A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Volume I Part 8

120).

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 36.--Osiris, from a bronze in the Louvre. Height 228 inches.]

Their task was, in one sense, more difficult than that of the Greek artists. When newly born Greek art first began to make representations of Greek deities, the work of intellectual a.n.a.lysis and abstraction had already come to a state of maturity which it never reached in Egypt. The divinities were fewer in number and consequently more fixed and decided in their individual characteristics. The Egyptian polytheism was always more mixed, more strongly tinged with fetishism than that of Greece. Even in those centuries in which the ideas of the Egyptian people were most elevated and refined, the three successive stages, which are always found in the development of religious life, co-existed in the mind of the nation. A few more or less isolated thinkers were already seeking to formulate monotheism. The _elite_ of the nation--the king, the priest, and the military cla.s.s--were adoring Amen and Ptah, Khons or Khonsu, Mouth, Osiris and Horus, Sekhet, Isis, Nephtis and many other divinities; all more or less abstract in their nature, and presiding over special phenomena. As for the lower orders of the people, they knew the names of these deities and a.s.sociated themselves with the great public honours which were paid to them; but their homage and their faith were more heartily rendered to such concrete and visible G.o.ds as the sacred animals, as the bulls Apis and Mnevis, the goat of Mendes, the ibis, the hawk, &c. None of the peculiarities of Egyptian civilization struck Greek travellers with more amazement than this semiworship of animals.[74]

[74] HERODOTUS, ii. 75-86.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 37.--The G.o.ddess Bast. (From a bronze in the Louvre. Actual Size.)]

Later theology has succeeded in giving more or less subtle and specious explanations of these forms of worship. Each of these animals has been a.s.signed, as symbol or attribute, to one of the greater deities. As for ourselves we have no doubt that these objects of popular devotion were no more than ancient fetishes. In the long prehistoric centuries, while the Egyptian race was occupied in making good its possession of the Nile valley and bringing it into cultivation, imagination deified these animals, some for the services which they rendered, others for the terror which they inspired; and it was the same with certain vegetables.

We find traces of this phenomenon, which at first seems so inexplicable, among the other races of antiquity, but it is nowhere else so marked as it is in Egypt. When Egypt, after being for three centuries subject to the influence and supremacy of the Greek genius, had lost all but the shadow of its former independence and national life; when all the energy and intellectual activity which remained to it was concentrated at the Greco-Syrian rather than Egyptian Alexandria, the ancient religion of the race lost all its highest branches.[75] The aspirations towards monotheism took a form that was either philosophical and Platonic or Christian; and as for the cultivated spirits who wished to continue the personification of the eternal forces of the world and of the laws which govern them, these laws and forces presented themselves to their minds in the forms which had been figured and described by the sculptors, painters, and writers of Greece. They accepted, without hesitation or dispute, the numbers and physical characteristics of the divine types of Greece. From end to end of the habitable earth, as the Greeks boasted, the G.o.ds of the h.e.l.lenic pantheon absorbed and a.s.similated all those of other nationalities; within the boundaries of the Roman Empire, at least, its polytheism became a kind of universal religion for civilized humanity, and was adopted by nations of the most diverse origin and language. The lower cla.s.ses alone, who read neither Homer nor Hesiod and were unable to admire the statues of the Greek sculptors, were kept free from the powerful and softening influence of poetry and art.

They guarded with obstinacy the ancient foundations of their early faith, and in the void left by the disappearance of the national G.o.ds, their primitive beliefs seem to have put on a new life and to have enjoyed a restored _prestige_. Thus we may see, in forest clearings, the ancient but still vigorous stumps of great trees which have been felled send out fresh shoots to renew their youth.

