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Table of Contents | |
Section | Page |
Start of eBook | 1 |
CHAPTER II. | 1 |
CHAPTER III. | 1 |
CHAPTER IV. | 1 |
CHAPTER V. | 2 |
NOTES | 3 |
INDEX | 3 |
FIGURE | 3 |
EGYPTIAN ARCHAEOLOGY. | 8 |
CHAPTER I. | 8 |
CHAPTER II. | 27 |
I.—MATERIALS AND PRINCIPLES OF CONSTRUCTION. | 27 |
CHAPTER III. | 55 |
I.—Mastabas. | 56 |
CHAPTER IV. | 82 |
I.—DRAWING AND COMPOSITION. | 82 |
CHAPTER V. | 114 |
I.—STONE, CLAY, AND GLASS. | 115 |
NOTES TO FIRST ENGLISH EDITION. | 156 |
INDEX | 158 |
Religious architecture.
Sec. 1. Materials;
principles of construction:—Materials
of Temples—
Foundations of Temples—Sizes
of Blocks—Mortars—Mode of hoisting
Blocks—Defective
Masonry—Walls—Pavements—Vaultings—Supports—
Pillars and Columns—Capitals—Campaniform
Capitals—Lotus-bud
Capitals—Hathor-headed
Capitals
Sec. 2. Temples:—Temples of the Sphinx—Temples of Elephantine—Temple at El Kab—Temple of Khonsu—Arrangement of Temples—Levels—Crypts— Temple of Karnak—Temple of Luxor—Philae—The Speos, or Rock-cut Temple—Speos of Horemheb—Rock-cut Temples of Abu Simbel—Temple of Deir el Bahari—Temple of Abydos—Sphinxes—Crio-sphinxes
Sec. 3. Decoration:—Principles
of Decoration—The Temple a Symbolic
Representation of the World—Decoration
of Parts nearest the Ground—
Dadoes—Bases of
Columns—Decoration of Ceilings—Decoration
of
Architraves—Decoration
of Wall-surfaces—Magic Virtues of Decoration
—Decoration of
Pylons—Statues—Obelisks—Libation-tables—Altars—
Shrines—Sacred
Boats—Moving Statues of Deities
Tombs.
Sec. 1. Mastabas:—Construction
of the Mastaba—The Door of the Living,
and the Door of the Dead—The
Chapel—Wall Decorations—The Double
and
his Needs—The Serdab—Ka
Statues—The Sepulchral Chamber
Sec. 2. Pyramids:—Plan of the Pyramid comprises three leading features of the Mastaba—Materials of Pyramids—Orientation—Pyramid of Khufu— Pyramids of Khafra and Menkara—Step Pyramid of Sakkarah—Pyramid of Unas—Decoration of Pyramid of Unas—Group of Dashur—Pyramid of Medum
Sec. 3. Tombs of the Theban empire; the rock-cut tombs:—Pyramid-mastabas of Abydos—Pyramid-mastabas of Drah Abu’l Neggah—Rock-cut Tombs of Beni Hasan and Syene—Rock-cut Tombs of Siut—Wall-decoration of Theban Catacombs—Tombs of the Kings of the Eighteenth Dynasty at Thebes—Valley of the Tombs of the Kings—Royal Catacombs—Tomb of Seti I.—Wall-decorations of Royal Catacombs—Funerary Furniture of Catacombs—Ushabtiu—Amulets—Common Graves of the Poor
Painting and sculpture.
Sec. 1. Drawing and composition:—Supposed Canon of Proportion—Drawing Materials—Sketches—Illustrations to the Book of the Dead— Conventional Treatment of Animal and Human Figures—Naturalistic Treatment—Composition—Grouping—Wall-paintings of Tombs—A Funerary Feast—A Domestic Scene—Military Subjects—Perspective—Parallel between a Wall-painting in a Tomb at Sakkarah and the Mosaic of Palestrina
Sec. 2. Technical
processes:—The Preparation of Surfaces—Outline—
Sculptors’ Tools—Iron
and Bronze Tools—Impurity of Iron—Methods
of
Instruction in Sculpture—Models—Methods
of cutting Various Stones—
Polish—Painted
Sculptures—Pigments—Conventional
Scale of Colour—
Relation of Painting to Sculpture
in Ancient Egypt
Sec. 3. Sculpture:—The Great Sphinx—Art of the Memphite School—Wood- panels of Hesi—Funerary Statues—The Portrait-statue and the Double —Chefs d’oeuvre of the Memphite School—The Cross-legged Scribe—Diorite Statue of Khafra—Rahotep and Nefert—The Sheikh el Beled—The Kneeling Scribe—The Dwarf Nemhotep—Royal Statues of the Twelfth Dynasty—Hyksos Sphinxes of Tanis—Theban School of the Eighteenth Dynasty—Colossi of Amenhotep III.—New School of Tel el Amarna—Its Superior Grace and Truth—Works of Horemheb—School of the Nineteenth Dynasty—Colossi of Rameses II.—Decadence of Art begins with Merenptah—Ethiopian Renaissance—Saite Renaissance—The Attitudes of Statues—Saite Innovations—Greek Influence upon Egyptian Art—The Ptolemaic and Roman Periods—The School of Meroe—Extinction of Egyptian Art
THE INDUSTRIAL ARTS.
Sec. 1. STONE, CLAY, AND GLASS:—Precious Stones—Lapidary Art—Beads and Amulets—Scarabaei—Statuettes—Libation Tables—Perfume Vases—Kohl- pots—Pottery—Clay—Glazes—Red and Painted Wares—Ushabtiu—Funerary Cones—Painted Vases—“Canopic” Vases—Clay Sarcophagi—Glass—Its Chemical Constituents—Clear Glass—Coloured Glass—Imitations of Precious Stones in Glass—Glass Mosaics—Miniature Objects in Coloured Glass—Glass Amulets—Coloured Glass Vases—Enamels—The Theban Blue— The Enamels of Tell el Amarna—Enamelled Ushabtiu of Amen Ptahmes— Enamelled Tiles of the Step Pyramid at Sakkarah—Enamelled Tiles of Tell el Yahudeh
Sec. 2. WOOD, IVORY,
LEATHER; TEXTILE FABRICS:—Bone and Ivory—Elephant
Tusks—Dyed Ivory—Egyptian
Woods—Wooden Statuettes—Statuette
of
Hori—Statuette
of Nai—Wooden Toilet Ornaments—Perfume
and Unguent
Spoons—Furniture—Chests
and Coffers—Mummy-cases—Wooden
Effigies on
Mummy Cases—Huge
Outer Cases of Ahmesnefertari and Aahhotep—Funerary
Furniture—Beds—­
;Canopies—Sledges—Chairs—Stools—Thrones—
Textiles—Methods
of Weaving—Leather—Breast-bands
of Mummies—
Patchwork Canopy in Coloured
Leather of Princess Isiemkheb—
Embroideries—Muslins—Celebrated
Textiles of Alexandria
Sec. 3. METALS:—Iron—Lead—Bronze—Constituents of Egyptian Bronze— Domestic Utensils in Bronze—Mirrors—Scissors—Bronze Statuettes— The Stroganoff Bronze—The Posno Bronzes—The Lion of Apries—Gilding —Gold-plating—Gold-leaf—Statues and Statuettes of Precious Metals —The Silver and Golden Cups of General Tahuti—The Silver Vases of Thmuis—Silver Plate—Goldsmith’s Work—Richness of Patterns— Jewellery—Funerary Jewellery—Rings—Seal-rings—Chains—The Jewels of Queen Aahhotep—The Ring of Rameses II.—The Ear-rings of Rameses IX.—The Bracelet of Prince Psar—Conclusion
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
1. Brickmaking, tomb of Rekhmara, Eighteenth Dynasty
2. House with vaulted floors, Medinet Habu
3. Plan of the town of Kahun, Twelfth Dynasty
4. Plan of house, Medinet Habu, Twentieth Dynasty
5. Plan of house, Medinet Habu, Twentieth Dynasty
6. Facade of house of Second Theban Period
7. Plan of house of Second Theban Period
8. Restoration of hall in Twelfth Dynasty house, Kahun
9. Box representing a house
10. Wall-painting in Twelfth Dynasty house, Kahun
11. View of mansion, tomb of Anna, Eighteenth Dynasty
12. Porch of mansion of Second Theban Period
13. Porch of mansion of Second Theban Period
14. Plan of Theban house and grounds, Eighteenth Dynasty
15. A perspective view of same
16. Part of palace of Ai, El Amarna tomb, Eighteenth Dynasty
17. Perspective view of part of palace of Ai
18. Frontage of house, Second Theban Period
19. Frontage of house, Second Theban Period
20. Central pavilion of house, Second Theban Period
21. Ceiling decoration from house at Medinet Habu, Twentieth Dynasty
22. Ceiling decoration, Twelfth Dynasty style
23. Ceiling decoration, tomb of Aimadua, Twentieth Dynasty
24. Door of house, Sixth Dynasty tomb
25. Facade of Fourth Dynasty house, sarcophagus of Khufu Poskhu
26. Plan of second fortress at Abydos, Eleventh or Twelfth Dynasty
27. Walls of same fortress, restored
28. Facade of fort, tomb at Beni Hasan, Twelfth Dynasty
29. Plan of main gate, second fortress of Abydos
30. Plan of S.E. gate of same
31. Plan of gate, fortress of Kom el Ahmar
32. Plan of walled city at El Kab
33. Plan of walled city at Kom Ombo
34. Plan of fortress of Kummeh
35. Plan of fortress of Semneh
36. Section of platform of same
37. Syrian fort, elevation
38. Town walls of Dapur
39. City of Kaclesh, Ramesseum
40. Plan of pavilion of Medinet Habu, Twentieth Dynasty
41. Elevation of same
42. Canal and bridge of Zaru, Karnak, Nineteenth Dynasty
43. Cellar with amphorae
44. Granary
45. Plan of Store City of Pithom, Nineteenth Dynasty
46. Store-chambers of the Ramesseum
47. Dike at Wady Gerraweh
48. Section of same dike
49. Quarries of Silsilis
50. Draught of Hathor capital, quarry of Gebel Abufeydeh
51. Transport of blocks, stela of Ahmes, Turrah, Eighteenth Dynasty
52. Masonry in temple of Seti I., Abydos
53. Temple wall with cornice
54. Niche and doorway in temple of Seti I., Abydos
55. Pavement in same temple
56. “Corbelled” vault in same temple
57. Hathor pillar in temple of Abu Simbel, Nineteenth Dynasty
58. Pillar of Amenhotep III., Karnak
59. Sixteen-sided pillars, Karnak
60. Fluted pillar, Kalabsheh
61. Polygonal Hathor-headed pillar, El Kab
62. Column with square die, Contra Esneh
63. Column with campaniform capital, Ramesseum
64. Inverted campaniform capital, Karnak
65. Palm capital, Bubastis
66. Compound capital
67. Ornate capitals, Ptolemaic
68. Lotus-bud column, Beni Hasan, Twelfth Dynasty
69. Lotus-bud column, processional hall of Thothmes HI., Karnak
70. Column in aisle of Hypostyle Hall, Karnak
71. Hathor-head capital, Ptolemaic
72. Campaniform and Hathor-headed capital, Philae
73. Section of Hypostyle Hall, Karnak
74. Plan of the temple of the Sphinx
75. South temple of Elephantine
76. Plan of temple of Amenhotep III., El Kab
77. Plan of temple of Hathor, Deir el Medineh
78. Plan of temple of Khonsu, Karnak
79. Pylon with masts, wall-scene, temple of Khonsu, Karnak
80. Ramesseum, restored
81. Plan of sanctuary at Denderah
82. Pronaos, temple of Edfu
83. Plan of same temple
84. Plan of temple of Karnak in reign of Amenhotep III
85. Plan of Hypostyle Hall, Karnak
86. Plan of great temple, Luxor
87. Plan of buildings on island of Philae
88. Plan of Speos, Kalaat Addah
89. Plan of Speos, Gebel Silsileh
90. Plan of Great Speos, Abu Simbel
91. Plan of Speos of Hathor, Abu Simbel
92. Plan of upper portion of temple of Deir el Bahari
93. Plan of temple of Seti I., Abydos
94. Crio-sphinx from temple of Wady Es Sabuah
95. Couchant ram, from Avenue of Sphinxes, Karnak
96-101. Decorative designs from Denderah
102. Decorative group of Nile gods
103. Dado decoration, hall of Thothmes III., Karnak
104. Ceiling decoration, tomb of Bakenrenf, Twenty-sixth Dynasty
105. Zodiacal circle of Denderah
106. Frieze of uraei and cartouches
107. Wall-scene from temple of Denderah
108. Obelisk of Heliopolis, Twelfth Dynasty
109. Obelisk of Begig, Twelfth Dynasty
110. “Table of offerings” from Karnak
111. Limestone altar from Menshiyeh
112. Wooden naos, in Turin Museum
113. A mastaba
114. False door in mastaba
115. Plan of forecourt, mastaba of Kaaepir
116. Plan of forecourt, mastaba of Neferhotep
117. Door in mastaba facade
118. Portico and door of mastaba
119. Plan of chapel, mastaba of Khabiusokari
120. Plan of chapel, mastaba of Ti
121. Plan of chapel, mastaba of Shepsesptah
122. Plan of chapel, mastaba of Affi
123. Plan of chapel, mastaba of Thenti
124. Plan of chapel, mastaba of Red Scribe
125. Plan of chapel, mastaba of Ptahhotep
126. Stela in mastaba of Merruka
127. Wall-scene from mastaba of Ptahhotep
128. Wall-scene from mastaba of Urkhuu
129. Wall-scene from mastaba of Ptahhotep
130. Plan of serdab in mastaba at Gizeh
131. Plan of serdab and chapel in mastaba of Rahotep
132. Plan of serdab and chapel in mastaba of Thenti
133. Section of mastaba showing shaft and vault, at Gizeh
134. Section of mastaba, at Sakkarah
135. Wall-scene from mastaba of Nenka
136. Section of Great Pyramid
137. The Step Pyramid of Sakkarah
138. Plan and section of pyramid of Unas
139. Portcullis and passage, pyramid of Unas
140. Section of pyramid of Unas
141. Mastabat el Faraun
142. Pyramid of Medum
143. Section of passage and vault in pyramid of Medum
144. Section of “vaulted” brick pyramid, Abydos, Eleventh Dynasty
145. Section of “vaulted” tomb, Abydos
146. Plan of tomb, Abydos
147. Theban tomb with pyramidion, wall-scene, tomb at Sheikh Abd el Gurneh
148. Similar tomb
149. Section of Apis tomb, Eighteenth Dynasty
150. Tombs in cliff opposite Asuan
151. Facade of rock-cut tomb of Khnumhotep, Beni Hasan, Twelfth Dynasty
152. Facade of rock-cut tomb, Asuan
153. Plan of tomb of Khnumhotep, Beni Hasan, Twelfth Dynasty
154. Plan of unfinished tomb, Beni Hasan, Twelfth Dynasty
155. Wall-scene, tomb of Manna, Nineteenth Dynasty
156. Plan of tomb of Rameses IV.
157. Plan of tomb of Rameses IV., from Turin papyrus
158. Plan of tomb of Seti I.
159. Fields of Aalu, wall-scene, tomb of Rameses III.
160. Pestle and mortar for grinding colours
161. Comic sketch on ostrakon
162. Vignette from Book of the Dead, Saite period
163. Vignette from Book of the Dead, papyrus of Hunefer
164-5. Wall-scenes, tomb of Khnumhotep, Beni Hasan
166. Wall-scene, tomb, Eighteenth Dynasty
167. Wall-scene, tomb of Horemheb
168. Wall-scene, Theban tomb, Ramesside period
169. Wall-scene, tomb of Horemheb
170. Wall-scene, Ramesseum
171. Wall-scene, Medinet Habu
172. Wall-scene, Ramesseum
173. Wall-scene, Ramesseum
174. Wall-scene, tomb of Rekhmara
175. Wall-scene, tomb of Rekhmara
176. Wall-scene, mastaba of Ptahhotep
177. Palestrina mosaic
178. Sculptor’s sketch, Ancient Empire tomb
179. Sculptor’s sketch, Ancient Empire tomb
180. Sculptor’s correction, Medinet Habu, Twentieth Dynasty
181. Bow drill
182. Sculptor’s trial-piece, Eighteenth Dynasty
183. The Great Sphinx of Gizeh
184. Wooden panel, mastaba of Hesi
185. Cross-legged scribe, in the Louvre, Ancient Empire
186. Cross-legged scribe, at Gizeh, Ancient Empire
187. King Khafra
188. The “Sheikh el Beled” (Raemka), Ancient Empire
189. Rahotep, Ancient Empire
190. Nefert, wife of Rahotep, Ancient Empire
191. Head of the “Sheikh el Beled,” Ancient Empire
192. Wife of the “Sheikh el Beled,” Ancient Empire
193. The kneeling scribe, at Gizeh. Ancient Empire
194. A bread-maker, Ancient Empire
195. The dwarf Nemhotep, Ancient Empire
196. One of the Tanis sphinxes, Hyksos period
197. Bas-relief head of Seti I.
198. Amen and Horemheb
199. Head of a queen, Eighteenth Dynasty
200. Head of Horemheb
201. Colossal statue of Rameses 11.
202. Queen Ameniritis.
203. Thueris, Saite period
204. Hathor cow, Saite period
205. Pedishashi, Saite period
206. Head of a scribe, Saite period
207. Colossus of Alexander II.
208. Hor, Graeco-Egyptian
209. Group from Naga, Ethiopian School
210. Ta amulet
211. Frog amulet
212. Uat amulet
213. Uta amulet
214. A scarab
215-7. Perfume vases, alabaster
218. Perfume vase, alabaster
219. Vase for antimony powder
220. Turin vases, pottery
221-3. Decorated vases, pottery
224. Glass-blowers, wall-scene, Twelfth Dynasty
225-6. Parti-cloured glass vases
227. Parti-coloured glass vase
228. Glass goblets of Nesikhonsu
229. Hippopotamus in blue glaze
230-1. Theban glazed ware
232. Cup, glazed ware
233. Interior decoration of bowl, Eighteenth Dynasty
234. Lenticular vase, glazed ware, Saite period
235. Tiled chamber in Step Pyramid of Sakkarah
236. Tile from same
237. Tile, Tell el Yahudeh, Twentieth Dynasty
238. Tile, Tell el Yahudeh, Twentieth Dynasty
239. Inlaid tiles, Tell el Yahudeh, Twentieth Dynasty
240-1. Relief tiles, Tell el Yahudeh, Twentieth Dynasty
242. Spoon
243. Wooden statuette of officer, Eighteenth Dynasty
244. Wooden statuette of priest, Eighteenth Dynasty
245. Wooden statuette of Nai
246-54. Wooden perfume and unguent spoons
255. Fire-sticks, bow, and unfinished drill-stock, Twelfth Dynasty
256. Dolls, Twelfth Dynasty
257. Tops, tip-cat, and toy boat, Twelfth Dynasty
258-60. Chests
261. Construction of a mummy-case, wall-scene, Eighteenth Dynasty
262. Mask of Twenty-first Dynasty coffin of Rameses II
263. Mummy-case of Queen Ahmesnefertari
264. Panel portrait from the Fayum, Graeco-Roman
265. Carved and painted mummy-canopy
266. Canopied mummy-couch, Graeco-Roman
267. Mummy-sledge and canopy
268. Inlaid chair, Eleventh Dynasty
269. Inlaid stool, Eleventh Dynasty
270. Throne-chair, wall-scene, Twentieth Dynasty
271. Women weaving, wall-scene, Twelfth Dynasty
272. Man weaving carpet or hangings, wall-scene, Twelfth Dynasty
273. Cut leather work, Twenty-first Dynasty
274-5. Barks with cut leather-work sails, Twentieth Dynasty
276-7. Bronze jug
278. Unguent vase, or spoon (lamp for suspension?)
279. Bronze statuette of Takushet
280. Bronze statuette of Horus
281. Bronze statuette of Mosu
282. Bronze lion from Horbeit, Saite period
283. Gold-worker, wall-scene
284. Golden cup of General Tahuti, Eighteenth Dynasty
285. Silver vase of Thmuis
286. Silver vase of Thmuis
287. Piece of plate, wall-scene, Twentieth Dynasty
288-95. Plate, wall-scenes, Eighteenth Dynasty
296. Signet-ring, with bezel
297. Gold cloisonne pectoral, Dahshur, Twelfth Dynasty
298. Mirror of Queen Aahhotep, Eighteenth Dynasty
299-300. Bracelets of same
301. Diadem of same
302. Gold Usekh of same
303. Gold pectoral of same
304-5. Poignards found with mummy of Queen Aahhotep
306. Battle-axe found with same
307. Model funerary bark found with same
308. Ring of Rameses II
309. Bracelet of Prince Psar
ARCHITECTURE—CIVIL AND MILITARY.
Archaeologists, when visiting Egypt, have so concentrated their attention upon temples and tombs, that not one has devoted himself to a careful examination of the existing remains of private dwellings and military buildings. Few countries, nevertheless, have preserved so many relics of their ancient civil architecture. Setting aside towns of Roman or Byzantine date, such as are found almost intact at Koft (Coptos), at Kom Ombo, and at El Agandiyeh, one-half at least of ancient Thebes still exists on the east and south of Karnak. The site of Memphis is covered with mounds, some of which are from fifty to sixty feet in height, each containing a core of houses in good preservation. At Kahun, the ruins and remains of a whole provincial Twelfth Dynasty town have been laid bare; at Tell el Mask-hutah, the granaries of Pithom are yet standing; at San (Tanis) and Tell Basta (Bubastis), the Ptolemaic and Saitic cities contain quarters of which plans might be made (Note 1), and in many localities which escape the traveller’s notice, there may be seen ruins of private dwellings which date back to the age of the Ramessides, or to a still earlier period. As regards fortresses, there are two in the town of Abydos alone, one of which is at least contemporary with the Sixth Dynasty; while the ramparts of El Kab, of Kom el Ahmar, of El Hibeh, and of Dakkeh, as well as part of the fortifications of Thebes, are still standing, and await the architect who shall deign to make them an object of serious study.
* * * * *
1.—PRIVATE DWELLINGS.
The soil of Egypt, periodically washed by the inundation, is a black, compact, homogeneous clay, which becomes of stony hardness when dry. From immemorial time, the fellahin have used it for the construction of their houses. The hut of the poorest peasant is a mere rudely-shaped mass of this clay. A rectangular space, some eight or ten feet in width, by perhaps sixteen or eighteen feet in length, is enclosed in a wickerwork of palm-branches, coated on both sides with a layer of mud. As this coating cracks in the drying the fissures are filled in, and more coats of mud are daubed on until the walls attain a thickness of from four inches to a foot. Finally, the whole is roofed over with palm-branches and straw, the top being covered in with a thin layer of beaten earth. The height varies. In most huts, the ceiling is so low that to rise suddenly is dangerous both to one’s head and to the structure, while in others the roof is six or seven feet from the floor. Windows, of course, there are none. Sometimes a hole is left in the middle of the roof to let the smoke out; but this is a refinement undreamed of by many.
[Illustration: Fig. 1.—Brickmaking, from Eighteenth Dynasty tomb-painting, Tomb of Rekhmara.]
At the first glance, it is not always easy to distinguish between these huts of wattle and daub and those built with crude bricks. The ordinary Egyptian brick is a mere oblong block of mud mixed with chopped straw and a little sand, and dried in the sun. At a spot where they are about to build, one man is told off to break up the ground; others carry the clods, and pile them in a heap, while others again mix them with water, knead the clay with their feet, and reduce it to a homogeneous paste. This paste, when sufficiently worked (Note 2), is pressed by the head workman in moulds made of hard wood, while an assistant carries away the bricks as fast as they are shaped, and lays them out in rows at a little distance apart, to dry in the sun (fig. I). A careful brickmaker will leave them thus for half a day, or even for a whole day, after which the bricks are piled in stacks in such wise that the air can circulate freely among them; and so they remain for a week or two before they are used. More frequently, however, they are exposed for only a few hours to the heat of the sun, and the building is begun while they are yet damp. The mud, however, is so tenacious that, notwithstanding this carelessness, they are not readily put out of shape. The outer faces of the bricks become disintegrated by the action of the weather, but those in the inner part of the wall remain intact, and are still separable. A good modern workman will easily mould a thousand bricks a day, and after a week’s practice he may turn out 1,200, 1,500, or even 1,800. The ancient workmen, whose appliances in no wise differed from those of the present day, produced equally satisfactory results. The dimensions they generally adopted were 8.7 x 4.3 x 5.5 inches for ordinary bricks, or 15.0 x 7.1 x 5.5 for a larger size (Note 3), though both larger and smaller are often met with in the ruins. Bricks issued from the royal workshops were sometimes stamped with the cartouches of the reigning monarch; while those made in private factories bore on the side a trade mark in red ochre, a squeeze of the moulder’s fingers, or the stamp of the maker. By far the greater number have, however, no distinctive mark. Burnt bricks were not often used before the Roman period (Note 4), nor tiles, either flat or curved. Glazed bricks appear to have been the fashion in the Delta. The finest specimen that I have seen, namely, one in the Gizeh Museum, is inscribed in black ink with the cartouches of Rameses III. The glaze of this brick is green, but other fragments are coloured blue, red, yellow, or white.
The nature of the soil does not allow of deep foundations. It consists of a thin bed of made earth, which, except in large towns, never reaches any degree of thickness; below this comes a very dense humus, permeated by slender veins of sand; and below this again—at the level of infiltration— comes a bed of mud, more or less soft, according to the season. The native builders of the present day are content to remove only the made earth, and lay their foundations on the primeval soil; or, if that lies too deep, they stop at a yard or so below the surface. The old Egyptians did likewise; and I have never seen any ancient house of which the foundations were more than four feet deep. Even this is exceptional, the depth in most cases being not more than two feet. They very often did not trouble themselves to cut trenches at all; they merely levelled the space intended to be covered, and, having probably watered it to settle the soil, they at once laid the bricks upon the surface. When the house was finished, the scraps of mortar, the broken bricks, and all the accumulated refuse of the work, made a bed of eight inches or a foot in depth, and the base of the wall thus buried served instead of a foundation. When the new house rose on the ruins of an older one decayed by time or ruined by accident, the builders did not even take the trouble to raze the old walls to the ground. Levelling the surface of the ruins, they-built upon them at a level a few feet higher than before: thus each town stands upon one or several artificial mounds, the tops of which may occasionally rise to a height of from sixty to eighty feet above the surrounding country. The Greek historians attributed these artificial mounds to the wisdom of the kings, and especially to Sesostris, who, as they supposed, wished to raise the towns above the inundation. Some modern writers have even described the process, which they explain thus:—A cellular framework of brick walls, like a huge chess-board, formed the substructure, the cells being next filled in with earth, and the houses built upon this immense platform (Note 5).
[Illustration: Fig. 2.—Ancient house with vaulted floors, against the northern wall of the great temple of Medinet Habu]
[Illustration: Fig. 3.—Plan of three-quarters of the town of Hat-Hotep-Usertesen (Kahun), built for the accommodation of the officials and workmen employed in connection with the pyramid of Usertesen II. at Illahun. The workmen’s quarters are principally on the west, and separated from the eastern part of the town by a thick wall. At the south-west corner, outside the town, stood the pyramid temple, and in front of it the porter’s lodge. Reproduced from Plate XIV. of Illahun, Kahun, and Gurob, W.M.F. Petrie.]
But where I have excavated, especially at Thebes, I have never found anything answering to this conception. The intersecting walls which one finds beneath the later houses are nothing but the ruins of older dwellings, which in turn rest on others still older. The slightness of the foundations did not prevent the builders from boldly running up quite lofty structures. In the ruins of Memphis, I have observed walls still standing from thirty to forty feet in height. The builders took no precaution beyond enlarging the base of the wall, and vaulting the floors (fig. 2).[1] The thickness of an ordinary wall was about sixteen inches for a low house; but for one of several storeys, it was increased to three or four feet. Large beams, embedded here and there in the brickwork or masonry, bound the whole together, and strengthened the structure. The ground floor was also frequently built with dressed stones, while the upper parts were of brick. The limestone of the neighbouring hills was the stone commonly used for such purposes. The fragments of sandstone, granite, and alabaster, which are often found mixed in with it, are generally from some ruined temple; the ancient Egyptians having pulled their neglected monuments to pieces quite as unscrupulously as do their modern successors. The houses of an ancient Egyptian town were clustered round its temple, and the temple stood in a rectangular enclosure to which access was obtained through monumental gateways in the surrounding brick wall. The gods dwelt in fortified mansions, or at any rate in redoubts to which the people of the place might fly for safety in the event of any sudden attack upon their town. Such towns as were built all at once by prince or king were fairly regular in plan, having wide paved streets at right angles to each other, and the buildings in line. The older cities, whose growth had been determined by the chances and changes of centuries, were characterised by no such regularity. Their houses stood in a maze of blind alleys, and narrow, dark, and straggling streets, with here and there the branch of a canal, almost dried up during the greater part of the year, and a muddy pond where the cattle drank and women came for water. Somewhere in each town was an open space shaded by sycamores or acacias, and hither on market days came the peas-ants of the district two or three times in the month. There were also waste places where rubbish and refuse was thrown, to be quarrelled over by vultures, hawks, and dogs.
[Illustration: Fig. 4.—Plan of house, Medinet Habu]
[Illustration: Fig. 5.—Plan of house, Medinet Habu.]
[Illustration: Fig. 6.—Facade of a house toward the street, second Theban period.]
[Illustration: Fig. 7.—Plan of central court of house, second Theban period.]
[Illustration: Fig. 8.—Restoration of the hall in a Twelfth Dynasty house. In the middle of the floor is a tank surrounded by a covered colonnade. Reproduced from Plate XVI. of Illahun, Kahun, and Gurob, W.M.F. Petrie.]
[Illustration: Fig. 9.—Box representing a house (British Museum).]
The lower classes lived in mere huts which, though built of bricks, were no better than those of the present fellahin. At Karnak, in the Pharaonic town; at Kom Ombo, in the Roman town; and at Medinet Habu, in the Coptic town, the houses in the poorer quarters have seldom more than twelve or sixteen feet of frontage. They consist of a ground floor, with sometimes one or two living-rooms above. The middle-class folk, as shopkeepers, sub-officials, and foremen, were better housed. Their houses were brick-built and rather small, yet contained some half-dozen rooms communicating by means of doorways, which were usually arched over, and having vaulted roofs in some cases, and in others flat ones. Some few of the houses were two or three storeys high, and many were separated from the street by a narrow court, beyond which the rooms were ranged on either side of a long passage (fig. 4). More frequently, the court was surrounded on three sides by chambers (fig. 5); and yet oftener the house fronted close upon the street. In the latter case the facade consisted of a high wall, whitewashed or painted, and surmounted by a cornice. Even in better houses the only ornamentation of their outer walls consisted in angular grooving, the grooves being surmounted by representations of two lotus flowers, each pair with the upper parts of the stalks in contact (see figs. 24, 25). The door was the only opening, save perhaps a few small windows pierced at irregular intervals (fig. 6). Even in unpretentious houses, the door was often made of stone. The doorposts projected slightly beyond the surface of the wall, and the lintel supported a painted or sculptured cornice. Having crossed the threshold, one passed successively through two dimly-lighted entrance chambers, the second of which opened into the central court (fig. 7). The best rooms in the houses of wealthier citizens were sometimes lighted through a square opening in the centre of a ceiling supported on wooden columns. In the Twelfth Dynasty town of Kahun the shafts of these columns rested upon round stone bases; they were octagonal, and about ten inches in diameter (fig. 8). Notwithstanding the prevalence of enteric disease and ophthalmia, the family crowded together into one or two rooms during the winter, and slept out on the roof under the shelter of mosquito nets in summer. On the roof also the women gossiped and cooked. The ground floor included both store-rooms, barns, and stables. Private granaries were generally in pairs (see fig. 11), brick-built in the same long conical shape as the state granaries, and carefully plastered with mud inside and out. Neither did the people of a house forget to find or to make hiding places in the walls or floors of their home, where they could secrete their household treasures—such as nuggets of gold and silver, precious stones, and jewellery for men and women—from thieves and tax-collectors
[Illustration: Fig. 10.—Wall-painting in a Twelfth Dynasty house. Below is a view of the outside, and above a view of the inside of a dwelling. Reproduced from Plate XVI. of Illahun, Kahun, and Gurob, W.M.F. Petrie.]
[Illustration: Fig. 11.—View of mansion from the tomb of Anna, Eighteenth Dynasty.]
The mansions of the rich and great covered a large space of ground. They most frequently stood in the midst of a garden, or of an enclosed court planted with trees; and, like the commoner houses, they turned a blank front to the street, consisting of bare walls, battlemented like those of a fortress (fig. 11). Thus, home-life was strictly secluded, and the pleasure of seeing was sacrificed for the advantages of not being seen. The door was approached by a flight of two or three steps, or by a porch supported on columns (fig. 12) and adorned with statues (fig. 13), which gave it a monumental appearance, and indicated the social importance of the family.
[Illustration: WALL-PAINTINGS, EL AMARNA. Fig. 12.—Porch of mansion, second Theban period, Fig. 13.—Porch of mansion, second Theban period.]
Sometimes this was preceded by a pylon-gateway, such as usually heralded the approach to a temple. Inside the enclosure it was like a small town, divided into quarters by irregular walls. The dwelling-house stood at the farther end; the granaries, stabling, and open spaces being distributed in different parts of the grounds, according to some system to which we as yet possess no clue. These arrangements, however, were infinitely varied. If I would convey some idea of the residence of an Egyptian noble,—a residence half palace, half villa,—I cannot do better than reproduce two out of the many pictorial plans which have come down to us among the tomb-paintings of the Eighteenth Dynasty. The first (figs. 14, 15) represent a Theban house. The enclosure is square, and surrounded by an embattled wall. The main gate opens upon a road bordered with trees, which runs beside a canal, or perhaps an arm of the Nile. Low stone walls divide the garden into symmetrical compartments, like those which are seen to this day in the great gardens of Ekhmim or Girgeh.
[Illustration: Fig. 14.—Plan of a Theban house with garden, from Eighteenth Dynasty tomb-painting.]
In the centre is a large trellis supported on four rows of slender pillars. Four small ponds, two to the right and two to the left, are stocked with ducks and geese. Two nurseries, two summer-houses, and various avenues of sycamores, date-palms, and dom-palms fill up the intermediate space; while at the end, facing the entrance, stands a small three-storied house surmounted by a painted cornice.
[Illustration: Fig. 15.—Perspective view of the Theban house, from Eighteenth Dynasty tomb-painting.]
[Illustration: Fig. 16.—Part of the palace of Ai, from tomb-painting, Eighteenth Dynasty, El Amarna.]
The second plan is copied from one of the rock-cut tombs of Tell el Amarna (figs. 16, 17). Here we see a house situate at the end of the gardens of the great lord Ai, son-in-law of the Pharaoh Khuenaten, and himself afterwards king of Egypt. An oblong stone tank with sloping sides, and two descending flights of steps, faces the entrance. The building is rectangular, the width being somewhat greater than the depth. A large doorway opens in the middle of the front, and gives access to a court planted with trees and flanked by store-houses fully stocked with provisions. Two small courts, placed symmetrically in the two farthest corners, contain the staircases which lead up to the roof terrace. This first building, however, is but the frame which surrounds the owner’s dwelling. The two frontages are each adorned with a pillared portico and a pylon. Passing the outer door, we enter a sort of long central passage, divided by two walls pierced with doorways, so as to form three successive courts. The inside court is bordered by chambers; the two others open to right and left upon two smaller courts, whence flights of steps lead up to the terraced roof.
[Illustration: Fig. 17.—Perspective view of the Palace of AT, Eighteenth Dynasty, El Amarna.]
[Illustration: Fig. 18.—Frontage of house, second Theban period.]
[Illustration: Fig. 19.—Frontage of house, second Theban period.]
[Illustration: Fig. 20.—Central pavilion of house, in form of tower, second Theban period.]
