brick walls, which have always been laid out in the form of a parallelogram.[36] These walls are sometimes between sixty and seventy feet thick.[37] In some cases their position is only to be traced by a gentle swelling in the soil; at Sais, however, they seem to have preserved a height of fifty-seven feet in some parts.[38] No signs of towers or bastions are ever found. At Heliopolis there were gates at certain distances with stone jambs covered with inscriptions.[39] The best preserved of all these _enceintes_ is that of the ancient city of Nekheb, the Eilithyia of the Greeks, in the valley of El-Kab. The rectangle is 595 yards long by 516 wide; the walls are 36 feet-thick.[40] About a quarter of the whole _enceinte_ has been destroyed for the purposes of agriculture; the part which remains contains four large gates, which are not placed in the middle of the faces upon which they open. In all the paintings representing sieges these walls are shown with round-topped battlements, which were easily constructed in brick.

[36] Plate 55 of the first volume of Lepsius's _Denkmaeler_ contains traces of the _enceintes_ of Sais, Heliopolis, and Tanis. See also the _Description de l'egypte_, _Ant._, Ch. 21, 23, 24.

[37] At Heliopolis they were 64 feet thick (_Description_), at Sais 48 feet (_ibid._) while at Tanis they were only 19 feet.

[38] ISAMBERT, _Itineraire de l'egypte_.

[39] MAXIME DU CAMP, _Le Nil_, p. 64.

[40] LEPSIUS, _Denkmaeler_, vol. ii. pl. 100.--EBERS, (_aegypten_,) makes the _enceinte_ of Nekheb a square.

The only fort, properly speaking, which has been discovered in Egypt, appears to be the ruin known as _Chounet-es-Zezib_ at Abydos.[41] This is a rectangular court inclosed by a double wall, and it still exists in a fair state of preservation, to the west of the northern necropolis (Fig. 28). After examining many possible hypotheses, Mariette came to the conclusion that this was a military post intended to watch over the safety of the necropolis, and to keep an eye upon the caravans arriving from the desert. Robber tribes might otherwise be tempted to make use of any moment of confusion for the pillage of the temple. There were curious arrangements for the purpose of guarding against a _coup-de-main_. Within the outer wall, which is provided with small gateways, there is a covered way extending round the whole fort, and commanded by the inner wall. Before the inner court could be reached, an enemy had to traverse a narrow and crooked pa.s.sage in the thickness of the wall, which was well calculated to secure the necessary time for a moment of preparation in case of surprise (Fig. 29).

[41] MARIETTE, _Abydos, Description des Fouilles_, vol. ii. pp.

46-49, and plate 68.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 28.--Military post at Abydos; perspective from the plans, etc., of Mariette.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 29.--Military post. Plan of the entrances; from Mariette.]

The most curious relic of the military engineering of the Egyptians is to be found in Nubia. Thirty-seven miles south-ward of the cataracts of Wadi-Halfah the Nile has worn a channel through a long chain of granite hills which run across the valley from east to west. On each side of the river-bed these hills rise to some height and across its torrent there are a few detached rocks, which once formed a natural dam, but between which the water now rushes impetuously. Navigation is only possible among these rapids during the inundation. This point in the river's course was therefore well fitted to be the gate of Egypt and to be fortified against the incursions of the southern tribes. During the first Theban Empire, the Pharaohs of the twelfth dynasty drew the national frontier at this point, and resolved to establish themselves there in force. The Third Ousourtesen seems to have built the two fortresses of which substantial remains exist even now. Each fortress contained a temple and numerous houses. Lepsius gives the name of _k.u.mmeh_ to that on the right bank and reserves the name _Semneh_, which has usually been applied to the whole group, to the building on the left bank only.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 30.--Bird's-eye view of the fortress of Semneh; restored by Charles Chipiez.]

For our restoration (Fig. 30) we have had to depend very little upon conjecture.[42] The only flight of fancy in which we have indulged is seen in the extra height which we have given to the tower at the north-eastern angle of the building. It seemed to us probable that at some point upon such a lofty terrace there would be a belvedere or watch-tower to facilitate the proper surveillance of the country round about. For the rest we have merely re-established the upper part of the works and restored its depth to the ditch, which had been filled in by the falling of the parapets. The line of walls and bastions can be easily followed except at one point upon the southern face, where a wide breach exists. The destruction of this part of the wall alone and the clearing of the ground upon which it stood, suggests that it was broken down by man rather than by time. It is probable that the fortress was taken by some Ethiopian conqueror, by Sabaco or Tahraka, and that he took care to render its fortifications useless in a way that could not be easily repaired.

