A History of Art in Ancient Egypt_ Vol. 1 (of 2) Georges Perrot and Charles Chipiez 2172 downloads.pdf

The Project Gutenberg eBook of A History of Art in Ancient
Egypt, Vol. 1 (of 2)
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will
have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using
this eBook.

Title: A History of Art in Ancient Egypt, Vol. 1 (of 2)

Author: Georges Perrot
Charles Chipiez

Translator: Sir Walter Armstrong

Release date: July 5, 2012 [eBook #40144]
Most recently updated: October 23, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/40144

Credits: Produced by Albert László, Matthew Wheaton and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A HISTORY OF
ART IN ANCIENT EGYPT, VOL. 1 (OF 2) ***

A HISTORY OF ART IN
ANCIENT EGYPT.

A HISTORY OF ART IN ANCIENT EGYPT

FROM THE FRENCH
OF
GEORGES PERROT,
PROFESSOR IN THE FACULTY OF LETTERS, PARIS; MEMBER OF THE INSTITUTE
AND
CHARLES CHIPIEZ.

ILLUSTRATED WITH FIVE HUNDRED AND NINETY-EIGHT ENGRAVINGS IN THE
TEXT, AND FOURTEEN STEEL AND COLOURED PLATES.

IN TWO VOLUMES.—VOL. I.

TRANSLATED AND EDITED BY
WALTER ARMSTRONG, B. A., Oxon.,
AUTHOR OF "ALFRED STEVENS," ETC.

London: CHAPMAN AND HALL, Limited.
New York: A. C. ARMSTRONG AND SON.
1883.

London:
R. Clay, Sons, and Taylor,
BREAD STREET HILL.

PREFACE.
M. Perrot's name as a classical scholar and archæologist, and M. Chipiez's
as a penetrating critic of architecture, stand so high that any work from their
pens is sure of a warm welcome from all students of the material remains of
antiquity. These volumes are the first instalment of an undertaking which
has for its aim the history and critical analysis of that great organic growth
which, beginning with the Pharaohs and ending with the Roman Emperors,
forms what is called Antique Art. The reception accorded to this instalment
in its original form is sufficient proof that the eulogium prefixed to the
German translation by an eminent living Egyptologist, Professor Georg
Ebers, is well deserved; "The first section," he says, "of this work, is broad
and comprehensive in conception, and delicate in execution; it treats
Egyptian art in a fashion which has never previously been approached." In
clothing it in a language which will, I hope, enable it to reach a still wider
public, my one endeavour has been that it should lose as little as possible,
either in substance or form.
A certain amount of repetition is inevitable in a work of this kind when
issued, as this was, in parts, and in one place[1] I have ventured to omit
matter which had already been given at some length, but with that exception
I have followed M. Perrot's words as closely as the difference of idiom
would allow. Another kind of repetition, with which, perhaps, some readers
may be inclined to quarrel, forced itself upon the author as the lesser of two
evils. He was compelled either to sacrifice detail and precision in
attempting to carry on at once the history of all the Egyptian arts and of
their connection with the national religion and civilization, or to go back
upon his footsteps now and again in tracing each art successively from its
birth to its decay. The latter alternative was chosen as the only one
consistent with the final aim of his work.
Stated in a few words, that aim is to trace the course of the great plastic
evolution which culminated in the age of Pericles and came to an end in
that of Marcus Aurelius. That evolution forms a complete organic whole,
with a birthday, a deathday, and an unbroken chain of cause and effect

uniting the two. To objectors who may say that the art of India, of China, of
Japan, should have been included in the scheme, it may be answered: this is
the life, not of two, or three, but of one. M. Perrot has been careful,
therefore, to discriminate between those characteristics of Egyptian art
which may be referred either to the national beliefs and modes of thought,
or to undeveloped material conditions, such as the want or superstitious
disuse of iron, and those which, being determined by the very nature of the
problems which art has to solve, formed a starting point for the arts of all
later civilizations. By means of well-chosen examples he shows that the art
of the Egyptians went through the same process of development as those of
other and later nationalities, and that the real distinguishing characteristic of
the sculptures and paintings of the Nile Valley was a continual tendency to
simplification and generalization, arising partly from the habit of mind and
hand created by the hieroglyphic writing, partly from the stubborn nature of
the chief materials employed.
To this characteristic he might, perhaps, have added another, which is
sufficiently remarkable in an art which had at least three thousand years of
vitality, namely, its freedom from individual expression. The realism of the
Egyptians was a broad realism. There is in it no sign of that research into
detail which distinguishes most imitative art and is to be found even in that
of their immediate successors; and yet, during all those long centuries of
alternate renascence and decay, we find no vestige of an attempt to raise art
above imitation. No suspicion of its expressive power seems to have
dawned on the Egyptian mind, which, so far as the plastic arts were
concerned, never produced anything that in the language of modern
criticism could be called a creation. In this particular Egypt is more closely
allied to those nations of the far east whose art does not come within the
scope of M. Perrot's inquiry, than to the great civilizations which formed its
own posterity.

Before the late troubles intervened to draw attention of a different kind to
the Nile Valley, the finding of a pit full of royal mummies and sepulchral
objects in the western mountain at Thebes had occurred to give a fresh
stimulus to the interest in Egyptian history, and to encourage those who

were doing their best to lead England to take her proper share in the work of
exploration. A short account of this discovery, which took place after M.
Perrot's book was complete, and of some of the numerous art objects with
which it has enriched the Boulak Museum, will be found in an Appendix to
the second volume.

My acknowledgments for generous assistance are due to Dr. Birch, Mr.
Reginald Stuart Poole, and Miss A. B. Edwards.
W. A.

CONTENTS.
PAGE
INTRODUCTION i-lxi
lxiii-
TO THE READER
lxiv

CHAPTER I.
THE GENERAL CHARACTER OF
EGYPTIAN CIVILIZATION.
§ 1. Egypt's place in the History of the World 1-2
§ 2. The Valley of the Nile and its Inhabitants 2-16
§ 3. The Great Divisions of Egyptian History 16-21
The Constitution of Egyptian Society—Influence
§ 4. 21-44
of that Constitution upon Monuments of Art
The Egyptian Religion and its Influence upon the
§ 5. 44-69
Plastic Arts
That Egyptian Art did not escape the Law of
§ 6. Change, and that its History may therefore be 70-89
written
Of the place held in this work by the Monuments
§ 7. of the Memphite Period, and of the Limits of our 89-93
Inquiry

CHAPTER II.
PRINCIPLES AND GENERAL
CHARACTERISTICS OF EGYPTIAN
ARCHITECTURE.
Method to be Employed by us in our Study of
§ 1. 94-96
this Architecture
§ 2. General Principles of Form 96-102
§ 3. General Principles of Construction.—Materials 103-106
§ 4. Dressed Construction 106-113

§ 5. Compact Construction 113-114
§ 6. Construction by Assemblage 114-119
§ 7. Decoration 119-125

CHAPTER III.
SEPULCHRAL ARCHITECTURE.
The Egyptian Belief as to a Future Life and its
§ 1. 126-163
Influence upon their Sepulchral Architecture
§ 2. The Tomb under the Ancient Empire 163-241
The Mastabas of the Necropolis of Memphis 165-189
The Pyramids 189-241
§ 3. The Tomb under the Middle Empire 241-254
§ 4. The Tomb under the New Empire 255-317

CHAPTER IV.
THE SACRED ARCHITECTURE OF EGYPT.
§ 1. The Temple under the Ancient Empire 318-333
§ 2. The Temple under the Middle Empire 333-335
§ 3. The Temple under the New Empire 335-433
§ 4. General Characteristics of the Egyptian Temple 434-444

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
COLOURED PLATES.
To face
page
The Arab Chain, from near Keneh 102
The Pyramids, from old Cairo 102
Karnak, bas-reliefs in the Granite Chambers 124
Seti I., bas-relief at Abydos 126
General view of Karnak 360
Perspective view of the Hypostyle Hall, Karnak 368
Thebes, the plain, with the Colossi of Memnon 376

FIG. PAGE
1. During the Inundation of the Nile 3
2. Hoeing 4
3. Ploughing 4
4. Harvest scene 5
5. The Bastinado 6
6. Statue from the Ancient Empire 10
7. The Sheikh-el-Beled 11
8. Hunting in the Marshes 14
9. Shadouf 15
10. The White Crown 16
11. The Red Crown 16
12. The Pschent 16
13. Seti I. in his War-Chariot 23
14. Rameses II. in adoration before Seti 25
15. Homage to Amenophis III. 26
16. Construction of a Temple at Thebes 27
17. Columns in the Hypostyle Hall, Karnak 28
18, 19. Scribes registering the yield of the harvest 29

20. Colossi of Amenophis III. 30 30
21. Scribe registering merchandize 31
22. Boatmen 32
23. Cattle Drovers 33
24. Bakers 33
25. Women at a loom 34
26. Netting birds 35
27. Shepherds in the fields 36
28. Winnowing corn 36
29. Herdsmen 37
30. From the tomb of Menofre 39
31. Water Tournament 42
32. Mariette's House 43
Amenhotep, or Amenophis III., presented by
33. 45
Phré to Amen-Ra
34. Amen (or Ammon) 51
35. Ptah 52
36. Osiris 53
37. The goddess Bast 54
38. Painted bas-relief 58
39. Sekhet 59
40. Isis-Hathor 60
41. A Sphinx 61
42. Touaris 63
43. Rannu 64
44. Horus 65
45. Thoth 66
46. Sacrifice to Apis 67
47. Statue from the Ancient Empire 73
48. Woman kneading dough 74
49. The Scribe Chaphré 75
50. The Lady Naï 76
51. Ouah-ab-ra 79
52. Sculptor at work upon an arm 81

53. Sculptor carving a statue 83
54. Artist painting a statue 85
55. Isis nursing Horus 87
56. Chephren 90
57. Ti, with his wife and son 91
58. Square building 97
59. Rectangular and oblong building 97
The Libyan chain, above the Necropolis of
60. 98
Thebes
61. General appearance of an Egyptian Temple 99
62. Temple of Khons, at Thebes 100
63. Temple of Khons, Thebes 100
64. Temple of Khons, Thebes 100
65. From the second court of Medinet-Abou, Thebes 101
66. Ramesseum, Thebes 101
67. The Egyptian Gorge or Cornice 102
Capital and Entablature of the Temple of the
68. 104
Deus Rediculus at Rome
69. The Egyptian "bond" 107
70. Double-faced wall 108
71, 72. Elements of the portico 108
73. Egyptian construction 109
74. Element of an off-set arch 111
75. Arrangement of the courses in an off-set arch 111
76. Off-set semicircular arch 111
77. Voussoir 112
78. Arrangement of voussoirs 112
79. Semicircular vault 112
80. Granaries, from a bas-relief 113
81. Modern pigeon house, Thebes 114
82. Elements of wooden construction 116
83. Wooden building (first system) 117
84. Wooden building (second system) 118
85. Seti I. striking prisoners of war with his mace 124

86. Stele of the eleventh dynasty 131
87. Mummy case from the eighteenth dynasty 137
88. Man and his wife in the style of the fifth dynasty 138
Sekhem-ka, his wife Ata, and his son Khnem, in
89. 139
the style of the fifth dynasty
90. Stele of Nefer-oun 140
Preparation of the victims and arrival of funeral
91. 141
gifts
92. Table for offerings 144
93. Another form of the table for offerings 144
94. Labourers heaping up ears of corn 146
95, 96. Sepulchral statuettes 147
97. Vignette from a Ritual upon papyrus 149
Arrival in Egypt of a company of Asiatic
98. 152
emigrants
The tomb of Ti; women, representing the lands
99. 154
of the deceased, carrying the funeral gifts
100. Lid of the coffin of Entef 158
101,
Scarabs 159
102.
103,
Funerary amulets 159
104.
105. Pillow 160
Actual condition of a Mastaba. The Tomb of
106. 167
Sabou
107. Three mastabas at Gizeh 168
108. Restoration of part of the Necropolis of Gizeh 169
109. The Mastabat-el-Faraoun 170
110. Entrance to a Mastaba at Sakkarah 171
111. Lintel of the tomb of Teta 172
112. Plan of the tomb of Ti 174
113,
Mastaba at Sakkarah 174
114.
Western wall in the chamber of the tomb of
115. 175
Ptah-Hotep

116. Plan of a Mastaba with four serdabs 178
117. Longitudinal section of the same Mastaba 178
118. Transverse section through the chamber 179
119. Transverse section through the serdabs 179
120. Figures in high relief, from a Mastaba at Gizeh 180
121. The upper chamber, well, and mummy-chamber 181
122. Double Mastaba at Gizeh 182
123. Sarcophagus of Khoo-foo-Ankh 183
124. Details of the Sarcophagus of Khoo-foo-Ankh 184
125. Bas-relief from Sakkarah 185
126. Head of a Mummy 188
Plans of the temples belonging to the Second and
127. 193
Third Pyramids
128. Plan of the Pyramid of Cheops 198
The Great Pyramid and the small pyramids at its
129. 199
foot
130. The Three Great Pyramids; from the south 201
The Pyramid of Illahoun, horizontal section in
131. 205
perspective
132. Section of the Pyramid of Cheops 206
133. The southern Pyramid of Dashour 207
134. Section of the Stepped Pyramid 207
135. The Stepped Pyramid 208
136-
Successive states of a pyramid 209
142.
143. Section of the Stepped Pyramid at Sakkarah 213
Construction of the Pyramid of Abousir in
144. 213
parallel layers
145. Partial section of the Stepped Pyramid 214
146. The Pyramid of Meidoum 215
147. The Mastabat-el-Faraoun 216
Funerary monument represented in the
148. 216
inscriptions
149. Plan and elevation of a pyramid at Meroe 219
150. Method of closing a gallery by a stone portcullis 220

151. Portcullis closed 220
Transverse section, in perspective, through the
152. Sarcophagus-chamber and the discharging 221
chambers of the Great Pyramid
Longitudinal section through the lower
153. 222
chambers
154. Pyramidion 230
155. The casing of the pyramids 233
Plan of the Pyramids of Gizeh and of that part of
156. the Necropolis which immediately surrounds 237
them
157. The Sphinx 238
158. Pyramid with its inclosure, Abousir 239
159. The river transport of the Mummy 243
160. Tomb at Abydos 244
161. Section of the above tomb 244
162. Tomb at Abydos 245
163. Section of the above tomb 245
164. Stele of the eleventh dynasty, Abydos 246
165. Stele of Pinahsi, priest of Ma; Abydos 247
166. Façade of a tomb at Beni-Hassan 250
Façade of a tomb at Beni-Hassan, showing some
167. 251
of the adjoining tombs
168. Interior of a tomb at Beni-Hassan 252
169. Plan of the above tomb 252
170. Chess players, Beni-Hassan 253
171. General plan of Thebes 257
Rameses III. conducting a religious procession,
172. 261
at Medinet-Abou
173. Rameses III. hunting 265
174. Rameses II. in battle 271
175. Painting in a royal tomb at Gournah 273
176. Amenophis III. presenting an offering to Amen 274
177. Flaying the funerary victim 275
178. Entrance to a royal tomb 277

179. Plan of the tomb of Rameses II. 282
180. Horizontal section of the same tomb 282
The smaller Sarcophagus-chamber in the tomb
181. 283
of Rameses VI.
182. Entrance to the tomb of Rameses III. 284
183. Hunting scene upon a tomb at Gournah 286
184. The weighing of actions 287
185. Anubis, in a funerary pavilion 288
186. Plan and section of a royal tomb 292
187,
Theban tombs from the bas-reliefs 294
188.
189. Theban tomb from a bas-relief 295
190. A tomb of Apis 296
191. The tomb of Petamounoph 297
192. The most simple form of Theban tomb 299
193. Tomb as represented upon a bas-relief 299
Stele in the Boulak Museum, showing tombs
194. 302
with gardens about them
195. The sarcophagus of a royal scribe 303
196. Canopic vase of alabaster 305
197. View of the grand gallery in the Apis Mausoleum 306
198. Sepulchral chamber of an Apis bull 308
199. Section in perspective of "Campbell's tomb" 312
Vertical section in perspective of the
200. 312
Sarcophagus-chamber of the above tomb
201. A Tomb on El-Assasif 313
202. The Temple of the Sphinx 324
203. Interior of the Temple of the Sphinx 325
The Temple of the Sphinx, the Sphinx, and the
204. 331
neighbouring parts of the Necropolis
205. Ram, or Kriosphinx 336
206. Gateway and boundary wall of a temple 339
207. Principal façade of the Temple of Luxor 345
208. The Temple of Khons; horizontal and vertical 349
section showing the general arrangement of the

temple
209. The Bari, or sacred boat 352
210. Portable tabernacle of painted wood 354
211. Granite tabernacle 355
212. General plan of the Great Temple at Karnak 358
213. Longitudinal section of the Temple of Luxor 361
Plan of the anterior portion of the Great Temple
214. 363
at Karnak
215. The Great Temple at Karnak; inner portion 367
216. Karnak as it is at present 369
217. Plan of the Temple of Luxor 371
218. Bird's-eye view of Luxor 373
219. Plan of the Ramesseum 377
The Ramesseum. Bird's-eye view of the general
220. 379
arrangement
221. General plan of the buildings at Medinet-Abou 381
222. Plan of the Temple of Thothmes 382
223. Plan of the Great Temple at Medinet-Abou 383
224. Plan of the Temple at Abydos 387
Seti, with the attributes of Osiris, between Amen,
225. 390
to whom he is paying homage, and Chnoum
226. Plan of the Temple of Gournah 392
227. Façade of the naos of the Temple of Gournah 393
Longitudinal section of the Temple of Gournah,
228. 393
from the portico of the naos to the back wall
229. Plan of the Temple of Elephantiné 396
230. View in perspective of the Temple of Elephantiné 397
Longitudinal section of the Temple of
231. 398
Elephantiné
232. Temple of Amenophis III. at Eilithyia 401
Temple of Amenophis III. at Eilithyia;
233. 403
longitudinal section
234. The speos at Addeh 406
235. The speos at Addeh; longitudinal section 406
236. Plan of speos at Beit-el-Wali 407

237. Longitudinal section of the speos at Beit-el-Wali 407
238. Plan of the hemispeos of Gherf-Hossein 408
239. Gherf-Hossein; longitudinal section 409
240. Plan of the hemispeos of Derri 409
241. Longitudinal section; Derri 409
242. Façade of the smaller temple at Ipsamboul 411
243. Plan of the smaller temple 413
Perspective of the principal Chamber in the
244. 413
smaller temple
245. Longitudinal section of the smaller temple 413
246. Plan of the Great Temple 413
Perspective of the principal Hall in the Great
247. 414
Temple
248. Façade of the Great Temple at Ipsamboul 415
249. Longitudinal section of the Great Temple 417
250. Dayr-el-Bahari 419
251. Restoration in perspective of Dayr-el-Bahari 423
252. The ruins on the Island of Philæ 431
253. The battle against the Khetas, Luxor 436
254. Rameses II. returning in triumph from Syria 437
The goddess Anouké suckling Rameses II., Beit-
255. 441
el-Wali

INTRODUCTION.
I.

The successful interpretation of the ancient writings of Egypt, Chaldæa, and
Persia, which has distinguished our times, makes it necessary that the
history of antiquity should be rewritten. Documents that for thousands of
years lay hidden beneath the soil, and inscriptions which, like those of
Egypt and Persia, long offered themselves to the gaze of man merely to
excite his impotent curiosity, have now been deciphered and made to render
up their secrets for the guidance of the historian. By the help of those
strings of hieroglyphs and of cuneiform characters, illustrated by paintings
and sculptured reliefs, we are enabled to separate the truth from the
falsehood, the chaff from the wheat, in the narratives of the Greek writers
who busied themselves with those nations of Africa and Asia which
preceded their own in the ways of civilization. Day by day, as new
monuments have been discovered and more certain methods of reading
their inscriptions elaborated, we have added to the knowledge left us by
Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus, to our acquaintance with those empires on
the Euphrates and the Nile which were already in old age when the Greeks
were yet struggling to emerge from their primitive barbarism.
Even in the cases of Greece and Rome, whose histories are supplied in their
main lines by their classic writers, the study of hitherto neglected writings
discloses many new and curious details. The energetic search for ancient
inscriptions, and the scrupulous and ingenious interpretation of their
meaning, which we have witnessed and are witnessing, have revealed to us
many interesting facts of which no trace is to be found in Thucydides or
Xenophon, in Livy or Tacitus; enabling us to enrich with more than one
feature the picture of private and public life which they have handed down
to us. In the effort to embrace the life of ancient times as a whole, many
attempts have been made to fix the exact place in it occupied by art, but
those attempts have never been absolutely successful, because the
comprehension of works of art, of plastic creations in the widest
significance of that word, demands an amount of special knowledge which

the great majority of historians are without; art has a method and language
of its own, which obliges those who wish to learn it thoroughly to cultivate
their taste by frequenting the principal museums of Europe, by visiting
distant regions at the cost of considerable trouble and expense, by perpetual
reference to the great collections of engravings, photographs, and other
reproductions which considerations of space and cost prevent the savant
from possessing at home. More than one learned author has never visited
Italy or Greece, or has found no time to examine their museums, each of
which contains but a small portion of the accumulated remains of antique
art. Some connoisseurs do not even live in a capital, but dwell far from
those public libraries, which often contain valuable collections, and
sometimes—when they are not packed away in cellars or at the binder's—
allow them to be studied by the curious.[2] The study of art, difficult enough
in itself, is thus rendered still more arduous by the obstacles which are
thrown in its way. The difficulty of obtaining materials for self-
improvement in this direction affords the true explanation of the absence, in
modern histories of antiquity, of those laborious researches which have led
to such great results since Winckelmann founded the science of archæology
as we know it. To take the case of Greece, many learned writers have in our
time attempted to retrace its complete history—England, Germany, and
France have each contributed works which, by various merits, have
conquered the favour of Europe. But of all these works the only one which
betrays any deep study of Greek art, and treats it with taste and competence,
is that of M. Ernest Curtius; as for Mr. Grote, he has neither a theoretic
knowledge of art, nor a feeling for it. Here and there, indeed, where he
cannot avoid it, he alludes to the question, but in the fewest and driest
phrases possible. And yet Greece, without its architects, its sculptors, and its
painters, without in fact its passion for beautiful form, a passion as warm
and prolific as its love for poetry, is hardly Greece at all.
Much disappointment is thus prepared for those who, without the leisure to
enter deeply into detail, wish to picture to themselves the various aspects of
the ancient world. They are told of revolutions, of wars and conquests, of
the succession of princes; the mechanism of political and civil institutions is
explained to them; "literature," we are told, "is the expression of social
life," and so the history of literature is written for us. All this is true enough,
but there is another truth which seems to be always forgotten, that the art of

a people is quite as clear an indication of their sentiments, tastes, and ideas,
as their literature. But on this subject most historians say little, contenting
themselves with the brief mention of certain works and proper names, and
with the summary statement of a few general ideas which do not even
possess the merit of precision. And where are we to find the information
thus refused? Europe possesses several histories of Greek and Roman
literature, written with great talent and eloquence, such as the work,
unhappily left unfinished, of Ottfried Müller; there are, too, excellent
manuals, rich in valuable facts, such as those of Bernhardy, Baehr, and
Teuffel; but where is there, either in England, in France, or in Germany, a
single work which retraces, in sufficient detail, the whole history of antique
art, following it throughout its progress and into all its transformations,
from its origin to its final decadence, down to the epoch when Christianity
and the barbaric invasions put an end to the ancient forms of civilization
and prepared for the birth of the modern world, for the evolution of a new
society and of a new art?
To this question our neighbours may reply that the Geschichte der
bildenden Kunst of Carl Schnaase[3] does all that we ask. But that work has
one great disadvantage for those who are not Germans. Its great bulk will
almost certainly prevent its ever finding a translator, while it makes it very
tedious reading to a foreigner. It must, besides, be very difficult, not to say
impossible, for a single writer to treat with equal competence the arts of
Asia, of Greece, and of Rome, of the Middle Ages and of modern times. As
one might have expected, all the parts of such an extensive whole are by no
means of equal value, and the chapters which treat of antique art are the
least satisfactory. Of the eight volumes of which the work consists, two are
devoted to ancient times, and, by general acknowledgment, they are not the
two best. They were revised, indeed, for the second edition, by two
colleagues whom Herr Schnaase called in to his assistance; oriental art by
Carl von Lützow, and that of Greece and Rome by Carl Friedrichs. But the
chapters in which Assyria, Chaldæa, Persia, Phœnicia, and Egypt are
discussed are quite inadequate. No single question is exhaustively treated.
Instead of well-considered personal views, we have vague guesses and
explanations which do nothing to solve the many problems which perplex
archæologists. The illustrations are not numerous enough to be useful, and,
in most cases, they do not seem to have been taken from the objects

themselves. Those which relate to architecture, especially, have been
borrowed from other well known works, and furnish therefore no new
elements for appreciation or discussion. Finally, the order adopted by the
author is not easily understood. For reasons which have decided us to
follow the same course, and which we will explain farther on, he takes no
account of the extreme east, of China and Japan; but then, why begin with
India, which had no relations with the peoples on the shores of the
Mediterranean until a very late date, and, so far as art was concerned, rather
came under their influence than brought them under its own?
The fact is that Schnaase follows a geographical order, which is very
confusing in its results. To give but one example of its absurdity, he speaks
of the Phœnicians before he has said a word of Egypt; now, we all know
that the art of Tyre and Sidon was but a late reflection from that of Egypt;
the workshops of those two famous ports were mere factories of cheap
Egyptian art objects for exportation.
Again, the first part of Herr Schnaase's work is already seventeen years old,
and how many important discoveries have taken place since 1865? Those of
Cesnola and Schliemann, for instance, have revealed numberless points of
contact and transmission between one phase of antique art and another,
which were never thought of twenty years ago. The book therefore is not
"down to date." With all the improvements which a new edition might
introduce, that part of it which deals with antiquity can never be anything
but an abridgment with the faults inherent in that kind of work. It could
never have the amplitude of treatment or the originality which made
Winckelmann's History of Art and Ottfried Müller's Manual of Artistic
Archæology so successful in their day.[4]
Winckelmann's History of Art among the Ancients, originally published in
1764, is one of those rare books which mark an epoch in the history of the
human intellect. The German writer was the first to formulate the idea, now
familiar enough to cultivated intelligences, that art springs up, flourishes,
and decays, with the society to which it belongs; in a word, that it is
possible to write its history.[5] This great savant, whose memory Germany
holds in honour as the father of classic archæology, was not content with
stating a principle: he followed it through to its consequences; he began by
tracing the outlines of the science which he founded, and he never rested till

he had filled them in. However, now that a century has passed away since it
appeared, his great work, which even yet is never opened without a
sentiment of respect, marks a date beyond which modern curiosity has long
penetrated. Winckelmann's knowledge of Egyptian art was confined to the
pasticcios of the Roman epoch, and to the figures which passed from the
villa of Hadrian to the museum of Cardinal Albani. Chaldæa and Assyria,
Persia and Phœnicia, had no existence for him; even Greece as a whole was
not known to him. Her painted vases were still hidden in Etruscan and
Campanian cemeteries; the few which had found their way to the light had
not yet succeeded in drawing the attention of men who were preoccupied
over more imposing manifestations of the Greek genius. Nearly all
Winckelmann's attention was given to the works of the sculptors, upon
which most of his comprehensive judgments were founded; and yet, even in
regard to them, he was not well-informed. His opportunities of personal
inspection were confined to the figures, mostly of unknown origin, which
filled the Italian galleries. The great majority of these formed part of the
crowd of copies which issued from the workshops of Greece, for some three
centuries or more, to embellish the temples, the basilicas, and the public
baths, the villas and the palaces of the masters of the world. In the very few
instances in which they were either originals or copies executed with
sufficient care to be fair representations of the original, they never dated
from an earlier epoch than that of Praxiteles, Scopas, and Lysippus. Phidias
and Alcamenes, Pæonius and Polycletus, the great masters of the fifth
century, were only known to the historian by the descriptions and allusions
of the ancient authors.
In such a case as this the clearest and most precise of verbal descriptions is
of less value than any fragment of marble upon which the hand of the artist
is still to be traced. Who would then have guessed that the following
generation would have the opportunity of studying those splendid groups of
decorative sculpture whose close relation to the architecture of certain
famous temples has taught us so much? Who in those days dreamt of
looking at, still less of drawing, the statues in the pediments and sculptured
friezes of the Parthenon, of the Thesæum, of the temples at Ægina, at
Phigalia, or at Olympia? Now if Winckelmann was ignorant of these, the
real monuments of classic perfection, it follows that he was hardly
competent to recognise and define true archaism or to distinguish the works

of sculpture which bore the marks of the deliberate, eclectic, and over-
polished taste of the critical epochs. He made the same mistake in speaking
of architecture. It was always, or nearly always, by the edifices of Rome
and Italy, by their arrangement and decoration, that he pretended to explain
and judge the architecture of Greece.
But Winckelmann rendered a great service to art by founding a method of
study which was soon applied by Zoëga[6] and by Ennio Quirino Visconti,[7]
to the description of the works which filled public and private galleries, or
were being continually discovered by excavation. These two savants
classified a vast quantity of facts; thanks to their incessant labours, the lines
of the master's rough sketch were accented and corrected at more than one
point; the divisions which he had introduced into his picture were marked
with greater precision; the groups which he had begun to form were
rendered more coherent and compact; their features became more precise,
more distinct, and more expressive. This progress was continuous, but after
the great wars of the Revolution and the Empire its march became much
more rapid, and the long peace which saw the growth of so rich a harvest of
talent, was also marked by a great increase in the energy with which all
kinds of historical studies were prosecuted.
But the widest, as well as the most sudden, enlargement of the horizon was
due to a rapid succession of discoveries, some the result of persevering
searches and lucky excavations, others rendered possible by feats of
induction which almost amounted to genius. It seemed as though a curtain
were drawn up, and, behind the rich and brilliant scenery of Græco-Roman
civilization, the real ancient world, the world of the East, the father of
religions and of useful inventions, of the alphabet and of the plastic arts,
were suddenly revealed to us. The great work which was compiled by the
savants who accompanied Bonaparte to Egypt first introduced the
antiquities of that country to us, and not long afterwards Champollion
discovered the key to the hieroglyphics, and thus enabled us to assign to the
monuments of the country at least a relative date.
A little later Layard and Botta freed Nineveh from the ruins of its own
buildings, and again let in the light upon ancient Assyria. But yesterday we
knew nothing beyond the names of its kings, and yet it sprang again to the
day, its monuments in marvellous preservation, its history pictured by

thousands of figures in relief and narrated by their accompanying
inscriptions. These did not long keep their secrets to themselves, and their
interpretation enables us to classify chronologically the works of
architecture and sculpture which have been discovered.
The information thus obtained was supplemented by careful exploration of
the ruins in Babylonia, lower Chaldæa, and Susiana. These had been less
tenderly treated by time and by man than the remains of Nineveh. The
imposing ruins of the palace at Persepolis and of the tombs of the kings, had
been known for nearly two centuries, but only by the inadequate
descriptions and feeble drawings of early travellers. Ker-Porter, Texier, and
Flandrin provided us with more accurate and comprehensive descriptions,
and, thanks to their careful copies of the writings upon the walls of those
buildings, and upon the inscribed stones of Persia and Media, Eugène
Burnouf succeeded in reconstructing the alphabet of Darius and Xerxes.
Thus, to the toils of artists and learned men, who examined the country
from the mountains of Armenia to the low and marshy plains of Susiana,
and from the deserts which border the Euphrates to the rocks of Media and
Persia, and to the philologists who deciphered the texts and classified the
monumental fragments which had travelled so far from the scene of their
creation, we owe our power to describe, upon a sound basis and from
authentic materials, the great civilisation which was developed in Western
Asia, in the basin of the Persian Gulf. There were still many details which
escaped us, but, through the shadows which every day helped to dissipate,
the essential outlines and the leading masses began to be clearly
distinguished, and the local distinctions which, in such a vast extent of
country and so long a succession of empires, were caused by differences of
race, of time, and of physical conditions, began to be appreciated. But, in
spite of all these differences, the choice of expressive means and their
employment, from Babylon to Nineveh, and from Nineveh to Susa and
Persepolis, presented so many points of striking similarity as to prove that
the various peoples represented by those famous capitals all sprang from the
same original stock. The elements of writing and of the arts are in each case
identical. The alphabets were all formed upon the same cuneiform principle,
notwithstanding the variety in the languages which they served. In the
plastic arts, although the plans of their buildings vary in obedience to the
requirements of different materials, their sculpture always betrays the same

way of looking at living forms, the same conventions and the same motives.
Every work fashioned by the hand of man which has been discovered
within the boundaries given above, displays community of style and unity
of origin and tradition.

The result of these searches and discoveries was to show clearly that this
ancient civilisation had sprung from two original sources, the one in the
valley of the Nile, the other in Chaldæa. The latter was the less ancient of
the two, and was considerably nearer our own time than the epoch which
witnessed the commencement of the long series of Egyptian dynasties by
the reign of Menes. These two civilizations met and intermingled through
the agency of the Phœnicians, and any active and prolific interchange of
ideas and products began, traces of which are still to be found both in Egypt
and Assyria.
It still remained doubtful, and the doubt has but lately been removed, how
the influence of these two great centres of cultivation was extended to the
still barbarous tribes, the ancestors of the Greeks and Romans, who
inhabited the northern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean.
It is only within the last twenty years, since the mission of M. Renan, that
Phœnicia has become well-known to us. Several English and French
travellers, Hamilton, Fellows, Texier, among others, had already, in the first
half of the century, described the curious monuments of Lydia, Phrygia,
Cappadocia, and of the still more picturesque Lycia, whose spoils now
enrich the British Museum; people vaguely conjectured that through those
countries had progressed, stage by stage, from the east to the west, the
forms and inventions of a system of civilization which had been elaborated
in the distant Chaldæa. But it was not till 1861 that an expedition, inspired
by the desire to clear up this very question, succeeded in demonstrating the
rôle actually played by the peoples inhabiting the plateau of Asia Minor. As
for Cyprus, it was but yesterday that the explorations of Lang and Cesnola
revealed it to us, with its art half Egyptian and half Assyrian, and its
cuneiform alphabet pressed into the service of a Greek dialect. These
discoveries have put us on the alert. Not a year passes without some lucky

"find," such as that of the Palæstrina treasure, in the immediate
neighbourhood of Rome, or that made by Salzmann at Rhodes. These
pieces of good fortune allow the archæologist to supply, one by one, the
missing links of the chain which attaches the arts of Greece and Italy to the
earlier civilizations of Egypt and Assyria.

While the remains of Oriental antiquity were being thus recovered piece by
piece, secrets no less interesting and documents no less curious were
continually coming to the surface to cast new light upon the history of
classic antiquity. First came the marbles of the Parthenon, transferred by
Lord Elgin to the British Museum in 1816. Both artists and connoisseurs,
after a short pause of hesitation, agreed in asserting that the bas-reliefs of
the frieze and the sculptures of the two pediments excelled anything which
had previously entered into any European museum. Artists declared that
they experienced a sense of beauty never felt before; they were face to face
for the first time with the ideal of the Greeks, as it had been conceived and
realised at that happy period of perfection which followed the
disappearance of the last traces of archaic hardness. That period was but too
short. It was comprised in a single generation, which was followed by one
which made the first steps down the slope of the decadence. During a single
lifetime a crowd of works were produced which, in spite of differences in
material and subject, were all stamped with the same character of easy and
frank nobility, of sincerity and elegant severity, of simplicity combined with
grandeur. The death, or even the old age of the great men who had produced
these works, was sufficient to lower the standard. Emphasis and a striving
for effect took the place of nobility; under a pretence of sincerity, artists
took to a servile imitation of nature, and mannerism, with all its
weaknesses, began to disfigure their works. Art remained at a high level in
Greece, however, longer than elsewhere. The word decadence can hardly be
pronounced in connection with the admirable works produced in the fourth
century before Christ, and yet it cannot be denied that, so long as we were
without original examples from the great epoch of Pericles, we were
without that most necessary material for a history of Greek art, a knowledge
of the most masterly, the most pure, and the most elevated of her creations.

The literary historian might as well have attempted to trace the course of
her poetry without having read Sophocles, without having heard of the
Electra or the Œdipus Rex.
Attention being once turned in this direction, discoveries followed each
other in rapid succession. The statues from the pediments at Ægina, so ably
restored by Thorwaldsen, were bought to form the nucleus of the collection
at Munich.[8] The study of these statues is very instructive in making clear
to us the paths which sculptors had to follow in their progress from the
stiffness and conventions of early periods to the ease and amplitude of
classic perfection. As for the friezes from the temple of Apollo Epicurius,
near Phigalia, they too are in the British Museum.[9] Thus brought into
immediate propinquity with the marbles from the Parthenon, with which
they are almost cotemporary, they afford us some curious information. They
show us what the art of Phidias and Alcamenes became when those
sculptors had to work in what we should call "the provinces;" how much
they preserved and how much they lost of their complete excellence when
employed upon buildings erected at less cost and with less care than those
of the capital. So far as the composition is concerned, the consummate
facility and the natural verve of the master who supplied the sketches and
models is never absent, but the execution, which must have been left to
local artists, betrays their inferiority by its inequalities and general
weakness. The same may be said of the figures with which Alcamenes and
Pæonius ornamented the pediments and metopes of the Temple of Zeus at
Olympia. Even before the discoveries at Ægina and Phigalia, the results of
the French expedition to the Morea and the beautiful fragments of sculpture
brought to the Louvre from the banks of the Alphæus, had given us reason
to suspect this inferiority of provincial art, and the excavations recently
undertaken by Germany, after an interval of about half a century of inaction,
have finally removed all doubts. Neither the statues nor the bas-reliefs, nor
any other part of the decoration of the temple at Olympia, possess the
nobility and purity which distinguish the great buildings on the Athenian
acropolis. They show abundant power and science, but also perceptible
inequalities, and certain signs of that exaggerated objectivity which we now
call realism. Each fresh discovery helps us to comprehend, not without a
certain sense of surprise, how much freedom and variety Greek art
possessed during its best time. There is none of that dull uniformity which,

with other races, distinguishes most of the works of a single epoch, none of
the tyranny of a single master or school, none of the narrowness of mere
formulæ.
The memorable exploration to which we have alluded, and many others
which it would take too long to enumerate, have not only made known to us
the most original and most fertile period of Greek sculpture, but have given
us much information as to that art which, when combined with the statues
of Phidias and Alcamenes, reared those splendid creations which have been
reconstructed with such skill and care by the artist and the archæologist; we
mean Greek architecture at its best, the purest and the most complete
architecture which the world has yet seen. Every year sees the excellent
example set by Stuart and Revett,[10] in the second half of the eighteenth
century, followed by an increasing number of imitators. The smallest
remains of ancient architecture are measured and drawn with religious care;
their arrangements are explained, their elements are grouped, their ensemble
is restored with a comprehension of their artistic conditions which steadily
gains in certainty and penetration. Blouet's interesting restorations of
Olympia and Phigalia, published in the account of the French expedition to
the Morea,[11] excited the emulation of the young architects at the French
Academy in Rome, and opened to them a new course of study. Until then
they had been contented with the monumental buildings of Rome and its
neighbourhood, of Latium and Campania; a few of the more adventurous
among them had penetrated as far as Pæstum; but it was not till 1845 that
they ventured to cross the sea and to study the ruins of Greece and Athens;
[12]
in later years they have travelled as far as Syria and Asia Minor in
search of objects for their pencils.[13]
But the occupants of the Villa Medici were not alone in these researches.
Doubtless, the invaluable publication which contains the results of their
labours, forms the most ample and varied collection of documents open to
the historian of architecture among the ancients. But many other architects
of different nationalities have given their help to the work of patiently
reconstructing the past.[14]
Examined thus closely, and by the trained eyes of professional artists
provided with all the necessary instruments, the relics of antiquity yielded
up secrets which would never have been suspected by the casual observer.

Thus Mr. Penrose discovered and explained that those walls of the
Propylæum and of the Parthenon, which seemed straight to the eye, are in
fact planned on a gentle curve;[15] he showed how this subtle variation was
calculated to add to the beauty of the buildings, and to augment their effect.
Hittorf arrived at still more important results through the minute
examination of the Sicilian ruins. He was the first to describe the important
part which painting played in the decoration of Greek architecture; he
affirmed that in many parts of their buildings the stone or marble was
painted over, and that the various members of the architecture were
distinguished by differences of tint, which gave accent to the mouldings,
and force to the figures in relief. These ideas were too strongly opposed to
modern habits of thought to be received without strong protestations. Their
partisans, too, did something to retard their acceptance by their absolute
fashion of stating their convictions, and by certain unhappy applications of
their system; but the polychromatic principles of the Greeks are now
confirmed by too many facts to be denied.[16]

Of the three principal branches of ancient art, that of which we know least
is painting, properly speaking; the art of Polygnotus, of Zeuxis, and of
Apelles. Of this we have but few remains, and we are obliged to take our
ideas of its excellence from the descriptions of ancient authors. We have
indeed the wall-paintings of those Campanian cities which were so long
buried under the ashes of Vesuvius; paintings which were uncovered in
great numbers under the Napoleonic domination, and have in later times
been added to every year, in spite of the indolent fashion in which the
excavations have been conducted. Fragmentary mural paintings of the same
kind have also been discovered in Rome and in a few other
neighbourhoods. But after all, great though the interest may be which
attaches to these works, it must not be forgotten that they are Italian rather
than Greek, that they are the decorations for the most part of small
provincial cities, and that even the best of them, when compared with the
productions of the fifth and fourth centuries before our era, are examples of
decadence. At the most they enable us to recall, with some approach to
probable truth, the taste and technical methods of the Alexandrian school.

