A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Volume I Part 6

[55] MARIETTE, _Apercu de l'Histoire d'egypte_, p. 66.

Even thus summarily stated, these historical indications are enough to show how little foundation there is for the opinion which was held by the ancient Greeks, and too long accepted by modern historians. It was, they said, from Ethiopia that Egyptian civilization had come. A colony of Ethiopian priests from the island of Meroe in Upper Nubia, had introduced their religion, their written characters, their art and their civil inst.i.tutions into the country. The exact opposite of this is the truth. "It was the Egyptians who advanced up the banks of the Nile to found cities, fortresses, and temples in Ethiopia; it was the Egyptians who carried their civilization into the midst of savage negro tribes. The error was caused by the fact that at one epoch in the history of Egypt the Ethiopians played an important part.

"If it were true that Egypt owed its political existence to Ethiopia, we should be able to find in the latter country monuments of a more remote antiquity, and as we descended the Nile, we should find the remains comparatively modern; but, strangely enough, the study of all these monuments incontestably proves that the sequence of towns, holy places, and tombs, constructed by the Egyptians on the banks of their river, follow each other in such chronological order that the oldest remains, the Pyramids, are found in the north, in Lower Egypt, near the southern point of the Delta. The nearer our steps take us to the cataracts of Ethiopia, the less ancient do the monuments become. They show ever increasing signs of the decadence of art, of taste, and of the love for beauty. Finally, the art of Ethiopia, such as its still existing monuments reveal it to us, is entirely wanting in originality. A glance is sufficient to tell us that it represents the degeneracy only of the Egyptian style, that the spirit of Egyptian forms has been weakly grasped, and that their execution is generally mediocre."[56]

[56] BRUGSCH-BEY, _Histoire de l'egypt_, pp. 6 and 7. Maspero's _Histoire ancienne_, p. 382, may also be consulted upon the character of the Ethiopian kingdom and the monuments of Napata.

A good idea of this process of degradation may be gained by merely glancing through the plates to part v. of Lepsius's _Denkmaeler_; plate 6, for example, shows what the caryatid became at Napata.

We may condense all these views into a simple and easily remembered formula; we may say that _as we mount towards the springs of the Nile, we descend the current of time_. Thebes is younger than Memphis, and Meroe than Thebes. The river which Egypt worshipped, and by which the walls of its cities were bathed, flowed from the centre of Africa, from the south to the north; but the stream of civilization flowed in the other direction, until it was lost in the country of the negro, in the mysterious depths of Ethiopia. The springs of this latter stream must be sought in that district where the waters of the Nile, as if tired by their long journey, divide into several arms before falling into the sea; in that district near the modern capital, over which stretch the long shadows of the Pyramids.

-- 4. _The Const.i.tution of Egyptian Society--Influence of that Const.i.tution upon Monuments of Art._

During the long sequence of centuries which we have divided into three great periods, the national centre of gravity was more than once displaced. The capital was at one time in Middle Egypt, at another in Upper, and at a third period in Lower Egypt, in accordance with its political necessities. At one period the nation had nothing to fear from external enemies, at others it had to turn a bold front to Asia or Ethiopia. At various times Egypt had to submit to her foreign foes; to the shepherd invaders, to the kings of a.s.syria and Persia, to the princes of Ethiopia, and finally to Alexander, to whom she lost her independence never again to recover it. And yet it appears that the character and social condition of the race never underwent any great change. At the time of the pyramid-builders, Egypt was the most absolute monarchy that ever existed, and so she remained till her final conquest.