[75] We do not mean to say that the higher qualities of the Egyptian religion were then altogether lost. In Roman Egypt the fetish superst.i.tions were no doubt predominant, but still it had not lost all that theological erudition which it had acc.u.mulated by its own intellectual energy. In an inscription cut in the time of Philip the Arab, we find an antique hymn transcribed in hieroglyphs upon the wall of a temple. We find abstract and speculative ideas in all those Egyptian books which have come down to us, in a form which betrays the last two centuries of the Empire. Alexandria had its Egyptian Serapeum by the side of its Greek one. Monuments are to be found there which are Egyptian in every particular. Gnosticism was particularly successful in Egypt, which was predestined to accept it by the whole of its past. Certain doctrines of Plotinus are thus best explained. More than one purely Egyptian notion may be found interpreted in the works of Alexandrian philosophers and in the phraseology of Greek philosophy. The princ.i.p.al sanctuaries did not allow their rites and ceremonies to fall into disuse.

Although Thebes was nothing but a heap of ruins, a dead city visited for its relics of the past, the worship of Vulcan, that is of Ptah, at Memphis, was carried on up to the establishment of Christianity. That of Isis, at Philae, lasted until the time of Justinian. Diocletian negotiated a treaty with the Blemmyes, those people of Nubia who were at one time such redoubtable soldiers, which guaranteed to them the free use of that temple.

It was not converted into a church until after the destruction of the Blemmyes by Silco and the Christian kings of Ethiopia.

The old religion and theology of the Egyptians did not expire in a single day. It was no more killed by the Roman conquest than it was by that of the Ptolemies. But although its rites did not cease, and some of its elaborate doctrines still continued to be transmitted, its vitality had come to an end. It exercised some remains of influence only on condition of being melted down and re-modelled in the crucible of Greek philosophy. A little _coterie_ of thinkers set themselves to complete this transfusion, but the great ma.s.s of the people returned to simple practices which had been sanctified by thousands of years, and formed nearly the whole of their religion.

This persistence, this apparent recrudescence of fetishism made itself felt in Egypt alone. It amazed and scandalized both pagans and Christians during the early centuries of Christianity. They mocked at a people who "hardly dared to bite a leek or an onion; who adored divinities which grew in their own gardens,"[76] and a G.o.d which was nothing but a "beast wallowing on a purple carpet."[77] Guided by a more critical knowledge of the past, we are now better able to understand the origin of these beliefs and the secret of their long duration. We are enabled to account for them by that inexperience which falsifies all the judgments of infancy, in the race as well as in the individual; we see that they are the exaggeration of a natural sentiment, which becomes honourable and worthy of our sympathy when it is addressed to the useful and laborious helpers of man, to domestic animals, for instance, such as the cow and the draught ox.

[76] Porrum et caepe nefas violare et frangere morsu.

O Sanctas gentes, quibus haec nasc.u.n.tur in hortis Numina!--JUVENAL, xv. 9-11.

[77] CLEMENS ALEXANDRINUS, quoted by Maspero, _Histoire ancienne_, p. 46.

It would be interesting to know why these beliefs were so curiously tenacious of life in Egypt; perhaps the reason is to be found in the prodigious antiquity of Egyptian civilization. That civilization was the oldest which the world has seen, the least remote from the day of man's first appearance upon the earth. It may therefore be supposed to have received more deeply, and maintained more obstinately, those impressions which characterize the infancy of men as well as of mankind. Add to this, that other races in their efforts to emerge from barbarism, were aided and incited by the example of races which had preceded them on the same road. The inhabitants of the Nile Valley, on the other hand, were alone in the world for many centuries; they had to depend entirely upon their own internal forces for the accomplishment of their emanc.i.p.ation; it is, therefore, hardly surprising that they should have remained longer than their successors in that fetish worship which we have a.s.serted to be the first stage of religious development.[78]

[78] This was perceived by the President de Brosses, a _savant_ with few advantages but a bold and inquiring spirit, to whom the language is indebted for the use of the term _fetishism_ as a name for a definite state of religious conception. We can still read with interest the book which he published anonymously in 1760, under the t.i.tle: _Du Culte des Dieux fetiches; ou, Parallele de l'Ancienne Religion de l'egypte avec la Religion actuelle de Nigritie_ (12mo). The study of the fetish elements of the Egyptian religion has been resumed lately with competent knowledge and talent by a German egyptologist, Herr Pietschmann, in an essay which appeared in 1878 in the _Zeitschrift fur Ethnologie_, which is published in Berlin under the direction of M. Virchow. It is called _Der aegyptische Fetischdienst und Gotterglaube--Prolegomena zur aegyptischen Mythologie_ (28 pp.