[17]
Winckelmann and his immediate successors saw the ashes cleared from
the first Pompeian wall-paintings. But they possessed no standards by
which they could define the styles of those great schools of painting which
flourished in Greece between the epoch of the Persian Wars and the
beginning of the Macedonian supremacy; such a definition we may now
however attempt with at least partial success. Since the time of
Winckelmann hundreds and thousands of those painted vases of burnt clay,
which the public persist in calling Etruscan, have been discovered,
classified, described, and explained, in such a manner as to leave unsolved
scarcely any of the problems upon which they could cast a light.
Gerhard led the way in 1831 with his famous report on the Volscian vases;
[18]
numerous savants have followed his example, and nearly every day the
series which they have established are enriched by new discoveries. These
vases, as we now know, were made in many places, at Athens, at Corinth, in
the Greek cities of Africa and of Magna Græcia. They were eagerly sought
after by some of the races whom the Greeks considered barbarous, by the
Græco-Scythians of the Crimea, as well as by the Sabellians and the
Etruscans; the latter imitated them now and then more or less awkwardly,
but it is unanimously acknowledged that they are an essentially Greek
product, the product of an art which sprang up with the first awakening of
the Greek genius, and was extinguished about two hundred years before
Christ, when the nation ceased to be creative and prolific. From analogy
with all that has passed elsewhere we are justified in believing that, in each
century, the painting of these vases, which would belong to what we call the
industrial arts, followed with docility the example set by historical painters,
and that it reproduced, so far as its resources would allow, the style and
taste of their works. If we study each series of vases in the light of the
judgments passed by the ancients upon the most celebrated painters of
Greece, we may find, by a legitimate induction, traces now of the style of
Polygnotus, now of that of Zeuxis, and again suggestions of the hands of
Apelles or Protogenes; a vase here and there may have even preserved more
or less faithful imitations of the actual works of those masters. These
inductions and conjectures certainly demand both prudence and delicacy of
perception, but their principle is incontestable, and the profit to be obtained
from them is great. In the whole wreck of antiquity there is no loss which
lovers of art find so hard to bear, as the complete annihilation of the works

of those great painters whom the ancients put at least upon the same level as
their most famous sculptors; and who would not rejoice to be able, by the
remains of contemporary though inferior productions, to trace a reflection,
distant and feeble perhaps, but yet faithful so far as it goes, of a whole art
which has been lost to the world?
The archæologists of the eighteenth century never dreamt of such
researches as these, still less of the results to which they might lead; few of
them suspected what valuable aid might be afforded to the historian of art
and of antique civilization, by the multitude of small objects—vases, gems,
glass, mirrors, bronze plaques and figures, terra-cotta bas-reliefs, and
statuettes—which are now so eagerly sought after, and which begin to form
valuable collections in most of the great museums of Europe.[19] These
objects, which were in continual use, were manufactured in prodigious
quantities for thousands of years, and their vast numbers gave them a
greatly increased chance of being preserved. In spite of the rough usage of
man, and the slower progress of destruction due to the action of nature, a
certain number of them were sure, from the first, to find means of escape,
and, from so many examples, a few of each type have therefore come down
to us. The small size of these objects also contributed to preserve them from
destruction. In times of war and revolution the poor and humble ones of the
earth easily avoid the catastrophes which overwhelm those who are richer,
more powerful, and more conspicuous than themselves. So it was with these
little memorials of antiquity. Their insignificance was their salvation in the
overthrow of the civilisation to which they belonged. More numerous and
better sheltered than the masterpieces of fine art, they survived when the
latter perished. Thus it is that so many of the lighter and more fragile
products of industry have survived to our time, and have made us
acquainted with modes of thought and life, and with forms of plastic
expression which we should never have known without them. The painted
vases, for instance, have preserved for us more than one myth of which no
trace can be found in poetry or sculpture; and as for terra-cottas, to which
the Tanagra statuettes have directed so much attention, we may judge from
the labours of M. Henzey of the value which they possess for archæologists,
who, though unable, like some of our amateurs, to buy them with their
weight in gold, may compare them one with another and study their
smallest details.[20] Those statuettes, which are now classified in museums

in the order of their production, have shown us how narrow and inadequate
were the formulæ by which the early historians of the plastic arts attempted
to define the genius of the Greeks. Even now, the most accomplished and
well-informed critics are not always able to repress a feeling of
astonishment when they examine a collection of terra-cottas. Some of these
figures, no more than a span high, resemble the marbles of the Parthenon in
dignity and grandeur, others are full of grace and playfulness in their
outlines, and show a capricious abandon which disconcerts for a moment
even those who are least insensible to their charm. At the bases of such
works one is apt to look for the signature of some artist of the Renaissance
or of the eighteenth century. In reality they have existed ever since the
fourth or third century before our era, and yet there is something modern in
their appearance. But an indescribable purity of taste suffices to betray their
real origin to all those who possess knowledge and delicate perceptions.
That origin is still Greece, but Greece in her lighter and more playful
moments, when, leaving the representation of gods and heroes, she
condescends to treat the familiar objects of domestic life, and does it with
an ease of which her great writers, notably Plato and Aristophanes, had also
found the secret, when they passed from epic tragedy to comedy, from the
noblest eloquence to hearty expressions of enjoyment.
These little statues interest the historian for other reasons also. They
sometimes give him, as at Tanagra, the most precise and accurate
information as to dress and social customs: sometimes, as at Tegæa, they
afford particulars of a famous though obscure form of worship, of a divinity
and of rites which are but imperfectly described in the writings of classic
authors.
This extension of knowledge and the great discoveries upon which it was
based, naturally led those who were interested in the study of the remains of
antique civilisation, to feel the necessity of organisation, of division of
labour, and of the importance of ensuring a steady supply of the best and
most trustworthy information. Societies were therefore founded in many
different centres with the express object of meeting those wants. We cannot,
of course, enumerate them here, nor attempt to estimate their various claims
to our gratitude, but we may be permitted to allude to the good work
accomplished, during fifty years of incessant activity, by the Association
which has perhaps done more than any other for the progress of

archæology, we mean the Instituto di Corrispondenza Archeologica,
founded in Rome in 1829, by Bunsen, Gerhard, and the Duc de Luynes.
Thanks to the breadth of view which characterised its founders, this society
has been, ever since its inauguration, an international one in the best sense
of the word; it brings together for a common end the most eminent
European savants and their best pupils; it finds fellow-labourers and
correspondents in every country. With their aid it soon established a
Bullettino, where, month by month, all discoveries of interest made at any
point of the Mediterranean basin were registered; and volumes, called
sometimes Annali, sometimes Memorie, in which really important
discoveries, and the problems to which they give rise, were discussed.
Some of these dissertations are so elaborate and so full of valuable matter as
to have formed epochs in the history of science. They are accompanied by
fine plates, which, by their size, permit the reproduction of objects of art on
a grander scale, and with more fidelity, than had been previously attempted.
[21]

While the Roman Instituto was thus devoting itself to research, and assuring
to its members the advantages of a regular publicity, these inquiries were
daily attracting a more considerable share of attention from the other
learned bodies of Europe. The Académie des Inscriptions et de Belles
Lettres, the Academies of Berlin, Munich, and Vienna, devoted an ever-
increasing portion of their programmes to such studies. Men began
everywhere to understand that the writings of the classic authors, which had
been so exhaustively studied ever since the Renaissance, were no longer
capable of affording fresh information. In order to learn more of antiquity
than the great scholars of the last three centuries, it was necessary to
penetrate into the past by paths as yet unexplored; it was necessary to
complement and control the evidence of classic authors by that of public
and private inscriptions, engraved upon bronze, marble, or stone; it was
above all necessary to seek for the expression, in their handiwork, of the
wants and ideas, of the personal sentiments and religious conceptions, of
the men of antiquity. There are, in fact, nations, such as the Etruscans,
whose whole literature has perished, who are only known to us by the relics
of their art. Others, like the Greeks and Latins, have indeed transmitted to
us noble masterpieces of literature; but these masterpieces are few in
proportion to those which time has destroyed. Of the thoughts which they

expressed in their immortal languages, too many have been lost for ever
with the fragile strips of papyrus to which they were confided.
With the ardour for knowledge and the heroic perseverance which are
among the virtues of our time, curiosity has refused to resign itself to such a
loss. It has determined to discover the unpublished, to draw into the light all
that has not perished beyond recovery, to collect all that the spirit of
antiquity has left behind it, either upon works hitherto unnoticed, or upon
those which have been imperfectly understood. The treasures of epigraphy
have been classified and shown in their full value by Bœckh, Borghesi, and
others, and the world is now able to guess all that history may owe to them.
The study, however, of those remains which bear figured representations is
still more complex and formidable. The language of forms is, in itself, less
definite than that of words, and it becomes very difficult to decipher when
we have no words dealing with the same ideas to help us, when we possess
the art of a people without a line of their literature. Another difficulty
springs from the very abundance and variety of the materials to our hand.
We feel oppressed by the ever-growing accumulation of facts, and can
neither determine where to begin our work, nor how to leave it off: we
cannot see the forest for the trees!

II.

In 1830, when the Roman Institute was founded, the time seemed to have
come for the formulation of all the gathered facts and for their arrangement
into groups, a task which had become much more difficult than in the time
of Winckelmann. To conduct it to a successful conclusion a rare
combination of faculties was required; breadth of intellect, aided by vast
reading and a powerful memory; a philosophical spirit, capable of wide
generalisation, joined to that passion for accurate detail which distinguishes
the philologist; it demanded one whose taste would survive the trying
labour of the cabinet, a savant and an artist combined in one person. Books
do not teach everything. He who wishes to speak of art with intelligence

must study art objects themselves, must cultivate an intimate acquaintance
with them, and, within himself, a love for beautiful forms. Without the
perceptive powers which such an educational process alone can give, no
man can appreciate the subtle differences which distinguish styles and
schools. He who possesses no ear, who is unable to perceive the intervals
which separate one note from another, who knows that he can neither
recognise nor remember an air, does not, unless he be both presumptuous
and ignorant, dilate upon music, or attempt to write its history. In the art of
design, as in music, no education can supply the place of natural aptitudes;
but the latter are not by themselves sufficient to form a connoisseur.
Something more is necessary to those who wish to form judgments upon
which reliance may be placed, and to give reasons for them which will bear
discussion. A special preparation must be undergone, the rules and technical
processes—that is to say, the language of art—must be learnt. A
connoisseur need not be able to compose an opera, or to chisel a statue, but
he should be able to read a part, or to decide, for instance, by the
appearance of a copy whether its original were of bronze or marble.
At the end of the last century there was born in Silesia a man who, while yet
in his first youth, gave evidence of a rare combination of the gifts necessary
for the successful accomplishment of the task which we have described; we
mean Carl Ottfried Müller, who has been called, without any exaggeration,
a "scholar of genius."[22] A disciple of Niebuhr and Bœckh, he excelled all
his contemporaries in his efforts to embrace the whole of antiquity in one
view, to trace out and realise for himself all the varied aspects of ancient
civilisation. As a philologist, he took the greatest pleasure in the science
which weighs words and syllables, which collates manuscripts. A poet in his
hours of leisure, he appreciated both ancient and modern works of
literature. As a young man he studied with passion the antiques in the
Dresden Museum and the gallery of casts belonging to the University of
Gottingen.
In the last year of his life he traversed Italy and Sicily with continual
delight, and was like one intoxicated with the beauty of that Athens of
which he caught but a glimpse, of that Greece whose sun so quickly
destroyed him.

All this knowledge, all these experiences he hoped to make use of as the
lines and colours for the great picture of ancient Greece which he
meditated, for the canvas upon which he meant to portray the Greek
civilization for the benefit of the moderns, with all its indivisible unity of
social and political life, of literary and artistic production. In striking him
down in his forty-second year, death put an end to this project, and the great
picture, which would have been, perhaps, one of the capital works of our
century, was never executed. But the preparatory sketches of the master
happily remain to us. While he was employed in collecting materials for the
work which he meant to be his highest title to honour, he was not shut up in
silence and meditation, as a less prolific spirit might have been. His facility
of arrangement and utterance was prodigious; all that he learnt, all new
discoveries that he made or thought he had made, he hastened to make
public, either by direct addresses to the auditors who crowded round his
chair at Gottingen, or by his pen to the readers of the numerous
philosophical periodicals to which he contributed. Like a man who has
travelled much and who loves to tell of what he has seen, he was ever ready
to take the public into his confidence when he embarked upon a new study.
This he generally did by means of papers full of facts and ideas, written
sometimes in German, sometimes in Latin. In his later years he issued short
articles upon archæology and the history of art, in sufficient number to form
five substantial volumes.[23] Besides this, he gave to the world learned
editions of Varro, of Festus, of the Eumenides of Æschylus; or important
monographs like his Geschichten hellenischer Stämme und Städte,
including Orchomenos und die Minyer and Die Dorier, the most famous
and most actively discussed of his works; and finally, Die Etrusker, a work
which was suggested to him by one of the publications of the Berlin
Academy. There was also Prolegomena zu einer wissenschaftlichen
Mythologie, which has been fruitful for good even in its errors, and the
Geschichte der griechischen Literatur, &c., which, incomplete as it is, has
never become obsolete. Since the time of Ottfried Müller several other
critics have attempted to rival his achievements, but they have all lacked his
breadth of view and comprehensiveness of exposition, as well as the
versatility with which he combined the most accurate scientific
investigations with a delicate appreciation of the beauty and originality of
the Greek authors.

But of all these works, that which has perhaps rendered the greatest service
to the science of archæology is the Handbuch der Archæologie der Kunst,
which was published in Breslau in 1830.[24] Translated into French, Italian,
and English, it at once took its place as the indispensable guide for all those
who wished to learn something of antique art.[25] In all the universities into
which archæology had made good its entrance, this manual has formed the
basis of the teaching, and also has enabled the pupils to supplement for
themselves the lessons which they learnt from their professors. Even now it
has not been superseded, and to all appearance it will long preserve its
supremacy.
The form of a handbuch or manual, which Ottfried Müller gave to his work,
was well and favourably known to cultivated Germans, but it was not so
with the French. They had nothing of the kind but worthless epitomes made
to facilitate the passing of University examinations. In this matter the
Germans are better off than any other nation in Europe. They have manuals
in which every branch of history and science is treated by competent writers
with as much care and skill as the most ambitious publications, a few being
original works by savants of the first order. The arrangement of the
Handbuch is very simple. It opens with an introduction in which the author
defines art—more especially the plastic arts—divides it into classes, and
indicates the principal works to be consulted, namely, those to which he
himself has had continually to refer during the progress of his book. Then
comes the history of Greek and Roman art divided into periods, and the
paragraphs which are devoted to Etruria and the East. To this historical
epitome succeed the theoretical chapters.
He takes antique art as a whole, and studies its constitution, the materials
and processes which it employs, the conditions under which it works, the
characteristics which it gives to form, the subjects of which it treats, and the
partition of its remains over the whole territory occupied by ancient
civilization. Greece, in her best days, gave most of its care to the
representation of those beings, superior to humanity and yet clothed with
human forms, in which her glowing imagination personified the forces and
eternal laws of nature and of the moral world; it was in striving to create
these types, and to endow them with outward features worthy of their
majesty, that Grecian art produced its noblest and most ideal works. It will,
therefore, be seen that a comprehensive manual had to include a history of

those gods and heroes which, with that of their statues, formed a whole
mythology of art; and this mythology occupies the larger portion of the
second part of the work.
This plan has been often criticised, but we need here make no attempt to
repel or even to discuss the objections which have been brought against it.
It has doubtless the inconvenience of leading to frequent repetition;
monuments which have been necessarily described and estimated in the
historical division are again mentioned in the chapters which treat of theory;
but a better plan has yet to be found, one which will enable us to avoid such
repetitions without any important sacrifice. The chief thing in a work of the
kind is to be clear and complete, merits which the Handbuch possesses in
the highest degree. Things are easily found in it, and, by a powerful effort
of criticism, the author has succeeded in classifying and condensing into a
single convenient volume, all the interesting discoveries of several
generations of archæologists. Not that it is a mere compilation, for previous
writers were far from being unanimous as to the dates and significance of
the remains which they had described, and it was necessary to choose
between their different hypotheses, and sometimes to reject them all. In
such cases Müller shows great judgment, and very often the opinion to
which he finally commits himself had been previously unknown. Without
entering into any long discussion he sustains it by a few shortly stated
reasons, which are generally conclusive. The plan of his book prevents him
from launching out, like Winckelmann, into enthusiastic periods; he makes
no attempt at those brilliant descriptions which in our day seem a little over-
coloured; but in the very brevity of his judgments and his laconic but
significant phraseology, we perceive a sincere and individual emotion, an
independent intellect, a pure though catholic taste. We need say no more to
the objectors who attack the mere form of the book. Its one real defect is
that it was written thirty or forty years too soon. The second edition,
carefully revised and largely augmented, appeared in 1835; it was the last
issued during the lifetime of Müller. From that moment down to the day but
lately passed when the excavations at Olympia and Pergamus were brought
to an end, many superb remains of Greek, Etruscan, and Roman art have
risen from their temporary graves and ranged themselves in our museums.
If, however, recent archæology had made no further discoveries, a few
occasional corrections and additions, at intervals of ten or fifteen years,

would have sufficed to prevent the manual from becoming obsolete. With a
little care any intelligent editor could have satisfactorily performed what
was wanted. For the Græco-Roman period especially Müller had erected so
complete a historical framework that the new discoveries could find their
places in it without any difficulty. Welcker, indeed, published a third edition
in 1848, corrected and completed, partly from the manuscript notes left by
the author in his interleaved copy, partly from information extracted by the
editor from the lectures and other writings of Müller. But why does Welcker
declare, in his advertisement to the reader, that but for the respect due to a
work which had become classic, he would have modified it much more than
he had dared. And why, for more than thirty years, has his example found
no imitators? Why have we been content to reprint word for word the text
of that third edition?
A few years ago one of the most eminent of our modern archæologists, Carl
Bernhard Stark, was requested by a firm of publishers to undertake a new
revision of the Handbuch. Why then, after having brought his materials
together, did he find it more useful, and even easier, to compose an original
work, a new manual which should fulfil the same requirements on a system
of his own devising?—an enterprise which he would have brought to a
successful conclusion had not death interrupted him after the publication of
the first part.[26]
The answer is easy. The East was not discovered till after the death of
Ottfried Müller. By the East we mean that part of Africa and Asia which is
bordered by the Mediterranean, or is so near to that sea that constant
communication was kept up with its shores; we mean Egypt, Syrian
Phœnicia, and its great colony on the Libyan Coast, Chaldæa and Assyria,
Asia Minor, and those islands of Cyprus and Rhodes which were so long
dependent upon the empires on the neighbouring continents. It was between
1820 and 1830 that the young savant conceived the ideas which he
developed in his works; it was then that he first took an important part in
the discussion as to the origin of the Greek nation, upon which
archæologists had long been engaged. What part had foreign example taken
in the birth and development of the religion, the arts, the poetry, and the
philosophy of Greece, of the whole Hellenic civilization? How much of it
was due to suggestions derived from those peoples who had so long
preceded the Greeks in the ways of civil life? No historian has answered

this question in a more feeble and narrow spirit than Ottfried Müller; no one
has been more obstinate than he in insisting upon the originality of the
Greek genius, and in believing that the Greek race extracted from its own
inner consciousness all that has made its greatness and glory.
When Müller first attacked this question, Egypt alone had begun to emerge
from the obscurity which still enveloped the ancient civilization of the East.
It was not until three years after his death, that Botta began to excavate the
remains of Assyrian art; and nothing but the vaguest and most confused
information was to be had about the ruins in Chaldæa. Now, however, we
can follow the course of the Phœnician ships along the Mediterranean, from
the Thracian Bosphorus to the pillars of Hercules. From the traces left by
the commerce and the industries of the Syrians and Carthaginians, we can
estimate the duration of their stay in each of the countries which they
visited, and the amount of influence which they exercised over the various
peoples who were tributary to them. Forty years ago this was impossible;
the writings of ancient authors were our sole source of knowledge as to the
style and taste of Phœnician art, and the ideas which they imparted were of
necessity inexact and incomplete. Wherever they passed the Phœnicians left
behind them numbers of objects manufactured by them for exportation, and
these objects are now eagerly collected, and the marks of the Sidonian and
Carthaginian makers examined and classified, and thus we are enabled to
recognize and describe the industrial processes and the decorative motives,
which were conveyed to the Greeks and to the races of the Italian peninsula
by the "watery highway" of the Mediterranean. Fifty years ago the land
routes were as little known as those by sea. The roads were undiscovered
which traversed the defiles of the Taurus and the high plateaux of Asia
Minor, to bring to the Greeks of Ionia and Æolia, those same models,
forms, and even ideas, and it was still impossible to indicate their detours,
or to count their stages.
Leake had indeed described, as early as 1821, the tombs of the Phrygian
kings, one of whom bore that name of Midas to which the Greeks attached
so strange a legend;[27] but he had given no drawings of them, and the work
of Steuart,[28] which did not appear till 1842, was the first from which any
definite knowledge of their appearance could be obtained. Müller knew
nothing of the discoveries of Fellows, of Texier, or of Hamilton; while he
was dying in Greece, they were exploring a far more difficult and

dangerous region. A few years afterwards they drew the attention of
European savants to the remains which they had discovered, dotted about
over the country which extends from the shores of the Ægæan to the
furthest depths of Cappadocia, remains which recall, both by their style and
by their symbolic devices, the rock sculptures of Upper Assyria. The Lycian
remains, which give evidence of a similar inspiration and are now in the
British Museum, were not transported to Europe until after Müller's death.
The clear intellect of Ottfried Müller easily enabled him to perceive the
absurdity of attempting to explain the birth of Greek art by direct borrowing
from Egypt. He saw that the existing remains in both countries emphatically
negatived such a supposition, but materials were wanting to him for a right
judgment of the intensity and duration of the influence under which the
Greeks of the heroic age worked for many centuries, influences which came
to them partly from the Phœnicians, the privileged agents of intercourse
between Egypt and the East, partly from the people of Asia Minor, the
Cappadocians, Lycians, Phrygians, and Lydians, all pupils and followers of
the Assyrians, whose dependants they were for the time, and with whom
they communicated by caravan routes. We may thus explain the
extravagance of the hypothesis which Müller advocated in all his writings;
and, as the originality of the Greek intellect displayed itself in the plastic
arts much later than in poetry, the partial falsity of his views and their
incompleteness is much more obvious and harmful in his handbook than in
his history of Greek literature.
In writing the life of any great man and attempting to account for his
actions, it is important to know where he was born, and who were his
parents; to learn the circumstances of his education, and the surroundings of
his youth. The biographer who should have no information on these points,
or none but what was false, would be likely to fall into serious mistakes and
misapprehensions. He would find great difficulty in explaining his hero's
opinions and the prejudices and sentiments by which he may have been
influenced, or he would give absurd explanations of them. Peculiarities of
character and eccentricities of idea would embarrass him, which, had he but
known the hereditary predisposition, the external circumstances during
infancy and adolescence, the whole course of youthful study, of the man
whose life he was describing, he might easily have understood. It is the

same with the history of a people and of their highest intellectual
manifestations, such as their religion, arts, and literature.
It was not the fault of Ottfried Müller, it was that of the time in which he
lived, that he was deceived as to the true origin of Greek art. The baneful
effects of his mistake are evident in the very first pages of the historical
section of his work, in the chapters which he devotes to the archaic period.
These chapters are very unsatisfactory. Attempt, under their guidance alone,
to study the contents of one of those museum saloons where the remains of
Oriental art are placed side by side with those from Etruria and primitive
Greece; at every step you will notice resemblances of one kind or another,
similarities between the general aspects of figures, between the details of
forms and the choice of motives, as well as in the employment of common
symbols and attributes. These resemblances will strike and even astonish
you, and if you are asked how they come to exist among differences which
become ever more and more marked in the succession of the centuries, you
will know not how to reply. In these archaic remains there are many traits
for which those who, like Ottfried Müller, begin with the history of Greece,
are unable to account. He wishes us to believe that Greece in the beginning
was alone in the world, that she owed all her glory to the organic
development of her unequalled genius, which, he says, "displayed a more
intimate combination than that of any other Aryan nation of the life of
sensibility with that of intelligence, of external with internal life." He goes
no further back than the Greece described to us in the heroic poems; he
never has recourse to such comparisons as we are now continually making;
at most he lets fall at lengthy intervals a few words which seem to imply
that Oriental civilization may have had something to do with the awakening
of Greek thought and the directing of her first endeavours. He never
formally denies her indebtedness, but he fails to perceive its vast
importance, or to declare it with that authoritative accent which never fails
him in the expression of those ideas which are dear to him, of those truths
which he has firmly grasped.
This tendency is to be seen even in the plan of his work. There is nothing
surprising in the fact that Müller, in 1830, or even in 1835, had but a slight
acquaintance with the art of the Eastern Empires; but as he thought it
necessary not entirely to ignore those peoples in a book which pretended to
treat of antiquity as a whole, it would perhaps have been better not to have

relegated them to a few paragraphs at the end of his historical section. He
knew well enough that the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Phœnicians,
even the Phrygians and the Lydians were much older than the Greeks; why
should he have postponed their history to that of the decline and fall of
Græco-Roman art? Would it not have been better to put the little he had to
tell us in its proper place, at the beginning of his book?
This curious prejudice makes the study of a whole series of important
works more difficult and less fruitful. It prevents him from grasping the true
origin of many decorative forms which, coming originally from the East,
were adopted by the Greeks and carried to perfection by their unerring taste,
were perpetuated in classic art, and thence transferred to that of modern
times; and this, bad though it is, is not the worst result of Müller's
misapprehension. His inversion of the true chronological order makes a
violent break in the continuity of the phenomena and obscures their mutual
relations. There is no sequence in a story so broken up, falsified, and turned
back upon itself. You will there seek in vain for that which we mean to
strive after in this present history of antique art—a regular and
uninterrupted development, which in spite of a few more or less brusque
oscillations and periods of apparent sterility, carried the civilization of the
East into the West, setting up as its principal and successive centres,
Memphis, Thebes, Babylon, Nineveh, Sidon, Carthage, Miletus and the
cities of Ionia, Corinth and Athens, Alexandria, Antioch, Pergamus, and
finally Rome, the disciple and heir of Greece.
Ottfried Müller saw clearly enough the long and intimate connection
between Greece and Rome, but he did not comprehend—and perhaps in the
then state of knowledge it was impossible that he should comprehend—that
the bonds were no less close which bound the Hellenic civilization to the far
more ancient system which was born upon the banks of the Nile, and crept
up the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates, to spread itself over the plains of
Iran on the one hand and of Asia Minor on the other; while the Phœnicians
carried it, with the alphabet which they had invented and the forms of their
own worship of Astarte, over the whole basin of the Mediterranean. His
error lay in his arbitrary isolation of Greece, in dragging her from the soil in
which her roots were deeply imbedded, from which she had drawn her first
nourishment and the primary elements of that varied and luxuriant

vegetation which, in due time, became covered with the fairest hues of art
and poetry.

III.

Thanks to the numerous discoveries of the last fifty years, and to the
comparisons which they have suggested, thanks also to the theories for
which they afford a basis, history has been at last enabled to render justice
to certain nations whose activity had never before been properly
understood, to give to them their proper place in the civilization of ancient
times. But Greece—the Greece which Ottfried Müller worshipped, and for
which he was too ready to sacrifice her predecessors and teachers, to whom
she herself was more just in her early legends—has lost nothing by the
more exact information which is now at our command. Served by her
situation on the confines of Europe and Asia and not far from Africa, by the
superiority of the genius of her people and the marvellous aptitudes of her
language, Greece was able to arrange and classify previous discoveries and
to bring them to perfection, to protect from destruction and oblivion the
machinery of progress, the processes of art, the newly-born scientific
methods, in a word, all the complex and fragile apparatus of civilization
which was so often threatened with final destruction, and which has more
than once been overwhelmed for a time in epochs of national conflict and
social decadence.
This is not the place for insistence upon all that Greece has accomplished in
the domains of pure thought, philosophy, and science, nor even for calling
attention to her literature. We are writing the history of the arts and not that
of letters, a history which we wish to conduct to the point where Müller left
off, to the commencement of those centuries which are called the Middle
Ages; and Greece will occupy by far the most important place in our work.
We shall endeavour to bring the same care and conscience, the same
striving after accuracy, into every division of our history; but the
monuments of Greece will be examined and described in much greater

detail than those of Egypt and Assyria, or even those of Etruria and Latium.
It was our love for Greece that drove us to this undertaking; we desire and
hope to make her life better known, to show a side of it which is not to be
found in the works of her great writers, to give to our readers new and
better reasons for loving and admiring her than they have had before. A
combination of circumstances that is unique in the history of the world gave
to the contemporaries of Pericles and Alexander the power of approaching
more nearly to perfection, in their works of art, than men of any other race
or any other epoch. In no other place or time have ideas been so clearly and
completely interpreted by form; in no other place or time have the
intellectual qualities been so closely wedded to a strong love for beauty and
a keen sensibility to it. It results from this that the works of the Greek
artists, mutilated by time and accident as they are, serve as models and
teachers for our painters and sculptors, a rôle which they will continue to
fill until the end of time. They form a school, not, as some have thought, to
enable us to dispense with nature, the indispensable and eternal master, but
to incite to such an ardent and intelligent study of her beauties, as may lead
to the creation of great works, works capable, like those of the Greeks, of
giving visible expression to the highest thoughts.
As the Greeks excelled all other nations in the width and depth of their
æsthetic sentiments; as their architects, their sculptors, and their painters,
were superior both to their pupils and their masters, to the orientals on the
one hand, and the Etruscans and the Latins on the other, we need feel no
surprise at their central and dominating position in the history of antique art.
Other national styles and artistic manifestations will pass before the eye of
the reader in their due order and succession; they will all be found
interesting, because they show to us the continual struggle of man against
matter, and we shall endeavour to distinguish each by its peculiar and
essential characteristics, and to illustrate it by the most striking remains
which it has left behind. But each style and nationality will for us have an
importance in proportion to the closeness of its connection with the art of
Greece. In the case of those oriental races which were the teachers of the
Greeks, we shall ask how much they contributed to the foundations of
Greek art and to its ultimate perfection; in the case of the ancient Italians,
we shall endeavour to estimate and describe the ability shown by them in
apprehending the lessons of their instructors, and the skill with which they

drew from their teachers a method for the expression of their own peculiar
wants and feelings and for the satisfaction of their own æsthetic desires.
The study of oriental art will really, therefore, be merely an introduction to
our history as a whole, but an introduction which is absolutely required by
our plan of treatment, and which will be completely embodied in the work.
The history of Etruscan and Roman art will be its natural and necessary
epilogue.
This explanation will show how far, and for what reasons we mean to
separate ourselves from our illustrious predecessor. We admit, as he did, we
even proclaim with enthusiasm, the pre-eminence of Greece, the originality
of its genius and the superiority of its works of plastic art; but we cannot
follow him in his arbitrary isolation of Greece, which he suspends, so to
speak, in air. Our age is the age of history; it interests itself above all others
in the sequence of social phenomena and their organic development, an
evolution which Hegel explained by the laws of thought. It would be more
than absurd in these days to accept Greek art as a thing self-created in its
full perfection, without attempting to discover and explain the slow and
careful stages by which it arrived at its apogee in the Athens of Pericles. In
this history of ours of which we are attempting to sketch the form, we must,
in order to get at the true origin of Greek art, penetrate far beyond its
apparent origin; to describe the springing of Greek civilization, we must
first study the early history of those races which surround the eastern basin
of the Mediterranean.
The Greece which we call ancient entered late into history, when
civilization had already a long past behind it, a past of many centuries. In
this sense, the words which, as we are told by Plato, a priest of Saïs
addressed to Solon, were perfectly true, "You Greeks, you are but children!"
[29]
In comparison with Egypt, with Chaldæa, with Phœnicia, Greece is
almost modern: the age of Pericles is nearer to our day than to that which
saw the birth of Egyptian civilization.
Appearing thus lately upon the scene, when the genius of man had, by
efforts continued without intermission through a long procession of
centuries, arrived at the power of giving clear and definite expression to his
thoughts, by means either of articulate sounds and the symbols which

represent them or by the aid of plastic forms, the Greeks could only have
remained ignorant of all that had been achieved before their time if they had
sprung into existence in some distant and isolated corner of the world, or in
some inaccessible island. Their actual situation was a very different one. In
the earliest epoch of which we have any record we find them established in
a peninsula, which is on one hand upon the very borders of Asia, and upon
another seems to hold out a hand to Africa by the innumerable islands
which surround its shores. Between the shores of this peninsula and those of
Asia, these islands are sprinkled so thickly over the narrow seas that nature
seems to have intended them for stepping-stones which should tempt the
least venturesome to cross from one continent to the other.
The Greek race thus found itself, by the accident of its geographical
situation, in contact with the Egyptian, Assyrian, and Median empires, the
masters of the Eastern Mediterranean; while the insular or peninsular
character of most of the region which it inhabited, together with the
numerous colonies attached to the surrounding coasts like vessels at anchor,
had the effect of greatly multiplying the points of contact. The Greek
frontier was thus one of abnormal extent, and was, moreover, always open,
always ready to receive foreign ideas and influences. Her eyes were ever
turned outwards; the Greek nationality was not one of those which remain
for ages inaccessible to foreign merchandize and modes of thought.
Such being the situation of Greece, it could not but happen, that, as soon as
the Greek race drew itself clear from primitive barbarism, the fertile germs
of art,—examples, models, processes,—should penetrate into the country
from the neighbouring East by all the channels of communication which we
have mentioned. Seeing how far civilization had advanced, would it not
have been absurd for the Greeks to have turned a deaf ear and a blind eye to
the experience of their predecessors; to have begun again at the beginning?
Was it not better to take up the work at the point where it had been left, and
to make use, for future developments, of those which had already been
established? Man progresses as fast as he can; as soon as he learns any new
method of satisfying his wants and ameliorating his life, he makes use of it;
he makes use of it at first in its original form, but with years and experience
he improves it and brings it nearer to perfection.

Thus then, the more we study the past, the more surely do we recognize the
truth contained in those myths and traditions which betray the influence
exercised upon Greece by the people of Egypt, Syria, and Asia Minor. To
confine ourselves to the plastic arts, the historian of Greek art discovers
survivals, forms and motives which had been employed in previous
centuries and earlier civilizations, in exact proportion to the accuracy of his
researches, and to the number of his elements for comparison. He also finds
that the Greeks borrowed from the same instructors those industrial
processes which, although not in themselves artistic, are among the
antecedent conditions of art; namely, metallurgy, ceramics, smith's work,
glass-making, weaving, embroidery, stone-working and carving, in a word
all those trades which seem so simple when their secrets are known, but
which, nevertheless, represent the accumulated efforts of countless
unknown inventors.
It was not only the material outfit of civilization that the Greeks borrowed
from their predecessors; they obtained, together with that alphabet which
represents the principal sounds of the voice by a few special signs, another
alphabet which has been happily named the alphabet of art, certain
necessary conventions, combinations of line, ornaments, decorative forms,
a crowd of plastic elements which they had employed in the expression of
their own ideas and sentiments. Even after Greek art had reached perfection
and was in the full enjoyment of her own individuality, we still find traces
of these early borrowings. Sometimes it is a decorative motive, like the
sphinx, the griffin, the palm-leaf, and many others, which, invented on the
banks of the Nile or the Tigris, were transported to Greece and there
preserved to be handed down to our modern ornamentist. The nearer we get
to the fountain head of Greek art, the more we are struck with these
resemblances, which are something beyond mere coincidences. The deeper
we penetrate into what is called archaism, the more numerous do those
features become which are common to oriental, especially Assyrian, art, and
that of Greece. We find analogous methods of indicating the human
skeleton, of accenting its articulations, of representing the drapery with
which the forms are covered. Greek taste had not yet so transformed the
details of ornamentation as to prevent us from recognizing the motives
which commerce had brought for its use over the waves of the Ægean or the
mountains of Asia Minor. The marks of their origin are continually visible,

and yet a practised eye can perceive that the Greeks were never satisfied,
like the Phœnicians, with merely combining in various proportions the
materials furnished by the artisans of Egypt or Assyria; the facilities of such
a soulless and indiscriminating eclecticism as that could not satisfy the
ambitions of a race that already possessed the poetry of Hesiod and Homer.
The art of Greece was profoundly original in the best sense of the word. It
was far superior to all that went before it; it alone deserved to become
classic, that is, to furnish a body of rules and laws capable of being
transmitted by teaching. In what does its superiority consist? How does its
originality show itself, and how can its existence be explained? These are
the questions which we propose to answer; but in order to arrive at a just
conclusion we must begin with the study of those nations to whom the
Greeks went to school, and of whose art they were the heirs and continuers.
We should be unable to grasp the exclusively Greek features of Greek art
did we not begin by defining the foreign elements which have taken their
part in the work, and that we can only do by going back to the civilizations
in which they were produced; we must endeavour to penetrate into the spirit
of those civilizations, to discover whence they started and how far they
progressed; we must first define their ideas of the beautiful, and then show,
by well-chosen examples, by what means and with how great a measure of
success, they realised their own conception.

We undertake this long detour in order that we may arrive in Greece
instructed by all that we have learnt on the way, and prepared to understand
and to judge; but during the whole voyage our eyes will be turned towards
Greece, as those of the traveller towards his long-desired goal. Our route
will conduct us from the shores of the Nile to those of the Euphrates and
Tigris, over the plains of Medea and Persia and Asia Minor to the shores of
Phœnicia, to Cyprus and Rhodes. But beyond the obelisks and pyramids of
Egypt, beyond the towers of Chaldæa and the domes of Nineveh, the lofty
colonnades of Persepolis, the fortresses and rock-cut tombs of Phrygia and
Lycia, beyond the huge ramparts of the cities of Syria, we shall never cease
to perceive on the horizon the sacred rock of the Athenian acropolis; we
shall see it before us, as our history of the past advances, lifting into the

azure sky the elegant severity of its marble porticoes, the majesty of those
pediments where live and breathe the gods of Homer and Phidias.
When we have crossed the threshold of the Propylæa, and have visited the
Parthenon, the Erecthæum, and the temple of the Wingless Victory; when
we have seen all Greece become covered with monuments of architecture
and sculpture, which, without rivalling those of Athens in purity of line or
finesse of execution, bear the impress of the same style and the same taste;
when we have seen Praxiteles and Scopas succeed to Phidias and
Polycletus, will it not cost us a struggle to quit the scene of so many
wonders and conclude our voyage? If we leave the Athens of Cimon, of
Pericles, and Lycurgus, for the pompous capitals of the heirs of Alexander;
if we cross the sea to visit Veii and Clusium, to describe the Etruscan
cemeteries with the fantastic magnificence of their decoration; if at last we
find ourselves in imperial Rome, among its basilicas, its baths, its
amphitheatres, and all the sumptuous evidence of its luxury, we shall now
and again turn our eyes with regret to what we have left behind; and,
although we shall endeavour to comprehend and to judge with the liberality
and largeness of taste and sympathy which is the honour of contemporary
criticism, we shall sometimes sigh for that ideal of pure and sovereign
beauty which we adored in Greece; and shall feel, now and again, the
nostalgia of the exile.

IV.

In this sketch of our plan, we have reserved no place for the art which is
called prehistoric, the art of the caverns and the lake dwellings. This
omission may surprise some of our readers, and we therefore beg to submit
for their consideration the reasons which, after grave reflection, have
induced us to refrain from retracing the first steps of human industry, from
describing the first manifestations of the plastic instinct of mankind.

We are actuated by neither indifference nor disdain. We fully appreciate the
importance of such researches, and of the results to which they have led. No
sooner had it entered into the mind of man to look for and collect the
humble remains upon which so many centuries had looked with
indifference, than they were found almost everywhere, thickly dispersed
near the surface of the earth, heaped among the bones of deer in the grottoes
for which men and animals had once contended, buried in peat marshes and
sandy shores, sometimes even sprinkled upon the surface of the fields and
country roads. Pieces of flint, bone, or horn, fashioned into instruments of
the chase, into fishhooks, and domestic utensils; shells, perforated teeth,
amber balls which were once strung upon necklaces and bracelets;
fragments of rough tissue and of skin garments; seeds and carbonized fruits;
earthen vessels made by hand and dried in the sun or simply in the open air.
In some of the cave dwellings, bones and pieces of horn have been found
upon which the figures of animals are carved with a truth and spirit which
allow their species to be at once and certainly recognized.
But none of these remains bear the slightest trace of a system of signs for
the transmission of ideas or recollections; there is nothing which suggests
writing; and, more significant still, there is a complete absence of metal. All
this is evidence that the remains in question belong to a very remote
antiquity, to a period much nearer the primitive barbarism than to the
civilization of Egypt and Chaldæa, to say nothing of that of Greece and
Rome. The comparative method, which has done so much for natural
science, has also taken these remains in hand, has attempted to classify
them and to gain from them some notion of the life led by the early human
families which manufactured them. These arms, tools, and instruments
which have been recovered from the soil of the old and cultivated nations of
Europe, have been carefully compared with similar objects still in use by
the savage races which people the far corners of the world. These
comparisons have enabled us to decide the former use of each of the objects
discovered. By collating the observations of the various travellers who have
visited the savage races in question, we have been enabled to form for
ourselves a probably truthful picture, so far as it goes, of the life and social
habits of those primitive Europeans who made use of similar tools and
weapons. And that is not all. The general character of those early periods
being established, further examination brought to light the local differences

which prevailed then as now. Thus the proneness to plastic imitation seems
to have been peculiar to a few tribes—although traces of this taste are found
elsewhere, it is nowhere so marked as among those primitive cave-dwellers
of Perigord whom Christy and Edouard Lartet have so patiently studied.
By dint of careful classification and comparison, we have been enabled to
follow the march of progress through those countless centuries whose
number will never be known to us, whose total would, perhaps, oppress our
imaginations if we knew it; we have been enabled to discover the slow steps
by which mankind raised itself from the earliest, almost shapeless, flint axe,
found with the bones of the mammoth in the quaternary alluvial deposits, to
the rich and varied equipment of "lacustrian civilization," as it has
sometimes been called. In this unlimited field, of which one side at least
must ever be lost in unfathomable obscurity, the main divisions have been
traced; the stone age has been defined and divided into the palæolithic and
neolithic epochs; the age of bronze followed, and then came the iron age.
With the appearance of the former metal the tribes of northern and central
Europe established a connection with the civilized races which surrounded
the Mediterranean, and with iron we are in the full classic period.
We can never be too grateful for the persevering labours of those who have
carried on these researches in every corner of Europe; their deserts are all
the greater from the fact that they could never count upon those agreeable
surprises which come now and then to reward excavators on the sites of
ancient and historic cities. Their chances are small of finding those objects
of art which, by their beauty and elegance, repay any amount of toil and
expense. The remains which they bring to light have little to say to our
æsthetic perceptions; they repeat a few types with an extreme monotony;
but, on the other hand, they carry our thoughts back to a point far nearer the
cradle of our race than the myths of early history or even the monumental
remains of Egypt and Chaldæa. They cast some slight illumination upon
those distant ages of which humanity has preserved no recollection. They
people with unknown multitudes those remote epochs into which scientific
curiosity had, but yesterday, no desire to penetrate. There can be in all this
no real question of chronology, but when from the sands of Abbeville or the
caverns of Perigord we dig up the first flint implements or those fragments
of bone, of ivory, of reindeer horn, which have preserved to us the first
attempts made by man to copy the outlines of living beings, it takes us far

beyond those days of which our only knowledge comes from vague
tradition, and still farther beyond those centuries which saw the first
struggling dawn of history.