The decoration of walls and ceilings in no wise resembled such scenes or designs as we find in the tombs. The panels were whitewashed or colour-washed, and bordered with a polychrome band. The ceilings were usually left white; sometimes, however they were decorated with geometrical patterns, which repeated the leading motives employed in the sepulchral wall-paintings. Thus we find examples of meanders interspersed with rosettes (fig. 21), parti-coloured squares (fig. 22), ox-heads seen frontwise, scrolls, and flights of geese (fig. 23).
[Illustration: Fig. 21.—Ceiling pattern from behind, Medinet Habu, Twentieth Dynasty.]
[Illustration: Fig. 22.—Ceiling pattern similar to one at El Bersheh, Twelfth Dynasty.]
I have touched chiefly upon houses of the second Theban period,[2] this being in fact the time of which we have most examples. The house-shaped lamps which are found in such large numbers in the Fayum date only from Roman times; but the Egyptians of that period continued to build according to the rules which were in force under the Pharaohs of the Twelfth, Eighteenth, Nineteenth, and Twentieth Dynasties. As regards the domestic architecture of the ancient kingdom, the evidences are few and obscure. Nevertheless, the stelae, tombs, and coffins of that period often furnish designs which show us the style of the doorways (fig. 24), and one Fourth Dynasty sarcophagus, that of Khufu Poskhu, is carved in the likeness of a house (fig. 25).
[1] Many of the rooms at Kahun had vaulted ceilings.
[2] Seventeenth to Twentieth Dynasties.
2.—FORTRESSES.
Most of the towns, and even most of the larger villages, of ancient Egypt were walled. This was an almost necessary consequence of the geographical characteristics and the political constitution of the country. The mouths of the defiles which led into the desert needed to be closed against the Bedawin; while the great feudal nobles fortified their houses, their towns, and the villages upon their domains which commanded either the mountain passes or the narrow parts of the river, against their king or their neighbours.
[Illustration: Fig. 23.—Ceiling pattern from tomb of Aimadua, Twentieth Dynasty.]
[Illustration: Fig. 24.—Door of a house of the Ancient Empire, from the wall of a tomb of the Sixth Dynasty.]
[Illustration: Fig. 25.—Facade of a Fourth Dynasty house, from the sarcophagus of Khufu Poskhu.]
The oldest fortresses are those of Abydos, El Kab, and Semneh. Abydos contained a sanctuary dedicated to Osiris, and was situate at the entrance to one of the roads leading to the Oasis. As the renown of the temple attracted pilgrims, so the position of the city caused it to be frequented by merchants; hence the prosperity which it derived from the influx of both classes of strangers exposed the city to incursions of the Libyan tribes. At Abydos there yet remain two almost perfect strongholds. The older forms, as it were, the core of that tumulus called by the Arabs “Kom es Sultan,” or “the Mound of the King.” The interior of this building has been excavated to a point some ten or twelve feet above the ground level, but the walls outside have not yet been cleared from the surrounding sand and rubbish. In its present condition, it forms a parallelogram of crude brickwork measuring 410 feet from north to south, and 223 feet from east to west. The main axis of the structure extends, therefore, from north to south. The principal gateway opens in the western wall, not far from the northwest corner: but there would appear to have been two smaller gates, one in the south front, and one in the east. The walls, which now stand from twenty-four to thirty-six feet high, have lost somewhat of their original height. They are about six feet thick at the top. They were not built all together in uniform layers, but in huge vertical panels, easily distinguished by the arrangement of the brickwork. In one division the bedding of the bricks is strictly horizontal; in the next it is slightly concave, and forms a very flat reversed arch, of which the extrados rests upon the ground. The alternation of these two methods is regularly repeated. The object of this arrangement is obscure; but it is said that buildings thus constructed are especially fitted to resist earthquake shocks. However this may be, the fortress is extremely ancient, for in the Fifth Dynasty, the nobles of Abydos took possession of the interior, and, ultimately, so piled it up with their graves as to deprive it of all strategic value. A second stronghold, erected a few hundred yards further to the south-east, replaced that of Kom es Sultan about the time of the Twelfth Dynasty, and narrowly escaped the fate of the first, under the rule of the Ramessides. Nothing, in fact, but the sudden decline of the city, saved the second from being similarly choked and buried.
[Illustration: Fig. 26.—Plan of second fortress at Abydos, Eleventh or Twelfth Dynasty.]
[Illustration: Fig. 27.—Walls of second fort at Abydos, restored.]
[Illustration: Fig. 28.—Facade of fort, from wall-scene, Beni Hasan, Twelfth Dynasty.]
[Illustration: Fig. 29.—Plan of main gate, second fortress of Abydos.]
[Illustration: Fig. 30.—Plan of south-east gate, second fortress of Abydos.]
[Illustration: Fig. 31.—Plan of gate, fortress of Kom el Ahmar.]
The early Egyptians possessed no engines calculated to make an impression on very massive walls. They knew of but three ways of forcing a stronghold; namely, scaling the walls, sapping them, or bursting open the gates. The plan adopted by their engineers in building the second fort is admirably well calculated to resist each of these modes of attack (fig. 26). The outer walls are long and straight, without towers or projections of any kind; they measure 430 feet in length from north to south, by 255 feet in width. The foundations rest on the sand, and do not go down more than a foot. The wall (fig. 27) is of crude brick, in horizontal courses. It has a slight batter; is solid, without slits or loopholes; and is decorated outside with long vertical grooves or panels, like those depicted on the stelae of the ancient empire. In its present state, it rises to a height of some thirty-six feet above the plain; when perfect, it would scarcely have exceeded forty feet, which height would amply suffice to protect the garrison from all danger of scaling by portable ladders. The thickness of the wall is about twenty feet at the base, and sixteen feet above. The top is destroyed, but the bas-reliefs and mural paintings (fig. 28) show that it must have been crowned with a continuous cornice, boldly projecting, furnished with a slight low parapet, and surmounted by battlements, which were generally rounded, but sometimes, though rarely, squared. The walk round the top of the ramparts, though diminished by the parapet, was still twelve or fifteen feet wide. It ran uninterruptedly along the four sides, and was reached by narrow staircases formed in the thickness of the walls, but now destroyed. There was no ditch, but in order to protect the base of the main wall from sappers, they erected, about ten feet in advance of it, a battlemented covering wall, some sixteen feet in height. These precautions sufficed against sap and scaling; but the gates remained as open gaps in the circuit. It was upon these weak points that besiegers and besieged alike concentrated their efforts. The fortress of Abydos had two gates, the main one being situate at the east end of the north front (fig. 29). A narrow cutting (A), closed by a massive wooden door, marked the place in the covering wall. Behind it was a small place d’armes (B), cut partly in the thickness of the wall, and leading to a second gate (C) as narrow as the first. When, notwithstanding the showers
[Illustration: Fig. 32.—Plan of the walled city at El Kab.]
The same system of fortification which was in use for isolated fortresses was also employed for the protection of towns. At Heliopollis, at San, at Sais, at Thebes, everywhere in short, we find long straight walls forming plain squares or parallelograms, without towers or bastions, ditches or outworks. The thickness of the walls, which varied from thirty to eighty feet, made such precautions needless. The gates, or at all events the principal ones, had jambs and lintels of stone, decorated with scenes and inscriptions; as, for instance, that of Ombos, which Champollion beheld yet in situ, and which dated from the reign of Thothmes III. The oldest and best preserved walled city in Egypt, namely, El Kab, belongs probably to the ancient empire (fig. 32). The Nile washed part of it away some years ago; but at the beginning of the present century it formed an irregular quadrilateral enclosure, measuring some 2,100 feet in length, by about a quarter less in breadth. The south front is constructed on the same principles as the wall at Kom es Sultan, the bricks being bedded in alternate horizontal and concave sections. Along the north and west fronts they are laid in undulating layers from end to end. The thickness is thirty-eight feet, and the average height thirty feet; and spacious ramps lead up to the walk upon the walls. The gates are placed irregularly, one in each side to north, east, and west, but none in the south face; they are, however, in too ruinous a state to admit of any plan being taken of them. The enclosure contained a considerable population, whose dwellings were unequally distributed, the greater part being concentrated towards the north and west, where excavations have disclosed the remains of a large number of houses. The temples were grouped together in a square enclosure, concentric with the outer wall; and this second enclosure served for a keep, where the garrison could hold out long after the rest of the town had fallen into the hands of the enemy.
[Illustration: Fig. 33.—Plan of walled city at Kom Ombo.]
[Illustration: Fig. 34.—Plan of fortress of Kummeh.]
[Illustration: Fig. 35.—Plan of fortress of Semneh.]
[Illustration: Fig. 36.—Section of the platform at A B, of the preceding plan.]
The rectangular plan, though excellent in a plain, was not always available in a hilly country. When the spot to be fortified was situate upon a height, the Egyptian engineers knew perfectly well how to adapt their lines of defence to the nature of the site. At Kom Ombo (fig. 33) the walls exactly followed the outline of the isolated mound on which the town was perched, and presented towards the east a front bristling with irregular projections, the style of which roughly resembles our modern bastions. At Kummeh and Semneh, in Nubia, where the Nile rushes over the rocks of the second cataract, the engineering arrangements are very ingenious, and display much real skill. Usertesen III. had fixed on this pass as the frontier of Egypt, and the fortresses which he there constructed were intended to bar the water-way against the vessels of the neighbouring negro tribes. At Kummeh, on the right bank, the position was naturally strong (fig. 34). Upon a rocky height surrounded by precipices was planned an irregular square measuring about 200 feet each way. Two elongated bastions, one on the north-east and the other on the south-east, guarded respectively the path leading to the gate, and the course of the river. The covering wall stood thirteen feet high, and closely followed the line of the main wall, except at the north and south corners, where it formed two bastion-like projections. At Semneh, on the opposite bank, the site was less favourable. The east side was protected by a belt of cliffs going sheer down to the water’s edge; but the three other sides were well-nigh open (fig. 35). A straight wall, about fifty feet in height, carried along the cliffs on the side next the river; but the walls looking towards the plain rose to eighty feet, and bristled with bastion-like projections (A.B.) jutting out for a distance of fifty feet from the curtain wall, measuring thirty feet thick at the base and thirteen feet at the top, and irregularly spaced, according to the requirements of the defence. These spurs, which are not battlemented, served in place of towers. They added to the strength of the walls, protected the walk round the top, and enabled the besieged to direct a flank attack against the enemy if any attempt were made upon the wall of circuit. The intervals between these spurs are accurately calculated as to distance, in order that the archers should be able to sweep the intervening ground with their arrows. Curtains and salients are alike built of crude brick, with beams bedded horizontally in the mass. The outer face is in two parts, the lower division being nearly vertical, and the upper one inclined at an angle of about seventy degrees, which made scaling
[Illustration: Fig. 37.—Syrian fort.]
[Illustration: Fig. 38.—The town-walls of Dapuer.]
[Illustration: Fig. 39.—City of Kadesh, Ramesseum.]
[Illustration: Fig. 40.—Plan of the pavilion of Medinet Habu.]
[Illustration: Fig. 41.—Elevation of pavilion, Medinet Habu.]
New methods of fortification were revealed to the Egyptians in the course of the great Asiatic wars undertaken by the Pharaohs of the Eighteenth Dynasty. The nomadic tribes of Syria erected small forts in which they took refuge when threatened with invasion (fig. 37). The Canaanite and Hittite cities, as Ascalon, Dapur, and Merom, were surrounded by strong walls, generally built of stone and flanked with towers (fig. 38). Those which stood in the open country, as, for instance, Qodshu (Kadesh), were enclosed by a double moat (fig. 39). Having proved the efficacy of these new types of defensive architecture in the course of their campaigns, the Pharaohs reproduced them in the valley of the Nile. From the beginning of the Nineteenth Dynasty, the eastern frontier of the Delta (always the weakest) was protected by a line of forts constructed after the Canaanite model. The Egyptians, moreover, not content with appropriating the thing, appropriated also the name, and called these frontier towers by the Semitic name of Magdilu or Migdols. For these purposes, or at all events for cities which were exposed to the incursions of the Asiatic tribes, brick was not deemed to be sufficiently strong; hence the walls of Heliopolis, and even those of Memphis, were faced with stone. Of these new fortresses no ruins remain; and but for a royal caprice which happens to have left us a model Migdol in that most unlikely place, the necropolis of Thebes, we should now be constrained to attempt a restoration of their probable appearance from the representations in certain mural tableaux. When, however, Rameses III. erected his memorial temple[3] (figs. 40 and 41), he desired, in remembrance of his Syrian victories, to give it an outwardly military aspect. Along the eastward front of the enclosure there accordingly runs a battlemented covering wall of stone, averaging some thirteen feet
Material evidence fails us almost entirely, after the reign of Rameses III. Towards the close of the eleventh century B.C., the high-priests of Amen repaired the walls of Thebes, of Gebeleyn, and of El Hibeh opposite Feshn. The territorial subdivision of the country, which took place under the successors of Sheshonk, compelled the provincial princes to multiply their strongholds. The campaign of Piankhi on the banks of the Nile is a series of successful sieges. Nothing, however, leads us to suppose that the art of fortification had at that time made any distinct progress; and when the Greek rulers succeeded the native Pharaohs, they most probably found it at much the same stage as it was left by the engineers of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Dynasties.
[3] At Medinet Habu.
3.—PUBLIC WORKS.
A permanent network of roads would be useless in a country like Egypt. The Nile here is the natural highway for purposes of commerce, and the pathways which intersect the fields suffice for foot-passengers, for cattle, and for the transport of goods from village to village. Ferry-boats for crossing the river, fords wherever the canals were shallow enough, and embanked dams thrown up here and there where the water was too deep for fordings, completed the system of internal communication. Bridges were rare. Up to the present time, we know of but one in the whole territory of ancient Egypt; and whether that
[Illustration: Fig. 42.—Canal and bridge, Zaru, Karnak.]
[Illustration: Fig. 43.—Cellar, with amphorae.]
[Illustration: Fig. 44.—Granary.]
The taxation of ancient Egypt was levied in kind, and government servants were paid after the same system. To workmen, there were monthly distributions of corn, oil, and wine, wherewith to support their families; while from end to end of the social scale, each functionary, in exchange for his labour, received cattle, stuffs, manufactured goods, and certain quantities of copper or precious metals. Thus it became necessary that the treasury officials should have the command of vast storehouses for the safe keeping of the various goods collected under the head of taxation. These were classified and stored in separate quarters, each storehouse being surrounded by walls and guarded by vigilant keepers. There was enormous stabling for cattle; there were cellars where the amphorae were piled in regular layers (fig. 43), or hung in rows upon the walls, each with the date written on the side of the jar; there were oven-shaped granaries where the corn was poured in through a trap at the top (fig. 44), and taken out through a trap at the bottom. At Thuku, identified with Pithom by M. Naville,[5] the store-chambers (A) are rectangular and of different dimensions (fig. 45), originally divided by floors, and having no communication with each other. Here the corn had to be not only put in but taken out through the aperture at the top. At the Ramesseum, Thebes, thousands of ostraka and jar-stoppers found upon the spot prove that the brick-built remains at the back of the temple were the cellars of the local deity. The ruins consist of a series of vaulted chambers, originally surmounted by a platform or terrace (fig. 46). At Philae, Ombos, Daphnae,[6] and most of the frontier towns of the Delta, there were magazines of this description, and many more will doubtless be discovered when made the object of serious exploration.
[Illustration: Fig. 45.—Plan of Pithom.]
[Illustration: Fig. 46.—Store-chambers of the Ramesseum.]
[Illustration: Fig. 47.—Dike at Wady Gerraweh.]
The irrigation system of Egypt is but little changed since the olden time. Some new canals have been cut, and yet more have been silted up through the negligence of those in power; but the general scheme, and the methods employed, continue much the same, and demand but little engineering skill. Wherever I have investigated the remains of ancient canals, I have been unable to detect any traces of masonry at the weak points, or at the mouths, of these cuttings. They are mere excavated ditches, from twenty to sixty or seventy feet in width. The earth flung out during the work was thrown to right and left, forming irregular embankments from seven to fourteen feet in height. The course of the ancient canals was generally straight: but that rule was not strictly observed, and enormous curves were often described in order to avoid even slight irregularities of surface. Dikes thrown up from the foot of the cliffs to the banks of the Nile divided the plain at intervals into a series of artificial basins, where the overflow formed back-waters at the time of inundation. These dikes are generally earth-works, though they are sometimes constructed of baked brick, as in the province of Girgeh. Very rarely are they built of hewn stone, like that great dike of Kosheish which was constructed by Mena in primaeval times, in order to divert the course of the Nile from the spot on which he founded Memphis.[7] The network of canals began near Silsilis and extended to the sea-board, without ever losing touch of the river, save at one spot near Beni Suef, where it throws out a branch in the direction of the Fayum. Here, through a narrow and sinuous gorge, deepened probably by the hand of man, it passes the rocky barrier which divides that low-lying province from the valley of the Nile, and thence expands into a fanlike ramification of innumerable channels. Having thus irrigated the district, the waters flow out again; those nearest the Nile returning by the same way that they flowed in, while the rest form a series of lakes, the largest of which is known as the Birket el Kurun. If we are to believe Herodotus, the work was not so simply done. A king, named Moeris, desired to create a reservoir in the Fayum which should neutralise the evil effects of insufficient or superabundant inundations. This reservoir was named, after him, Lake Moeris. If the supply fell below the average, then the stored waters were let loose, and Lower Egypt and the Western Delta were flooded to the needful height. If next year the inundation came down in too great force, Lake Moeris received and stored the surplus till such time as the waters began to subside. Two pyramids, each surmounted by a sitting colossus, one representing the king and the other his queen, were erected in the midst of the lake. Such is the tale told by Herodotus, and it is a tale which has considerably embarrassed our modern engineers and topographers. How, in fact, was it possible to find in the Fayum
Most of the localities from which the Egyptians derived their metals and choicest materials in hard stone, were difficult of access, and would have been useless had roads not been made, and works of this kind carried out, so as to make life somewhat less insupportable there.
[Illustration: Fig. 48.—Section of dike at Wady Gerraweh.]
In order to reach the diorite and grey granite quarries of the Hammamat Valley, the Pharaohs caused a series of rock-cut cisterns to be constructed along the line of route. Some few insignificant springs, skilfully conducted into these reservoirs, made it possible to plant workmen’s villages in the neighbourhood of the quarries, and also near the emerald mines on the borders of the Red Sea. Hundreds of hired labourers, slaves, and condemned criminals here led a wretched existence under the rule of some eight or ten overseers, and the brutal surveillance of a company of Libyan or negro mercenary troops. The least political disturbance in Egypt, an unsuccessful campaign, or any untoward incident of a troubled reign, sufficed to break up the precarious stability of these remote establishments. The Bedawin at once attacked the colony; the workmen deserted; the guards, weary of exile, hastened back to the valley of the Nile, and all was at a standstill.
The choicest materials, as diorite, basalt, black granite, porphyry, and red and yellow breccia, which are only found in the desert, were rarely used for architectural purposes. In order to procure them, it was necessary to organise regular expeditions of soldiers and workmen; therefore they were reserved for sarcophagi and important works of art. Those quarries which supplied building materials for temples and funerary monuments, such as limestone, sandstone, alabaster, and red granite, were all found in the Nile valley, and were, therefore, easy of access. When the vein which it was intended to work traversed the lower strata of the rock, the miners excavated chambers and passages, which were often prolonged to a considerable distance. Square pillars, left standing at intervals, supported the superincumbent mass, while tablets sculptured in the most conspicuous places commemorated the kings and engineers who began or continued the work. Several exhausted or abandoned quarries have been transformed into votive chapels; as, for instance, the Speos Artemidos, which was consecrated by Hatshepsut, Thothmes III. and Seti I. to the local goddess Pakhet.[9]
[Illustration: Fig. 49.—Quarries of Silsilis.]
[Illustration: Fig. 50.—Draught of Hathor capital in quarry of Gebel Abufeydeh.]
The most important limestone quarries are at Turah and Massarah, nearly opposite Memphis. This stone lends itself admirably to the most delicate touches of the chisel, hardens when exposed to the air, and acquires a creamy tone most restful to the eye. Hence it was much in request by architects and sculptors. The most extensive sandstone formations are at Silsilis (fig. 49). Here the cliffs were quarried from above, and under the open sky. Clean cut and absolutely vertical, they rise to a height of from forty to fifty feet, sometimes presenting a smooth surface from top to bottom, and sometimes cut in stages
[Illustration: Fig. 51.—Bas-relief from one of the stelae of Ahmes, at Turrah, Eighteenth Dynasty.]
[4] The bas-relief sculpture from which the illustration,
fig. 42, is taken
(outer wall of Hypostyle Hall,
Karnak, north end) represents Seti I.
returning in triumph from
one of his Syrian campaigns. He is met at
Zaru by the great officers
of his court, who bring bouquets of lotus-
blossoms in their hands.
Pithom and other frontier forts are depicted
in this tableau, and Pithom
is apparently not very far from Zaru.
Zaru, Zalu, is the Selle of
the Roman Itineraries.—A.B.E.
[5] See The Store City of Pithom and the Route
of the Exodus, by Ed.
Naville, with 13 Plates and
2 Maps; published by the Egypt Exploration
Fund. First edition 1885,
second edition 1885. Truebner & Co., London.
—A.B.E.
[6] For an account of the explorations at Daphnae
(the “Tahpanhes” of the
Bible, the Tell Defenneh
of the present day) see Mr. Petrie’s
memoir, entitled Tanis,
Part II, (including Nebesheh, Gemayemi,
Defenneh, etc.), published
by the Egypt Exploration Fund.—A.B.E.
[7] The remains of this gigantic work may yet be seen
about two hours’
distance to the southward
of Medum. See Herodotus, book II.; chap.
99.—A.B.E.
[8] See The Fayum and Lake Moeris. Major R.H. Brown, R.E.
[9] Officially, this temple is attributed to Thothmes
III., and the
dedicatory inscription dates
from the first year of his reign; but the
work was really that of his
aunt and predecessor, Queen Hatshepsut.
[10] See also an exact reduction of this design, to
scale, in Mr. Petrie’s
work A Season in Egypt,
1887, Plate XXV.
[11] Chenoboscion.—A.B.E.
RELIGIOUS ARCHITECTURE.
In the civil and military architecture of Ancient Egypt brick played the principal part; but in the religious architecture of the nation it occupied a very secondary position. The Pharaohs were ambitious of building eternal dwellings for their deities, and stone was the only material which seemed sufficiently durable to withstand the ravages of time and man.
It is an error to suppose that the Egyptians employed only large blocks for building purposes. The size of their materials varied very considerably according to the uses for which they were destined. Architraves, drums of columns, lintel-stones, and door-jambs were sometimes of great size. The longest architraves known—those, namely, which bridge the nave of the hypostyle hall of Karnak—have a mean length of 30 feet. They each contain 40 cubic yards, and weigh about 65 tons. Ordinarily, however, the blocks are not much larger than those now used in Europe. They measure, that is to say, about 2-1/2 to 4 feet in height, from 3 to 8 feet in length, and from 2 to 6 feet in thickness.
Some temples are built of only one kind of stone; but more frequently materials of different kinds are put together in unequal proportions. Thus the main part of the temples of Abydos consists of very fine limestone; but in the temple of Seti I., the columns, architraves, jambs, and lintels,— all parts, in short, where it might be feared that the limestone would not offer sufficient resistance,—the architect has had recourse to sandstone; while in that of Rameses II., sandstone, granite, and alabaster were used. At Karnak, Luxor, Tanis, and Memphis, similar combinations may be seen. At the Ramesseum, and in some of the Nubian temples, the columns stand on massive supports of crude brick. The stones
[Illustration: Fig. 52.—Masonry in temple of Seti I. at Abydos.]
The system of construction in force among the ancient Egyptians resembles in many respects that of the Greeks. The stones are often placed together with dry joints, and without the employment of any binding contrivance, the masons relying on the mere weight of the materials to keep them in place. Sometimes they are held together by metal cramps, or sometimes—as in the temple of Seti I., at Abydos—by dovetails of sycamore wood bearing the cartouche of the founder. Most commonly, they are united by a mortar-joint, more or less thick. All the mortars of which I have collected samples are thus far of three kinds: the first is white, and easily reduced to an impalpable powder, being of lime only; the others are grey, and rough to the touch, being mixtures of lime and sand; while some are of a reddish colour, owing to the pounded brick powder with which they are mixed. A judicious use of these various methods enabled the Egyptians to rival the Greeks in their treatment of regular courses, equal blocks, and upright joints in alternate bond. If they did not always work equally well, their shortcomings must be charged to the imperfect mechanical means at their disposal. The enclosure walls, partitions, and secondary facades
[Illustration: Fig. 53.—Temple wall with cornice.]
[Illustration: Fig. 54.—Niche and doorway in temple of Seti I. at Abydos.]
[Illustration: Fig. 55.—Pavement of the portico of Osiris in the temple of Seti I. at Abydos.]
The ground-level of the courts and halls was flagged with rectangular paving stones, well enough fitted, except in the intercolumniations, where the architects, hopeless of harmonising the lines of the pavement with the curved bases of the columns, have filled in the space with small pieces, set without order or method (fig. 55). Contrary to their practice when house building, they have scarcely ever employed the vault or arch in temple architecture. We nowhere meet with it, except at Deir el Bahari, and in the seven parallel sanctuaries of Abydos. Even in these instances, the arch is produced by “corbelling”; that is to say, the curve is formed by three or four superimposed horizontal courses of stone, chiselled out to the form required (fig. 56). The ordinary roofing consists of flat paving slabs. When the space between the walls was not too wide, these slabs bridged it over at a single stretch; otherwise the roof had to be supported at intervals, and the wider the space the more these supports needed to be multiplied. The supports were connected by immense stone architraves, on which the roofing slabs rested.
[Illustration: Fig. 56.—“Corbelled” arch, temple of Seti I. at Abydos.]
The supports are of two types,—the pillar and the column. Some are cut from single blocks. Thus, the monolithic pillars of the temple of the sphinx (Note 8), the oldest hitherto found, measure 16 feet in height by 4- 1/2 feet in width. Monolithic columns of red granite are also found among the ruins of Alexandria, Bubastis,[12] and Memphis, which date from the reigns of Horemheb and Rameses II., and measure some 20 to 26 feet in height. But columns and pillars are commonly built in courses, which are often unequal and irregular, like those of the walls which surround them. The great columns of Luxor are not even solid, two-thirds of the diameter being filled up with yellow cement, which has lost its strength, and crumbles between the fingers. The capital of the column of Taharka at Karnak contains three courses, each about 48 inches high. The last and most projecting course is made up of twenty-six convergent stones, which are held in place by merely the weight of the abacus. The same carelessness which we have already noted in the workmanship of the walls is found in the workmanship of the columns.
[Illustration: Fig. 57.—Hathor pillar, Abu Simbel.]
[Illustration: Fig. 58.—Pillar of Amenhotep III., Karnak.]
The quadrangular pillar, with parallel or slightly inclined sides, and generally without either base or capital, frequently occurs in tombs of the ancient empire. It reappears later at Medinet Habu, in the temple of Thothmes III., and again at Karnak, in what is known as the processional hall. The sides of these square pillars are often covered with painted scenes, while the front faces were more decoratively
[Illustration: Fig. 59.—Sixteen-sided pillars, Karnak.]
The column does not rest immediately upon the soil. It is always furnished with a base like that of the polygonal pillar, sometimes square with the ground, and sometimes slightly rounded. This base is either plain, or ornamented only with a line of hieroglyphs. The principal forms fall into three types: (1) the column with campaniform, or lotus-flower capital; (2) the column with lotus-bud capital; (3) the column with Hathor-head capital.
[Illustration: Fig. 60.—Fluted pillar, Kalabsheh.]
[Illustration: Fig. 61.—Polygonal Hathor-headed pillar, El Kab.]
I. Columns with Campaniform Capitals.—The shaft is generally plain, or merely engraved with inscriptions or bas-reliefs. Sometimes, however, as at Medamot, it is formed of six large and six small colonnettes in alternation. In Pharaonic times, it is bulbous, being curved inward at the base, and ornamented with triangles one within another, imitating the large leaves which sheathe the sprouting plant. The curve is so regulated that the diameter at the base and the top shall be about equal. In the Ptolemaic period, the bulb often disappears, owing probably to Greek influences. The columns which surround the first court at Edfu rise straight from their plinths. The shaft always tapers towards the top. It is finished by three or five flat bands, one above the other. At Medamot, where the shaft is clustered, the architect has doubtless thought that one tie at the top appeared insufficient to hold in a dozen colonnettes; he has therefore marked two other rings of bands at regular intervals. The campaniform capital is decorated from the spring of the curve with a row of leaves, like those which sheathe the base. Between these are figured shoots of lotus and papyrus in flower and bud. The height of the capital, and the extent of its projection beyond the line of the shaft, varied with the taste of the architect. At Luxor, the campaniform capitals are eleven and a half feet in diameter at the neck, eighteen feet in diameter at the top, and eleven and a half feet in height. At Karnak, in the hypostyle hall, the height of the capital is twelve and a quarter feet, and the greatest diameter twenty-one feet. A square die surmounts the whole. This die is almost hidden by the curve of the capital, though occasionally, as at Denderah, it is higher, and bears on each face a figure of the god Bes (fig. 62).
[Illustration: Fig. 62.—Column with square die, Contra Esneh.]
[Illustration: Fig. 63.—Column with campaniform capital, Ramesseum.]
The column with campaniform capital is mostly employed in the middle avenue of hypostyle halls, as at Karnak, the Ramesseum, and Luxor (fig. 63); but it was not restricted to this position, for we also find it in porticoes, as at Medinet Habu, Edfu, and Philae. The processional hall[13] of Thothmes III., at Karnak, contains one most curious variety (fig. 64); the flower is inverted like a bell, and the shaft is turned upside down, the smaller end being sunk in the plinth, while the larger is fitted to the wide part of the overturned bell. This ungraceful innovation achieved no success, and is found nowhere else. Other novelties were happier, especially those which enabled the artist to introduce decorative elements taken from the flora of the country. In the earlier examples at Soleb, Sesebeh, Bubastis, and Memphis, we find a crown of palm branches springing from the band, their heads being curved beneath the weight of the abacus (fig. 65). Later on, as we approach the Ptolemaic period, the date and the half-unfolded lotus were added to the palm-branches (fig. 66).
[Illustration: Fig. 64.—Inverted campaniform capital, Karnak.]
[Illustration: Fig. 65.—Palm capital, Bubastis.]
[Illustration: Fig. 66.—Compound capital.]
Under the Ptolemies and the Caesars the capital became a complete basket of flowers and leaves, ranged row above row, and painted in the brightest colours (fig. 67.) At Edfu, Ombos, and Philae one would fancy that the designer had vowed never to repeat the same pattern in the same portico.
[Illustration: Fig. 67.—Ornate capitals, Ptolemaic.]
[Illustration: Fig. 68.—Lotus-bud column, Beni Hasan.]
[Illustration: Fig. 69.—Lotus-bud column, processional hall, Thothmes III., Karnak.]
[Illustration: Fig. 70.—Column in the aisles of the hypostyle hall at Karnak.]
II. Columns with Lotus-bud Capitals.—Originally these may perhaps have represented a bunch of lotus plants, the buds being bound together at the neck to form the capital. The columns of Beni Hasan consist of four rounded stems (fig. 68). Those of the Labyrinth, of the processional hall of Thothmes III., and of Medamot, consist of eight stems, each presenting a sharp edge on the outer side (fig. 69). The bottom of the column is bulbous, and set round with triangular leaves. The top is surrounded by three or five bands. A moulding composed of groups of three vertical stripes hangs like a fringe from the lowest band in the space between every two stems. So varied a surface does not admit of hieroglyphic decoration; therefore the projections were by degrees suppressed, and the whole shaft was made smooth. In the hypostyle hall at Gurneh, the shaft is divided in three parts, the middle one being smooth and covered with sculptures, while the upper and lower divisions are formed of clustered stems. In the temple of Khonsu, in the aisles of the hypostyle hall of Karnak, and in the portico of Medinet Habu, the shaft is quite smooth, the fringe alone being retained below the top bands, while a slight ridge between each of the three bands recalls the original stems (fig. 70). The capital underwent a like process of degradation. At Beni Hasan, it is finely clustered throughout its height. In the processional hall of Thothmes III., at Luxor, and at Medamot, a circle of small pointed leaves and channellings around the base lessens the effect, and reduces it to a mere grooved and truncated cone. In the hypostyle hall of Karnak, at Abydos, at the Ramesseum, and at Medinet Habu, various other ornaments, as triangular leaves, hieroglyphic inscriptions, or bands of cartouches flanked by uraei, fill the space thus unfortunately obtained. Neither is the abacus hidden as in the campaniform capital, but stands out boldly, and displays the cartouche of the royal founder.
[Illustration: Fig. 71.—Hathor-head capital, Ptolemaic.]
III. Columns with Hathor-head Capitals.—We find examples of the Hathor-headed column dating from ancient times, as at Deir el Bahari; but this order is best known in buildings of the Ptolemaic period, as at Contra Latopolis, Philae, and Denderah. The shaft and the base present no special characteristics. They resemble those of the campaniform columns. The capital is in two divisions. Below we have a square block, bearing on each face a woman’s head in high relief and crowned with a naos. The woman has the ears of a heifer. Her hair, confined over the brow by three vertical bands, falls behind the ears, and hangs long on the shoulders. Each head supports a fluted cornice, on which stands a naos framed between two volutes, and crowned by a slender abacus (fig. 71). Thus each column has for its capital four heads of Hathor. Seen from a distance, it at once recalls the form of the sistrum, so frequently represented in the bas-reliefs as held in the hands of queens and goddesses. It is in fact a sistrum, in which the regular proportions of the parts are disregarded. The handle is gigantic, while the upper part of the instrument is unduly reduced. This notion so pleased the Egyptian fancy that architects did not hesitate to combine the sistrum design with elements borrowed from other orders. The four heads of Hathor placed above a campaniform capital, furnished Nectenebo with a composite type for his pavilion at Philae (fig. 72). I cannot say that the compound is very satisfactory, but the column is in reality less ugly than it appears in engravings.
[Illustration: Fig. 72.—Campaniform and Hathor-headed capital, Philae.]
[Illustration: Fig. 73.—Section of the hypostyle hall at Karnak to show the arrangement of the two varieties: campaniform and lotus-bud columns.]
Shafts of columns were regulated by no fixed rules of proportion or arrangement. The architect might, if he chose, make use of equal heights with very different diameters, and, regardless of any considerations apart from those of general harmony, might design the various parts according to whatever scale best suited him. The dimensions of the capital had no invariable connection with those of the shaft, nor was the height of the shaft dependent on the diameter of the column. At Karnak, the campaniform columns of the hypostyle hall measure 10 feet high in the capital, and 55 feet high in the shaft, with a lower diameter of 11 feet 8 inches. At Luxor, the capital measures 11-1/2 feet, the shaft 49 feet, and the diameter at the spring of the base 11-1/4 feet. At the Ramesseum, the shaft and capital measure 35 feet, and the spring diameter is 6-1/2 feet. The lotus-bud or clustered column gives similar results. At Karnak, in the aisles of the hypostyle hall, the capital is 10 feet high, the shaft 33 feet, and the base diameter 6-3/4 feet. At the Ramesseum, the capital is 5- 1/2 feet high, the shaft 24-1/2 feet, and the base diameter
[12] For an account of the excavations at Bubastis,
see Eighth and Tenth
Memoirs of the Egypt Exploration
Fund, by M.E. Naville.
[13] French “Promenoir”; this is perhaps
best expressed by “Processional
Hall,” in accordance
with the description of its purpose on p. 67.
—A.B.E.
2. THE TEMPLE.
[Illustration: Fig. 74.—Plan of temple of the Sphinx.]