8vo). A great many judicious observations and curious facts are to be found in it; the realistic and materialistic character of the Egyptian conceptions are very well grasped; it is perhaps to be regretted that the author has not endeavoured to make the creeds to which he gives this name of _fetichisme_ somewhat clearer, and to show by what workings of the mind they were adopted and abandoned. With regard to the Egyptian religion, we shall find treated, in the excellent _Manuel de l'Histoire des Religions_, by Tiele, which M. Maurice Vernes has just translated from the Dutch (1 vol. 12mo, Ernest Leroux, 1880), views much the same as those which we have just described. The author denominates the religious state which we call fetishism _animism_, but he points out the fact that this cla.s.s of conceptions had a perennial influence over the Egyptian mind.

"The Egyptian religion," he says, "like the Chinese, was nothing to begin with but an organised _animism_." He finds traces of this _animism_ in the worship of the dead, the deification of the kings, and the adoration of animals. From his point of view the custom of placing a symbol of the divinity rather than an image in the temple, must be traced to fetishism (pp. 44 and 45 of the French version).

This stage must never be forgotten, if we wish to understand the part which art played in the figuring of the Egyptian G.o.ds. In most of the types which it created it mixed up the physical characteristics of man and beast. Sometimes the head of an animal surmounts the body of a man or woman; sometimes, though more rarely, the opposite arrangement obtains. The Sphinx, and the bird with a human head which symbolizes death, are instances of the latter combination. The usual explanation of these forms is as follows. When men began to embody for the eye of others the ideas which they had formed of the divine powers, they adopted as the foundation for their personifications the n.o.blest living form they knew, that of man. In the next place they required some easy method for distinguishing their imaginary beings one from another. They had to give to each deity some feature which should be peculiar to him or her self, and should allow of his being at once identified and called by his own name. The required result was obtained in a very simple manner, by adding to the constant quant.i.ty the human figure, a varying element in the heads of different animals.

These the fauna of Egypt itself afforded. In the case of each divinity, the particular animal was selected which had been consecrated to it, which was its symbol or at least its attribute, and the head or body, as the case might be, was detached in order to form part of a complex and imaginary being. The special characteristics of the animal made use of were so frankly insisted upon that no confusion could arise between one deity and another. Even a child could not fail to see the difference between Sekhet, with the head of a cat or a lioness, and Hathor, with that of a cow.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 38.--Painted bas-relief. Boulak. (Drawn by Bourgoin.)]

We do not refuse to accept this explanation, but yet we may express our surprise that the Egyptians, who were able, even in the days of the ancient empire, to endow the statues of their kings with so much purity and n.o.bility of form, were not disgusted by the strangeness of such combinations, by their extreme grotesqueness, and by the disagreeable results which they sometimes produced. A certain beauty may be found in such creations as the Sphinx, and a few others, in which the human face is allied to the wings of a bird, and the trunk and posterior members of the most graceful and powerful of quadrupeds.

But could any notion be more unhappy than that of crowning the bust of a man or woman with the ugly and ponderous head of a crocodile, or with the slender neck and flat head of a snake?

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 39.--Sekhet. Louvre. (Granite. Height 050 metres.)]

Every polytheistic nation attacked this problem in turn, and each solved it in its own manner. The Hindoos multiplied the human figure by itself, and painted or carved their G.o.ds with three heads and many pairs of arms and legs, of which proceeding traces are to be found among the Western Asiatics, the Greeks, and even the Latins. The Greeks represented all their G.o.ds in human form, and yet by the delicacy of their contours and the general coherence of their characterization, they were enabled to avoid all confusion between them. With them, too, costume and attributes helped to mark the difference. But even where these are absent, our minds are never left in doubt. Even a fragment of a torso can be at once recognized at sight as part of a statue of Zeus, of Apollo, or of Bacchus, and a head of Demeter or Hera would never be confounded with one of Artemis or Pallas.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 40.--Isis-Hathor. Louvre. (Bronze. Actual size.)]

