G. Maspero

“ The queen, standing behind him like Isis behind Osiris, uplifts her hand to protect him, shakes the sistrum, beats the tambourine to dispel evil spirits, or holds the libation vase or bouquet. The eldest son carries the net or lassoes the bull, and recites the prayer while his father successively presents to the god each object prescribed by the ritual. A priest may occasionally act as substitute for the prince, but other men perform only the most menial offices. They are slaughterers or servants, or they bear the boat or canopy of the god. The god, for his part, is not always alone. ”

“ If some were capable of doing good work, the greater number were mere craftsmen; and we must be careful not to ascribe awkward manipulation, or lack of teaching, to the timidity of archaism. The works of the primitive dynasties yet sleep undiscovered beneath seventy feet of sand at the foot of the Sphinx; those of the historic dynasties are daily exhumed from the depths of the neighbouring tombs. These have not yielded Egyptian art as a whole; but they have familiarised us with one of its schools--the school of Memphis. ”

“ The earth, as they believed, was a flat and shallow plane, longer than its width. The sky, according to some, extended overhead like an immense iron ceiling, and according to others, like a huge shallow vault. As it could not remain suspended in space without some support, they imagined it to be held in place by four immense props or pillars. The floor of the temple naturally represented the earth. The columns, and if needful the four corners of the chambers, stood for the pillars. The roof, vaulted at Abydos, flat elsewhere, corresponded exactly with the Egyptian idea of the sky. ”

“ Inscriptions, bas-reliefs, paintings, such as we are accustomed to find everywhere in Egypt, are all wanting; and yet these bare walls produce as great an impression upon the spectator as the most richly decorated temples of Thebes. Not only grandeur but sublimity has been achieved in the mere juxtaposition of blocks of granite and alabaster, by means of purity of line and exactness of proportion. ”

“ Notwithstanding the fact that Egyptology is now recognised as a science, an exact and communicable knowledge of whose existence and scope it behoves all modern culture to take cognisance, this work of M. Maspero still remains the Handbook of Egyptian Archaeology. But Egyptology is as yet in its infancy; whatever their age, Egyptologists will long die young. Every year, almost every month, fresh material for the study is found, fresh light is thrown upon it by the progress of excavation, exploration, and research. ”

“ I have treated briefly of the Noble Arts; it remains to say something of the Industrial Arts. All classes of society in Egypt were, from an early period, imbued with the love of luxury, and with a taste for the beautiful. Living or dead, the Egyptian desired to have jewels and costly amulets upon his person, and to be surrounded by choice furniture and elegant utensils. ”

“ The destiny of the Double was to continue to lead the shadow of its terrestrial life, and fulfil it in the chapel; the destiny of the Soul was to follow the sun across the sky, and it, therefore, needed the instructions which it read on the walls of the vault. It was by their virtue that the absorption of the dead into Osiris became complete, and that they enjoyed hereafter all the immunity of the divine state. Above, in the chapel, they were men, and acted as men; here they were gods, and acted as gods. ”

“ In the Gizeh Museum is a life-size head, produced from a block of black and red granite in less than a fortnight by one of the best forgers in Luxor. I have no doubt that the ancient Egyptians worked in precisely the same way, and mastered the hardest stones by the use of iron. Practice soon taught them methods by which their labour might be lightened, and their tools made to yield results as delicate and subtle as those which we achieve with our own. ”

“ Under the Ptolemies and the Caesars, figures and hieroglyphs became so crowded that the stone on which they are sculptured seems to be lost under the masses of ornament with which it is charged. We recognise at a glance that these scenes are not placed at random. They follow in sequence, are interlinked, and form as it were a great mystic book in which the official relations between gods and men, as well as between men and gods, are clearly set forth for such as are skilled to read them. The temple was built in the likeness of the world, as the world was known to the Egyptians. ”

“ The eyes, which are large and well open, owe their lifelike vivacity to an ingenious contrivance of the ancient artist. The orbit has been cut out from the stone, the hollow being filled with an eye composed of enamel, white and black. The edges of the eyelids are of bronze, and a small silver nail inserted behind the iris receives and reflects the light in such wise as to imitate the light of life. The contours of the flesh are somewhat full and wanting in firmness, as would be the case in middle life, if the man's occupation debarred him from active exercise. ”

“ The eye instinctively tones down whatever is too forcible, and supplies what is lacking. Thanks to these subtle devices of the ancient craftsman, a tiny statuette of this or that divinity measuring scarcely an inch and a quarter in height, has almost the breadth and dignity of a colossus. ”

“ The copper in this bronze is largely intermixed with gold, thus producing a chastened lustre which is admirably suited to the richness of the embroidered garment. The kneeling genius of Gizeh is as rude and repellent as the Lady Takûshet is delicate and harmonious. He has a hawk's head, and he worships the sun, as is the duty of the Heliopolitan genii. His right arm is uplifted, his left is pressed to his breast. The style of the whole is dry, and the granulated surface of the skin adds to the hard effect of the figure. ”

“ If a statue of the ordinary type had been placed in the tomb of the dead man, his "Ka," accustomed during life to the deformity of his limbs, would not be able to adapt itself to an upright and shapely figure, and would therefore be deprived of the conditions necessary to his future well- being. The artist was free to vary the details and arrange the accessories according to his fancy; but without missing the point of his work, he could not change the attitude, or depart from the general style of the conventional portrait statue. ”