Most of the famous sanctuaries—Denderah, Edfu, Abydos—were founded before Men a by the Servants of Hor.[14] Becoming dilapidated or ruined in the course of ages, they have been restored, rebuilt, remodelled, one after the other, till nothing remains of the primitive design to show us what the first Egyptian architecture was like. The funerary temples built by the kings of the Fourth Dynasty have left some traces.[15] That of the second pyramid of Gizeh was so far preserved at the beginning of the last century, that Maillet saw four large pillars standing. It is now almost entirely destroyed; but this loss has been more than compensated by the discovery, in 1853, of a temple situate about fifty yards to the southward of the sphinx (fig. 74). The facade is still hidden by the sand, and the inside is but partly uncovered. The core masonry is of fine Turah limestone. The casing, pillars, architraves, and roof were constructed with immense blocks of alabaster or red granite (Note 9). The plan is most simple: In the middle (A) is a great hall in shape of the letter T, adorned with sixteen square pillars 16 feet in height; at the north-west corner of this hall is a narrow passage on an inclined plane (B), by which the building is now entered;[16] at the south-west corner is a recess (C) which contains six niches, in pairs one over the other. A long
Some few scattered ruins in Nubia, the Fayum, and Sinai, do not suffice to prove whether the temples of the Twelfth Dynasty merited the praises lavished on them in contemporary inscriptions or not. Those of the Theban kings, of the Ptolemies, and of the Caesars which are yet standing are in some cases nearly perfect, while almost all are easy of restoration to those who conscientiously study them upon the spot. At first sight, they seem to present an infinite variety as to arrangement; but on a closer view they are found to conform to a single type. We will begin with the sanctuary. This is a low, small, obscure, rectangular chamber, inaccessible to all save Pharaoh and the priests. As a rule it contained neither statue nor emblem, but only the sacred bark, or a tabernacle of painted wood placed upon a pedestal. A niche in the wall, or an isolated shrine formed of a single block of stone, received on certain days the statue, or inanimate symbol of the local god, or the living animal, or the image of the animal, sacred to that god. A temple must necessarily contain this one chamber; and if it contained but this one chamber, it would be no less a temple than the most complex buildings. Very rarely, however, especially in large towns, was the service of the gods thus limited to the strictly necessary. Around the sanctuary, or “divine house,” was grouped a series of chambers in which sacrificial and ceremonial objects were stored, as flowers, perfumes, stuffs, and precious vessels. In advance of this block of buildings were next built one or more halls supported on columns; and in advance of these came a courtyard, where the priests and devotees assembled. This courtyard was surrounded by a colonnade to which the public had access, and was entered through a gateway flanked by two towers, in front of which were placed statues, or obelisks; the whole being surrounded by an enclosure wall of brickwork, and approached through an avenue of sphinxes. Every Pharaoh was free to erect a hall still more sumptuous in front of those which his predecessors had built; and what he did, others might do after him. Thus, successive series of chambers and courts, of pylons and porticoes, were added reign after reign to the original nucleus; and—vanity or piety prompting the work—the temple continued to increase in every direction, till space or means had failed.
[Illustration: Fig. 75.—South Temple of Amenhotep III. at Elephantine.]
[Illustration: Fig. 76.—Plan of temple of Amenhotep III., at El Kab.]
The most simple temples were sometimes the most beautiful. This was the case as regards the sanctuaries erected by Amenhotep III. in the island of Elephantine, which were figured by the members of the French expedition at the end of the last century, and destroyed by the Turkish governor of Asuan in 1822. The best preserved, namely, the south temple (fig. 75), consisted of but a single chamber of sandstone, 14 feet high, 31 feet wide, and 39 feet long. The walls, which were straight, and crowned with the usual cornice, rested on a platform of masonry some 8 feet above the ground. This platform was surrounded by a parapet wall, breast high. All around the temple ran a colonnade, the sides each consisting of seven square pillars, without capital or base, and the two facades, front and back, being supported by two columns with the lotus-bud capital. Both pillars and columns rose direct from the parapet; except on the east front, where a flight of ten or twelve steps, enclosed between two walls of the same height as the platform, led up to the cella. The two columns at the head of the steps were wider apart than those of the opposite face, and through the space thus opened was seen a richly-decorated door. A second door opened at the other end, beneath the portico. Later, in Roman times, this feature was utilised in altering the building. The inter-columnar space at the end was filled up, and thus was obtained a second hall, rough and bare, but useful for the purposes of the temple service. These Elephantine sanctuaries bring to mind the peripteral temples of the Greeks, and this resemblance to one of the most familiar forms of classical architecture explains perhaps the boundless admiration with which they were regarded by the French savants. Those of Mesheikh, of El Kab, and of Sharonah are somewhat more elaborate. The building at El Kab is in three divisions (fig. 76); first, a hall of four columns (A); next, a chamber (B) supported by four Hathor-headed pillars; and in the end wall, opposite the door, a niche (C), approached by four steps. Of these small oratories the most complete model now remaining belongs to the Ptolemaic period; namely, the temple of Hathor at Deir el Medineh (fig. 77). Its length is just double its breadth. The walls are built with a batter inclining inwards,[17] and are externally bare, save at the door, which is framed in a projecting border covered with finely-sculptured scenes. The interior is in three parts: A portico (B), supported by two lotus flower columns; a pronaos (C), reached by a flight of four steps, and separated from the portico by a wall which connects the two lotus flower columns with two Hathor-headed pilasters in antis; lastly, the sanctuary (D), flanked by two small chambers (E, E), which are lighted by square openings cut in the ceiling. The ascent to the terrace is by way of a staircase, very ingeniously placed in the south corner of the portico, and furnished with a beautiful open window (F). This is merely a temple in miniature; but the parts, though small, are so well proportioned that it would be impossible to conceive anything more delicate or graceful.
[Illustration: Fig. 77.—Plan of temple of Hathor, Deir el Medineh.]
[Illustration: Fig. 78.—Plan of temple of Khonsu, Karnak.]
[Illustration: Fig. 79.—Pylon, with masts, from a bas-relief in the temple of Khonsu at Karnak.]
[Illustration: Fig. 80.—The Ramesseum restored, to show the rising of the ground.]
[Illustration: Fig. 81.—Crypts in the thickness of the walls, round the sanctuary at Denderah.]
[Illustration: Fig. 82.—The pronaos of Edfu, as seen from the top of the eastern pylon.]
We cannot say as much for the temple which the Pharaohs of the Twentieth Dynasty erected to the south of Karnak, in honour of the god Khonsu (fig. 78); but if the style is not irreproachable, the plan is nevertheless so clear, that one is tempted to accept it as the type of an Egyptian temple, in preference to others more elegant or majestic. On analysis, it resolves itself into two parts separated by a thick wall (A, A). In the centre of the lesser division is the Holy of Holies (B), open at both ends and isolated from the rest of the building by a surrounding passage (C) 10 feet in width. To the right and left of this sanctuary are small dark chambers (D, D), and behind it is a hall of four columns (E), from which open seven other chambers (F, F). Such was the house of the god, having no communication with the adjoining parts, except by two doors (G) in the southern wall (A, A). These opened into a wide and shallow hypostyle hall (H), divided into nave and aisles. The nave is supported by four lotus-flower columns, 23 feet in height; the aisles each contain two lotus-bud columns 18 feet high. The roof of the nave is, therefore, 5 feet higher than that of the sides. This elevation was made use of for lighting purposes, the clerestory being fitted with stone gratings, which admitted the daylight. The court (I) was square, and surrounded by a double colonnade entered by way of four side-gates and a great central gateway flanked by two quadrangular towers with sloping fronts. This pylon (K) measures 105 feet in length, 33 feet in width, and 60 feet in height. It contains no chambers, but only a narrow staircase, which leads to the top of the gate, and thence up to the towers. Four long grooves in the facade, reaching to a third of its height, correspond to four quadrangular openings cut through. the whole thickness of the masonry. Here were fixed four great wooden masts, formed of joined beams and held in place by a wooden framework fixed in the four openings above mentioned. From these masts floated long streamers of various colours (fig. 79). Such was the temple of Khonsu, and such, in their main features, were the majority of the greater temples of Theban and Ptolemaic times, as Luxor, the Ramesseum, Medinet Habu, Edfu, and Denderah. Though for the most part half in ruins, they affect one with a strange and disquieting sense of oppression. As mystery was a favourite attribute of the Egyptian
[Illustration: Fig. 83.—Plan of temple, Edfu.]
[Illustration: Fig. 84.—Plan of the temple of Karnak in the reign of Amenhotep III.]
[Illustration: Fig. 85.—Plan of Hypostyle Hall, Karnak.]
[Illustration: Fig. 86.—Plan of great temple, Luxor.]
[Illustration: Fig. 87.—Plan of the Isle of Philae.]
Thus designed, the building sufficed for all the needs of worship. If enlargement was needed, the sanctuary and surrounding chambers were generally left untouched, and only the ceremonial parts of the building, as the hypostyle halls, the courts, or pylons, were attacked. The procedure of the Egyptians under these circumstances is best illustrated by the history of the great temple of Karnak. Founded by Usertesen I., probably on the site of a still earlier temple, it was but a small building, constructed of limestone and sandstone, with granite doorways. The inside was decorated with sixteen-sided pillars. The second and third Amenemhats added some work to it, and the princes of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Dynasties adorned it with statues and tables of offerings. It was still unaltered when, in the eighteenth century B.C., Thothmes I., enriched with booty of war, resolved to enlarge it. In advance of what already stood there, he erected two chambers, preceded by a court and flanked by two isolated chapels. In advance of these again, he erected three successive pylons, one behind the other. The whole presented the appearance of a vast rectangle placed crosswise at the end of another rectangle. Thothmes II. and Hatshepsut[18] covered the walls erected by their father with bas-relief sculptures, but added no more buildings. Hatshepsut, however, in order to bring in her obelisks between the pylons of Thothmes I., opened a breach in the south wall, and overthrew sixteen of the columns which stood in that spot. Thothmes III., probably finding certain parts of the structure unworthy of the god, rebuilt the first pylon, and also the double sanctuary, which he renewed in the red granite of Syene. To the eastward, he rebuilt some old chambers, the most important among them being the processional hall, used for the starting-point and halting-place of ceremonial processions, and these he surrounded with a stone wall. He also made the lake whereon the sacred boats were launched on festival days; and, with a sharp change of axis, he built two pylons facing towards the south, thus violating the true relative proportion which had till then subsisted between the body and the front of the general mass of the building. The outer enclosure was now too large for the earlier pylons, and did not properly accord with the later ones. Amenhotep III. corrected this defect. He erected a sixth and yet more massive pylon, which was, therefore, better suited for the facade. As it now stood (fig. 84), the temple surpassed even the boldest architectural enterprises hitherto attempted; but the Pharaohs of the Nineteenth Dynasty succeeded in achieving still more. They added only a hypostyle hall (fig. 85) and a pylon; but the hypostyle hall measured 170 feet in length by 329 feet in breadth. Down the centre they carried a main avenue of twelve columns, with lotus-flower capitals, being the loftiest ever erected in the interior of a building; while in the aisles, ranged in seven
[Illustration: Fig. 88.—Plan of Speos, Kalaat Addah, Nubia.]
[Illustration: Fig, 89.—Plan of Speos, Gebel Silsileh.]
[Illustration: Fig. 90.—Plan of the Great Speos, Abu Simbel.]
[Illustration: Fig. 91.—Speos of Hathor, Abu Simbel.]
[Illustration: Fig. 92.—Plan of the upper portion of the temple of Deir el Bahari, showing the state of the excavations, the Speos of Hathor (A); the rock-cut sanctuary (B); the rock-cut funerary chapel of Thothmes I. (C); the Speos of Anubis (D); and the excavated niches of the northern colonnade. Reproduced from Plate III. of the Archaeological Report of the Egypt Exploration Fund for 1893-4.]
[Illustration: Fig. 93.—Plan of temple of Seti I., at Abydos.]
The idea of the rock-cut temple must have occurred to the Egyptians at an early period. They carved the houses of the dead in the mountain side; why, therefore, should they not in like manner carve the houses of the gods? Yet the earliest known Speos-sanctuaries date from only the beginning of the Eighteenth Dynasty. They are generally found in those parts of the valley where the cultivable land is narrowest, as near Beni Hasan, at Gebel Silsileh, and in Nubia. All varieties of the constructed temple are found in the rock-cut temple, though more or less modified by local conditions. The Speos Artemidos is approached by a pillared portico, but contains only a square chamber with a niche at the end for the statue of the goddess Pakhet. At Kalaat Addah (fig. 88), a flat narrow facade (A) faces the river, and is reached by a steep flight of steps; next comes a hypostyle hall (B), flanked by two dark chambers (C), and lastly a sanctuary in two storeys, one above the other (D). The chapel of Horemheb (fig. 89), at Gebel Silsileh, is formed of a gallery parallel to the river (A), supported by four massive pillars left in the rock. From this gallery, the sanctuary chamber opens at right angles. At Abu Simbel, the two temples are excavated entirely in the cliff. The front of the great speos (fig. 90) imitates a sloping pylon crowned with a cornice, and guarded as usual by four seated colossi flanked by smaller statues. These colossi are sixty-six feet high. The doorway passed, there comes a first hall measuring 130 feet in length by 60 feet in width, which corresponds to the usual peristyle. Eight Osiride statues backed by as many square pillars, seem to bear the mountain on their heads. Beyond this come (1) a hypostyle hall; (2) a transverse gallery, isolating the sanctuary, and (3) the sanctuary itself, between two smaller chambers. Eight crypts, sunk at a somewhat lower level than that of the main excavation, are unequally distributed to right and left of the peristyle. The whole excavation measures 180 feet from the doorway to the end of the sanctuary. The small speos of Hathor, about a hundred paces to the northward, is of smaller dimensions. The facade is adorned with six standing colossi, four representing
Between the hemi-speos and the isolated temple, the Egyptians created yet another variety, namely, the built temple backed by, but not carried into, the cliff. The temple of the sphinx at Gizeh, and the temple of Seti I. at Abydos, may be cited as two good examples. I have already described the former; the area of the latter (fig. 93) was cleared in a narrow and shallow belt of sand, which here divides the plain from the desert. It was sunk up to the roof, the tops of the walls but just showing above the level of the ground. The staircase which led up to the terraced roof led also to the top of the hill. The front, which stood completely out, seemed in nowise extraordinary. It was approached by two pylons, two courts, and a shallow portico supported on square pillars. The unusual part of the building only began beyond this point. First, there were two hypostyle halls instead of one. These are separated by a wall with seven doorways. There is no nave, and the sanctuary opens direct from the second hall. This, as usual, consists of an oblong chamber with a door at each end; but the rooms by which it is usually surrounded are here placed side by side in a line, two to the right and four to the left; further, they are covered by “corbelled” vaults, and are lighted only from the doors. Behind the sanctuary are further novelties. Another hypostyle hall (K) abuts on the end wall, and its dependencies are unequally distributed to right and left. As if this were not enough, the architect also constructed, to the left of the main building, a court, five chambers of columns, various passages and dark chambers—in short, an entire wing branching off at right angles to the axis of the temple proper, with no counterbalancing structures on the other side. These irregularities become intelligible when the site is examined. The cliff is shallow at this part, and the smaller
[Illustration: Fig. 94.—Crio-sphinx from Wady Es Sabuah.]
[Illustration: Fig. 95.—Couchant ram, with statuette of royal founder, restored from the Avenue of Sphinxes at Karnak.]
Most temples, even the smallest, should be surrounded by a square enclosure or temenos.[20] At Medinet Habu, this enclosure wall is of sandstone—low, and embattled. The innovation is due to a whim of Rameses III., who, in giving to his monument the outward appearance of a fortress, sought to commemorate his Syrian victories. Elsewhere, the doorways are of stone, and the walls are built in irregular courses of crude bricks. The great enclosure wall was not, as frequently stated, intended to isolate the temple and screen the priestly ceremonies from eyes profane. It marked the limits of the divine dwelling, and served, when needful, to resist the attacks of enemies whose cupidity might be excited by the accumulated riches of the sanctuary. As at Karnak, avenues of sphinxes and series of pylons led up to the various gates, and formed triumphal approaches. The rest of the ground was in part occupied by stables, cellarage, granaries, and private houses. Just as in Europe during the Middle Ages the population crowded most densely round about the churches and abbeys, so in Egypt they swarmed around the temples, profiting by that security which the terror of his name and the solidity of his ramparts ensured to the local deity. A clear space was at first reserved round the pylons and the walls; but in course of time the houses encroached upon this ground, and were even built up against the boundary wall. Destroyed and rebuilt century after century upon the self-same spot, the debris of these surrounding dwellings so raised the level of the soil, that the temples ended for the most part by being gradually buried in a hollow formed by the artificial elevation of the surrounding city. Herodotus noticed this at Bubastis, and on examination it is seen to have been the same in many other localities. At Ombos, at Edfu, at Denderah, the whole city nestled inside the precincts of the divine dwelling. At El Kab, where the temple temenos formed a separate enclosure within the boundary of the city walls, it
[14] Hor-shesu, “followers,” or
“servants of Horus,” are mentioned
in the Turin papyrus as the
predecessors of Mena, and are referred to
in monumental inscriptions
as representing the pre-historic people of
Egypt. It is to the Hor-shesu
that Professors Maspero and Mariette
attribute the making of the
Great Sphinx.—A.B.E.
[15] For a full description of the oldest funerary
chapel known, that of
King Sneferu, see W.M.F.
Petrie’s Medum.
[16] Conf. Mr. Petrie’s plan of this temple
in Pyramids and Temples of
Gizeh, Plate VI.—A.B.E.
[17] That is to say, the wall is vertical on the inside;
but is
built much thicker at the
bottom than at the top, so that on the
outside it presents a sloping
surface, retiring with the height of
the wall.—A.B.E.
[18] “Hatshepsut,” more commonly known
as “Hatasu;” the new reading is,
however, more correct.
Professor Maspero thinks that it was pronounced
“Hatshopsitu.”—A.B.E.
[19] For full illustrated account of the complete
excavation of this
temple, see the Deir el
Bahari publications of the Egypt
Exploration Fund.
[20] Temenos, i.e., the enclosure wall of the
Temple, within which
all was holy ground.—A.B.E.
3.—DECORATION.
[Illustration: Figs. 96 to 101.—DECORATIVE DESIGNS, FROM DENDERAH.]
[Illustration: Fig. 96.]
[Illustration: Fig. 97.]
[Illustration: Fig. 98.]
[Illustration: Fig. 99.]
[Illustration: Fig. 100.]
[Illustration: Fig. 101.]
[Illustration: Fig. 102.—Two Nile-gods, bearing lotus flowers and libation vases.]
[Illustration: Fig. 103.—Dado decoration, hall of Thothmes III., Karnak.]
[Illustration: Fig. 104.—Ceiling decoration, from tomb of Bakenrenf (Bocchoris), Sakkarah, Twenty-sixth Dynasty.]
Ancient tradition affirmed that the earliest Egyptian temples contained neither sculptured images, inscriptions, nor symbols; and in point of fact, the Temple of the Sphinx is bare. But this is a unique example. The fragments of architraves and masonry bearing the name of Khafra, which were used for building material in the northern pyramid of Lisht, show that this primitive simplicity had already been abandoned by the time of the Fourth Dynasty. During the Theban period, all smooth surfaces, all pylons, wall-faces, and shafts of columns, were covered with figure-groups and inscriptions. Under the Ptolemies and the Caesars, figures and hieroglyphs became so crowded that the stone on which they are sculptured seems to be lost under the masses of ornament with which it is charged. We recognise at a glance that these scenes are not placed at random. They follow in sequence, are interlinked, and form as it were a great mystic book in which the official relations between gods and men, as well as between men and gods, are clearly set forth for such as are skilled to read them. The temple was built in the likeness of the world, as the world was known to the Egyptians. The earth, as they believed, was a flat and shallow plane, longer than its width. The sky, according to some, extended overhead like an immense iron ceiling, and according to others, like a huge shallow vault. As it could not remain suspended in space without some support, they imagined it to be held in place by four immense props or pillars. The floor of the temple naturally represented the earth. The columns, and if needful the four corners of the chambers, stood for the pillars. The roof, vaulted at Abydos, flat elsewhere, corresponded exactly with the Egyptian idea of the sky. Each of these parts was, therefore, decorated in consonance with its meaning. Those next to the ground were clothed with vegetation. The bases of the columns were surrounded by leaves, and the lower parts of the walls were adorned with long stems of lotus or papyrus (fig. 96), in the midst of which animals were occasionally depicted. Bouquets of water-plants emerging from the water (fig. 97), enlivened the bottom of the wall-space in certain chambers. Elsewhere, we find full-blown flowers interspersed with buds (fig. 98), or tied together with cords (fig. 99); or those emblematic plants which symbolise the union of Upper and Lower Egypt under the rule of a single Pharaoh (fig. 100); or birds with
[Illustration: Fig. 105.—Zodiacal circle of Denderah.]
These scenes illustrate the official relations which subsisted between Egypt and the gods. The people had no right of direct intercourse with the deities. They needed a mediator, who, partaking of both human and divine nature, was qualified to communicate with both. The king alone, Son of the Sun, was of sufficiently high descent to contemplate the god in his temple, to serve him, and to speak with him face to face. Sacrifices could be offered only by him, or through him, and in his name. Even the
[Illustration: Fig. 106.—Frieze of uraei and cartouches.]
In Pharaonic times, the tableaux were not over-crowded. The wall-surface intended to be covered was marked off below by a line carried just above the ground level decoration, and was bounded above by the usual cornice, or by a frieze. This frieze might be composed of uraei, or of bunches of lotus; or of royal cartouches (fig. 106) supported on either side by divine symbols; or of emblems borrowed from the local cult (by heads of Hathor, for instance, in a temple dedicated to Hathor); or of a horizontal line of dedicatory inscription engraved in large and deeply-cut hieroglyphs. The wall space thus framed in contained sometimes a single scene and sometimes two scenes, one above the other. The wall must be very lofty, if this number is exceeded. Figures and inscriptions were widely spaced, and the scenes succeeded one another with scarcely a break. The spectator had to discover for himself where they began or ended. The head of the king was always studied from the life, and the faces of the gods reproduced the royal portrait as closely as possible. As Pharaoh was the son of the gods, the surest way to obtain portraits of the gods was to model their faces after the face of the king. The secondary figures were no less carefully wrought; but when these were very numerous, they were arranged on two or three levels, the total height of which never exceeded that of the principal personages. The offerings, the sceptres, the jewels, the vestments, the head-dresses, and all the accessories were treated with a genuine feeling for elegance and truth. The colours, moreover, were so combined as to produce in each tableau the effect of one general and prevailing tone; so that in many temples there were chambers which can be justly distinguished as the Blue Hall, the Red Hall, or the Golden Hall. So much for the classical period of decoration.
[Illustration: Fig. 107.—Wall of a chamber at Denderah, to show the arrangement of the tableaux.]
As we come down to later times, these tableaux are multiplied, and under the Greeks and Romans they become so numerous that the smallest wall contained not less than four (fig. 107), five, six, or even eight registers. The principal figures are, as it were, compressed, so as to occupy less room, and all the intermediate space is crowded with thousands of tiny hieroglyphs. The gods and kings are no longer portraits of the reigning sovereign, but mere conventional types without vigour or life. As for the secondary figures and accessories, the sculptor’s only care is to crowd in as many as possible. This was not due to a defect of taste, and to the prevalence of a religious idea which decided but enforced these changes. The object of decoration was not merely the delight of the eye. Applied to a piece of furniture, a coffin, a house, a temple, decoration possessed a certain magic property, of which the power and nature were determined by each being or action represented, by each word inscribed or spoken, at the moment of consecration. Every subject was, therefore, an amulet as well as an ornament. So long as it endured, it ensured to the god the continuance of homage rendered, or sacrifices offered, by the king. To the king, whether living or dead, it confirmed the favours granted to him by the god in recompense for his piety. It also preserved from destruction the very wall upon which it was depicted. At the time of the Eighteenth Dynasty, it was thought that two or three such amulets sufficed to compass the desired effect; but at a later period it was believed that their number could not be too freely multiplied, and the walls were covered with as many as the surface would contain. An average chamber of Edfu or Denderah yields more material for study than the hypostyle hall of Karnak; and the chapel of Antoninus Pius at Philae, had it been finished, would have contained more scenes than the sanctuary of Luxor and the passages by which it is surrounded.
Observing the variety of subjects treated on the walls of any one temple, one might at first be tempted to think that the decoration does not form a connected whole, and that, although many series of scenes must undoubtedly contain the development of an historic idea or a religious dogma, yet that others are merely strung together without any necessary link. At Luxor, and again at the Ramesseum, each face of the pylon is a battle-field on which may be studied, almost day for day, the campaign of Rameses II. against the Kheta, which took place in the fifth year of his reign. There we see the Egyptian camp attacked by night; the king’s bodyguard surprised during the march; the defeat of the enemy; their flight; the garrison of Kadesh sallying forth to the relief of the vanquished; and the disasters which befell the prince of the Kheta and his generals. Elsewhere, it is not the war which is represented, but the human sacrifices which anciently celebrated the close of each campaign.
[Illustration: Fig. 108.—Obelisk of Usertesen I., of Heliopolis.]
Nor was this all. Each part of the temple had its accessory decoration and its furniture. The outer faces of the pylons were ornamented, not only with the masts and streamers before mentioned, but with statues and obelisks. The statues, four or six in number, were of limestone, granite, or sandstone. They invariably represented the royal founder, and were sometimes of prodigious size. The two Memnons seated at the entrance of the temple of Amenhotep III., at Thebes, measured about fifty feet in height. The colossal Rameses II. of the Ramesseum measured fifty-seven feet, and that of Tanis at least seventy feet. The greater number, however, did not exceed twenty feet. They mounted guard before the temple, facing outwards, as if confronting an approaching enemy. The obelisks of Karnak are mostly hidden amid the central courts; and those of Queen Hatshepsut were imbedded for seventeen feet of their height in masses of masonry which concealed their bases. These are accidental circumstances, and easy of explanation. Each of the pylons before which they are stationed had in its turn been the entrance to the temple, and was thrown into the rear by the works of succeeding Pharaohs. The true place of all obelisks was in front of the colossi, on each side of the main entrance.[22] They are always in pairs, but often of unequal height. Some have professed to see in them the emblem of Amen, the Generator; or a finger of the god; or a ray of the sun. In sober truth, they are a more shapely form of the standing stone, or menhir, which is raised by semi-civilised peoples in commemoration of their gods or their dead. Small obelisks, about three feet in height, are found in tombs as early as the Fourth Dynasty. They are placed to right and left of the stela; that is to say, on either side of the door which leads to the dwelling of the dead. Erected before the pylon-gates of temples, they are made of granite, and their dimensions are considerable. The obelisk of Heliopolis (fig. 108) measures sixty-eight feet in the shaft, and the obelisks of Luxor stand seventy-seven and seventy-five and a half feet high, respectively. The loftiest known is the obelisk of Queen Hatshepsut at Karnak, which rises to a height of 109 feet. To convey such masses, and to place them in equilibrium, was a sufficiently difficult task, and one is at a loss to understand how the Egyptians succeeded in erecting them with no other appliances than ropes and sacks of sand. Queen Hatshepsut boasts that her obelisks were quarried, shaped, transported, and erected in seven months; and we have no reason to doubt the truth of her statement.[23]
[Illustration: Fig. 109.—Obelisk of Usertesen I., Begig, Fayum.]
Obelisks were almost always square, with the faces slightly convex, and a slight slope from top to bottom. The pedestal was formed of a single square block adorned with inscriptions, or with cynocephali in high relief, adoring the sun. The point was cut as a pyramidion, and sometimes covered with bronze or gilt copper. Scenes of offerings to Ra Harmakhis, Hor, Tum, or Amen are engraved on the sides of the pyramidion and on the upper part of the prism. The four upright faces are generally decorated with only vertical lines of inscription in praise of the king (Note 11). Such is the usual type of obelisk; but we here and there meet with exceptions. That of Begig in the Fayum (fig. 109) is in shape a rectangular oblong, with a blunt top. A groove upon it shows that it was surmounted by some emblem in metal, perhaps a hawk, like the obelisk represented on a funerary stela in the Gizeh Museum. This form, which like the first is a survival of the menhir, was in vogue till the last days of Egyptian art. It is even found at Axum, in the middle of Ethiopia, dating from about the fourth century of our era, at a time when in Egypt the ancient obelisks were being carried out of the country, and none dreamed of erecting new ones. Such was the accessory decoration of the pylon. The inner courts and hypostyle halls of the temple contained more colossi. Some, placed with their backs against the outer sides of pillars or walls, were half engaged in the masonry, and built up in courses. At Luxor under the peristyle, and at Karnak between each column of the great nave, were also placed statues of Pharaoh; but these were statues of Pharaoh the victor, clad in his robe of state. The right of consecrating a statue in the temple was above all a royal prerogative; yet the king sometimes permitted private persons to dedicate their statues by the side of his own. This was, however, a special favour, and such monuments always bear an inscription stating that it is “by the king’s grace” that they occupy that position. Rarely as this privilege was granted, it resulted in a vast accumulation of votive statues, so that in the course of centuries the courts of some temples became crowded with them. At Karnak, the sanctuary enclosure was furnished outside with a kind of broad bench, breast high, like a long base. Upon this the statues were placed, with their backs to the wall. Attached to each was an oblong block of stone, with a projecting spout on one side; these are known as “tables of offerings” (fig. 110). The upper face is more or less hollowed, and is often sculptured with bas-relief representations of loaves, joints of beef, libation vases, and other objects usually presented to the dead or to the gods. Those of King Ameni Entef Amenemhat, at Gizeh, are blocks of red granite more than three feet in length, the top of which is hollowed out in regular rows of cup-holes, each cup-hole being reserved for one particular offering. There was, in fact, an established form of worship provided for statues, and these tables were really altars upon which were deposited sacrificial offerings of meat, cakes, fruits, vegetables, and the like.
[Illustration: Fig. 110.—Table of offerings, Karnak.]
[Illustration: Fig. 111.—Limestone altar.]
[Illustration: Fig.112.—Naos of wood in the Museum at Turin.]
The sanctuary and the surrounding chambers contained the objects used in the ceremonial of worship. The bases of altars varied in shape, some being square and massive, others polygonal or cylindrical. Some of these last are in form not unlike a small cannon, which is the name given to them by the Arabs. The most ancient are those of the Fifth Dynasty; the most beautiful is one dedicated by Seti I., now in the Gizeh Museum. The only perfect specimen of an altar known to me was discovered at Menshiyeh in 1884 (fig. 111). It is of white limestone, hard and polished like marble. It stands upon a pedestal in the form of a long cone, having no other ornament than a torus about half an inch below the top. Upon this pedestal, in a hollow specially prepared for its reception, stands a large hemispherical basin. The shrines are little chapels of wood or stone (fig. 112), in which the spirit of the deity was supposed at all times to dwell, and which, on ceremonial occasions, contained his image. The sacred barks were built after the model of the Bari, or boat, in which the sun performed his daily course. The shrine was placed amidship of the boat, and covered with a veil, or curtain, to conceal its contents from all spectators. The crew were also represented, each god being at his post of duty, the pilot at the helm, the look-out at the prow, the king upon his knees before the door of the shrine. We have not as yet discovered any of the statues employed in the ceremonial, but we know what they were like, what part they played, and of what materials they were made. They were animated, and in addition to their bodies of stone, metal, or wood, they had each a soul magically derived from the soul of the divinity which they represented. They spoke, moved, acted—not metaphorically, but actually. The later Ramessides ventured upon no enterprises without consulting them. They stated their difficulties, and the god replied to each question by a movement of the head. According to the Stela of Bakhtan,[24] a statue of Khonsu places its hands four times on the nape of the neck of another statue, so transmitting the power of expelling demons. It was after a conversation with the statue of Amen in the dusk of the sanctuary, that Queen Hatshepsut despatched her squadron to the shores of the Land of Incense.[25] Theoretically, the divine soul of the image was understood to be the only miracle worker; practically, its speech and motion were the results of a pious fraud. Interminable avenues of sphinxes, gigantic obelisks, massive pylons, halls of a hundred columns, mysterious chambers of perpetual night—in a word, the whole Egyptian temple and its dependencies—were built by way of a hiding-place for a performing puppet, of which the wires were worked by a priest.
[21] That is, the spirits of the North, represented
by On (Heliopolis), and
of the South (Khonu).—A.B.E.
[22] At Tanis there seems to have been a close succession
of obelisks and
statues along the main avenue
leading to the Temple, without the usual
corresponding pylons.
These were ranged in pairs; i.e., a pair
of obelisks, a pair of statues;
a pair of obelisks, a pair of shrines;
and then a third pair of obelisks.
See Tanis, Part I., by
W.M.F. Petrie, published
by the Egypt Exploration Fund, 1884.—A.B.E.
[23] This fact is recorded in the hieroglyphic inscription
upon the
obelisks.—A.B.E.
[24] This celebrated tablet, preserved in the Bibliotheque
Nationale,
Paris, has been frequently
translated, and is the subject of a
valuable treatise by the late
Vicomte de Rouge. It was considered
authentic till Dr. Erman,
in an admirable paper contributed to the
Zeitschrift, 1883,
showed it to have been a forgery concocted
by the priests of Khonsu during
the period of the Persian rule in
Egypt, or in early Ptolemaic
times. (See Maspero’s Hist. Ancienne
des Peuples de l’Orient,
chap, vi., pp. 287, 288. Fourth
Edition.)—A.B.E.
[25] The Land of Incense, called also in the inscriptions
“The Land of
Punt,” was the country
from which the Egyptians imported spices,
precious woods, gums, etc.
It is supposed to represent the southern
coasts of the Red Sea, on
either side the Bab el Mandeb. Queen
Hatshepsut’s famous
expedition is represented in a series of coloured
bas-relief sculptures on the
walls of her great temple at Deir el
Bahari, reproduced in Dr.
Duemichen’s work, The Fleet of an Egyptian
Queen, and in Mariette’s
Deir el Bahari. For a full account
of this temple, its decoration,
and the expedition of Hatshepsut, see
the Deir el Bahari
publications of the Egypt Exploration Fund.
TOMBS.
The Egyptians regarded man as composed of various different entities, each having its separate life and functions. First, there was the body; then the Ka or double, which was a less solid duplicate of the corporeal form—a coloured but ethereal projection of the individual, reproducing him feature for feature. The double of a child was as a child; the double of a woman was as a woman; the double of a man was as a man. After the double (Ka) came the Soul (Bi or Ba), which was popularly represented as a human-headed bird; after the Soul came the “Khu,” or “the Luminous,” a spark from the divine fire. None of these elements were in their own natures imperishable. Left to themselves, they would hasten to dissolution, and the man would thus die a second time; that is to say,
[26] These three parts are (l) the chapel, (2) the
passage, or shaft, (3)
the sepulchral vault.
If the latter was below the level of the chapel,
as in the time of the Ancient
Empire, the communication was by a
sloping or vertical shaft.—A.B.E.
The most ancient monumental tombs are found in the necropolis of Memphis, between Abu Roash and Dahshur, and in that of Medum;[27] they belong to the mastaba type (Note 12). The mastaba (fig. 113) is a quadrangular building, which from a distance might be taken for a truncated pyramid. Many mastabas are from 30 to 40-feet in height, 150 feet in length, and 80 feet in width; while others do not exceed 10 feet in height or 15 feet in length. The faces are symmetrically inclined and generally smooth, though sometimes the courses retreat like steps. The materials employed are stone or brick. The stone is limestone, cut in blocks about two and a half feet long, two feet
[Illustration: Fig. 113.—A Mastaba.]
The later kind is of mud mixed with straw, black, compact, carefully moulded, and of a fair size (15.0 X 7.1 X 5.5 inches). The style of the internal construction differs according to the material employed by the architect. In nine cases out of ten, the stone mastabas are but outwardly regular in construction. The core is of roughly quarried rubble, mixed with rubbish and limestone fragments hastily bedded in layers of mud, or piled up without any kind of mortar. The brick mastabas are nearly always of homogeneous construction. The facing bricks are carefully mortared, and the joints inside are filled up with sand. That the mastaba should be canonically oriented, the four faces set to the four cardinal points, and the longer axis laid from north and south, was indispensable; but, practically, the masons took no special care about finding the true north, and the orientation of these structures is seldom exact. At Gizeh, the mastabas are distributed according to a symmetrical plan, and ranged in regular streets. At Sakkarah, at Abusir, and at Dahshur, they are scattered irregularly over the surface of the plateau, crowded in some places, and wide apart in others. The Mussulman cemetery at Siut perpetuates the like arrangement, and enables us to this day to realise the aspect of the Memphite necropolis towards the close of the ancient empire.
[Illustration: Fig. 114.—False door in mastaba, from Mariette’s Les Mastabahs.]