"Successor and descendant of the deities who once reigned over the valley of the Nile, the king was the living manifestation and incarnation of G.o.d: child of the sun (_Se Ra_), as he took care to proclaim whenever he wrote his name, the blood of the G.o.ds flowed in his veins and a.s.sured to him the sovereign power."[57] He was _the priest_ above all others. Such a form of worship as that of Egypt, required no doubt a large sacerdotal cla.s.s, each member of which had his own special function in the complicated and gorgeous ceremonies in which he took part; but the king alone, at least in the princ.i.p.al temples, had the right to enter the sanctuary and to open the door of the kind of chapel in which the symbolical representation of the divinity was kept; he alone saw the G.o.d face to face, and spoke to him in the name of his people.[58] The pre-eminent dignity of this priestly office did not, however, prevent the king from taking his proper share in war or political affairs generally. The army of scribes and various functionaries, whose t.i.tles may still be read upon the most ancient monuments of the country, depended upon him for their orders from one end of the country to the other, and in war, it was he who led the serried battalions of the Egyptian army. The king was thus a supreme pontif, the immediate chief of all civil and military officers; and, as the people believed that his career was directed by the G.o.ds with whom he held converse, he became to them a visible deity and, in the words of an inscription, "the representative of Ra among the living." His divinity, begun on earth, was completed and rendered perpetual in another life. All the dead Pharaohs became G.o.ds, so that the Egyptian pantheon obtained a new deity at the death of each sovereign. The deceased Pharaohs thus const.i.tuted a series of G.o.ds to whom the reigning sovereign would of course address himself when he had anything to ask; hence the monuments upon which we find living Pharaohs offering worship to their predecessors.[59]

[57] MASPERO, _Histoire ancienne_, p. 58. This affiliation of the king to the G.o.d was more than a figure of speech. In an inscription which is reproduced both at Ipsamboul and at Medinet-Abou, Ptah is made to speak in the following terms of Rameses II. and Rameses III. respectively: "I am thy father, as a G.o.d I have begotten thee; all thy members are divine; when I approached thy royal mother I took upon me the form of the sacred ram of Mendes" (line 3rd). This curious text has lately been interpreted by E. Naville (_Society of Biblical Archaeology_, vol. vii. pp. 119-138). The monarchy of the Incas was founded upon an almost identical belief.

[58] See the account of the visit to Heliopolis of the conquering Ethiopian, Piankhi-Mer-Amen; we shall quote the text of this famous inscription in our chapter upon the Egyptian temple.

[59] FR. LENORMANT, _Manuel d'Histoire ancienne_, t. 1, pp.

485-486. The most celebrated of these is the famous _Chamber of Ancestors_ from Karnak, which is now preserved in the _Bibliotheque Nationale_ at Paris.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 13.--Seti I. in his War-Chariot, bas-relief at Thebes. (Champollion, pl. 297.)]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 14.--Rameses II. in adoration before Seti. From Abydos (Mariette).]

The prestige which such a theory of royalty was calculated to give to the Egyptian kings may easily be imagined. They obtained more than respect; they were the objects of adoration, of idolatry. Brought up from infancy in this religious veneration, to which their hereditary qualities also inclined them, generation succeeded generation among the Egyptians, without any attempt to rebel against the royal authority or even to dispute it. Ancient Egypt, like its modern descendant, was now and then the scene of military revolts. These were generally provoked by the presence of foreign mercenaries, sometimes by their want of discipline and licence, sometimes by the jealousy which they inspired in the native soldiery; but never, from the time of Menes to that of Tewfik-Pacha, has the civil population, whether of the town or of the fields, shown any desire to obtain the slightest guarantee for what we should call their rights and liberties. During all those thousands of years not the faintest trace is to be discovered of that spirit from which sprung the republican const.i.tutions of Greece and ancient Italy, a spirit which, in yet later times, has led to the parliamentary governments of Christian Europe. The Egyptian labourer or artisan never dreamt of calling in question the orders of any one who might be master for the time.

Absolute obedience to the will of a single man--such was the constant and instinctive national habit, and by it every movement of the social machine, under foreign and native kings alike, was regulated.

From the construction of the pyramids of Cheops and Chephren, and the cutting of a new ca.n.a.l between the two seas under Nekau, to the Mahmoudieh ca.n.a.l of Mehemet-Ali and that abortive enterprise, the barrage of the Nile, the only method thought of for obtaining the necessary labour was compulsion.[60] An order is received by the governor, who has it proclaimed from one village to another throughout his province; next day the whole male population is driven, like a troop of sheep, to the workshops. Each man carries a bag or basket which holds his provisions for a fortnight or a month, as the case may be; a few dry cakes, onions, garlic, and _Egyptian beans_, as the Greeks called the species of almond which is contained in the fruit of the lotus. Old men and children, all had to obey the summons. The more vigorous and skilful among them dressed and put in place the blocks of granite or limestone; the weakest were useful for the transport of the rubbish to a distance, for carrying clay and water from the Nile to the brickmakers, for arranging the bricks in the sun so that they might be dried and hardened.

