A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Volume I Part 5

The Delta had, in fact, existed long before the appearance of Menes, and perhaps it may have shown pretty much its present form when the Egyptian race first appeared in the valley of the Nile.[45]

[44] HERODOTUS, ii. 4.

[45] MASPERO, _Histoire ancienne des Peuples de l'Orient_, pp. 6 and 7. In such general explanations as are unavoidable we shall content ourselves with paraphrasing M. Maspero.

As to the origin of that race, we need not enter at length into a question so purely ethnographical. It is now generally allowed that they were connected with the white races of Europe and Western Asia; the anatomical examination of the bodies recovered from the most ancient tombs, and the study of their statues, bas-reliefs, and pictures, all point to this conclusion. If we take away individual peculiarities these monuments furnish us with the following common type of the race even in the most remote epochs:--

"The average Egyptian was tall, thin, active. He had large and powerful shoulders,[46] a muscular chest, sinewy arms terminating in long and nervous hands, narrow hips, and thin muscular legs. His knees and calves were nervous and muscular, as is generally the case with a pedestrian race; his feet were long, thin, and flattened, by his habit of going barefoot. The head, often too large and powerful for the body, was mild, and even sad in its expression. His forehead was square and perhaps a little low, his nose short and round; his eyes were large and well opened, his cheeks full and round, his lips thick but not turned out like a negro's; his rather large mouth bore an habitually soft and sorrowful expression. These features are to be found in most of the statues of the ancient and middle empires, and in all the later epochs. Even to the present day the peasants, or _fellahs_, have almost everywhere preserved the physiognomy of their ancestors, although the upper cla.s.ses have lost it by repeated intermarriage with strangers."[47]

[46] Their exceptional breadth of shoulder has been confirmed by an examination of the skeletons in the mummies. See on this subject a curious note in BONOMI's _Some Observations on the Skeleton of an Egyptian Mummy_ (_Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archaeology_, vol. iv. pp. 251-253).

[47] MASPERO, _Histoire ancienne_, p. 16.

When Mariette discovered in the necropolis at Memphis the famous wooden statue of a man standing and holding in his hand the baton of authority, the peasants of Sakkarah recognised at once the feature and att.i.tude of one of themselves, of the rustic dignitary who managed the _corvees_ and apportioned the taxation. An astonished fellah cried out: "The Sheikh-el-Beled!" His companions took up the cry, and the statue has been known by that name ever since.[48]

[48] _Notice des princ.i.p.aux Monuments exposes dans les Galeries provisoires du Musee d' Antiquites egyptiennes de S. A. le Vice-Roi, a Boulaq_ (1876), No. 492. The actual statue holds the _baton_ in its left hand.

Increased knowledge of the Egyptian language has enabled us to carry our researches much farther than Champollion and his successors. By many of its roots, by its system of p.r.o.nouns, by its nouns of number, and by some of the arrangements of its conjugations, it seems to have been attached to the Semitic family of languages. Some of the idioms of these Semitic tongues are found in Egyptian in a rudimentary state.

From this it has been concluded that Egyptian and its cognate languages, after having belonged to that group, separated from it at a very early period, while their grammatical system was still in course of formation. Thus, disunited and subjected to diverse influences, the two families made a different use of the elements which they possessed in common.

There would thus seem to have been a community of root between the Egyptians on the one part and the Arabs, Hebrews, and Phnicians on the other, but the separation took place at such an early period, that the tribes who came to establish themselves in the valley of the Nile had both the time and the opportunity to acquire a very particular and original physiognomy of their own. The Egyptians are therefore said to belong to the proto-Semitic races.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 6.--Statue from the Ancient Empire, in calcareous stone. (Boulak.[49]) Drawn by G. Benedite.]

[49] _Notice des princ.i.p.aux Monuments exposes dans les Galeries provisoires du Musee d' Antiquites egyptiennes de S. A. le Vice-Roi, a Boulaq_ (1876), p. 582. With the exception of a few woodcuts from photographs the contents of the museums at Cairo and Boulak have been reproduced from drawings by M. J. Bourgoin.