[Illustration: Fig. 115.—Plan of forecourt of mastaba of Kaapir.]
A flat, unpaved platform, formed by the top course of the core (Note 13), covers the top of the mass of the mastaba. This platform is scattered over with terracotta vases, nearly buried in the loose rubbish. These lie thickly over the hollow interior, but are more sparsely deposited elsewhere. The walls are bare. The doors face to the eastward side. They occasionally face towards the north or south side, but never towards the west. In theory, there should be two doors, one for the dead, the other for the living. In practice, the entrance for the dead was a mere niche, high and narrow, cut in the eastward face, near the north-east corner. At the back of this niche are marked vertical lines, framing in a closed space. Even this imitation of a door was sometimes omitted, and the soul was left
[Illustration: Fig. 116.—Plan of forecourt, mastaba of Neferhotep.]
[Illustration: Fig. 117.—Door in facade of mastaba.]
[Illustration: Fig. 118.—Portico and door, from Mariette’s Les Mastabahs.]
[Illustration: Fig. 119.—Plan of chapel in mastaba of Khabiusokari, Fourth Dynasty.]
[Illustration: Fig. 120.—Plan of chapel in mastaba of Ti, Fifth Dynasty.]
[Illustration: Fig. 121.—Plan of chapel in mastaba of Shepsesptah, Fourth Dynasty.]
[Illustration: Fig. 122.—Plan of chapel in mastaba of Affi, Sakkarah, Fourth Dynasty.]
The chapel was usually small, and lost in the mass of the building (fig. 119), but no precise rule determined its size. In the tomb of Ti there is first a portico (A), then a square ante-chamber with pillars (B), then a passage (C) with a small room (D) on the right, leading to the last chamber (E) (fig. 120). There was room enough in this tomb for many persons, and, in point of fact, the wife of Ti reposed by the side of her husband. When the monument belonged to only one person, the structure was less complicated. A short and narrow passage led to an oblong chamber upon which it opened at right angles, so that the place is in shape of a T (fig. 121). The end wall is generally smooth; but sometimes it is recessed just opposite the entrance passage, and then the plan forms a cross, of which the head is longer or shorter (fig. 122). This was the ordinary arrangement, but the architect was free to reject it, if he so pleased. Here, a chapel consists of two parallel lobbies connected by a cross passage (fig. 123). Elsewhere, the chamber opens from a corner of the passage (fig. 124). Again, in the tomb of Ptahhotep, the site was hemmed in by older buildings, and was not large enough. The builders therefore joined the new mastaba to the older one in such wise as to give them one entrance in common, and thus the chapel of the one is enlarged by absorbing the whole of the space occupied by the other (fig. 125).
[Illustration: Fig. 123.—Plan of chapel in mastaba of Thenti II., Fourth Dynasty, Sakkarah.]
[Illustration: Fig. 124.—Plan of chapel in mastaba of the Red Scribe, Fourth Dynasty, Sakkarah.]
The chapel was the reception room of the Double. It was there that the relations, friends, and priests celebrated the funerary sacrifices on the days prescribed by law; that is to say, “at the feasts of the commencement of the seasons; at the feast of Thoth on the first day of the year; at the feast of Uaga; at the great feast of Sothis; on the day of the procession of the god Min; at the feast of shew-bread; at the feasts of the months and the half months, and the days of the week.” Offerings were placed in the principal room, at the foot of the west wall, at the exact spot leading to the entrance of the “eternal home” of the dead. Unlike the Kiblah of the mosques, or Mussulman oratories, this point is not always oriented towards the same quarter of the compass, though often found to the west. In the earliest times it was indicated by a real door, low and narrow, framed and decorated like the door of an ordinary house, but not pierced through. An inscription graven upon the lintel in large readable characters, commemorated the name and rank of the owner. His portrait, either sitting or standing, was carved upon the jambs; and a scene, sculptured or painted on the space above the door, represented him seated before a small round table, stretching out his hand towards the repast placed upon it. A flat slab, or offering table, built into the floor between the two uprights of the doorway, received the votive meats and drinks.
[Illustration: Fig. 125.—Plan of chapel in mastaba of Ptahhotep, Fifth Dynasty, Sakkarah.]
[Illustration: Fig. 126.—Stela in tomb of Merruka (Fifth Dynasty, Abusir): a false doorway containing the statue of the deceased.]
The general appearance of the recess is that of a somewhat narrow doorway. As a rule it was empty, but occasionally it contained a portrait statue of the dead standing with one foot forward as though about to cross the gloomy threshold of his tomb, descend the few steps before him, advance into his reception room or chapel, and pass out into the sunlight (fig. 126). As a matter of fact, the stela symbolised the door leading to the private apartments of the dead, a door closed and sealed to the living. It was inscribed on door-posts and lintels, and its inscription was no mere epitaph for the information of future generations; all the details which it gave as to the name, rank, functions, and family of the deceased were intended to secure the continuity of his individuality and civil status in the life beyond death. A further and essential object of its inscriptions was to provide him with food and drink by means of prayers or magic formulae constraining one of the gods of the dead—Osiris or Anubis—to act as intermediary between him and his survivors
[Illustration: Fig. 127.—Wall scene of funerary offerings, from mastaba of Ptahhotep, Fifth Dynasty.]
[Illustration: Fig. 128.—Wall-painting, funeral voyage; mastaba of Urkhuu, Gizeh, Fourth Dynasty.]
[Illustration: Fig. 129.—Wall-scene from mastaba of Ptahhotep, Fifth Dynasty.]
The living having taken their departure, the Double was supposed to come out of his house and feed. In principle, this ceremony was bound to be renewed year by year, till the end of time; but the Egyptians ere long discovered that this could not be. After two or three generations, the dead of former days were neglected for the benefit of those more recently departed. Even when a pious foundation was established, with a revenue payable for the expenses of the funerary repasts and of the priests whose duty it was to prepare them, the evil hour of oblivion was put off for only a little longer. Sooner or later, there came a time when the Double was reduced to seek his food among the town refuse, and amid the ignoble and corrupt filth which lay rejected on the ground. Then, in order that the offerings consecrated on the day of burial might for ever preserve their virtues, the survivors conceived the idea of drawing and describing them on the walls of the chapel (fig. 127). The painted or sculptured reproduction of persons and things ensured the reality of those persons and things for the benefit of the one on whose account they were executed. Thus the Double saw himself depicted upon the walls in the act of eating and drinking, and he ate and drank. This notion once accepted, the theologians and artists carried it out to the fullest extent. Not content with offering mere pictured provisions, they added thereto the semblance of the domains which produced them, together with the counterfeit presentment of the herds, workmen, and slaves belonging to the same. Was a supply of meat required to last for eternity? It was enough, no doubt, to represent the several parts of an ox or a gazelle—the shoulder, the leg, the ribs, the breast, the heart, the liver, the head, properly prepared for the spit; but it was equally easy to retrace the whole history of the animal—its birth, its life in the pasture-lands, its slaughter, the cutting up of the carcass, and the presentation of the joints. So also as regarded the cakes and bread-offerings, there was no reason why the whole process of tillage,
[Illustration: Fig. 130. Plan of serdab in mastaba at Gizeh, Fourth Dynasty.]
The details are of infinite variety. The inscriptions run to a less or greater length according to the caprice of the scribe; the false door loses its architectural character, and is frequently replaced by a mere stela engraved with the name and rank of the master; yet, whether large or small, whether richly decorated or not decorated at all, the chapel is always the dining-room—or, rather, the larder—to which the dead man has access when he feels hungry.
[Illustration: Fig. 131.—Plan of serdab and chapel in mastaba of Rahotep at Sakkarah, Fourth Dynasty.]
[Illustration: Fig. 132.—Plan of serdab and chapel in mastaba of Thenti I. at Sakkarah, Fourth Dynasty.]
On the other side of the wall was constructed a hiding-place in the form of either a high and narrow cell, or a passage without outlet. To this hiding-place archaeologists have given the Arab name of “serdab.” Most mastabas contain but one; others contain three or four (fig. 130). These serdabs communicated neither with each other nor with the chapel; and are, as it were, buried in the masonry (fig. 131). If connected at all with the outer world, it is by means of an aperture in the wall about as high up as a man’s head (fig. 132), and so small that the hand can with difficulty pass through it. To this orifice came the priests, with murmured prayers and perfumes of incense. Within lurked the Double, ready to profit by these memorial rites, or to accept them through the medium of his statues. As when he lived upon earth, the man needed a body in which to exist. His corpse, disfigured by the process of embalmment, bore but a distant resemblance to its former self. The mummy, again, was destructible,
[Illustration: Fig. 133.—Section showing shaft and vault of mastaba at Gizeh, Fourth Dynasty.]
[Illustration: Fig. 134.—Section of mastaba, Sakkarah, Sixth Dynasty.]
[Illustration: Fig. 135.—Wall painting of funerary offerings, from mastaba of Nenka, Sakkarah, Sixth Dynasty.]
Up to the time of the Sixth Dynasty, the walls of the vault are left bare. Once only did Mariette find a vault containing half-effaced inscriptions from The Book of the Dead. In 1881, I however discovered some tombs at Sakkarah, in which the vault is decorated in preference to the chapel. These tombs are built with large bricks, a niche and a stela sufficing for the reception of sacrificial offerings. In place of the shaft, they contain a small rectangular court, in the western corner of which was placed the sarcophagus. Over the sarcophagus was erected a limestone chamber just as long and as wide as the sarcophagus itself, and about three and a half feet high. This was roofed in with flat slabs. At the end, or in the wall to the right, was a niche, which answered the purpose of a serdab; and above the flat roof was next constructed an arch of about one foot and a half radius, the space above the arch being filled in with horizontal courses of brickwork up to the level of the platform. The chamber occupies about two-thirds of the cavity, and looks like an oven with the mouth open. Sometimes the stone walls rest on the lid of the sarcophagus, the chamber having evidently been built after the interment had taken place (fig. 134). Generally speaking, however, these walls rest on brick supports, so that the sarcophagus may be opened or closed when required. The decoration, which is sometimes painted, sometimes sculptured, is always the same. Each wall was a house stocked with the objects depicted or catalogued upon its surface, and each was, therefore, carefully provided with a fictitious door, through which the Double had access to his goods. On the left wall he found a pile of provisions (fig. 135)[29] and a table of offerings; on the end wall a store of household utensils, as well as a supply of linen and perfumes, the name and quantity of each being duly registered. These paintings more briefly sum up the scenes depicted in the chapels of ordinary mastabas. Transferred from their original position to the walls of an underground cellar, they were the more surely guaranteed against such possible destruction as might befall them in chambers open to all comers; while upon their preservation depended the length of time during which the dead man would retain possession of the property which they represented.
[27] For an account of the necropolis of Medum, see
W.M.F. Petrie’s
Medum.
[28] The sarcophagus of Menkara, unfortunately lost
at sea when on its way
to England, was of this type.
See illustration No. 19, Chapter III.,
in Sir E. Wilson’s Egypt
of the Past.—A.B.E.
[29] This wall scene is from the tomb of Nenka, near
Sakkarah. For a
coloured facsimile on a large
scale, see Professor Maspero’s article
entitled “Trois Annees
de Fouilles,” in Memoires de la Mission
Archeologique Francaise du
Caire, Pl. 2. 1884.—A.B.E.
2.—THE PYRAMIDS.
[For the following translation of this section of Professor Maspero’s book I am indebted to the kindness of Mr. W.M. Flinders Petrie, whose work on The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh, published with the assistance of a grant from the Royal Society in 1883, constitutes our standard authority on the construction of these Pyramids.—A.B.E.]
The royal tombs have the form of pyramids with a square base, and are the equivalent in stone or brick of the tumulus of heaped earth which was piled over the body of the warrior chief in prehistoric times (Note 14). The same ideas prevailed as to the souls of kings as about those of private men; the plan of the pyramid consists, therefore, of three parts, like the mastaba, —the chapel, the passage, and the sepulchral vault.
The chapel is always separate. At Sakkarah no trace of it has been found; it was probably, as later on at Thebes, in a quarter nearer to the town. At Medum, Gizeh, Abusir, and Dahshur, these temples stood at the east or north fronts of the pyramids. They were true temples, with chambers, courts, and passages. The fragments of bas-reliefs hitherto found show scenes of sacrifice, and prove that the decoration was the same as in the public halls of the mastabas. The pyramid, properly speaking, contained only the passages and sepulchral vault. The oldest of which the texts show the existence, north of Abydos, is that of Sneferu; the latest belong to the princes of the Twelfth Dynasty. The construction of these monuments was, therefore, a continuous work, lasting for thirteen or fourteen centuries, under government direction. Granite, alabaster, and basalt for the sarcophagus and some details were the only materials of which the use and the quantity was not regulated in advance, and which had to be brought from a distance. To obtain them, each king sent one of the great men of his court on a mission to the quarries of Upper Egypt; and the quickness with which the blocks were brought back was a strong claim upon the sovereign’s favour. The other material was not so costly. If mainly brick, the bricks were moulded on the spot with earth taken from the foot of the hill. If of stone, the nearest parts of the plateau provided the common marly limestone in abundance (Note 15). The fine limestone of Turah was usually reserved for the chambers and the casing, and this might be had without even sending specially for it to the opposite side of the Nile; for at Memphis there were stores always full, upon which they continually drew for public buildings, and, therefore, also for the royal tombs. The blocks being taken from these stores, and borne by
[Illustration: Fig. 136.—Section of the Great Pyramid.[30]]
The pyramids were supposed to have their four faces to the four cardinal points, like the mastabas; but, either from bad management or neglect, the greater part are not oriented exactly, and many vary distinctly from the true north (Note 18). Without speaking of the ruins of Abu Roash or Zowyet el Aryan, which have not been studied closely enough, they naturally form six groups, distributed from north to south on the border of the Libyan plateau, from Gizeh to the Fayum, by Abusir, Sakkarah, Dahshur, and Lisht. The Gizeh group contains nine, including those of Khufu, Khafra, and Menkara, which were anciently reckoned among the wonders of the world. The ground on which the pyramid of Khufu stands was very irregular at the time of construction. A small rocky height which rose above the surface was roughly cut (fig. 136) and enclosed in the masonry, the rest being smoothed and covered with large slabs, some of which still remain (Note 19). The pyramid itself was 481 feet high and 755 feet wide, dimensions which the injuries of time have reduced to 454 feet and 750 feet respectively. It preserved, until the Arab conquest, a casing of stones of different colours (Note 20), so skilfully joined as to appear like one block from base to summit. The casing work was begun from the top, and the cap placed on first, the steps being covered one after the other, until they reached the bottom (Note 21).
[Illustration: Fig. 137.—The Step Pyramid of Sakkarah.]
The pyramids of Khafra and Menkara were built on a different plan inside to that of Khufu. Khafra’s had two entrances, both to the north, one from the platform before the pyramid, the other fifty feet above the ground. Menkara’s still preserves the remains of its casing of red granite (Note 31). The entrance passage descends at an angle of twenty-six degrees, and soon runs into the rock. The first chamber is decorated with panels sculptured in the stone, and was closed at the further end by three portcullises of granite. The second chamber appears to be unfinished, but this was a trap to deceive the spoilers. A passage cut in the floor, and carefully hidden, gave access to a lower chamber. There lay the mummy in a sarcophagus of sculptured basalt. The sarcophagus was still perfect at the beginning of this century. Removed thence by Colonel Howard Vyse, it foundered on the Spanish coast with the ship which was bearing it to England.
[Illustration: Fig. 138.—Plan and Section of the Pyramid of Unas.]
[Illustration: Fig. 139.—Portcullis and passage, pyramid of Unas.]
The same variety of arrangement prevails in the groups of Abusir, and in one part of the Sakkarah group. The great pyramid of Sakkarah is not oriented with exactness. The north face is turned 4 deg. 21’ E. of the true north. It is not a perfect square, but is elongated from east to west, the sides being 395 and 351 feet. It is 196 feet high, and is formed of six great steps with inclined faces, each retreating about seven feet; the step nearest the ground is thirty-seven and a half feet high, and the top one is twenty-nine feet high (fig. 137). It is built entirely of limestone, quarried from the neighbouring hills. The blocks are small and badly cut, and the courses are concave, according to a plan applied both to quays and to fortresses. On examining the breaches in the masonry, it is seen that the outer face of each step is coated with two layers, each of which has its regular casing (Note 32). The mass is solid, the chambers being cut in the rock below the pyramid. It has four entrances, the main one being in the north; and the passages form a perfect labyrinth, which it is perilous to enter. Porticoes with columns, galleries, and chambers, all end in a kind of pit, in the bottom of which a hiding place was contrived, doubtless intended to contain the most precious objects of the funeral furniture. The pyramids which surround this extraordinary monument have been nearly all built on one plan, and only differ in their proportions. The door (fig. 138, A) opens close below the first course, about the middle of the north face, and the passage (B) descends by a gentle slope between two walls of limestone. It is plugged up all along by large blocks (Note 33), which needed to be broken up before the first chamber could be entered (C). Beyond this chamber, it
[Illustration: Fig. 140.—Section of the Pyramid of Unas.]
The pyramids of Gizeh belonged to the Pharaohs of the Fourth Dynasty, and those of Abusir to the Pharaohs of the Fifth. The five pyramids of Sakkarah, of which the plan is uniform, belonged to Unas and to the first four kings of the Sixth Dynasty, Teti, Pepi I., Merenra, and Pepi II., and are contemporary with the mastabas with painted vaults which I have mentioned above (p. 129). It is, therefore, no matter of surprise to find them inscribed and decorated. The ceilings are covered with stars, to represent the night-sky. The rest of the decoration is very simple. In the pyramid of Unas, which is the most ornamented, the decoration occupies only the end wall of the sepulchral chamber; the part against the sarcophagus was lined with alabaster, and engraved to represent great monumental doors, through which the deceased was supposed to enter his storerooms of provisions. The figures of men and of animals, the scenes of daily life, the details of the sacrifice, are not here represented, and, moreover, would not be in keeping; they belong to those places where the Double lived his public life, and where visitors actually performed the rites of offering; the passages and the vault in which the soul alone was free to wander needed no ornamentation except that which related to
[Illustration: Fig. 141.—Mastabat el Faraun.]
[Illustration: Fig. 142.—Pyramid of Medum.]
The enormous rectangular mass which the Arabs call Mastabat el Faraun, “the seat of Pharaoh” (fig. 141), stands beside the pyramid of Pepi II. Some have thought it to be an unfinished pyramid, some a tomb surmounted by an obelisk; in reality it is a pyramid which was left unfinished by its builder, King Ati of the Sixth Dynasty. Recent excavations have, on the other hand, shown that the brick pyramids of Dahshur probably belonged to the Twelfth Dynasty. The stone pyramids of that group, which may be older, furnish a curious variation from the usual type. One of these stone pyramids has the lower half inclined at 54 deg. 41’, while the upper part changes sharply to 42 deg. 59’; it might be called a mastaba (Note 35) crowned by a gigantic attic. At Lisht, where the two pyramids now standing are of the same period (one of them was erected by Usertesen I.), the structure is again changed. The sloping passage ends in a vertical shaft, at the bottom of which open chambers now filled by the infiltration of the Nile. The pyramids of Illahun and Hawara, which contained the remains of Usertesen II. and Amenemhat III., are of the same type as those at Lisht. Their rooms are now filled with water. The pyramid of Medum is empty, having been violated before the Ramesside age. It consists of three square towers (Note 36) with sides slightly sloping, placed in retreating stages one over the other (fig. 142). The entrance is on the north, at about 53 feet above the sand. After 60 feet, the passage goes into the rock; at 174
[Illustration: Fig. 143.—Section of passage and vault in pyramid of Medum.]
The custom of building pyramids did not end with the Twelfth Dynasty; there are later pyramids at Manfalut, at Hekalli to the south of Abydos, and at Mohammeriyeh to the south of Esneh. Until the Roman period, the semi-barbarous sovereigns of Ethiopia held it as a point of honour to give the pyramidal form to their tombs. The oldest, those of Nurri, where the Pharaohs of Napata sleep, recall by their style the pyramids of Sakkarah; the latest, those of Meroe, present fresh characteristics. They are higher than they are wide, are built of small blocks, and are sometimes decorated at the angles with rounded borderings. The east face has a false window, surmounted by a cornice, and is flanked by a chapel, which is preceded by a pylon. These pyramids are not all dumb. As in ordinary tombs, the walls contain scenes borrowed from the “Ritual of Burial,” or showing the vicissitudes of the life beyond the grave.
[30] This section is reproduced, by permission of
Mr. W.M.F. Petrie, from
Plate VII. of his “Pyramids
and Temples of Gizeh.” The vertical
shaft sunk by Perring is shown
going down from the floor of the
subterranean unfinished chamber.
The lettering along the base of the
pyramid, though not bearing
upon the work of Professor Maspero, has
been preserved for the convenience
of readers who may wish to consult
Mr. Petrie’s work for
more minute details and measurements. This
lettering refers to that part
of Mr. Petrie’s argument which disproves
the “accretion theory”
of previous writers (see “Pyramids and
Temples of Gizeh”
chap, xviii., p. 165).—A.B.E.
3.—THE TOMBS OF THE THEBAN EMPIRE.
Excavated Tombs.
Two subsequent systems replaced the mastaba throughout Egypt. The first preserved the chapel constructed above ground, and combined the pyramid with the mastaba; the second excavated the whole tomb in the rock, including the chapel.
[Illustration: Fig. 144.—Section of “vaulted” brick pyramid, Abydos.]
[Illustration: Fig. 145.—Section of “vaulted” tomb, Abydos.]
[Illustration: Fig. 146.—Plan of tomb, at Abydos.]
[Illustration: Fig. 147.—Theban tomb, with pyramidion, from scene in a tomb at Sheikh Abd el Gurneh.]
[Illustration: Fig. 148.—Theban tomb with pyramidion, from wall-painting.]
The necropolis quarter of Abydos, in which were interred the earlier generations of the Theban Empire, furnishes the most ancient examples of the first system. The tombs are built of large, black, unbaked bricks, made without any mixture of straw or grit. The lower part is a mastaba with a square or oblong rectangular base, the greatest length of the latter being sometimes forty or fifty feet. The walls are perpendicular, and are seldom high enough for a man to stand upright inside the tomb. On this kind of pedestal was erected a pointed pyramid of from 12 to 30 feet in height, covered externally with a smooth coat of clay painted white. The defective nature of the rock below forbade the excavation of the sepulchral chamber; there was no resource, therefore, except to hide it in the brickwork. An oven-shaped chamber with “corbel” vault was constructed in the centre (fig. 144); but more frequently the sepulchral chamber is found to be half above ground in the mastaba and half sunk in the foundations, the vaulted space above being left only to relieve the weight (fig. 145). In many cases there was no external chapel; the stela, placed in the basement, or set in the outer face, alone marking the place of offering. In other instances a square vestibule was constructed in front of the tomb where the relations assembled (fig. 146). Occasionally a breast-high enclosure wall surrounded the monument, and defined the boundaries of the ground belonging to the tomb. This mixed form was much employed in Theban cemeteries from the beginning of the Middle Empire. Many kings and nobles of the Eleventh Dynasty were buried at Drah Abu’l Neggeh, in tombs like those of Abydos (fig. 147). The relative proportion of mastaba and pyramid became modified during the succeeding centuries. The mastaba—often a mere insignificant substructure—gradually returned to its original height, while the pyramid as gradually decreased, and ended by being only an unimportant pyramidion (fig. 148). All the monuments of this type which ornamented the Theban necropolis during the Ramesside period have perished, but contemporary tomb-paintings show many varieties, and the chapel of an Apis which died during the reign of Amenhotep III. still remains to show that this fashion extended as far as Memphis. Of the pyramidion, scarcely any traces remain; but the mastaba is intact. It is a square mass of limestone, raised on a base, supported by four columns at the corners, and surmounted by an overhanging cornice; a flight of five steps leads up to the inner chamber (fig. 149).
[Illustration: Fig. 149.—Section of Apis tomb, tempo Amenhotep III.]
The earliest examples of the second kind are those found at Gizeh among the mastabas of the Fourth Dynasty, and these are neither large nor much ornamented. They begin to be carefully wrought about the time of the Sixth Dynasty, and in certain distant places, as at Bersheh, Sheikh Said, Kasr es Said, Asuan, and Negadeh. The rock-cut tomb did not, however, attain its full development until the times of the last Memphite kings and the early kings of the Theban line.
In these rock-cut tombs we find all the various parts of the mastaba. The designer selected a prominent vein of limestone, high enough in the cliff side to risk nothing from the gradual rising of the soil, and yet low enough for the funeral procession to reach it without difficulty. The feudal lords of Minieh slept at Beni Hasan; those of Khmunu at Bersheh; those of Siut and Elephantine at Siut and in the cliff opposite Asuan (fig. 150). Sometimes, as at Siut, Bersheh, and Thebes, the tombs are excavated at various levels; sometimes, as at Beni Hasan, they follow the line of the stratum, and are ranged in nearly horizontal terraces.[31] A flight of steps, rudely constructed in rough-hewn stones, leads up from the plain to the entrance of the tomb. At Beni Hasan and Thebes, these steps are either destroyed or buried in sand; but recent excavations have brought to light a well-preserved example leading up to a tomb at Asuan.[32]
[Illustration: Fig. 150.—Tombs in cliff opposite Asuan.]
[Illustration: Fig. 151.—Facade of tomb of Khnumhotep, at Beni Hasan, Twelfth Dynasty.]
[Illustration: Fig. 152.—Facade of tomb, Asuan.]
The funeral procession, having slowly scaled the cliff-side, halted for a moment at the entrance to the chapel. The plan was not necessarily uniform throughout any one group of tombs. Several of the Beni Hasan tombs have porticoes, the pillars, bases, and entablatures being all cut in the rock; those of Ameni and Khnumhotep have porticoes supported on two polygonal columns (fig. 151). At Asuan (fig. 152), the doorway forms a high and narrow recess cut in the rock wall, but is divided, at about one-third of its height, by a rectangular lintel, thus making a smaller doorway in the doorway itself. At Siut, the tomb of Hapizefa was entered by a true porch about twenty-four feet in height, with a “vaulted” roof elegantly sculptured and painted. More frequently the side of the mountain was merely cut away, and the stone dressed over a more or less extent of surface, according to the intended dimensions of the tomb. This method ensured the twofold advantage of clearing a little platform closed in on three sides in front of the tomb, and also of forming an upright facade which could be decorated or left plain, according to the taste of the proprietor. The door, sunk in the middle of this facade, has sometimes no framework; sometimes, however, it has two jambs and a lintel, all slightly projecting. The inscriptions, when any occur,
[Illustration: Fig. 153.—Plan of tomb of Khnumhotep, at Beni Hasan.]
[Illustration: Fig. 154.—Plan of unfinished tomb, Beni Hasan.]
[Illustration: Fig. 155.—Funeral processions and ceremonies from wall-painting in tomb of Manna, Thebes, Nineteenth Dynasty.]
To form a serdab in the solid rock was almost impossible; while on the other hand, movable statues, if left in a room accessible to all comers, would be exposed to theft or mutilation. The serdab, therefore, was transformed, and combined with the stela of the ancient mastabas. The false door of the olden time became a niche cut in the end wall, almost always facing the entrance. Statues of the deceased and his wife, carved in the solid rock, were there enthroned. The walls were decorated with scenes of offerings, and the entire decoration of the tomb converged towards the niche, as that of the mastaba converged towards the stela. The series of tableaux is, on the whole, much the same as of old, though with certain noteworthy additions. The funeral procession, and the scene where the deceased enters into possession of his tomb, both merely indicated in the mastaba, are displayed in full upon the walls of the Theban sepulchre. The mournful cortege is there, with the hired mourners, the troops of friends, the bearers of offerings, the boats for crossing the river, and the catafalque drawn by oxen. It arrives at the door of the tomb. The mummy, placed upright upon his feet, receives the farewell of his family; and the last ceremonies, which are to initiate him into the life beyond the grave, are duly represented (fig. 155). The sacrifices, with all the preliminary processes, as tillage, seed-growing, harvesting, stock-breeding, and the practice of various kinds of handicraft, are either sculptured or painted, as before. Many details, however, which are absent from tombs of the earlier dynasties are here given, while others which are invariably met with in the neighbourhood of the
When space permitted, the vault was excavated immediately below the chapel. The shaft was sometimes sunk in a corner of one of the chambers, and sometimes outside, in front of the door of the tomb. In the great cemeteries, as for instance at Thebes and Memphis, the superposition of these three parts—the chapel, the shaft, and the vault—was not always possible. If the shaft were carried to its accustomed depth, there was sometimes the risk of breaking into tombs excavated at a lower level. This danger was met either by driving a long passage into the rock, and then sinking the shaft at the farther end, or by substituting a slightly sloping or horizontal disposition of the parts for the old vertical arrangement of the mastaba model. The passage in this case opens from the centre of the end wall, its average length being from 20 to 130 feet. The sepulchral vault is always small and plain, as well as the passage. Under the Theban dynasties, as under the Memphite kings, the Soul dispensed with decorations; but whenever the walls of the vault are decorated, the figures and inscriptions are found to relate chiefly to the life of the Soul, and very slightly to the life of the Double. In the tomb of Horhotep, which is of the time of the Usertesens, and in similar rock-cut sepulchres, the walls (except on the side of the door) are divided into two registers. The upper row belongs to the Double, and contains, besides the table of offerings, pictured representations of the same objects which are seen in certain mastabas of the Sixth Dynasty; namely, stuffs, jewels, arms, and perfumes, all needful to Horhotep for the purpose of imparting eternal youth to his limbs. The lower register belonged to both the Soul and the Double, and is inscribed with extracts from a variety of liturgical writings, such as The Book of the Dead, the Ritual of Embalmment, and the Funeral Ritual, all of which were possessed of magic properties which protected the Soul and supported the Double. The stone sarcophagus, and even the coffin, are also covered with closely-written inscriptions. Precisely as the stela epitomised the whole chapel, so did the sarcophagus and coffin epitomise the sepulchral chamber, thus forming, as it were, a vault within a vault. Texts, tableaux, all thereon depicted, treat of the life of the Soul, and of its salvation in the world to come.
At Thebes, as at Memphis, the royal tombs are those which it is most necessary to study, in order to estimate the high degree of perfection to which the decoration of passages and sepulchral chambers was now carried. The most ancient were situated either in the plain or on the southern slopes of the western mountain; and of these, no remains are extant. The mummies of Amenhotep I., and Thothmes III., of Sekenenra, and Aahhotep have survived the dwellings of solid stone designed for their protection. Towards the middle of the Eighteenth Dynasty, however, all the best places
These tombs are not complete. Each had its chapel; but those chapels stood far away in the plain, at Gurneh, at the Ramesseum, at Medinet Habu; and they have already been described. The Theban rock, like the Memphite pyramid, contained only the passages and the sepulchral chamber. During the daytime, the pure Soul was in no serious danger; but in the evening, when the eternal waters which flow along the vaulted heavens fall in vast cascades adown the west and are engulfed in the bowels of the earth, the Soul follows the bark of the Sun and its escort of luminary gods into a lower world bristling with ambuscades and perils. For twelve hours, the divine squadron defiles through long and gloomy corridors, where numerous genii, some hostile, some friendly, now struggle to bar the way, and now aid it in surmounting the difficulties of the journey. Great doors, each guarded by a gigantic serpent, were stationed at intervals, and led to an immense hall full of flame and fire, peopled by hideous monsters and executioners whose office it was to torture the damned. Then came more dark and narrow passages, more blind gropings in the gloom, more strife with malevolent genii, and again the joyful
[Illustration: Fig. 156.—Plan of tomb of Rameses IV.]
[Illustration: Fig. 157.—Plan of tomb of Rameses IV., from Turin papyrus.]
[Illustration: Fig. 158.—Plan of tomb of Seti I.]
Each king attacked the rock at any point where he might hope to find a suitable bed of stone; and this was done with so little regard for his predecessors, that the workmen were sometimes obliged to change the direction of the excavation in order not to invade a neighbouring catacomb. The designer’s plan was a mere sketch, to be modified when necessary, and which was by no means intended to be strictly carried out. Hence the plan and measurement of the actual tomb of Rameses IV. (fig. 156) differ in the outline of the sides and in the general arrangement from the plan of that same tomb which is preserved on a papyrus in the Turin Museum (fig. 153). Nothing, however, could be more simple than the ordinary distribution of the parts. A square door, very sparingly ornamented, opened upon a passage leading to a chamber of more or less extent. From the further end of this chamber opened a second passage leading to a second chamber, and thence sometimes to more chambers, the last of which contained the sarcophagus. In some tombs, the whole excavation is carried down a gently inclined plane, broken perhaps by only one or two low steps between the entrance and the end. In others, the various parts follow each other at lower and lower levels. In the catacomb of Seti I. (fig. 158) a long and narrow flight of stairs and a sloping corridor (A) lead to a little antechamber and two halls (B) supported on pillars. A second staircase (C) leads through a second antechamber to another pillared hall (D), which was the hiding-place of the sarcophagus. The tomb did not end here. A third staircase (E) opening from the end of the principal hall was in progress, and would no doubt have led to more halls and chambers, had not the work been stopped by the death of the king.[33] If we go from catacomb to catacomb, we do not find many variations from this plan. The entrance passage in the tomb of Rameses III. is flanked by eight small lateral chambers. In almost every other instance, the lesser or greater length of the passages, and the degree of finish given to the wall paintings, constitute the only differences between one tomb and another. The smallest of these catacombs comes to an end at fifty-three feet from the entrance; that of Seti I.,
[Illustration: Fig. 159.—Wall-painting of the Fields of Aalu, tomb of Rameses III.]
The most complete type of this class of catacomb is that left to us by Seti I.; figures and hieroglyphs alike are models of pure design and elegant execution. The tomb of Rameses III. already points to decadence. It is for the most part roughly painted. Yellow is freely laid on, and the raw tones of the reds and blues are suggestive of the early daubs of our childhood. Mediocrity ere long reigned supreme, the outlines becoming more feeble, the colour more and more glaring, till the latest tombs are but caricatures of those of Seti I. and Rameses III. The decoration is always the same, and is based on the same principles as the decoration of the pyramids. At Thebes as at Memphis, the intention was to secure to the Double the free enjoyment of his new abode, and to usher the Soul into the company of the gods of the solar cycle and the Osirian cycle, as well as to guide it through the labyrinth of the infernal regions. But the Theban priests exercised their ingenuity to bring before the eyes of the deceased all that which the Memphites consigned to his memory by means of writing, thus enabling him to see what he had formerly been obliged to read upon the walls of his tomb. Where the texts of the pyramid of Unas relate how Unas, being identified with the sun, navigates the celestial waters or enters the Fields of Aalu, the pictured walls of the tomb of Seti I. show Seti sailing in the solar bark, while a side chamber in the tomb of Rameses III. shows Rameses III. in the Fields of Aalu (fig. 159). Where the walls of the pyramid of Unas give the prayers recited over the mummy to open his mouth, to restore the use of his limbs, to clothe, to perfume, to feed him, the walls of Seti’s catacomb contain representations of the actual mummy, of the Ka statues which are the supports of his Double, and of the priests who open their mouths, who clothe them, perfume them, and offer them the various meats and drinks of the funeral feast. The ceilings of the pyramid chambers were sprinkled over with stars to resemble the face of the heavens; but there was nothing to instruct the Soul as to the names of those heavenly bodies. On the ceilings of some of the Theban catacombs, we not only find the constellations depicted, each with its personified image, but astronomical tables giving the aspect of the heavens fortnight by fortnight throughout the months of the Egyptian year, so that the Soul had but
As every part of the tomb had its special decoration, so also it had its special furniture. Of the chapel furniture few traces have been preserved. The table of offerings, which was of stone, is generally all that remains. The objects placed in the serdab, in the passages, and in the sepulchral chamber, have suffered less from the ravages of time and the hand of man. During the Ancient Empire, the funerary portrait statues were always immured in the serdab. The sepulchral vault contained, besides the sarcophagus, head-rests of limestone or alabaster; geese carved in stone; sometimes (though rarely) a scribe’s palette; generally some terra-cotta vases of various shapes: and lastly a store of food-cereals, and the bones of the victims sacrificed on the day of burial. Under the Theban Dynasties, the household goods of the dead were richer and more numerous. The Ka statues of his servants and family, which in former times were placed in the serdab with those of the master, were now consigned to the vault, and made on a smaller scale. On the other hand, many objects which used to be merely depicted on the walls were now represented by models, or by actual specimens. Thus we find miniature funeral boats, with crew, mummy, mourners, and friends complete; imitation bread-offerings of baked clay, erroneously called “funerary cones,” stamped with the name of the deceased; bunches of grapes in glazed ware; and limestone moulds wherewith the deceased was supposed to make pottery models of oxen, birds, and fish, which should answer the purpose of fish, flesh, and fowl. Toilet and kitchen utensils, arms, and instruments of music abound. These are mostly broken—piously slain, in order that their souls should go hence to wait upon the soul of the dead man in the next world. Little statuettes in stone, wood, and enamel—blue, green, and white—are placed by hundreds, and even by thousands, with these piles of furniture, arms, and provisions. Properly speaking, they are reduced serdab-statues, destined, like their larger predecessors, to serve as bodies for the Double, and (by a later conception) for the Soul. They were at first represented clothed like the individual whose name they bore. As time went on, their importance dwindled, and their duties were limited to merely answering for their master when called by Thoth to the corvee, and acting as his substitutes when he was summoned by the gods to work in the Fields of Aalu. Thenceforth they were called “Respondents” (Ushabtiu), and were represented with agricultural implements in their hands. No longer clothed as the man was clothed when living, they were made in the semblance of a mummified corpse, with only the face and hands unbandaged. The so-called “canopic vases,” with lids fashioned like heads of hawks, cynocephali, jackals, and men, were reserved from the time of the Eleventh Dynasty for the viscera, which were extracted from the body by the embalmers. As for the mummy, it continued, as time went on, to be more and more enwrapped in cartonnage, and more liberally provided with papyri and amulets; each amulet forming an essential part of its magic armour, and serving to protect its limbs and soul from destruction.