It may be said that the artists of Egypt were lacking in the skill necessary for all this, or that they generalized their forms to such a degree as to leave no scope for such subtle differences. But, in fact, we find in their oldest statues a facility of execution which suggests that, had they chosen, they could have expressed anything which can be expressed by the chisel. That they did not do so, we know. They contented themselves with plastic interpretations so rough and awkward that, perhaps, we should rather seek their explanation in some hereditary predisposition, some habit of thought and action contracted in the infancy of the race and fortified by long transmission.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 41.--A Sphinx; in rose granite. Thirteenth dynasty. Louvre. Drawn by Saint-Elme Gautier.]

We have already spoken of that which we believe to be the cause of the peculiar forms under which the Egyptians figured their deities, namely, the fetish worship, which was the earliest, and for many centuries the only, form of religion which they possessed. That worship had struck its roots so deeply into the souls of the people, that it could not be torn up even when a large part of the nation had gradually educated itself to the comprehension of the highest religious conceptions. Its practices never fell into total neglect, and its influence was so far maintained that during the decadence of the nation it again became the ruling faith, so that foreign observers were led to believe that the Egyptian religion began and ended in the adoration of plants and sacred animals. The eyes and the imagination being thus educated by immemorial custom, it is not surprising that even the most cultivated section of the people should have seen nothing offensive in the representation of their G.o.ds sometimes under the complete form of an animal (Horus is often symbolized under the likeness of a hawk), sometimes as composite monsters with human bodies and animal heads.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 42.--Touaris. Boulak. (Drawn by G. Benedite.)]

Take, for a moment, the bird to which we have just alluded. The hawk, like the vulture, plays an important part in Egyptian art. The vulture symbolizes Maut, the spouse of Amen. It furnishes the sign by which her name is written, and sometimes, as the symbol of maternity, its head appears over the brow of the G.o.ddess, its wings forming her head-dress. The G.o.ddess Nekheb, who symbolizes the region of the South, is also represented by a vulture.[79] So it is with the ibis.

It supplies the character by which the name Thoth is written, and that G.o.d is figured with the head of an Ibis. The part played by these birds in the representation of the G.o.ds, both in the plastic arts and in writing, is to be explained by the sentiments of grat.i.tude and religious veneration of which they were the objects, sentiments which were the natural outcome of the practical services which they rendered to mankind.

[79] PIERRET, _Dictionnaire d'Archeologie egyptienne_.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 43.--Rannu (from Wilkinson).]

When the early fathers of the nation first established themselves upon the banks of the Nile, they found invaluable allies in those energetic birds of prey, and the alliance has been continued to their latest descendants. After the annual inundation the damp earth was overrun by toads and frogs, by snakes and lizards and all kinds of creeping things. Fishes, left by the retreating flood in pools which were soon dried up by the blazing sun, perished, and, decomposing, rendered the air noisome and malarious. In addition to this there were the corpses of wild and domestic animals, and the offal of every kind which acc.u.mulated round the dwellings of the peasantry and rapidly became putrid under the sun of Egypt. If left to decompose they would soon have bred a pestilence, and in those days human effort was not to be reckoned upon in the work of sanitation. To birds of prey, then, was a.s.signed the indispensable work of elimination and transformation, an office which they yet fill satisfactorily in the towns and villages of Africa. Thanks to their appet.i.te and to the powerful wings which carried them in a twinkling to wherever their presence was required, the multiplication of the inferior animals was kept within due limits, and decomposing matter was recalled into the service of organic life.