The Boulak Museum will be referred to by the simple word Boulak.

The reproductions of objects in the Louvre are all from the pencil of M. Saint-Elme Gautier.

This opinion has been sustained with more or less plausibility by MM.

Lepsius, Benfey, and Bunsen, and accepted by M. Maspero.[50] But other critics of equal authority are more impressed by the differences than by the resemblances, which, however, they neither deny nor explain. M. Renan prefers to rank the Copts, the Tuaregs, and the Berbers in a family which he would call Chamitic, and to which he would refer most of the idioms of Northern Africa.[51] A comparison of the languages is, then, insufficient to decide the question of origin.

[50] MASPERO, _Histoire ancienne_, p. 17.

[51] _Histoire des Langues semitiques_, Book i. ch. ii. -- 4.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 7.--The _Sheikh-el-Beled_. (Boulak.) Drawn by J.

Bourgoin.]

The people whose physical characteristics we have described and whose idiom we have defined, came from Asia, to all appearance, by the Isthmus of Suez. Perhaps they found established on the banks of the Nile another race, probably black, and indigenous to the African continent.[52] If this were so the new comers forced the earlier occupants of the country southwards without mixing with them, and set themselves resolutely to the work of improvement. Egypt must then have presented a very different sight from its richness and fertility of to-day. The river when left to itself, was perpetually changing its bed, and even in its highest floods it failed to reach certain parts of the valley, which remained unproductive; in other districts it remained so long that it changed the soil into swamp. The Delta, half of it drowned in the waters of the Nile, the other half under those of the Mediterranean, was simply a huge mora.s.s dotted here and there with sandy islands and waving with papyrus, reeds, and lotus, across which the river worked its sluggish and uncertain way; upon both banks the desert swallowed up all the soil left untouched by the yearly inundations. From the crowding vegetation of a tropical marsh to the most absolute aridity was but a step. Little by little the new comers learnt to control the course of the floods, to bank them in and to carry them to the farthest corners of the valley, and Egypt gradually arose out of the waters and became in the hand of man one of the best adapted countries in the world for the development of a great civilization.[53]

[52] See LEPSIUS, _Ueber die Annahme eines sogenannten prehistorischen Steinalters in aegypten_ (in the _Zeitschrift fur aegyptische Sprache_, 1870, p. 113, et seq.).

[53] MASPERO, p. 18.

How many generations did it require to create the country and the nation? We cannot tell. But we may affirm that a commencement was made by the simultaneous establishment at several different points of small independent states, each of which had its own laws and its own form of worship. These districts remained almost unchanged in number and in their respective boundaries almost up to the end of the ancient world. Their union under one sceptre formed the kingdom of the Pharaohs, the country of Khemi, but their primitive divisions did not therefore disappear; the small independent states became provinces and were the foundation of those local administrative districts which the Greeks called _nomes_.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 8.--Hunting in the Marshes; from a bas-relief in the tomb of Ti.]

Besides this division into districts, the Egyptians had one other, and only one--the division into Lower Egypt, or the North Country (_Tomera_, or _To-meh_), and into Upper Egypt, or the South Country (_To-res_). Lower Egypt consisted of the Delta; Upper Egypt stretched from the southernmost point of the Delta to the first cataract. This division has the advantage of corresponding exactly to the configuration of the country; moreover, it preserves the memory of a period before the time of Menes, during which Egypt was divided into two separate kingdoms--that of the North and that of the South, a division which in later times had often a decisive influence upon the course of events. This state of things was of sufficiently long duration to leave an ineffaceable trace upon the official language of Egypt, and upon that which we may call its blazonry, or heraldic imagery. The sovereigns who united the whole territory under one sceptre are always called, in the royal protocols, the lords of Upper and Lower Egypt; they carry on their heads two crowns, each appropriate to one of the two great divisions of their united kingdom.

That of Upper Egypt is known to egyptologists as the White crown, because of the colour which it bears upon painted monuments; that of the North is called the red crown, for a similar reason. Combined with one another they form the complete regal head-dress ordinarily called the pschent. In the hieroglyphics Northern Egypt is indicated by the papyrus; Southern by the lotus.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 9.--Shadouf; machine for irrigating the land above the level of the ca.n.a.ls.]