Theoretically, every Egyptian was entitled to an eternal dwelling constructed after the plan which I have here described with its successive modifications; but the poorer folk were fain to do without those things which were the necessities of the wealthier dead. They were buried wherever it was cheapest—in old tombs which had been ransacked and abandoned; in the natural clefts of the rock; or in common pits. At Thebes, in the time of the Ramessides, great trenches dug in the sand awaited their remains. The funeral rites once performed, the grave-diggers cast a thin covering of sand over the day’s mummies, sometimes in lots of two or three, and sometimes in piles which they did not even take the trouble to lay in regular layers. Some were protected only by their bandages; others were wrapped about with palm-branches, lashed in the fashion of a game-basket. Those most cared for lie in boxes of rough-hewn wood, neither painted nor inscribed. Many are huddled into old coffins which have not even been altered to suit the size of the new occupant, or into a composite contrivance made of the fragments of three or four broken mummy-cases. As to funerary furniture, it was out of the question for such poor souls as these. A pair of sandals of painted cardboard or plaited reeds; a staff for walking along the heavenly highways; a ring of enamelled ware; a bracelet or necklace of little blue beads; a tiny image of Ptah, of Osiris, of Anubis, of Hathor, or of Bast; a few mystic eyes or scarabs; and, above all, a twist or two of cord round the arm, the neck, the leg, or the body, intended to preserve the corpse from magical influences,—are the only possessions of the pauper dead.
[31] For a full account of the Twelfth Dynasty tombs
at Beni Hasan and El
Bersheh see the first memoirs
of the Archaeological Survey of the
Egypt Exploration Fund.
[32] The steps are shown in fig. 150. They were
discovered by General Sir
F. Grenfell in 1885.
Noting the remains of two parallel walls running
up from the water’s
edge to a part of the cliff which had evidently
been escarped and presented
a vertical face, General Grenfell caused
the sand to be cleared, thus
disclosing the entrances to several rock-
cut tombs dating from the
Sixth and Twelfth Dynasties, as well as two
flights of steps on either
side of an inclined plane leading from the
Nile bank to the door of one
of the tombs. The distance between the
two walls is ten feet.
The steps are eighteen inches deep, and 250 in
number. The steps were
for the haulers, the mummies and sarcophagi
being dragged up the inclined
plane. (See p. 209.)—A.B.E.
[33] M. Lefebure has lately produced a superb and
elaborate volume on this
tomb, with the whole of the
texts and the wall decorations faithfully
reproduced: Memoires
publies par les Membres de la Mission du
Caire, Vol. II.,
fasc. I.—A.B.E.
[34] We have in this country two very fine specimens
of inscribed
sarcophagi; namely, that of
Seti I., of beautiful alabaster, in the
Soane collection (xixth Dyn.),
and that of Queen Ankhnesraneferab
(xxvith Dyn.) in the British
Museum.—A.B.E.
PAINTING AND SCULPTURE.
The statues and bas-reliefs which decorated the temples and tombs of Ancient Egypt were for the most part painted. Coloured stones, such as granite, basalt, diorite, serpentine, and alabaster, sometimes escaped this law of polychrome; but in the case of sandstone, limestone, or wood it was rigorously enforced. If sometimes we meet with uncoloured monuments in these materials, we may be sure that the paint has been accidentally rubbed off, or that the work is unfinished. The sculptor and the painter were therefore inseparably allied. The first had no sooner finished his share of the task than the other took it up; and the same artist was often as skilful a master of the brush as of the chisel.
Of the system upon which drawing was taught by the Egyptian masters, we know nothing. They had learned from experience to determine the general proportions of the body, and the invariable relations of the various parts one with another; but they never troubled themselves to tabulate those proportions, or to reduce them to a system. Nothing in what remains to us of their works justifies the belief that they ever possessed a canon based upon the length of the human finger or foot. Theirs was a teaching of routine, and not of theory. Models executed by the master were copied over and over again by his pupils, till they could reproduce them with absolute exactness. That they also studied from the life is shown by the facility with which they seized a likeness, or rendered the characteristics and movements of different kinds of animals. They made their first attempts upon slabs of limestone, on drawing boards covered with a coat of red or white stucco, or on the backs of old manuscripts of no value. New papyrus was too dear to be spoiled by the scrawls of tyros. Having neither pencil nor stylus, they made use of the reed, the end of which, when steeped in water, opened out into small fibres, and made a more or less fine brush according to the size of the stem. The palette was of thin wood, in shape a rectangular oblong, with a groove in which to lay the brush at the lower end. At the upper end were two or more cup-like hollows, each fitted with a cake of ink; black and red being the colours most in use. A tiny pestle and mortar for colour-grinding (fig. 160), and a cup of water in which to clip and wash the brush, completed the apparatus of the student. Palette in hand, he squatted cross-legged before his copy, and, without any kind of support for his wrist, endeavoured to reproduce the outline in black. The master looked over his work when done, and corrected the errors in red ink.
[Illustration: Fig. 160.—Pestle and mortar for grinding colours.]
[Illustration: Fig. 161.—Comic sketch on ostrakon in New York Museum.]
[Illustration: Fig. 162.—Vignette from The Book of the Dead, Saite period]
[Illustration: Fig. 163.—Vignette from The Book of the Dead, from the papyrus of Hunefer.]
The few designs which have come down to us are drawn on pieces of limestone, and are for the most part in sufficiently bad preservation. The British Museum possesses two or three subjects in red outline, which may perhaps have been used as copies by the decorators of some Theban tomb about the time of the Twentieth Dynasty. A fragment in the Museum of Gizeh contains studies of ducks or geese in black ink; and at Turin may be seen a sketch of a half-nude female figure bending backwards, as about to turn a somersault. The lines are flowing, the movement is graceful, the modelling delicate. The draughtsman was not hampered then as now, by the rigidity of the instrument between his fingers. The reed brush attacked the surface perpendicularly; broadened, diminished, or prolonged the line at will; and stopped or turned with the utmost readiness. So supple a medium was admirably adapted to the rapid rendering of the humorous or ludicrous episodes of daily life. The Egyptians, naturally laughter-loving and satirical, were caricaturists from an early period. One of the Turin papyri chronicles the courtship of a shaven priest and a songstress of Amen in a series of spirited vignettes; while on the back of the same sheet are sketched various serio-comic scenes, in which animals parody the pursuits of civilised man. An ass, a lion, a crocodile, and an ape are represented in the act of giving a vocal and instrumental concert; a lion and a gazelle play at draughts; the Pharaoh of all the rats, in a chariot drawn by dogs, gallops to the assault of a fortress garrisoned by cats; a cat of fashion, with a flower on her head, has come to blows with a goose, and the hapless fowl, powerless in so unequal a contest, topples over with terror. Cats, by the way, were the favourite animals of Egyptian caricaturists. An ostrakon in the New York Museum depicts a cat of rank en grande toilette, seated in an easy chair, and a miserable Tom, with piteous mien and tail between his legs, serving her with refreshments (fig. 161). Our catalogue of comic sketches is brief; but the abundance of pen-drawings with which certain religious works were illustrated compensates for our poverty in secular subjects. These works are The Book of the Dead and The Book of Knowing That which is in Hades, which were reproduced by hundreds, according to standard copies preserved in the temples, or handed down through families whose hereditary profession it was to conduct the services for the dead. When making these illustrations, the artist had no occasion to draw upon his imagination. He had but to imitate the copy as skilfully as he could.
[Illustration: Figs. 164 and 165.—Scenes from the tomb of Khnumhotep at Beni Hasan, Twelfth Dynasty.]
[Illustration: Fig. 166.—From a tomb-painting in the British Museum, Eighteenth Dynasty.]
Their conventional system differed materially from our own. Man or beast, the subject was never anything but a profile relieved against a flat background. Their object, therefore, was to select forms which presented a characteristic outline capable of being reproduced in pure line upon a plane surface. As regarded animal life, the problem was in no wise complicated. The profile of the back and body, the head and neck, carried in undulating lines parallel with the ground, were outlined at one sweep of the pencil. The legs also are well detached from the body. The animals themselves are lifelike, each with the gait and action and flexion of the limbs peculiar to its species. The slow and measured tread of the ox; the short step, the meditative ear, the ironical mouth of the ass; the abrupt little trot of the goat, the spring of the hunting greyhound, are all rendered with invariable success of outline and expression. Turning from domestic animals to wild beasts, the perfection of treatment is the same. The calm strength of the lion in repose, the stealthy and sleepy tread of the leopard, the grimace of the ape, the slender grace of the gazelle and the antelope, have never been better expressed than in Egypt. But it was not so easy to project man—the whole man—upon a plane surface without some departure from nature. A man cannot be satisfactorily reproduced by means of mere lines, and a profile outline necessarily excludes too much of his person. The form of the forehead and the nose, the curvature of the lips, the cut of the ear, disappear when the head is drawn full face; but, on the other hand, it is necessary that the bust should be presented full face, in order to give the full development of the shoulders, and that the two arms may be visible to right and left of the body. The contours of the trunk are best modelled in a three-quarters view, whereas the legs show to most advantage when seen sidewise. The Egyptians did not hesitate to combine these contradictory points of view in one single figure. The head is almost always given in profile, but is provided with a full-face eye and placed upon a full-face bust. The full-face bust adorns a trunk seen from a three-quarters point of view, and this trunk is supported upon legs depicted in profile. Very seldom do we meet with figures treated according to our own rules of perspective. Most of the minor personages represented in the tomb of Khnumhotep seem, however, to have made an effort to emancipate themselves from the law of malformation. Their bodies are given in profile, as well as their heads and legs; but they thrust forward first one shoulder and then the other, in order to show both arms (fig. 164), and the effect is not happy. Yet, if we examine the treatment of the farm servant who is cramming a goose, and, above all, the figure of the standing man who throws his weight upon the neck of a gazelle to make it kneel down (fig. 165), we shall see that the action of the arms and hips is
[Illustration: Fig. 167.—Funerary repast, tomb of Horemheb, Eighteenth Dynasty.]
[Illustration: Fig. 168.—From a wall-painting, Thebes, Ramesside period.]
We admit, then, that the Egyptians could draw. Were they, as it has been ofttimes asserted, ignorant of the art of composition? We will take a scene at hazard from a Theban tomb—that scene which represents the funerary repast offered to Prince Horemheb by the members of his family (fig. 167). The subject is half ideal, half real. The dead man, and those belonging to him who are no longer of this world, are depicted in the society of the living. They are present, yet aloof. They
[Illustration: Fig. 169.—From wall-scene in tomb of Horemheb.]
[Illustration: Fig. 170.—From wall-scene, Ramesseum.]
[Illustration: Fig. 171.—Archers, as represented on walls of Medinet Habu.]
Again, when a number of persons engaged in the simultaneous performance of any given act were represented on the same level, they were isolated as much as possible, so that each man’s profile might not cover that of his neighbour. When this was not done, they were arranged to overlap each other, and this, despite the fact that all stood on the one level; so that they have actually but two dimensions and no thickness. A herdsman walking in the midst of his oxen plants his feet upon precisely the same ground-line as the beast which interposes between his body and the spectator. The most distant soldier of a company which advances in good marching order to the sound of the trumpet, has his head and feet on exactly the same level; as the head and feet of the foremost among his comrades (fig. 169). When a squadron of chariots defiles before Pharaoh, one would declare that their wheels all ran in the self-same ruts, were it not that the body of the first chariot partly hides the horse by which the second chariot is drawn (fig. 170). In these examples the people and objects are, either accidentally or naturally, placed so near together, that the anomaly does not strike one as too glaring. In taking these liberties, the Egyptian artist but anticipated a contrivance adopted by the Greek sculptor of a later age. Elsewhere, the Egyptian has occasionally approached nearer to truth of treatment. The archers of Rameses III. at Medinet Habu make an effort, which is almost successful, to present themselves in perspective. The row of helmets slopes downwards, and the row of bows slopes upwards, with praiseworthy regularity; but the men’s feet are all on the same level, and do not, therefore, follow the direction of the other lines (fig. 171). This mode of representation is not uncommon during the Theban period. It was generally adopted when men or animals, ranged in line, had to be shown in the act of doing the same thing; but it was subject to the grave drawback (or what was in Egyptian eyes the grave drawback) of showing the body of the first man only, and of almost entirely hiding the rest of the figures. When, therefore, it was found impossible to range all upon the same level without hiding some of their number, the artist frequently broke his masses up into groups, and placed one above the other on the same vertical plane. Their height in no wise depends on the place they occupy in the perspective of the tableau, but only upon the number of rows required by the artist to carry out his idea. If two rows of figures are sufficient, he divides his space horizontally into equal parts; if he requires three rows, he divides it into three parts; and so on. When, however, it is a question of mere accessories, they are made out upon a smaller
[Illustration: Fig. 172.—Phalanx of Egyptian infantry, Ramesseum.]
[Illustration: Fig. 173.—Hittite battalion, Ramesseum.]
It was not only in their treatment of men and animals that the Egyptians allowed themselves this latitude. Houses, trees, land and water, were as freely misrepresented. An oblong rectangle placed upright, or on its side, and covered with regular zigzags, represents a canal. Lest one should be in doubt as to its meaning, fishes and crocodiles are put in, to show that it is water, and nothing but water. Boats are seen floating upright upon this edgewise surface; the flocks ford it where it is shallow; and the angler with his line marks the spot where the water ends and the bank begins. Sometimes the rectangle is seen suspended like a framed picture, at about half way of the height of several palm trees (fig. 174); whereby we are given to understand a tank bordered on both sides by trees. Sometimes, again, as in the tomb of Rekhmara, the trees are laid down in rows round the four sides of a square pond, while a profile boat conveying a dead man in his shrine, hauled by slaves also shown in profile, floats on the vertical surface of the water (fig. 175). The Theban catacombs of the Ramesside period supply abundant examples of contrivances of this kind; and, having noted them, we end by not knowing which most to wonder at—the obstinacy of the Egyptians in not seeking to discover the natural laws of perspective, or the inexhaustible wealth of resource which enabled them to invent so many false relations between the various parts of their subjects.
[Illustration: Fig. 174.—Pond and palm-trees, from wall painting in tomb of Rekhmara, Eighteenth Dynasty.]
When employed upon a very large scale, their methods of composition shock the eye less than when applied to small subjects. We instinctively feel that even the ablest artist must sometimes have played fast and loose with the laws of perspective, if tasked to cover the enormous surfaces of Egyptian pylons.
[Illustration: Fig. 175.—Scene from tomb of Rekhmara, Eighteenth Dynasty.]
[Illustration: Fig. 176.—Scene from Mastaba of Ptahhotep, Fifth Dynasty.]
[Illustration: Fig. 177.—Palestrina mosaic.]
Hence the unities of the subject are never strictly observed in these enormous bas-reliefs. The main object being to perpetuate the memory of a victorious Pharaoh, that Pharaoh necessarily plays the leading part; but instead of selecting from among his striking deeds some one leading episode pre-eminently calculated to illustrate his greatness, the Egyptian artist delighted to present the successive incidents of his campaigns at a single coup d’oeil. Thus treated, the pylons of Luxor and the Ramesseum show a Syrian night attack upon the Egyptian camp; a seizure of spies sent by the prince of the Kheta for the express purpose of being caught and giving false intelligence of his movements; the king’s household troops surprised and broken by the Khetan chariots; the battle of Kadesh and its various incidents, so furnishing us, as it were, with a series of illustrated despatches of the Syrian campaign undertaken by Rameses II. in the fifth year of his reign. After this fashion precisely did the painters of the earliest Italian schools depict within the one field, and in one uninterrupted sequence, the several episodes of a single narrative. The scenes are irregularly dispersed over the surface of the wall, without any marked lines of separation, and, as with the bas-reliefs upon the column of Trajan, one is often in danger of dividing the groups in the wrong place, and of confusing the characters. This method is reserved almost exclusively for official art. In the interior decoration of temples and tombs, the various parts of the one subject are distributed in rows ranged one above the other, from the ground line to the cornice. Thus another difficulty is added to the number of those which prevent us from understanding the style and intention of Egyptian design. We often imagine that we are looking at a series of isolated scenes, when in fact we have before our eyes the disjecta membra of a single composition. Take, for example, one wall-side of the tomb of Ptahhotep at Sakkarah (fig. 176). If we would discover the link which divides these separate scenes, we shall do well to compare this wall-subject with the mosaic at Palestrina (fig. 177), a monument of Graeco-Roman time which represents almost the same scenes, grouped, however, after a style more familiar to our ways of seeing and thinking. The Nile occupies the immediate foreground of the picture, and extends as far as the foot of the mountains in the distance. Towns rise from the water’s edge; and not only towns, but obelisks, farm-houses, and towers of Graeco-Italian style, more like the buildings depicted in Pompeian landscapes than the monuments of the Pharaohs. Of these buildings, only the large temple in the middle distance to the right of the picture, with its pylon gateway and its four Osirian colossi, recalls the general arrangement of Egyptian architecture. To the left, a party of sportsmen in a large boat are seen in the act of harpooning the hippopotamus and crocodile. To
2.—TECHNICAL PROCESSES.
[Illustration: Fig. 178.—Sculptor’s sketch from Ancient Empire tomb.]
[Illustration: Fig. 179.—Sculptor’s sketch from Ancient Empire tomb.]
The preparation of the surface about to be decorated demanded much time and care. Seeing how imperfect were the methods of construction, and how impossible it was for the architect to ensure a perfectly level surface for the facing stones of his temple-walls and pylons, the decorator had perforce to accommodate himself to a surface slightly rounded in some places and slightly hollowed in others. Even the blocks of which it was formed were scarcely homogeneous in texture. The limestone strata in which the Theban catacombs were excavated were almost always interspersed with flint nodules, fossils, and petrified shells. These faults were variously remedied according as the decoration was to be sculptured or painted. If painted, the wall was first roughly levelled, and then overlaid with a coat of black clay and chopped straw, similar to the mixture used for brick-making. If sculptured, then the artist had to arrange his subject so as to avoid the inequalities of the stone as much as possible. When these occurred in the midst of the figure subjects, and if they did not offer too stubborn a resistance to the chisel, they were simply worked over; otherwise the piece was cut out and a new piece fitted in, or the hole was filled up with white cement. This mending process was no trifling matter. We could point to tomb-chambers where every wall is thus inlaid to the extent of one quarter of its surface. The preliminary work being done, the whole was covered with a thin coat of fine plaster mixed with white of egg, which hid the mud-wash or the piecing, and prepared a level and polished surface for the pencil of the artist. In chambers, or parts of chambers, which have been left unfinished, and even in the quarries, we constantly find sketches of intended bas-reliefs, outlined in red or black ink. The copy was generally executed upon a small scale, then squared off, and transferred to the wall by the pupils and assistants of the master. As in certain scenes carefully copied by Prisse from the walls of Theban tombs, the subject is occasionally indicated by only two or three rapid strokes of the reed (fig. 178). Elsewhere, the outline is fully made out, and the figures only await the arrival of the sculptor. Some designers took pains to determine the position of the shoulders, and the centre of gravity of the bodies, by vertical and horizontal lines, upon which, by means of a dot, they noted the height of the knee, the hips, and other parts (fig. 179). Others again, more self-reliant, attacked their subject at once, and drew in the figures without the aid of guiding points. Such were the artists who decorated the catacomb of Seti I., and the southern walls of the temple of Abydos. Their outlines are so firm, and their facility is so surprising, that they have been suspected of stencilling; but no one who has closely examined their figures, or who has taken the trouble to measure them with a compass, can maintain that opinion. The forms of some are slighter
[Illustration: Fig. 180.—Sculptor’s correction, Medinet Habu, Rameses III.]
[Illustration: Fig. 181.—Bow drill.]
The sculptors of ancient Egypt were not so well equipped as those of our own day. A kneeling scribe in limestone at the Gizeh Museum has been carved with the chisel, the grooves left by the tool being visible on his skin. A statue in grey serpentine, in the same collection, bears traces of the use of two different tools, the body being spotted all over with point-marks, and the unfinished head being blocked out splinter by splinter with a small hammer. Similar observations, and the study of the monuments, show that the drill (fig. 181), the toothed-chisel, and the gouge were also employed. There have been endless discussions as to whether these tools were of iron or of bronze. Iron, it is argued, was deemed impure. No one could make use of it, even for the basest needs of daily life, without incurring a taint prejudicial to the soul both in this world and the next. But the impurity of any given object never sufficed to prevent the employment of it when required. Pigs also were impure; yet the Egyptians bred them. They bred them, indeed, so abundantly in certain districts, that our worthy Herodotus tells us how the swine were turned into the fields after seed-sowing, in order that they might tread in the grain. So also iron, like many other things in Egypt, was pure or impure according to circumstances. If some traditions held it up to odium as an evil thing, and stigmatised it as the “bones of Typhon,” other traditions equally venerable affirmed that it was the very substance of the canopy of heaven. So authoritative was this view, that iron was currently
[Illustration: Fig. 182.—Sculptor’s trial-piece, Eighteenth Dynasty.]
The Egyptians treated bas-relief in three ways: either as a simple engraving executed by means of incised lines; or by cutting away the surface of the stone round the figure, and so causing it to stand out in relief upon the wall; or by sinking the design below the wall-surface and cutting it in relief at the bottom of the hollow. The first method has the advantage of being expeditious, and the disadvantage of not being sufficiently decorative. Rameses
A sandstone or limestone statue would have been deemed imperfect if left to show the colour of the stone in which it was cut, and was painted from head to foot. In bas-relief, the background was left untouched and only the figures were coloured. The Egyptians had more pigments at their disposal than is commonly supposed. The more ancient painters’ palettes—and we have some which date from the Fifth Dynasty—have compartments for yellow, red, blue, brown, white, black, and green.[40] Others, of the time of the Eighteenth Dynasty, provide for three varieties of yellow, three of brown, two of red, two of blue, and two of green; making in all some fourteen or sixteen different tints.
Black was obtained by calcining the bones of animals. The other substances employed in painting were indigenous to the country. The white is made of gypsum, mixed with albumen or honey; the yellows are ochre, or sulphuret of arsenic, the orpiment of our modern artists; the reds are ochre, cinnabar, or vermilion; the blues are pulverised lapis-lazuli, or silicate of copper. If the substance was rare or costly, a substitute drawn from the products of native industry was found. Lapis-lazuli, for instance, was replaced by blue frit made with an admixture of silicate of copper, and this was reduced to an impalpable powder. The painters kept their colours in tiny bags, and, as required, mixed them with water containing a little gum tragacanth. They laid them on by means of a reed, or a more or less fine hair brush. When well prepared, these pigments are remarkably solid, and have changed but little during the lapse of ages. The reds have darkened, the greens have faded, the blues have turned somewhat green or grey; but this is only on the surface. If that surface is scraped off, the colour underneath is brilliant and unchanged. Before the Theban period, no precautions were taken to protect the painter’s work from the action of air and light. About the time of the Twentieth Dynasty, however, it became customary to coat painted surfaces with a transparent varnish which was soluble in water, and which was probably made from the gum of some kind of acacia. It was not always used in the same manner. Some painters varnished the whole surface, while others merely glazed the ornaments and accessories, without touching the flesh-tints or the clothing. This varnish has cracked from the effects of age, or has become so dark as to spoil the work it was intended to preserve. Doubtless, the Egyptians discovered the bad effects produced by it, as we no longer meet with it after the close of the Twentieth Dynasty.
Egyptian painters laid on broad, flat, uniform washes of colour; they did not paint in our sense of the term; they illuminated. Just as in drawing they reduced everything to lines, and almost wholly suppressed the internal modelling, so in adding colour they still further simplified their subject by merging all varieties of tone, and all play of light and shadow, in one uniform tint. Egyptian painting is never quite true, and never quite false. Without pretending to the faithful imitation of nature, it approaches nature as nearly as it may; sometimes understating, sometimes exaggerating, sometimes substituting ideal or conventional renderings for strict realities. Water, for instance, is always represented by a flat tint of blue, or by blue covered with zigzag lines in black. The buff and bluish hues of the vulture are translated into bright red and vivid blue. The flesh-tints of men are of a dark reddish brown, and the flesh-tints of women are pale yellow. The colours conventionally assigned to each animate and inanimate object were taught in the schools, and
It must not, however, be supposed that the effect produced by this artificial system was grating or discordant. Even in works of small size, such as illuminated MSS. of The Book of the Dead, or the decoration of mummy-cases and funerary coffers, there is both sweetness and harmony of colour. The most brilliant hues are boldly placed side by side, yet with full knowledge of the relations subsisting between these hues, and of the phenomena which must necessarily result from such relations. They neither jar together, nor war with each other, nor extinguish each other. On the contrary, each maintains its own value, and all, by mere juxtaposition, give rise to the half-tones which harmonise them.
Turning from small things to large ones, from the page of papyrus, or the panel of sycamore wood, to the walls of tombs and temples, we find the skilful employment of flat tints equally soothing and agreeable to the eye. Each wall is treated as a whole, the harmony of colour being carried out from bottom to top throughout the various superimposed stages into which the surface was divided. Sometimes the colours are distributed according to a scale of rhythm, or symmetry, balancing and counterbalancing each other. Sometimes one special tint predominates, thus determining the general tone and subordinating every other hue. The vividness of the final effect is always calculated according to the quality and quantity of light by which the picture is destined to be seen. In very dark halls the force of colour is carried as far as it will go, because it would not otherwise have been visible by the flickering light of lamps and torches. On outer wall-surfaces and on pylon-fronts, it was as vivid as in the darkest depths of excavated catacombs; and this because, no matter how extreme it might be, the sun would subdue its splendour. But in half-lighted places, such as the porticoes of temples and the ante-chambers of tombs, colour is so dealt with as to be soft and discreet. In a word, painting was in Egypt the mere humble servant of architecture and sculpture. We must not dream of comparing it with our own, or even with that of the Greeks; but if we take it simply for what it is, accepting it in the secondary place assigned to it, we cannot fail to recognise its unusual merits. Egyptian painting excelled in the sense of monumental decoration, and if we ever revert to the fashion of colouring the facades of our houses and our public edifices, we shall lose nothing by studying Egyptian methods or reproducing Egyptian processes.
[35] The late T. Deveria ingeniously conjectured that
“Ba-en-pet” (iron of
heaven) might mean the ferruginous
substance of meteoric stones. See
Melanges d’Archeologie
Egyptienne et Assyrienne, vol. i.—
A.B.E.
[36] The traces of tools upon the masonry show the
use of bronze and
jewel-points.—A.B.E.
[37] Many such trial-pieces were found by Petrie in
the ruins of a
sculptor’s house at
Tell el Amarna.
[38] A similar collection was found by Mr. F. Ll.
Griffith at Tell
Gemayemi, in 1886, during
his excavations for the Egypt Exploration
Fund. See Mr. Petrie’s
Tanis. Part II., Egypt Exploration
Fund.—A.B.E.
[39] Mr. Loftie’s collection contains, however,
an interesting piece of
trial-work consisting of the
head of a Ptolemaic queen in red
granite.—A.B.E.
[40] For pigments used at the beginning of the Fourth
Dynasty, see Petrie’s
Medum.
[41] The rose-coloured, or rather crimson, flesh-tints
are also to be seen
at El Kab, and in the famous
speos at Beit el Wally, both tempo
Nineteenth Dynasty.—A.B.E.
3.—WORKS OF SCULPTURE.
[Illustration: Fig. 183.—The Great Sphinx of Gizeh.]
To this day, the most ancient statue known is a colossus—namely, the Great Sphinx of Gizeh. It was already in existence in the time of Khufu (Cheops), and perhaps we should not be far wrong if we ventured to ascribe it to the generations before Mena, called in the priestly chronicles “the Servants of Horus.” Hewn in the living rock at the extreme verge of the Libyan plateau, it seems, as the representative of Horus, to uprear its head in order to be the first to catch sight of his father, Ra, the rising sun, across the valley (fig. 183). For centuries the sands have buried it to the chin, yet without protecting it from ruin. Its battered body preserves but the general form of a lion’s body. The paws and breast, restored by the Ptolemies and the Caesars, retain but a part of the stone facing with which they were then clothed in order to mask the ravages of time. The lower part of the head-dress has fallen, and the diminished neck looks too slender to sustain the enormous weight of the head. The nose and beard have been broken off by fanatics, and the red hue which formerly enlivened the features is almost wholly effaced. And yet, notwithstanding its fallen fortunes, the monster preserves an expression of sovereign strength and greatness. The eyes gaze out afar with a look of intense and profound thoughtfulness; the mouth still wears a smile; the whole countenance is informed with power and repose. The art which conceived and carved this prodigious statue was a finished art; an art which had attained self-mastery, and was sure of its effects. How many centuries had it taken to arrive at this degree of maturity and perfection?
[Illustration: Fig. 184.—Panel from tomb of Hesi.]
The lesser folk of the art-world excelled in the manipulation of brush and chisel, and that their skill was of a high order is testified by the thousands of tableaux they have left behind them. The relief is low; the colour sober; the composition learned. Architecture, trees, vegetation, irregularities of ground, are summarily indicated, and are introduced only when necessary to the due interpretation of the scene represented. Men and animals, on the other hand, are rendered with a wealth of detail, a truth of character, and sometimes a force of treatment, to which the later schools of Egyptian art rarely attained. Six wooden panels from the tomb of Hesi in the Gizeh Museum represent perhaps the finest known specimens of this branch of art. Mariette ascribed them to the Third Dynasty, and he may perhaps have been right; though for my own part I incline to date them from the Fifth Dynasty. In these panels there is nothing that can be called a “subject.” Hesi either sits or stands (fig. 184), and has four or five columns of hieroglyphs above his head; but the firmness of line, the subtlety of modelling, the ease of execution, are unequalled. Never has wood been cut with a more delicate chisel or a firmer hand.
The variety of attitude and gesture which we so much admire in the Egyptian bas-relief is lacking to the statues. A mourner weeping, a woman bruising corn for bread, a baker rolling dough, are subjects as rare in the round as they are common in bas-relief. In sculpture, the figure is generally represented either standing with the feet side by side and quite still, or with one leg advanced in the act of walking; or seated upon a chair or a cube; or kneeling; or, still more frequently, sitting on the ground cross-legged, as the fellahin are wont to sit to this day. This intentional monotony of style would be inexplicable if we were ignorant of the purpose for which such statues were intended. They represent the dead man for whom the tomb was made, his family, his servants, his slaves, and his kinsfolk. The master is always shown sitting or standing, and he could not consistently be seen in any other attitude. The tomb is, in fact, the house in which he rests after the labours of life, as once he used to rest in his earthly home; and the scenes depicted upon the walls represent the work which he was officially credited with performing. Here he superintends the preliminary operations necessary to raise the food by which he is to be nourished in the form of funerary offerings; namely, seed-sowing, harvesting, stock-breeding, fishing, hunting, and the like. In short, “he superintends all the labour which is done for the eternal dwelling.” When thus engaged, he is always standing upright, his head uplifted, his hands pendent, or holding the staff and baton of command. Elsewhere, the diverse offerings are brought to him one by one, and then he sits in a chair of state. These are his two attitudes, whether as a bas-relief subject or a statue. Standing, he receives the homage of his vassals; sitting, he partakes of the family repast. The people of his household comport themselves before him as becomes their business and station. His wife either stands beside him, sits on the same chair or on a second chair by his side, or squats beside his feet as during his lifetime. His son, if a child at the time when the statue was ordered, is represented in the garb of infancy; or with the bearing and equipment proper to his position, if a man. The slaves bruise the corn, the cellarers tar the wine jars, the hired mourners weep and tear their hair. His little social world followed the Egyptian to his tomb, the duties of his attendants being prescribed for them after death, just as they had been prescribed for them during life. And the kind of influence which the religious conception of the soul exercised over the art of the sculptor did not end here. From the moment that the statue is regarded as the support of the Double, it becomes a condition of primary importance that the statue shall reproduce, at least in the abstract, the proportions and distinctive peculiarities of the corporeal body; and this in order that the Double shall more easily adapt himself to his new
[Illustration: Fig. 185.—The Cross-legged Scribe at the Louvre, Old Empire.]
Most museums are poor in statues of the Memphite school; France and Egypt possess, however, some twenty specimens which suffice to ensure it an honourable place in the history of art. At the Louvre we have the “Cross-legged Scribe,"[44] and the statues of Skemka and Pahurnefer; at Gizeh there are the “Sheikh el Beled"[45] and his wife, Khafra[46], Ranefer, the Prince and General Rahotep, and his wife, Nefert, a “Kneeling Scribe,” and a “Cross-legged Scribe.” The original of the “Cross-legged Scribe” of the Louvre was not a handsome man (fig. 185), but the vigour and fidelity of his portrait amply compensate for the absence of ideal beauty. His legs are crossed and laid flat to the ground in one of those attitudes common among Orientals, yet all but impossible to Europeans. The bust is upright, and well balanced upon the hips. The head is uplifted. The right hand holds the reed pen, which pauses in its place on the open papyrus scroll. Thus, for six thousand years he has waited for his master to go on with the long-interrupted dictation. The face is square-cut, and the strongly-marked features indicate a man in the prime of life. The mouth, wide and thin-lipped, rises slightly towards the corners, which are lost in the projecting muscles by which it is framed in. The cheeks are bony and lank; the ears are thick and heavy, and stand out well from the head; the thick, coarse hair is cut close above the brow. The eyes, which are large and well open, owe their lifelike vivacity to an ingenious contrivance of the ancient artist. The orbit has been cut out from the stone, the hollow being filled with an eye composed of enamel, white and black. The edges of the eyelids are of bronze, and a small silver nail inserted behind the iris receives and reflects the light in such wise as to imitate the light of life. The contours of the flesh are somewhat full and wanting in firmness, as would be the case in middle life, if the man’s occupation debarred him from active exercise. The forms of the arm and back are in good relief; the hands are hard and bony, with fingers of somewhat unusual length; and the knees are sculptured with a minute attention to anatomical details. The whole body is, as it were, informed by the expression of the face, and is dominated by the attentive suspense which breathes in every feature. The muscles of the arm, of the bust, and of the shoulder are caught in half repose, and are ready to return at once to work. This careful observance of the professional attitude, or the characteristic gesture, is equally marked in the Gizeh Cross-legged Scribe, and in all the Ancient Empire statues which I have had an opportunity of studying.
The Cross-legged Scribe of Gizeh (fig. 186) was discovered by M. de Morgan at Sakkarah in the beginning of 1893. This statue exhibits a no less surprising vigour and certainty of intention and execution on the part of the sculptor than does its fellow of the Louvre, while representing a younger man of full, firm, and supple figure.