We have, then, decided not to embark upon these questions of prehistoric
art, because, as the title which we have chosen declares, we propose to
write a history, and the word history, when the human race is in question,
implies established relations between certain groups of facts and certain
portions of time, measured at least with something approaching to probable
truth.
We do not yet possess, probably we shall never possess, any means of
estimating even within five or six thousand years, the actual duration of the
stone age. From all analogies progress must have been, in the beginning,
exceedingly slow; like that of a falling body, the rapidity of industrial
progress is continually accelerating. This acceleration is not of course quite
regular; the phenomena of social life are too complex, the forces at work
are too numerous and sometimes too contrary to allow us to express it by
the mathematical formula which may be applied to movement in the
physical world; but on the whole this law of constantly accelerated progress
holds good, as indeed may be historically proved. So long as man had to do
without metals, each generation, in all probability, added but little to the
discoveries of that which preceded it; most likely after each happy effort
many generations succeeded one another without any further attempt to
advance. Ever since they have been under our observation, the savage races
of the world have been practically stationary except where European
commerce has profoundly modified the conditions of their lives. It is
probable, therefore, that more centuries rolled away between the first
chipped flints and the well polished weapons which succeeded them than
between the latter and the earliest use of bronze. But we cannot prove that it
was so, nor satisfy those whom probability and a specious hypothesis will
not content. Where neither written evidence nor oral tradition exist there
can be little question of historic order. The remains of the stone age are not
calculated to dissipate the silence which enshrouds those centuries. In the
art of a civilized people we find their successive modes of feeling and

thought interpreted by expressive forms; we may even attempt under all
reserve to sketch their history with the sole aid of their plastic remains. The
chances of error would of course be numerous; but yet if all other materials
had, unhappily, failed us, the attempt would have been well worth making.
The more ancient portions of our prehistoric collections do not offer the
same opportunities; they are too simple and too little varied. The primitive
savage who moulded matter to his will with great and painful difficulty,
could impress upon it nothing but those gross instincts which are common
to man and beast; we can discover nothing from his works, beyond the
means which he employed in his struggles with his enemies, and in his
never-ending effort to procure food for himself.
The word history cannot then be pronounced in connection with these
remote periods, nor can their remains be looked upon in any sense as works
of art. Art commences for us with man's first attempts to impress upon
matter some form which should be the expression of a sentiment or of an
idea. The want of skill shown in these attempts is beside the question; the
mere desire on the part of the workman renders him an artist. The most
hideous and disgusting of those idols in stone or terra-cotta which are found
in the islands of the Greek Archipelago, at Mycenæ and in Bœotia, idols
which represent, as we believe, the great goddess mother whose worship the
Phœnicians taught to the Greeks, are works of art; but we are unable to give
that title to the axes and arrowheads, the harpoons and fish-hooks, the
knives, the pins, the needles, the crowds of various utensils which we see in
the glass cases of a pre-historic museum; all this, interesting though it be to
those who wish to study the history of labour, is nothing but an industry,
and a rudimentary industry, which is content with supplying the simplest
wants. It is not until we reach the sculptures of the cave-dwellings that we
find the first germs of artistic effort, and in truth, man did not cut the figures
of animals upon the handles of his tools and upon those objects which have
been called, perhaps a little recklessly, batons of command, for any
utilitarian purpose; it was to give himself pleasure, it was because he found
true æsthetic enjoyment in copying and interpreting living nature. Art was
born, we may acknowledge, with those first attempts at the representation
of life, and it might fairly be expected that our history should commence
with them, were it not that they offer no sequence, no starting point for any
continuous movement like that which, beginning in Egypt and Chaldæa,

was prosecuted in Greece and led in time to such high developments; even
its competent students confess that the art of the cave-men was an isolated
episode without fruition or consequence. Specimens of this art are found at
but a few points of the vast surface over which the vestiges of primitive
man are spread, and neither in the neolithic age, nor even in that of bronze
—both far in advance in other ways of that of the cave-dwellings—does it
ever seem to have entered into the mind of man to copy the types offered to
him by the organic world, still less those of mankind, which, however, had
long before been roughly figured in one or two caves in the Dordogne.[30]
Towards the close of the prehistoric age the taste for ornament becomes
very marked, but that ornament is always of the kind which we call
geometric. Hardly a single decorative motive is taken from the vegetable
world. Like the rude efforts of the cave-men, this decoration proves that
those by whom it was imagined and who frequently employed it with such
happy results, were not contented with bare utility, but, so far as they could,
sought after beauty. A secret instinct worked in them and inspired them with
the desire to give some appearance of elegance to the objects which they
had in daily use. This geometrical style of decoration prevailed all over
central Europe until, in the first place, the movements of commerce with
Greece and Etruria, and secondly the Roman conquest, introduced the
methods of classic art.
From what we have said, it will be seen that we could not have passed over
in silence this system of ornamentation; but we shall again find it in our
path when we come to treat of that prehistoric Greece which preceded by
perhaps two or three centuries the Greece of Homer. By the help of the
discoveries which have been lately made in the Troad, at Mycenæ, and in
other ancient sites, we shall study the works produced by the ancestors of
the Greeks before they went to school to the nations of the East. But even
with the discoveries which carry us farthest back, we only reach the end of
the period in question, when maritime commerce had already brought to the
islands and the mainland of Greece objects of Egyptian, Phœnician or
Chaldaic manufacture, but before those objects were sufficiently numerous
or the relations with those countries sufficiently intimate to produce any
great effect upon the habits of native workmen. Among the deposits to
which we have alluded, it is generally possible to distinguish those works
which are of foreign origin; and such works excluded, it is easy to form a

sufficiently accurate general idea of the art practised by the forefathers of
the historic Greeks—by the Pelasgians, to use a conventional term. So long
as it was left to its own inspiration, Pelasgic art did not differ, in its general
characteristics, from that of the various peoples spread over the continent of
Europe, and still practised for centuries after the dawn of Greek civilization
in the great plains to the north of the Alps and the Danube. Its guiding spirit
and its motives are similar. There is the same richness, or rather the same
poverty, the same combinations produced by a small number of never-
changing linear elements. One would say that from the shores of the great
ocean and the Baltic to those of the Mediterranean, all the workmen
laboured for the same masters. Struck by this resemblance, or rather
uniformity, one of the most eminent of German archæologists, Herr Conze,
has proposed that this kind of ornament shall be called Indo-European; he
sees, in the universality of the system, a feature common to all branches of
the Aryan race, a special characteristic which may serve to distinguish it
from the Semites.
Objections have been brought against this doctrine of which Herr Conze
himself has recognized the gravity; by numerous examples taken from the
art of nations which do not belong to the Aryan family, it has been shown
that, human nature being the same everywhere, all those peoples whose
development has been normal, neither interrupted nor accelerated by
external causes, have, at some period of their lives, turned to the style in
question for the decoration of their weapons, of their earthenware, their
furniture, their apparel and their personal ornaments. The less richly
endowed among them would have stopped at that point but for the example
of their neighbours, who stirred them on to new attempts and further
progress; others advanced without impulse from other sources than their
own instincts, they reproduced vegetable and animal forms, and finally the
human figure in all its beauty and nobility. It was the same with letters.
Among the nations which have made a name in history how few there are
that possess a true literature, a poetry at once inspired and critical! All
however, under one form or another, have a popular poetry which is more
or less varied and expressive.
The trace of this earliest spontaneous effort, of this first naïve product of the
imagination, never entirely disappears in a literature which is life-like and
sincere; it is found even in the most perfect works of its classic period. In

the same way the most advanced and refined forms of art draw a part of
their motives and effects from geometrical decoration. This style therefore
should be studied both for its principle and for the resources of which it
disposes, but as we shall have to notice it when we treat of Greece, it seems
to us better to adjourn till then any discussion of its merits. Both in Greece
and Italy approximate dates can be given to the monuments which it
ornaments, they can be placed in their proper historical position, which is
by no means the case with the objects gleaned throughout central Europe.

There is another consideration of still greater importance; the artistic
remains of Greece form an almost unbroken series, from the humble and
timid attempts of nascent sculpture to the brilliant masterpieces of Phidias
and Polycletus, and show the steps by which the artist succeeds in passing
from one style to another, from curves and interlacing lines, from all mere
abstract combinations, to the imitation of nature, to the representation of
bodies which breathe, feel, and speak, which move and struggle. Elsewhere
force has either been wanting for this development, or evidence of the
transition has escaped our researches. Nothing can be much more imperfect
or more conventional than the figures which we find upon some of the
painted vases from Mycenæ and Cyprus,[31] upon which the workman's
hand, accustomed to straight lines and circles, or segments of circles, has
succeeded in suggesting by those means the figures of birds and fighting
men. Nothing could be farther from the subtlety and variety of the contours
presented by living organisms. But in spite of all this, art was born with the
awakening of this desire to reproduce the beauty and mobility of living
forms. All that had preceded it was but the vague murmuring of a wish
which had not yet become self conscious; but, at last the intellect divined
the use to which it might be put, and guessed at the part which might be
played by the plastic instincts with which it felt itself endowed. All the rest
depended upon natural gifts, upon time and circumstance; the march along
the road of progress began, and although its rapidity was intermittent, it was
certain to arrive, if not always at the production of masterpieces of divine
beauty, at least at sufficient competence in painting and modelling to
transmit the types of a race and the images of its gods to posterity.

The student of plastic art finds in the remains of prehistoric times rather a
tendency to the creation of art, than art itself; by postponing our study of
this tendency until we come to investigate the origin of Greek and Italian
art, we are enabled to avoid all excursion beyond the limits implied by our
title, beyond that which is generally called antiquity. The conventional
meaning of this word embraces neither the primitive savages who chipped
the first flint, nor the cave-men, but it calls up before our eyes the brilliant
cities of northern Africa and hither-Asia, of Greece and Italy, with which
our school-days have made us familiar; it reminds us of those nations
whose stories we learnt from the sacred and profane authors whose works
we read in our youth; and our thoughts revert to their grandiose monuments
of architecture and sculpture, to their masterpieces of poetry and eloquence,
to those great works of literature in which we took our first lessons in the
art of writing and speaking. Behind all these images and associations the
intelligence of an educated man tells him—and the discoveries of science
every day make the fact more certain—that in the ancient as in the modern
world, the nations which figure upon the stage of history were not isolated;
they each had neighbours who influenced them, or whom they influenced,
by commerce or conquest; each also received something from its
predecessors, and in turn transmitted the results of its labour to those which
came after it; in a word, the work of civilization was continuous and
universal. The nations which, for three or four thousand years, were
grouped round the basin of the Mediterranean, belonged to one historical
system; to those who take a wide grasp of facts they are but the members
and organs of one great body, in which the nervous centres, the sources of
life, of movement and of thought, slowly gravitated with the effluxion of
time from the east to the west, from Memphis and Babylon to Athens and
Rome.
As for the populations which, long before the opening of this period and
during the whole of its duration, lived on the north of the Danube, the Alps,
and the Pyrenees, they do not belong to the same system; they were
attached to it by the Roman conquest, but at a very late period; not long,
indeed, before the triumph of Christianity, the invasion of the barbarians,
and the fall of the empire, led to the dissolution of the antique system and
the substitution for it, after centuries of confusion and violence, of the wider
and more comprehensive civilization of modern Europe, a civilization

which was destined to cross every sea and to spread itself over the whole
surface of the globe. As soon as the victories of the Roman legions, and the
construction of the great roads which united Rome with her most distant
provinces, had brought them into constant communication with the
maritime cities of the Mediterranean, these barbaric nations, who had
neither history, nor letters, nor expressive art, received them from their
conquerors, whose very language they all, or nearly all, adopted; and for all
this they gave practically nothing in return. Elsewhere, the old world had
almost finished its task. It had exhausted every form in which those ideas
and beliefs could be clothed which it had kept unchanged, or little changed,
for millenium after millenium. The old world employed such force and
vitality as remained to it in giving birth to the new, to that religion which
has led to the foundation of our modern social and political systems. These
also were to have their modes of expression, rich and sonorous enough, but
dominated by analysis; they were to have arts and literatures, which have
given expression to far more complex ideas than those of antiquity. The
Celts and Teutons, the Slavs and Scandinavians, all those tribes which the
Romans called barbarous, have, in spite of the apparent poverty of their
share, made an important contribution to the civilization into which they
plunged at so late a period, when they did so much to provide a foundation
for those modes of thought and feeling which are only to be found in
modern society.
These races do not belong, then, to what we call antiquity. They are
separated from it by many things; they have no history, they have neither
literary and scientific culture nor anything that deserves the name of art.
Hidden behind a thick curtain of mountains and forests, sprinkled over vast
regions where no towns existed, they remained in their isolation for
thousands of years, furnishing to civilization nothing but a few rough
materials which they themselves knew not how to use; they took no part in
the work which, throughout those ages, was being prosecuted in the great
basin of the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean, in that accumulation of
inventions and creations which, fixed and preserved by writing and realized
by art, form the common patrimony of the most civilized portion of the
human species. When, at a late hour, these nations entered upon the scene, it
was as disturbers and destroyers,—and although they helped to found
modern society, they produced none of those elements left to us by antiquity

and preserved for us by that Rome in whose hands the heritage of Greece
was concentrated.

V.

We have different, but equally valid, reasons for leaving that which is called
the far East—India, China, and Japan—outside the limit of our studies.
Those rich and populous countries have, doubtless, a civilization which
stretches back nearly as far as that of Egypt and Assyria, a civilization
which has produced works both of fine and of industrial art which in many
respects equalled those of the nations with which we are now occupied. In
all those countries there are buildings which impress by their mass and by
the marvellous delicacy of their ornamentation, sculptures of a singular
freedom and power, and decorative painting which charms by its skilful use
of brilliant colour as well as by the facility and inventive fancy of its design.
The representation of the human figure has never reached the purity of line
or nobility of expression of a Greek statue, but, on the other hand, the
science of decoration has never been carried farther than by the wood-
carvers, weavers and embroiderers of Hindostan, and the potters of China
and Japan.
These styles have their fanatical admirers who see nothing but their brilliant
qualities; they have also their detractors, or at least their severe judges, who
are chiefly struck by their shortcomings, but no one attempts to deny that
each of those nations possesses an art which is always original, and
sometimes of great and rare power. Why then, it may be asked, do we
refuse to comprehend the more ancient monuments of India and China,
those which by their age belong to the centuries with which we are
concerned, in this work? Our motives may be easily divined.
We might allege our incompetence for such an extended task, which would
be enough to occupy several lives. But we have a still more decisive reason.
Neither Aryan India nor Turanian China belongs to the antiquity which we

have defined, and as for Indo-China and Japan they are but annexes to those
two great nations; religion, written characters, the industrial and plastic arts
—all came to them from one or the other of those two great centres of
civilization.
So far as China is concerned no doubt or hesitation is possible. Down
almost to our own days China and its satellites had no dealings with the
western group of nations. It is a human family which has lived in voluntary
isolation from the rest of its species. It is separated from western mankind
by the largest of the continents, by deserts, by the highest mountains in the
world, by seas once impassable, finally, by that contempt and hatred of
everything foreign which such conditions of existence are calculated to
engender. In the course of her long and laborious existence China has
invented many things. She was the first to discover several of those
instruments and processes which, in the hands of Europeans, have, in a few
centuries, changed the face of the world; not only did she fail to make good
use of her inventions, she guarded them so closely that the West had to
invent them anew. We may cite printing as an example; nearly two hundred
years before our era the Chinese printed with blocks of wood. On the other
hand, every useful discovery made in the period and by the group of nations
to whom we mean to confine our attention, from the time of Menes and
Ourkham, the first historic kings of Egypt and Chaldæa, to the latest of the
Roman Emperors, has been turned to the profit of others than its authors,
and forms, so to speak, part of the public wealth. A single alphabet, that
which the Phœnicians extracted from one of the forms of Egyptian writing,
made the tour of the Mediterranean, and served all the nations of the ancient
world in turn for preserving their thoughts and the idiom of their language.
A system of numerals, of weights and measures, was invented in Babylon
and travelled across Western Asia to be adopted by the Greeks, and, through
the mediation of the Greek astronomers and geographers, has given us the
sexagesimal division which we still employ for the partition of a
circumference into degrees, minutes and seconds.
From this point of view, then, there is a profound difference between Egypt
or Chaldæa, and China. The most remote epochs in the history of China do
not belong to antiquity as we have defined the term. Without knowing it or
wishing it, all those nations included in our plan laboured for their
neighbours and for their successors. Read as a whole, their history proves to

us that they each played a part in the gradual elaboration of civilized life
which was absolutely necessary to the total result. But when China is in
question our impression is very different, our intellects are quite equal to
imagining what the world would have been like had that Empire been
absolutely destroyed centuries ago, with all its art, literature, and material
wealth. Rightly or wrongly, we should not expect such a catastrophe to have
had any great effect upon civilization; we should have been the poorer by a
few beautiful plates and vases, and should have had to do without tea, and
that would have been the sum of our loss.

The case of India is different. Less remote than China, bathed by an ocean
which bore the fleets of Egypt, Chaldæa, Persia, Greece and Rome, she was
never beyond the reach of the western nations. The Assyrians, the Persians,
and the Greeks carried their arms into the basin of the Indus, some portions
of which were annexed for a time to those Empires which had their centre
in the valley of the Euphrates and stretched westwards as far as the
Mediterranean. There was a continuous coming and going of caravans
across the plateau of Iran and the deserts which lie between it and the oases
of Bactriana, Aria, and Arachosia, and through the passes which lead down
to what is now called the Punjab; between the ports of the Arabian and
Persian gulfs and those of the lower Indus and the Malabar coast, a
continual commercial movement went on which, though fluctuating with
time, was never entirely interrupted. From the latter regions western Asia
drew her supplies of aromatic spices, of metals, of precious woods, of
jewels, and other treasures, all of which came mainly by the sea route.
All this, however, was but the supply of the raw material for Egyptian,
Assyrian, and Phœnician industries. There is no evidence that up to the very
last days of antique civilization the inhabitants of Hindostan with all their
depths and originality of thought ever exercised such influence upon their
neighbours as could have made itself felt as far as Greece. The grand lyric
poetry of the Vedas, the epics and dramas of the following epoch, the
religious and philosophical speculations, those learned grammatical
analyses which are now admired by philologists, all the rich and brilliant
intellectual development of a race akin to the Greeks and in many ways no

less richly endowed, remained shut up in that basin of the Ganges into
which no stranger penetrated until the time of the Mohammedan conquest.
Neither Egyptians, Arabs nor Phœnicians reached the true centres of
Hindoo civilization; they merely visited those sea-board towns where the
mixed population was more occupied with commerce than with intellectual
pursuits. The conquerors previous to Alexander did no more than reach the
gates of India and reconnoitre its approaches, while Alexander himself
failed to penetrate beyond the vestibule.
Let us suppose that the career of the Macedonian hero had not been cut
short by the fatigues and terrors of his soldiers. So far as we can judge from
what Megasthenes tells us of Palibothra, the capital of Kalaçoka, the most
powerful sovereign in the valley of the Ganges in the time of Seleucus
Nicator, the Greeks would not, even in that favoured region, have found
buildings which they could have studied with any profit, either for their
plan, construction, or decoration. Recent researches have proved
Megasthenes to be an intelligent observer and an accurate narrator, and he
tells us that in the richest parts of the country the Hindoos of his time had
nothing better than wooden houses, or huts of pisè or rough concrete. The
palace of the sovereign, at Palibothra, impressed the traveller by its
situation, its great extent, and the richness of its apartments. It was built
upon an artificial, terraced mound, in the midst of a vast garden. It was
composed of a series of buildings surrounded by porticos, which contained
large reception halls separated from one another by courtyards in which
peacocks and tame panthers wandered at will. The columns of the principal
saloons were gilt. The general aspect was very imposing. The arrangements
seem to have had much in common with those of the Assyrian and Persian
palaces. But there was one capital distinction between the two; at Palibothra
the residence of the sovereign, like those of his subjects, was built of wood.
With its commanding position, and the fine masses of verdure with which it
was surrounded, it must have produced a happy and picturesque effect, but,
after all, it was little more than a collection of kiosques. Architecture,
worthy of the name, began with the employment of those solid and durable
materials which defend themselves against destruction by their weight and
constructive repose.
The other arts could not have been much more advanced. Ignorant as they
were of the working of stone for building, these people can hardly have

been sculptors, and as to their painting, we have no information. There is,
moreover, no allusion to works of painting or sculpture in their epics and
dramas, there are none of those descriptions of pictures and statues which,
in the writings of the Greek poets and dramatists, show us that the
development of the plastic arts followed closely upon that of poetry. This
difference between the two races may perhaps be explained by the
opposition between their religions and, consequently, their poetry. In giving
to their gods the forms and features of men, the oldest of the Greek singers
sketched in advance the figures to be afterwards created by their painters
and sculptors. Homer furnished the sketch from which Phidias took his type
of the Olympian Jupiter. It was not so with the Vedic hymns. In them the
persons of the gods had neither consistence nor tangibility. They are
distinguished now by one set of qualities and again by another; each of the
immortals who sat down to the banquet on Olympus, had his or her own
personal physiognomy, described by poets and interpreted by artists, but it
was not so with the Hindoo deities. The Hindoo genius had none of the
Greek faculty for clear and well-defined imagery; it betrays a certain
vagueness and want of definition which is not to be combined with a
complete aptitude for the arts of design. It is the business of these arts to
render ideas by forms, and a well marked limit is the essence of form,
which is beautiful and expressive in proportion as its contours are clearly
and accurately drawn.
Indian art then, for the reasons which we have given, and others which are
unknown, was only in its cradle in the time of Alexander, while the artists
of Greece were in full possession of all their powers; they had already
produced inimitable master-pieces in each of the great divisions of art, and
yet their creative force was far from being exhausted. It was the age of
Lysippus and Apelles; of those great architects who, in the temples of Asia
Minor, renewed the youth of the Ionic order by their bold and ingenious
innovations. Under such conditions, what would the effect have been, had
these two forms of civilization entered into close relations with each other?
In all probability the result would have been similar to that which ensued
when the ancestors of the Greeks began to deal with the more civilized
Phœnicians and the people of Asia Minor. But in the case of the Hindoos, as
we have said, the disciples had a less, instead of a greater, aptitude for the
plastic arts than their teachers, and, moreover, the contact between the two

was never complete nor was it of long duration. The only frontier upon
which the interchange of idea was frequent and continuous was the north-
west, which divided India from that Bactrian kingdom of which we know
little more than the mere names of its princes and the date of its fall. But
before the end of the second century B.C. this outpost of Hellenism had
fallen before the attacks of those barbarians whom we call the Saci. In such
an isolated position it could not long hope to maintain itself, especially after
the rise of the Parthian monarchy had separated it from the empire of the
Seleucidæ. Its existence must always have been precarious, and the mere
fact that it did not succumb until the year 136 B.C. is enough to prove that
several of its sovereigns must have been remarkable men. Should their
annals ever be discovered they would probably form one of the strangest
and most interesting episodes in the history of the Greek race.
Through the obscurity in which all the details are enveloped we can clearly
perceive that those princes were men of taste. They were, as was natural,
attached to the literature and the arts which reminded them of their superior
origin and of that distant fatherland with which year after year it became
more difficult to communicate. Although they were obliged, in order to
defend themselves against so many enemies, to employ those mercenary
soldiers, Athenians, Thebans, Spartans and Cretans, which then overran
Asia, and to pay them dearly for their services, they also called skilful
artists to their court and kept them there at great expense; the beautiful
coins which have preserved their images down to our day are evidence of
this, the decoration of their cities, of their temples, and of their palaces must
have been in keeping with these; everywhere no doubt were Corinthian and
Ionic buildings, statues of the Greek gods and heroes mixed with those
portraits and historic groups which had been multiplied by the scholars of
Lysippus, wall paintings, and perhaps some of those easel pictures signed
by famous masters, for which the heirs of Alexander were such keen
competitors. Artisans, who had followed the Greek armies in their march
towards the East with the object of supplying the wants of any colonies
which might be established in those distant regions, reproduced upon their
vases and in their terra-cotta figures the motives of the painting, the
sculpture, and the architecture which they left behind; goldsmiths, jewellers
and armourers cut, chased, and stamped them in metal. And it was not only
the Greek colonists who employed their skill. Like the Scythian tribes

among whom the Greek cities of the Euxine were planted, the nations to the
north of India were astonished and delighted by the elegance of their
ornament and the variety of its forms. They imported from Bactriana these
products of an art which was wanting to them, and soon set themselves,
with the help perhaps of foreign artists settled among them, to imitate
Grecian design in the courts of the Indian rajahs.
That this was so is proved by those coins which bear on their reverse such
Hindoo symbols as Siva with his bull, and on their obverse Greek
inscriptions, and by the remains of what is now called Græco-Buddhic art,
an art which seems to have flourished in the upper valley of the Indus in the
third or second century before our era. These remains, formerly much
neglected, are now attracting much attention. They have been carefully
studied and described by Cunningham[32]; Dr. Curtius has described them
and published reproductions of the most curious among them.[33] They are
found in the north of the Punjab upon a few ancient sites where excavations
have been made. Some of them have been transported to Europe in the
collection of Dr. Leitner, while others remain in the museums of Peshawur,
Lahore, and Calcutta.[34] In those sacred buildings which have been
examined the plan of the Greek temple has not been adopted, but the
isolated members of Greek architecture and the most characteristic details
of its ornament are everywhere made use of. It is the same with the
sculpture; in the selection of types, in the arrangement of drapery, in the
design, there is the same mixture of Greek taste with that of India, of
elements borrowed from foreign, and those drawn from the national,
beliefs. The helmeted Athené and Helios in his quadriga figure by the side
of Buddha.
Traces of the same influence are to be found in a less marked degree in
other parts of India. Near the mouth of the Indus and upon the Malabar
coast, the native sculptors and architects were able to obtain more than one
useful suggestion, more than one precious hint as to their technique, from
the works of art brought in the ships of maritime traders. It is even possible
that Greek workmen may thus have been introduced into seaport towns, and
there employed upon the decoration of palaces and temples. However this
may be it is incontestable that all the important sacred edifices of that
region, whether stone-built or carved in the living rock, date from a period

more recent than that of Alexander, and that most of them show details
which imply acquaintance with Greek architectural forms and their
imitation. We are thus on all hands forced to this conclusion: that, in the
domain of the plastic arts, Greece owed nothing to India, with which she
made acquaintance very late and at a period when she had no need to take
lessons from others. That, moreover, India had little or nothing to give; that
her arts were not developed till after her early relations with Greece, and it
would even seem that her first stimulus was derived from the models which
Greece put within her reach.

From all this it will be seen that we need not go as far as China, or even as
the Punjab, in order to explain the origin of Greek art. During the period
with which we are concerned, China might as well have been in the planet
Saturn for all she had to do with the ancient world, and we need refer to her
no more, except now and then perhaps for purposes of illustration. We
cannot treat India quite in the same fashion, because there were, as we have
said, certain points of contact and reciprocal influences at work between her
and the group of nations we are about to treat. But as Greece borrowed
nothing from India, at least in the matter of art, the little which we shall
have to say of the products of the Hindoos will not be connected with our
discussion of the origin of Greek art. A curious though hardly an important
episode in history, is seen in the reaction by which the Greek genius, when
arrived at maturity, threw itself at the command of Alexander upon that East
from which it had received its first lessons.
None of those philosophical discussions to which Ottfried Müller and Stark
thought it necessary to give so large a place will be found in our
introduction; both of those authors devoted a long chapter to the definition
of art and its principal manifestations. Stark went so far as to discuss, with
much patience and ingenuity, the definitions of art and of its essential forms
which had been given by previous writers. We shall attempt nothing of the
kind; we have not undertaken a work of criticism or æsthetic demonstration.
We wish to build up the history of ancient civilization through the study,
description, and comparison of its plastic remains.

Neither do we feel sure that, in such a question as this, definitions do not
lead to confusion rather than to clearness. When short, they are vague and
obscure, and only acquire precision through distinctions and developments
which have to be discussed at length; and again they generally lead, on one
hand or the other, either to objections or reservations. Omnis definitio in
jure periculosa, says an old maxim, which is certainly true in matters of art.
Why should we attempt, unless we are obliged, to define terms which
awake sufficiently clear and distinct ideas in all cultivated minds? No
satisfactory definition has ever been given of the word architecture, and yet,
when we use it, every one knows what we mean. Architecture, sculpture,
painting, each of these sounds has a precise meaning for those to whom our
work is addressed, and we may say the same of certain other expressions,
such as industrial arts, decoration, style, historical painting, genre painting,
landscape painting, which will often be found in our pages. We must refer
those who want definitions of these phrases to the Grammaire des Arts du
Dessin of M. Charles Blanc and kindred works. It will suffice for us that
these words should be taken in the ordinary meaning which they bear in the
conversation of cultivated men. If our ideas of art and its different branches
diverge here and there from those which are commonly received, those
divergencies will become evident, and will be discussed and justified to the
best of our ability as the work proceeds. But on all occasions we shall do
our best to avoid the abstract and pedantic terminology which makes
Ottfried Müller's first chapter so difficult to read.

We have now declared the aim of our work and the route which we propose
to follow. In order to increase our chances of success, I have sought and
obtained the collaboration of M. Charles Chipiez, whose special knowledge
is well calculated to neutralise my own deficiencies. To his Histoire critique
des Origines et de la Formation des Ordres grecques, was awarded, in
1877, one of the highest prizes of the Académie des Inscriptions, and in the
Salons of 1878 and 1879 he confirmed his double reputation as a skilful
draughtsman and a learned theorist; his Essais de Restoration d'un Temple
grecque hypèthre, et des tours à étages de la Chaldée, was much noticed
and discussed by connoisseurs. It would not be fitting, however, to praise it

here. I must confine myself to saying how fortunate I am in having obtained
a help which I have found more helpful, more single-minded, more
complete, than I had dared to hope for. In all that has to do with
architecture, I have not written a line until after consulting M. Chipiez upon
all technical points. He has also taken an active part in the revision of the
text of certain chapters. As for the plates and illustrations in the text, we
have together chosen the objects to be represented, and M. Chipiez, as a
professional man and able draughtsman, has personally superintended the
execution of the drawings. It remains for me to explain the rôle which we
have assigned to our illustrations.

VI.

In the single edition of his great work which appeared during his own
lifetime, Winckelmann inserted but a small number of illustrations, and
those for ornament rather than for instruction. One of his translators, M.
Huber, tells us that their execution gave great dissatisfaction to the author.
[35]
In our days, on the other hand, those who undertake a work of this kind
make use of the great progress which has taken place in engraving and
typography, to insert numerous figures in their text, to which they offer an
indispensable and animated commentary. Without their help many
descriptions and observations might remain unnecessarily obscure and
doubtful. When forms are to be defined and compared, mere words, in
whatever language spoken or written, can never suffice.
With well chosen phrases we may awake the recollections of others, and
give renewed life to any impression which they may have received from
some striking natural phenomenon or some fine work of art. Their
imaginations will call up for a moment some landscape, picture, or statue
which has formerly charmed them. But if we wish to explain the
complicated plan of some great building, its design and its proportions, the
slightest sketch will be of more use than the longest and most minute
descriptions. So it will, if we wish to make clear the characteristics which

distinguish one style from another, the Assyrian from the Egyptian, the
archaic Greek style from that of the Phidian epoch or of the decadence, an
Ionic column from the Erechtheum from one of the same order treated by a
Roman architect. Between the contour of a figure from a Memphite bas-
relief and that of one from Nineveh, what difference is there? A tenth of an
inch more or less, a slight difference in the sweep of a line in order to mark
more strongly the junction of the thigh and the knee. If we placed three
nude torsos side by side, one of the sixth century, another of the fifth
century, and the third of the time of Hadrian, a practised eye would at once
assign its true date to each, in accordance with the manner in which the
skeleton was indicated under the flesh, and the muscles drawn over it and
attached to it. Supposing that the same model had served all three artists, it
would show in the one case a lively sentiment of form combined with some
dryness and rigidity; in another a freer, larger, and more subtle treatment,
and in the third a want of vigour and firmness: but it would be difficult to
give by words a clear idea of what caused the difference. Between the
contour which satisfies us and that which does not there is hardly the
difference of a hair; by leaning a little harder with the chisel the aspect of
the one surface might have been made identical with the other. By its
double astragali, by the fine chiselling of its gorgerin, by the elegant curve
which unites the two volutes, and by the general delicacy of its ornament, a
capital from the Erechtheum is distinguished above a Roman Ionic capital;
it is at once finer in design and richer in ornamentation: by the side of it a
capital from the theatre of Marcellus or the Coliseum would look mean and
poor.
The whole history of art consists of the succession of subtle changes like
these, and it would be impossible to convey them to the reader by the
utmost precision of technical language or the most brilliant and life-like
descriptions. The best thing that can be done is to make one's remarks in the
presence of the statues, pictures and buildings concerned. But it is rarely
that we find ourselves in such favourable conditions for teaching and
explaining our ideas. But, in default of the objects themselves, we may at
least give the most faithful images of them which can be obtained, and that
we shall attempt to do throughout the course of this history.
We shall, then, give a large number of figures, in which absolute accuracy
and justice of proportion will be aimed at rather than picturesque effects. It

is not very long since, in collections of drawings from antique remains, they
were all presented under one aspect, so far as the subtleties of style were
concerned. The hand of the engraver spread a technical uniformity over
them all in which differences of school and date disappeared, just as the
delicate carvings and coloured ornament of the middle ages and the
renaissance, which gave to each building an individuality of its own, were
reduced to dull monotony by the undiscriminating brush of the
whitewasher. It seemed to the artist natural enough to clothe the monuments
of the past in the style of his own day—and it required much less care than
would have been needed for the successful expression of all the diversities
of style in his models. We have now, however, grown more exacting. We
demand from the draughtsman who pretends to interpret a work of art the
same devotion and the same self-sacrifice as from the writer who is charged
with the translation of a work of literature from one language into another
—we require him to forget himself, so that we may say of him, as the Latin
poet says of his Proteus:

"Omnia transformat sese in miracula rerum."

We require him to change his style with every change of subject, to copy the
gesture, the accent, and even the faults of his model; to be Chinese in China,
Greek in Greece, and Tuscan when he takes us to Siena or Florence. But we
have indicated an ideal which is not often reached. Every one of us has his
preferences and natural affinities, every artist his own methods and personal
modes of thought. One will be conspicuous for his interpretation of the
nobility and purity of the antique, another for his treatment of oriental art or
of the elegance of our eighteenth century. But the mere enunciation of the
principle is of value, for a great effect follows the praise which those who
treat their model with scrupulous and intelligent respect are sure to obtain,
and the blame to which they who are less conscientious expose themselves.
Fidelity in interpretation is, in fact, the honesty of the draughtsman; it may
become, if carried to a great height, his honour, and even his glory. So far as
we are concerned, we demand it from all those who are associated with us in
this task; and, so far as existing methods will allow, we shall see that we
obtain it. Unless our illustrations had that merit they would obscure the text
instead of making it more comprehensible. Our readers would search in vain
for the features and characteristics to which we might call their attention, and
many of our remarks and theories would become difficult to understand. We
should be in the same position as an incompetent barrister who has made a
bad choice of witnesses; witnesses who, when in the box, prove either to
know nothing or to know only facts which tell against the party who has
called them.
Our aim in choosing our illustrations will be to place before our readers good
reproductions of most of the objects which are discussed in our text. We
shall, of course, be unable to figure everything that is of interest, but we can
at least ensure that those figures which we give shall each be interesting in
some particular or another. So far as possible, we shall select for illustration
such objects as have not previously been reproduced, or have been ill
reproduced, or have been figured in works which are difficult of access. We
shall sometimes, of course, find it necessary to reproduce some famous statue
or some building which is familiar to most people; but even then we shall
endeavour to give renewed interest to their beauties by displaying them under
some fresh aspect and by increased care in the delineation of their forms.

Views in perspective, of which we shall make frequent use, give the general
aspect of buildings with much greater truth and completeness than a mere
plan, or a picturesque sketch of ruinous remains, or even than an elevation.
Most of the more important perspectives and restorations due to the learned
pencil of M. Chipiez will be given in plates separate from the text, as well as
the most curious or significant of the works in sculpture or painting to which
we shall have to refer. Some of these plates will be coloured. But the majority
of our illustrations will consist of engravings upon zinc and wood, which will
not, we hope, fall short of their more elaborate companions in honesty and
fidelity.

From the earliest Egyptian dynasties and from fabled Chaldæa to imperial
Rome, from the Pyramids and the Tower of Babel to the Coliseum, from the
Statue of Chephren and the bas-reliefs of Shalmaneser III, to the busts of the
Cæsars, from the painted decorations of the tomb of Ti, and the enamelled
bricks of Nineveh to the wall-paintings of Pompeii, we shall review in due
succession all the forms which the great nations of antiquity made use of to
express their beliefs, to give shape to their ideas, to satisfy their instincts for
luxury and their taste for beauty, to lodge their gods and their kings, and to
transmit their own likenesses to posterity.
We propose to trace and explain the origin of, and to describe, without
æsthetic dissertations or excessive use of technical terms, those processes
which imply the practice of art; the creation and descent of forms; the
continual changes, sometimes slight and sometimes great, which they
underwent in passing from one people to another, until, among the Greeks,
they arrived at the most happy and complete perfection which the world has
seen. We hope, too, by the judicious choice and careful execution of our
figures, to give a fair idea of this course of development even to those artists
who have neither time nor patience to follow our criticisms and descriptions.
I conceived the plan of this history, of which the first instalment is now
submitted to the public, at the time when M. Wallon, who is secretary to the
Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, entrusted me with the
inauguration, at the Sorbonne, of the teaching of classic archæology. But

before it could be realized two conditions had to be fulfilled. I had to find an
associate in the work, a companion who would help me in the necessary
labour and study, and I found him among my auditors in those first lectures at
the Sorbonne. I had also to find a publisher who would understand the wants
of the public and of the critics in such a matter. In this, too, I have succeeded,
and I am free to undertake a work which is, I hope, destined to carry far
beyond the narrow limits of a Parisian lecture room, the methods and
principal results of a science, which, having made good its claims to the
gratitude of mankind, is progressing with a step which becomes daily more
assured. The task is an arduous one, and the continual discoveries which are
reported from nearly every quarter of the ancient world, make it heavier
every day. As for my colleague and myself, we have resigned ourselves in
advance to seeing omissions and defects pointed out even by the most
benevolent critics, but we are convinced that in spite of such imperfections as
it may contain, our work will do good service, and will cause one of the
aspects of ancient civilization to be better understood. This conviction will
sustain us through the labours which, perhaps with some temerity, we have
taken upon us. How far shall we be allowed to conduct our history? That we
cannot tell, but we may venture to promise that it shall be the chief
occupation and the dearest study of all that remains to us of life and strength.
Georges Perrot.

TO THE READER.
We have been in some doubt as to whether we should append a special
bibliography to each section of this work, but after mature reflection we have
decided against it. We shall, of course, consider the art of each of the races of
antiquity in less detail than if we had undertaken a monograph upon
Egyptian, upon Assyrian, or upon Phœnician art; but yet it is our ambition to
neglect no source of information which is likely to be really valuable. From
many of the books and papers which we shall have to consult we may
reproduce nothing but their titles, but we hope that no important work will
escape us altogether, and in every case we shall give references which may be
easily verified. Under these circumstances a formal list of works would be a
mere repetition of our notes and would only have the effect of giving a
useless bulk to our volumes.
Whenever our drawings have not been taken directly from the originals we
have been careful to indicate the source from which we obtained them, and
we have made a point of borrowing only from authors of undoubted
authority. Those illustrations which bear neither an artist's name nor the title
of a book have been engraved from photographs. As for the perspectives and
restorations supplied by M. Chipiez, they are in every case founded upon the
study and comparison of all accessible documents; but it would take too long
to indicate in each of these drawings how much has been borrowed from
special publications and how much has been founded upon photographic
evidence. M. Chipiez has sometimes employed the ordinary perspective,
sometimes that which is called axonometric perspective. The difference will
be at once perceived.
Egyptologists may, perhaps, find mistakes in the hieroglyphs which occur in
our illustrations. These hieroglyphs have been as a rule exactly transcribed,
but we do not pretend to offer a collection of texts; we have only reproduced
these characters on account of their decorative value, and because without
them we could not have the general appearance of this or that monument. It
will thus be seen that our object is not affected by a mistake or two in such
matters.

We may here express our gratitude to all those who have interested
themselves in our enterprise and who have helped us to make our work
complete. Our dear and lamented Mariette had promised us his most earnest
help. During the winter that we passed in Egypt, while he still enjoyed some
remains of strength and voice, we obtained from his conversation and his
letters some precious pieces of information. We have cited the works of M.
Maspero on almost every page, and yet we have learnt more from his
conversation than from his writings. Before his departure for Egypt—whither
he went to succeed Mariette—M. Maspero was our perpetual counsellor and
referee; whenever we were embarrassed we appealed to his well ordered,
accurate, and unbiased knowledge. We are also deeply indebted to M. Pierret,
the learned conservateur of the Louvre; not only has he done everything to
facilitate the work of our draughtsmen in the great museum, he has also
helped us frequently with his advice and his accumulated knowledge. M.
Arthur Rhôné has lent us a plan of the temple of the Sphinx, and M. Ernest
Desjardins a view of the interior of that building.
The artists who have visited Egypt have helped us as cordially as the learned
men who have deciphered its inscriptions. M. Gerome opened his portfolios
and allowed us to take three of those drawings, which express with such
truthful precision the character of Egyptian landscape from them. M. Hector
Leroux was as generous as M. Gerome, and if we have taken but one
illustration from his sketch-books it is because the arrangements for this
volume were complete before we had the chance of looking through them. M.
Brune has allowed us to reproduce his plans of Karnak and Medinet-Abou.
We have had occasion, in the work itself, to express our acknowledgments to
MM. J. Bourgoin, G. Bénédite, and Saint-Elme Gautier, who have drawn for
us the principal monuments of the Boulak and Louvre Museums. For the
architecture we must name M. A. Guérin, a pupil of M. Chipiez, who
prepared the drawings under the direction of his master, and M.
Tomaszkievicz, whose light and skilful point has so well engraved them. If
the process of engraving upon zinc has given results which, as we hope, will
satisfy our readers, much of the honour belongs to the untiring care of M.
Comte, whose process has been employed; all these plates have been
reviewed and retouched by him with minute care. The steel engravings are by
MM. Ramus, Hibon, Guillaumot père and Sulpis. In order that the
polychromatic decoration of the Egyptians should be rendered with truth and
precision in its refined tones and complicated line, we begged M. Sulpis to

make use of a process which had almost fallen into disuse from its difficulty
and want of rapidity; we mean that which is called aquatint. Our plates II,
XIII, and XIV will perhaps convince our readers that its results are superior
to those of chromo-lithography, which is now so widely employed.