During the Ptolemaic epoch a new administrative division into Upper, Middle, and Lower Egypt was established. The Middle Egypt of the Greek geographers began at the southern point of the Delta, and extended to a little south of Hermopolis. Although this latter division was not established until after the centuries which saw the birth of those monuments with which we shall have to deal, we shall make frequent use of it, as it will facilitate and render more definite our topographical explanations. For the contemporaries of the Pharaohs both Memphis and Thebes belong to Upper Egypt, and if we adopted their method of speech we should be under the continual necessity of stopping the narration to define geographical positions; but with the tri-part.i.te division we may speak of Beni-Ha.s.san as in Middle, and Abydos as in Upper Egypt, and thus give a sufficient idea of their relative positions.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 10.--The White Crown.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 11.--The Red Crown.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 12.--The Pschent.]

-- 3. _The Great Divisions of Egyptian History._

In enumerating and a.n.a.lysing the remains of Egyptian art, we shall cla.s.sify them chronologically as well as locally. The monuments of the plastic arts will be arranged into groups determined by the periods of their occurrence, as well as by their geographical distribution. We must refer our readers to the works of M. Maspero and others for the lists of kings and dynasties, and for the chief events of each reign, but it will be convenient for us to give here a summary of the princ.i.p.al epochs in Egyptian history. Each of those epochs corresponds to an artistic period with a special character and individuality of its own. The following paragraphs taken from the history of M. Maspero give all the necessary information in a brief form.

"In the last years of the prehistoric period, the sacerdotal cla.s.s had obtained a supremacy over the other cla.s.ses of the nation. A man called Menes (Menha or Mena in the Egyptian texts) destroyed this supremacy and founded the Egyptian monarchy.

"This monarchy existed for at least four thousand years, under thirty consecutive dynasties, from the reign of Menes to that of Nectanebo (340 years before our era). This interval of time, the longest of which political history takes note, is usually divided into three parts: the _Ancient Empire_, from the first to the eleventh dynasty; the _Middle Empire_, from the eleventh dynasty to the invasion of the Hyksos or Shepherds; the _New Empire_ from the shepherd kings to the Persian conquest. This division is inconvenient in one respect; it takes too little account of the sequence of historical events.

"There were indeed, three great revolutions in the historical development of Egypt. At the beginning of its long succession of human dynasties (the Egyptians, like other peoples, placed a number of dynasties of divine rulers before their first human king) the political centre of the country was at Memphis; Memphis was the capital and the burying-place of the kings; Memphis imposed sovereigns upon the rest of the country and was the chief market for Egyptian commerce and industry. With the commencement of the sixth dynasty, the centre of gravity began to shift southwards. During the ninth and tenth dynasties it rested at Heracleopolis, in Middle Egypt, and in the time of the eleventh dynasty, it fixed itself at Thebes. From that period onwards Thebes was the capital of the country and furnished the sovereign. From the eleventh to the twenty-first all the Egyptian dynasties were Theban with the single exception of the fourteenth Xoite dynasty. At the time of the shepherd invasion, the Thebad became the citadel of Egyptian nationality, and its princes, after centuries of war against the intruders, finally succeeded in freeing the whole valley of the Nile for the benefit of the eighteenth dynasty, which opened the era of great foreign wars.

"Under the nineteenth dynasty an inverse movement to that of the first period carried the political centre of the country back towards the north. With the twenty-first Tanite dynasty, Thebes ceased to be the capital, and the cities of the Delta, Tanis, Bubastis, Mendes, Sebennytos, and above all Sais, rose into equal or superior importance. From that time the political life of the country concentrated itself in the maritime districts. The _nomes_ of the Thebad, ruined by the Ethiopian and a.s.syrian invasions, lost their influence; and Thebes itself fell into ruin and became nothing more than a _rendezvous_ for curious travellers.

"I propose, therefore, to divide Egyptian history into three periods, each corresponding to the political supremacy of one town or province over the whole of Egypt:--

"FIRST PERIOD, Memphite (the first ten dynasties). The supremacy of Memphis and of the sovereigns furnished by her.