[Illustration: Fig. 186.—The Cross-legged Scribe of Gizeh, from Sakkarah.]
Khafra is a king (fig. 187). He sits squarely upon his chair of state, his hands upon his knees, his chest thrown forward, his head erect, his gaze confident. Had the emblems of his rank been destroyed, and the inscription effaced which tells his name, his bearing alone would have revealed the Pharaoh. Every trait is characteristic of the man who from childhood upwards has known himself to be invested with sovereign authority. Ranefer belonged to one of the great feudal families of his time. He stands upright, his arms down, his left leg forward, in the attitude of a prince inspecting a march-past of his vassals. The countenance is haughty, the attitude bold; but Ranefer does not impress us with the almost superhuman calm and decision of Khafra.
[Illustration: Fig. 187.—King Khafra, Fourth Dynasty.]
[Illustration: Fig. 188.—Sheikh el Beled, Old Empire.]
[Illustration: Fig. 189.—Rahotep, Ancient Empire.]
General Rahotep[47] (fig. 189), despite his title and his high military rank, looks as if he were of inferior birth. Stalwart and square-cut, he has somewhat of the rustic in his physiognomy. Nefert, on the contrary (fig. 190), was a princess of the blood royal; and her whole person is, as it were, informed with a certain air of resolution and command, which the sculptor has expressed very happily. She wears a close-fitting garment, opening to a point in front. The shoulders, bosom, and bodily contours are modelled under the drapery with a grace and reserve which it is impossible to praise too highly. Her face, round and plump, is framed in masses of fine black hair, confined by a richly-ornamented bandeau. This wedded pair are in limestone, painted; the husband being coloured of a reddish brown hue, and the wife of a tawny buff.
[Illustration: Fig. 190.—Nefert, wife of Rahotep, Ancient Empire.]
[Illustration: Fig. 191.—Head of the Sheikh el Beled.]
[Illustration: Fig. 192.—Wife of the Sheikh el Beled, Old Empire.]
[Illustration: Fig. 193.—The Kneeling Scribe, Old Empire.]
[Illustration: Fig. 194.—A Bread-maker, Old Empire.]
Turning to the “Sheikh el Beled” (figs. 188, 191), we descend several degrees in the social scale. Raemka was a “superintendent of works,” which probably means that he was an overseer of corvee labour at the time of building the great pyramids. He belonged to the middle class; and his whole person expresses vulgar contentment and self-satisfaction. We seem to see him in the act of watching his workmen, his staff of acacia wood in his hand. The feet of the statue had perished, but have been restored. The body is stout and heavy, and the neck thick. The head (fig. 191), despite its vulgarity, does not lack energy. The eyes are inserted, like those of the “Cross-legged Scribe.” By a curious coincidence, the statue, which was found
[Illustration: Fig. 195.—The dwarf Nemhotep, Old Empire.]
[Illustration: Fig. 196.—One of the Tanis Sphinxes.]
The thighs could have existed only in a rudimentary form, and Nemhotep, standing as best he can upon his misshapen feet, seems to be off his balance, and ready to fall forward upon his face. It would be difficult to find another work of art in which the characteristics of dwarfdom are more cleverly reproduced.
The sculpture of the first Theban empire is in close connection with that of Memphis. Methods, materials, design, composition, all are borrowed from the elder school; the only new departure being in the proportions assigned to the human figure. From the time of the Eleventh Dynasty, the legs become longer and slighter, the hips smaller, the body and the neck more slender. Works of this period are not to be compared with the best productions of the earlier centuries. The wall-paintings of Siut, of Bersheh, of Beni Hasan, and of Asuan, are not equal to those in the mastabas of Sakkarah and Gizeh; nor are the most carefully-executed contemporary statues worthy to take a place beside the “Sheikh el Beled” or the “Cross-legged Scribe.” Portrait statues of private persons, especially those found at Thebes, are, so far as I have seen, decidedly bad, the execution being rude and the expression vulgar. The royal statues of this period, which are nearly all in black or grey granite, have been for the most part usurped by kings of later date. Usertesen III., whose head and feet are in the Louvre, was appropriated by Amenhotep III., as the sphinx of the Louvre and the colossi of Gizeh were appropriated by Rameses II. Many museums possess specimens of supposed Ramesside Pharaohs which, upon more careful inspection, we are compelled to ascribe to the Thirteenth or Fourteenth Dynasty. Those of undisputed identity, such as the Sebekhotep III. of the Louvre, the Mermashiu of Tanis, the Sebekemsaf of Gizeh, and the colossi of the Isle of Argo, though very skilfully executed, are wanting in originality and vigour. One would say, indeed, that the sculptors had purposely endeavoured to turn them all out after the one smiling and commonplace pattern. Great is the contrast when we turn from these giant dolls to the black granite sphinxes discovered by Mariette at Tanis in 1861, and by him ascribed to the Hyksos period. Here energy, at all events, is not lacking. Wiry and compact, the lion body is shorter than in sphinxes of the usual type. The head, instead of wearing the customary “klaft,” or head-gear of folded linen, is clothed with an ample mane, which also surrounds the face. The eyes are small; the nose is aquiline and depressed at the tip; the cheekbones are prominent; the lower lip slightly protrudes. The general effect of the face is, in short, so unlike the types we are accustomed to find in Egypt, that it has been accepted in proof of an Asiatic origin (fig. 196). These sphinxes are unquestionably
[Illustration: Fig. 197.—Bas-relief head of Seti I.]
[Illustration: Fig. 198.—The god Amen, and Horemheb.]
[Illustration: Fig. 199.—Head of a Queen, Eighteenth Dynasty.]
The first three dynasties of the New Empire[48] have bequeathed us more monuments than all the others put together. Painted bas-reliefs, statues of kings and private persons, colossi, sphinxes, may be counted by hundreds between the mouths of the Nile and the fourth cataract. The old sacerdotal cities, Memphis, Thebes, Abydos, are naturally the richest; but so great was the impetus given to art, that even remote provincial towns, such as Abu Simbel, Redesiyeh, and Mesheikh, have their chefs-d’oeuvre, like the great cities. The official portraits of Amenhotep I. at Turin, of Thothmes I. and Thothmes III. at the British Museum, at Karnak, at Turin, and at Gizeh, are conceived in the style of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Dynasties, and are deficient in originality; but the bas-reliefs in temples and tombs show a marked advance upon those of the earlier ages. The modelling is finer; the figures are more numerous and better grouped; the relief is higher; the effects of perspective are more carefully worked out. The wall-subjects of Deir el Bahari, the tableaux in the tombs of Hui, of Rekhmara, of Anna, of Khamha, and of twenty more at Thebes, are surprisingly rich, brilliant, and varied. Awakening to a sense of the picturesque, artists introduced into their compositions all those details of architecture, of uneven ground, of foreign plants, and the like, which formerly they neglected, or barely indicated. The taste for the colossal, which had fallen somewhat into abeyance since the time of the Great Sphinx, came once again to the surface, and was developed anew.
[Illustration: Fig. 200.—Head of Horemheb.]
[Illustration: Fig. 201.—Colossal statue of Rameses II., Luxor.]
It is unfortunate that Egyptian artists never signed their works; for the sculptor of this portrait of Horemheb deserves to be remembered. Like the Eighteenth Dynasty, the Nineteenth Dynasty delighted in colossi. Those of Rameses II. at Luxor measured from eighteen to twenty feet in height (fig. 201); the colossal Rameses of the Ramesseum sat sixty feet high; and that of Tanis about seventy.[49] The colossi of Abu Simbel, without being of quite such formidable proportions, face the river in imposing array. To say that the decline of Egyptian art began with Rameses II. is a commonplace of contemporary criticism; yet nothing is less true than an axiom of this kind. Many statues and bas-reliefs executed during his reign are no doubt inconceivably rude and ugly; but these are chiefly found in provincial towns where the schools were indifferent, and where the artists had no fine examples before them. At Thebes, at Memphis, at Abydos, at Tanis, in those towns of the Delta where the court habitually resided, and even at Abu Simbel and Beit el Wally, the sculptors of Rameses II. yield nothing in point of excellence to those of Seti I. and Horemheb. The decadence did not begin till after the reign of Merenptah. When civil war and foreign invasion brought Egypt to the brink of destruction, the arts, like all else, suffered and rapidly declined. It is sad to follow their downward progress under the later Ramessides, whether in the wall-subjects of the royal tombs, or in the bas-reliefs of the temple of Khonsu, or on the columns of the hypostyle hall at Karnak. Wood carving maintained its level during a somewhat longer period. The admirable statuettes of priests and children at Turin date from the Twentieth Dynasty. The advent of Sheshonk and the internecine strife of the provinces at length completed the ruin of Thebes, and the school which had produced so many masterpieces perished miserably.
[Illustration Fig. 202.—Queen Ameniritis.]
[Illustration: Fig. 203.—The goddess Thueris. Saite work.]
The Renaissance did not dawn till near the end of the Ethiopian Dynasty, some three hundred years later. The over-praised statue of Queen Ameniritis[50] (fig. 202) already manifests some noteworthy qualities. The limbs, somewhat long and fragile, are delicately treated; but the head is heavy, being over-weighted by the wig peculiar to goddesses. Psammetichus I., when his victories had established him upon the throne, busied himself in the restoration of the temples. Under his auspices, the valley of the Nile became one vast studio of painting and sculpture. The art of engraving hieroglyphs attained a high degree of excellence, fine statues and bas-reliefs were everywhere multiplied, and a new school arose. A marvellous command of material, a profound knowledge of detail, and a certain elegance tempered by severity, are the leading characteristics of this new school. The Memphites preferred limestone; the Thebans selected red or grey granite; but the Saites especially attacked basalt, breccia, and serpentine, and with these fine-grained and almost homogeneous substances, they achieved extraordinary results. They seem to have sought difficulties for the mere pleasure of triumphing over them; and we have proof of the way in which artists of real merit bestowed years and years on the chasing of sarcophagus lids and the carving of statues in blocks of the hardest material. The Thueris, and the four monuments from the tomb of Psammetichus[51] in the Gizeh Museum, are the most remarkable objects hitherto discovered in this class of work. Thueris[52] (fig. 203) was the especial protectress of maternity, and presided over childbirth. Her portrait was discovered by some native sebakh diggers[53] in the midst of the mounds of the ancient city of Thebes. She was found standing upright in a little chapel of white limestone which had been dedicated to her by one Pibesa, a priest, in the name of Queen Nitocris, daughter of Psammetichus I. This charming hippopotamus, whose figure is perhaps more plump than graceful, is a fine example of difficulties overcome; but I do not know that she has any other merit. The group belonging to Psammetichus has at all events some artistic value. It consists of four pieces of green basalt; namely, a table of offerings, a statue of Osiris, a statue of Nephthys, and a Hathor-cow supporting a statuette of the deceased (fig. 204). All four are somewhat flaccid, somewhat artificial; but the faces of the divinities and the deceased are not wanting in sweetness; the action of the cow is good; and the little figure under her protection falls naturally into its place. Certain other pieces, less known than these, are however far superior. The Saite style is easy of recognition. It lacks the breadth and learning of the first Memphite school; it also lacks the grand, and sometimes rude, manner of the great Theban school. The proportions
[Illustration: Fig. 204.—Hathor-cow in green basalt. Saite work.]
This we know from the bas-reliefs. But the Memphite sculptors, deeming the two last ungraceful, excluded them from the domain of art, and rarely, if ever, reproduced them. The “Cross-legged Scribe” of the Louvre and the “Kneeling Scribe” of Gizeh show with what success they could employ the two first. The third was neglected (doubtless for the same reason) by the Theban sculptors. The fourth began to be currently adopted about the time of the Eighteenth Dynasty.
[Illustration: Fig. 205.—Squatting statue of Pedishashi. Saite work.]
It may be that this position was not in fashion among the moneyed classes, which alone could afford to order statues; or it may be that the artists themselves objected to an attitude which caused their sitters to look like square parcels with a human head on the top. The sculptors of the Saite period did not inherit that repugnance. They have at all events combined the action of the limbs in such wise as may least offend the eye, and the position almost ceases to be ungraceful. The heads also are modelled to such perfection that they make up for many shortcomings. That of Pedishashi (fig. 205) has an expression of youth and intelligent gentleness such as we seldom meet with from an Egyptian hand. Other heads, on the contrary, are remarkable for their almost brutal frankness of treatment. In the small head of a scribe (fig. 206), lately purchased for the Louvre, and in another belonging to Prince Ibrahim at Cairo, the wrinkled brow, the crow’s-feet at the corners of the eyes, the hard lines about the mouth, and the knobs upon the skull, are brought out with scrupulous fidelity. The Saite school was, in fact, divided into two parties. One sought inspiration in the past, and, by a return to the methods of the old Memphite school, endeavoured to put fresh life into the effeminate style of the day. This it accomplished, and so successfully, that its works are sometimes mistaken for the best productions of the Fourth and Fifth Dynasties. The other, without too openly departing from established tradition, preferred to study from the life, and thus drew nearer to nature than in any previous age. This school would, perhaps, have prevailed, had Egyptian art not been directed into a new channel by the Macedonian conquest, and by centuries of intercourse with the Greeks.
[Illustration: Fig. 206.—Head of a scribe. Saite work.]
[Illustration: Fig. 207.—Colossus of Alexander II.]
The new departure was of slow development. Sculptors began by clothing the successors of Alexander in Egyptian garb and transforming them into Pharaohs, just as they had in olden time transformed the Hyksos and the Persians. Works dating from the reigns of the first Ptolemies scarcely differ from those of the best Saite period, and it is only here and there that we detect traces of Greek influence. Thus, the colossus of Alexander II., at Gizeh (fig. 207), wears a flowing head-dress, from beneath which his crisp curls have found their way. Soon, however, the sight of Greek masterpieces led the Egyptians of Alexandria, of Memphis, and of the cities of the Delta to modify their artistic methods. Then arose a mixed school, which combined certain elements of the national art with certain other elements borrowed from Hellenic art. The Alexandrian Isis of the Gizeh Museum is clad as the Isis of Pharaonic times; but she has lost the old slender shape and straitened bearing. A mutilated effigy of a Prince of Siut, also at Gizeh, would almost pass for an indifferent Greek statue.
[Illustration: Fig. 208.—Statue of Hor, Graeco-Egyptian.]
[Illustration: Fig. 209.—Group from Naga.]
The most forcible work of this hybrid class which has come down to us is the portrait-statue of one Hor (fig. 208), discovered in 1881 at the foot of Kom ed Damas, the site of the tomb of Alexander. The head is good, though in a somewhat dry style. The long, pinched nose, the close-set eyes, the small mouth with drawn-in corners, the square chin,—every feature, in short, contributes to give a hard and obstinate character to the face. The hair is closely cropped, yet not so closely as to prevent it from dividing naturally into thick, short curls. The body, clothed in the chlamys, is awkwardly shapen, and too narrow for the head. One arm hangs pendent; the other is brought round to the front; the feet are lost. All these monuments are the results of few excavations; and I do not doubt that the soil of Alexandria would yield many such, if it could be methodically explored. The school which produced them continued to draw nearer and nearer to the schools of Greece, and the stiff manner, which it never wholly lost, was scarcely regarded as a defect at an epoch when certain sculptors in the service of Rome especially affected the archaic style. I should not be surprised if those statues of priests and priestesses wearing divine insignia, with which Hadrian adorned the Egyptian rooms of his villa at Tibur, might not be attributed to the artists of this hybrid school. In those parts which were remote from the Delta, native art, being left to its own resources, languished, and slowly perished. Nor was this because Greek models, or even Greek artists, were lacking. In the Thebaid, in the Fayum, at Syene, I have both discovered and
[42] The classic Syene, from all time the southernmost
portion of Egypt
proper. The Sixth Dynasty
is called the Elephantine, from the island
immediately facing Syene which
was the traditional seat of the
Dynasty, and on which the
temples stood. The tombs of Elephantine were
discovered by General Sir
F. Grenfell, K.C.B., in 1885, in the
neighbouring cliffs of the
Libyan Desert: see foot-note p. 149.—
A.B.E.
[43] For an explanation of the nature of the Double,
see Chapter III., pp.
111-112, 121 et seq.
[44] Known as the “Scribe accroupi,” literally
the “Squatting Scribe”; but
in English, squatting, as
applied to Egyptian art, is taken to mean
the attitude of sitting with
the knees nearly touching the chin.
—A.B.E.
[45] “The Sheikh of the Village.”
This statue was best known in England as
the “Wooden Man of Bulak.”—A.B.E.
[46] The Greek Chephren.
[47] I venture to think that the heads of Rahotep
and Nefert, engraved from
a brilliant photograph in
A Thousand Miles up the Nile, give a
truer and more spirited idea
of the originals than the present
illustrations,—A.B.E.
[48] That is, the Eighteenth, Nineteenth, and Twentieth
Dynasties.
—A.B.E.
[49] According to the measurements given by Mr. Petrie,
who discovered the
remains of the Tanite colossus,
it must have stood ninety feet high
without, and one hundred and
twenty feet high with, its pedestal. See
Tanis, Part I., by
W.M.F. Petrie, published by the Egypt
Exploration Fund, 1885.—A.B.E.
[50] Ameniritis, daughter of an Ethiopian king named
Kashta, was the sister
and successor of her brother
Shabaka, and wife of Piankhi II., Twenty-
fifth Dynasty. The statue
is in alabaster.—A.B.E.
[51] A Memphite scribe of the Thirtieth Dynasty.—A.B.E.
[52] In Egyptian Ta-urt, or “the Great;”
also called Apet.
This goddess is always represented
as a hippopotamus walking. She
carries in each hand the emblem
of protection, called “Sa.”
The
statuette of the illustration
is in green serpentine.—A.B.E.
[53] Sebakh, signifying “salt,”
or “saltpetre,” is the general
term for that saline dust
which accumulates wherever there are mounds
of brick or limestone ruins.
This dust is much valued as a manure, or
“top-dressing,”
and is so constantly dug out and carried away by the
natives, that the mounds of
ancient towns and villages are rapidly
undergoing destruction in
all parts of Egypt.—A.B.E.
[54] For an example of Graeco-Egyptian portrait painting,
tempo
Hadrian, see p. 291.
THE INDUSTRIAL ARTS.
I have treated briefly of the Noble Arts; it remains to say something of the Industrial Arts. All classes of society in Egypt were, from an early period, imbued with the love of luxury, and with a taste for the beautiful. Living or dead, the Egyptian desired to have jewels and costly amulets upon his person, and to be surrounded by choice furniture and elegant utensils. The objects of his daily use must be distinguished, if not by richness of material, at least by grace of form; and in order to satisfy his requirements, the clay, the stone, the metals, the woods, and other products of distant lands were laid under contribution.
[Illustration: Fig. 210.—The Ta, or girdle-buckle of Isis.]
[Illustration: Fig. 211.—Frog amulet.]
[Illustration: Fig. 212.—The Uat, or lotus-column amulet.]
[Illustration: Fig. 213.—An Uta, or sacred eye.]
[Illustration: Fig. 214.—A scarabaeus.]
It is impossible to pass through a gallery of Egyptian antiquities without being surprised by the prodigious number of small objects in pietra dura which have survived till the present time. As yet we have found neither the diamond, the ruby, nor the sapphire; but with these exceptions, the domain of the lapidary was almost as extensive as at the present day. That domain included the amethyst, the emerald, the garnet, the aquamarine, the chrysoprase, the innumerable varieties of agate and jasper, lapis lazuli, felspar, obsidian; also various rocks, such as granite, serpentine, and porphyry; certain fossils, as yellow amber and some kinds of turquoise; organic remains, as coral, mother-of-pearl, and pearls; metallic ores and carbonates, such as hematite and malachite, and the calaite, or Oriental turquoise. These substances were for the most part cut in the shape of round, square, oval, spindle-shaped, pear-shaped, or lozenge-shaped beads. Strung and arranged row above row, these beads were made into necklaces, and are picked up by myriads in the sands of the great cemeteries at Memphis, Erment, Ekhmim, and Abydos. The perfection with which many are cut, the deftness with which they are pierced, and the beauty of the polish, do honour to the craftsmen who made them. But their skill did not end here. With the point, saw, drill, and grindstone, they fashioned these materials into an infinity of shapes—hearts, human fingers, serpents, animals, images of divinities. All these were amulets; and they were probably less valued for the charm of the workmanship than for the supernatural virtues which they were supposed to possess. The girdle-buckle in carnelian (fig. 210) symbolised the blood of Isis, and washed away the sins of the wearer. The frog (fig. 211) was emblematic of renewed birth. The little lotus-flower column in green felspar (fig. 212) typified the divine gift of eternal youth. The “Uat,” or sacred
The earthly goods of the gods and of the dead were mostly in solid stone. I have elsewhere described the little funerary obelisks, the altar bases, the statues, and the tables of offerings found in tombs of the ancient empire. These tables were made of alabaster and limestone during the Pyramid period, of granite or red sandstone under the Theban kings, and of basalt or serpentine from the time of the Twenty-sixth Dynasty. But the fashions were not canonical, all stones being found at all periods. Some offering-tables are mere flat discs, or discs very slightly hollowed. Others are rectangular, and are sculptured in relief with a service of loaves, vases, fruits, and quarters of beef and gazelle. In one instance—the offering-table of Situ—the libations, instead of running off, fell into a square basin which is marked off in divisions, showing the height of the Nile at the different seasons of the year in the reservoirs of Memphis; namely, twenty-five cubits in summer during the inundation, twenty-three in autumn and early winter, and twenty-two at the close of winter and in spring-time. In these various patterns there was little beauty; yet one offering-table, found at Sakkarah, is a real work of art. It is of alabaster. Two lions, standing side by side, support a sloping, rectangular tablet, whence the libation ran off by a small channel into a vase placed between the tails of the lions. The alabaster geese found at Lisht are not without artistic merit. They are cut length-wise down the middle, and hollowed out, in the fashion of a box. Those which I have seen elsewhere, and, generally speaking, all simulacra of offerings, as loaves, cakes, heads of oxen or gazelles, bunches of black grapes, and the like, in carved and painted limestone, are of doubtful taste and clumsy execution. They are not very common, and I have met with them only in tombs of the Fifth and Twelfth Dynasties. “Canopic” vases, on the contrary, were always carefully wrought. They were generally made in two kinds of stone, limestone and alabaster; but the heads which surmounted them were often of painted wood. The canopic vases of Pepi I. are of alabaster; and those of a king buried in the southernmost pyramid at Lisht are also of alabaster, as are the human heads upon the lids. One, indeed, is of such fine execution that I can only compare it with that of the statue of Khafra. The most ancient funerary statuettes yet found—those, namely, of the Eleventh Dynasty—are of alabaster, like the canopic vases; but from the time of the Thirteenth Dynasty, they were cut in compact limestone. The workmanship is very unequal in quality. Some are real chefs-d’oeuvre, and reproduce the physiognomy of the deceased as faithfully as a portrait statue. Lastly, there are the perfume vases, which complete the list of objects found in temples and tombs. The names of these vases are far from being satisfactorily established, and most of the special designations furnished in the texts remain as yet without equivalents in our language. The greater number were of alabaster, turned and polished. Some are heavy, and ugly (fig. 215), while others are distinguished by an elegance and diversity of form which do honour to the inventive talent of the craftsmen. Many are spindle-shaped and pointed at the end (fig. 216), or round in the body, narrow in the neck, and flat at the bottom (fig. 217).
[Illustration: Fig. 215.—Perfume vase, alabaster.]
[Illustration: Fig. 216.—Perfume vase, alabaster.]
[Illustration: Fig. 217.—Perfume vase, alabaster.]
They are unornamented, except perhaps by two lotus-bud handles, or two lions’ heads, or perhaps a little female head just at the rise of the neck (fig. 218). The smallest of these vases were not intended for liquids, but for pomades, medicinal ointments, and salves made with honey. Some of the more important series comprise large-bodied flasks, with an upright cylindrical neck and a flat cover (fig. 219). In these, the Egyptians kept the antimony powder with which they darkened their eyes and eyebrows. The Kohl-pot was a universal toilet requisite; perhaps the only one commonly used by all classes of society. When designing it, the craftsman gave free play to his fancy, borrowing forms of men, plants, and animals for its adornment. Now it appears in the guise of a full-blown lotus; now it is a hedgehog; a hawk; a monkey clasping a column to his breast, or climbing up the side of a jar; a grotesque figure of the god Bes; a kneeling woman, whose scooped-out body contained the powder; a young girl carrying a wine-jar. Once started upon this path, the imagination of the artists knew no limits. As for materials, everything was made to serve in turn—granite, diorite, breccia, red jade, alabaster, and soft limestone, which lent itself more readily to caprices of form; finally, a still more plastic and facile substance—clay, painted and glazed.
[Ilustration: Fig. 218.—Perfume vase, alabaster.]
[Illustration: Fig. 219.—Vase for antimony powder.]
It was not for want of material that the art of modelling and baking clays failed to be as fully developed in Egypt as in Greece, The valley of the Nile is rich in a fine and ductile potter’s clay, with which the happiest results might have been achieved, had the native craftsman taken the trouble to prepare it with due care. Metals and hard stone were, however, always preferred for objects of luxury; the potter was fain, therefore, to be content with supplying only the commonest needs of household and daily life. He was wont to take whatever clay happened to be nearest to the place where he was working, and this clay was habitually badly washed, badly kneaded, and fashioned with the finger upon a primitive wheel worked by the hand. The firing was equally careless. Some pieces were barely heated at all, and melted it they came into contact with water, while others were as hard as tiles. All tombs of the ancient empire contain vases of a red or yellow ware, often mixed, like the clay of bricks, with finely-chopped straw or weeds. These are mostly large solid jars with oval bodies, short necks, and wide mouths, but having neither foot nor handles. With them are also found pipkins and pots, in which to store the dead man’s provisions; bowls more or less shallow; and flat plates, such as are still used by the fellahin.
[Illustration: Fig. 220.]
[Illustration: Fig. 221.]
[Illustration: Fig. 222.]
[Illustration: Fig. 223.]
The pottery of the earliest Theban dynasties which I have collected at El Khozam and Gebeleyn is more carefully wrought than the pottery of the Memphite period. It may be classified under two heads. The first comprises plain, smooth-bodied vases, black below and dark red above. On examining this ware where broken, we see that the colour was mixed with the clay during the kneading, and that the two zones were separately prepared, roughly joined, and then uniformly glazed. The second class comprises vases of various and sometimes eccentric forms, moulded of red or tawny clay. Some are large cylinders closed at one end; others are flat; others oblong and boat-shaped; others, like cruets, joined together two and two, yet with no channel of communication[56] (fig. 220). The ornamentation is carried over the whole surface, and generally consists of straight parallel lines, cross lines, zigzags, dotted lines, or small crosses and lines in geometrical combination; all these patterns being in white when the ground is red, or in reddish brown when the ground is yellow or whitish. Now and then we find figures of men and animals interspersed among the geometrical combinations. The drawing is rude, almost childish; and it is difficult to tell whether the subjects represent herds of antelopes or scenes of gazelle-hunting. The craftsmen who produced these rude attempts were nevertheless contemporary with the artists who decorated the rock-cut tombs at Beni Hasan. As regards the period of Egypt’s great military conquests, the Theban tombs of that age have supplied objects enough to stock a museum of pottery; but unfortunately the types are very uninteresting. To begin with, we find hand-made sepulchral statuettes modelled in summary fashion from an oblong lump of clay. A pinch of the craftsman’s fingers brought out the nose; two tiny knobs and two little stumps, separately modelled and stuck on, represented the eyes and arms. The better sort of figures were pressed in moulds of baked clay, of which several specimens have been found. They were generally moulded in one piece; then lightly touched up; then baked; and lastly, on coming out of the oven, were painted red, yellow, or white, and inscribed with the pen. Some are of very good style, and almost equal those made in limestone. The ushabtiu of the scribe Hori, and those of the priest Horuta
[Illustration: Fig. 224.—Glass-blowers from Twelfth Dynasty tomb.]
[Illustration: Fig. 225.—Parti-coloured glass vase, inscribed Thothmes III.]
[Illustration: Fig. 226.—Parti-coloured glass vase.]
[Illustration: Fig. 227.—Parti-coloured glass vase.]
[Illustration: Fig. 228.—Parti-coloured glass goblets of Nesikhonsu.]
Glass was known to the Egyptians from the remotest period, and glass-blowing is represented in tombs which date from some thousands of years before our era (fig. 224). The craftsman, seated before the furnace, takes up a small quantity of the fused substance upon the end of his cane and blows it circumspectly, taking care to keep it in contact with the flame, so that it may not harden during the operation. Chemical analysis shows the constituent parts of Egyptian glass to have been nearly identical with our own; but it contains, besides silex, lime, alumina, and soda, a relatively large proportion of extraneous substances, as copper, oxide of iron, and oxide of manganese, which they apparently knew not how to eliminate. Hence Egyptian glass is scarcely ever colourless, but inclines to an uncertain shade of yellow or green. Some ill-made pieces are so utterly decomposed that they flake away, or fall to iridescent dust, at the lightest touch. Others have suffered little from time or damp, but are streaky and full of bubbles. A few are, however, perfectly homogenous and limpid. Colourless glass was not esteemed by the Egyptians as it is by ourselves; whether opaque or transparent, they preferred it coloured. The dyes were obtained by mixing metallic oxides with the ordinary ingredients; that is to say, copper and cobalt for the blues, copperas for the greens, manganese for the violets and browns, iron for the yellows, and lead or tin for the whites. One variety of red contains 30 per cent of bronze, and becomes coated with verdegris if exposed to damp. All this chemistry was empirical, and acquired by instinct. Finding the necessary elements at hand, or being supplied with them from a distance, they made use of them at hazard, and without being too certain of obtaining the effects they sought. Many of their most harmonious combinations were due to accident, and they could not reproduce them at will. The masses which they obtained by these unscientific means were nevertheless of very considerable dimensions. The classic authors tell of stelae, sarcophagi, and columns made in one piece. Ordinarily, however, glass was used only for small objects, and, above all, for counterfeiting precious stones. However cheaply they may have been sold in the Egyptian market, these small objects were not accessible to all the world. The glass-workers imitated the emerald, jasper, lapis lazuli, and carnelian to such perfection that even now we are sometimes embarrassed to distinguish the real stones from the false. The glass was pressed into moulds made of stone or
[Illustration: Fig. 229.—Hippopotamus in blue glaze.]
[Illustration: Fig. 230.—Glazed ware from Thebes.]
[Illustration: Fig. 231.—Glazed ware from Thebes.]
The Egyptians also enamelled stone. One half at least of the scarabaei, cylinders, and amulets contained in our museums are of limestone or schist, covered with a coloured glaze. Doubtless the common clay seemed to them inappropriate to this kind of decoration, for they substituted in its place various sorts of earth—some white and sandy; another sort brown and fine, which they obtained by the pulverisation of a particular kind of limestone found in the neighbourhood of Keneh, Luxor, and Asuan; and a third sort, reddish in tone, and mixed with powdered sandstone and brick-dust. These various substances are known by the equally inexact names of Egyptian porcelain and Egyptian faience. The oldest specimens, which are hardly glazed at all, are coated with an excessively thin slip. This vitreous matter has, however, generally settled into the hollows of the hieroglyphs or figures, where its lustre stands out in strong contrast with the dead surface of the surrounding parts. The colour most frequently in use under the ancient dynasties was green; but yellow, red, brown, violet, and blue were not disdained.[61] Blue predominated in the Theban
[Illustration: Fig. 232.]
Fine as these pieces are, the chef-d’oeuvre of the series is a statuette of one Ptahmes, first Prophet of Amen, now in the Gizeh Museum. The hieroglyphic inscriptions as well as the details of the mummy bandages are chased in relief upon a white ground of admirable smoothness afterwards filled in with enamel. The face and hands are of turquoise blue; the head-dress is yellow, with violet stripes; the hieroglyphic characters of the inscription, and the vulture with outspread wings upon the breast of the figure, are also violet. The whole is delicate, brilliant, and harmonious; not a flaw mars the purity of the contours or the clearness of the lines.
[Illustration: Fig. 233.—Interior decoration of cup, Eighteenth Dynasty.]
[Illustration: Fig. 234.—Lenticular vase, glazed ware, Saite.]
[Illustration: Fig. 235.—Chamber decorated with tiles in step pyramid of Sakkarah.]
Glazed pottery was common from the earliest times. Cups with a foot (fig. 232), blue bowls, rounded at the bottom and decorated in black ink with mystic eyes, lotus flowers, fishes (fig. 233), and palm-leaves, date, as a rule, from the Eighteenth, Nineteenth, or Twentieth Dynasties. Lenticular ampullae coated with a greenish glaze, flanked by two crouching monkeys for handles, decorated along the edge with pearl or egg-shaped ornaments, and round the body with elaborate collars (fig. 234), belong almost without exception to the reigns of Apries and Amasis.[66] Sistrum handles, saucers, drinking-cups in the form of a half-blown lotus, plates, dishes—in short, all vessels in common use—were required to be not only easy to keep clean, but pleasant to look upon. Did they carry their taste for enamelled ware so far as to cover the walls of their houses with glazed tiles? Upon this point we can pronounce neither affirmatively nor negatively; the few examples of this kind of decoration which we possess being all from royal buildings. Upon a yellow brick, we have the family name and Ka name of Pepi I.; upon a green brick, the name of Rameses III.; upon certain red and white fragments, the names of Seti I. and Sheshonk.
[Illustration: Fig. 236.—Tile from step pyramid of Sakkarah.]
Up to the beginning of the present century, one of the chambers in the step pyramid at Sakkarah yet retained its mural decoration of glazed ware (fig. 235). For three-fourths of the wall-surface it was covered with green tiles, oblong in shape, flat at the back, and slightly convex on the face (fig. 236). A square tenon, pierced through with a hole large enough to receive a wooden rod, served to fix them together in horizontal pyramid of rows.[67] The three rows which frame in the doorway are inscribed with the titles of an unclassed Pharaoh belonging to one of the first Memphite dynasties. The hieroglyphs are relieved in blue, red, green, and yellow, upon a tawny ground. Twenty centuries later, Rameses III. originated a new style at Tell el Yahudeh. This time the question of ornamentation concerned, not a single chamber, but a whole temple. The mass of the building was of limestone and alabaster; but the pictorial subjects, instead of being sculptured according to custom, were of a kind of mosaic made with almost equal parts of stone tesserae and glazed ware.
[Illustration: Fig. 237.—Tile inlay, Tell el Yahudeh.]
[Illustration: Fig. 238.—Tile inlay, Tell el Yahudeh.]
[Illustration: Fig. 239.—Inlaid tiles, Tell el Yahudeh.]
The most frequent item in the scheme of decoration was a roundel moulded of a sandy frit coated with blue or grey slip, upon which is a cream-coloured rosette (fig. 237). Some of these rosettes are framed in geometrical designs (fig. 238) or spider-web patterns; some represent open flowers. The central boss is in relief; the petals and tracery are encrusted in the mass. These roundels, which are of various diameters ranging from three-eighths of an inch to four inches, were fixed to the walls by means of a very fine cement. They were used to form many different designs, as scrolls, foliage, and parallel fillets, such as may be seen on the foot of an altar and the base of a column preserved in the Gizeh Museum. The royal ovals were mostly in one piece; so also were the figures. The details, either incised or modelled upon the clay before firing, were afterwards painted with such colours as might be suitable. The lotus flowers and leaves which were carried along the bottom of the walls or the length of the cornices, were, on the contrary, made up of independent pieces; each colour being a separate morsel cut to fit exactly into the pieces by which it was surrounded (fig. 239). This temple was rifled at the beginning of the present century, and some figures of prisoners brought thence have been in the Louvre collection ever since the time of Champollion. All that remained of the building and its decoration was demolished a few years ago by certain dealers in antiquities, and the debris are now dispersed in all directions. Mariette, though with great difficulty, recovered some of the more important fragments, such as the name of Rameses III., which dates the building; some borderings of lotus flowers and birds with human hands (fig. 240); and some heads of Asiatics and negro prisoners (fig. 241).[68] The destruction of this monument is the more grievous because the Egyptians cannot have constructed many after the same type. Glazed bricks, painted tiles, and enamelled mosaics are readily injured; and in the judgment of a people enamoured of stability and eternity, that would be the gravest of radical defects.