A HISTORY OF ART IN ANCIENT EGYPT

CHAPTER I.
THE GENERAL CHARACTER OF EGYPTIAN
CIVILIZATION.

§ 1. Egypt's Place in The History of the World.

Egypt is the eldest daughter of civilization. In undertaking to group the great
nations of antiquity and to present them in their proper order, in attempting to
assign to each its due share in the continuous and unremitting labour of
progress until the birth of Christianity, we have no alternative but to
commence with the country of the Pharaohs.
In studying the past of mankind, we have the choice of several points of view.
We may attempt to determine the meaning and value of the religious
conceptions which succeeded one another during that period, or we may give
our attention rather to the literature, the arts and the sciences, to those
inventions which in time have done so much to emancipate mankind from
natural trammels and to make him master of his destiny. One writer will
confine himself to a description of manners, and social and political
institutions; another to the enumeration and explanation of the various
changes brought on by internal revolutions, by wars and conquests; to what
Bossuet calls "la suite des empires." Finally, he who has the highest ambition
of all will attempt to unite all these various features into a single picture, so
as to show, as a whole, the creative activity of a race and the onward
movements of its genius in the continual search for "the best." But in any
case the commencement must be made with Egypt. It is Egypt that has
preserved the earliest attempts of man towards outward expression; it is in
Egypt that those monuments exist which contain the first permanent
manifestation of thought by written characters or plastic[36] forms; and it is in
Egypt that the historian of antique art will find the earliest materials for study.
But, in the first place, we must give some account of the curious conditions
under which the people lived who constructed and ornamented so many

imposing monuments. We must begin, then, by describing the circumstances
and the race characteristics under which this early civilization was developed.

§ 2. The Valley of the Nile and its Inhabitants.

The first traveller in Egypt of which we have any record is Herodotus; he
sums up, in an often quoted phrase, the impression which that land of
wonders made upon him: "Egypt," he says, "is a present from the Nile."[37]
The truth could not be better expressed. "Had the equatorial rains not been
compelled to win for themselves a passage to the Mediterranean, a passage
upon which they deposited the mud which they had accumulated on their
long journey, Egypt would not have existed. Egypt began by being the bed of
a torrent; the soil was raised by slow degrees ... man appeared there when, by
the slow accumulation of fertile earth, the country at last became equal to his
support...."[38]
Other rivers do no more than afford humidity for their immediate borders, or,
in very low-lying districts, for a certain narrow stretch of country on each
hand. When they overflow their banks it is in a violent and irregular fashion,
involving wide-spread ruin and destruction. Great floods are feared as public
misfortunes. It is very different with the Nile. Every year, at a date which can
be almost exactly foretold, it begins to rise slowly and to spread gently over
the land. It rises by degrees until its surface is eight or nine metres above
low-water mark;[39] it then begins to fall with the same tranquillity, but not
until it has deposited, upon the lands over which it has flowed, a thick layer
of fertile mud which can be turned over easily with the lightest plough, and in
which every seed will germinate, every plant spring up with extraordinary
vigour and rapidity.

Fig. 1.—During the Inundation of the Nile.

Thus nature has greatly facilitated the labour of the Egyptian agriculturist; the
river takes upon itself the irrigation of the country for the whole width of its
valley, and the preparation of the soil for the autumnal seed-time; it restores
the virtue annually taken out of the ground by the crops. Each year it brings
with it more fertility than can be exhausted in the twelve months, so that
there is a constantly accumulating capital, on both banks of the river, of the
richest vegetable earth.

Fig. 2. —Hoeing; Beni-Hassan. (Champollion, pl. 381 bis. [40]

Fig. 3.—Ploughing; from the Necropolis of Memphis.
(Description de l'Égypte, ant. V., pl. 17.)

Thus the first tribes established themselves in the country under singularly
favourable conditions; thanks to the timely help of the river they found
themselves assured of an easy existence.[41] We know how often the lives of
those tribes who live by fishing and the chase are oppressed by care; there are
some days when game is not to be found, and they die of hunger. Those who
live a pastoral life are also exposed to cruel hardships from the destruction of
their flocks and herds by those epidemics against which even modern science
sometimes struggles in vain. As for agricultural populations, they are
everywhere, except in Egypt, at the mercy of the weather; seasons which are
either too dry or too wet may reduce them to famine, for in those distant
times local famines were far more fatal than in these days, when facility of
transport and elaborate commercial connections ensure that where the
demand is, thither the supply will be taken. In Egypt the success of the crops
varied with the height of the Nile, but they never failed altogether. In bad
years the peasant may have had the baton of the tax-collector to fear, but he
always had a few onions or a few ears of maize to preserve him from
starvation.[42]

Fig. 4.—Harvest scene; from a tomb at Gizeh. (Champollion, pl. 417.)

The first condition of civilization is a certain measure of security for life.
Now, thanks to the beneficent action of the king of rivers, that condition was
created sooner in Egypt than elsewhere. In the valley of the Nile man found
himself able, for the first time, to calculate upon the forces of nature and to
turn them to his certain profit. It is easy then to understand that Egypt saw the
birth of the most ancient of those civilizations whose plastic arts we propose
to study.

Fig. 5.—The Bastinado; Beni-Hassan. (Champollion, pl. 390.)

Another favourable condition is to be found in the isolation of the country.
The tribes who settled there in centuries so remote that they are beyond
tradition and even calculation, could live in peace, hidden as it were in a

narrow valley and protected on all sides, partly by deserts, partly by an
impassable sea. It would perhaps be well to give some idea of the natural
features of their country before commencing our study of their art. The terms,
Lower-, Middle-, and Upper-Egypt, the Delta, and Ethiopia will continually
recur in these pages, as also will the names of Tanis and Sais, Memphis and
Heliopolis, Abydos and Thebes, and of many other cities; it is important
therefore that our readers should know exactly what is meant by each of these
time-honoured designations; it is necessary that they should at least be able to
find upon the map those cities which by their respective periods of
supremacy represent the successive epochs of Egyptian history.
"Egypt is that country which, stretching from north to south, occupies the
north-east angle of Africa, or Libya as the ancients called it. It is joined to
Asia by the isthmus of Suez. It is bounded on the east by that isthmus and the
Red Sea; on the south by Nubia, the Ethiopia of the Greeks, which is
traversed by the Nile before its entrance into Egypt at the cataracts of Syene;
on the west by the desert sprinkled here and there with a few oases, and on
the north by the Mediterranean. The desert stretches as far north on the west
of the country as the Red Sea does on the east.
"It penetrates moreover far into the interior of Egypt itself. Strictly speaking
Egypt consists simply of that part of this corner of Africa over which the
waters of the Nile flow during the inundation, to which may be added those
districts to which the water is carried by irrigation. All outside this zone is
uninhabited, and produces neither corn nor vegetables nor trees nor even
grass. No water is to be found there beyond a few wells, all more or less
exposed to exhaustion in an ever-parching atmosphere. In Upper Egypt rain
is an extremely rare phenomenon. Sand and rock cover the whole country,
except the actual valley of the Nile. Up to the point where the river divides
into several arms, that is to say for more than three-quarters of the whole
length of Egypt, this valley never exceeds an average width of more than four
or five leagues. In a few districts it is even narrower than this. For almost its
whole length it is shut in between two mountain chains, that on the east
called the Arab, that on the west the Libyan chain. These mountains,
especially towards the south, sometimes close in and form defiles. On the
other hand, in Middle Egypt the Libyan chain falls back and becomes lower,
allowing the passage of the canal which carries the fertilizing waters into the
Fayoum, the province in which the remains of the famous reservoir which the
Greek writers called Lake Mœris exist. Egypt, which was little more than a

glen higher up, here widens out to a more imposing size. A little below Cairo,
the present capital of Egypt, situated not far from the site of ancient
Memphis, the Nile divides into two branches, one of which, the Rosetta
branch, turns to the north-west, the other, that of Damietta, to the north and
north-east.... The ancients knew five others which, since their time, have
either been obliterated or at least have become non-navigable.... All these
branches took their names from towns situated near their mouths. A large
number of less important watercourses threaded their way through Lower
Egypt; but as the earth there is marshy, their channels have shifted greatly
from age to age and still go on changing. The Nile forms several lagunes near
the sea, shut in by long tongues of earth and sand, and communicating with
the Mediterranean by openings here and there. The space comprised between
the two most distant branches of the river is called the Delta, on account of its
triangular form, which is similar to that of a capital Greek delta (Δ)."[43]
At one time the waves of the Mediterranean washed the foot of the sandy
plateau which is now crowned by the Great Pyramid; the Nile flowed into the
sea at that time slightly to the north of the site upon which Memphis was
afterwards built. With the slow passage of time the particles of earth which it
brought down from the mountains of Abyssinia were deposited as mud banks
upon the coast, and gradually filling up the gulf, created instead wide marshy
plains intersected by lakes. Here and there ancient sand ridges indicate the
successive watercourses. The never-ceasing industry of its floods had already,
at the earliest historic period, carried the mouths of the Nile far beyond the
normal line of the neighbouring coasts. The Egyptian priests—whose words
have been preserved for us by Herodotus—had a true idea as to how this vast
plain had been created, a plain which now comprises twenty-three thousand
square kilometres and is continually being added to; but they were strangely
deceived when they thought and declared that Menes or Ména, the first of all
kings, found almost all Egypt under the waters. The sea, they said, penetrated
in those days beyond the site of Memphis, and the remainder of the country,
the district of Thebes excepted, was an unhealthy morass.[44] 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]
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 classes have lost it by
repeated intermarriage with strangers."[47]
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 attitude of one of
themselves, of the rustic dignitary who managed the corvées 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]
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 pronouns, 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 Phœnicians 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.

Fig. 6.—Statue from the Ancient Empire in calcareous stone.
(Boulak.[49]) Drawn by G. Bénédite.

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.

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 morass 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]
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.

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.

Fig. 9.—Shadouf; machine for irrigating the land above the level of the
canals.

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-partite
division we may speak of Beni-Hassan as in Middle, and Abydos as in Upper
Egypt, and thus give a sufficient idea of their relative positions.

Fig. 10.—The White Crown. Fig. 11.—The Red Crown. Fig. 12.—The
Pschent.

§ 3. The Great Divisions of Egyptian History.

In enumerating and analysing the remains of Egyptian art, we shall classify
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 principal 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 class had obtained a
supremacy over the other classes of the nation. A man called Menes (Menha
or Ména 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 Thebaïd 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 Thebaïd, ruined
by the Ethiopian and Assyrian 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]
Mariette places the accession of Ména 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 partitioned between
princes who reigned in Upper and Lower Egypt respectively; but, guided by
circumstances 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 passed 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 Assyria, 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 exactitude. 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]
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 Meroè in Upper Nubia, had introduced their religion, their
written characters, their art and their civil institutions 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]
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 Meroè
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 Constitution of Egyptian Society—Influence of that
Constitution 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 Assyria 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 God: child
of the sun (Se Râ), as he took care to proclaim whenever he wrote his name,
the blood of the gods flowed in his veins and assured 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 class, 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 principal 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 god 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 titles 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 gods with whom he held
converse, he became to them a visible deity and, in the words of an
inscription, "the representative of Râ among the living." His divinity, begun
on earth, was completed and rendered perpetual in another life. All the dead

Pharaohs became gods, so that the Egyptian pantheon obtained a new deity at
the death of each sovereign. The deceased Pharaohs thus constituted a series
of gods 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]

Fig. 13.—Seti I. in his War-Chariot, bas-relief at Thebes. (Champollion,
pl. 297.)

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 Fig. 14.—Rameses II.
mercenaries, sometimes by their want of in adoration before Seti.
discipline and licence, sometimes by the From Abydos (Mariette).
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 constitutions 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 canal between the two seas under Nekau, to the
Mahmoudieh canal 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.

Fig. 15.—Homage to Amenophis III. (From Prisse.[61])

Under the stimulus of the rod, this multitude 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
succumbed 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 massive grandeur of some of the Egyptian monuments is only to be
explained by this levy en masse 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 Assyrian 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.

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 Assyria; 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 passionate 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.

Fig. 17.—Columns in the Hypostyle Hall, Karnak.

Fig. 18, 19—Scribes registering the yield of the harvest. From a tomb at
Sakkarah. (Boulak, 9-1/2 inches high. Drawn by Bourgoin.)

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 gods 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
gods, 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 surpassed
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.

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 class 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 classes. 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.

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 class, 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
classes 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
classes 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 circumstances,
or the favour of the sovereign could raise a man of the lowest class 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
illustrious.

Fig. 23.—Cattle Drovers. From the tomb of Ra-ka-pou, Sakkarah, 5th
dynasty. (Boulak. Drawn by Bourgoin.)

Fig. 24.—Bakers. From a tomb. (Boulak, 9-1/2 inches high. Bourgoin.)

Fig. 25.—Women at a loom. From a tomb at Beni-Hassan. (Champollion,
381 bis)

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 classes 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-Hassan
that we must go for complete types of sepulchral architecture at those epochs;
to the statues in the recesses of their massive 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.

Fig. 27.—Shepherds in the fields. From a tomb at Sakkarah. (Boulak. 8-
3/4 inches high. Drawn by Bourgoin.)

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 Assyria 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 illustrations of all classes 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.

Fig. 29.—Herdsman. From a tomb at Sakkarah, 5th dynasty. (Boulak.)

The art of Egypt resembled that of Greece in being a complete and catholic
art, seeing everything and taking an interest in everything. It was sensitive to
military glory, and at the same time it did not scorn to portray the peaceful
life of the fields. It set itself with all sincerity to interpret the monarchical
sentiment in its most enthusiastic and exaggerated form, but while it placed
kings and princes above and almost apart from humanity, it did not forget the
"humble and meek," on the contrary, it frankly depicted them in their
professional attitudes, with all those ineffaceable characteristics, both of face
and figure which the practice of some special trade so certainly imparts.
Looked at from this point of view Egyptian art was popular, it might even be
called democratic, but that such a phrase would sound curious when used in
connection with the most absolute monarchy which the world has ever seen.
This absolute power, however, does not seem, speaking generally, to have
been put in force in a hard or oppressive manner either by the king himself or
by his agents. M. Maspero and others who, like him, live in intimate
communion with the ancient Egyptians, declare that they were by no means
unhappy. They tell us that the confidences whispered to them in the pictured
tomb-houses of Sakkarah and Memphis complain of no misery, from the time
of Mena to that of Psemethek, except during a few violent reigns and a few
moments of national crisis. The country suffered only on those comparatively
rare occasions when the sceptre passed into the hands of an incapable master
or into those of some insatiable warrior who thought only of satisfying his
own ambition, and sacrificed to the day the resources of the future. Egypt,
with her river, her teeming soil and her splendid climate, found life easy as
long as she enjoyed an easy and capable administration. She then gave to her
princes almost without an effort all they could desire or demand.
It was one of the fundamental principles of Egyptian morality that those who
were powerful should treat the poor and feeble with kindness and
consideration. Their sepulchral inscriptions tell us that their kings and princes
of the blood, their feudal lords and functionaries of every grade, made it a
point of honour to observe this rule. They were not content with strict justice,
they practised a bountiful charity which reminds us of that which is the chief
beauty of the Christian's morality. The "Book of the Dead"—that passport for
Egyptians into the other world which is found upon every mummy—gives us
the most simple, and at the same time the most complete description of this
virtue. "I have given bread to the hungry, I have given water to the thirsty, I
have clothed the naked ... I have not calumniated the slave in the ears of his

master." The lengthy panegyrics of which some epitaphs consist, are, in
reality no more than amplifications of this theme. "As for me, I have been the
staff of the old man, the nurse of the infant, the help of the distressed, a warm
shelter for all who were cold in the Thebaïd, the bread and sustenance of the
down-trodden, of whom there is no lack in Middle Egypt, and their protector
against the barbarians."[64] The prince Entef relates that he has "arrested the
arm of the violent, used brute force to those who used brute force, showed
hauteur to the haughty, and lowered the shoulders of those who raised them
up," that he himself on the other hand, "was a man in a thousand, wise,
learned, and of a sound and truthful judgment, knowing the fool from the
wise man, paying attention to the skilful and turning his back upon the
ignorant, ... the father of the miserable and the mother of the motherless, the
terror of the cruel, the protector of the disinherited, the defender of those
whose goods were coveted by men stronger than themselves, the husband of
the widow, the asylum of the orphan."[65]

Fig. 30.—From the tomb of Menofre, at Sakkarah. (Champollion, pl.
408.)

Amoni, hereditary prince of the nome of Meh, talks in the same fashion. "I
have caused sorrow to no youth under age, I have despoiled no widow, nor
have I repelled any labourer, I have imprisoned no shepherd, I have never
taken for the labour gangs the serfs of him who had but five, there have been
no paupers, nor has any man or woman starved in my time; for, although

there have been years of scarcity, I have caused all the tillable land in Meh to
be tilled, from the northern frontier to that of the south, and have made such
arrangements and such provision for the people that there has been no famine
among them; I have given to the widow and to the married woman alike, and
I have never made any distinction between the great and the small in my
gifts."[66]
Doubtless these laudatory self-descriptions may be exaggerated in some
respects; hyperbole has ever been a favourite figure with the composers of
epitaphs, and those of Egypt formed no exception to the rule. As M. Maspero
remarks in connection with this question, "The man as he is, often differs
very greatly from the man as he thinks he is." But we may safely say that the
Egyptian realized some portion of the ideal which he set before himself. If
only to obtain admiration and esteem, he would practice, to a certain extent,
the virtues of which he boasted. Many signs combine to tell us that the
Egyptians of all classes possessed a large fund of tenderness and good-will.
The master was often both clement and charitable; the peasant, the servant,
and the slave, were patient and cheerful, and that in spite of the fatigue of
labours which could never enrich them. In a country so favoured by nature,
men had so few wants that they had no experience of all that is implied by
that doleful word poverty, with us. The pure skies and brilliant sunshine, the
deep draughts of Nile water, and the moments of repose under the shadows of
the sycamores, the freshness of the evening bath, the starry night with its
reinvigorating breezes, were all enjoyments which the poorest could share.
We need feel no surprise therefore at the vivacity with which one of the most
learned of the historians of Egypt, Brugsch-Bey, protests against the common
misconception of the Egyptians "as a race grave, serious, morose, exclusive,
religious, thinking much of the next world, and little of this; living, in a word,
like the Trappists of former days. Are we to believe," he cries, "that this
majestic river and the fertile soil through which it flows, this azure sky with
its unclouded sun, produced a nation of living mummies, a race of solemn
philosophers who looked upon life in this world as a burden to be shuffled off
as quickly as possible? Travel over Egypt; examine the scenes painted and
sculptured upon the walls of sepulchral chambers; read the inscriptions
carved upon stone or traced in ink upon the rolls of papyrus, and you will
find yourself compelled to modify the false notions you have imbibed as to
the Egyptian philosophers. Nothing could be more cheerful, more amusing or

more frank, than the social life of this pleasure-loving people. Far from
wishing to die, they prayed to the gods for a long life and a happy old age;
they prayed that, 'if possible, they might live to the perfect age of one
hundred and ten.' They were addicted to all kinds of pleasures. They drank,
they sang, they danced, they were fond of excursions into the country, where
the sports of hunting and fishing were specially reserved for the upper class.
As a natural effect of this desire for enjoyment, gay conversation and
pleasantry which was sometimes rather free, jokes and what we should call
chaff, were much in vogue: even their tombs were not sacred from their
desire for a jest."[67]
The worst government, the sternest oppression, could never extinguish this
natural gaiety; it was too intimately connected with the climate and the
natural conditions of the country, conditions which had never changed since
the days of Menes. Never were the Egyptians more roughly treated than
under Mehemet Ali and the late viceroy; their condition was compared, with
justice, to that of the negroes in Carolina and Virginia, who, before the
American civil war, laboured under the whips of their drivers, and enjoyed no
more of the fruits of their own labour than what was barely sufficient to keep
life in their bodies. Torn from their homes and kept by force in the public
works, the fellahs died in thousands; those who remained in the fields had to
pay the taxes one or two years in advance; they were never out of debt,
nominally, to the public treasury, and the rattan of the collector extorted from
them such savings as they might make during years of plenty, up to the last
coin. But still laughter did not cease in Egypt! Look, for instance, at the
children in the streets of Cairo who let out mounts to sight-seeing Europeans.
Let the tourist trot or gallop as he will, when he stops he finds his donkey-
boy by his side, full of spirits and good humour; and yet perhaps while
running behind his "fare" he has been making his midday meal upon a few
grains of maize tied up in a corner of his shirt.

Fig. 31.—Water Tournament, from a tomb at Khoum-el-Ahmar. (From
Prisse.)

In 1862 I returned from Asia Minor in company with M. Edmond Guillaume,
the architect, and M. Jules Delbet, the doctor, of our expedition to Ancyra.
We took the longest way home, by Syria and Egypt. At Cairo, Mariette, after
having shown us the museum at Boulak, wished to introduce us to his own
"Serapeum." He took us for a night to his house in the desert, and showed us
the galleries of the tomb of Apis by torchlight. We passed the next afternoon
in inspecting those excavations in the necropolis of Sakkarah which have led
to the recovery of so many wonders of Egyptian art. The works were carried
on by the labour of four hundred children and youths, summoned by the
corvée for fifteen days at a time from some district, I forget which, of Middle
Egypt. At sunset these young labourers quitted their work and seated
themselves in groups, according to their native villages, upon the still warm
sand. Each drew from a little sack, containing his provision for two or three
weeks, a dry cake; those whose parents were comfortably off had also,
perhaps, a leek or a raw onion. But even for such gourmands as those, the
repast was not a long one. Supper over, they chattered for a time, and then
went to rest; the bigger and stronger among them took possession of some
abandoned caves, the others stretched themselves upon the bare earth; but,
before going to sleep they sang; they formed themselves into two choirs who
alternated and answered one another, and this they kept up to an advanced
hour of the night.

Fig. 32.—Mariette's House.

I shall never forget the charm of that night in the desert, nor the weird aspect
of the moonlight upon the sea of sand. Were it not that no star was reflected
upon its surface, and that no ray scintillated as it does even on the calmest
sea, we might have thought ourselves in mid ocean. Sleep came to me
reluctantly. While I listened to the alternate rise and fall of the chorus outside,
I reflected upon how little those children required; upon the slender wants of
their fathers and mothers, who, like them, sink into their nightly sleep with a
song upon their lips. I compared this easy happiness with the restless and
complicated existence which we should find, at the end of a few days, in the
ambitious cities of the West, and I regretted that our year of travel, our twelve
months of unrestrained life in the desert or the forest, had come to an end.

§ 5. The Egyptian Religion and its Influence upon the Plastic Arts.

We have still to notice the profoundly religious character of Egyptian art.
"The first thing that excites our surprise, when we examine the reproductions
of Egyptian monuments which have been published in our day, is the

extraordinary number of scenes of sacrifice and worship which have come
down to us. In the collection of plates which we owe to contemporary
archæologists, we can hardly find one which does not contain the figure of
some deity, receiving with impassive countenance the prayers or offerings of
a prostrate king or priest. One would say that a country with so many sacred
pictures and sculptures, must have been inhabited by gods, and by just
enough men for the service of their temples.[68] The Egyptians were a devout
people. Either by natural tendency or by force of education, they saw God
pervading the whole of their universe; they lived in Him and for Him. Their
imaginations were full of His greatness, their words of His praise, and their
literature was in great part inspired by gratitude for the benefits which He
showered upon them. Most of their manuscripts which have come down to us
treat of religious matters, and even in those which are ostensibly concerned
only with profane subjects, mythological names and allusions occur on every
page, almost at every line."[69]
An examination into the primitive religious beliefs of the Egyptians is full of
difficulty. In discovering new papyri, in determining the signification of signs
which have been puzzling egyptologists, the inquirer will undoubtedly do
good work, and will establish facts which are sure not to lack interest and
even importance; but even when documents abound and when every separate
word they contain is understood, even then it is very difficult to penetrate to
the root of their meaning. A glimpse will be caught of it, I admit, by one of
those efforts of inductive divination which distinguish modern research; but
even then it will remain to explain the primitive and only half-understood
notions of five or six thousand years ago in the philosophical vocabularies of
to-day. It is here that the most difficult and irksome part of the task begins.
We who represent the old age, or, perhaps, the prime, of humanity, think of
these matters and speak of them as abstractions, while the Egyptians, who
were children compared to us, thought of them under concrete forms. Their
very ideals were material, more or less vague and refined perhaps, but still
material. Their only conception of a deity was of a figure larger, more
vigorous and more beautiful than mortals; the powers and attributes with
which it was endowed were all physical. If we attempt to express their
conceptions in abstract terms, we falsify their meaning. We cannot avoid
altering it to a certain extent, for exact equivalents are not to be found, and, in
spite of all precautions, we give to the confused and childish ideas of ancient
religion, a precision which is entirely modern.

Fig. 33.—Amenhotep or Amenophis III. presented by Phré to Amen-Ra;
Thebes. (Champollion, pl. 344.)

If, under these reserves, we study the Egyptian theology in its most learned
and refined form—namely, that which it attained during the eighteenth and
nineteenth dynasties—we shall dimly perceive that it implies a belief in the
unity of the First Cause of all life. But this belief is obscured behind the
numerous gods who are, in fact, emanations from its substance and

manifestations of its indefatigable activity. It is in the person of these gods
that the divine essence takes form. Each of them has his own name, his own
figure, and his own special share in the management of the universe; each of
them presides over the production of some particular order of phenomena and
insures their regularity. These gods are related to each other as fathers,
mothers, and sons. They thus form a vast hierarchy of beings, superior to
man, and each enjoying a dignity corresponding to his rank in the series.
There is, so to speak, most of divinity in those who are nearest to the "one
God in heaven or earth who was not begotten." These deities are divided into
groups of three, each group constituting a family, like those of earth,
consisting of father, mother, and son. Thus from triad to triad, the concealed
god develops his sovereign powers to all eternity, or, to use an expression
dear to the religious schools of ancient Egypt, "he creates his own members,
which are themselves gods."[70]
How should the science of comparative religion class this form of faith?
Should it be called polytheism or pantheism? The answer is, perhaps, not of
great importance, and this is hardly the place for its discussion. It is certain
that, practically, the Egyptians were polytheists. The Egyptian priests, indeed,
had, by dint of long reflection, arrived at the comprehension, or at least at the
contemplation, of that First Cause which had started the river of life—that
inexhaustible stream of which the Nile with its fertilising waves was the
concrete image—in its long journey across time and space. But the devotion
of the people themselves never succeeded in mounting above the minor
divinities, above those intermediaries in whom the divine principle and
attributes became personified and put on the tangibility of body necessary to
make them intelligible to childish understandings. So, too, was it with artists,
and for still more powerful reasons; as by forms only could they express the
ideas which they had conceived. Even in those religions which are most
clearly and openly monotheistic and spiritual, such as Christianity, art has
done something of the same kind. Aided in secret by one of the most
powerful instincts of the human soul, it has succeeded, in spite of all
resistance and protestation, in giving plastic expression to those parts of our
belief which seem least fitted for such treatment; and it has caused those
methods of expression to be so accepted by us that we see nothing unnatural
in the representation under the features of an old man, of the first Person of
the Trinity,—of that Jehovah who, in the Old Testament, proscribed all

graven images with such impartial rigour; who, in the Evangel, described
Himself as "the Truth and the Life."
In Egypt, both sculptors and painters could multiply their images to infinity
without coming into collision with dogma, without provoking the regrets or
censures of its most severe interpreters. Doctrine did not condemn these
personifications, even when it had been refined and elaborated by the
speculative theologians of Thebes and Heliopolis. In the interior of the
temples, there was a small class of mystics who took pleasure in
contemplating "the 'One' who exists by his own essential power, the only
being who substantially exists." Even then men tried, as they have often done
since, to define the undefinable, to grasp the incomprehensible, to perceive
the supreme "I am" through the shifting and transparent veil of natural
phenomena. But those refined metaphysics never touched and influenced the
crowd, and never will. The deity, in order to be perceived by them and to
touch their feelings, must have his unity broken; he must, if the expression be
admissible, be cut up into morsels for them.
By a process of "abstraction" which is as old as religion itself, the human
intelligence is led to consider separately each of the qualities of existence,
each of the forces which it perceives to be at work either within man himself
or in the exterior world. At first it thinks those forces and qualities are
distributed impartially to all creation. It confounds existence with life. Hence
the reign of fetishism, when man believes, as young children do, that thought,
passion, and volition like his own, are to be found in everything he meets.
His own image seems to him reflected as in a mirror with a thousand
converging facets, and he is unable to distinguish the real condition of things
outside it.
Certain celestial and terrestrial bodies make a particularly strong impression
upon his mind by their size, their beauty, by their evil or beneficial effects
upon himself. They fill him with more than the average gratitude, admiration,
or terror. Driven by the illusion which possesses him, he places the origin of
those qualities which seem to him the highest and most important, in the
bodies which have made so deep an impression upon his senses; to them he
attributes the friendly or hostile influences which alternately excite his desire
and his fear. According to circumstances a fetish might be a mountain, a rock
or a river, a plant or an animal. It might be those heavenly bodies which
exercised much more influence over the life of primitive man than they do

over us; it might be the moon and stars, which tempered the darkness of the
night and diminished its terrors; it might be the cloud, from whose bosom
came rain and thunder; above all, it might be the sun which returned every
morning to light and warm the world. Differences of climate and race had
their modifying effect, but everywhere one common characteristic is to be
found. It was always to some material and visible object that the human
intellect referred those forces and qualities which it drew from its own
consciousness; forces which, when thus united with something tangible,
constituted the first types of those divine beings whom mankind have so long
adored, to whom they have turned for ages in their hope and fear.
As the years passed away, man advanced beyond his primitive conceptions.
He did not entirely renounce them—we may indeed see reminiscences of
them all around us—but he superimposed others upon them which were more
complex. His powers of observation, still imperfect though they were, began
to insinuate into his mind a disbelief in the activity of inanimate matter, and
those objects which were nearest to him, which he could touch with his hand,
were the first victims of his disenchantment. Thus began a long course of
intellectual development, the result of which we know, although the various
stages of its progress are difficult to follow at this distance of time. It appears
certain, however, that star worship formed the transition between fetishism
and polytheism. Men no longer attributed vital forces and pre-eminent
qualities generally to bodies with which they themselves were in immediate
contact, to stones and trees; but they found no difficulty in continuing to
assign them to those great luminaries whose distance and beauty placed them,
so to speak outside the material world. As they gradually deprived inanimate
matter of the properties with which they had once gifted it, they sought for
new objects to which they might attach those properties. These they found in
the stars which shone in the firmament century after century, and knew
neither old age nor death; and especially in the most brilliant, the most
beneficent, and the most necessary of them all, in that sun whose coming
they awaited every morning with an impatience which must once have been
mixed with a certain amount of anxiety.
The attributes which awakened intelligence had taken away from the
inanimate objects of the world could not be left floating in space. They
became gradually and imperceptibly grouped in men's minds around the great
luminary of day, and a bond of union was found for the different members of
the group by endowing the sun with a personality modelled upon that of man.

This operation was favoured by the constitution of contemporary language,
by its idioms made up entirely of those images and metaphors which, by their
frank audacity, surprise and charm us in the works of the early poets. It
commenced with the first awakening of thought, when man endowed all
visible nature with the bounding life which he felt in his own veins. No effort
of intelligence was required for its commencement or for its prosecution. The
sun became a young hero advancing, full of pride and vigour, upon the path
prepared for him by Aurora; a hero who pursued his daily path in spite of all
obstacle or hindrance, who, when evening came, went to his rest amid all the
glories of an eastern sunset, and amid the confidence of all that after his hours
of sleep he would take up his eternal task with renewed vigour. He was an
invincible warrior. He was sometimes an angry master, whose glance killed
and devoured. He was above all the untiring benefactor of mankind, the nurse
and father of all life. Whether as Indra or as Amen-Ra, it was the same cry
that went up to him from Egypt and Hindostan; the prayers which we find in
the Vedas and in the papyri, breathe the same sentiments and were addressed
to the same god.[71]
This solar god and the divinities who resemble him, form the transition from
the simple fetish to complete deities, to those gods who played such an
important part in the Egyptian religion, and attained to their highest and most
complete development in the Hellenic mythology. In some respects, the
luminous globe of the sun with its compulsory course, belonged to the same
category as the material objects which received the first worship of humanity.
But its brilliance, its tranquil and majestic movement, and the distance which
conceals its real substance from the eye of man, allowed his imagination to
endow it with the purest and noblest characteristics which the finest examples
of humanity could show; while the phenomena which depend upon its action
are so numerous that there was no hesitation in assigning to it qualities and
energies of the most various kinds.
This type when once established was used for the creation of other deities,
which were all, so to speak, cast in the same mould. As the intellect became
more capable of abstraction and analysis, the personality and moral
individuality of these gods gradually threw off its astral or physical
characteristics, although it never lost all trace of their existence. It resulted
that, both in Egypt and in Greece, there were deities who were mere entities,
the simple embodiment of some power, some quality, or some virtue. It

requires all the subtle finesse of modern criticism to seek out and distinguish
the obscure roots which attach these divinities to the naturalistic beliefs of
earlier ages. Sometimes absolute certainty is not to be attained, but we may
safely say that a race is polytheistic when we find these abstract deities
among their gods, such deities as the Ptah, Amen, and Osiris of the
Egyptians, and the Apollo and Athenè of the Greeks.[72]

Fig. 34.—Amen or Ammon, from a bronze in the Louvre. Height 22·04
inches.

We may, then, define polytheism as the partition of the highest attributes of
life between a limited number of agents. The imagination of man could not
give these agents life without at the same time endowing them with essential
natural characteristics and with the human form, but, nevertheless, it wished
to regard them as stronger, more beautiful and less ephemeral than man. The
system had said its last word and was complete, when it had succeeded in
embodying in some divine personality each of those forces whose combined
energy produces movement in the world or guarantees its duration.
When religious evolution follows its normal course, the work of reflection
goes on, and in course of time makes new discoveries. It refers, by efforts of
conjecture, all phenomena to a certain number of causes, which it calls gods.
It next perceives that these causes, or gods, are of unequal importance, and so
it constitutes them into a hierarchy. Still later it begins to comprehend that
many of these causes are but different names for one thing, that they form but
one force, the application of a single law. Thus by reduction and
simplification, by logic and analysis, is it carried on to recognize and
proclaim the unity of all cause. And thus monotheism succeeds to
polytheism.
In Egypt, religious speculation arrived on the threshold of this doctrine. Its
depths were dimly perceived, and it was even taught by the select class of
priests who were the philosophers of those days; but the monotheistic
conception never penetrated into the minds of the great mass of the people.
[73]
Moreover, by the very method in which Egyptian mythology described it,
it was easily adapted to the national polytheism, or even to fetish worship.
The theory of emanations reconciled everything. The different gods were but
the different qualities of the eternal substance, the various manifestations of
one creative force. These qualities and energies were revealed by being
imported into the world of form. They took finite shape and were made
comprehensible to the intellect of man by their mysterious birth and
generation. It was necessary, if the existence of the gods were to be brought
home to mankind, that each of them should have a form and a domicile.
Imagination therefore did well in commencing to distinguish and define the
gods; artists were piously occupied when they pursued the same course. They

gave precision of contour to the forms roughly
sketched, and by the established definition
which they gave to each divine figure, we might
almost say that they created the gods.
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 analysis
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 élite of the nation—the king, the priest, and
the military class—were adoring Amen and
Ptah, Khons or Khonsu, Mouth, Osiris and
Fig. 35.—Ptah, Horus, Sekhet, Isis, Nephtis and many other
from a bronze in the Louvre. divinities; all more or less abstract in their
Actual size. nature, and presiding over special
phenomena. As for the lower orders of the
people, they knew the names of these deities and associated 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 gods 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]

Later theology has succeeded in giving more or
less subtle and specious explanations of these
forms of worship. Each of these animals has been
assigned, 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 Fig. 36.—Osiris,
world and of the laws which govern them, from a bronze in the Louvre.
these laws and forces presented themselves Height 22·8 inches.
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 gods of the Hellenic pantheon absorbed and
assimilated 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 classes 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
gods, 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.
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;
Fig. 37.—The goddess Bast. who adored divinities which grew in their
(From a bronze in the Louvre. own gardens,"[76] and a god which was
Actual Size.) 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.

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
emancipation; it is, therefore, hardly surprising that they should have
remained longer than their successors in that fetish worship which we have
asserted to be the first stage of religious development.[78]
This stage must never be forgotten, if we
wish to understand the part which art
played in the figuring of the Egyptian gods.
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 noblest living
Fig. 38.—Painted bas-relief. form they knew, that of man. In the next
Boulak. (Drawn by Bourgoin.) 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 quantity 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.
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 nobility
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?

Fig. 39.—Sekhet. Louvre. (Granite. Height 0·50 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 gods 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 gods 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.
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.

Fig. 40.—Isis-Hathor. Louvre.
(Bronze. Actual size.)

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
gods 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.
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 goddess, its wings forming her head-dress. The
goddess 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 god is figured with the head
of an Ibis. The part played by these birds in the
representation of the gods, both in the plastic arts and
in writing, is to be explained by the sentiments of
gratitude and religious veneration of which they were
the objects, sentiments which were the natural
outcome of the practical services which they Fig. 42.—Touaris. Boulak.
rendered to mankind. (Drawn by G. Bénédite.)

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
Fig. 43.—Rannu every kind which accumulated round the dwellings of
(from Wilkinson). 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 assigned the
indispensable work of elimination and transformation, an office which they

yet fill satisfactorily in the towns and villages of Africa. Thanks to their
appetite 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]

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 gods who correspond to the personages of the
Hellenic 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
superstition. These objects of veneration were therefore enabled to maintain
their places by the side of the superior gods, 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.
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 classes of
forms which, to us, seem so differently constituted
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
Fig. 45.—Thoth. Louvre.
Ptah; he was, in a word, his living statue.[81]
Enamelled clay.
Actual size. 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 god 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 assurance that his meaning would be
understood at a glance without any particular effort on his part.
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 god and goddess 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 Fig. 46.—Sacrifice to Apis,
the original characteristics of the Egyptian from Mariette.
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 gods 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 god, 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 god; 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 god 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 god, 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 Philæ became popular and was
prolonged in that island sanctuary until the sixth century of our era.
The movement of religious thought in Egypt was very different from what we
shall find in Greece. We find no god, like that of the Hellenes, 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 godhead 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 gods and
men. The Egyptian artist could find no such inspiration in a long succession
of gods, 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.

§ 6. That Egyptian Art did not escape the Law of Change, and that
its History may therefore be written.

It may be well, before embarking upon the study of Egyptian architecture,
sculpture, and painting, to dispel a prejudice which in spite of recent
discoveries still exists in some minds; we mean, the belief in the immobility
of Egyptian art. This mistake is a very ancient one. The Greeks were the first
to make it, and they transmitted their error to us. In regard to this we must
cite the famous passage of Plato[84]:—"Long ago they appear to have
recognized the very principle of which we are now speaking—that their

young citizens must be habituated to forms and strains of virtue. These they
fixed, and exhibited patterns of them in their temples; and no painter or artist
is allowed to innovate upon them, or to leave the traditional forms and invent
new ones. To this day no alteration is allowed, either in these arts or in music,
at all. And you will find that their works of art are painted or moulded in the
same forms that they had ten thousand years ago—(this is literally true and
no exaggeration)—their ancient paintings and sculptures are not a whit better
or worse than the work of to-day, but are made with just the same skill."
This strange assertion was long accepted without question even in modern
times. We need not go back to the archæologists of the last century, whose
credulity is to be accounted for by their lack of materials for the formation of
a better judgment. In 1828 in his first lecture at the Bibliothèque Royale,
Raoul-Rochette turned his attention to Egypt. He had before his eyes, in the
Parisian museums and in the Description de l'Égypte, works which dated
from the finest periods of the Theban dynasties, although the still more
ancient monuments which now form the glory of the Boulak Museum were
not yet discovered; he might have perceived and pointed out the difference
between the statues of Ousourtesen, Thothmes, and Rameses on the one
hand, and those of the Sait epoch; still more should he have remarked upon
the characteristics which distinguish the monuments of independent Egypt
from those which were erected under the Ptolemies and the Roman emperors.
What he did say, however, and say with consummate confidence was: "From
the first of the Pharaohs to the last of the Ptolemies, the art of Egypt never
varied."[85]
Such crude notions as this can no longer be upheld. M. Marriette protests in
the following almost indignant terms against certain utterances of M. Renan
which seemed to him to imply the same doctrine. "M. Renan loves[86] to
represent ancient Egypt as a sort of China, walled in and fortified against the
exterior world, immovable, old even in its infancy, and arrived by a single
spring at a degree of civilization which it never surpassed. He looks upon the
country as a great plain, green indeed and fertile, but without accidents of
contour to break the monotony of the landscape. And yet Egypt had periods
of grandeur and decadence more marked than those of other countries. Her
civilization went through all the different phases; it went through many
complete transformations, it had its sudden moments of brilliancy and its
epochs of eclipse. Its art was not so stationary as to prevent us from writing

its history. The influence of Egypt was felt from Mesopotamia to the equator.
Thothmes, in a word, was no Chinaman. Egypt perished because in attacking
foreign nations she provoked a reaction which was fatal to her."[87]
Now that we are enabled to contrast the statues of the Ptolemaic period with
those of the pyramid builders, we find nothing surprising in Mariette's
language; but even before these means of study were open to us, criticism
should have cast more than doubt upon the assertions of Plato; it should have
appealed from a theory which was at variance with all historical analogies to
the monuments themselves to tell the truth, to those monuments which were
best known and understood. Was it likely, was it possible, that such a people
as that which created these monuments, should remain for more than forty
centuries unaffected by the law of continual, even if almost insensible,
change? What right have we thus to place Egypt and China apart from the
rest of humanity? There are, it is true, some peoples who are more attached
than others to traditional customs and ancient institutions; they are more
conservative, to use the modern phrase. But, although their evolution is a
slower process, it is there; our eyes cannot perceive any movement in the
small hand of a watch, but yet it does move exactly in the same fashion as
that which marks the seconds. Upon the banks of the Peiho as upon those of
the Nile, upon the whole surface of our planet, man is not; he becomes, to
borrow one of the favourite expressions of German philosophy. History can
admit no exception to this law either for China or Egypt. In the cases of both
those countries there is a certain illusion, which is to be explained by our
ignorance. We are not well enough acquainted with them to grasp the
different periods of their political and social, their artistic and literary
development. For one who is too far off or very short-sighted the details of
the most varied landscape become obliterated or confused; waste land and
smiling fields are blended together; hollows and hillocks lose the vigour of
their contours.
China, as we have said, does not enter into our purview; and as for Egypt, the
deeper we penetrate into her history the more are we convinced that her long
career was troubled by moments of crisis similar to those which have come to
other human societies. The narratives of the Greek historians give us reason
to suspect that it was so, and the monuments which have been discovered
insist upon the same truth, and compel us to accept it. For certain epochs
these are very abundant, beautiful, and varied. Afterwards they become rare

and clumsy, or altogether wanting; and again they reappear in great numbers
and in their full nobility, but with a different general character. These
contrasts and temporary eclipses occur again and again. How, then, can we
doubt that here, as elsewhere, there were alternations of grandeur and
poverty, of periods of conquest and expansion and epochs of civil war or of
defeat by foreign invaders? May we not believe that through the clouds
which obscure the causes of such changes we may catch glimpses of those
periods of decadence and renascence which, following one upon the other,
exhausted in the end the genius of the race?
Let us take a single example—the most striking of all. "After the sixth
dynasty all documents cease; they are absolutely wanting until the eleventh,
the first of the Middle Empire. This is one of those sudden interruptions in
the history of Egypt which may be compared to the temporary disappearance
of those curious rivers which run partly underground."[88]

Fig. 47.—Statue from the Ancient Empire, in limestone. Boulak. Drawn
by Bourgoin.