[60] The beaters for the great hunts which took place in the Delta and the Fayoum were procured in the same fashion. These hunts were among the favourite pleasures of the kings and the great lords. See MASPERO, _Le Papyrus Mallet_, p. 58 (in _Recueil de Travaux_, etc. t. 1).

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 15.--Homage to Amenophis III. (From Prisse.[61])]

[61] The work to which we here refer is the _Histoire de l'Art egyptien d'apres les Monuments_, 2 vols. folio. Arthus Bertrand, 1878. As the plates are not numbered, we can only refer to them generally.

Under the stimulus of the rod, this mult.i.tude worked well and obediently under the directions of the architect's foreman and of skilled artisans who were permanently employed upon the work; they did all that could be done by men without special education. At the end of a certain period they were relieved by fresh levies from another province, and all who had not succ.u.mbed to the hard and continuous work, returned to their own places. Those who died were buried in hasty graves dug in the sands of the desert by the natives of their own village.

The ma.s.sive grandeur of some of the Egyptian monuments is only to be explained by this levy _en ma.s.se_ of every available pair of hands.

The kings of the ancient empire, at least, were unable to dispose of those prisoners of war captured in myriads, in whole races, by the a.s.syrian kings, and apparently employed by them in the construction of Nineveh. Now, it is impossible that such works as the Pyramids could have been begun and finished in the course of a single reign by free and remunerated labour, even if it had the help of numerous slaves.

Certain arrangements in their design and the marvellously exact execution of the more important details of the masonry, prove that architects of great ability and skilful workmen were, indeed, employed upon those gigantic works; but the great bulk of the task must have required the collective effort of a whole population; of a population devoting themselves night and day to complete the work when once begun, like ants over their subterranean city or bees over their comb.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 16.--Construction of a Temple at Thebes. (From Prisse.)]

Even supposing that history had been silent upon this subject, the architect could easily divine, from these monuments themselves, how they had been constructed. Cast your eyes upon the ruins of the Athenian Acropolis; their dimensions will seem to you small in the extreme if you compare them with the buildings of Egypt and a.s.syria; on the other hand their workmanship is equally careful throughout; it is as exact and perfect in the concealed parts of the structure as in those which were to be visible, in the structural details as in the ornamental painting and sculpture. By these signs you may recognize at once, that, from its foundation to its completion, the whole work was in the hands of artisans whom long practice had made perfect in their trade, and that each single individual among them had made it a point of honour to acquit himself worthily of the task entrusted to him. In the gangs of docile labourers who succeeded each other in the workshops of Memphis or Thebes, there was, of course, a certain sprinkling of men who had become qualified by experience for the special work upon which they were employed; but the great majority were men suddenly taken from very different occupations, from the oar, the plough, the management of cattle; who therefore could have nothing but their unskilled labour to bestow. To such men as these a great part of the work had perforce to be confided, in order that it might be complete at the required time. In spite of the strictest supervision, the almost religious care in the placing and fixing of masonry, which might be fairly expected from the practised members of a trade guild, could not be ensured. Hence the singular inequalities and inconsistences which have been noticed in most of the great Egyptian buildings; sometimes it is the foundations which are in fault, and, by their sinking, have compromised the safety of the whole building;[62] sometimes it is the built up columns of masonry, which, when deprived by time of their coating of stucco, appear very poor and mean. The infinite foresight and self-respect, the pa.s.sionate love for perfection for its own sake, which is characteristic of Greek work at its best time, is not here to be found. But this defect was inseparable from the system under which the Egyptian buildings were erected.

[62] "The foundations of the great temple at Abydos, commenced by Seti I. and finished by Rameses II., consist of but a single course of generally ill-balanced masonry. Hence the settling which has taken place, and the deep fissure which divides the building in the direction of its major axis."--MARIETTE, _Voyage dans la Haute-egypte_, p. 59. The same writer speaks of Karnak in a similar strain: "The Pharaonic temples are built, as a rule, with extreme carelessness. The western pylon, for instance, fell because it was hollow, which made the inclination of the walls a source of weakness instead of strength."--_Itineraire_, p. 179.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 17.--Columns in the Hypostyle Hall, Karnak.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIGS. 18, 19.--Scribes registering the yield of the harvest. From a tomb at Sakkarah. (Boulak, 9-1/2 inches high. Drawn by Bourgoin.)]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 20.--Colossi of Amenophis III. (statues of Memnon) at Thebes.]