“ Two young slaves rub the hands and necks of the living guests with perfumes taken from an alabaster vase. Two women dressed in robes of ceremony present offerings to the group of dead, consisting of vases filled with flowers, perfumes, and grain. These they place in turn upon a square table. Three others dance, sing, and play upon the lute, by way of accompaniment to those acts of homage. In the picture, as in fact, the tomb is the place of entertainment. There is no other background to the scene than the wall covered with hieroglyphs, along which the guests were seated during the ceremony. ”

“ The play of light upon the surface may at first prevent the eye from apprehending the fineness of the work; but, seen under favourable circumstances, the details of knee and chest, of shoulder and face, prove to be no less subtly rendered in granite than in limestone. Excess of polish has no more spoiled the statues of Ancient Egypt than it spoiled those of the sculptors of the Italian Renaissance.
A sandstone or limestone statue would have been deemed imperfect if left to show the colour of the stone in which it was cut, and was painted from head to foot. ”

“ Fig 200.--Head of Horemheb.
His youthful face is pervaded by an air of melancholy, such as we rarely see depicted in portraits of Pharaohs of the great period. The nose is straight and delicate, the eyes are long, the lips are large, full, somewhat contracted at the corners, and strongly defined at the edges. The chin is overweighted by the traditional false beard. Every detail is treated with as much skill as if the sculptor were dealing with a soft stone instead of with a material which resisted the chisel. ”

“ Towards the middle of the Nineteenth Dynasty, the fashion changed. The single mummy-case, soberly decorated, was superseded by two, three, and even four cases, fitting the one into the other, and covered with paintings and inscriptions. Sometimes the outer receptacle is a sarcophagus with convex lid and square ears, upon which the deceased is pictured over and over again upon a white ground, in adoration before the gods of the Osirian cycle. When, however, it is shaped in human form, it retains somewhat of the old simplicity. ”

“ Some of the largest subjects are made of pieces of glass joined together and retouched with the chisel, in imitation of bas-relief. Thus the face, hands, and feet of the goddess Ma are done in turquoise blue, her headdress in dark blue, her feather in alternate stripes of blue and yellow, and her raiment in deep red. ”

“ But the blocks and beams which the Egyptians had at command were seldom large enough for a statue. The Wooden Man himself, though but half life-size, consists of a number of pieces held together by square pegs. Hence, wood-carvers were wont to treat their subjects upon such a scale as admitted of their being cut in one block, and the statues of olden time became statuettes under the Theban dynasties. Art lost nothing by the reduction, and more than one of these little figures is comparable to the finest works of the ancient empire. ”

“ Fig 1.--Brickmaking, from Eighteenth Dynasty tomb-painting, Tomb of Rekhmara.
At the first glance, it is not always easy to distinguish between these huts of wattle and daub and those built with crude bricks. The ordinary Egyptian brick is a mere oblong block of mud mixed with chopped straw and a little sand, and dried in the sun. At a spot where they are about to build, one man is told off to break up the ground; others carry the clods, and pile them in a heap, while others again mix them with water, knead the clay with their feet, and reduce it to a homogeneous paste. ”

“ But it was not so easy to project man--the whole man--upon a plane surface without some departure from nature. A man cannot be satisfactorily reproduced by means of mere lines, and a profile outline necessarily excludes too much of his person. The form of the forehead and the nose, the curvature of the lips, the cut of the ear, disappear when the head is drawn full face; but, on the other hand, it is necessary that the bust should be presented full face, in order to give the full development of the shoulders, and that the two arms may be visible to right and left of the body. ”

“ An ass, a lion, a crocodile, and an ape are represented in the act of giving a vocal and instrumental concert; a lion and a gazelle play at draughts; the Pharaoh of all the rats, in a chariot drawn by dogs, gallops to the assault of a fortress garrisoned by cats; a cat of fashion, with a flower on her head, has come to blows with a goose, {172} and the hapless fowl, powerless in so unequal a contest, topples over with terror. Cats, by the way, were the favourite animals of Egyptian caricaturists. ”

“ Painted bas-reliefs, statues of kings and private persons, colossi, sphinxes, may be counted by hundreds between the mouths of the Nile and the fourth cataract. The old sacerdotal cities, Memphis, Thebes, Abydos, are naturally the richest; but so great was the impetus given to art, that even remote provincial towns, such as Abû Simbel, Redesîyeh, and Mesheikh, have their chefs-d'oeuvre, like the great cities. ”

“ The British Museum possesses two or three subjects in red outline, which may perhaps have been used as copies by the decorators of some Theban tomb about the time of the Twentieth Dynasty. A fragment in the Museum of Gizeh contains studies of ducks or geese in black ink; and at Turin may be seen a sketch of a half-nude female figure bending backwards, as about to turn a somersault. The lines are flowing, the movement is graceful, the modelling delicate. ”

“ Fig 283.--Gold worker.
With these exceptions, they made the same use of the precious metals as we do ourselves. We gild the crosses and cupolas of our churches; they covered the doors of their temples, the lower part of their wall-surfaces, certain bas-reliefs, pyramidions of obelisks, and even whole obelisks, with plates of gold. The obelisks of Queen Hatshepsût at Karnak were coated with electrum. "They were visible from both banks of the Nile, and when the sun rose between them as he came up from the heavenly horizon, they flooded the two Egypts with their dazzling rays." ”

“ Funerary cones were objects purely devotional, and the most consummate art could have done nothing to make them elegant. A funerary cone consists of a long, conical mass of clay, stamped at the larger end with a few rows of hieroglyphs stating the name, parentage, and titles of the deceased, the whole surface being coated with a whitish wash. These are simulacra of votive cakes intended for the eternal nourishment of the Double. Many of the vases buried in tombs of this period are painted to imitate alabaster, granite, basalt, bronze, and even gold ”