When historians, living as long after our nineteenth century as we do after the
epochs of Memphite and Theban supremacy in Egypt, come to treat the
history of the past, they will perhaps look upon the ages which rolled away
between the fall of Græco-Roman civilization and the revival of learning in
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as no longer than that which divided the
ancient from the middle empire of Egypt, or the latter from the dynasties of
Thebes. In the distant future men will know, in a vague fashion, that between
the fall of Rome and the discovery of printing, or that of America, there were

great movements among the nations, and an apparent recoil of civilization;
but memory and imagination will leap without effort over the gap, over that
period which we call the Middle Ages. The Roman empire will seem to touch
our modern civilization, and many of the differences which strike us so
strongly will be imperceptible. They will perceive that we had a new religion
and new inventions, but they will take more account of the resemblances than
of the differences. Our languages, manners, laws, and forms of government
will seem to them continuations of those of Greece and Rome. In that which
we call antiquity, and in Christian Europe, they will find similar literary
habits and standards of criticism, the same judicial nomenclature, the same
terms for monarchy, empire, and republic, the same titles for kings and
Cæsars. These different civilizations are like star clusters. To us who are
among them they seem distinct enough, but to generations which are divided
from them by a vast space of time they will seem to form but one nebulous
body.

Fig. 48.—Woman kneading dough. Statuette from the Ancient Empire,
in limestone.
Drawn by Bourgoin.

Egypt, then, had her great convulsions like
the rest of the world. She met with
disasters, and underwent periods of
confusion like those which overtook the
nations of the West between the reigns of
Trajan and Charlemagne. Wars and
invasions, the action and reaction of
civilization, had upon her the same
influence as upon them, and, in
transforming her sentiments and ideas,
caused their plastic expression to pass
through a series of changes in taste and
style. The Theban tomb of the time of
Rameses is very different from that of
Memphis and the ancient empire; the new
empire constructed no buildings like the
greater pyramids, but its temples were
larger and more magnificent than any of
their predecessors. It was the same with
sculpture. A cultivated eye has no need to
run to inscriptions to enable it to
distinguish between works of the Fig. 49.—The Scribe Chaphré.
ancient and of the middle empire; nor Fifth dynasty. Boulak. Limestone.
will it confound works created in either
of those periods with those of the Sait
epoch. The differences are almost as well marked as those which enable
archæologists to distinguish a torso of the time of Phidias from one of the
school of Praxiteles or Lysippus. These differences it will be our duty to
describe hereafter, but our readers may perhaps discover them for themselves
if they examine the illustrations to this chapter, which are arranged in
chronological order.
Variety is universal in Egypt, local variety as well as that of different periods.
Language had its dialects as well as art. The pronunciation of Upper and that
of Lower Egypt was quite dissimilar, except in the case of a few letters. In the
same way different cities had distinct schools of sculpture and painting,
which were distinguished from one another by their traditional methods of
conception and execution. Neither under Ousourtesen nor under Rameses,

had art the same character in the cities of the Delta, in Memphis, and in
Thebes. Among the works in sculpture executed for Rameses II., those of
Abydos were more elegant and refined than those of Thebes.
How, then, are we to explain the error
committed by Plato, and by him
transmitted to posterity? The
explanation is easy. The Greeks visited
Egypt too late in its history to form a
true judgment. In Plato's time the
Egyptians were still trying, by violent
but spasmodic efforts, to reconquer the
independence which had been
destroyed by the successor of Cyrus.
But the moment was at hand when even
these intermittent struggles were to be
abandoned, and they were to finally
succumb to sovereigns of foreign
blood. Their still brilliant civilization
might deceive a passing stranger, but
the decadence had commenced—a
decadence slow indeed, but none the
more remediable.
Some years after the visit of Plato, the
two Nectanebos, more especially the
second, devoted themselves with
energetic ardour to the restoration of
the ancient buildings of the country and
to the construction of new ones, such as
the temple at Philæ. Buildings signed
with their name are to be found
Fig. 50.—The Lady Naï. Wooden statue all over Egypt; but these
from the 19th or 20th dynasty. Louvre. simultaneous undertakings seem
to betray a sense of vanishing
power, an uncertainty of the
morrow, a feverish activity seeking to deceive itself and to hide its own
weakness. Nothing could be more precarious than the political conditions
under which this activity was displayed. The independence of the country

was maintained by the dearly bought services of Spartan and Athenian
mercenaries. Twice already had Persia crushed Egyptian revolts, and she was,
perhaps, but watching her opportunity to cast the hordes of Asia upon the
unhappy country for a third time. Ill obeyed as he was, the "Great King"
could always find troops to take part in the spoiling of a country whose riches
had proved so inexhaustible. And if, by any remote chance, the Persians
should fail in their enterprise, another and a graver danger would menace the
Egyptian monarchy from the rapid growth of the Greek power in the
Mediterranean. Since the period of the Persian wars, the language, the
literature, the arts, the mythology of Greece, had spread with great rapidity;
and the moment might be foreseen when a supremacy founded upon
intellectual worth would be confirmed by military triumph and the creation of
a vast Hellenic empire. The conquest of Egypt was begun by the Ionian
soldiers and merchants who were introduced into the Nile valley by
Psemethek; it was bloodlessly completed by the arms of Alexander. For three
centuries the Egyptians had been accustomed to see the Greeks freely coming
and going among them as merchants, as mercenary officers, as travellers
eager for instruction. The latter posed as disciples before the priests of
Memphis and Heliopolis, and freely expressed a warmth of admiration which
could not fail to flatter the national vanity. The Greeks would be better
masters than their rivals from Persia. From them the Egyptians would, at
least, obtain good administration and complete freedom in the exercise of
their religion in return for their taxes. The Greeks were clear-sighted enough
to understand their own interests; they were too philosophical and large
minded for any fanatical persecution of, or even hindrance to, the national
religion; they were too much of connoisseurs to fail in respect to a form of
civilization whose prodigious antiquity they divined, and before which the
most eminent among them were ever inclined to bow, like youths before an
old man, or a parvenu before the descendant of a long line of kings.
Thus Egypt gradually fell into the hands of strangers after the commencement
of the fourth century before Christ. Ethiopians, Assyrians and Persians had by
turns overrun the country. Great numbers of the Phœnicians had established
themselves in it, and, after the fall of Jerusalem and Samaria, many Jews
followed their example. Finally, the Greeks came in by thousands through the
breaches which their predecessors had made, penetrating into all parts, and
making everywhere felt the superiority of a people who had, by appropriating
the useful results obtained in a long succession of centuries by more ancient

races, become wealthier, stronger, and better instructed than any of their
forerunners.
Thus Egypt lost her power of national rejuvenation, her power of rising again
after calamity. She existed on through the centuries by mere force of habit,
but she lived no more. Her population was so homogeneous, and her
institutions were so solid, that the social conditions of the country could not
be changed in a day or even in a century. The teachings of her religion had
been established by so long a course of development, and the hands of her
artists were so well practised, that the monumental types which had been
created in more fertile periods of her history were reproduced until a late
date, in a machine-like and instinctive fashion. Imagination was dead, and the
best that could be hoped for was the faithful repetition of those forms which
the genius of the race had conceived in its last moments of original thought.
Under the Sait princes, under the Psemetheks and Nekau, under Apries and
Amasis, Egypt was delivered from her enemies and again became mistress of
Syria and of the Island of Cyprus. She thus recovered confidence in herself
and in her future, and a period ensued which had an art of its own with
distinctive features which we shall endeavour to trace. In the intervals of
precarious repose which characterized the Persian domination, the Egyptians
had leisure neither to invent nor to improve. They copied, as well as they
could, the monuments of the twenty-sixth dynasty. Art became a mere
collection of technical precepts, kept together and transmitted in the
intercourse of the studio, by instruction and practice; it became a mere matter
of routine implying, perhaps, great technical skill, but displaying no sincere
and personal feeling. Nature was no longer studied or cared for. Artists knew
that the human figure should be divided into so many parts. They knew that
in the representation of this or that god a certain attitude or attribute was
necessary; and they carved the statues required of them after the traditional
recipes. Thus Egyptian art became conventional, and so it remained to the
end. So it was in the time of Diodorus. The sculptors whom that historian saw
at work in Memphis and Thebes, during the reign of Augustus, carved a
statue as a modern mechanic would make the different parts of a machine;
they worked with a rapidity and an easy decision more characteristic of the
precise workman than of the artist.[89] Thought was no longer necessary to
them. The due proportions and measurements had been ascertained and fixed
many centuries before their time.

Fig. 51.—Ouah-ab-ra, 26th dynasty. Louvre. Grey granite, height 37
inches.

But research must still precede discovery. We admit that a day arrived when
convention was supreme in Egyptian art, but it could not have begun with
convention any more than the arts of other nations. We must here define the
terms which we shall have occasion to employ. Every work of art is an
interpretation of nature. Let us take the example of the human figure. In the
works of a single period and of a single people, it is always full of striking
similarity; and yet two original artists never look at it with the same eyes.
One will look at it in certain aspects and will bring out certain qualities,

which another, although his contemporary and fellow-countryman, will leave
in the obscurity of shadows. One will devote himself to the beauty of form,
another to the accidents of colour or the expression of passion and thought.
The original remains the same, although its interpretations are so various.
And these varieties become still more marked when we compare the arts of
different races or of different periods—the art of Egypt with that of Assyria
or Greece, antique art with that of modern times.
On the other hand, the great resemblance which the arts of a single time and
country bear to each other, is accounted for by the fact that their creators look
upon the external facts of life through a glass, if we may put it so, tinted with
the colours of the national genius. They bring to their study of an eternal
model the same transient prejudices, the same preoccupations, the same
desires. And yet among those highly gifted races where art holds or has held
a lofty place, groups of artists are formed, either successively or
simultaneously, which we call schools. Each of these groups professes to
make a fresh reference to nature, to interpret her works more faithfully than
its predecessors, and to draw from them typical forms which shall be more
expressive of the real desires and sentiments of the public for which it caters.
Between the works of these different schools, there are, however, many
similarities, which are to be explained by the identity of race and belief.
There are also diversities which are caused either by different conditions or
by the influence of some master spirit. Wherever these schools spring up, art
lives, moves, and progresses. But sooner or later comes a time when this
ardour comes to an end, and exhaustion takes its place. The civilization to
which it belongs becomes old and languid, and its creative power ceases like
the imperceptible sinking of a flood. Now, it often happens that just before
this period of lassitude, in the last days of reproductive strength and healthy
maturity, a rich and brilliant school springs up, which interprets the
characteristic sentiments of the civilization to which it belongs, with the
greatest vigour and by admirably selected means. If such an interpretation be
found satisfactory at all points, why should a better be sought for at the risk
of choosing a worse? This question is but a confession of impotence on the
part of those who ask it. From that moment convention will be supreme, and
convention in the sense of an artificial set of rules which will release the artist
from his obligation of continual reference to nature.

Fig. 52.—Sculptor at work upon an arm, Thebes. (Champollion, pl. 180.)

Such a revolution is not the work of a day. Art requires time thus to inclose
itself in mere mechanical dexterity. As a nation grows old, its art, like its
literature, continually becomes more and more conventional. Every great
period or school leaves to the generations that come after it types which have
made a vivid impression upon taste and imagination. As time goes on these
types become more numerous and more brilliant, and their prestige increases
until it becomes little less than tyranny. Society can only escape from its
thrall at the expense of some great religious or philosophical revolution, or by
the infusion of new blood from without. And these changes western
civilization had to undergo in the early centuries of our era, in the
establishment of Christianity, the invasion of the barbarians, and the fall of
the Roman Empire.
Thanks to the peculiar circumstances of the country, Egyptian society was
enabled to maintain the originality of its genius and the vitality of its
institutions with unusual success. After each period of internal commotion or

foreign invasion, the Egyptians set themselves to renew the chain of their
national traditions. In spite of the foreign elements which had been received
among them, the great mass of the people remained the same down to the
latest days of antiquity. Heterogeneous constituents were absorbed by the
nation without leaving any apparent trace. The ideas which the people had
formed for themselves of the ultimate destiny of humanity were developed,
indeed, and in successive ages varied slightly in general colour, but in none
of their variations did they give rise to a new religion, as Brahmanism gave
birth to Buddhism.
As often as a new dynasty of kings succeeded in driving out the foreign
conqueror and in re-establishing the unity of the kingdom, so often was there
a complete restoration. The aim which they had in view was ever to restore,
in all its parts, a régime which was founded upon national pride. Enjoying a
civilization which for ages had been alone in the world, it was in its full and
glorious past that Egyptian society found the ideal to which it clung in spite
of all obstacles and misfortunes. Its gaze was turned backwards towards those
early sovereigns who seemed transfigured by distance, but whose presence in
the memory kept alive the perpetual worship which had been vowed to them.

Fig. 53.—Sculptor carving a statue, Thebes. (Champollion, pl. 180.)

Every restoration is inspired by a more or less blind and superstitious
reverence for the past. This has often been asserted in connection with
politics and religion, and the assertion is equally true in respect to art. Each of
those dynasties to which Egypt owed its political restoration, set themselves
to repair the temples which had been destroyed, and to replace upon their
pedestals the statues of gods or ancestors which had been overthrown. When
new temples and new statues were to be erected, the first idea of the artists
employed was to study the ancient monuments and to try to equal them. As
long as Egypt preserved her vitality, the wants of the present and external
influences no doubt had their effect in introducing certain changes, both in
the arrangement of her buildings, and in the modelling, movement, and
expression of the statues which adorned them. Ancient types were not
servilely copied, but the temptation to borrow from them a point of departure,
at least, for new attempts at progression, was too strong to be resisted. It was
necessary that all buildings and statues should be in harmony with the
remains which subsisted from previous ages, and from this it resulted that
each new creative effort began by imitating what had gone before. The
'school' in process of foundation accepted on trust the architectural
disposition left by its predecessor, as well as its methods of looking at nature.
And this is equivalent to saying that, from its first moment, it must have been
conventional in a certain degree.
This conventionality must have increased at every fresh renascence, because
each new development had its own processes to transmit to posterity as well
as those of its ancestors. After each recoil or pause in the progress of art, the
weight of the past must have seemed heavier to those who attempted to
revive the onward movement. On the one hand, the more ancient of the
traditional elements had acquired, by their constant and often repeated
transmission, a prestige and authority which placed them above discussion;
on the other, the legacy of admitted principles and processes was continually
increasing, until it became a source of embarrassment to the artist, and of
destruction to his liberty. When at last the decadence of the race had
advanced so far that all initiative power and independence of thought had
disappeared, the time arrived when convention was everything, like one of
those elaborate rituals which regulate every word, and even gesture of the

officiating priest. When Plato visited Egypt, the schools of sculpture were
nothing more than institutions for teaching pupils, who were remarkable for
docility and for dexterity of hand, to transmit to their successors an
assemblage of precepts and receipts which provided for every contingency
and left no room for the exercise of fancy or discretion.
At that very time Greek art was progressing with a power and rapidity which
has never been rivalled. To the school of Phidias, a school established in that
Athens which yet possessed so many works of the archaic period, had
succeeded those of Praxiteles and Scopas. The Greeks found means to
improve, or at least to innovate, upon perfection itself. Plato did not, and
could not, perceive, in his hasty journey through the Egyptian cities, that they
too had seen their periods of change, their different schools and
developments of style, less marked, perhaps, than those of Greece, and
certainly less rapid, but yet quite perceptible to the practised observer. We are
now in a better position to estimate these differences. Monuments have been
brought before our eyes such as Plato never saw; namely, the statues of the
ancient empire which were hidden for so many ages in the thickness of walls
or in the depths of sepulchral pits. Even now these statues have not reached
the age of ten thousand years so persistently attributed by the Greek
philosopher to the early works which he did see, works which seemed to him
exactly the same as those which were being made in his presence. But
although the statues of the early empire were then no more than some thirty
centuries old, Plato could not have helped seeing, if he had seen them at all,
that they were quite distinct from the works which the sculptors of Nectanebo
had in progress, always supposing that he looked at them with reasonable
attention. The art of the pyramid builders, an art which possesses in a very
high degree certain qualities for which the Egyptians have been too
commonly refused credit, is known to us chiefly through the excavations of
Mariette and the contents of the Boulak museum. But even before Cheops,
Chefren, and their subjects had risen from their tombs, the historian might
have divined by analogy, and described by no very bold conjecture, the
essential characteristics of Egyptian art during its first centuries. Whether we
speak of an individual, of a school, or of a people, every artistic career which
follows its natural course and is not rudely broken through, ends sooner or
later in conventionality, in that which is technically called mannerism. But
mannerism is never the beginning of art. Art always begins by humble and
sincere attempts to render what it sees. Its awkwardness is at first extreme

and its power of imitation very imperfect. But it is not discouraged; it tries
different processes; it takes account now of one, now of another aspect of
life; it consults nature incessantly and humbly, taking note of her answers and
modifying its work in obedience to their teaching. This teaching is not always
rightly understood, but it is ever received with docility and good faith.

Fig. 54.—Artist painting a statue, Thebes. (Champollion, pl. 180.)

Every work which bears the marks of frank and loyal effort is interesting; but
the moment in an artistic career which gives birth to real chefs d'œuvre is
towards the end of that period, when the eye has become sure, and the hand
sufficiently well practised, for the faithful interpretation of any model whose
beauty or original expression may have caught the fancy. Success is then
achieved, always provided that the model is never lost sight of or studied
with anything short of passionate devotion. But the time comes when this
devotion is relaxed. The artist thinks that such constant reference to nature is
no longer required when he has made his final choice between the different

methods which his art employs. In devoting himself to the reproduction of
certain features for which he has a marked preference, he has himself
produced types which he thenceforward takes pleasure in repeating, as if they
were in themselves an epitome of nature's infinite diversity.
In the case of Egypt, even those discoveries which carry us back farthest do
not enable us to grasp, as we can in the case of Greece, the first attempts at
plastic expression, the first rude efforts of the modeller or painter; but they
carry us to the end of that period which, in the case of other countries, we call
archaic; and above all they transport us into the centre of the epoch which
was to Egypt what the fifth century was to Greece, namely, the age of
perfection. The Egyptian people had already lived so long and worked so
hard that they could not free their work from certain common and
irrepressible characteristics. In the plastic arts and in poetry they had their
own style, and that style was both individual and original in an extraordinary
degree. This style was already formed, but it was not yet robbed of its vitality
by indolent content or petrified by mannerism; it had neither renounced its
freedom nor said its last word.

Fig. 55.—Isis nursing Horus. Ptolemaic bronze; in the Louvre. Height,
19 inches.

§ 7. Of the place held in this work by the monuments of the
Memphite period, and of the limits of our inquiry.

It will be found that a very large space in the present work, some may say too
large a space, is devoted to the pre-conventional art of the ancient empire. We
had reasons for taking such a course, and reasons that may be easily divined.
This early art is much less known than that of the later epochs. While the
great museums of Europe are filled with statues and reliefs from Thebes, or,
at least, contemporary with the Theban and Sait dynasties, monuments from
the Memphite period are still rare out of Egypt. Thanks to Mariette and
Lepsius, Paris and Berlin are not without remarkable examples of the art in
question, but it is in Egypt itself, at the Boulak museum, that any detailed
study must be made. It is there that the masterpieces of an art whose very
existence was unsuspected by Champollion, are to be found; the Chephren,
the two statues from Meidoum, the bas-reliefs from the tomb of Ti, and many
others of similar style and value. These figures have been drawn for our
readers by two skilful artists, MM. Bourgoin and Bénédite. They have
rendered with fidelity and sincerity more than one object which had never
before been reproduced, either by photography or otherwise. A few
specimens of these treasures, selected by him who had been the means of
bringing them to light and whom we now mourn, were seen at the Universal
Exhibitions of 1867 and 1878, but they soon returned to Cairo, and western
archæologists had but slight opportunity to become acquainted with their
characteristics.
The art of the early dynasties has thus been practically ignored by those who
have never visited Egypt. The lifelike and enthusiastic descriptions of M.
Eugene Melchior de Vogüé and others have done something to arouse the
attention of connoisseurs; but in such a matter the slightest sketch, provided it
be correct so far as it goes, is of more value, as a definition of style, than the
most picturesque or eloquent writing.
These reflections would by themselves justify our efforts to incorporate in
our pages, reproductions of all the more important objects with which the
necropolis at Memphis has enriched the museum at Boulak; but we were
impelled by other motives also. The extant monuments of the ancient empire

are less numerous than those of the Theban and Sait dynasties; they are of
comparatively modest dimensions, and, with rare exceptions they all belong
to one category, that of works relating to death and burial. They also have a
special interest of their own. They enable us to protest, and to give tangible
justification for our protestations, against a prejudice which dates back to a
remote antiquity; even if all evidence had perished the critic would have no
great difficulty in casting doubt upon assertions which were in themselves
extremely improbable, but his task is rendered much easier when he is able to
point to existing monuments in support of his contention, and his pleasure is
great in seeing the certainty of his critical methods borne out, and Egyptian
art replacing itself, as if of its own motion, under the normal conditions of
historic development.
This volume, then, will treat of the remains of early
Egyptian art at a length which would seem at first sight out
of due proportion to their number, but later ages will also
be represented by a series of monuments, which will bring
us down to the Persian conquest. This limit will hardly be
over-passed in our choice of examples for study, and that
for two reasons.
The first is, that at the latter period the evolution of
Egyptian art was complete, it had created all that it could
and had become a slave to its own past. Disposing under
the Ptolemies of all the resources of a great empire, it
indeed introduced certain architectural changes which do
not seem to have been borrowed from previous buildings,
but those changes were of no very great
importance and were mostly in matters of detail. In
Fig. 56.—Chephren.
sculpture and painting we can easily see that it
Sketched by Bourgoin.
abandoned itself to mere copying, to the repetition
See also Fig. 460.
of a lesson learnt by rote. Whatever had to be
done, was done in accordance with fixed tradition,
and one monument only differed from another in the amount of care and
manual dexterity bestowed upon it.
Our second reason is this, that Egypt was opened to the Greeks in the time of
the Sait princes. From the year 650 B.C. onwards, there was constant
communication between Ionia and the cities of the Delta. If at any time Greek

art borrowed directly from that of Egypt, it was during the second half of the
seventh century and the first half of the sixth. By the end of the sixth century,
it had become so original and so skilful in the management of its selected
methods of expression that it could not have been very receptive to foreign
influences. After the Persian wars such influences would be still more
powerless. In the Ptolemaic era the state of things was reversed; Greece
imposed her language, her literature, her religious conceptions and their
visible symbols upon the whole eastern world. Even then the art of Egypt
could defend, and even perpetuate itself, by the power of custom and of a
tradition which had been handed down through so many centuries, but the
day was past when it could provoke imitation.

Fig. 57.—Ti, with his wife and son.

As for the indirect borrowings of forms and motives which Greece received
from Egypt through the Phœnicians, their transmission had come to an end
before the Persian conquest, even before the time of Psemethek. Egypt was
represented, either immediately or through the imitative powers of the Syrian

manufacturers, in the first textiles, jewels, and vases of clay or metal, carried
by the Sidonian merchants to the savage ancestors of the Greeks. In this
roundabout manner she had probably more influence over Greece than in
their periods of more direct communication. The rays kindled upon her
hearth, the earliest of civilization, fell upon the Hellenic isles as refracted
rays, after passing through the varied media of Chaldæa, Assyria or Phœnicia.
Thus if we wish thoroughly to understand Greece, we must start from
Memphis and go through Babylon and Nineveh, Tyre and Sidon. But Greece
will be the aim of our voyage, and Egypt will interest us less on her own
account than on account of that unique and unrivalled people who inherited
her inventions and discoveries, and made them the foundation for a
productiveness in which are summarized all the useful labours of antiquity.
Egyptian art will be followed by us down to the moment in which it lost its
creative force and with it its prestige. We shall rarely have occasion to speak
of the Ptolemaic remains of Egyptian art. Now and then we shall go to them
for examples when any particular detail which we desire to mention has not
been preserved for us by earlier monuments, but even then we shall require to
have good reasons for believing that such detail did in fact originate in the
creative periods of the national history.
The Egypt of the Pharaohs has not even yet been entirely explored. Are we to
believe that the splendid edifices reared in the cities of the Delta, and
especially at Sais, by the twenty-sixth dynasty, have perished to the last
stone? We are loth to think that it is so, but no remains have yet been
discovered. Some day, perhaps, well directed excavations may bring to light
the temples which Herodotus so greatly admired; and who knows but that we
may find in them more than one of those motives and arrangements which at
present are only known to exist in the buildings of the Ptolemies and of the
Roman emperors?

CHAPTER II.
PRINCIPLES AND GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF
EGYPTIAN ARCHITECTURE.

§ 1. Method to be Employed by us in our Study of this Architecture.

In the enterprise which we have undertaken the study of oriental art is but an
introduction to that of Greece. Without an attentive examination of its
remains we should be unable to distinguish the original elements in the work
of the Greek genius from those which it borrowed from other nations. We
must pass in review the whole artistic production of several great nations who
occupied a vast surface of the globe, and whose fertility was prolonged
through a long course of centuries, but we shall not attempt to describe singly
the great buildings of Egypt and Assyria, of Persia and Phœnicia, as such an
attempt would perhaps cause us to lose sight of the main object of our work.
Our task is no easy one. While limiting our study in the fashion which has
been described, we must not fail to extend our purview to every fact which
may help to justify the comparison which we propose to institute between the
arts of Greece and those of the nations by whose teachings she profited.
There is but one road to success in this double task. We must devote the
greatest possible care to our study of the details in question, and then give the
general results of that study; we must make ourselves thoroughly acquainted
with all the phenomena, but must confine our exposition to the general laws
which governed them, such as our minute inquiries have presented them to
us. No circumstantial description need, therefore, be looked for in these pages
even in the case of the most important and famous buildings of Egypt. No
monograph upon any tomb or temple will be found, but we shall ourselves
have examined many tombs and temples; we shall, to speak figuratively, have
taken them to pieces, and by means of the knowledge acquired we shall
endeavour to make our readers acquainted with the notions of the Egyptians
upon sepulchral and religious architecture, and with the changes which those
conceptions underwent in the course of centuries.

Thus, for example, we have explored the pages of Lepsius[90] and Prisse
d'Avennes[91] for information relating to the sepulchres of the first six
dynasties, and further researches have been made on the spot expressly for
the present work, but we shall not give any descriptions or illustrations of
those works individually; we shall merely use them for an ideal restoration of
the characteristic tombhouse of the ancient empire. We may, perhaps, for this
purpose, make a more particular reference to one or two sepulchres which are
in unusually good preservation, but only for the sake of giving firm definition
to the type and to its main variations.
By this analytical method of treatment we shall be enabled to give an
account, which shall be at once accurate and not too long, of the constructive
processes employed by the Egyptians, of the general aspect of their buildings,
and of the modifications enforced by the decorative forms of which they
made use. We shall be enabled to see how far those forms were decided by
natural conditions, by ancient tradition, or by special wants. We shall thus
include in a single chapter all that relates to principal or accessory openings,
to doors and their construction, to those loftily placed windows which were
calculated to give so little light. In another chapter we shall discuss the
column and its capital; we shall describe the variations produced by time and
materials upon its proportions and its entasis. Each assertion will be justified
by reference to characteristic examples. In this matter our only difficulty will
be an embarras de richesse, a difficulty of choice among the vast number of
remains still existing of ancient Egypt from the time of Menes to that of the
Persian conquest.
In order to avoid repetition and to put before the reader ideas which he will
have no difficulty in assimilating, we shall push our work of analysis and
generalization farther still. Before we embark upon the study of any special
class of buildings we shall endeavour to define the general and unchanging
characteristics of Egyptian architecture as a whole; characteristics which
were fixed by the idiosyncracy of the race, by its beliefs and social customs,
by the nature of the climate, and of the materials of which the architect could
dispose. We shall do the same for Assyria and Chaldæa, for Persia and
Phœnicia, for each, indeed, of the nationalities which are to be considered in
our history.
These theoretical chapters will be illustrated in the same fashion as the others,
except that the illustrations will partake of the generalized and abstract

character of the text which they accompany. In most cases they will be simple
diagrams composed for the express purpose of illustrating the definitions or
descriptions to which they belong. They will each refer to some essential
element in the national architecture, to some element which is not peculiar to
any one edifice more than another, but is to be found in all those which have
similar aims and are constructed of the same materials. Such elements are
above and outside such accidental variations as may be found in details of
plan or ornament; they form part of the substantial inner constitution of the
arts of Egypt and Chaldæa, and make their originality indisputable.

§ 2. General Principles of Form.

The external forms of Egyptian edifices are pyramidoid; in other words, the
outward surfaces of their walls affect the form of a trapezium. Thus if we
prolong these surfaces vertically we find that they unite at last in a point, in
the case of square buildings (Fig. 58), and in a ridge in those which are
oblong in plan (Fig. 59).[92] A square building will sometimes end in a ridge,
or aréte, when the principal façade and the corresponding one in its rear are
vertical, the other two being inclined.
Horizontal lines predominate over inclined or vertical lines, and buildings,
therefore, tend to develop in length and depth rather than in height. To this
general rule, however, the pylons afford exceptions.

Fig. 58.—Square building.

The terminations of their edifices were also horizontal. There was no
necessity for sloping roofs, as, away from the immediate proximity of the
sea, it hardly ever rains in Egypt. Moreover, the natural conformation of the
country had its influence upon the creations of its inhabitants. The unforeseen
and sudden variations, the contrasts of hill and plain, which we find in a
mountainous country like Greece, are here unknown. Lower Egypt is a
verdant plain, intersected by canals, and stretching from the sea to the desert;
in Upper and Middle Egypt the lazy river is accompanied throughout its
journey from south to north by two long chains of hills, the Arab chain and
the Libyan, whose summits form an almost unbroken line. Between these
aspects of nature and the works of man which they enframe, there is a
striking general sympathy.[93]

Fig. 59.—Rectangular and oblong building.

The peculiar character of Egyptian architecture is owing to its lateral
extension, and to those wide-spreading bases and foundations which suggest
the inclination of the superincumbent walls. In looking at one of these
buildings, we feel that it is capable of infinite extension horizontally, and that
but one of its dimensions, that of height, is limited by its essential forms.
These characteristics give a look of sturdy power to Egyptian architecture
which is peculiar to itself, and suggests an idea of unbounded durability.[94]

Fig. 60.—The Libyan chain, above the necropolis of Thebes.

An appearance of incomparable gravity, of solemnity, is also stamped upon it
by the small number of openings for the admission of light of which it makes
use, and also by their arrangement. Compared to our modern architecture, in
which windows play such an important part, that of Egypt is prison-like in its
gloom; but, in consequence of its rare openings and their small size, it
presents more imposing walls than any other style.
One of the essential arrangements of Egyptian architecture is shared by many
other countries, that of the portico, by which we mean an alternation of voids
and solids in certain well defined proportions, either for ornamenting the
exterior and providing a covered way, or for dividing the halls of the interior
and supporting their roofs.

Fig. 61.—General appearance of an Egyptian Temple.[95]

The relation between voids and solids in any style of architecture is one of
the most vital characteristics.
In the case of Egypt this relation gives rise to the following remarks:
1. Supports of the same kind and of the same diameter may have very
different heights in one and the same building (Fig. 62).

Fig. 62.—Temple of Khons, at Thebes.
(Description de l'Égypte, t. iii., pl. 55.)

Fig. 63.—Temple of Khons, Thebes. (Descr. de l'Égypte, t. iii., pl. 55.)
Fig. 64.—Temple of Khons, Thebes. (Descr. de l'Égypte, t. iii., pl. 55.)

In a single edifice supports of different kinds but of the same diameter, have
no fixed proportions, one to the other. A column with a lotus capital may be
higher than one with a bell-shaped termination, and vice versâ (Figs. 63 and
64), while, again in a single building, we may find these two differently
shaped columns equal to each other both in average diameter and in height
(Fig. 65).

Fig. 65.—From the second court of Medinet-Abou, Thebes.
(Description, t. ii., pl. 6.)

2. The spaces, or voids, between columns of one size and similar design, may
vary considerably (Fig. 66), and the entablatures which they support may
differ greatly in height (Fig. 66).

Fig. 66.—Ramesseum, Thebes.
(Description de l'Égypte, t. ii., pl. 28.)

The proportional combinations of these elements are such that they cannot be
methodically classified, and in this the architecture of Egypt is distinguished
from that which we call classic. In Greek art there is a modulus which
determines the quantitative relation of forms to each other, and fixes a mutual
and invariable interdependence. This modulus is found in the diameter of the
column, and the standard of proportion which is based upon it is called a
canon. In Egypt, as in other countries, there must have been a certain
connection between the diameter of a column and its height, but there was no
approach to that rigid and immutable law which had its effect upon every
detail of a Greek temple. The modulus, in Egyptian art, was used with such
freedom, and gave rise to such varied proportions, that we may say that no
canon existed. The elementary forms of an Egyptian edifice had so little

dependence upon the modulus that we need not take it into consideration,
and, in this sense, the art of Egypt was not mathematical, like that of Greece.

Fig. 67.—The Egyptian Gorge or Cornice.

Finally, all Egyptian buildings are crowned by the same entablature, an
architrave and the moulding which is called the Egyptian gorge (Fig. 67).[96]
An architectural member, the plain quadrangular architrave, is invariably
inserted between this termination and the upper extremity of the voids and
points of support.

THE ARAB CHAIN FROM NEAR KENEH

THE PYRAMIDS FROM OLD CAIRO

§ 3. General Principles of Construction.—Materials.

In studying a natural architecture and in attempting to assign reasons for its
particular characteristics, many circumstances have to be taken into
consideration. The innate genius of the race, the physical and moral
conditions of its development, the perfection of its civilization, the spirit of
its religion, and the ardour of its faith; none of these must be forgotten, but
some of them act in such a complex fashion that they are extremely difficult
to follow. In its aspirations towards the infinite and the eternal, the Egyptian
religion raised from the surface of the earth many buildings which varied as
greatly in form and aspect as they did in date and situation. The climatic
conditions of the world have changed but little since the beginning of the
historic period, and every nation has to take them into the first consideration
in deciding upon its own architectural forms and principles. We have here a
problem whose data do not vary, and yet its solutions have not always been
the same even in a single country. Without ever being absolutely incorrect,
they attached themselves now to one principle, now to another, and so gave
much variety to the appearance of successive buildings under one sky and
destined for similar uses.

As for the materials employed, we cannot go so far as to say that their
different properties absolutely determined the characteristics of Egyptian
building in advance. Stone, the chief of all materials, can lend itself to forms
of great variety in principle; and so, too, can brick and wood. But although no
material can narrowly confine a skilful architect, there are, nevertheless,
certain systems and constructions which are only possible with those which
possess certain properties.
To give but a single example, neither the hypo-style halls of Egypt and
Persepolis, nor the Greek temples, with their architraves resting upon widely
spaced columns, with the coffered roofs of their porticos, and their decorative
and expressive sculpture, could have been carried out in brick. In stone, or
rather in marble, alone, could the typical temple, such as the Parthenon, have
been realised; without such a material the Greeks could never have created
that incomparable ensemble whose different parts are so intimately allied one
with another, in which the richest decoration is in complete unity with the
constructive forms which it accentuates and embellishes. Brick could never
have led to the invention or employment of these forms. Those who try to
imitate them in any such material have to make up for its deficiencies by
various ingenious devices. The joints between the bricks have to be hidden
under stucco, the mouldings and carved ornaments of stone have to be
replaced, as in the temple of the Deus Rediculus, by moulded terra cotta (Fig.
68). The result is sometimes pleasing enough, especially by the surprise
which it causes. Santa Maria delle Grazie, at Milan, is a masterpiece of its
kind, thanks to the skill and tact displayed by Bramante in the management of
the burnt clay which was the only material afforded him by the plains of
Lombardy; but where Bramante succeeded, less skilful artists have failed.
They have demanded effects from brick which it was unable to give, with a
profound discord between form and matter as a result.

Fig. 68.—Capital and entablature of the temple
of the Deus Rediculus at Rome.[97]

Of all the causes which modify the forms of architecture and determine its
character, the most important is the nature, the genius, if we may say so, of
the materials used. So, before we can arrive at a correct judgment of the rules
and principles of any style, we must begin by appreciating and describing the
materials of which it disposes. We never forget this in the case of sculpture,
still less should we do so in the case of architecture, where the material is still
more despotic.

The materials made use of by the Egyptians were granite,[98] sandstone,[99]
and limestone.[100] A softer stone, namely alabaster, was often employed for
lining.[101]

Sandstone and limestone, especially the latter, are used nearly everywhere;
granite is of less frequent occurrence and suggests an important observation.
Granite is not a sedimentary, stratified rock like limestone; it is a material
compacted in great masses, to a depth or, to speak more accurately, in a
volume which is practically unlimited; the dimensions of the stones which
may be cut from these masses are therefore infinite to all intents and
purposes.[102]
The Egyptians also made use of both burnt and unburnt brick.
The employment of these different materials gave birth to what we may call
"dressed construction," that is, construction the elements of which are
squared upon each face and put into close juxtaposition one with another.
Concrete or pisé, compressed, as in the pylons, between moulds or caissons
of woodwork, was also made use of by the Egyptians. This material gave rise
to what we may call compact construction.
Again, although trees, except the palm, were rare enough in the valley of the
Nile, the Egyptians built also in wood, by which a third kind of construction,
called construction by assemblage, in which the elementary units were held
together by being introduced one into another, was obtained.
In a few buildings of the latter class metal seems to have been employed,
sometimes in the construction, sometimes for lining, and sometimes for
outward decoration.

§ 4. Dressed Construction.

The constructive elements which enter into the composition of this first class
of buildings are stone and brick.
In the first place, these elements are horizontal or vertical.

The horizontal elements constitute the planes, as they cover the voids by
horizontal superposition.
They consist of courses and architraves.
The courses form the walls. They are arranged in horizontal bands, with
vertical and sometimes sloping joints. The separate stones are often bound
together upon their horizontal surfaces by dovetails or tenons of wood. The
blocks made use of in this form of construction are usually of large
dimensions, but the Egyptians also made use of small stones or rubble, lined
on the exterior by large flat ones which concealed the meanness of the
material behind them.[103] (Fig. 70.)
Various peculiarities of construction which are comparatively seldom met
with will be noticed when we come to describe the monuments in which they
are to be found.
Architraves were stone beams used to bridge over the voids and to support
the covering of the building, which latter was composed of long and heavy
slabs.
The vertical elements support the architraves and combine them one with
another. These vertical supports vary greatly in size. Those of small or
medium dimensions are monoliths; others are composed of many courses of
stone one upon another, courses which in this case take the name of drums.

Fig. 69.—The Egyptian "bond."

Upon exterior surfaces, supports take various forms of development which
may all be referred to the type which we have defined, namely, the portico. In
the interiors the form of support is a logical consequence of the material
employed. Whenever the stones which form the roof are too small to bridge
over the whole of the space comprised within two walls, they must be made
to rest upon intermediate supports; and this necessity springs up in every
building of any importance. This very elementary combination fulfils all the
requirements of circulation. The number of supports depends upon the
number of rows of the flat stones which form the roof. They are sometimes
multiplied to such an extent that they remind us of that planting arrangement
in our gardens which we call a quincunx.

We cannot, however, affirm that the number
of supports is invariably decided by the
length of the architraves, or of the roofing
stones. Some very long monoliths are
supported at regular intervals, lest they
should break with their own weight or with
that put upon them. The walls, architraves,
and vertical supports are always far stronger
than the mere weight of the roof would
Fig. 70.—Double-faced wall. require.

Figs. 71, 72.—Elements of the portico.

The following woodcut shows the arrangement of supports, architraves and
roof. These simple arrangements constitute a complete system of construction
which, belonging exclusively to Egypt, has had results upon which we cannot
too strongly insist. Both roof and architraves being horizontal, all the
pressure upon the walls is vertical. There is no force tending to thrust the
walls outwards nor to affect the immobility of the supports.

Fig. 73.—Egyptian construction, epitomized by Ch. Chipiez.