The absolute and dreaded master whose gesture, whose single word, was sufficient to depopulate a province and to fill quarries and workshops with thousands of men, the sovereign who, in spite of his mortality, was looked up to by his people as one so near akin to the G.o.ds as to be hardly distinguishable from them, the high priest and father of his people, the king before whom all heads were bent to the earth; filled with his own glory and majesty the buildings which he caused to spring, as if by magic, from the earth. His effigy was everywhere. Seated in the form of colossal statues in front of the temples, in bas-reliefs upon pylons, upon the walls of porticos and pillared halls, he was represented sometimes offering homage to the G.o.ds, sometimes leading his troops to battle or bringing them home victorious. The supreme efforts of architect and sculptor were directed to constructing for their prince a tomb which should excel all others in magnificence and durability, or to immortalizing him by a statue which should raise its head as much above its rivals as the royal power surpa.s.sed the power and dignity of ordinary men. The art of Egypt was, in this sense, a monarchical art; and in so being it was the direct expression of the sentiments and ideas of the society which had to create it from its foundations.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 21.--Scribe registering merchandize. Sakkarah.

(9-1/2 inches high. Drawn by Bourgoin.)]

After the king came the priests, the soldiers, and the scribes or royal functionaries, each receiving authority directly from the king and superintending the execution of his orders. These three groups formed what we may call the upper cla.s.s of Egyptian society. The soil was entirely in their hands. They possessed among them the whole valley of the Nile, with the exception of the royal domain. The agriculturists were mere serfs attached to the soil. They cultivated, for a payment in kind, the lands belonging to the privileged cla.s.ses.

They changed masters with the lands upon which they lived, which they were not allowed to quit without the permission of the local authorities.

Their position did not greatly differ from that of the modern fellahs, who cultivate the Egyptian soil for the benefit of the effendis, beys, and pachas or for that of the sovereign, who is still the greatest landowner in the country.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 22.--Boatmen. Tomb of Ra-ka-pou, 5th dynasty.

(Boulak, 16 inches high. Drawn by Bourgoin.)]

The shepherds, the fishermen and boatmen of the Nile, the artisans and shopkeepers of the cities were in a similar condition. They lived upon their gains in the same way as the peasant upon the share of the harvest which custom reserved for his use. As a natural consequence of their life in a city and of the character of their occupations, small traders and artisans enjoyed more liberty and independence, more power of coming and going than the agriculturists, although legal rights were the same in both cases. The burden of forced labour must have pressed less heavily upon the latter cla.s.s, and they must have had better opportunities of escaping from it altogether.

In consequence of a mistaken interpretation of historic evidence, it was long believed that the Egyptians had castes, like the Hindoos.

This notion has been dispelled by more careful study of their remains.

The vigorous separation of cla.s.ses according to their social functions, the enforced heredity of professions, and the prohibition of intermarriage between the different groups, never obtained a footing in Egypt. We often find, in Egyptian writings, two members of a single family attached one to the civil service and the other to the army, or the daughter of a general marrying the son of a priest. Nay, it often happens that the offices of soldier and priest, of priest and civil servant, or of civil servant and soldier, are united in the person of a single individual. In families which did not belong to these aristocratic cla.s.ses there was, in all probability, more heredity of occupation; in the ordinary course the paternal employment fixed that of the children, but yet there was nothing approaching to an absolute rule. The various trades were formed into corporations or guilds, rather than castes in the strict sense of the word. From this it resulted that great natural talents, fortunate circ.u.mstances, or the favour of the sovereign could raise a man of the lowest cla.s.s up to the highest dignities of the state. In the latter days of the monarchy we have an example of this in the case of Amasis, who, born among the dregs of the population, finally raised himself to the throne.[63] Such events were of frequent occurrence in all those oriental monarchies where the will of the sovereign was the supreme and undisputed law. Even in our own days, similar things have taken place in Turkey and Persia to the surprise of none but Europeans. When the master of all is placed so high above his fellow men that his subjects seem mere human dust about his feet, his caprice is quite sufficient to raise the most insignificant of its atoms to a level with the most ill.u.s.trious.