[Illustration: Fig. 240.—Relief tile, Tell el Yahudeh.]
[Illustration: Fig. 241.—Relief tile, Tell el Yahudeh.]
[55] Works on scarabaei are the Palin collection,
published in 1828; Mr.
Loftie’s charming Essay
of Scarabs, which is in fact a
catalogue of his own specimens,
admirably illustrated from drawings by
Mr. W.M.F. Petrie; and
Mr. Petrie’s Historical Scarabs,
published 1889.—A.B.E.
[56] These twin vases are still made at Asuan.
I bought a small specimen
there in 1874.—A.B.E.
[57] The sepulchral vases commonly called “canopic”
were four in number,
and contained the embalmed
viscera of the mummy. The lids of these
vases were fashioned to represent
the heads of the four genii of
Amenti, Hapi, Tuatmutf, Kebhsennef,
and Amset; i.e. the
Ape-head, the Jackal-head,
the Hawk-head, and the human head.—A.B.E.
[58] The remains of this shrine, together with many
hundreds of beautiful
glass hieroglyphs, figures,
emblems, etc., for inlaying, besides
moulds and other items of
the glassworker’s stock, were discovered by
Mr. F. Ll. Griffith at
Tell Gemayemi, about equidistant from the
mounds of Tanis and Daphnae
(San and Defenneh) in March 1886. For a
fuller account see Mr. Griffith’s
report, “The Antiquities of Tell
el Yahudiyeh,” in Seventh
Memoir of the Egypt Exploration Fund.
—A.B.E.
[59] Some of these beautiful rods were also found
at Tell Gemayemi by Mr.
F. Ll. Griffith, and
in such sound condition that it was possible to
cut them in thin slices, for
distribution among various museums.—
A.B.E.
[60] That is, of the kind known as the “false murrhine.”—A.B.E.
[61] The yellows and browns are frequently altered greens.—A.B.E.
[62] One of the Eleventh Dynasty kings.
[63] There is a fine specimen at the Louvre, and another
in the museum at
Leydeu.—A.B.E.
[64] For an account of every stage and detail in the
glass and glaze
manufactures of Tell el Amarna,
see W.M.F. Petrie’s Tell el
Amarna.
[65] Klaft, i.e., a headdress of folded linen.
The beautiful
little head here referred
to is in the Gizeh Museum, and is a portrait
of the Pharaoh Necho.—A.B.E.
[66] Apries, in Egyptian “Uahabra,”
the biblical “Hophra;”
Amasis, Ahmes II.;
both of the Twenty-sixth Dynasty.—A.B.E.
[67] Some specimens of these tiles may be seen in
the Egyptian department
at the British Museum.—A.B.E.
2.—WOOD, IVORY, LEATHER, AND TEXTILE FABRICS.
[Illustration: Fig. 242.—Spoon.]
Objects in ivory, bone, and horn are among the rarities of our museums; but we must not for this reason conclude that the Egyptians did not make ample use of those substances. Horn is perishable, and is eagerly devoured by certain insects, which rapidly destroy it. Bone and ivory soon deteriorate and become friable. The elephant was known to the Egyptians from the remotest period. They may, perhaps, have found it inhabiting the Thebaid when first they established themselves in that part of the Nile Valley, for as early as the Fifth Dynasty we find the pictured form of the elephant in use as the hieroglyphic name of the island of Elephantine. Ivory in tusks and half tusks was imported into Egypt from the regions of the Upper Nile. It was sometimes dyed green or red, but was more generally left of its natural colour. It was largely employed by cabinet makers for inlaying furniture, as chairs, bedsteads, and coffers. Combs, dice, hair-pins, toilette ornaments, delicately wrought spoons (fig. 242), Kohl bottles hollowed out of a miniature column surmounted by a capital, incense-burners in the shape of a hand supporting
[Illustration: Fig. 243.—Wooden statuette of officer, Eighteenth Dynasty.]
[Illustration: Fig. 244.—Wooden statuette of priest, Eighteenth Dynasty.]
[Illustration: Fig. 245.—Wooden statuette of the Lady Nai.]
Egypt produces few trees, and of these few the greater number are useless to the sculptor. The two which most abound—namely, the date palm and the dom palm—are of too coarse a fibre for carving, and are too unequal in texture. Some varieties of the sycamore and acacia are the only trees of which the grain is sufficiently fine and manageable to be wrought with the chisel. Wood was, nevertheless, a favourite material for cheap and rapid work. It was even employed at times for subjects of importance, such as Ka statues; and the Wooden Man of Gizeh shows with what boldness and amplitude of style it could be treated. But the blocks and beams which the Egyptians had at command were seldom large enough for a statue. The Wooden Man himself, though but half life-size, consists of a number of pieces held together by square pegs. Hence, wood-carvers were wont to treat their subjects upon such a scale as admitted of their being cut in one block, and the statues of olden time became statuettes under the Theban dynasties. Art lost nothing by the reduction, and more than one of these little figures is comparable to the finest works of the ancient empire. The best, perhaps, is at the Turin Museum, and dates from the Twentieth Dynasty. It represents a young girl whose only garment is a slender girdle. She is of that indefinite age when the undeveloped form is almost as much like that of a boy as of a girl. The expression of the head is gentle, yet saucy. It is, in fact, across thirty centuries of time, a portrait of one of those graceful little maidens of Elephantine, who, without immodesty or embarrassment, walk unclothed in sight of strangers. Three little wooden men in the Gizeh Museum are probably contemporaries of the Turin figure. They wear full dress, as, indeed, they should, for one was a king’s favourite named Hori, and surnamed Ra. They are walking
This influence becomes even more apparent when we study the knick-knacks of the toilet table, and such small objects as, properly speaking, come under the head of furniture. To pass in review the hundred and one little articles of female ornament or luxury to which the fancy of the designer gave all kinds of ingenious and novel forms, would be no light task. The handles of mirrors, for instance, generally represented a stem of lotus or papyrus surmounted by a full-blown flower, from the midst of which rose a disk of polished metal. For this design is sometimes substituted
[Illustration: Fig. 246.—Spoon.]
[Illustration: Fig. 247.—Spoon.]
[Illustration: Fib. 248.—Spoon.]
[Illustration: Fig. 249.—Spoon.]
[Illustration: Fig. 250.—Spoon.]
[Illustration: Fig. 251.—Spoon.]
[Illustration: Fig. 252.—Spoon.]
[Illustration: Fig. 253.—Spoon.]
Not to soil their fingers the Egyptians made use of spoons for essences, pomades, and the variously-coloured preparations with which both men and women stained their cheeks, lips, eyelids, nails, and palms. The designer generally borrowed his subjects from the fauna or flora of the Nile valley. A little case at Gizeh is carved in the shape of a couchant calf, the body being hollowed out, and the head and back forming a removable lid. A spoon in the same collection represents a dog running away with an enormous fish in his mouth (fig. 246), the body of the fish forming the bowl of the spoon. Another shows a cartouche springing from a full-blown lotus; another, a lotus fruit laid upon a bouquet of flowers (fig. 247); and here is a simple triangular bowl, the handle decorated with a stem and two buds (fig. 248). The most elaborate specimens combine these subjects with the human figure. A young girl, clad in a mere girdle, is represented in the act of swimming (fig. 249). Her head is well lifted above the water, and her outstretched arms support a duck, the body of which is hollowed out, while the wings, being movable, serve as a cover. We have also a young girl in the Louvre collection, but she stands in a maze of lotus plants (fig. 250), and is in the act of gathering a bud. A bunch of stems, from which emerge two full-blown blossoms, unites the handle to the bowl of the spoon, which is in reverse position, the larger end being turned outwards and the point inwards. Elsewhere, a young girl (fig. 251) playing upon a long-necked lute as she trips along, is framed in by two flowering stems. Sometimes the fair musician is standing upright in a tiny skiff (fig. 252); and sometimes a girl bearing offerings is substituted for the lute player. Another example represents a slave toiling under the weight of an enormous sack. The age and physiognomy of each of these personages is clearly indicated. The lotus gatherer is of
[Illustration: Fig. 254.—Spoon.]
Household furniture was no more abundant in ancient Egypt than it is in the Egypt of to-day. In the time of the Twelfth Dynasty an ordinary house contained no bedsteads, but low frameworks like the Nubian angareb; or mats rolled up by day on which the owners lay down at night in their clothes, pillowing their heads on earthenware, stone, or wooden head-rests. There were also two or three simple stone seats, some wooden chairs or stools with carved legs, chests and boxes of various sizes for clothes and tools, and a few
[Illustration: Fig. 255.—Fire-sticks, bow, and unfinished drill-stock, Twelfth Dynasty; Illahun, Kahun, and Gurob, W.M.F. Petrie, Plate VII., p. 11.]
[Illustration: Fig. 256.—Remains of two Twelfth Dynasty dolls; Kahun, Gurob and Hawara, W.M.F. Petrie, Plate VIII. p. 30.]
[Illustration: Fig. 257.—Tops, tip-cat, and a terra-cotta toy boat, Twelfth Dynasty; Kahun, Gurob, and Hawara, W.M.F. Petrie, Plates VIII., IX., p. 30.]
[Illustration: Fig. 258.—Chest]
[Illustration: Fig. 259.—Chest.]
[Illustration: Fig. 260.—Chest.]
The art of the cabinet-maker was nevertheless carried to a high degree of perfection, from the time of the ancient dynasties. Planks were dressed down with the adze, mortised, glued, joined together by means of pegs cut in hard wood, or acacia thorns (never by metal nails), polished, and finally covered with paintings. Chests generally stand upon four straight legs, and are occasionally thus raised to some height from the ground. The lid is flat, or rounded according to a special curvature (fig. 258) much in favour among the Egyptians of all periods. Sometimes, though rarely, it is gable-shaped, like our house-roofs (fig. 259). Generally speaking, the lid lifts off bodily; but it often turns upon a peg inserted in one of the uprights. Sometimes, also, it turns upon wooden pivots (fig. 260). The panels, which are large and admirably suited for decorative art, are enriched with paintings, or inlaid with ivory, silver, precious woods, or enamelled plaques. It may be that we are scarcely in a position justly to appraise the skill of Egyptian cabinet-makers, or the variety of designs produced at various periods. Nearly all the furniture which has come down to our day has been found in tombs, and, being destined for burial in the sepulchre, may either be of a character exclusively destined for the use of the mummy, or possibly a cheap imitation of a more precious class of goods.
The mummy was, in fact, the cabinet-maker’s best customer. In other lands, man took but a few objects with him into the next world; but the defunct Egyptian required nothing short of a complete outfit. The mummy-case alone was an actual monument, in the construction of which a whole squad of workmen was employed (fig. 261). The styles of mummy-cases varied from period to period. Under the Memphite and first Theban empires, we find only rectangular chests in sycamore wood, flat at top and bottom, and
[Illustration: Fig. 261.—Construction of a mummy-case, wall scene, Eighteenth Dynasty.]
[Illustration: Fig. 262.—Mask of Twenty-first Dynasty coffin of Rameses II.]
[Illustration: Fig. 263.—Mummy-case of Queen Ahmesnefertari.]
Upon this surface, the seventeenth chapter of The Book of the Dead was generally written in red and black inks, and in fine cursive hieroglyphs. The body of the chest is made with three horizontal planks for the bottom, and eight vertical planks, placed two and two, for the four sides. The outside is sometimes decorated with long strips of various colours ending in interlaced lotus-leaves, such as are seen on stone sarcophagi. More frequently, it is ornamented on the left side with two wide-open eyes and two monumental doors, and on the right with three doors exactly like those seen in contemporary catacombs. The sarcophagus is in truth the house of the deceased; and, being his house, its four walls were bound to contain an epitome of the prayers and tableaux which covered the walls of his tomb. The necessary formulae and pictured scenes were, therefore, reproduced inside, nearly in the same order in which they appear in the mastabas. Each side is divided in three registers, each register containing a dedication in the name of the deceased, or representations of objects belonging to him, or such texts from the Ritual as need to be repeated for his benefit. Skilfully composed, and painted upon a background made to imitate some precious wood, the whole forms a boldly-designed and harmoniously-coloured picture. The cabinet-maker’s share of the work was the lightest, and the long boxes in which the dead of the earliest period were buried made no great demand upon his skill. This, however, was not the case when in later times the sarcophagus came to be fashioned in the likeness of the human body. Of this style we have two leading types. In the most ancient, the mummy serves as the model for his case. His outstretched feet and legs are in one. The form of the knee, the swell of the calf, the contours of the thigh and the trunk, are summarily indicated, and are, as it were, vaguely modelled under the wood. The head, apparently the only living part of this inert body, is wrought out in the round. The dead man is in this wise imprisoned in a kind of statue of himself; and this statue is so well balanced that it can stand on its
[Illustration: Fig. 264.—Panel portrait from the Graeco-Roman Cemetery at Hawara, now in the National Gallery, London. (Hawara, Biahmu, and Arsinoe, W.M.F. Petrie, Plate X., page 10.)]
A series of Graeco-Roman examples from the Fayum exhibit the stages by which portraiture in the flat there replaced the modelled mask, until towards the middle of the second century A.D. it became customary to bandage over the face of the mummy a panel-portrait of the dead, as he was in life (fig. 264).
The remainder of the funerary outfit supplied the cabinet-maker with as much work as the coffin-maker. Boxes of various shapes and sizes were required for the wardrobe of the mummy, for his viscera, and for his funerary statuettes. He must also have tables for his meals; stools, chairs, a bed to lie upon, a boat and sledge to convey him to the tomb, and sometimes even a war-chariot and a carriage in which to take the air.[71] The boxes for canopic vases, funerary statuettes, and libation-vases, are divided in several compartments. A couchant jackal is sometimes placed on the top, and serves for a handle by which to take off the lid. Each box was provided with its own little sledge, upon which it was drawn in the funeral procession on the day of burial. Beds are not very uncommon. Many are identical in structure with the Nubian angarebs, and consist merely of some coarse fabric, or of interlaced strips of leather, stretched on a plain wooden frame. Few exceed fifty-six inches in length; the sleeper, therefore, could never lie outstretched, but must perforce assume a doubled-up position. The frame is generally horizontal, but sometimes it slopes slightly downwards from the head to the foot. It was often raised to a considerable height above the level of the floor, and a stool, or a little portable set of steps, was used in mounting it. These details were known to us by the wall-paintings only until I myself discovered two perfect specimens in 1884 and 1885; one at Thebes, in a tomb of the Thirteenth Dynasty, and the other at Ekhmim, in the Graeco-Roman necropolis. In the former, two accommodating lions have elongated their bodies to form the framework, their heads doing duty for the head of the bed, and their tails being curled up under the feet of the sleeper.
[Illustration: Fig. 265.—Carved and painted mummy canopy.]
[Illustration: Fig. 266.—Canopied mummy-couch, Graeco-Roman.]
[Illustration: Fig. 267.—Mummy-sledge and canopy.]
[Illustration: Fig. 268.—Inlaid-chair, Eleventh Dynasty.]
The bed is surmounted by a kind of canopy, under which the mummy lay in state. Rhind had already found a similar canopy, which is now in the Museum of Edinburgh[72] (fig. 265). In shape it is a temple, the rounded roof being supported by elegant colonnettes of painted wood. A doorway guarded by serpents is supposed to give access to the miniature edifice. Three winged discs, each larger than the one below it, adorn three superimposed cornices above the door, the whole frontage being surmounted by a row of erect uraei, crowned with the solar disc. The canopy belonging to the Thirteenth Dynasty bed is much more simple, being a mere balustrade in cut and painted wood, in imitation of the water-plant pattern with which temple walls were decorated; the whole is crowned with an ordinary cornice. In the bed of Graeco-Roman date (fig. 266), carved and painted figures of the goddess Ma, sitting with her feather on her knee, are substituted for the customary balustrades. Isis and Nephthys stand with their winged arms outstretched at the head and foot. The roof is open, save for a row of vultures hovering above the mummy, which is wept over by two kneeling statuettes of Isis and Nephthys, one at each end. The sledges upon which mummies were dragged to the sepulchre were also furnished with canopies, but in a totally different style. The sledge canopy is a panelled shrine, like those which I discovered in 1886, in the tomb of Sennetmu at Kurnet Murraee. If light was admitted, it came through a square opening, showing the head of the mummy within. Wilkinson gives an illustration of a sledge canopy of this kind, from the wall paintings of a Theban tomb (fig. 267). The panels were always made to slide. As soon as the mummy was laid upon his sledge, the panels were closed, the corniced roof placed over all, and the whole closed in. With regard to chairs, many of those in the Louvre and the British Museum were made about the time of the Eleventh Dynasty. These are not the least beautiful specimens which have come down to us, one in particular (fig. 268) having preserved an extraordinary brilliancy of colour. The framework, formerly fitted with a seat of strong netting, was originally supported on four legs with lions’ feet. The back is ornamented with two lotus flowers, and with a row of lozenges inlaid in ivory and ebony upon a red ground. Stools of similar workmanship (fig. 269), and folding stools, the feet of which are in the form of a goose’s head, may be seen in all museums. Pharaohs and persons of high rank affected more elaborate designs. Their seats were sometimes raised very high, the arms being carved to resemble running lions, and the lower supports being prisoners of war, bound back to back (fig. 270). A foot-board in front served as a step to mount by, and as a foot-stool for the sitter. Up to the present time, we have found no specimens of this kind of seat.[73]
[Illustration: Fig. 269.—Inlaid stool, Eleventh Dynasty.]
[Illustration: Fig. 270.—Royal throne-chair, wall-painting Rameses III.]
[Illustration: Fig. 271.—Women weaving. From wall-scene in tomb of Khnumhotep, Beni Hasan, Twelfth Dynasty.]
We learn from the tomb paintings that netted or cane-bottomed chairs were covered with stuffed seats and richly worked cushions. These cushions and stuffed seats have perished, but it is to be concluded that they were covered with tapestry. Tapestry was undoubtedly known to the Egyptians, and a bas-relief subject at Beni Hasan (fig. 271)[74] shows the process of weaving. The frame, which is of the simplest structure, resembles that now in use among the weavers of Ekhmim. It is horizontal, and is formed of two slender cylinders, or rather of two rods, about fifty-four inches apart, each held in place by two large pegs driven into the ground about three feet distant from each other. The warps of the chain were strongly fastened, then rolled round the top cylinder till they were stretched sufficiently tight. Mill sticks placed at certain distances facilitated the insertion of the needles which carried the thread. As in the Gobelins factory, the work was begun from the bottom. The texture was regulated and equalised by means of a coarse comb, and was rolled upon the lower cylinder as it increased in length. Hangings and carpets were woven in this manner; some with figures, others with geometrical designs, zigzags, and chequers (fig. 272). A careful examination of the monuments has, however, convinced me that most of the subjects hitherto supposed to represent examples of tapestry represent, in fact, examples of cut and painted leather. The leather-worker’s craft flourished in ancient Egypt. Few museums are without a pair of leather sandals, or a specimen of mummy braces with ends of stamped leather bearing the effigy of a god, a Pharaoh, a hieroglyphic legend, a rosette, or perhaps all combined. These little relics are not older than the time of the priest-kings, or the earlier Bubastites. It is to the same period that we must attribute the great cut-leather canopy in the Gizeh Museum. The catafalque upon which the mummy was laid when transported from the mortuary establishment to the tomb, was frequently adorned with a covering made of stuff or soft leather. Sometimes the sidepieces hung down, and sometimes they were drawn aside with bands, like curtains, and showed the coffin.
[Illustration: Fig. 272.—Man weaving hangings, or carpet. From Beni Hasan, Twelfth Dynasty.]
[Illustration: Fig. 273.—Border pattern of cut leather canopy of Isiemkheb, Twenty-first Dynasty.]
The canopy of Deir el Bahari was made for the Princess Isiemkheb, daughter of the High Priest Masahirti, wife of the High Priest Menkheperra, and mother of the High Priest Pinotem III. The centrepiece, in shape an oblong square, is divided into three bands of sky-blue leather, now faded to pearl-grey. The two side-pieces are sprinkled with yellow stars. Upon the middle piece are rows of vultures, whose outspread wings protect the mummy. Four other pieces covered with red and green chequers are attached to the ends and sides. The longer pieces which hung over the sides are united to the centre-piece by an ornamental bordering. On the right, scarabaei with extended wings alternate with the cartouches of King Pinotem II., and are surmounted by a lance-head frieze. On the left side, the pattern is more complicated (fig. 273). In the centre we see a bunch of lotus lilies flanked by royal cartouches. Next come two antelopes, each kneeling upon a basket; then two bouquets of papyrus; then two more scarabaei, similar to those upon the other border. The lance-head frieze finishes it above, as on the opposite side. The technical process is very curious. The hieroglyphs and figures were cut out from large pieces of leather; then, under the open spaces thus left, were sewn thongs of leather of whatever colour was required for those ornaments or hieroglyphs. Finally, in order to hide the patchwork effect presented at the back, the whole was lined with long strips of white, or light yellow, leather. Despite the difficulties of treatment which this work presented, the result is most remarkable.[75] The outlines of the gazelles, scarabaei, and flowers are as clean-cut and as elegant as if drawn with the pen upon a wall-surface or a page of papyrus. The choice of subjects is happy, and the colours employed are both lively and harmonious.
[Illustration: Fig. 274.—Bark with cut leather sail; wall-painting tomb of Rameses III.]
The craftsmen who designed and executed the canopy of Isiemkheb had profited by a long experience of this system of decoration, and of the kind of patterns suitable to the material. For my own part, I have not the slightest doubt that the cushions of chairs and royal couches, and the sails of funeral and sacred boats used for the transport of mummies and divine images, were most frequently made in leather-work. The chequer-patterned sail represented in one of the boat subjects painted on the wall of a chamber in the tomb of Rameses III. (fig. 274), might be mistaken for one of the side pieces of the canopy at Gizeh. The vultures and fantastic birds depicted upon the sails of another boat (fig. 275) are neither more strange nor more difficult to make in cut leather than the vultures and gazelles of Isiemkheb.
[Illustration: Fig. 275.—Bark with cut leather sail; wall-painting tomb of Rameses III.]
We have it upon the authority of ancient writers that the Egyptians of olden time embroidered as skilfully as those of the Middle Ages. The surcoats given by Amasis, one to the Lacedaemonians, and the other to the temple of Athena at Lindos, were of linen embroidered with figures of animals in gold thread and purple, each thread consisting of three hundred and sixty-five distinct filaments. To go back to a still earlier period, the monumental tableaux show portraits of the Pharaohs wearing garments with borders, either woven or embroidered, or done in applique work. The most simple patterns consist of one or more stripes of brilliant colour parallel with the edge of the material. Elsewhere we see palm patterns, or rows of discs and points, leaf-patterns, meanders, and even, here and there, figures of men, gods, or animals, worked most probably with the needle. None of the textile materials yet found upon royal mummies are thus decorated; we are therefore unable to pronounce upon the quality of this work, or the method employed in its production. Once only, upon the body of one of the Deir el Bahari princesses, did I find a royal cartouche embroidered in pale rose-colour. The Egyptians of the best periods seem to have attached special value to plain stuffs, and especially to white ones. These they wove with marvellous skill, and upon looms in every respect identical with those used in tapestry work. Those portions of the winding sheet of Thothmes III. which enfolded the royal hands and arms, are as fine as the finest India muslin, and as fairly merit the name of “woven air” as the gauzes of the island of Cos. This, of course, is a mere question of manufacture, apart from the domain of art. Embroideries and tapestries were not commonly used in Egypt till about the end of the Persian period, or the beginning of the period of Greek rule. Alexandria became partly peopled by Phoenician, Syrian, and Jewish colonists, who brought with them the methods of manufacture peculiar to their own countries, and founded workshops which soon developed into flourishing establishments. It is to the Alexandrians that Pliny ascribes the invention of weaving with several warps, thus producing the stuff called brocades (polymita); and in the time of the first Caesars, it was a recognised fact that “the needle of Babylon was henceforth surpassed by the comb of the Nile.” The Alexandrian tapestries were not made after exclusively geometrical designs, like the products of the old Egyptian looms; but, according to the testimony of the ancients, were enriched with figures of animals, and even of men. Of the masterpieces which adorned the palaces of the Ptolemies no specimens remain. Many fragments which may be attributed to the later Roman time have, however, been found in Egypt, such as the piece with the boy and goose described by Wilkinson, and a piece representing marine divinities bought by myself at Coptos.[76] The numerous embroidered winding sheets with woven borders which have recently been discovered near Ekhmim, and in the Fayum, are nearly all from Coptic tombs, and are more nearly akin to Byzantine art than to the art of Egypt.
[68] We have a considerable number of specimens of
these borderings,
cartouches, and painted tiles
representing foreign prisoners, in the
British Museum; but the finest
examples of the latter are in the
Ambras Collection, Vienna.
For a highly interesting and scholarly
description of the remains
found at Tell el Yahudeh in 1870, see
Professor Hayter Lewis’s
paper in vol. iii. of the Transactions
of the Biblical Archaeological
Society.—A.B.E.
[69] The Tat amulet was the emblem of stability.—A.B.E.
[70] That is, the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Dynasties.
[71] There is a fine specimen of one of these sledges
in the Leyden Museum,
and the Florentine Museum
contains a celebrated Egyptian war-chariot
in fine preservation.—A.B.E.
[72] See the coloured frontispiece to Thebes; its
Tombs and their
Tenants, by A.H.
Rhind. 1862.—A.B.E.
[73] Since the publication of this work in the original
French, a very
splendid specimen of a royal
Egyptian chair of state, the property of
Jesse Haworth, Esq., was placed
on view at the Manchester Jubilee
Exhibition. It is made
of dark wood, apparently rosewood; the legs
being shaped like bull’s
legs, having silver hoofs, and a solid gold
cobra snake twining round
each leg. The arm-pieces are of lightwood
with cobra snakes carved upon
the flat in low relief, each snake
covered with hundreds of small
silver annulets, to represent the
markings of the reptile.
This chair, dated by a fragment of a royal
cartouche, belonged to Queen
Hatshepsut, of the Eighteenth Dynasty. It
is now in the British Museum.—A.B.E.
[74] In this cut, as well as in the next, the loom
is represented as if
upright; but it is supposed
to be extended on the ground.—A.B.E.
[75] For a chromolithographic reproduction of this
work as a whole, with
drawings of the separate parts,
facsimiles of the inscriptions, etc.,
see The Funeral Tent of
an Egyptian Queen, by H. Villiers
Stuart.—A.B.E.
[76] An unusually fine specimen of carpet, or tapestry
work from Ekhmim,
representing Cupids rowing
in papyrus skiffs, landscapes, etc., has
recently been presented to
the British Museum by the Rev. G.J.
Chester. The tapestry
found at Ekhmim is, however, mostly of the
Christian period, and this
specimen probably dates from about A.D. 700
or A.D. 600.—A.B.E.
3.—METALS.
The Egyptians classified metals under two heads—namely, the noble metals, as gold, electrum, and silver; and the base metals, as copper, iron, lead, and, at a later period, tin. The two lists are divided by the mention of certain kinds of precious stones, such as lapis lazuli and malachite.
Iron was reserved for weapons of war, and tools, in use for hard substances, such as sculptors’ and masons’ chisels, axe and adze heads, knife-blades, and saws. Lead was comparatively useless, but was sometimes used for inlaying temple-doors, coffers, and furniture. Also small statuettes of gods were occasionally made in this metal, especially those of Osiris and Anubis. Copper was too yielding to be available for objects in current use; bronze, therefore, was the favourite metal of the Egyptians. Though often affirmed, it is not true that they succeeded in tempering bronze so that it became as hard as iron or steel; but by varying the constituents and their relative proportions, they were able to give it a variety of very different qualities. Most of the objects hitherto analysed have yielded precisely the same quantities of copper and tin commonly used by the bronze founders of the present day. Those analysed by Vauquelin in 1825 contained 84 per cent. of copper 14 per cent. of tin, and 1 per cent. of iron and other substances. A chisel brought from Egypt by Sir Gardner Wilkinson contained only from 5 to 9 per cent. of tin, 1 per cent. of iron, and 94 of copper. Certain fragments of statuettes and mirrors more recently subjected to analysis have yielded a notable quantity of gold and silver, thus corresponding with the bronzes of Corinth. Other specimens resemble brass, both in their colour and substance. Many of the best Egyptian bronzes offer a surprising resistance to damp, and oxidise with difficulty. While yet hot from the mould, they were rubbed with some kind of resinous varnish which filled up the pores and deposited an unalterable patina upon the surface. Each kind of bronze had its special use. The ordinary bronze was employed for weapons and common amulets; the brazen alloys served for household utensils; the bronzes mixed with gold and silver were destined only for mirrors, costly weapons, and statuettes of value. In none of the tomb-paintings which I have seen is there any representation of bronze-founding or bronze-working; but this omission is easily supplemented by the objects themselves. Tools, arms, rings, and cheap vases were sometimes forged, and sometimes cast whole in moulds of hard clay or stone. Works of art were cast in one or several pieces according to circumstances; the parts were then united, soldered, and retouched with the burin. The method most frequently employed was to prepare a core of mixed clay and charcoal, or sand, which roughly reproduced the modelling of the mould into which it was introduced. The layer of metal between this core and the mould was often so thin that it would have yielded to any moderate pressure, had they not taken the precaution to consolidate it by having the core for a support.
[Illustration: Fig. 276.—Bronze jug.]
[Illustration: Fig. 277.—Same jug seen from above.]
Domestic utensils and small household instruments were mostly made in bronze. Such objects are exhibited by thousands in our museums, and frequently figure in bas-reliefs and mural paintings. Art and trade were not incompatible in Egypt; and even the coppersmith sought to give elegance of form, and to add ornaments in a good style, to the humblest of his works. The saucepan in which the cook of Rameses III. concocted his masterpieces is supported on lions’ feet. Here is a hot-water jug which looks as if it were precisely like its modern successors (fig. 276); but on a closer examination we shall find that the handle is a full-blown lotus, the petals, which are bent over at an angle to the stalk, resting against the edge of the neck (fig. 277). The handles of knives and spoons are almost always in the form of a duck’s or goose’s neck, slightly curved. The bowl is sometimes fashioned like an animal—as, for instance, a gazelle ready bound for the sacrifice (fig. 278). On the hilt of a sabre we find a little crouching jackal; and the larger limb of a pair of scissors in the Gizeh Museum is made in the likeness of an Asiatic captive, his arms tied behind his back. A lotus leaf forms the disk of a mirror, and its stem is the handle. One perfume box is a fish, another is a bird, another is a grotesque deity. The lustration vases, or situlae, carried by priests and priestesses for the purpose of sprinkling either the faithful, or the ground traversed by religious processions, merit the special consideration of connoisseurs. They are ovoid or pointed at the bottom, and decorated with subjects either chased or in relief. These sometimes represent deities, each in a separate frame, and sometimes scenes of worship. The work is generally very minute.
[Illustration: Fig. 278.—Spoon (or lamp?).]
[Illustration: Fig. 279.—Bronze statuette of the Lady Takushet.]
[Illustration: Fig. 280.—Bronze statuette of Horus.]
[Illustration: Fig. 281.—Bronze statuette of one Mosu.]
Bronze came into use for statuary purposes from a very early period; but time unfortunately has preserved none of those idols which peopled the temples of the ancient empire. Whatsoever may be said to the contrary, we possess no bronze statuettes of any period anterior to the expulsion of the Hyksos. Some Theban figures date quite certainly from the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Dynasties. The chased lion’s head found with the jewels of Queen Aahhotep, the Harpocrates of Gizeh inscribed with the names of Kames and Ahmes I., and several statuettes of Amen, said to have been discovered at Medinet Habu and Sheikh Abd el Gurneh, are of that period. Our most important bronzes belong, however, to the Twenty-second Dynasty, or, later still, to the time of the Saite Pharaohs. Many are not older than the first Ptolemies. A fragment found in the ruins of Tanis and now in the possession of Count Stroganoff, formed part of a votive
[Illustration: Fig. 282.—Bronze lion from Horbeit, Saite.]
[Illustration: Fig. 283.—Gold worker.]
The idea of inlaying gold and other precious metals upon the surface of bronze, stone, or wood was already ancient in Egypt in the time of Khufu. The gold is often amalgamated with pure silver. When amalgamated to the extent of 20 per cent, it changes its name, and is called electrum (asimu). This electrum is of a fine light-yellow colour. It pales as the proportion of silver becomes larger, and at 60 per cent. it is nearly white. The silver came chiefly from Asia, in rings, sheets, and bricks of standard weight. The gold and electrum came partly from Syria in bricks and rings; and partly from the Soudan in nuggets and gold-dust. The processes of refining and alloying are figured on certain monuments
Bronze and gilded wood were not always good enough for the gods of Egypt. They exacted pure gold, and their worshippers gave them as much of it as possible. Entire statues of the precious metals were dedicated by the kings of the ancient and middle empires; and the Pharaohs of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Dynasties, who drew at will upon the treasures of Asia, transcended all that had been done by their predecessors. Even in times of decadence, the feudal lords kept up the traditions of the past, and, like Prince Mentuemhat, replaced the images of gold and silver which had been carried off from Karnak by the generals of Sardanapalus at the time of the Assyrian invasions. The quantity of metal thus consecrated to the service of the gods must have been considerable, If many figures were less
[Illustration: Fig. 284.—Golden cup of General Tahuti, Eighteenth Dynasty.]
[Illustration: Fig. 285.—Silver vase of Thmuis.]
The form is simple and elegant, the ornamentation sober and delicate; the relief low. One is, however, surrounded by a row of ovoid bosses (fig. 286), which project in high relief, and somewhat alter the shape of the body of the vase. These are interesting specimens; but they are so few in number that, were it not for the wall-paintings, we should have but a very imperfect idea of the skill of the Egyptian goldsmiths.
[Illustration: Fig. 286.—Silver vase of Thmuis.]
[Illustration: Fig. 287.—Ornamental basket in precious metal. From wall-painting, Twentieth Dynasty.]
[Illustration: Fig. 288.—Crater of precious metal, borne by slaves. Wall-painting, Eighteenth Dynasty.]
[Illustration: Fig. 289.—Hydria of precious metal. Wall-painting, Eighteenth Dynasty.]
[Illustration: Fig. 290.—Enamelled cruet. Wall-painting, Eighteenth Dynasty.]
[Illustration: Fig. 291.—Enamelled cruet. Wall-painting, Eighteenth Dynasty.]
[Illustration: Fig. 292.—Gold centre-piece of Amenhotep III. Wall-painting, Eighteenth Dynasty.]
The Pharaohs had not our commercial resources, and could not circulate the gold and silver tribute-offerings of conquered nations in the form of coin. When the gods had received their share of the booty, there was no alternative but to melt the rest down into ingots, fashion it into personal ornaments, or convert it into gold and silver plate. What was true of the kings held good also for their subjects. For the space of at least six or eight centuries, dating from the time of Ahmes I., the taste for plate was carried to excess. Every good house was not only stocked with all that was needful for the service of the table, such as cups, goblets, plates, ewers, and ornamental baskets chased with figures of fantastic animals (fig. 287); but also with large ornamental vases which were dressed with flowers, and displayed to visitors on gala days. Some of these vases were of extraordinary richness. Here, for instance, is a crater, the handles modelled as two papyrus buds, and the foot as a full-blown papyrus. Two Asiatic slaves in sumptuous garments are represented in the act of upheaving it with all their strength (fig. 288). Here, again, is a kind of hydria with a lid in the form of an inverted lotus flanked by the heads of two gazelles (fig. 289). The heads and necks of two horses, bridled and fully caparisoned, stand back to back on either side of the foot of the vase. The body is divided into a series of horizontal zones, the middle zone being in the likeness of a marshland, with an antelope coursing at full speed among the reeds. Two enamelled cruets (fig. 290) have elaborately wrought lids, one fashioned as the head of a plumed eagle, and the other as the head of the god Bes flanked by two vipers (fig. 291). But foremost among them all is a golden centrepiece offered by a viceroy of Ethiopia to Amenhotep III. The design reproduces one of the most popular subjects connected with the foreign conquests of Egypt (fig. 292). Men and apes are seen gathering fruits in a forest of dom palms. Two natives, each with a single feather on his head and a striped kilt about his loins, lead tame giraffes with halters. Others, apparently of the same nationality, kneel with upraised hands, as if begging for quarter. Two negro prisoners lying face downwards upon the ground, lift their heads
[Illustration: Fig. 293.—Crater of precious metal. Wall-painting, Eighteenth Dynasty.]