Consequently, if the proportions of the vertical and horizontal elements of a
building, that is to say, its sections, have been skilfully determined, there is in
the building itself no latent cause of disruption; its equilibrium is perfect, and
can only be destroyed by external physical causes, by long exposure to the
weather, by earthquakes, or by the hand of man.[104]
We see then that the first impression caused by the external lines of the
architectural monuments of Egypt is confirmed and explained by further
study. They are built, as said the Pharaohs themselves, "for eternity."

Stability, in a word, in its highest and most simple form is the distinguishing
characteristic, the true originality, of Egyptian architecture.
This character is most strongly marked in stone buildings, but it is by no
means absent from those built of materials created by human industry. Works
in brick form the transition between the construction that we have described
and that which we call compact. A stone roof is not often found, and the
termination is generally a terrace in which wood is the chief element. In some
cases the secondary parts of such edifices, and sometimes the whole of them,
are covered in by brick vaults, and maintained by walls of a sufficient
thickness.
Although the use of monoliths for roofing purposes was general in Egypt, it
must not be thought that the architects of that country were ignorant of the art
of covering voids with materials of small size, that is to say, of building
vaults. There are numerous examples of Egyptian vaults, some of them of
great antiquity, and, moreover, the Egyptian builders constructed their vaults
after a method of their own. In spite of the facilities which they afforded, they
played, however, but a secondary rôle in the development of art. They were
never used in the buildings to which greater importance was attached; they
are introduced chiefly in out-of-the-way corners of the building, and in the
substructures of great monumental combinations. This method of
construction, being confined within such narrow limits, never resulted in
Egypt in an architectural system;[105] neither did it give birth to any of those
accessory forms which spring from its use.
Egyptian vaults may be divided into two great categories, according to the
method of their construction.
1. Off-set vaults. These vaults are composed of courses off-set one from
another, and with their faces hollowed to the segment of a circle. (Fig. 74.)
If the face of those stones which, in the form of
inverted steps, are turned to the void which has to be
covered, be cut into the line of a continuous curve,
the superficial appearance of a segmental arch or Fig. 74.—Element of
barrel vault will be obtained; but this appearance will an off-set arch.
be no more than superficial, the vault will be in fact
a false one, because, in such a construction, all the

stones which enframe the void and offer to
the eye the form of a vault, are really laid
horizontally one upon another, and their
lateral joints are vertical. (Fig. 76.) When
the units of such vaults are properly
proportioned they are stable in themselves,
and they have no lateral thrust.

Fig. 75.—Arrangement of the courses
in an off-set arch.

Fig. 76.—Off-set semicircular arch.

2. Centred vaults. These are true vaults. They are composed of voussoirs,
whose lateral joints are oblique, and radiate towards one centre or more.
(Figs. 77, 78, and 79.)
This method of construction is very convenient because it enables the builder
to utilize constructive units of very small dimensions, such as bricks. But this

advantage has a corresponding drawback. These voussoirs
thrust one against another and tend towards disintegration.
They are not stable in themselves, and in order to give them
stability they must be kept in place by surrounding them
with opposing
forces which will Fig. 77.—Voussoir.
effectually
prevent their setting up any movement in
the structure of which they form a part.
This function is fulfilled by the wall in
Egyptian architecture, which is
consequently very thick, but the
radiating arch never arrived at such a
development in Egypt as to lead to the
adoption of any contrivance specially
charged with the maintenance of vaults
in a state of proper rigidity. The
Fig. 78.—Arrangement of voussoirs. Egyptians not only employed the
semicircular arch; they made use, in
a few instances, of the pointed form,
and many of their underground buildings have roofs cut out of the rock in the
form of a segmental vault. The fact that these sepulchral chambers affected
the aspect of vaulted halls, can only be explained by the supposition that a
similar construction was common in the dwellings of the living.[106]

Fig. 79.—Semicircular vault.

§ 5. Compact Construction.

The methods employed in what we may call compact
construction permit the use, in considerable quantities, of
moulded clay mixed with chopped straw. This material
was used in buildings which were homogeneous; it was
poured into a mould formed by planks, which was
raised as the work progressed and the mixture dried.
But the material had little strength, and was far Fig. 80.—Granaries,
inferior to those modern concretes which have the from a bas-relief.
density and durability of the hardest stone. The
Egyptians do not seem to have been acquainted with concrete proper, and
unburnt bricks did not differ essentially from pisé. Such bricks, when placed
one upon another after being imperfectly dried, combined, under the
influence of the weather and their own weight, into one homogeneous mass
so that the separate courses became undistinguishable. This latter fact has

been frequently noticed in Assyria, by those who had to cut through the
thickness of walls in the process of excavation.
If voids have to be covered in pisé, one of
those self-supporting curves which we
have described under the name of vaults,
must be made use of, and the vault must be
constructed over a centring of wood. But
we have no evidence that the Egyptians
could carry the art of construction to this
point in pisé. On the contrary, we have
good reason to believe that they generally
made use of this material for the quiescent
body of the edifice alone, and that voids
Fig. 81.—Modern pigeon house, were mostly covered with stone or wood.
Thebes. In a word, the Egyptians did not carry
the use of artificial material far enough
to form a complete system based upon it. They made great use of it, but only
in a strictly limited fashion. It is only found in certain well-defined parts of
buildings, which were never of any very great interest from an artistic point
of view (Fig. 80). It deserved to be mentioned, if only for the frequency of its
use in Egypt, in the private architecture of both ancient and modern times
(Fig. 81), but it need not detain us longer.

§ 6. Construction by Assemblage.

Carpentry, or construction by assemblage, played a considerable part in
ancient Egypt, but, as may easily be understood, few traces of it are to be
found in our day. Those edifices which were constructed of wood have, of
course, all perished; but, in spite of their disappearance, we can form a very
good idea of their aspect and of the principles of their construction. In the
most ancient epoch of Egyptian art, the people took pleasure in copying, in
their stone buildings, the arrangements which had characterised their work in
wood; besides which, their paintings and reliefs often represent buildings of

the less durable material. The constructive principles which we have next to
notice, have thus left traces behind them which will enable us to describe
them with almost as much accuracy as if the carpenters of Cheops and
Rameses were working before our eyes.
We need not insist upon the characteristics which distinguish assembled
construction from masonry or brickwork. The different parts of the former
are, of course, much more intimately allied than in buildings constructed of
large stones. Supports of dressed stone truly fixed with the plumb line are
perfectly stable of themselves.
In both Egypt and Greece we often come upon a few columns still standing
upright amid their desolate surroundings, and announcing to the traveller the
site of some city or famous temple which has been long destroyed. But
wooden supports have little thickness in comparison with their height, and
the material of which they are formed, being far less dense than stone, cannot
maintain itself in place by its own weight. It is the same with wooden
architraves. The heaviest beams of wood will not keep their places when
simply laid one upon another, and are in that matter far inferior to those well
dressed stones which, in so many ancient walls, have resisted change with
neither tenons nor cement to help them.
As a general principle, when wood has to be employed to the best advantage,
and endowed with all the solidity and resisting power of which it is capable,
the separate pieces must be introduced one into another (Fig. 82). But even
when thus combined and held in place by mechanical contrivances, such as
bolts and nails, they will never form a homogeneous and impenetrable mass
like brick or stone. By such methods an open structure is obtained, the voids
of which have afterwards to be filled up by successive additions, and these
additions often take the form of what we call panels.
We may look upon the different faces of a wooden building as separate pieces
of construction which should be put together upon the ground before being
combined with each other. This process, though not always made use of in
practice, is at least the most logical method for those who wish to make the
best use of their materials. But even when thus put together, one of these
single faces has not much more stability than each of its constituent elements.
In order to form a rigid and stable whole, the several faces must be allied by
reciprocal interpenetration at the angles.

It was necessary to call attention once for all to these general characteristics
of wooden construction, because we shall hereafter have occasion to examine
the forms and motives which stone architecture borrowed from wood in the
case of other people besides the Egyptians. We must now determine the
particular characteristics offered by the material in Egypt, as they may be
learnt in the representations to which we have already referred.

Fig. 82.—Elements of wooden construction.

When a wall has to be built of wood so as neither to warp nor give way, it is
necessary to make use of a certain number of oblique members. This is one of
the elementary rules of the carpenter's art, and to form an idea how it was
applied in our own country it is enough to cast an eye over any of the wooden
buildings of the middle ages or of the renaissance. The Egyptians were not
ignorant of the advantages conferred by the use of these oblique members
because they employed them frequently in their furniture; but they seem
never to have introduced them into the construction of their buildings. All
joints are there made at a right angle. They were probably led to reject
oblique lines by their unwillingness to break in upon the simple harmony of
vertical and horizontal lines which is the distinguishing principle of all their
architecture. Thus self-deprived of a valuable resource, they were driven to
the discovery of some other means of giving the required cohesion and

stability to their walls. This requirement they thought they had fulfilled in
exaggerating the points of connection between the vertical and horizontal
members, which were thus brought into more intimate relation than would in
these days be thought necessary.[107] The consequence of this was that their
wooden buildings presented much the same closed appearance (Fig. 83) as
we have already noticed in their stone constructions; and, moreover, as every
joint was made at right angles, the pyramidal form was entirely absent.

Fig. 83.—Wooden building (first system), composed by Charles Chipiez.
[108]

But the Egyptians also made use of wood for buildings very different from
those to which we have hitherto alluded. Those were closed; but we have
now to speak of another system, of one which, by contrast, might be called an
open system of construction. The edifices upon which it was employed were
generally of small size, and in this respect resembled those which we have
described, but they were distinguished by a different system of carpentering.
We know them only by the figured representations which have come down to
us, for they were little calculated to outlast the centuries (Fig. 84). This

second system lends itself as little as the first to pyramidal and kindred
forms; horizontal lines, also, were in it of but secondary importance.
Composed of a few vertical members bound together at the top, such a
building was allied to the portico type which has already been described. This
method of carpentry seems to have been used only for subordinate buildings;
but yet it should not be passed by in silence. It was frequently used for the
construction of light decorative pavilions, and it had a set of principles which
are as susceptible of definition as those of the most ambitious architecture.

Fig. 84.—Wooden building (second system), composed by Charles
Chipiez.

Metal must have entered into the construction of these pavilions. It may have
furnished either the horizontal or the vertical members, and it is certain that it
was partly used for the roofs.

In all wooden structures the roof must also be of wood, because the light
walls which are proper to the material could not support the great weight of a
flat stone covering, still less could they stand up against the combined weight
and thrust of a stone or brick vault, which would destroy them in very
summary fashion.

§ 7. Decoration.

We have hitherto described Egyptian architecture according to the general
character of its forms and principles of construction; we must now attempt to
give a true idea of its method of decoration. This may be described in a very
few words. For the decoration of the vast surfaces, either plain or curved,
which their style of architecture placed at their disposal, the Egyptians made
use of paint. They overlaid with a rich system of colour the whole inside and
outside of their buildings, and that with no desire to accentuate, by a carefully
balanced set of tones, the great constructive lines, contours and mouldings,
nor with any wish to produce merely a complicated, polychromatic
ornamentation. Groups of figures borrowed from the animal and vegetable
kingdoms form its chief constituents. In these picture decorations, man is
seen in every attitude or vocation, side by side with birds, fishes and
quadrupeds, and with those composite forms which have been created by
himself to represent his gods.
Intaglio and bas-relief often lend their help to the ornament. Images and
explanatory inscriptions are sometimes cut in the stone, sometimes modelled
in slight relief; but in either case all figures are distinguished by their proper
colour as well as by the carved or modelled outlines.
It will thus be seen that Egyptian decoration is distinguished by the intimate
and constant alliance of two elements which are often separated in that of
other races. The first is the employment of colour to give variety to surfaces
and to distinguish different members of the architecture by the opposition of
tones. The second is the employment of colour for the representation of life,
for which purpose every surface is seized upon, whether the face of a wall, or

the round shaft of a column. The decorator is not satisfied to use colour to
give force to the lines of a building and to increase its general effect; he also
makes use of it to interpret, to multiply, and to immortalize the ideas which
float through his own brain. A building thus ornamented presents us with a
series of pictures embodied in its own constitution. From cornice to
foundation, upon wall and column, it is covered with an unending series of
wall paintings, which, like a gorgeous tapestry, envelop and embellish it
without hiding any of the details of its construction.
The polychromatic decoration of the Egyptians is to be explained, like that of
the Assyrians, of the Greeks, of the Italians, and of all other southern nations,
by the quality and quantity of their daylight and the way in which it affected
their visual organs. The more intense the light, the more pleasure does the eye
receive from strength and variety of colour. The science of optics gives us an
explanation of this fact, but at present we are concerned only with the fact
itself, which is a matter of daily experience. It is notorious that the colours of
birds and butterflies, and of the petals of flowers, become brighter and gayer
in exact proportion as we near the equator and leave the pole;[109] the same
rule holds good with the habitations of mankind, with his clothes and
furniture, which become more brilliant in colour, and more audaciously
abrupt in their transitions from one hue to another. Delicate shades of
difference are imperceptible by an eye blinded with the southern sun; it sees
nothing but the simplest, strongest, and frankest colour notes to the exclusion
of all half-tint.[110]
Under a burning and never clouded sun, objects of a neutral colour do not
stand out against their background, and their shadows lose a part of their
value, "comme dévorées par la diffusion et la réverbération d'une
incomparable lumière."[111] In Egypt, a column, a minaret, a dome, hardly
seem to be modelled as they stand against the depths of the sky. All three
seem almost flat. The warm and varied hues with which polychromatic
decoration endows buildings help us to distinguish them in such situations
from the ground upon which they stand, and to accentuate their different
planes. They also compensate, in some degree, for the absence of those
strong shadows which elsewhere help to make contours visible. Attention is
drawn to the dominant and bounding lines of an architectural composition by
contrasts of tint which also serve to give force to wall paintings and bas-
reliefs.

Polychromy is thus a help to our eyes in those countries where a blinding
light would otherwise prevent us from appreciating the structural beauties of
their architecture. It is by no means peculiar to Egypt, but that country was
the first to employ it upon rich and vast undertakings, she employed it more
constantly and more universally than any other people, and she carried it to
its logical conclusion with a boldness which was quite unique.
The Egyptian habit of sprinkling figures over every surface without regard to
its shape, its functions, or those of the mass to which it belonged, was also
peculiar to themselves. Upon the round shaft of the column, upon the bare
expanse of the wall, these figures were multiplied and developed to an extent
which was limited only by the length of the wall or the height of the column.
They were generally painted in bands of equal height, separated one from
another by a narrow fillet which indicated the plane upon which the groups of
figures had a footing. There is no visible connection between the bands of
figures and the structures which they ornament; right and left, above and
below, they spread over every surface and pay no attention to the joints and
other structural accidents by which they are seamed (Fig. 85 and Pl. III.).
It may be said that these joints were invisible until the passage of centuries
had laid them bare by destroying the stucco which, especially where
sandstone or limestone was used, once veiled the surface of the bare walls.
[112]
Doubtless this is true; but even in a climate such as that of Egypt, the
architect could not believe that a thin coat of plaster would endure as long as
the massive walls upon which he laid it. We have here a great contrast in
principle between the decoration and the architecture of Egypt. In the latter
the chief, if not the only aim, seems to have been to make sure of absolute
stability, of indefinite duration; and yet these eternal walls are lined with a
rich decoration which is spoiled by the fall of a piece of plaster, which is
injured by the unavoidable settlings of the masonry and destroyed by the
slightest earthquake! Of this we need give but one conclusive instance. Our
third plate reproduces that admirable portrait of Seti I., which is the wonder
of the temple at Abydos. This beautiful work in relief is sculptured upon the
internal faces of four unequal stones in the wall of one of the rooms. The
joints may be distinguished, but as yet they have not opened sufficiently to do
much damage to the artistic beauty of the work; but it cannot be denied that
the preservation of the royal effigy would have been much more certainly

assured if the sculptor had chosen a single stone to work upon, instead of a
built-up wall which so many causes would help to destroy.
When Egyptian buildings were new and their colour fresh, this method of
decoration must have given them a most fascinating brilliancy. Whether the
pencil alone were employed to trace the designs upon the smooth walls, or
whether its powers were supplemented by the work of the chisel, these
figures, which succeeded each other in thousands upon every wall and pillar,
mingled with inscriptions which were in themselves pictures, and dressed in
the most vivid colours, must have at once amused the eye and stirred the
brain by the variety of their tints and of the scenes which they represented.
But in spite of its breadth and vivacity the system had two grave defects.
The first was the fragility of the plaster surface upon which it was displayed.
This surface may be compared to a tapestry stretched over the whole interior
of the building, and, to continue the comparison, when once any portion of
the plaster coat became detached from the wall, there was nothing left but the
ground or reverse of the stuff.[113] The design and colour may still be
distinguished or divined, but there is a great difference between painted
ornament which is subject to such damage and a woven hanging at any time
before the threads of the woof have been discoloured and entirely worn out.
The other defect in the system, is its uniformity. It is monotonous and
confused in spite of all its richness. It suffers from the absence of that learned
balance between plain and decorated surface which the Greeks understood so
thoroughly. In the Greek temples, sculptured figures had the more importance
in that the eye of the spectator was drawn forcibly to them by the very
limitation of the space reserved for them. They were cut from separate blocks
of marble, which, though carefully and skilfully allied with the architecture
which they were meant to adorn, did not form an integral part of it. Such
figures ran no risk of being cut in two by the opening of the joints between
the stones. Although marvellously well adapted to the places for which they
were intended, and closely allied to the architecture by their subject as well as
their material shape, they yet preserved a life and individuality of their own.
To take decorative art as a whole, the Greeks did not make use of so many
figures as the Egyptians, but they knew better how to economize the sources
of effect, and to preserve their works against the destructive action of time.

Fig. 85.—Seti I. striking prisoners of war with his mace.
Karnak, Thebes. (Champollion, Pl. 294.)

J. Sulpis del.
KARNAK
BAS-RELIEFS IN THE GRANITE CHAMBERS

To Egypt, then, belongs the credit of having been the first to discover the
obligation imposed upon the architect by the sunlight of the south—to
accentuate the main lines of his edifice by means of colour. She thoroughly
understood how to make different tones distinguish between the various parts
of a structure and defend its contours against the effect of a dazzling light. On
the other hand, she went too far when she covered every surface, without
choice or stint, with her endless figure processions. Such a decoration was
only rendered possible by the use of a material which compromised its
durability; and that is not her only shortcoming. She failed to understand the
value of repose and the absolute necessity of contrast; she failed to perceive
that by multiplying figures to infinity, she lessened their effect and made
them a fatigue to the eye and the intellect.

CHAPTER III.
Sepulchral Architecture.

§ 1. The Egyptian Belief as to a Future Life and its Influence upon
their Sepulchral Architecture.

The most ancient monuments which have yet been discovered in Egypt are
the tombs; they have therefore a right to the first place in our sketch of
Egyptian architecture.
In every country the forms and characteristics of the sepulchre are determined
by the ideas of the natives as to the fate of their bodies and souls after life is
over. In order to understand the Egyptian arrangements, we must begin then
by inquiring into their notions upon death and its consequences; we must ask
whether they believed in another life, and in what kind of life. We shall find a
complete answer to our question in the collation of written texts with figured
monuments.
In the first period of his intellectual development, man is unable to
comprehend any life but that which he experiences in his own person. He is
as yet unable to observe, to analyse or to generalize. He does not perceive the
characteristics which distinguish him from things about him, and he sees
nothing in nature but a repetition of himself. He is therefore incapable of
distinguishing between life such as he leads it and mere existence. He dreams
of no other way of being than his own. As such is the tendency of his
intellect, nothing could be more natural or more logical than the conception
to which it leads him in presence of the problem offered to him every time
that a corpse descends into the grave. M. Maspero has so thoroughly
understood the originality of the solution adopted by the Egyptians that we
cannot do better, in attempting to explain the hypothesis, at once gross and
subtle, to which they had recourse for consolation, than borrow his rendering
of the texts which throw light upon this subject, together with some of the
reflections which those texts suggested to him.[114]

J. Sulpis del. et sc.
SETI I

BAS-RELIEF AT ABYDOS

Were we to affirm that during thousands of years no change took place in the
ideas of the Egyptians upon a future life, we should not be believed, and, as a
fact, those ideas underwent a continual process of refinement. Under the
eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties, during those centuries when the limits of
Egyptian empire and Egyptian thought were carried farthest afield, we find
traces of doctrines which offer notable variations, and even, when closely
examined, actual contradictions. These are successive answers made during a
long course of time to the eternal and never-changing enigma. As they
became more capable of philosophic speculation the Egyptians modified their
definition of the soul, and, by a necessary consequence, of the manner in
which its persistence after death must be understood, and as always happens
in such a case, these successive conceptions are super-imposed one upon
another; the last comer did not dethrone its predecessor but became
inextricably blended with it in the popular imagination.
We refer all those who wish to follow minutely this curious development of
the Egyptian intellect to the subtle analysis of M. Maspero. That historian has
applied himself to the apprehension of every delicate shade of meaning in a
system of thought which has to be grasped through the veil thrown around it
by extreme difficulties of language and written character, but at the same time
he has never attempted to endow it with a precision or logical completeness
to which it had no claim. By well chosen comparisons and illustrations he
enables us to understand how the Egyptian contented himself with vague
notions, and how he managed to harmonize ideas which seem to us
inconsistent.
We shall not enter into those details. We shall not seek to determine the sense
which the Egyptians attached, after a certain period, to the word bâi,[115]
which has been translated soul, nor the distinction between it and khou,
luminousness, which the soul seems to have enveloped like a garment. We
shall not follow the soul and its internal light in its subterranean journey
across Ament, the Egyptian Hades, to which it entered by a cleft, Pega, to the
west of Abydos, which was the only portal to the kingdom of the shades; nor
shall we accompany them in the successive transformations which made
them acquainted with every corner of the earth and sky in the infinite series
of their becomes (to use the Egyptian expression); what we have to do is to

trace out the most ancient of their religious conceptions, the conception
which, like the first teachings of infancy, was so deeply engraved upon the
soul and intellect of the race as to exercise a much stronger influence than the
later more abstract and more philosophical theories, which were
superimposed upon it. In this primitive conception we ought to find the
determining cause of the Egyptian form of tomb. Its constitution was already
settled in the time of the ancient Empire, and, from the Memphite dynasties
until the end, it remained unchanged in principle. In this constitution we shall
find embodied the essential idea adopted by the Egyptians when they first
attempted to find some eternal element in man, or, at least, some element
which should resist the annihilation of death for a period much longer than
the few days which make up our mortal life.
The Egyptians called that which does not perish as the dying man draws his
last sigh, the ka, a term which M. Maspero has rendered as the double. "This
double was a duplicate of the body in a matter less dense than that of the
body, a projection, coloured but aërial, of the individual, reproducing him
feature for feature, a child if coming from a child, a woman if from a woman,
and a man if from a man."[116]
This double had to be installed in a lodging suitable to its existence, had to be
surrounded by objects which it had used in its former state, had to be
supplied with the food which was necessary for the sustenance of its life. And
all these things it obtained from the piety of its relations, who, on fixed days,
brought them to the threshold of the good dwelling or the eternal dwelling,
which were the phrases used by the Egyptians.[117] By these offerings alone
could the hungry and thirsty phantom which had replaced the living man be
kept alive. The first duty of the survivors was to take care that this dependent
existence should not be extinguished by their neglect, to provide food and
drink for the support, if we may use such a phrase, of the precarious life of
the dead, who would otherwise be irritated against them and use the almost
godlike power attributed to his mysterious condition for the punishment of
his ungrateful posterity.[118]
This conception is not peculiar to Egypt. The double of the Egyptian
sepulchral records corresponds exactly to the εἴδωλον[119] of the Greeks and
the umbra of the Latins. Both Greeks and Latins believed that when the
funeral rites had been duly accomplished, this image or shadow entered upon

the possession of a subterranean dwelling and began a life which was no
more than the continuation of that in the light.[120] The dead thus remained in
close relation with the living, on the one hand by the nourishment which they
received, on the other by the protection which they afforded; even in the
funeral repast they took their parts, in the strictest sense of the word, in the
eating and drinking.[121] They looked impatiently forward to these supplies
because, for a moment, they awoke their dormant thoughts and feelings and
gave them glimpses of the true life, the life above ground and in the sunshine.
[122]
If they were kept waiting too long they became angry and revenged
themselves upon those who had caused their sufferings. Woe to the family or
city which was not careful to interest the dead in its stability and thus to
associate them with its prosperity![123]
These beliefs seem to have been common to all ancient peoples during that
period of their existence which is lost in the shadow of prehistoric times.
From India to Italy all the primitive forms of public and private rights betray
their presence. For this fact and its consequences we may refer our readers to
the fine work of M. Fustel de Coulange, La Cité antique.[124]

Fig. 86.—Stele of the 11th dynasty. Boulak. Drawn by Bourgoin.

With the progress of centuries and the development of religious thought,
more elevated ideas prevailed. The growth of the scientific spirit tended to
make the notion of a being suspended between life and death ever more
strange and inadmissible. Experience accumulated its results and it became

daily more evident that death not only put an end to the activity of the organs,
but that, immediately upon its occurrence, it began to dissolve and
decompose their tissues. As time rolled on men must have found it very
difficult to believe in a shadow thus placed outside the normal conditions of
life, in a something which was not a spirit and yet survived the destruction of
its organs.
It would seem then that observation and logical reflection should soon have
led to the abandonment of a theory which now appears so puerile; but, even
in these scientific times, those whose intellects demand well defined ideas are
few indeed.[125] At a period when the diffusion of intellectual culture and the
perfection of scientific methods add daily to our accumulations of positive
knowledge, most men allow their souls to be stirred and their actions to be
prompted by the vaguest words and notions; how much greater then must the
influence of those confused beliefs and baseless images have been in
antiquity when but a few rare minds, and those ill provided with means of
research and analysis, attempted to think with originality, clearness and
freedom.
The prestige of this illusion was increased and perpetuated by its intimate
connection with several of those sentiments which are most honourable to
human nature. Such a worship of the dead surprises and even scandalizes us
by its frank materialism, but if we seek for the source of its inspiration and its
primitive meaning, we find them in the remembrance of lost objects of
affection, in feelings broken by the supreme separation, in the gratitude of
children to the parents who gave them birth and nourished their infancy, in
the recognition by the living of the blessings which they enjoy through the
long and laborious efforts of their ancestors. There was no doubt a perishable
element in the funerary ideas of Egypt, an element which the progress of
reason was sure to destroy, and we may be tempted to smile when we think of
the Greek or Egyptian giving himself the trouble to feed his departed
ancestors with blood, milk, or honey, but with all their simplicity, both one
and the other were alive to a truth which the revolutionary spirit of our days,
with its childish and brutal contempt for the past, is often unable to grasp.
They realized the complete solidarity of one human generation with another.
Guided by their hearts alone they anticipated the results at which modern
thought has arrived by close and attentive study of history. From a reasoned
out conviction of this truth and its consequences, philosophy now draws the

principles of a high morality! but long before our days this idea and the
tender, grateful, sentiments which it provoked had been a powerful
instrument in the moral improvement of the first-born of civilization and a
bond of union for their civil and domestic life.
We have thought it right to dwell upon this worship of the dead and to
describe its character at some length, because the beliefs upon which it was
based are not to be found so clearly set forth in the art of any other people.
Their most complete, clear, and eloquent expression, in a plastic form, is to
be seen in the tombs which border the Nile. And why is this so? It is because
the Egyptian industries were already in full possession of their resources at
the period when those beliefs had their strongest hold over the minds and
feelings of the people. In the case of Greece, art did not arrive at its full
development until the worship of the dead had lost its high place in the
national conscience. When the Greek genius had arrived, after much striving,
at its complete power of plastic expression, the gods of Olympus had been
created for several centuries, and art was called upon to interpret the brilliant
polytheism of Homer and Hesiod, to give outward image to those gods, and
to construct worthy dwellings for their habitation. Sculptors, painters, and
architects still worked indeed, at the decoration of the tomb. They strove to
give it beauty of shape and arrangement, and to adorn its walls with bas-
reliefs and pictures; they designed for it those vases and terra cottas which, in
our own day, have been found in thousands in the cemeteries of Greece and
Italy, but all this was only a subordinate use of their talent. Their ambition
was to build temples, to model statues of Zeus, Pallas, and Apollo. On the
other hand, those distant ages in which primitive and childish ideas of
religion prevailed, had no art in which to manifest their beliefs with clearness
and precision.
It was otherwise in the valley of the Nile. A well provided industry and an
experienced art laid themselves out to interpret the popular beliefs and to
defend the dead against final dissolution, or the agonies of hunger and thirst.
Egypt did not differ from other nations in its opinions upon the mystery of
death. In the infancy of every race the same notions on this matter are to be
found, and in this respect the only difference between the Egyptians and the
rest of the world is very much to the credit of the former; they rapidly
attained to a degree of civilization which was only reached by other races
after their religious development was comparatively mature. Thanks to this
advantage, they were enabled to push their ideas to consequences which were

not to be attained by tribes which were little less than barbarous, and they had
no difficulty in expressing them with sufficient force and precision.
It remains for us to show the use which the Egyptians made of their
superiority in doing more honour to their dead, in guarding them more safely
against the chances which might shorten the duration or destroy the
happiness of their life in the tomb. The fulfilment of this duty was, as the
Greek travellers rightly affirmed, their chief pre-occupation. Their sepulchral
architecture was, of all their creations, the most original and the most
characteristic of their genius, especially in the forms which we find in the
cemeteries of the Ancient Empire. In the time of the New Empire, at Thebes,
it is less complete and homogeneous. In the latter the arrangement and
decoration do not spring, as a whole, from a unique conception; we find
traces in it of new hypotheses and novel forms of belief. These do not
supersede the primitive ideas; they are added to them, and they bear witness
to the restless efforts made by human thought to solve the problem of human
destiny. These apparent contradictions and hesitations are of great interest to
the student of the Egyptian religion, but from the art point of view the
Memphite tombs are more curious and important than those of later date.
They have the great merit of being complete in their unity both of artistic
form and of intellectual conception. They are the offspring of a single growth,
and are perfect in their clear logical expression. And again, they are the type
of all the later tombs, of those at Abydos, at Beni-Hassan, and at Thebes.
Certain details, indeed, are modified, but the general disposition remains the
same to the end. We shall, therefore, find the ruling principle of Egyptian
sepulchral architecture most clearly laid down in the cemeteries of Gizeh and
Sakkarah.
The first and most obvious necessity for the obscure form of life which was
supposed to commence as soon as the tomb had received its inmate, was the
body. No pains, therefore, were spared which could retard its dissolution and
preserve the organs to which the double and the soul might one day return.
[126]
Embalming, practised as it was by the Egyptians, rendered a mummy
almost indestructible, so long, at least, as it remained in the dry soil of Egypt.
On the warm sands of Sakkarah and close to the excavations from which the
fellahs of the corvée were returning at the end of their day's labour, we—my
travelling companions and myself—stripped a great lady of the time of
Ramses of the linen cloths and bandages in which she was closely enveloped,

and found her body much in the same condition as it must have been when it
left the workshop of the Memphite embalmer! Her black hair was plaited into
fine tresses; all her teeth were in place between the slightly contracted lips;
the almond-shaped nails of her feet and hands were stained with henna. The
limbs were flexible and the graceful shapes but little altered under the still
firm and smooth skin, which, moreover, seemed to be still supported by flesh
in some parts. Had it not been for its colour of tarred linen or scorched paper,
and the smell of naphtha which arose from the body and from the numberless
bandages which were strewn about, we might have shared the sentiment
attributed to Lord Evandale in Theophile Gautier's brilliant Roman de la
Momie; with an effort of good-will we could almost sympathise with those
emotions of tenderness and admiration which were excited in the breast of
the young Englishman at the sight of the unveiled charms of that daughter of
Egypt whose perfect beauty had once troubled the heart of the proudest of the
Pharaohs.[127]
In order that all the expense of embalming should not be thrown away, the
mummy had to be so placed that it could not be reached by the highest
inundations of the river. The cemeteries were therefore established either
upon a plateau surrounded by the desert, as in the case of Memphis and
Abydos, or in the sides of the mountain ranges and in the ravines by which
they were pierced, as at Thebes and Beni-Hassan. In the whole valley of the
Nile, no ancient tomb has been discovered which was within reach of the
inundation at its highest.[128]
The corpse was thus preserved from destruction, first by careful and scientific
embalming, secondly by placing its dwelling above the highest "Nile."
Besides this we shall see that the Egyptian architects made use of many
curious artifices of construction in order to conceal the entrance to the tomb,
and to prevent the intrusion of any one coming with evil intentions. All kinds
of obstacles and pitfalls are accumulated in the path of the unbidden visitor,
with a fertility and patient ingenuity of invention which has often carried
despair into the minds of modern explorers, especially in the case of the
pyramids. Mariette was fond of saying that there are mummies in Egypt
which will never, in the strictest sense of the word, be brought to light.
But in spite of all this pious and subtle foresight, it sometimes happened that
private hate or, more often, the greed of gain, upset every calculation.
Enemies might succeed in penetrating to the sepulchres of the dead, in

destroying their bodies, and thus inflicting a second death
worse than the first; or a thief might drag the corpse from
its resting place, and leave it naked and dishonoured upon
the sands, that he might, with the greater ease, possess
himself of the gold and jewels with which it had been
adorned.
The liability of the mummy to accident had to be provided
against. The idea of the unhappy condition in which the
double would find itself when its mummy had been
destroyed, led to the provision of an artificial support for
it in the shape of a statue. Art was sufficiently advanced
not only to reproduce the costume and ordinary attitude of
the defunct and to mark his age and sex, but even to
render the individual characteristics of his physiognomy.
It aspired to portraiture; and the development of writing
allowed the name and qualities of the deceased to be
inscribed upon his statue. Thus identified by its
resemblance and its inscriptions it served to perpetuate the
life of the double, which was in continual danger of
dissolution or evaporation in the absence of a material
support.
Fig. 87.—Mummy case
The statues were more solid than the mummy, and from the 18th dynasty.
nothing stood in the way of their multiplication. Boulak.
The body gave but one chance of duration to the
double; twenty statues represented twenty chances
more. Hence the astonishing number of statues which are sometimes found in
a single tomb. The images of the dead were multiplied by the piety of
surviving relations, and consequently the double was assured a duration
which practically amounted to immortality.[129]

Fig. 88.—Man and his wife in the style of the 5th dynasty.
Calcareous stone. From the Louvre.

We shall see that a special recess was prepared in the thickness of the built up
portion of the tomb for the reception of wooden or stone statues, so that they
might be kept out of sight and safe from all indiscreet curiosity. Other effigies
were placed in the chambers of the tomb or the courts in front of it. Finally,
we know that persons of consideration obtained from the king permission to
erect statues in the temples, where they were protected by the sanctity of the
place and the vigilance of the priests.[130]

Fig. 89.—Sekhem-ka, his wife Ata, and his son Khnem,
in the style of the 5th dynasty.
Limestone. From the Louvre.

From the point of view of the ancient Egyptians such precautions were by no
means futile. Many of these effigies have come down to us safely through
fifty or sixty centuries and have found an asylum in our museums where they
have nothing to fear but the slow effects of climate and time. Those which
remain intact may therefore count upon immortality. If the double required
nothing to preserve it from annihilation but the continued existence of the
image, that of Chephren, the builder of the second great pyramid, would be
still alive, preserved by the magnificent statue of diorite which is the glory of

Boulak, and thanks to the durability of its material, it would have every
chance of lasting as long as the world itself. But, unhappily for the shade of
Pharaoh, this posthumous existence which is so difficult of comprehension to
us, was only to be prolonged by attention to conditions most of which could
not long continue to be observed.

Fig. 90.—Stele of Nefer-oun. Boulak.

It was entirely a material life. The dead-alive had need of food and drink,
which he obtained from supplies placed beside him in the tomb,[131] and
afterwards, when these were consumed, by the repasts which took place
periodically in the tomb, of which he had his share. The first of these feasts

was given upon the conclusion of the funeral ceremonies,[132] and they were
repeated from year to year on days fixed by tradition and sometimes by the
expressed wish of the deceased.[133] An open and public chamber was
contrived in the tomb for the celebration of these anniversaries. It was a kind
of chapel, or, perhaps, to speak more accurately, a saloon in which all the
relations and friends of the deceased could find room. At the foot of the stele
upon which the dead man was represented sacrificing to Osiris, the god of the
dead, was placed a table for offerings, upon which the share intended for the
double was deposited and the libations poured. A conduit was reserved in the
thickness of the wall by which the odour of the roast meats and perfumed
fruits and the smoke of the incense might reach the concealed statues.[134]

Fig. 91.—Preparation of the victims and arrival of funeral gifts, 5th
dynasty.
Height of each band, 13-1/2 inches. Boulak. Drawn by Bourgoin.

The Egyptians did not trust only to the piety of their descendants to preserve
them from a final death by inanition in their neglected tombs. At the end of a
few generations that piety might grow cold and relax its care; besides, a
family might become extinct. All those who could afford it provided against
such contingencies as these by giving their tombs what we now call a
perpetual foundation. They devoted to the purpose the revenues of some part
of their property, which was also charged with the maintenance of the priest

or priests who had to perform the ceremonial rites which we have described.
[135]
We find that, even under the Ptolemies, special ministers were attached
to the sepulchral chapel of Cheops, the builder of the great pyramid.[136] It
may seem difficult to believe that a "foundation" of the ancient empire should
have survived so many changes of régime, but the honours paid to the early
kings had become one of the national institutions of Egypt. Each restoring
sovereign made it a point of duty to give renewed life to the worship of those
remote princes who represented the first glories of the national history.

Fig. 92.—Table for offerings. Louvre.

Besides which there were priests attached to each necropolis, who, for certain
fees, officiated at each tomb in turn. They were identified by Mariette upon
some of the bas-reliefs at Sakkarah. Their services were retained much in the
same way as masses are bought in our days.[137]
The same sentiment led to the burial with the dead of all arms, clothes,
jewels, and other objects of which they might have need in the next life. We
know what treasures of this kind have been obtained from the Egyptian
tombs and how they fill the cases of our museums. But neither was this habit
peculiar to Egypt. It was common to all ancient people whether civilized or
barbarous. Traces are to be found even in the early traditions of the Hellenic
race of a time when, like those Scythians described by Herodotus,[138] the
Greeks sacrificed, at the death of a chief, his wives and servants that they
might accompany him to the next world. When she began to reveal herself in
the arts Egypt was already too far civilized for such practices as these; thanks
to the simultaneous development of science, art and religion, she found

means to give the same advantages to her dead
without permitting Scythian cruelties. Those
personal attendants and domestic officers
whose services would be so necessary in
another life, were secured to them at a small
expense; instead of slaying them at the door of
the tomb, they were represented upon its walls
in all the variety of their occupations and in the
actual moment of labour. So too with all objects
of luxury or necessity which the double would
wish to have at hand, as for instance his food
and drink.[139]
Fig. 93.—Another form A custom which would seem to have established
of the table for offerings. itself a little later may be referred to the same
Boulak. desire; we mean the habit of placing in the tomb
those statuettes which we meet with in such vast
numbers after the commencement of the second Theban Empire.[140] Mariette
obtained some from tombs of the twelfth dynasty, and the sixth chapter of the
Book of the Dead, which is engraved upon them, seems to be one of the most
ancient. Egyptologists are now inclined to believe that the essential parts of
this ritual date back as far as the Memphite period.

Fig. 94.—Labourers heaping up ears of corn, from a tomb at Gizeh.
(Description de l'Égypte.)

These statuettes are of different sizes and materials. As a rule they do not
exceed from eight to twelve inches, but there are a few which are three feet or
more in height. Some are in wood, some in limestone, and some in granite,
but as a rule they are made of that kind of terra cotta which, when covered
with green or blue enamel, has been called Egyptian porcelain. They are like
a mummy in appearance; their hands are crossed upon the breast and hold
instruments of agriculture such as hoes and picks, and a sack meant for grain
hangs from their shoulders. The meaning of all this is to be sought in the
Egyptian notions of a future life; it is also explained by the picture in chapter
XC. of the Ritual, which shows us the dead tilling, sowing and harvesting in
the fields of the other world. The texts of the Ritual and of certain
inscriptions call these little figures oushebti or answerers from the verb
ousheb, to answer. It is therefore easy to divine the part attributed to them by
the popular imagination. They answered to the name traced upon the tomb
and acted as substitute for its tenant in the cultivation of the subterranean
regions.[141] With the help of the attendants painted and sculptured upon the
walls they saved him from fatigue and from the chance of want. This is
another branch of the same old idea. In his desire to take every precaution
against the misery and final annihilation which would result from

abandonment, the Egyptian thought he could never go too far in furnishing,
provisioning and peopling his tomb.

Figs. 95, 96.—Sepulchral statuettes, from the Louvre.

The ingenuity of their contrivances is extraordinary. Food in its natural state
would not keep, and various accidents, might, as we have shown, lead to the
death of the double by inanition. It was the same with furniture and clothes;
the narrow dimensions of the tomb, moreover, would forbid the accumulation
there of everything which its sombre tenant might desire. On the other hand
the funerary statuettes were made of the most indestructible materials and the
bas-reliefs and paintings were one with the thick walls of stone or living rock.

These have survived practically unaltered until our day. We visited the tomb
of Ti a short time after its chambers had been opened and cleared. It was
marvellous to see how form and colour had been preserved intact and fresh
under the sand, and this work which was four or five thousand years old
seemed to be but lately finished. By the brightness of their colours and the
sharp precision of their contours these charming reliefs had the effect of a
newly struck medal. Such scenes from the daily life of the people continued
to be figured upon Egyptian tombs from the old empire to the new. When
their study and comparison were first begun different explanations were put
forward. Some believed that they were an illustrated biography of the
deceased, a representation of his achievements or of those over which he had
presided during the course of his mortal life; others saw in them an
illustration of his future life, a setting forth of the joys and pleasures of the
Egyptian Elysium.
Both these interpretations have had to give way before the critical
examination of the pictures themselves and the decipherment of their
accompanying inscriptions. It was soon perceived, through comparisons
easily made, that these scenes were not anecdotic. On a few very rare
occasions they seem to be connected with circumstances peculiar to the
inhabitant of the tomb. There are a few steles and tombs upon which the dead
man seems to have caused his services to be described, with the object, no
doubt, of continuing in the next world his career of honour and success in
this. Such an inscription is so far biographical, and a similar spirit may
extend to the decorations of the stele and walls of the tomb. As an example of
such narrative epigraphs we may cite the long inscription of Ouna, which
gives us the life of a sort of grand-vizier to the two first Kings of the sixth
dynasty;[142] also the inscriptions upon the tombs of those feudal princes who
were buried at Beni-Hassan. In the latter there are historical representations
as commentaries upon the text. Among these is the often reproduced painting
of a band of Asiatic emigrants bringing presents to the prince and demanding,
perhaps, a supply of wheat in return, like the Hebrews in the time of Jacob.