[42] We have been able to make use, for this reconstruction, of two plans which only differ in details, and otherwise mutually corroborate each other. One is given by LEPSIUS, Plate 111, vol.

ii. of his _Denkmaeler_; the plans of the two fortresses are in the middle of his map of the valley where they occur. In plate 112 we have a pictorial view of the ruins and the ground about them. In the _Bulletin archeologique de l'Athenaeum Francais_ (1855, pp. 80-84, and plate 5), M. VOGue also published a plan of the two forts, accompanied by a section and a description giving valuable details, details which Lepsius, in his _Briefe aus aegypten_, pa.s.sed over in silence.

Our view of the fort shows it as it must have appeared from a hill in the Libyan Chain, to the south-west. The engineer lavished all his skill on rendering the castle impregnable from the side of the desert. An attack upon the flank facing the stream was impossible; on that side the walls rested upon precipitous rocks rising sheer from the rapids of the Nile.

The trace of the walls was a polygon not unlike a capital L. The princ.i.p.al arm was perpendicular to the course of the river. Its flat summit (see Fig. 30) was about 250 feet by 190 feet. The interior was reached by a narrow pa.s.sage in the thickness of the masonry, the entrance to which was reached by an inclined plane. The entrance is not visible in our ill.u.s.tration but the incline which leads to it is shown. The walls on the three sides which looked landwards were from fifty to eighty feet high, according to the ground. They increased in thickness from twenty-six feet at the base to about twelve or thirteen at the summit. Externally their upper parts fell backwards in such fashion that no ladder, however high, would have availed to reach the parapet. We find a similar arrangement in the walls of a fortress represented at Beni-Ha.s.san (Fig. 31).[43]

[43] In this case the inclination is, however, in the lower half of the wall; a device which would be far less efficient in defeating an escalade than that at Semneh.--ED.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 31.--A besieged fort, Beni-Ha.s.san; from Champollion, pl. 379.]

The walls of Semneh were strengthened, both structurally and from a military point of view, by salient b.u.t.tresses or small bastions on all the sides except that which faced the river. These b.u.t.tresses were either twelve or thirteen in number and from six to eight feet wide at the top. In the re-entering angle which faces north-west there is a long diagonal b.u.t.tress, by the use of which the engineer or architect at once economized material and protected a weak part of his structure in a most efficient manner. The salient angles of the _enceinte_ were protected by double towers, very well disposed so as to command the ditch. A symmetrical regularity is not to be found here any more than in the funerary and religious structures of Egypt. The curtain wall between two of the towers on the southern face is broken up into small b.u.t.tresses of various degrees of salience, instead of being planned on a straight line like the rest.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 32.--Siege of a fortress; from the Ramesseum, Thebes.]

When the fortress was prepared for defence the parapets may have been furnished with wooden structures acting as machicolations, whence the besieged could cast javelins and stones and shoot arrows at an enemy attempting to scale or batter the walls. A bas-relief at Thebes which represents the siege of a fortress seems to indicate that the parapets were crowned by wooden erections of some kind (Fig. 32).[44]

[44] Both the plate in the _Description de l'egypte_ (_Ant._ vol. ii. pl. 31), and that in LEPSIUS (part iii. pl. 166), suggest this interpretation.

The walls were surrounded by a ditch, which was from 95 to 125 feet wide. We cannot now tell what its depth may have been, but it appears to have been paved. The counterscarp and certain parts of the scarp were faced with stone, carefully polished, and fixed so as to augment the difficulty of approach. Moreover, the crown of the glacis and the wide glacis itself were also reveted with stone. All this formed a first line of defence, which had to be destroyed before the a.s.sailants could reach the place itself with their machines. The external line of the ditch does not follow all the irregularities of the _enceinte_, its trace is the same as that of the curtain wall, exclusive of the towers or b.u.t.tresses. The clear width from the face of the latter is about sixty-four feet. Neither ditch nor glacis exist on the eastern face, where the rapids of the Nile render them unnecessary.