Had these unpaid scavengers but struck work for a day, the plague, as Michelet puts it, would soon have become the only inhabitant of the country.[80]

[80] See in _L'Oiseau_ the chapter-headed _L'epuration_. With his genius for history and poetry Michelet has well understood the sentiment which gave birth to these primitive forms of worship, forms which have too long provoked unjust contempt. The whole of this beautiful chapter should be read; we shall only quote a few lines: "In America the law protects these public benefactors. Egyptian law does still more for them--it respects them and loves them. Although they no longer enjoy their ancient worship, they receive the friendly hospitality of man as in the time of Pharaoh. If you ask an Egyptian fellah why he allows himself to be besieged and deafened by birds, why he patiently suffers the insolence of the crow perched upon the horn of the buffalo, on the hump of a camel, or fighting upon the date-trees and shaking down the fruit, he will say nothing. Birds are allowed to do anything. Older than the Pyramids, they are the ancients of the country. Man's existence depends upon them, upon the persevering labour of the ibis, the stork, the crow and the vulture."

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 44.--Horus; from a bronze in the Posno collection.

(Height 38 inches.)]

The worship of the hawk, the vulture, and the ibis, had, then, preceded by many centuries that of the G.o.ds who correspond to the personages of the h.e.l.lenic pantheon. Rooted by long custom in the minds of the people, it did not excite the ire of the wise men of Heliopolis or Thebes. The doctrine of emanation and of successive incarnations of the deity, permitted their theology to explain and to accept anything, even those things which at a later epoch seemed nothing more than the grossest creations of popular superst.i.tion.

These objects of veneration were therefore enabled to maintain their places by the side of the superior G.o.ds, to represent them in written characters and in plastic creations, and, in the latter case, to be blended with the forms of man himself. To us, accustomed as we are to the types created by Greek anthropomorphism, these figures are surprising; but to the Egyptians they seemed perfectly natural, for they offered the characteristic features of the animals which they had loved, respected, and adored ever since the birth of their civilization.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 45.--Thoth. Louvre. Enamelled clay. Actual size.]

It is difficult for us to see things with the same eyes as the contemporaries of Cheops or even of Rameses; to enter into their ideas and sentiments so as to feel with them and to think with their brains.

Let us attempt to do so for a moment; let us make one of those intellectual efforts which are demanded from the historian, and we shall then understand how it was, that the Egyptians were not offended by a combination of two cla.s.ses of forms which, to us, seem so differently const.i.tuted and so unequal in dignity. The deity took the form of an animal and revealed himself in it, just as he took that of a man, or of a statue which he was supposed to animate, and to which he was attached. In one of his most curious and most penetrating essays, M. Maspero explains that the sacred animal was--like the king, the son of Amen; like the statue fashioned by the hands of a sculptor--the manifestation of the deity, the strength and support of his life, his _double_, to use an expression dear to the Egyptians.

At Memphis, Apis repeated and constantly renewed the life of Ptah; he was, in a word, his living statue.[81]

[81] MASPERO, _Notes sur differents Points de Grammaire et d'Histoire dans le Recueil de Travaux relatifs a la Philologie et a l'Archeologie egyptienne et a.s.syrienne_, vol. i. p. 157.

Egyptian art was, then, the faithful and skilful interpretation of the ideas of the people. What the Egyptians wished to say, that they did say with great clearness and a rare happiness of plastic expression.

To accuse them, as they have been sometimes accused, of a want of taste, would be to form a very narrow conception of art, to sin against both the method and the spirit of modern criticism. This latter seeks for originality and admires it, and all art which is at once powerful and sincere arouses its interest. We do not, however, wish to deny that their conception of divinity is less favourable to the plastic arts than the anthropomorphism of the Greeks. No more simple method of distinguishing one G.o.d from another could well be imagined than that of giving to each, as his exclusive property, the head of some well-known animal; the employment of such an unmistakable sign rendered the task of the artist too easy, in giving him a.s.surance that his meaning would be understood at a glance without any particular effort on his part.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 46.--Sacrifice to Apis, from Mariette.]

The value of an artistic result is in proportion to the difficulty of its achievement. The Greek sculptor had nothing beyond the bodily form and the features of man with which to give a distinct individuality to each G.o.d and G.o.ddess of his mythology; he was therefore obliged to make use of the most delicate and subtle distinctions of feature and contour. This necessity was a great incentive to perfection; it drove him to study the human form with a continuous energy which, unhappily for himself, was not required of the Egyptian sculptor or painter.