Fig. 97.—Vignette from a Ritual upon papyrus,
in the Louvre. Chap. XC., 20th dynasty.

But all this is exceptional. As a rule the same subjects occur upon the tombs
again and again, in the persistent fashion which characterizes traditional
themes. The figures by which the flocks and herds and other possessions of
the deceased were numbered are too great for literal truth.[143] On the other
hand the pictured tradesmen and artificers, from the labourer, the baker, and
the butcher up to the sculptor, seem to apply themselves to their work with an
energy which excludes the notion of ideal felicity. They, one and all, labour
conscientiously, and we feel that they are carrying out a task which has been
imposed upon them as a duty.
For whose benefit do they take all this trouble? If we attempt to enter into the
minds of the people who traced these images and compare the pictured
representations with the texts which accompany them, we shall be enabled to
answer that question. Let us take by chance any one of the inscriptions which

accompany the scenes figured upon the famous tomb of Ti, and here is what
we find. "To see the picking and pressing of the grape and all the labours of
the country." Again, "To see the picking of the flax, the reaping of the corn,
the transport upon donkeys, the stacking of the crops of the tomb." Again, "Ti
sees the stalls of the oxen and of the small animals, the gutters and water-
channels of the tomb."
It is for the dead that the vintage takes place, that the flax is picked, that the
wheat is threshed, that oxen are driven into the fields, that the soil is
ploughed and irrigated. It is for the supply of his wants that all these sturdy
arms are employed.
We shall leave M. Maspero to sum up the ideas which presided at the
construction of the Egyptian tomb, but first we must draw our readers' notice
to the fact that he, more than once, alludes to a conception of the future life
which differs somewhat from the early Egyptian notions, and belongs rather
to the Second Theban Empire and its successors.

Fig. 98.—Arrival in Egypt of a company of Asiatic emigrants
(Champollion, pls. 362, 393).

Fig. 98, Continued.—Arrival in Egypt of a company of Asiatic emigrants
(Champollion, pls. 362, 393).

"The scenes chosen for the decoration of tomb walls had a magic intention;
whether drawn from civil life in the world or from that of Hades, they were
meant to preserve the dead from danger and to insure him a happy existence
beyond the tomb.... Their reproduction upon the walls of the sepulchre
guaranteed the performance of the acts represented. The double shut up in his
σύριγξ[144] saw himself going to the chase upon the surrounding walls and he
went to the chase; eating and drinking with his wife, and he ate and drank
with her; crossing in safety the terrible gulfs of the lower world in the barque
of the gods, and he crossed them in safety. The tilling, reaping, and housing
on his walls were for him real tilling, reaping, and housing. So, too, the
statuettes placed in his tomb carried out for him under magic influence all the
work of the fields, and, like the sorcerer's pestle in Goethe's ballad, drew
water for him and carried grain. The workmen painted in his papyri made
shoes for him and cooked his food; they carried him to hunt in the deserts or
to fish in the marshes. And, after all, the world of vassals upon the sides of
the sepulchre was as real as the double for which they laboured; the picture of
a slave might well satisfy the shadow of a master. The Egyptian thought that
by filling his tomb with pictures he insured the reality of all the objects,
people, and scenes represented in another world, and he was thus encouraged
to construct his tomb while he was yet alive. Relations, too, thought that they
were doing a service to the deceased when they carried out all the mysterious

ceremonies which accompanied his burial. The certainty that they had been
the cause of some benefit to him consoled and supported them on their return
from the cemetery where they had left their regretted dead in possession of
his imaginary domain."[145]
Such a belief is astonishing to us; it demands an effort of the imagination to
which we moderns are in no way equal. We have great difficulty in realising a
state of mind so different from what ours has become after centuries of
progress and thought. Those early races had neither a long enough experience
of things, nor a sufficiently capable power of reflection to enable them to
distinguish the possible from the impossible. They did not appreciate the
difference between living things and those which we call inanimate. They
endowed all things about them with souls like their own. They found no more
difficulty in giving life to their carved and painted domestics, than to the
mummy or statue of the deceased, or to the phantom which they called the
double. Is it not natural to the child to take revenge upon the table against
which he hurts himself, or to speak tenderly to the doll which he holds in his
arms?

Fig. 99.—The tomb of Ti;
women, representing the lands of the deceased,
carrying the funeral gifts.

This power to endow all things with life and personality is now reserved for
the poet and the infant, but in the primitive days of civilization it belonged to
all people alike. Imagination had then a power over a whole race which in our
days is the gift of great poets alone. In the efforts which they made to
forestall the wants of the helpless dead, they were not content with providing
the food and furniture which we find upon the walls. They had a secret
impression that these might be insufficient for wants renewed through
eternity, and they made another step upon the way upon which they had
embarked. By a still more curious and still bolder fiction than those which
had gone before, they attributed to prayer the power of multiplying, by the
use of a few magic sentences, all objects of the first necessity to the
inhabitants of the tomb.
Every sepulchre has a stele, that is to say, an upright stone tablet which varied
in form and place in different epochs, but always served the same purpose
and had the same general character. Most of these steles were adorned with
painting and sculpture; all of them had more or less complicated inscriptions.
[146]
In the semicircle which forms the upper part of most of these inscribed
slabs, the dead person, accompanied by his family, presents offerings to a
god, who is usually Osiris. Under this an inscription is carved after an
unchanging formula: "Offering to Osiris (or to some other deity, as the case
may be) in order that he may give provision of bread, liquid, beef, geese,
milk, wine, beer, clothes, perfumes, and all good and pure things upon which
the god subsists, to the ka of N..., son of M...." Below this the defunct is often
shown in the act of himself receiving the offerings of his family. In both
divisions the objects figured are looked upon as real, as in the wall
decorations. In the lower division they are offered directly to him who is to
profit by them; in the upper, the god is charged to see that they are delivered
to the right address. The provisions which the god is asked to pass on to the
defunct are first presented to him; by the intervention of Osiris the doubles of
bread, meat and drink pass into the other world to nourish the double of man.
But it was not essential for the gift to be effective that it should be real, or
even quasi-real; that its image should even be given in paint or stone. The
first-comer could procure all things necessary for the deceased by their
enumeration in the proper form. We find therefore that many Egyptians
caused the following invocation to passing strangers, to be engraved upon
their tombs:

"Oh you who still exist upon the earth, whether you be private individuals,
priests, scribes, or ministers entering into this tomb, if you love life and do
not know death, if you wish to be in favour with the gods of your cities and to
avoid the terrors of the other world, if you wish to be entombed in your own
sepulchres and to transmit your dignities to your children, you must if you be
scribes, recite the words inscribed upon this stone, or, if not, you must listen
to their recital: say, offering to Amen, master of Karnak, that he may give
thousands of loaves of bread, thousands of jars of drink, thousands of oxen,
thousands of geese, thousands of garments, thousands of all good and pure
things to the ka, or double, of the prince Entef."[147]
Thanks to all these subtle precautions, and to the goodwill with which the
Egyptian intellect lent itself to their bold fictions, the tomb deserved the
name it received, the house of the double. The double, when thus installed in
a dwelling furnished for his use, received the visits and offerings of his
friends and relations; "he had priests retained and paid to offer sacrifices to
him; he had slaves, beasts of burden, and estates charged with his support. He
was like a great lord sojourning in a strange country and having his wants
attended to by intermediary officials assigned to his service."[148]
This analogy between the house and the tomb is so complete that it embraces
details which do not seem very congruous. Like the house of the living, the
tomb was strictly oriented, but after a mystic principle of its own.
As soon as the Egyptian began to think he perceived the most obvious of the
similarities between the sun's career and that of man. Man has his dawn and
his setting. Man grows from the early glimmerings of infancy to the apogee
of his wisdom and strength; he then begins to decline and, like the magnified
evening sun, ends by disappearing after his death into the depths of the soil.
In Egypt the sun sets every evening behind the Libyan chain; thence he
penetrates into those subterranean regions of Ament across which he has to
make his way before the dawn of the next day. The Egyptian cemeteries were
therefore placed on the left bank of the Nile, that is, in the west of the
country. All the known pyramids were built in the west, and there we find all
the more important "cities of the dead," the necropolis of Memphis and those
of Abydos and Thebes. A few unimportant groups of tombs have indeed been
found upon the eastern bank; but these exceptions to a general rule are
doubtless to be explained by a question of distance. For any city placed near

the eastern border of the wider parts of the Nile valley, a burying-place in the
Libyan chain would be very inconvenient both for the transport of the dead,
and for the sepulchral duties of the survivors.[149]
Each morning sees the sun rise as youthful and ardent as the morning before.
Why then should not man, after completing his subterranean journey and
triumphing over the terrors of Ament, cast off the darkness of the tomb and
again see the light of day? This undying hope was revivified at each dawn as
by a new promise, and the Egyptians followed out the analogy by the way in
which they disposed their sepulchres. They were placed in the west of their
country, towards the setting sun, but their doors, the openings through which
their inmates would one day regain the light, were turned to the east. In the
necropolis of Memphis, the door of nearly every tomb is turned to the east,
[150]
and there is not a single stele which does not face in that direction.[151]
In the necropolis of Abydos, both door and stele are more often turned
towards the south, that is towards the sun at its zenith.[152] But neither at
Memphis, at Abydos, nor at Thebes is there a tomb which is lighted from the
west or presents its inscription to the setting sun.[153] Thus, from the shadowy
depths where they dwell, the dead have their eyes turned to that quarter of the
heavens where the life-giving flame is each day rekindled, and seem to be
waiting for the ray which is to destroy their night and to rouse them from
their long repose.[154]

Fig. 100.—Lid of the coffin of Entef, 11th dynasty. Louvre.

The ideas and beliefs which we have described were common to all
Egyptians, irrespective of class. When he felt his last hour approaching, the
humble peasant or boatman on the Nile was as anxious as Pharaoh himself to
insure the survival of his double and to guard against the terrors of
annihilation:

. . . . Mais, jusqu'en son trépas,
Le riche a des honneurs que le pauvre n'a pas.

Those who, when alive, had to be content with a hut of earth or of reeds,
could not, when dead, expect to have a tomb of stone or brick, a habitation
for eternity; they could not look for joys in the other world which they had
been unable to procure in this. So that such tombs as those which most fully
embodied the ideas we have described must always have remained the
exclusive privilege more or less of the governing classes. These consisted of
the king, the princes and nobles, the priests, the military chiefs, and
functionaries of every kind down to the humblest of the scribes attached to
the administration. As for those Egyptians who did not belong to this
aristocracy, they had to be content with less expensive arrangements. The less
poor among them at least took measures to be embalmed and to be placed in
a coffin of wood or papier-mâché, accompanied by scarabs and other charms
to protect them against malignant spirits. The painted figures upon the coffin
also helped to keep off evil influences. If they could afford it they purchased
places in a common tomb, where the mummies were heaped one upon the
other and confided to the care of priests who performed the funerary rites for
a whole chamber at once.[155] It was the frequent custom to put with the dead
those pillows of wood or alabaster which the Egyptians seem to have used
from the most ancient times for the support of their heads in sleep. This
contrivance, which does away with the necessity for continually rearranging
their complicated head-dress, is still used by the Nubians and Abyssinians.

Figs. 101, 102.—Scarabs. Louvre.

Figs. 103, 104.—Funerary amulets. Oudja and ta. Louvre.

But those who could procure even these slight advantages were still among
the favourites of fortune. Many were unable to obtain even this minimum of
funeral honours. On the confines of all the great cemeteries, at Thebes as well
as at Memphis, corpses are found deposited in the loose sand two or three
feet from the surface. Some of these are packed in the leaves of the palm,
others are roughly enveloped in a few morsels of linen. They have been
hastily dipped in a bath of natron, which has dirtied rather than embalmed
them.[156] Sometimes even these slender precautions have been omitted.
Bodies have been found in the earth without vestige of either coffin or linen
swathes. The sand seems to have been intrusted with the work of drying
them, and they have been found in our days in the condition of skeletons.

Fig. 105.—Pillow, Louvre.

On the other hand, the fortunate ones of the world, those who were so easy in
their circumstances in this life that they could place themselves in the same
happy condition in the next, spared no expense in anything connected with
their burial. They never allowed themselves to be surprised by death, as we
so often do. Whether kings or private individuals, they made their
preparations while they were still alive, and caused their tombs to be
constructed under their own eyes.[157] Their forethought when living and the
piety of relations spared nothing that could add to the beauty and
convenience of dwellings which were to be the eternal resting places of their
inmates. The palaces of the princes and rich men of Egypt were so lightly
built that they have left no traces upon the soil; but many of their tombs have
subsisted uninjured to our day, and it is from them that we have obtained our
treasures of Egyptian art. All the other nations of the ancient world followed
the good example thus set, or rather, to speak more accurately, being all
penetrated with similar ideas, they took similar courses without borrowing
one from the other. Whenever we moderns have opened any of those ancient
tombs which have happily remained intact, we have been met by the same
discoveries. Whether it be in Egypt or Phœnicia, in Asia Minor, Cyprus or
Greece, in Etruria or Campania, the same astonishing sight meets our eyes.
The tombs are filled with precious objects and chefs d'œuvres of art which
their depositors had intended never again to see the light of day.
In modern times, when piety or pride stimulates to the decoration of a tomb,
all the care of the architect, the sculptor and the painter is given to the
outside, to the edifice which surmounts the actual grave. The grave or other
receptacle for the coffin is as plain and simple in the most sumptuous
monuments of our cemeteries as in the most humble. Our funerary
architecture is based upon our belief that the tomb is empty; that the vital part
of the deposit confided to it has escaped to rejoin the current of eternal life.
Under such conditions the tomb becomes above all things a commemorative
structure, a more or less sincere manifestation of the grief of a family or of
society at large for the loss of one of its members. As for the narrow pit into
which the "mortal coil" is lowered, all that we demand of it is that it should
be deep enough and properly closed. Art makes no attempt to illumine its
darkness. She leaves to workmen the task of excavation and of building its

walls and confines herself to the visible parts of the tomb. The dead within
furnishes the pretext for her activity, but it is the admiration of the living that
is her real incentive.
The ideas of the ancients on this matter were, as we have seen, very different.
They looked upon the tomb as an inhabited house; as a house in which the
dead was to lead some kind of existence. Rich men wished their tombs to
look well outside, even to the distant spectator, but it was to the inside that
their chief attention was turned. They wished to find there all the necessaries,
the comforts, the luxuries, to which they had been accustomed during life. So
we find that the Egyptians, the Greeks or the Etruscans, were willing enough,
when they built their own tombs or those of their relations, to throw a
tumulus of earth above it, or, later, a constructed building which was
conspicuous at a distance. In those sepulchres which were cut out of the side
of a mountain, the fronts were carved with frieze, pediment and columns into
the shape of a regularly constructed portico; but the chief object of solicitude
to the proud possessor of such a tomb, was its internal furnishing and
disposition. For him there was no removal should he be discontented with his
lodging. When a man is condemned by illness or accident to keep his room,
he takes care to surround himself with everything that he may want. He
gathers immediately about him all the comforts and luxuries which he can
afford; and death is an illness from which there is no recovery.
Impelled by such ideas as these, the ancients filled their tombs with precious
objects and decorated them with sumptuous art, all the more that they seemed
well guarded against intrusion for the sake of gain. Thus the Achæans of
Mycenæ (if that be the proper name of those mysterious people) buried, in
the sepulchres discovered by Dr. Schliemann, the innumerable objects of gold
and silver which now fill the museum of Athens; thus the tombs of Bœotia
were filled with those marvels of grace and delicate workmanship, the terra
cottas of Tanagra; and those of Etruria and Campania with the most beautiful
painted vases ever produced by Greek taste.
Identity of religious conception thus led, from end to end of the antique
world, to funerary arrangements which bore a curious resemblance one to
another, so that sepulchral architecture among the ancients had, as a whole, a
very different character from that of the moderns. This character is more
strongly marked in Egypt than anywhere else, and therefore we have studied
it in detail. The general observations to which it has given rise have been

made once for all, and we shall not have to repeat them when we describe the
funeral customs of other ancient peoples. We shall then confine ourselves to
pointing out the slight differences which naturally spring up in the several
interpretations of a common belief.
We have still to show how the varying circumstances of time and place
caused the Egyptian tomb to pass through certain modifications of form and
decoration, which, however, were never of so radical a nature as to affect its
general appearance and arrangement. Until Egypt became a mere
geographical expression and her venerable civilization lost its independence
and originality, these latter remained practically unchanged.

§ 2. The Tomb under the Ancient Empire.

Among the tombs which date from the time of the ancient empire, the most
interesting to the traveller are, of course, the Pyramids. Long before his
arrival at Cairo he sees the summits of those artificial mountains rising into
the air above the vapours raised by the sun, and above the dust thrown up by
the teeming population of the city. At that distance their peaks seem light and
slender from their height above the horizon (Plate I. 2).
The tourist's first visit is paid to the Pyramids, and many an European leaves
Egypt without seeing any other ancient building. He thinks that he has
qualified himself to discourse upon Egyptian architecture because a few
shouting Arabs have landed him, exhausted, upon the topmost stone of the
pyramid of Cheops, and have painfully dragged and thrust him along those
passages of the interior which will ever be among his most disagreeable
recollections. During all this his eyes and thoughts are entirely given to the
preservation of his own equilibrium, and he sees nothing of the real
constitution of the structure he has come to visit.
In spite of the wonderful panorama which repays the fatigues of the ascent,
and of the overpowering impression made upon the mind by their colossal
mass, the Pyramids, as we see them to-day are far from being the most

complete and interesting of the sepulchral monuments left to us by the early
dynasties. The largest and best preserved are not so old as some of the tombs
in the necropolis of Memphis, and, royal burying-places as they are, their
arrangement and ornamentation are less rich and expressive than those of
many sepulchres built by private individuals. Many of the latter, in their
comparatively restricted dimensions, answer better to the definition of a tomb
suggested to us by our study of the national beliefs.
We shall, therefore, reserve the Pyramids for future treatment, and in our
review of the successive forms taken by sepulchral architecture, we shall
assign the first place to those private tombs, dating from the Ancient Empire,
which are to be found in the necropolis of Memphis. Notwithstanding a few
differences, to which we shall refer hereafter, these tombs, as a whole, can be
traced to a single type, of which Lepsius was the first to perceive the interest.
[158]
This type, which was first clearly brought to light by the many and deep
excavations carried out by Mariette, has been known for some years past by
the Arab term mastaba,[159] which means literally a bench, a bench of stone
or wood. This name was given by the labourers employed upon the
excavations, and seemed well adapted to their long and low shapes, which
bear some resemblance to those divans, or ottomans, which are found in
every room of an oriental dwelling. Mariette was struck by the fitness of the
expression, and used it ever after to designate that particular kind of tomb.
Mariette will be our constant guide in this part of our study. After having
opened many hundreds of these monuments, he published in the Revue
archéologique, what we may call a theory of the mastaba.[160] In all essential
matters we shall allow his words to speak for themselves; when he enters into
more detail than is necessary for our purpose, we shall content ourselves with
epitomizing his descriptions.

THE MASTABAS OF THE NECROPOLIS OF MEMPHIS.

The space over which the monuments which we propose to describe are
spread, is on the left bank of the Nile, and extends from Abou-Roash to

Dashour; it is thus, in all probability, the largest cemetery in the world, being
more than fifteen miles in length, and of an average width of from two to two
and a half miles.[161] It was, in a word, the burial-place for Memphis and its
suburbs, and Memphis seems to have been the largest city of Egypt, and to
have boasted an antiquity which only Thinis could rival. Excavations have
failed, apparently, to confirm the assertion of Strabo, who describes the early
capital of Egypt as reaching to the foot of the Libyan chain. On the contrary,
it seems to have been confined between the canal which is called the Bahr
Yussef and the Nile. It would thus have formed a very long and rather narrow
city, close upon the river, of which the site may still be traced by the more or
less barren hillocks strewn with blocks of granite and fragments of walls,
which crop up from the plain between Gizeh and Chinbab. For forty centuries
there was a continual procession of corpses from Memphis itself, and
probably from towns on the other side of the Nile, such as Heliopolis, to the
plateau which lies along the foot of the Libyan chain. The formation of this
plateau makes it peculiarly well adapted for the purpose to which it was put.
It consists of a thick bed of soft limestone, covered by a layer of sand which
varies in depth from many yards to a few feet according to the inequalities of
the ground beneath it.
It was easy, therefore, either to lay bare the rock and to construct the tomb
upon it, or to dig the mummy pits in its substance, and the winds might be
trusted to quickly cover the grave with sand which would protect it when
made. The same sand covered the coffinless corpse of the pauper with its
kindly particles. Age after age the dead were interred by millions in this great
haven of rest. At first there was plenty of room, and the corpses were strewn
somewhat thinly in the sand,[162] but with time economy of space had to be
practised, until at last bodies were squeezed into the narrowest spaces
between older inhabitants. Sometimes these new comers even intruded into
the tombs of those who had gone before them, and that without always
troubling themselves to conceal their usurpation by effacing the name of the
rightful owner.[163]
The number of tombs was increased to a prodigious extent by the non-
employment of those family tombs which, as we shall see, were made use of
by the Phœnicians, the Greeks, and the Etruscans. The Egyptian sepulchre
was a personal appanage. The husband and father of a family admitted into it
only his wife and such of their children as died young. The son, when he in

turn became the head of a family, built a tomb for himself. Each generation,
each human couple marked their passage through the world by the erection of
a new tomb.
All the mastabas belong to the period of the Memphite empire. Those who
built them were able to give free play to their fancies, and to develop the
structure, both above and below ground, both in arrangement and in
decoration, to any extent they pleased. We may therefore look upon them as
the freest, the most spontaneous, and the most complete expression of the
ideas formed by the men of that remote age concerning death and the life
beyond the grave.
The mastabas of Sakkarah will receive most of our attention, and in
describing them we shall often have occasion to quote the words of Mariette.
[164]
Those which are to be found in the more northern part of the necropolis,
in the neighbourhood of the Great Pyramid, differ only in unimportant details
from those at Sakkarah. The general appearance now presented by these
monuments may be guessed from the sketch which M. Bourgoin has sent us
of the tomb of Sabou (Fig. 106). The other mastabas figured by us have all
been more or less restored.
"The mastaba is a massive structure, rectangular on plan, with four faces of
plain walling, each being inclined at a stated angle towards their common
centre. This inclination has led some people to assert that it is nothing more
than an unfinished pyramid. Such an idea is refuted, however, by the fact that
the divergence from the perpendicular is in some cases so slight that, were
the walls prolonged upwards, their ridges, or arêtes, would not meet for some
eight or nine hundred yards. The mastaba might be more justly compared to
the space comprised between two horizontal sections of an obelisk,
supposing the obelisk to have an oblong base.

Fig. 106.—Actual condition of a mastaba.
The tomb of Sabou. Drawn by Bourgoin.

"The major axis of the rectangle upon which these structures are planned,
always runs due north and south, and at the pyramids of Gizeh, the necropolis
of the west, they are arranged upon a symmetrical plan so as to resemble a
chess board on which all the squares are strictly oriented.[165] The more
carefully built mastabas are oriented according to the true astronomical north.
All the others show the same intention, and, in those instances where an error
of a few degrees is to be discovered, it is to be clearly attributed to
carelessness on the part of the builder, a common fault in these tombs, and
not to a difference of intention. We often find that the northern face is not
strictly parallel to the southern, nor that on the west to that on the east.

Fig. 107.—Three mastabas at Gizeh.
Perspective view, after the plan of Lepsius.
(Denkmæler, vol. i. pl. 24.)

"Although not varying much from true orientation, the mastabas of Sakkarah
are not arranged with the symmetry which distinguishes those on the south
and west of the Great Pyramid.[166] They are sprinkled about in a rather
haphazard fashion. Here we find them well interspaced and there actually
placed one upon another. It follows that the chess-board arrangement which
is so conspicuous at Gizeh is not here to be noticed. Even at Sakkarah there
were streets between the rows of tombs, but they are so irregularly placed,
and they are often so narrow, many of them being nothing more than blind
alleys, that the inexperienced visitor may well fancy himself in a maze.
"The Sakkarah mastabas are built either of stone or brick.
"The mastabas of stone are of two kinds: those of a very hard blue siliceous
limestone and those of a softer chalky limestone which is found upon the
spot. This latter stone was used for the Stepped Pyramid. The tombs upon
which it was used seem to be much the oldest in the necropolis; they are also
the least rich and important.

Fig. 108.—Restoration of part of the Necropolis of Gizeh.

"Our general notion of Egyptian architecture would lead us to look for the
use of huge stones in these mastabas, and, in fact, certain important
monuments, such as the Mastabat-el-Faraoun, and parts of important
monuments, such as the Temple of the Sphinx and the passages and chambers
of the greater pyramids, were constructed of very large blocks. But the
Sakkarah architects were more modest. Apart from the ceilings, architraves
and other places where big stones were necessary, the blocks are of an
average height of about half a yard, with a proportionate length and
thickness.
"The brick-built sepulchres are of two kinds also. The more elaborate are of
black brick, while a yellowish brick is used for the others. The yellow bricks
are a mixture of sand and pebbles with a little clay; the black bricks are of
earth and straw. The former are always small (8·8 in. x 4·4 in. x 2·8 in.); the
latter are comparatively large (15·2 in. x 7·2 in. x 5·6 in.). Both kinds are
dried simply in the sun. The yellow bricks seem to be the more ancient. Their
employment begins and ends with the Ancient Empire. The black bricks, on
the other hand, appear for the first time about midway through the fourth

dynasty. At first they were rarely employed, but under the eighteenth dynasty
and those which followed it, they came to be exclusively used."

Fig. 109.—The Mastabat-el-Faraoun.

All these mastabas, whether of brick or stone, betray an amount of negligence
in their construction which is astonishing. Considering the ideas which the
Egyptians had formed of a future life, the chief preoccupation of their
architects should have been to give a stability to their sepulchres which
would have insured their perpetuity, and, with it, that of the deposit
committed to their charge. The whole of our description will be pervaded by
accounts of the minute precautions devised to that end. "Now these mastabas
are constructed with care on their outsides alone. The core of their walls is
composed of sand, of rubbish, of blocks of stone mingled with the flakes
struck off by the masons, and all this in most cases without any cement to
give it coherence. The mastabas of Sakkarah are not homogeneous
constructions of masonry and cement, like the pyramids and most of the
mastabas of Gizeh. They are confused heaps of ill assorted materials, which
would collapse but for the retaining strength of their covering of solid stone.
"At Sakkarah the outward faces of the mastaba are not smooth. Each
successive course is slightly set back from the one below it. At Gizeh the
walls form a smooth plane gently inclined from the perpendicular.
"There are mastabas of all sizes. That of Sabou measures 172 feet by 84; that
of Ha-ar, 149 by 74; that of Ra-en-ma 169 by 81, and that of Hapi no more
than 25 ft. 6 in. by 19 ft. 6 in. In height they vary less. The highest are not
more than from 26 to 30 ft. high, the smallest about 12."

Fig. 110.—Entrance to a Mastaba at Sakkarah. Mariette.

The roof of the mastaba is a plain surface without irregularity of any kind;
but the soil above it is sprinkled with vases buried at a slight depth. These
vases are pretty evenly distributed, but they are rather more numerous in that
part of the soil which covers the ceilings of the chambers, a circumstance of
which Mariette often made use to guide him in his excavations. Like all the
vases of this epoch, those which are found upon the roof of the mastabas are
roughly made, pointed at the bottom and without handles. They each contain
a thin film of yellow clay deposited by the water with which they were filled.
They were placed in their curious position under the notion that the water
which they contained would quench the thirst of the dead man below. The
mouths of the jars were covered with flat stones, and the water would last
long enough to satisfy at least the immediate necessities of the inhabitant of
the tomb.
"The principal face of the mastaba is turned to the east. In four cases out of
five the entrance to its chambers, when there is one, is found upon this face.
The general arrangement is, almost always, as follows: 1. At a few metres
distance from the north-eastern angle we come upon a quadrangular niche or
recess, very high and very narrow, in the depths of which those long vertical
grooves which distinguish the steles of this epoch are carved upon the actual
masonry of the tomb. For this recess an unimportant stele, with or without
inscription, is occasionally substituted, or (2) we find, at a few metres

distance from the south-eastern angle, either a deeper, larger, and more
carefully built recess, in the depths of which a monolithic stele of white
limestone covered with hieroglyphs is placed; or a regular architectural
façade in miniature with a door in the centre. When the recess is found near
the southern angle of the eastern face, the tomb begins and ends there. It has
no internal chamber, or rather, the recess acts as substitute for one. But when,
instead of the niche or recess, we meet with a door, we then know that we
have come upon a regularly completed tomb. The name of its proprietor is
often carved upon the lintel. Several of these lintels, of a peculiar shape, are
to be seen in the Louvre.

Fig. 111.—Lintel of the tomb of Teta, 6th dynasty. Louvre.

"Next after the eastern face, in relative importance, comes that which is
turned to the north. When the entrance is in the northern wall the door is
invariably at the back of a kind of vestibule, in front of which are two
monolithic columns, without base or capital, supporting the architrave which,
in turn, supports the roof.
"Still more seldom than in the northern face, the entrance is occasionally
found upon that which is turned to the south. This exceptional arrangement
is, in most instances, caused by some local circumstance which may readily
be perceived. When the entrance is on the south its arrangement is sometimes
the one, sometimes the other, of the two which we have described.
"As for the western face, we have no evidence that it ever played any more
ambitious rôle than that of completing the inclosure. It is always destitute of
both openings and ornaments."
We have thus explored, with Mariette, the outside of the mastaba. We have
described its form and general aspect, we have noticed the materials of which
it was constructed, the principles upon which it was oriented, and its average
size. We have explained, too, how this single type of sepulchre was repeated

many thousands of times with but slight variations, until, upon the plateau
between Memphis and the desert there gradually arose a metropolis of the
dead more populous than that of the living. It remains to describe the contents
of those huge blocks of masonry. We shall begin by visiting the chambers
planned by the architect in the building itself; we shall afterwards penetrate,
by the paths which modern curiosity has established through the débris of
ages and the depths of the soil, to those recesses of the tomb which were
meant to be for ever inaccessible.
The interior of a mastaba is composed of three parts—the chamber, the
serdab, and the well. The last-named of the three is the only part which is
never wanting. Many of the mastabas are, in fact, solid. In them the chamber
is in a very rudimentary condition, being represented merely by one of those
external niches which Mariette has described. This arrangement was the
earliest, and, as long as the mastaba continued to be built, the less ambitious
tenants of the necropolis were contented to reproduce it. But in these pages,
as in a natural history, it is important to study the species when fully
developed and provided with all its organs. When we have clearly established
a general type nothing is more easy than to recognise and point out its
variations. It suffices to say here that some tombs are wanting in one, some in
another of those constituent parts whose meaning and uses we shall attempt
to determine, and that, in a few, they are of an unaccustomed importance.
It is natural that we should first turn our attention to the chamber. This was a
kind of neutral ground upon which the quick and the dead could meet, the
former to present, the latter to receive the funeral offerings.
"The interior of a mastaba may be divided into several 'chambers' (there are
three in the tomb of Ti), but generally there is only one. It is entered by the
door in the middle of the façade.
"These chambers have, as a rule, to depend upon the door for light, but there
are a few instances in which they are lighted from openings in the roof. A
remarkable example of the latter arrangement is to be seen in the tomb of Ti,
where the innermost chamber, which otherwise would be in complete
darkness, is lighted from the roof.
"The chamber is sometimes quite bare, sometimes covered with sculptures
and paintings such as those whose character and meaning we have already
pointed out. At its further end, and always facing eastwards, stands the

inscribed tablet or stele. There are some chambers in which the walls are bare
and the stele engraved, but there are none where the walls are carved and the
stele plain."

Fig. 112.—Plan of the tomb of Ti.
Figs. 113, 114.—Mastaba at Sakkarah, from Prisse.

In the tomb of Ptah-Hotep, of which we reproduce the principal side, the stele
proper is on the left, but the figures and the funerary inscriptions cover all the
central part of the richly decorated wall (Fig. 115).
We see, then, that the stele is the one indispensable part of this complicated
whole. It was, in fact, upon the formula with which it was inscribed, that the
Egyptians depended for those magical agencies by which Osiris became the
active medium of transmission between the living and the dead.
"At the foot of the stele there was often a table for offerings, in granite,
alabaster, or limestone. This was laid flat upon the ground (Fig. 92).

Fig. 115.—Western wall in the chamber of the tomb of Ptah-Hotep,
5th dynasty.
Drawn by Bourgoin.

"As a rule this was the only piece of furniture in the chamber; but
occasionally we find, on each side of the stele and always placed upon the
ground, either two small limestone obelisks, or two objects in that material
resembling table legs hollowed out at the top for the reception of offerings."
This chamber was left open to every comer. The entrance was in fact left
without a door. To this rule Mariette found but two exceptions in the many
hundreds of tombs which he examined.[167]
"Not far from the chamber, oftener on the south than the north, and oftener on
the north than the west, a passage in the masonry, high, narrow, and built of
very large stones, is found. The workmen employed upon the excavations
christened it the serdab, or corridor, and their name has been generally

adopted."[168] In Figs. 116-119 we give the plan and three sections of a
mastaba at Gizeh which has four serdabs.
"Sometimes the serdab has no communication with the other parts of the
mastaba, it is entirely walled in, but in other instances there is a narrow
quadrangular opening, a sort of pipe or conduit, which unites the serdab with
the chamber. It is so small that the hand can only be introduced into it with
difficulty.[169]
"The use of the serdab is revealed by the objects which have been found in it;
it was to hold one or more statues of the deceased. The Egyptians believed
these statues to be the most certain guarantees, always with the exception of
the mummy itself, of a future life for the dead. Hidden from sight in their
dark prison, they were protected from all violence, while they were separated
only by a few stones from the chamber where the friends and relations met
together, and the conduit by which the intervening wall was often pierced,
allowed the smell of fruit and incense and the smoke of burnt fat to come to
their nostrils.[170]

Fig. 116.—Plan of a mastaba with four Serdabs. (Lepsius, i., pl. 24.)

Fig. 117.—Longitudinal section of the same mastaba.

"No inscriptions have been found in a serdab except those upon the statues.
And no objects other than statues have ever been found in a serdab." So that
the function of the serdab was to afford a safe and final asylum to the statues.
These were, no doubt, to be found in other situations also, because, not to
mention the numerous bas-reliefs upon which the figure of the deceased
appeared in the chamber or in the niche which sometimes took its place, he
was sometimes portrayed in high relief, and of full life size, in the public hall
of the tomb.[171] Sometimes, also, we find a statue in one of those front courts
which, especially at the time of the fourth dynasty, seem to have been in great
favour. But this court, as well as the chamber, was open to every chance
passer by, and the statues which they both contained were in continual danger
from careless or malicious hands. It was to guard against such chances as
these that the inventive architects of Egypt contrived a safe retreat in the heart
of the massive structure which should provide a reserve of statues against
every contingency. When all those which were exposed to accident should
have perished, these would still survive and would furnish to the double the
material support, the tangible body, to which that phantom was obliged to
attach himself unless he wished to perish entirely.

Fig. 118.—Transverse section through the chamber.

These precautions were not ill conceived. The serdab kept efficient guard
over its deposit; the museum of Boulak contains at least a hundred statues
from the ancient empire which were found at Sakkarah, and nine-tenths of
them were found in the serdabs.

Fig. 119.—Transverse section through the serdabs.

We have now described all those parts of the tomb which were above ground.
We have not been content with visiting the chamber only, which was freely
left open, we have penetrated into the farthest recesses, and have discovered
those secrets of the massive walls which their constructor thought to hide for
ever from the eye of man. But even yet we have not arrived at the actual
place of burial; we shall reach it, however, through our third internal division,
the well or pit.
"The well is an artificial excavation, square or rectangular in plan, never
round, at the bottom of which is the chamber in which the mummy is
deposited.
"To arrive at the opening of the well, we must mount to the platform, or roof,
of the mastaba (Fig. 122). As there was never any staircase to a mastaba
either within or without, it will be seen that the well must have been a very
inaccessible part of the tomb." In one single instance, namely, in the tomb of
Ti, the well is sunk from the floor of the largest of the internal chambers, but
whether it opened upon the roof or upon the floor of the chamber, it was
always closed with the utmost care by means of a large flat stone.

Fig. 120.—Figures in high relief, from a mastaba at Gizeh,
5th dynasty (from Lepsius).

"The well is generally situated upon the major axis of the mastaba, and, as a
rule, nearer to the north than to the south. Its depth varies, but, on an average,
it is about forty feet. Now and then, however, it has a depth of sixty-five or
even eighty feet. As the well begins at the platform and ends in the rock-
carved mummy chamber, it follows that it passes vertically first through the
mastaba, secondly through the rock upon which the mastaba is founded. The
built part of the well is carefully constructed of large and perfect stones, and
in this we find one of the distinguishing characteristics of the tombs of the
ancient empire." In the tomb of Ti the well takes the form of an inclined plain
like a passage in the pyramids. In the common form of well the mummy pit
could only be reached by means of ropes.

"When the bottom of the well is reached a gaping passage is seen in the rock
which forms its southern wall. This passage, which is not high enough to
allow one to walk upright, does not run quite parallel to the axis of the
mastaba. It is directed obliquely towards the south-east, like the chamber
above. Suddenly it becomes enlarged into a small cavern, which is the
mortuary chamber properly speaking, that is to say, the room with a view to
which the whole structure has been planned and to which all its other parts
are but accessories.
"This mortuary chamber is vertically under the public hall above, so that the
survivors who came together in the latter for the funeral ceremonies had the
corpse of the deceased under their feet, at a distance which varied according
to the depth of the well."
The mortuary chambers are large and carefully built,
but generally without ornament or inscription. Of all
those explored by him Mariette found but one which
had its walls ornamented; in the middle of its
decorations, which he does not describe, he contrived
to make out a few phrases which seemed to belong to
the Ritual of the Dead.
The sarcophagus was placed in one corner of the
chamber. It was generally of fine limestone,
sometimes of red granite, and on a few occasions of
opaque black basalt. It was rectangular on plan with a
round-topped lid squared at the angles.
Mariette found none at Sakkarah with Fig. 121.—The upper chamber,
inscriptions. On the other hand we find
well, and mummy chamber.[172]
them upon the sarcophagus at Khoo-foo-
Ankh, which was discovered at Gizeh
and belongs to the fourth dynasty (Figs. 123, 124).
"The Egyptians did not always trust to the mere size and weight of the lid for
the secure closing of the sarcophagus. The under-side of the cover is made
with a rebate at its edge which fits into a corresponding groove on the upper
edge of the sarcophagus, and the two edges were bound still more tightly
together by a very hard cement. Finally, as if all these precautions were not

enough, wooden bolts were affixed to the under-side of the lid which fitted
into slots in the sarcophagus and helped to render the two inseparable."

Fig. 122.—Double mastaba at Gizeh, transverse section
(from Lepsius, t. i., pl. 22).

So far as we can judge from the few human remains which have been
gathered from these ancient tombs, the process of embalmment was then
carried on in simple and elementary fashion, and it was this imperfection that
the Egyptians attempted to neutralize, by the innumerable and complicated
precautions which they took to insure that the corpse should not be disturbed
in its envelope of stone. In later times, when the preparation of the mummy
was better understood, they were not so careful to seal up the sarcophagus
from the outer air.
"The furniture of the mummy chamber comprised neither statues, nor
funerary statuettes, nor amulets of any kind. Sometimes a few ox bones
bestrew the ground. Two or three large and pointed red vases, containing

nothing but a thin deposit of clay, rest against the walls. Within the
sarcophagus we find the same sobriety of sepulchral furniture. Beyond a
wooden or alabaster pillow (Fig. 105) and half a dozen little drinking cups of
alabaster, nothing has been found there but the mummy itself."

Fig. 123.—Sarcophagus of Khoo-foo-Ankh. Perspective after Bourgoin.
Red granite. Height 1·33 metres. Boulak.

These beef bones must be the remains of the quarters of meat which were
placed in the tomb for the nourishment of the dead. No scene is more
frequently represented upon the walls of the public chamber of the mastaba
than the killing and flaying of victims for the funeral ceremonies (Fig. 125).
Like those which are found upon the roof, the vases must have held water for
the double. The pillow was placed under the head of the mummy, it was the
one he had used during his life. As for the drinking cups, their use has not yet
been determined, so far as we know.
"As soon as the mummy was in the sarcophagus, the sarcophagus sealed, and
the various objects which we have described in place, the opening at the
bottom of the well was walled up; the well itself was filled with stones, earth,
and sand, and the dead was left to his eternal sleep."[173] These precautions
make it no easy thing to reach the mummy chamber. To find the entrance to
the well is the first difficulty, and when it is found, many hands and no little
time are required to remove the rubbish with which it is filled. The only

mechanical helps which the Egyptians have ever used in such work are those
which we ourselves have seen in the hands of Mariette's labourers, namely,
the wooden shovel and the little rush basket which is filled with a few
handfuls of sand and pebbles, and then carried on the head to be emptied at a
convenient distance. It may be guessed how many journeys to and fro have to
be made before a few cubic yards of débris are cleared by such means as this!

Fig. 124.—Details of the Sarcophagus of Khoo-foo-Ankh.

We have so far followed Mariette, and have frequently had to make use of his
ipsissima verba. To his pages and to the plates of the great work of Lepsius,
we must refer those readers who are not contented with being told general

rules but wish to know the exceptions also. We shall not go into all the
changes which variety of taste and the progress of art introduced into the
arrangement and decoration of Egyptian buildings; they do not affect the
general statements which we have made. We shall not re-state the evidence
which enabled Mariette to apportion the 142 painted and sculptured mastabas
explored by him in 1869, to the first six dynasties. It is certain that those
monuments form a chronological series extending over a space of from
twelve to fifteen centuries, and that during the whole of that long period, the
general character of Egyptian sepulchral architecture remained unchanged.

Fig. 125.—Bas-relief from Sakkarah. Boulak.