We must not forget to draw attention to the curious way in which the body of the fort is constructed. It is composed of crude bricks transfixed horizontally, and at rather narrow intervals, by pieces of wood. The situation of these beams may be easily recognized as they have decayed and left channels in the brickwork. That the holes with which the walls are pierced at regular distances (see Fig. 30) were thus caused, is beyond doubt, especially since a few fragments of wood which the centuries have spared have been found. These fragments have been recognized as having come from the _doum_ palm, which is very common in Upper Egypt, and commoner still in Nubia.

We need not dwell upon the other fortress--that on the right bank. It may be seen in the distance in our restoration of Semneh. Being built upon rocks which were on all sides difficult of access, it did not require any very elaborate works. It was composed of an _enceinte_ inclosing an irregular square about 190 feet each way. It had but a few salient b.u.t.tresses; there were only two on the north-east, towards the mountains, and one, a very bold one, on the south-west, commanding the river. There was no room for a wide ditch. But at a distance of thirteen feet from the walls there was a glacis similar to that at Semneh. It had the same casing of polished stone, but on account of the irregularities of the rock, the height of its crown varied considerably, and its slope was very steep, almost vertical. The trace of the counterscarp followed that of the _enceinte_, including the b.u.t.tresses. Moreover, at its northern and southern angles it followed a line which roughly resembled the bastions of a modern fortification.

Its structure was similar to that of Semneh.

Lepsius does not hesitate to ascribe both these forts to Ousourtesen III., whose name appears upon all the neighbouring rocks, and who, with the deities of the south, was worshipped at Semneh.[45] They would thus date back, according to the chronology which is now generally adopted, to the twenty-seventh or twenty-eighth century B.C.

In any case they cannot be later than the time of Thothmes III., who, in the course of the seventeenth century B.C. restored the temples which they inclose, and covered their walls with his effigies and royal cartouches. Even if we admit that these two castles are not older than the last-named epoch, we shall still have to give to Egypt the credit of possessing the oldest examples of military architecture, as well as the oldest temples and the oldest tombs.

[45] LEPSIUS, _Briefe aus aegypten_, p. 259.--See also MASPERO, _Histoire Ancienne_, pp. 111-113.

CHAPTER II.

METHODS OF CONSTRUCTION, THE ORDERS, SECONDARY FORMS.

-- 1. _An a.n.a.lysis of Architectural Forms necessary._

We have now described the tomb, the temple, and the house in ancient Egypt. We have attempted to define the character of their architecture, and to show how its forms were determined by the religious beliefs, social condition, and manners of the nation, as well as by the climate of the country. We have therefore pa.s.sed in review the most important architectural creations of a people who were the first to display a real taste and feeling for art.

In order to give a complete idea of Egyptian art, and of the resources at its disposal, we must now take these buildings to pieces and show the elements of which they were composed. The rich variety of supports, the numerous "orders" of pillar and column, the methods employed for decoration and illumination, must each be studied separately. We have commenced by looking at them from a synthetic point of view, but we must finish by a methodical a.n.a.lysis. From such an a.n.a.lysis alone can we obtain the necessary materials for an exhaustive comparison between the art of Egypt and that of the nations which succeeded her upon the stage of history. An examination of the Egyptian remains carries the historian back to a more remote date than can be attained in the case of any other country, and yet he is far from reaching the first springs of Egyptian civilization.

Notwithstanding their prodigious antiquity, the most ancient of the monuments that have survived carry us back into the bosom of a society which had long emerged from primitive barbarism. The centuries which saw the building of the Pyramids and the mastabas of the Memphite necropolis had behind them a long and well-filled past. Although we possess no relic from that past, we can divine its character to some extent from the impression which it made upon the taste and fancy of latter ages. Certain effects of which the artists of Memphis were very fond can only be explained by habits contracted during a long course of centuries. In the forms and motives employed by Egyptian architects we shall find more than one example of these survivals from a previous stage of development, such as forms appropriate to wood or metal employed in stone, and childish methods of construction perpetuated without other apparent cause.

-- 2. _Materials._

In our explanation of the general character of Egyptian architecture we have already enumerated the princ.i.p.al materials of which it disposed, and pointed out the modifications arising from the choice of one or another of those materials. We should not here return to the subject but for a misconception which has gained a wide acceptance.