"SECOND PERIOD, Theban (from the eleventh to the twentieth dynasties inclusive). Supremacy of Thebes and the Theban kings. This period is divided into two sub-periods by the Shepherd dynasties.

"_a. The old Theban empire_, from the eleventh to the sixteenth dynasties.

"_b. The new Theban empire_, from the sixteenth to the twentieth dynasties.

"THIRD PERIOD, Sait (from the twenty-first to the thirtieth dynasties, inclusive). Supremacy of Sais and the other cities of the Delta. This period is divided into two by the Persian invasion:--

"_First Sait period_, from the twenty-first to the twenty-sixth dynasties.

"_Second Sait period_, from the twenty-seventh to the thirtieth dynasties."[54]

[54] _Histoire ancienne des Peuples de l'Orient_, p. 53. We believe that the division proposed by M. Maspero is, in fact, the best. It is the most suggestive of the truth as to the successive displacements of the political centre and the movement of history. We shall, however, have no hesitation in making use of the terms _Ancient_, _Middle_, and _New Empire_, as occasion arises.

Mariette places the accession of Mena or Menes at about the fiftieth century before our era, while Bunsen and other Egyptologists bring forward his date to 3,600 or 3,500 B.C. as they believe some of the dynasties of Manetho to have been contemporary with each other.

Neither Mariette nor Maspero deny that Egypt, in the course of its long existence, was often part.i.tioned between princes who reigned in Upper and Lower Egypt respectively; but, guided by circ.u.mstances which need not be described here, they incline to believe that Manetho confined himself to enumerating those dynasties which were looked upon as the legitimate ones. The work of elimination which has been attempted by certain modern _savants_, must have been undertaken, to a certain extent, in Egypt itself; and some of the collateral dynasties must have been effaced and pa.s.sed over in silence, because the monuments still remaining preserve the names of reigning families which are ignored by history.

Whatever may be thought of this initial date, Egypt remains, as has been so well said by M. Renan, "a lighthouse in the profound darkness of remote antiquity." Its period of greatest power was long anterior to the earliest traditions of the Greek race; the reign of Thothmes III., who, according to a contemporary expression, "drew his frontiers where he pleased," is placed by common consent in the seventeenth century, B.C. The Egyptian empire then comprised Abyssinia, the Soudan, Nubia, Syria, Mesopotamia, part of Arabia, Khurdistan, and Armenia. Founded by the kings of the eighteenth dynasty, this greatness was maintained by those of the nineteenth. To this dynasty belonged Rameses II., the Sesostris of the Greeks, who flourished in the fifteenth century. It was the superiority of its civilization, even more than the valour of its princes and soldiers, which made Egypt supreme over Western Asia.

This supremacy declined during the twenty-first and twenty-second dynasties, but, at the same time, Egyptian chronology becomes more certain as opportunities of comparison with the facts of Hebrew history increase. The date of 980, within a year or two, may be given with confidence as that of the accession of Sheshonk I., the contemporary of Solomon and Rehoboam. From that date onwards, the constant struggles between Egypt and its neighbours, especially with a.s.syria, multiply our opportunities for synchronic comparison. In the seventh century the country was opened to the Greeks, the real creators of history, who brought with them their inquiring spirit and their love for exact.i.tude. After the accession of Psemethek I., the founder of the twenty-sixth dynasty, in 656, our historical materials are abundant. For that we must thank the Greek travellers who penetrated everywhere, taking notes which they afterwards amplified into narratives. It is a singular thing, that even as late as the Ptolemies, when the power of the Macedonian monarchy was fully developed, the Egyptians never seem to have felt the want of what we call an _era_, of some definite point from which they could measure the course of time and the progress of the centuries. "They were satisfied with calculating by the years of the reigning sovereign, and even those calculations had no certain point of departure. Sometimes they counted from the commencement of the year which had witnessed the death of his predecessor, sometimes from the day of his own coronation. The most careful calculations will therefore fail to enable modern science to restore to the Egyptians that which, in fact, they never possessed."[55]