[63] HERODOTUS, ii. 172. For an earlier epoch, see the history of a certain Ahmes, son of Abouna, as it is narrated upon his sepulchral inscription, which dates from the reign of Amosis, the founder of the eighteenth dynasty (DE ROUGe, _Memoire sur l'Inscription d'Ahmes, Chef des Nautoniers_, 4to. 1851, and Brugsch, _Histoire d'egypte_, t. i. p. 80). Starting as a private soldier for the war against the Shepherds, undertaken for the re-conquest of Avaris, he was noticed by the king for his frequent acts of gallantry, and promoted until he finally became something in the nature of high admiral.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 23.--Cattle Drovers. From the tomb of Ra-ka-pou, Sakkarah, 5th dynasty. (Boulak. Drawn by Bourgoin.)]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 24.--Bakers. From a tomb. (Boulak, 9-1/2 inches high. Bourgoin.)]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 25.--Women at a loom. From a tomb at Beni-Ha.s.san.

(Champollion, 381 bis)]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 26.--Netting birds. From a tomb. (Boulak. Drawn by Bourgoin.)]

The priests of the highest rank, the generals and officers of the army and the great civil functionaries, while they made no effort to rival the splendour of the royal creations, consecrated steles, images of the deity, and chapels, at their own expense. It was upon their tombs, however, that most of their care was lavished. These tombs furnish numberless themes of great interest to the historian. The tombs of the Memphite kings have not preserved for us anything that can fairly be called sculpture. All that we know of the style and methods of that art in those early times we owe to the burial-places which the members of the governing cla.s.ses were in the habit of preparing during their lifetime in the necropolis of Memphis. We may say the same of the early centuries of the Middle Empire. The Egypt of the great kings belonging to the twelfth dynasty has been preserved for us upon the tombs of Ameni and Num-Hotep, the governors of the _nomes_ in which they were buried. It is to the burial chambers at Gizeh, at Sakkarah, at Meidoum, and at Beni-Ha.s.san that we must go for complete types of sepulchral architecture at those epochs; to the statues in the recesses of their ma.s.sive walls and to the bas-reliefs in their narrow chambers, we must turn for those features of early Egyptian civilization which remained for many centuries without material change; by these monuments we are enabled to build up piece by piece a trustworthy representation of the Egyptian people both in their labours and in their pleasures. Finally it is from these tombs of private individuals that the best works of Egyptian artists have been obtained, the works in which they approached most nearly to the ideal which they pursued for so many centuries.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 27.--Shepherds in the fields. From a tomb at Sakkarah. (Boulak. 8-3/4 inches high. Drawn by Bourgoin.)]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 28.--Winnowing corn. From a tomb at Sakkarah.

(Boulak. Drawn by Bourgoin.)]

Thanks to these monuments erected at the expense of the great lords and rich burghers of Egypt, thanks also to the climate and to the desert sand which has preserved them without material injury, the art of Egypt appears to us more comprehensive and varied than that of any other nation of which we shall have to treat; than that of a.s.syria for instance, which represents little but scenes of battle and conquest. A faithful mirror of Egyptian society, it has preserved for us an exhaustive record of the never-ceasing activity which created and preserved the wealth of the country; it has not even neglected the games and various pleasures in which the laborious Egyptian sought for his well earned repose. The king indeed, preserved his first place by the importance of the religious buildings which he raised, by the size of his tomb, and by the number and dimensions of the reproductions of his features; reproductions which show him in the various aspects demanded by the complex nature of the civilization over which he presided. But in the large number of isolated figures, groups, and scenes which have come down to us, we have ill.u.s.trations of all cla.s.ses that helped in the work of national development, from the ploughman with his ox, to the scribe crouching, cross-legged, upon his mat, from the shepherd with his flock or the hunter pushing his shallop through the brakes of papyrus, to the directors of the great public works and the princes of the blood who governed conquered provinces or guarded the frontiers of the country at the head of ever faithful armies.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Height 12-3/4 inches.

Height 6-1/3 inches.