We should here, perhaps, in order to make our description complete, attempt
to convey a true idea of the reliefs which cover the sides of the chamber, and
of the statues which fill the serdab. We should, perhaps, by a judicious choice
of examples, endeavour to estimate their style and composition; but we shall
postpone all such examination until we come to treat of sculpture, and of the
way in which the earliest Egyptian artists treated the human form. A didactic
and analytic method is so far despotic that it compels us, in order to marshal
our facts and to make them easily understood, to separate phenomena which
are intimately connected, and to destroy the unity of natural groups. We have
thus been driven to separate the figured decorations of the tomb from the
architectural arrangements which enframe and support them; with the latter,
alone, are we now concerned.

We may sum up the foregoing details by the following general description of
the Egyptian tomb as it was established in the early ages of the national life,
in those years when the national civilization put on the form and colour
which it retained until the last days of antiquity.
This tomb, when complete, included (1) a built up part which, being raised
well above the surface of the soil, was a conspicuous object in the landscape;
and (2) a subterranean part cut in the living rock which was never more than
a few feet below the surface of the sand. The constructed part inclosed a
chamber which was sometimes internal and sometimes external, a chamber in
which the relations of the deceased deposited the funeral offerings, and in
which the priests officiated before the stele, to which the most conspicuous
place was always given. Sometimes this chamber is nothing more than a
recess in the façade, a mere frame for the stele. The structure also contains a
retreat in its thickness where the statues of the deceased were walled up. The
subterranean part is composed of the well and the mummy chamber. The well
is sunk from different parts of the building; usually traversing its whole
depth; it leads to the mummy chamber which is found at varying depths in
the bowels of the earth.
Such are the constituent elements of the mastaba, that is to say, of those
private tombs which were contemporary with the Pyramids. All over Egypt,
in every one of the cemeteries, no matter where they are situated or what their
date, the same elements are to be found, modified in certain particulars by the
rank of the deceased, by the nature of the soil, by the size of the tomb, and by
the changes of fashion, but always to be easily recognized. Of all these
elements there is but one which does not persistently reappear in monuments
other than the mastaba, and that is the serdab. This retreat for statues has not,
as yet, been found in any of the royal tombs of the first six dynasties, neither
has it been met with in the tombs of the two Theban empires, or of later
epochs. And yet it was connected with one of the most vital hopes of the
Egyptian religion. It fulfilled in the happiest manner, one of the conditions
imposed upon the Egyptian architect by the strange conceptions of a future
life which we have described. Why then do we, as a rule, find the serdab only
in the mastabas of the Memphite necropolis? Its absence under the Theban
princes is, perhaps to be explained by the progress made in the science of
embalming. The heads of more than one mummy have now been exhibited in
the cases of European museums for many years, and, in spite of the dampness
of our climates, they still preserve their skin, their teeth and their hair (Fig.

126). When they had learnt the secret of preserving the body from corruption,
so that after a long series of centuries it should be pretty much in the same
condition as on the day after death, they did not indeed, cease to make those
images which were supposed to guard the double from annihilation, but they
attached less importance to their safety, and took less trouble to hide them.
They considered that they had done enough for their preservation by putting
them in the precincts of their tombs and temples, and so under the
guardianship of their venerated religion.
As for the other parts of the tomb, a little attention will always suffice for
their identification even in those sepulchres which differ most from the
mastaba. In some instances we shall find the mummy chamber contrived in
the upper structure, in others the whole tomb is cut in the living rock.
Sometimes we find the chapel, as we may call the public chamber in which
the miraculous nourishment of the double took place, more or less distantly
separated from the mummy chamber; sometimes the well almost disappears,
sometimes it ceases to be vertical and becomes a long corridor with but a
gentle slope. As a rule all these variations are easily explained, and may be
connected without difficulty with that primitive type which we have
attempted to define by its most wide-spread and constant features.

Fig. 126.—Head of a Mummy. Louvre.

Another method of sepulture was made use of in the Ancient Empire, a
method which afterwards came into general use in Egypt, we mean the
hypogeum, or subterranean tomb. The Egyptian Commission has described
several rock-cut tombs in the neighbourhood of the Pyramids, especially
some which face the western slope of the Second Pyramid. Similar tombs are
to be found near the pyramid of Mycerinus. Some of these sepulchral grottos
declare their extreme antiquity by their imitations of wooden architecture;
[174]
others by their inscriptions dating from the fourth and fifth dynasties. We
shall not dwell long upon these rock-cut tombs. They are generally composed
of one or two small sculptured chambers, upon one of which the well opens
which leads to the mummy chamber. We shall postpone their study to a later
chapter, as the time of the Middle Empire affords us richer and more
complete examples of them than the earlier period; but, indeed, the New
Empire has left us the most important examples of this kind of sepulchre. We

shall here content ourselves with pointing out that the architects of Memphis
did not ignore the facilities offered by the easily cut limestone rocks, not only
for construction of well and mummy chamber, but also for those open parts
of the tomb where the funeral rites and the ceremonies of the Ritual of the
Dead were performed. In the whole course of her long vitality Egypt did little
more, either in art or religion, than develop, with variations, the themes
presented to her by the generations which were ruled by her first six
dynasties.

THE PYRAMIDS.

The mastaba was the private tomb of the great lord or rich citizen of
primitive Egypt; the pyramid was the royal tomb for the same epoch, the
tomb of that son of the gods, almost a god himself, before whom all
foreheads were bowed into the dust. As his head towered over those of his
prostrate subjects during life, so, after death, should his sepulchre rise high
above the comparatively humble tombs of his proudest servants. The most
imposing mastabas, before the sand had buried them to the summit, must
have looked small enough beside those prodigious masses. They were ant-
hills at the foot of a palace.
It may seem that in considering the mastaba before the pyramid we have
reversed the natural order. We were led to do so by the fact that the enormous
mass of the pyramids and their peculiarities of construction compelled their
architects to separate elements which are found closely allied in the mastaba.
In consequence of this separation the elements in question have not all had
the same fate. In the case of the mastaba all survived or perished together,
but, in the pyramids, some are in a marvellous state of preservation, while
others have disappeared and left hardly a trace behind. We are therefore
obliged to make use of the private tomb in our restoration of that which was
peculiar to the king.
Philologists have attempted to trace back the etymology of the word πυραμίς
to the ancient language of Egypt. The term was first employed by the Greeks,

and from their language it has been adopted into that of every civilized
nation, with a meaning which is scientifically exact. Its origin has been
sought for in the coptic term pi-rama, height, and in the term pir-aa, which
occurs continually in Exodus, and was used by Moses to signify the reigning
Pharaoh. But egyptologists now seem to be unanimous in rejecting both these
derivations. They are, we are told, refuted by the fact that the terms which are
supposed to have meant a pyramid are never used in that sense in any of the
texts. 'The words which mean a royal tomb or a tomb of any kind, have not
the remotest likeness,' says Herr Brugsch,[175] 'to the term πυραμίς. Each
royal pyramid had its own name, a composite epithet which was peculiar to
itself.' Thus the largest of them all was called "the brilliant dwelling of
Choufou;" the second, "the great;" the third, "that which is on high." The
word pyramid appears therefore to be a purely Greek term, derived from πῦρ,
fire, and suggested by the similarity between its shape and that of a tongue of
flame.
We shall not waste our time in noticing and refuting those fantastic
explanations of the pyramids which have been given in modern times. We
shall not trouble ourselves to prove that they were not observatories. Those
sloping tunnels, at the bottom of which some modern writers would set
unlucky astronomers to watch the passage of stars across the meridian, were
hermetically sealed, and minute precautions were taken with the sole object
of obstructing and concealing their entrance. The four slopes of the pyramid
faced to the cardinal points, simply because the orientation of the tomb was
habitual with the Egyptians; we have already explained its meaning. Still less
need we occupy ourselves with the theory, which made, however, some stir in
its time, that the pyramids were bulwarks by which the ancient Egyptians
attempted to keep back the sand from the fertile valley of the Nile. The
science of M. de Persigny was well worthy of his policy. There was in both,
the same turn for fantastic invention, the same want of reflection and
common sense. If such a costly barrier had been either useful or necessary it
should at least have been prolonged from one end of Egypt to the other, and
all the pyramids would not have been found assembled, with but few
exceptions, in the neighbourhood of Memphis.[176]
No one in our day thinks of either starting or discussing such theories as
these. There are, of course, several obscure points in the history of the
pyramids, several details of their construction, which stimulate to fresh

research and lend themselves to many different explanations; but there can be
no doubt as to their general character. Their exploration and the
interpretations of the Egyptian texts have confirmed the assertions of those
Greek writers who were most familiar with Egypt, such as Herodotus,[177]
Diodorus Siculus,[178] and Strabo.[179] The Pyramids are sepulchres. "They
are massive, simply conceived, carefully sealed up tombs. All entrance is
forbidden even to their most carefully built corridors. They are tombs without
windows, without doors, without exterior openings of any kind. They are the
gigantic and impregnable dwellings of the mummy; ... their colossal
dimensions have been invoked to bear out the arguments of those who would
attribute to them some other destination, but they are in fact to be found of all
sizes, some being no more than twenty feet high. Besides this, it must be
remembered that in all Egypt no pyramid, or rather group of pyramids, is to
be found, which is not the centre of a necropolis, a fact which is enough by
itself to indicate their funerary character."[180] It is proved still more
definitely, if that be possible, by the sarcophagi which have been found in the
internal chambers, empty in most cases, because those chambers had been
entered and despoiled, either in the days of antiquity or in those of the middle
ages, but sometimes intact, as in the pyramid of Mycerinus. The pyramids
were hermetically sealed. Even without direct evidence we might assert that
it was so, knowing as we do the precautions which the Egyptians took
elsewhere to guard their tombs against intrusion; but direct proof of the fact
is not wanting. When in the ninth century the Kaliph Al-Mamoun wished to
penetrate into the Great Pyramid he was only enabled to do so by breaking
into it violently, near the centre of its northern face, and thus stumbling
accidentally upon the descending passage at some distance from its mouth.
That he was reduced to employ this method at the risk of meeting with
nothing but the solid masonry shows that no external indication had been left
of the opening through which the mummy had been carried in. The casing
seems to have been then complete and consequently the four sides of the
Pyramid must have been free from débris and generally uniform. That the
Arabs should have chosen the right side for their attack was perhaps owing to
the survival of some ancient tradition indicating the northern side to be that
of the entrance, which, as a fact, it has been found to be in all the pyramids as
yet explored. Perhaps too the Arabs may have been guided by the traces of
previous attempts made either in the time of the Persians or in that of the
Romans.[181] However this may be it is very certain that had they perceived

any signs of an original doorway, they would have directed their attentions to
it. Those who seek for treasure do not, like archæologists, strike out lines of
exploration in all directions for the satisfaction of their curiosity, they go
straight to their point.
The pyramid includes two of those four parts into which we have divided the
typical Egyptian tomb; it contains the well and the mummy chamber. As for
the funerary chapel, there were obvious difficulties in the way of including it
in the thickness of the monument itself. It would have been difficult to
preserve it from being crushed by the immense weight above it, and as it
would have had to be lighted from the door alone, it must always have been
of the most restricted dimensions. A different arrangement had therefore to be
devised from that adopted in the case of the mastaba. The open part of the
monument was separated from that which was destined to be sealed up from
the outer world. The chapel or temple, in which the successors of the prince
buried in the pyramid and the priests told off for its service performed the
prescribed rites, was erected at some distance from the eastern face. The
remains of such buildings have been found to the east of both the second and
third pyramids. That of Cheops has not been discovered, but we may assert
with confidence that it has either been destroyed by the hand of man, or that
it still lies under the veil of sand. Were there any serdabs concealed in the
thickness of the temple walls? That question cannot be answered. The
remains of those buildings are in such a condition that all traces of such an
arrangement would have vanished had there been any. The walls have
disappeared. The lower courses of masonry are still in place, and allow us to
follow the very simple plan upon which these chapels were erected; and that
is all. It is possible, however, that the Egyptians depended solely upon the
profound respect which was felt for the royal person, combined with the
sacredness of the spot and the vigilance of the established priesthood of the
necropolis, to preserve the august images of the sovereign from insult or
destruction. The seven or eight statues of Chephren which were found at the
bottom of a pit in what is called the Temple of the Sphinx, were all more or
less mutilated, proving that this want of precaution was sometimes disastrous.
In the course of so many centuries, during which the Hyksos, the Ethiopians,
the Assyrians, and the Persians overran the country by turns, such statues as
were not sheltered in some well dissembled retreat must more than once have
been struck off their pedestals and broken, or, like those of the unlucky
Chephren, thrown head-foremost into the depths of the earth.

Fig. 127.—Plans of the temples belonging to the second and third
pyramids;
from Perring.

As such vast importance was attached to the preservation of the portrait
statues upon which the prolongation of life after death was made so largely to
depend, is it not probable that the idea of hiding some of them in the
innermost recesses of the pyramids themselves may have occurred to those
who caused those monuments to be built? It is obvious that no hiding-place
could be more secure. No such retreats have yet been discovered in any of the
galleries which have been explored by modern curiosity, but it does not
follow that they do not exist in some corner which has not yet been reached,
which will perhaps never be reached by the most persevering explorer. Quite
lately M. Maspero believed that he recognized a serdab in a subterranean
chamber with three niches which he found near the mummy chamber in the
Pyramid of Ounas, the last king of the fifth dynasty.[182] Before we could say
that such an arrangement does not exist elsewhere, we should have to take
some pyramid to pieces from the first stone to the last. It might, however, be
asserted that the images of the deceased would, if hidden in the pyramid, be
too far removed from that public hall to which his relations brought their
offerings and their pious homage. At such a distance they would not have
heard the friendly voices or the magic chants; nor would the scent of the
incense have reached their nostrils. In a word, they would have been ill
placed for the fulfilment of the office assigned to them by the Egyptian faith.
We have hitherto spoken only of the social purposes of the pyramid, of its
office as the sepulchre of the ancient kings of Egypt, or rather as the part of
that sepulchre that corresponded to the least interesting parts of private
tombs. In the plants of our gardens and orchards, we see cultivation develop
certain organs at the expense of others. We find stamens changed into petals,

giving us double flowers, and the envelope of the seeds thickened and made
to shed perfume. We see the same process of development in the tombs of the
early Egyptian monarchs. Under the influence of their pride of station, and as
a consequence of the effort which they made to perpetuate their rank even
after death, the stone hiding-place which protected the mummy took a size
which is oppressive to the imagination, while the funerary chapel remained of
modest dimensions. This disproportion is to be easily explained. The simple
method of construction which distinguishes the pyramid permitted almost
indefinite extension, while architecture, properly speaking, was not yet
sufficiently advanced to make use of those grandiose orders which
distinguish the porticos and hypostyle temples of the Theban period.
We have now to consider the pyramids from another point of view, from that
of their probable origin, of their variety of form, and of the materials of
which they are composed. Descriptions of these monuments, such as those
contained in the great works of Vyse[183] and Perring[184], works which gave
to the world the accumulated results of long and costly explorations, must not
be looked for in these volumes. We do not think it necessary that we should
give even a succinct account of the more important pyramids, such as that
given by Bædeker or Isambert. Such a proceeding would be a mere
duplication of those excellent manuals, and would moreover, be foreign to
the purpose which we have before us. We take the pyramids as known. The
two books just mentioned are within the reach of all. Thanks to the precise
information and the numerous figures which they contain, we may content
ourselves with making a few general observations. Some of these
observations will refer to the pyramids as a whole, some to the peculiarities
of construction which distinguish a few, peculiarities which do not affect that
general type which seems to be as old as the Egyptian monarchy itself.
As soon as a society had sprung up on the banks of the Nile which attempted
to organize itself under the directing lead of chiefs or headmen, the latter
seem to have been stung by the desire to make known their final resting-place
by some conspicuous sign. The most simple way of arriving at the desired
result was to heap up the earth over the corpse, so as to form an artificial
hillock which should be visible from a distance over the level plain. This was
the origin of that funerary mound which modern archæologists call a tumulus.
The tumulus is to be found in most districts of the ancient as well as of the
modern world. But to confine ourselves to our own province, it is to be found

in pre-Christian times among the Scythians of Herodotus and our ancestors
the Gauls, as well as among the Greeks of the heroic age. We all know the
frequent expression of Homer, σῆμα χεύειν, which is literally to display a
signal, that is to say, to accumulate over the corpse of a warrior a sufficient
number of spadefuls of earth to signalize it, for the worship and admiration of
posterity. Tradition ascribes those tumuli which are yet to be seen on the plain
of Troy to the observance of this custom.
The funerary architecture of Egypt commenced in the same fashion, in those
distant ages which were called by the Egyptians themselves the times of Hor-
schesou or slaves of Horus. We cannot doubt that the pyramid sprang from
the mound. Its birth must have taken place after Menes had, by uniting the
various tribes under his own sceptre, caused the whole race to take a distinct
step onwards in civilization. The pyramid is but a built mound. It is a tumulus
in which brick and stone take the place of earth. This substitution adds very
greatly to its chances of duration, and makes it a much safer place of deposit
and a much more lasting monument for the body committed to its charge. The
Nile mud, when moulded and dried in the sun, gave bricks which still remain
good; their manufacture and their constructive use seem to have been
understood by the Egyptians as soon as they emerged from primitive
barbarism. Thanks to the facilities thus afforded, they were enabled to build
monuments upon the graves of their rulers which could offer a better
resistance to injuries of time and human enemies than a few handfuls of earth
and grass. They began, perhaps, by placing a few blocks of stone upon their
mounds, so as to fix them more securely, or by covering them with a thin coat
of brickwork. But, after a few experiments in that direction, they found it
better to construct the whole body of the tumulus in the harder material. Its
size increased with the constructive skill and material appliances of its
builders, until it became first a hillock and finally a mountain of stone, with
the impenetrable rock for its base and flanks of solid masonry.
The built-up tumulus of masonry took a form very different, in its definite
lines, from the rounded slopes of the mound. The squared forms of brick or
cut stone infallibly give to the edifice upon which they are employed one of
those more or less rigid forms which are defined by geometry. When they
leave the hands of the builder they are either cubes or parallelopipeds,
pyramids or prisms, cylinders or cones. They present the general appearance,
they possess the essential properties, of one of those forms. We may say that
architecture was born on the day when man began to use the unyielding

materials by which definite geometrical forms can alone be given. As soon as
this early development was reached he set to work to combine those
elementary forms in different proportions and to add to their effect by
elegance and richness of decoration, and so in the end to form national
architectures.
When the first pyramid was built upon the borders of the desert man was on
the threshold of the movement to which we have referred. The form adopted
for the royal tomb was one of the most simple which could be chosen for a
building. The most simple of all would have been the tetrahedron, or pyramid
built upon a triangular base. But not a single pyramid of that kind has been
discovered in Egypt. The whole of the pyramids, large or small, are built
upon a right-angled base, and in most instances upon one with sides
practically equal.[185] Mystic reasons for this shape have been given. It has
been said that each face was dedicated to one of the four powers of Amen,
which corresponded to the cardinal points of heaven.[186] We are not yet
sufficiently well acquainted with the genesis of the Egyptian religion to be
able to decide how far into the past the four powers of Amen may be traced:
but it is quite possible that they were derived from the four faces of the
strictly oriented pyramids. Were we inclined to enter into this discussion we
should rather, perhaps, attribute the shape of the pyramid to the prevailing
Egyptian desire to turn one face of their tombs towards the west, the abode of
the dead, and another to the east, whence the hoped-for resurrection was to
come. The three-sided pyramid would not have lent itself to such an
arrangement.
There is also something unpleasant to the eye in the sharp angles which form
the three arêtes of the tetrahedron; it looks as if there had been a lack of
material, and as if the structure would suffer in consequence. The four-sided
pyramid has more dignity and more amplitude; its four faces, placed back to
back in pairs, seem to counterpoise and sustain each other in a fashion which
is impossible in the case of the tetrahedron.

Fig. 128.—Plan of the Pyramid of Cheops.

The one characteristic possessed in common by those relics of the Ancient
Empire which we call pyramids, is their four-sidedness. To an attentive
observer these buildings offer more diversities than would at first sight be
believed. From Meidoum in the south to Abou-Roash in the north is a
distance of 43-1/2 miles as the crow flies. Between these two points, which
may be called the northern and southern boundaries of the pyramid field,
about one hundred have been discovered, sixty-seven of which have been
examined by Lepsius. Now, in this whole number there are not two which
resemble each other in all particulars, or which seem to be copies of one
model. We do not refer only to their height, which differs in an extreme
degree. The three large pyramids at Gizeh are 482, 454, and 218 feet high
respectively, while at their feet are several little pyramids which hardly
exceed from 50 to 70 feet of vertical height. Between these two extremes

many of intermediate sizes may be inserted. The Stepped Pyramid, near
Sakkarah, is about 190 feet high; the largest of those at Abousir is about 165;
one of those at Dashour is not quite 100 feet. These differences in height are
easily explained by one of those national habits to which we have already
alluded. Every Egyptian, as soon as he arrived at years of discretion, set
about building his own tomb. He dug the well and the mummy chamber, he
caused the sarcophagus to be carved and the funerary chapel to be built. It
often happened that those who had ordered such works died long before they
were finished, and it would seem that their heirs were content with doing no
more than was strictly necessary. They placed the mummy in its grave with
the prescribed ceremonies, they filled up the well and sealed the private parts
of the tomb; but being occupied with the preparations for their own funeral,
they did not continue the decoration of the chapel, which thenceforward
remained in statu quo. Thus only can we explain the state in which several
important tombs have been discovered both at Memphis and at Thebes. On
one wall we find paintings and sculptures carried out with the greatest care
and finish, while on another nothing is to be seen but the first rough outline,
in red paint, by the artist charged with the undertaking. The completion of the
work must have been suddenly arrested by the death of the destined
inhabitant of the tomb.

Fig. 129.—The great pyramid and the small pyramids at its foot; from
Perring.

It was the same with the sepulchres of the kings. Each sovereign began the
construction of his pyramid as soon as he found himself upon the throne. But,
in case his life and his reign should be cut short, he began with those
constituents of the tomb which were absolutely necessary. He pressed on the
work until he had raised a pyramid of moderate size with its mummy
chamber. When this point had been reached, his immediate anxiety came to
an end; but that was no reason for interrupting the course of the work. The
higher and wider his pyramid, the more efficient a guardian of his body
would it be, and the more impressive would be the message carried down by
it to posterity as to the power of its builder. Year after year, therefore, he
employed crowds of impressed workmen to clothe it in layer after layer of
dressed stone or brick, so that the edifice raised in comparative haste at the
beginning of his reign, became in time nothing but the nucleus or kernel of
one many times its size.[187] The construction was thus begun in the centre
and was developed outwards, like the timber of a tree in successive years. As
the pyramid grew in extent and height, each successive coat, so to speak,
required more hands and more time. We have no reason to believe that each
coat had to be finished within a certain period, and so it would be futile to
attempt to found any calculation as to the duration of the different reigns
upon the number of these concentric layers; but we may assert in a general
way that the highest pyramids correspond to the longest reigns. We know, by
the witness of ancient authors, that the kings who built the three great
pyramids at Gizeh, namely, Cheops, Chephren, and Mycerinus, each reigned
about sixty years. History thus confirms the truth of the induction which
arises from the study of those monuments and from a comparison of the
constructive processes made use of by the architects of the pyramids.[188]
The author of Bædeker's Guide has not been content with believing, like
Perring, Lepsius, and Mariette, that the pyramid grew by the application of
successive envelopes of stone round the central mass, either in horizontal
courses or in courses sloping towards the axis of the building. He has brought
forward an elaborate theory of construction, which, though very ingenious,
encounters several grave objections. We shall point out those objections

while we endeavour to explain the system itself by the help of special
illustrations drawn for us by the author of the Guide in question.[189]

Fig. 130.—The three great pyramids; from the south.

When Cheops first began to think about building his tomb, he could not have
counted upon giving it the colossal dimensions which it presents even in its
actual injured condition. The area of the great pyramid is more than double
that of Saint Peter's at Rome. If we deduct from its total volume the core of
rock which it incloses[190] and the openings which it contains, the masonry in
its primitive integrity must have amounted to a total of 3,479,600 cubic
yards. Even now, when so much of its substances has been detached and
carried away, there still remains the enormous mass of 3,246,600 cubic yards.
Supposing that, two or three years after the commencement of a work upon
this colossal scale, death had carried off its projector, can we believe that any
successor, even a son who was sincerely devoted to the memory of his father,
would have burthened himself with the continuation and completion of such
an enterprise? The new sovereign would have enough to do in commencing
and carrying on the erection of his own tomb, and, moreover, would be
irresistibly tempted to make use, for its construction, of the accumulated
material and collected labour of his predecessor.
Even four or five thousand years before our era, men were too sagacious to
reckon upon the piety or gratitude of an heir. For the closing and final sealing
up of the pyramid, its builder and destined inhabitant was obliged to depend
upon his survivors, he could not do it himself. Moreover, the external
completion, which, in the case of the greater monuments, must have been a

long and costly matter, had to be entrusted to the same hands. The reigning
king, so long as he was not too sternly reminded of the end by disease or the
infirmities of age, must have felt great reluctance to order the cessation of the
work which had gone on under his own eye for so many years, or to arrest
that course of development which, after being a continual source of pride and
pleasure to himself, might end in giving him a monument surpassing those of
his famous predecessors. He was, therefore, very likely to be surprised by
death with his tomb still unfinished, with the final cope-stone still upon the
ground, or, even when that had been put in place so as to show the total
height, with the casing of polished stone which was destined to hide the inner
courses of the masonry and the entrances, still incomplete. Upon two-thirds
or three-quarters of each face, his pyramid would still present the aspect
which necessarily belonged to it during the period of its construction; an
aspect which has again distinguished the great pyramid since it was despoiled
of its casing. As each course was set back from that upon which it was
placed, the final ensemble looked like an enormous staircase with steps
gradually diminishing in length as they neared the summit.
There were many of the Egyptian princes who from want of patience or zeal,
or from some other motive, failed to carry on the enterprise of their
predecessors to its destined conclusion. We are ignorant as to the condition of
the three great pyramids of Gizeh at the death of their projectors. But they
appear to have been finished in most of their details with a care which would
seem to indicate that Cheops, Chephren, and Mycerinus, must have been
there to overlook the smallest details of their execution. Other pyramids, on
the other hand, seem to have been left in a comparatively imperfect state.
These observations furnish us with an initial objection to the theory to which
we have referred. Some may refuse to believe that Cheops intended from the
beginning that his pyramid should have the dimensions and the internal
arrangements which we now see. But why should he not have done so? If he
had died at the end of a few years, his pyramid would, perhaps, have
presented to us a shape like that of some other edifices of the same kind, a
large base which had never received either its cope-stone or its casing. So too
with those of Mycerinus and Chephren. Have not absolute monarchs existed
at all times, whose infinite power seems to have made them forget the eternal
limits of time and space? Sometimes Fortune has been cruel to them: but
often she seems to have placed herself entirely at their disposal.

Among the causes which combine to make the royal tombs of the first six
dynasties so unequal in height and appearance, the very unequal length of the
reigns is the most important. If we were better acquainted with the condition
of Egypt in those remote epochs, we should, no doubt, be enabled to give
other reasons for their want of uniformity. The chances of completion and
even of preservation in its complete state enjoyed by a pyramid must have
greatly depended upon the descent of the crown. When king succeeded king
in one family those chances were much better than when dynasty succeeded
dynasty, whether the break were due to internal revolution or to the failure of
the legitimate line. It is even possible that some of those pyramids which are
now to outward appearance mere heaps of débris never received the mummy
for whose reception they were designed and built.
The pyramids differ also in the materials employed. The great pyramids at
Gizeh are built of fine limestone from Mokattam and Toura; the chief one at
Sakkarah of a bad clayish limestone from the neighbouring rocks; at Dashour
and Abou-Roash there are pyramids of unburnt brick. Finally there are
pyramids built chiefly of stone which is kept in place by a carefully
constructed skeleton, so to speak, of brick. This construction is to be found in
the pyramid of Illahoun, at the entrance to the Fayoum (Fig. 131).
There is the same variety in the position of the mummy chamber. Sometimes
this is within the sides of the pyramid itself, as in that of Cheops; sometimes,
after the example of the mastaba, it is cut out of the living rock upon which
the pyramid stands. This arrangement is to be found, for instance, in the
pyramid of Mycerinus, where the roof of the mummy chamber is about 33
feet below the lowest course of the pyramid itself. So too in the Stepped
Pyramid, where the whole complicated system of corridors and cells, which
distinguishes that edifice, is cut in the rock, so that the building itself is
absolutely solid. Most of the pyramids have no more than one or two
entrances, giving access to narrow galleries, sometimes ascending, sometimes
descending, which lead to one or two chambers of very small dimensions
when compared to the enormous mass which rises above and around them
(Fig. 132). In the subterranean part of the Stepped Pyramid the proportion of
voids to solids is far less insignificant. This pyramid, which is not nearly so
carefully oriented as the others, has four entrances and a series of internal
passages, horizontal galleries, staircases and cells, which make it little else
than a subterranean labyrinth. It is singular also in having, upon its central
axis and at the point upon which, at various heights, all its galleries converge,

a sort of large well, a chamber about twenty feet square and eighty feet high,
in the pavement of which a huge block of granite cut into the shape of a cork
or plug was so placed as to open at will[191] and leave a free passage for the
descent into a second chamber, the purpose of which is more than obscure, as
it is too small even to have contained a sarcophagus.[192] The end of the long
passage which leads to the thirty chambers which have been counted beneath
this pyramid has been found in the neighbouring sands (Fig. 134).

Fig. 131.—The pyramid of Illahoun, horizontal section in perspective;
from the plan of Perring.

Another point of difference: most of the pyramids are built round a core of
living rock, which is embraced by the lower courses of their masonry. But the
pyramid of Mycerinus is just the reverse of this. It is built over a hollow in
the rock which is filled up with masonry. The inequalities of the surface were
usually taken advantage of so as to economize material, and make a greater
show with less labour. Mycerinus, however, did not fear to increase his task
by rearing his pyramid over a depression in the plateau.

Fig. 132.—Section of the pyramid of Cheops; from Perring.

There is no less diversity in the external aspects of the pyramids. We are most
familiar with the shapes of the great pyramids at Gizeh (Fig. 130 and Pl. 1,
2); their images have been multiplied to infinity by engraving and
photography, but we make a great mistake when we imagine all the royal
tombs at Memphis to be built upon this one model. They do not all present
the same simplicity of form, the same regular slope from summit to base, or
the smooth and polished casing which distinguished those great monuments
when they were in complete preservation. The southern pyramid of Dashour
offers us one of the most curious variations upon the original theme (Fig.
133). Its angle-ridges are not unbroken straight lines from base to summit.
The slope of its faces becomes less steep at about half their height. The lower
part of its sides make angles of 54° 41' with the horizon, while above they
suddenly fall back to an angle of 42° 59'. This latter slope does not greatly
differ from the 43° 36' of the other pyramid in the same neighbourhood. No
indication has yet been discovered as to the builder of this pyramid.
A second variation, still more unlike the Gizeh type, is to be found in the
great pyramid of Sakkarah, the Stepped Pyramid, which was considered by
Mariette as the oldest of them all. Taking a passage from Manetho as his
authority, he thought himself justified in attributing it to the fourth king of the
first dynasty, Ouenephes or Ata, and he was inclined to see in it the

Serapeum, or Apis tomb, of the Ancient Empire. Its present elevation is about
190 feet. Each of its sides is divided horizontally into six large steps with
inclined faces. The height of these steps decreases progressively, from the
base to the summit, from 38 feet 2 inches to 29 feet 6 inches. The width of
each step is nearly 7 feet. It will be seen, therefore, that this building rather
tends to the pyramidal form than achieves it; it is a rough sketch for a
pyramid.

Fig. 133.—The southern pyramid of Dashour; from the measurements of
Perring.

Fig. 134.—Section of the Stepped Pyramid; from Perring.

Does this want of completion result from accidental causes, or must it be
referred to ignorance of the full beauties of the pyramidal form on the part of

its builders? If the conjecture of Mariette is well founded, the Stepped
Pyramid is not only the most ancient building in Egypt but in the whole
world; and in the remote century which witnessed its construction men may
not yet have learnt to fill up the angles left in their masonry, they may have
been quite satisfied to leave their work in a condition which to us seems
imperfect.

Fig. 135.—The Stepped Pyramid; restored from the measurements of
Perring.

The Germans have evolved a complicated system of construction from notes
made by Lepsius upon the details of the masonry in different pyramids. In
order that this system may be more easily understood, we give, on the
opposite page, a series of representations of such a pyramid in different
stages of completion (Figs. 136 to 142). A commencement was made by
erecting a very narrow and perpendicular pyramid crowned by a pyramidion,
like a stumpy obelisk (Fig. 136). This finished, sloping masses were erected
against it so as to form, with the pyramidion of the first mass, a second
pyramid. The apex of this pyramid, a pyramidion of a single stone, might be
put in place and the work considered finished (Fig. 137); or, if the builder
were sanguine as to time, he might seek to push on still farther. Then, at the
line where the slopes of the pyramid left the earth, four perpendicular walls
were erected to the height of the pyramidion. The space between the sides of

the pyramid and the inner faces of these walls was filled in, and thus a kind
of terrace, or huge rectangular block, was obtained (Fig. 138), which served
as the core for a new pyramid (Fig. 139). This again disappeared under a
pyramid of larger section and gentler slope (Fig. 140), whose sides reached
the ground far beyond the foundations of the terrace. In the case of a long
reign this operation might be repeated over and over again (Figs. 140 and
142). A large pyramid would thus be composed of a series of pyramidal
envelopes placed one upon another. The mummy-chamber was either cut in
the rock before the laying of the first course of stone, or it was contrived in
the thickness of the masonry itself; as the casing of stone went on increasing
in thickness, galleries were left for ventilation and for the introduction of the
sarcophagus and the mummy. The mummy-chamber is always found either
upon the axis of the pyramid, or in its immediate neighbourhood, and always
nearer the base than the summit.

Figs. 136-142.—Successive states of a pyramid,
according to the system advocated in Bædeker's Guide.

We are told that the system of construction here set forth is rendered almost
certain by the fact that "the deeper we penetrate into the pyramid the more
careful do we find the construction, which becomes more and more careless
as the exterior is approached. In fact, as each new envelope was commenced,
the chances of its being completed became less." The mass of stone to be
worked and placed was greater, while the king, upon whose life the whole
operation depended, was older and nearer his death. The builders became less
sure of the morrow; they pressed on so as to increase, at all hazards, the size
of the monument, and trusted to the final casing to conceal all defects of
workmanship.
This system of pyramid building would explain the curious shapes which we
have noticed in the Stepped Pyramid and the southern pyramid of Dashour.
[193]
Both of those erections would thus be unfinished pyramids. At Sakkarah,
the angles left by the successive stages would be waiting for their filling in; at
Dashour, the upper part of a pyramid of gentle slope would have been
constructed upon the nucleus which was first erected, but the continuation of
the slope to the ground would have been prevented by the stoppage of the
works at the point of intersection of the upper pyramid and its provisional
substructure. Hence the broken slope which has such a strange effect, an
effect which could not have entered into the original calculations of the
architect.
But although this theory seems satisfactorily to explain some puzzling
appearances, it also, when tested by facts, encounters some very grave
objections. The explorers of the pyramids have more than once, in their
search for lost galleries and hidden chambers, cut for themselves a passage
through the masonry, but neither in these breaches made by violence, nor in
the ancient and carefully constructed passages to which they were the means
of giving access, have any signs been, discovered, or at least, reported, of the
junctions of different surfaces and slopes which must have existed according
to the theory which we are noticing. We should expect, at least, to find the
nearly upright sides of the cubic mass with which the pyramid began,
contrasting with the comparatively gentle slopes which were built against it.
These different parts of the pyramid, we are told, were built and finished

separately, a proceeding which, if the later parts were to be properly fitted to
the earlier and the final stability of the monument assured, would have
demanded a minute and scrupulous care which was not common with
Egyptian workmen. How, without numerous through bonding-stones, could
those slides and settlements be prevented to which the want of homogeneity
in the structure would otherwise be sure to lead? But we are not told that any
such junctions of old and new work are to be found even in those points
where they would be most conspicuous, namely, in the galleries leading to
the internal chambers, where a practised eye could hardly fail to note the
transition. We do not say that there are no such transitions, but we think the
advocates of the new theory should have begun by pointing them out if they
exist.
There is another difficulty in their way. How is their system to explain the
position of the mummy-chamber in certain pyramids? Let us take that of
Cheops as an example. If its internal arrangements had been fixed from the
beginning, if the intention had been from the first to place the mummy-
chamber where we now find it, at about one-third of the whole height, why
should the builders have complicated their task by imposing upon themselves
these ever difficult junctions? Would it not have been far better to build the
pyramid at once to the required height, leaving in its thickness the necessary
galleries? The same observation applies to the discharging chambers above
the mummy-chamber. The whole of these arrangements, the high vestibule
with its wonderful masonry, the chambers and the structural voids above
them, appear to have been conceived and carried out at one time, and by the
same brains and hands. Not a sign is to be found of those more or less well-
veiled transitions which are never absent when the work of one time and one
set of hands has to be united with that of another. Or are we to believe that
they commenced by building a hill of stone composed of those different
pyramids one within another, and that they afterwards carved the necessary
chambers and corridors out of its mass? One of the heroes of Hoffmann, the
fantastic Crespel, made use indeed of some such method in giving doors and
windows to his newly-built house, but we may be sure that no architect,
either in Egypt or elsewhere, ever thought of employing it. The disintegration
to which it would lead may easily be imagined.
We may here call attention to a circumstance which justifies all our reserves.
There is but one pyramid which seems to have been built upon a system
which, though much less complicated, resembled that which we are noticing

in some degree, we mean the Stepped Pyramid of Sakkarah. Now we find
that the whole of the complicated net-work of chambers and passages in that
pyramid is cut out of the living rock beneath its base, and that they are
approached from without by subterranean passages. The difficulty of
deciding upon the position of the chambers in advance, and of constructing
the galleries through the various slopes of the concentric masses which were
to form the pyramid, was thus avoided, and the builder was able to devote all
his attention to increasing the size of the monument, by multiplying those
parallel wedges disposed around a central core of which it is composed.
The observations made by Lepsius in the Stepped Pyramid and in one at
Abousir seem to prove that some pyramids were constructed in this manner.
In both of those buildings all necessary precautions were taken to guard
against the weaknesses of such a system. It is difficult to understand how
separate slices of masonry, placed one upon the other in the fashion shown by
the section which we have borrowed from Perring's work (Fig. 134), could
have had sufficient adherence one to another. Lepsius made a breach in the
southern face of this pyramid, and the examination which he was thus
enabled to institute led him to suggest a rather more probable system of
construction. Upon the external sloping face of each step he found two
casing-walls, but these did not extend from the ground to the apex of the
monument, they reached no higher than the single step, so that they found a
true resisting base in the flat mass (see Fig. 143) upon which they rested.
Moreover, the architect provided for the lateral tying of the different sections
of his work, as Lepsius proves to us by a partial section of the pyramid of
Abousir. Two walls of fine limestone blocks inclose a filling in of rubble, to
which they are bound by perpend stones which penetrate its substance. This
method of construction has its faults, but it is so rapid that its employment is
not to be wondered at.

Fig. 143.—Section of the Stepped Pyramid at Sakkarah; from Lepsius.
[194]

Fig. 144.—Construction of the Pyramid of Abousir in parallel layers;
transverse section in perspective
from the geometrical section of Lepsius.[195]

Do these parallel walls reach from top to bottom? A detail discovered by
Minutoli would seem to indicate that a base was first constructed of sufficient
extent for the whole monument. In the lower part of the Stepped Pyramid
Minutoli[196] shows concave courses of stone laid out to the segment of a
circle. These courses formed a kind of inverted vault, abutting, at its edges,
upon the rock. This curious arrangement should be studied upon the spot by
some competent observer. As we do not know whether these curves exist

upon each face or not, or whether they meet each other and penetrate deeply
into the structure or not, we cannot say what their purpose may have been.
But however this may be, they afford another argument against the notion
that all the great pyramids were built round such a pyramidoid core as that
represented by our Fig. 136. We fear that this system must be regarded
merely as an intellectual plaything. The views of Lepsius as to the
enlargement of the pyramid by the addition of parallel slices are worthy of
more respect, and their truth seems to be demonstrated in the case of some
pyramids. But these all belong to that category of monuments which have
subterranean chambers only. We have yet to learn that they were ever made
use of in those pyramids which inclose the mummy-chamber and its avenues
in their own substance. Variety is universal in that Egypt which has so often
been described as the land of uniformity and immobility—no two of the
pyramids resemble each other exactly.

Fig. 145.—Partial section of the Stepped Pyramid; from Minutoli.

We have yet to speak of two ancient monuments in which some would
recognize unfinished pyramids, namely, the Pyramid of Meidoum and the
Mastabat-el-Faraoun. We do not agree with this opinion, which has, however,
been lately put forward, so far, at least, as the former monument is concerned.
[197]
These two sepulchres seem to us to represent a different type of funerary
architecture, a type created by the ancient empire, and meriting special notice
at our hands.
The monument which rises so conspicuously from the plain near the village
of Meidoum on the road to the Fayoum, is called by Arabs the Haram-el-
Kabbab, or "the false pyramid." It is, in fact, not so much a pyramid, strictly
speaking, as a mass formed of three square towers with slightly inclined sides
superimposed one upon the other, the second being less in area than the first,
and the third than the second. The remains of a fourth story may be
distinguished on the summit of the third; some see in them the remains of a
small pyramid; others those of a cone. Judging from the names found in the
neighbouring mastabas, which were opened and examined by Mariette, this is
the tomb of Snefrou I., one of the greatest kings of the third dynasty.[198]

Fig. 146.—The Pyramid of Meidoum; from Perring.

The Mastabat-el-Faraoun or "Seat of Pharaoh," as the Arabs call it, is a huge
rectangular mass with sloping sides; it is about 66 feet high, 340 long, and
240 deep. It is oriented like the pyramids. It is a royal tomb with internal
arrangements which resemble those in the pyramid of Mycerinus; the same
sloping galleries, the same chambers, the same great lateral niches. Upon a
block lying at the foot of the structure of which it had once formed a part,
Mariette found a quarry-mark traced in red ochre which seemed to him to
form part of the name of Ounas, one of the last kings of the fifth dynasty
(Figs. 109 and 147).

Fig. 147.—The Mastabat-el-Faraoun; from Lepsius.