Art and religion have ever been so closely allied that it was necessary that we should give some account of the original characteristics of the Egyptian beliefs, but we shall make no attempt to describe, or even to enumerate, the chief divinities of the Egyptian pantheon; such an attempt would be foreign to the purposes which we have in view. We have, however, already mentioned most of the chief deities of Egypt, and we shall have occasion to draw the attention of our readers to others, in speaking of the tombs and temples, the statues and bas-reliefs, of the country. Now, each of these G.o.ds began by being no more than the local divinity of some particular nome or city. As a city grew in importance, so did its peculiar G.o.d, and sometimes it came about that both a dynasty of kings and a divinity were imposed upon Egypt by the power of what we may call their native city. In the course of time a number of successive deities thus held the supreme place, each of whom preserved, even after his fall, some of the dignity which he had acquired during his period of supremacy.

The two first dynasties, the authors of Egyptian unity, had their capital in the nome of Abydos, the nome which contained the tomb of Osiris; and it was in their reign that, from one end to the other of the Nile valley, spread the worship of that G.o.d; of that Osiris who, with Isis, seemed to Herodotus to be the only deity whom all the Egyptians combined to adore.[82] Under the following dynasties, whose capital was Memphis, Ptah rose into the first place; but, as if by a kind of compromise, his dignity is combined with that of the great G.o.d of Abydos under the names of Ptah-Osiris and Ptah-Sokar-Osiris. Toum, the chief deity of Heliopolis, never rose above the second rank because Heliopolis itself was neither a royal city nor even the birthplace of any powerful dynasty. During all this period we hear nothing of Amen, the local deity of Thebes; his name is hardly to be found upon any monument earlier than the eleventh dynasty, but, with the rise of the Theban empire he began to be a conspicuous figure in Egypt. During the domination of the Hyksos, their national deity, Soutekh or Set, overshadowed the ancient divinities of the soil; but the final victory of Thebes under Ahmes I. installed Amen as the national G.o.d, and we shall see hereafter what magnificent temples were raised in his honour by the kings of the brilliant Theban dynasties.

His successor would no doubt have been Aten, the solar disc, had Tell-el-Amarna, the new capital of Amenophis IV., and the worship which was there inaugurated, enjoyed a less ephemeral existence; but Thebes and Amen soon regained their supremacy. Again, when the Egyptian centre of gravity was transported to the Delta, the local deities of the district, and especially Neith, conquered the first place in the religious sentiments of the people. Under the Persians they returned to Amen, as to the protector who could give back to the nation its former independence and power. Under the Ptolemies, Horus and Hathor were in the ascendant, and later still, under the Roman emperors, the worship of the Isis of Philae became popular and was prolonged in that island sanctuary until the sixth century of our era.

[82] HERODOTUS, ii. 42.

The movement of religious thought in Egypt was very different from what we shall find in Greece. We find no G.o.d, like that of the h.e.l.lenes, whose pre-eminence dates back to the remote origin of the Aryan race, a pre-eminence which was never menaced or questioned;[83]

we find no Zeus, no Jupiter, whose G.o.dhead was conceived from century to century in an ever larger and more purified spirit, until at last it was defined in the famous hymn of Cleanthe as that "which governed all things according to law." We have pointed out how greatly the Greek artists profited by their efforts to endow the piety of their countrymen with an image of this great and good being, which should be worthy of the popular faith in him as the father of G.o.ds and men. The Egyptian artist could find no such inspiration in a long succession of G.o.ds, no one of whom succeeded in concentrating supreme power in his hands. No such ideal existed for them as that which the popular conscience and the genius of the national poets created in the lord of Olympus. Neither Thebes nor Sais could give birth to a Phidias; to an artist who should feel himself spurred on by the work of all previous generations to produce a masterpiece in which the highest religious conception, to which the intelligence of the race had mounted by slow degrees, should be realized in visible form.

[83] JAMES DARMESTETER, _Le Dieu supreme dans la Mythologie indo-europeenne_ (in the _Revue de l'Histoire des Religions_, 1880).