[Illustration: Fig. 294.—Cup of precious metal. Wall-painting, Eighteenth Dynasty.]
[Illustration: Fig. 295.—Cruet of precious metal. Wall-painting, Eighteenth Dynasty.]
Rameses II. and Rameses III. had thrones of gold—not merely of wood plated with gold, but made of the solid metal and set with precious stones. These things were too valuable to escape destruction, and were the first to disappear. Their artistic value, however, by no means equalled their intrinsic value, and the loss is not one for which we need be inconsolable.
[Illustration: Fig. 296.—Bezel signet-ring.]
[Illustration: Fig. 297.—Gold cloisonne pectoral bearing cartouche of Usertesen III. From Dahshur, found 1894, and now in the Gizeh Museum.]
Orientals, men and women alike, are great lovers of jewellery. The Egyptians were no exception to this rule. Not satisfied to adorn themselves when living with a profusion of trinkets, they loaded the arms, the fingers, the neck, the ears, the brow, and the ankles of their dead with more or less costly ornaments. The quantity thus buried in tombs was so considerable that even now, after thirty centuries of active search, we find from time to time mummies which are, so to say, cuirassed in gold. Much of this funerary jewellery was made merely for show on the day of the funeral, and betrays its purpose by the slightness of the workmanship. The favourite jewels of the deceased person were, nevertheless, frequently buried with him, and the style and finish of these leave nothing to be desired. Chains and rings have come down to us in large numbers, as indeed might be expected. The ring, in fact, was not a simple ornament, but an actual necessary. Official documents were not signed, but sealed; and the seal was good in law. Every Egyptian, therefore, had his seal, which he kept about his person, ready for use if required. The poor man’s seal was a simple copper or silver ring; the ring of the rich man was a more or less elaborate jewel covered with chasing and relief work. The bezel was movable, and turned upon a pivot. It was frequently set with some kind of stone engraved with the owner’s emblem or device; as, for example, a scorpion (fig. 296), a lion, a hawk, or a cynocephalous ape. As in the eyes of her husband his ring was the one essential ornament, so was her necklace in the estimation of the Egyptian lady. I have seen a chain in silver which measured sixty-three inches in length. Others, on the contrary, do not exceed two, or two and a half inches. They are of all sizes and patterns, some consisting of two or three twists, some of large links, some of small links, some massive and heavy, others as light and flexible as the finest Venetian filigree. The humblest peasant girl, as well as the lady of highest rank, might have her necklet; and the woman must be poor indeed whose little store comprised no other ornament. No mere catalogue of bracelets, diadems, collarettes, or insignia of nobility could give an idea of the number and variety of jewels known to us by pictured representations or existing specimens. Pectorals of gold cloisonne work inlaid with vitreous paste or precious stones, and which bear the cartouches of Amenemhat II., Usertesen II., and Usertesen III. (fig. 297), exhibit a marvellous precision of taste, lightness of touch, and dexterity of fine workmanship. So fresh and delicate are they we forget that the royal ladies to whom they belonged have been dead, and their bodies stiffened and disfigured into mummies, for nearly five thousand years. At Berlin may be seen the parure of an Ethiopian Candace; at the Louvre we have the jewels of Prince Psar; at Gizeh are preserved the ornaments of Queen Aahhotep.
[Illustration: Fig. 298.—Mirror of Queen Aahhotep.]
[Illustration: Fig. 299.—Bracelet of Queen Aahhotep, bearing cartouche of King Ahmes I.]
[Illustration: Fig. 300.—Bracelet of Queen Aahhotep.]
[Illustration: Fig. 301.—Diadem of Queen Aahhotep.]
[Illustration: Fig. 302.—Gold “Usekh” of Queen Aahhotep.]
[Illustration: Fig. 303.—Pectoral of Queen Aahhotep, bearing cartouche of King Ahmes I.]
[Illustration: Fig. 304.—Poignard of Queen Aahhotep, bearing cartouche of King Ahmes.]
[Illustration: Fig. 305.—Poignard of Queen Aahhotep, bearing cartouche of King Ahmes.]
[Illustration: Fig. 306.—Funerary battle-axe of Queen Aahhotep, bearing cartouche of King Ahmes I.]
[Illustration: Fig. 307.—Funerary bark of Queen Aahhotep.]
[Illustration: Fig. 308.—Ring of Rameses II.]
[Illustration: Fig. 309.—Bracelet of Prince Psar.]
The figures and hieroglyphs are cut out in solid gold, delicately engraved with the burin, and stand in relief upon a ground-surface filled in with pieces of blue paste and lapis lazuli artistically cut. A bracelet of more complicated workmanship, though of inferior execution, was found on the wrist of the queen (fig. 300). It is of massive gold, and consists of three parallel bands set with turquoises. On the front a vulture is represented with outspread wings, the feathers composed of green enamel, lapis lazuli, and carnelian, set in “cloisons” of gold. The hair of the mummy was drawn through a massive gold diadem, scarcely as large as a bracelet. The name of Ahmes is incrusted in blue paste upon an oblong plaque in the centre, flanked at each side by two little sphinxes which seem as if in the act of keeping watch over the inscription (fig. 301). Round her neck was a large flexible gold chain, finished at each end by a goose’s head reversed. These heads could be linked one in the other, when the chain needed to be fastened. The scarabaeus pendant to this chain is incrusted upon the shoulder and wing-sheaths with blue glass paste rayed with gold, the legs and body being in massive gold. The royal parure was completed by a large collar of the kind known as the Usekh (fig. 302). It is finished at each end with a golden hawk’s head inlaid with blue enamel, and consists of rows of scrolls, four-petalled fleurettes, hawks, vultures, winged uraei, crouching jackals, and figures of antelopes pursued by tigers. The whole of these ornaments are of gold repousse work, and they were sewn upon the royal winding sheet by means of a small ring soldered to the back of each. Upon the breast, below this collar, hung a square jewel of the kind known as “pectoral ornaments” (fig. 303). The general form is that of a naos, or shrine. Ahmes stands upright in a papyrus-bark, between Amen and Ra, who pour the water of purification upon his head and body. Two hawks hover to right and left of the king, above the heads of the gods. The figures are outlined in cloisons of gold, and these were filled in with little plaques of precious stones and enamel, many of which have fallen out. The effect of this piece is somewhat heavy, and if considered apart from the rest of the parure, its purpose might seem somewhat obscure. In order to form a correct judgment, we have, however, to remember in what fashion the women of ancient Egypt were clad. They wore a kind of smock of semi-transparent material, which came very little higher than the waist. The chest and bosom, neck and shoulders, were bare; and the one garment was kept in place by only a slender pair of braces. The rich clothed these uncovered parts with jewellery. The Usekh collar half hid the shoulders and chest. The pectoral masked the hollow between the breasts. Sometimes even the breasts were covered with two golden cups, either painted or enamelled. Besides the jewels found
In this rapid sketch of the industrial arts there are many lacunae. When referring to examples, I have perforce limited myself to such as are contained in the best-known collections. How many more might not be discovered if one had leisure to visit provincial museums, and trace what the hazard of sales may have dispersed through private collections! The variety of small monuments due to the industry of ancient Egypt is infinite, and a methodical study of those monuments has yet to be made. It is a task which promises many surprises to whomsoever shall undertake it.
[77] From the inscription upon the obelisk of Hatshepsut
which is still
erect at Karnak. For
a translation in full see Records of the
Past, vol. xii., p. 131,
et seqq.—A.B.E.
[78] Mr. Petrie suggests that this curious central
object may be a royal
umbrella with flaps of ox-hide
and tiger-skin.—A.B.E.
[79] That is, lentil-shaped, or a double convex.—A.B.E.
For the following notes, to which reference numbers will be found in the text, I am indebted to the kindness of Mr. W.M. Flinders Petrie, author of “The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh” (Field & Tuer), “Tanis” (Egypt Exploration Fund), “Naukratis” (Egypt Exploration Fund), etc., etc.
A.B.E.
(1) More striking than these are the towns of Tell Atrib, Kom Baglieh, Kom Abu Billu, and Tell Nebesheh, the houses of which may be traced without any special excavations.
(2) There is much skill needed in mixing the mud and sand in such proportions as to dry properly; when rightly adjusted there is no cracking in drying, and the grains of sand prevent the mud from being washed away in the rains.
(3) In the Delta, at least, the sizes of bricks from the Twenty-first Dynasty down to Arab times decrease very regularly; under the Twenty-first Dynasty they are about 18 x 9 x 5 inches; early in the Twenty-sixth, 16-1/2 x 8-1/4 x 5; later 15 x 7-1/2; in early Ptolemaic times, 14 x 7; in Roman times, 12 x 6, in Byzantine times, 10 x 5; and Arab bricks are 8 x 4, and continue so very generally to our times. The thickness is always least certain, as it depends on the amount placed in the mould, but the length and breadth may in most cases be accepted as a very useful chronological scale.
(4) They are found of Ramesside age at Nebesheh and Defenneh; even there they are rare, and these are the only cases I have yet seen in Egypt earlier than about the third century A.D.
(5) This system was sometimes used to raise a fort above the plain, as at Defenneh; or the chambers formed store-rooms, as at the fort at Naukratis.
(6) In the fine early work at Gizeh they sawed the paving blocks of basalt, and then ground only just the edges flat, while all the inside of the joint was picked rough to hold the mortar.
(7) A usual plan in early times was to dress the joint faces of the block in the quarry, leaving its outer face with a rough excess of a few inches; the excess still remains on the granite casing of the pyramid of Menkara, and the result of dressing it away may be seen in the corners of the granite temple at Gizeh.
(8) Otherwise called the Granite Temple of Gizeh, or Temple of Khafra, as its connection with the Sphinx is much disputed, while it is in direct communication with the temple of the pyramid of Khafra, by a causeway in line with the entrance passage.
(9) The casing of the open air court on the top of it was of fine limestone; only a few blocks of this remain. For full plan and measurements see Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh.
(10) One of the air slits, or ventilators, remains complete, opening to the upper court, from the top of the niche chamber.
(11) Below these lines, there is often a scene of offering at the bottom of the Obelisk.
(12) Mastaba is the Arabic name for a bench or platform, and was applied by the natives to such tombs on account of the resemblance in shape.
(13) In the few cases where the top remains perfect at Gizeh, the side ends in a parabolic curve which turns over into the top surface without any cornice or moulding; the tops of walls in the courts of mastabas are similar.
(14) Another view is that they are derived from the cumulative mastabas, such as the so-called step pyramid of Sakkarah.
(15) In the later pyramids; but the Gizeh pyramids are entirely built of Turah limestone.
(16) Still more conclusive is the fact that in the greatest of the pyramids the passages are such that it would have been impossible to build it by successive coats of enlargement.
(17) In only one case (that of Menkara) has a pyramid been clearly enlarged, and that was done at one step and not by many stages.
(18) The earliest—at Gizeh—are very accurate.
(19) These slabs of pavement do not extend beneath the pyramid, but only around it.
(20) Only fragments of the finest limestone casing have been found; the variety of colour was probably due to weathering.
(21) This would be impossible with the exquisitely fine joints of the masonry; a temporary staging of stone built up over part of the finished face would easily allow of raising the stones.
(22) There is no evidence that the facing block which covered the granite plugs was of granite; it was more probably of limestone.
(23) The entrance to the upper passages was never forced from the entrance passage, but was accidentally found by the Arabs, after they had forced a long tunnel in the masonry, being in ignorance of the real entrance, which was probably concealed by a hinging block of stone.
(24) Or rather it rose at an angle of 23-1/2 deg., like the descent of the entrance passage, thus making angles of 47 deg. and 133 deg. with it.
(25) This gallery has obtained a great reputation for the fineness of its joints, perhaps because they are coarse enough to be easily seen; but some joints of the entrance passage, and the joints in the queen’s chamber, are hardly visible with the closest inspection.
(26) The only signs of portcullises are those in the vestibule or antechamber.
(27) No traces of three of the portcullises remain, if they ever existed, and the other never could reach the floor or interrupt the passage, so its use is enigmatical.
(28) There is some evidence that the pyramid was opened in the early days, perhaps before the middle kingdom.
(29) Two rows of beams which rest on the side wall as corbels or cantilevers, only touching at the top, without necessarily any thrust. Such at least is the case in the queen’s chamber, and in the pyramid of Pepi, where such a roof is used.
(30) The end walls have sunk throughout a considerable amount, and the side walls have separated; thus all the beams of the upper chambers have been dragged, and every beam of the roof of the chamber is broken through. This is probably the result of earthquakes.
(31) This only covered the lower sixteen courses; the larger part above it was of limestone.
(32) Similar finished faces may be seen as far in as near the middle of the mass. This is not a true pyramid in form, but a cumulative mastaba, the faces of which are at the mastaba angle (75 deg.), and the successive enlargements of which are shown by numerous finished facings now within the masonry. The step form is the result of carrying upwards the mastaba form, at the same time that it was enlarged outwards.
(33) Not in all cases apparently, for the hieroglyphs on the passage of Pepi’s pyramid are not injured, as they would be if plugs had been withdrawn.
(34) Pepi’s roof is formed by a row of large beams which rested independently on the side walls as corbels or cantilevers (see Note 29).
(35) The mastaba angle is 75 deg., and the pyramid angle 50 deg. to 55 deg..
(36) Its present appearance is an accident of its demolition; it was originally, like the “step-pyramid” of Sakkarah, a cumulative mastaba, as is shown by the remains of the lower steps still in the mounds at its base, and by the mediaeval description of it.
Aahhotep, 157, 323-30.
Aahhotep II., 288-9.
Aalu, fields of, 163-4, 167.
Abacus, 52-4, 58, 61, 116.
Abi, 273.
Abu Roash, 113, 134.
Abu Simbel
(see TEMPLES, etc.).
Abusir, 114, 131, 134, 138, 140.
Abydos
(see FORTRESSES, TEMPLES,
TOMBS, etc.).
Acacia, 203, 274.
Adze, of iron, 283, 304.
Affi
(see TOMB).
Agate, 247.
Ahmes I., 267, 307, 317, 323, 324, 325, 326, 327,
328, 329.
Ahmes II., 269 and note.
(see AMASIS).
Ba, or Bi, the soul, 111, 112.
abode of the, 128.
abode of the, its decoration, 142, 156-7,
162-5.
following the sun at night, 159.
statuettes to serve as body for, 167.
transmigration of, 164.
Bab el Mandeb, 109 (note).
Ba-en-pet, 196 and note.
(see IRON).
Bakenrenf
(see TOMB).
Bakhtan, stela of, 109 and note.
Bari, or boat of the Sun, 108.
Barks, sacred and funerary, 66, 77, 95, 108, 159,
164, 166, 249, 301,
329-30.
Basalt, 42, 127, 169, 196, 236, 237, 252.
Basilisk, 201
(see URAEUS.)
Bas-relief,—
Abu Simbel, 229.
Egyptian forms of, 197-9.
gems, 249.
gilded, 313.
ivory, 273.
models for study of, 197.
New Empire, 228-9.
painting of, 205-6.
preparation of walls for, 192-3.
Roman period, 245.
sketches for, 193-5.
speos of Horemheb, 232.
Tell el Amarna, 231.
Temple of Abydos, 232.
Tomb of Seti I., 232.
(See PAINTING, SCULPTURE,
and WALL-SCENES.)
Bast
(see GODDESSES).
Bastions, 28, 29, 32.
Battlements, 14, 24, 25, 32, 50.
Beads, 168, 247, 261, 324.
Beams, 6, 30.
of stone, 140.
Beard,—
false, of statue of Horemheb, 233.
of sphinx, 208.
Bedawin, 20, 42, 101.
Beds, 281, 292.
funerary, 292-4.
Beer, at funerary feast, 180.
Beetles
(see SCARABAEI).
Begig, obelisk of, 105.
Beit el Wally
(see TEMPLES and HEMI-SPEOS).
Beni Hasan
(see TOMBS).
Beni Suef, 38.
Berlin Museum, parure of jewels at, 322.
Bersheh
(see TOMBS).
Bes
(see GODS).
Bezel, of rings, 321-2, 331.
Bi
(see BA).
Bird, human-handed, 91.
Birket el Kurun, lake of, 38, 39.
Blocks, building,—
dressing, 47, Notes 6 and 7.
in pyramids, 132, Note 15, 139, Note 33.
raising, 49.
sizes, 49.
working, 49, Note 7.
Boats, toy, 282.
transport by, 45, 132.
(See BARKS.)
Bonding, 48-9.
Bone, work in, 272-3.
Book of Knowing that which is in Hades, 172.
Book of Ritual of Burial, 157.
Book of Ritual of Embalmment, 157.
Book of the Dead, 129, 157, 165, 172-5, 205, 284-5.
Book of the Opening of the Mouth, 165.
Bowls, of blue glazed pottery, 268.
Bracelets, 249, 276, 308, 324-5, 331, 332.
Braces, 298, 327.
Bread,—
making of, depicted in tombs, etc.,
124, 127, 224.
offerings of, 166.
Breccia, 42, 236, 254.
Bricks,—
baked, 4.
for pyramids, 132.
glazed, 4, 270, Note 4.
in civil and military architecture, 46.
making of, 3-4, Notes 2 and 3.
of mud and straw, 3, 114.
sun-dried, 3, 21, 113-14, 145.
without straw, 113, 145.
Brickwork,—
civil and military architecture, 46.
dikes, 38.
domestic architecture, 3,5-6.
enclosure walls of temples, 67, 87.
Cabinet-making, 124. 273. 282 et seq.
Caesars
(see ROMAN PERIOD).
Calaite, 247.
Caligula, 245.
Cameos, 332.
Canaanites, 31.
Canal of Zaru, 35.
Canals, 37, 45.
Canopic vases, 167, 252-3, 258-9, 292.
Canopy, funerary, 293-5, 299-301.
Capitals
(see COLUMNS and PILLARS).
Caricatures, 171-2.
Carnelian, 247, 250, 324, 325, 328.
Cartonnage, 167.
Cartouches, 4, 48, 61, 250, 262, 271, 278, 299, 302,
322, 323, 324, 326,
328,
329.
Caryatid statues, 288.
Casing stones, 47, 65, Notes 7 and 9, 132, Note 15,
134, Note 20, 138,
Note
32.
Cat, 171, 172, 311.
Cattle, 13, 25, 155.
Cedar wood, 329.
Ceiling decoration, 18-9, 92, 94, 141, 163-4.
Cella, 58.
Cellars, 35, 36.
Cement, 52, 192, 194.
Census, 155.
Ceremonies, religious, performed by king, 95-7, 101-3.
Chains, 155, 325-6.
measuring, 155.
Chairs, 179, 281, 295-6.
Champollion, 26, 55, 271.
Chapel,—
furniture of, 166.
of mastabas, 116 et pas.
of pyramids, 131 et pas., 144.
painting and sculpture in, 121 et seq.,
141-2.
reception room of Ka, 118 et seq.
(See ABUSIR, ABYDOS, AMENHOTEP,
AMENI, APIS, DAHSHUR, GIZEH, GURNEH,
KHNUMHOTEP, MEDINET HABU,
MEROE, RAMESSEUM, THUERIS.)
Chariots, 183, 292.
Chenoboscion, 45 (note).
(see KASR ES SAID).
Cheops
(see KHUFU).
Chephren
(see KHAFRA).
Chester, the Rev. G.J., 303 (note).
Chests, 281, 283.
Chisels, 45, 195, 214, 304.
Chlamys, 242.
Chrysoprase, 246.
Cinnabar, 203.
Cisterns, 41.
Claudius, 245.
Clay, potter’s, of Nile valley, 254-5.
(see BRICKS, POTTERY).
Clerestory, 71.
Coffins, 157, 259
(see MUMMY-CASES and SARCOPHAGI).
Coins and medals, no Egyptian, 313.
Collar, Order of the Golden, 155.
Colonnade, 17, 48, 67-8, 75, 79.
Colossi, 83, 103, 106, 202, 226-30, 232, 241.
Columns, monolithic, and built in courses, 52.
campaniform, 56-9.
Hathor-headed, 61-2.
lotus-bud, 59-61.
types of, 55.
Concrete, 128.
Cones, funerary, 166, 257.
Contra Esneh, 57.
Contra Latopolis, 61.
Dahshur, 113, 114, 131, 134, 142, 323.
Dakkeh, 2.
Damanhur, 332.
Dams,—
embanked, 38.
of stone, 40-1.
Dancers, 177, 178.
Daphnae, 36 and note
(see TAHPANHES and TELL DEFENNEH).
Dapur, 30, 31.
Date palms, 15, 274.
Decani, 93.
Decoration, subjects of, 11, 12, 18-20, 21-2.
geometrical, 19, 256, 258, 295, 298.
(See COLUMNS, PAINTING, SCULPTURE.)
Deir el Bahari, 51, 53, 61, 83, 85 and note, 109 (note),
180, 229, 264,
266,
287, 299, 302.
Deir el Gebrawi
(see TOMBS).
Deirel Medineh
(see TEMPLES).
Delta, the, 4, 31, 37, 209, 235, 241, 243, 310, 311.
Denderah
(see TEMPLES).
Derr, 84.
Deveria, T., 196 (note).
Dice, of ivory, 273.
Die, of column, 57.
Dike,—
of Kosheish, 38.
Wady Garraweh, 40.
Wady Genneh, 41.
Diorite, 42, 169, 196, 224, 254.
Disc, winged, 294.
Dolls, 282.
Dom palms, 15, 274, 318.
Door, 9, 25, 68, 104, 135, 150, 151, 160, 285.
false, for KA, 115, 119-21, 125, 130,
141.
Door-jambs, 26, 46, 47, 116, 119, 151.
Double, the
(see KA).
Dovetails, 48.
Drah Abu’l Neggeh, 147, 158, 266.
Draught-box, 273.
Drawing, 169-70.
conventional system of, 175-9.
teaching of, 169-70.
want of perspective in, 182-91.
(See PAINTING AND SCULPTURE.)
Dress, 219, 274-6, 327.
articles of,—
braces, 298, 327.
girdle, 178, 274, 278.
head-dress, 241, 276, 286.
kilt, 201, 275.
klaft, 227, 267.
petticoat, 276, 286.
robe, embroidered, 308.
sandals, 168, 286, 298.
surcoat, 302.
tunic, 225, 279.
vest, 275, 286.
wig, 236, 275, 286, 308, 310.
Drill, 195, 247, 250, 282.
Duality, 96-7.
Ducks, 15, 20, 306.
Duemichen, 109 (note).
Dwarf, statue of, 224-6.
Dynasty III. (Memphite),—
possible wood panels of, 210.
Dynasty IV. (Memphite),—
decoration, 89-90.
funerary temples, 64 and note, 66.
mastabas of, 117, 118, 124, 125, 126,
128.
obelisks, 104.
Dynasty XII. (Theban),—
blue glaze, 266.
fortress, 23, 28.
houses, 7, 8, 12, 281-2.
jewellery 322, 323
(see KAHUN).
Karnak, 76.
models of offerings, 252.
pyramids 132, 142, 143.
statuary, 228, 229.
temples, 66.
tombs 149 (note), 156
(see BENI HASAN).
Dynasty XIII. (Theban),—
funerary couch, 293-4.
Karnak, 76.
statuary, 226-7, 229, 273-4.
statuettes, 233, 273.
Dynasty XIV. (Xoite),—
Karnak, 76.
statuary, 226-7.
Dynasty XVII. (Theban),—
draught-box, 273.
jewellery, 323 et seq.
sarcophagi, 287.
Dynasty XVIII. (Theban),—
in Abydos, 22.
blue glaze, 268.
Book of the Dead, 173.
bronzes, 307.
canopic vases, 258.
chair, 296-7 (note).
colossi, 229-30.
domestic architecture, 14 et seq.
gold and silver plate, 316, 318, 319,
320.
gold and silver statues, 314-15.
jewellery, 323 et seq.
Karnak, 76-7.
in Memphis, 88.
mummy-cases, 288-9.
painters’ palettes, 202.
scarabaei, 250.
sculpture, 229-31.
Speos-sanctuaries, 82, 83, 85.
stelae, 45.
in Thebes, 88-9.
tomb-paintings, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17.
tombs, 155 et seq.
wars, 31.
Dynasty XIX. (Theban),—
blue glaze of, 268.
bronzes, 307.
colossi, 234.
domestic architecture, 19.
flesh tints, 205.
fortifications, 31, 34.
gold and silver plate, 317, 321.
gold and silver statues, 314.
jewellery, 331.
Karnak, 78.
mummy-cases, 289.
tombs, 158 et pas.
Dynasty XX. (Theban),—
blue glaze, 268.
canopic vases, 258.
domestic architecture, 19.
fortresses 33
(see MEDINET HABU).
gold and silver plate, 317.
jewellery, 332.
leather-work, 300, 301.
sketches, 171.
stela of Bakhtan, 109 (note).
Earrings, 331, 332.
Earthquake,—
building to resist, 22.
of B.C. 27, at Karnak, 79.
of B.C. 22, at Thebes, 244.
Ebony, 295, 323.
Edfu
(see TEMPLES).
Edinburgh Museum, funerary canopy in, 293-4.
Eggs, 259.
Egypt Exploration Fund,—
at Bersheh, 148 (note).
at Bubastis, 52 (note).
at Daphnae, 36 (note).
at Deir el Bahari, 83, 85.
at Pithom, 36 (note).
at Tanis, 104 (note).
at Tell Gemayemi, 200 (note), 262 (note).
Ekhmim, 14, 247, 259, 291, 293, 297, 303 and note.
El Agandiyeh, 1.
El Hibeh, 2, 33.
at Beni Hasan, 148 (note).
El Kab, 2, 20, 26, 27, 54, 69, 88, 228, 265
(see CONTRA LATOPOLIS).
El Khozam, 256.
Electrum, 304, 312, 313.
Elephant, 273.
Elephantine, 148, 209 (note), 273, 275.
(see TEMPLES).
Embroidery, 276, 302, 303, 308.
Emerald, 41, 246, 250.
Enamel, 265-72.
in jewellery, 289, 322, 325, 327.
Erman, on Stela of Bakhtan, 109 (note).
Erment, 247.
Esneh, 92, 144, 245.
Ethiopia, 106, 318.
Ethiopian Dynasty
(see DYNASTY XXV.).
Etruria, imitated scarabs of, 248.
Eye,—
as amulet, 247-8.
in decoration, 268.
on sarcophagi, 285.
sacred, 168.
(See UTA).
Eyes of statues, 261, 310.
Fan, 323.
Fayum, the, 19, 38, 39, 66, 105, 134, 243, 259, 261,
304.
Feast,—
funerary, 118, 123, 125, 166.
funerary of Horemheb, 179-80.
Feasts, 118.
Felspar, 247, 250, 324, 328, 329.
Ferry, 34.
Feshn, 33.
Figs, 267.
Fires, 2, 12.
Fire-sticks, 282.
Fish,—
in decoration, 268, 278, 316.
in enamel, 267.
offerings of, 228.
Florence Museum, Egyptian war-chariot in, 292 (note).
Flowers
(see LOTUS),—
in temples, 67.
offerings of, 180, 228.
Fords, 34.
Fortresses, 20-34.
of Abydos, 20-6.
of El Kab, 20, 27.
of Kom el Ahmar, 25, 26.
of Kummeh, 28-9.
of Semneh, 28-30.
Foundations, 47, 48.
Frieze, 97.
Frog, as amulet, 247.
Frontier, 28, 31, 36-7.
Furnaces, glass, 259, 260.
Furniture, 281-4.
ancient Egyptian love of beautiful, 246.
funerary, 128, 166-8, 251 et seq.,
292 et seq.
funerary, of poor, 167-8, 255.
Galleries,—
in houses, 17.
Garden, of private house, 13, 14, 15.
Garnet, 246.
scarabaei of, 250.
Gazelle, 123, 128, 153, 171, 176, 180, 252.
Gebel Abufeydeh, 44, 45.
Gebel Barkal
(see TEMPLES).
Gebel Sheikh Herideh, 45.
Gebel Silsileh
(see TEMPLES).
Gebeleyn, 33, 256.
Geese, 15, 19, 166, 171, 177, 296, 306.
Genii, 159, 164, 258 (note).
of On, Sop, and Khonu, 96, 324.
Gerf Husein, 85.
Girgeh, 14, 38.
Gizeh
(see PYRAMIDS, TEMPLES, TOMBS).
Gizeh, Museum, 4, 106, 107, 171, 174, 195, 214, 216-26,
227, 229, 232-3,
237,
239, 241, 242, 244, 262, 265, 267, 268, 271, 273, 274,
275,
278,
286, 298, 301, 306, 307, 308, 309, 315, 316, 323-30,
331.
Glass, 259-65.
factories, at El Kab, the Ramesseum, Tell
el Amarna, Tell Eshmuneyn, 265.
factory at Tell Gemayemi, 262 (note).
Glazed stone and ware, 165-72
(see POTTERY).
Goat, 176.
Gods,—
Amen, 33, 97, 101, 104, 105, 109, 171,
231, 232, 249, 268, 289, 307, 315,
327.
Amen Ra, 96.
Anhur, 311.
Anubis, 168, 304.
Apis, 147, 263.
Bes, 53, 57, 254, 277, 318.
Harpocrates, 307.
Hor (Horus), 96, 105.
Horus (Hor), 64, 96, 105, 207, 259, 267,
309-10, 314.
Khonsu, 60, 64, 70, 72, 74, 75, 97, 109
and note, 235.
Mentu, 97, 329.
Min, 118.
Nefertum, 310, 314.
Osiris, 20, 53, 54, 95, 142, 168, 189,
237, 249, 304.
Ptah, 168, 315.
Ra, 208, 327.
Ra Harmakhis, 105.
Seb, 324.
Set (Typhon), 96, 196.
Shu, 311.
Thoth, 96, 118, 167, 259, 314.
Tum, 105.
Goddesses,—
Apet, 237 (note).
Bast, 168, 311.
Hathor, 53, 54, 55, 61, 62, 69, 70, 82,
83, 97, 168, 237.
Isis, 95, 241, 247, 249, 250, 287, 294,
310, 314.
Khuit, 259.
Ma, 262, 294.
Maut, 97, 289.
Neith, 250.
Nekheb, 92.
Nephthys, 237, 249, 250, 287, 294, 310.
Pakhet, 42, 82.
Sekhet, 250, 277, 311.
Sothis, 118.
Taurt, 237 (note).
Tefnut, 311.
Thueris, 237.
Uati, 92.
Gold, 11, 304, 312-21.
Goldsmith, 313.
Golenischeff, 228.
Gouge, 195.
Granaries, 1, 10, 36.
Granite, 6, 47, 66, 76, 103, 132, 136, 137, 169,196,
197, 199, 214, 247,
254,
290.
black, 42, 165, 233.
grey, 41, 236, 244.
red, 42, 52, 65, 77, 107, 127, 165, 232,
236.
Grapes, models, 166, 267.
Greeks,—
Egyptian fortification in time of, 34.
Egyptian patterns among, 320.
their imitation scarabs, 248.
their influence on astronomical tables,
93.
their influence on columns, 56.
their influence on jewellery, 332.
their influence on sculpture, 241-4.
their peripteral temples, 69.
their similar system of building construction,
48.
their theory of mounds, 5.
Hadrian, 243, 245 (note).
Hairpins, 277.
Hammamat, valley of, 41.
Hammer, 195, 313.
Hapi, genius, 258 (note).
Hapizefa
(see TOMB).
Harpocrates
(see GODS).
Hatasu
(see HATSHEPSUT).
Hathor
(see GODDESSES).
Hatshepsut (Hatasu), 42, 77, 85, 104, 105, 109 and
note, 296 (note), 313
and
note.
Hawara, 257, 291.
Hawk, 254, 259, 267, 322, 326.
Haworth, Mr. Jesse, 296 (note).
Headrest, 128, 166, 277.
Hedgehog, 254, 267.
Hekalli, 144.
Heliopolis, 26, 32, 103, 104, 309.
Helwan, dam at baths of, 40.
Hematite, 247, 250.
Hemi-speos,—
Beit el Wally, 84, 205 (note), 235.
Deir el Bahari, 83, 85.
Derr, 84.
Gerf Husein, 85.
Wady Sabuah, 85.
Herhor, 158, 261, 288.
Hermopolis, 209.
Herodotus, 38, 39-40, 88, 195.
Hesi, 210.
Hieroglyphs, 55, 60, 180, 236, 257, 261-2 and note,
268, 270, 284, 285,
289,
300, 316, 325.
Hippopotamus, 189, 236.
Hittites, 31, 185.
(see KHETA).
Honey, 203, 254.
Hophra, the biblical, 269.
Hor Horus
(see GODS).
Hor, portrait statue of one, 242.
Horbeit, 311, 312.
Horemheb, 50, 52, 53, 82, 155, 158, 179-80, 205, 231,
232, 233.
Horhotep
(see TOMB).
Hori Ra, wooden statuette of, 275.
Hori, scribe, ushabtiu of, 257.
Horn, objects in, 272.
Horse, date of introduction of, 153-4.
Horshesu, 64 and note. 207.
Horus
(see GODS).
Horuta, 257.
Houses, 1-20.
Hui
(see TOMB).
Hunefer, his papyrus, 173-4.
Huts, 20, 8.
Hyksos sphinxes
(see PERIOD).
Hypostyle hall, 72, 74, 76, 89, 92, 102, 106.
Abu Simbel, 84.
Abydos, 60, 85-6.
Gurneh, 60.
Kalaat Addah, 82.
Karnak, 34 (note), 46, 57, 60, 62-3,76,
78, 79, 100.
temple of Khonsu, 71.
Medinet Habu, 60.
Ramesseum, 57, 60.
Ibis, 259.
Ibrahim, Prince, 240.
Illahun, 39, 143.
Incense, 95, 126, 273.
Ink, black, 4, 170, 193, 285.
red, 44, 170, 171, 193, 285.
Inscriptions, absence of in Temple of Sphinx, 66.
obelisk, 313 and note.
pyramid of Unas, 163.
sarcophagi, 127, 157, 165.
tombs, 141-2, 151, 155-6.
(See HIEROGLYPHS).
Iron, 195-7, 304.
Irrigation, 35, 37-41.
Isiemkheb, 180, 299-300.
Isis
(see GODDESSES).
Italy, Egyptian patterns in, 320.
Ivory, 272, 273-4, 283.
Jade, 254.
Jasper, 247, 250.
Jewellery, 249, 321-33.
Jews, 303.
Jomard, 55.
Kaapir
(see TOMB).
Kadesh (Qodshu), 31, 101, 185, 187.
Kahun, Twelfth Dynasty Town, 1, 6 (note), 7, 282.
Kalaat Addah
(see TEMPLES).
Kalabsheh
(see TEMPLES).
Kames, 323, 330.
Ka, or Double, 111, 112, 118, 130, 141-2, 156-7, 162,
163, 165-7, 212-14,
257.
Ka-name of Pepi I, 270.
Karnak
(see TEMPLES).
Kashta, 235 (note).
Kasr es Said
(see CHENOBOSCION).
Kebhsennef, 258 (note).
Keneh, 265, 332.
Khabiusokari
(see TOMB).
Khafra (Chephren), 89, 133, 137, 134, 214, 217-18,
224, 253.
Khamha
(see TOMB).
Kheper, or Khepra
(see SCARABAEI).
Kheta, 101, 185, 187-8.
Kheti
(see TOMB).
Khmunu, 148.
Khnumhotep
(see TOMB).
Khonsu
(see GODS).
Khonu, 96, 324.
Khu, the, 111, 112.
Khuenaten (Amenhotep IV.), 15, 155, 230.
Khufu (Cheops), 133, 134-7, 206, 312, 314.
Khufu Poskhu, 20, 22.
Khuit
(see GODDESSES).
Klaft, 227, 306.
Knives, 304, 306.
Koft, I
(see COPTOS).
Kohl (antimony, collyrium), 254, 266, 273.
Kom ed Damas, 242.
Kom el Ahmar, 2, 25, 26.
Kom es Sultan, 21, 23, 27.
Kom Ombo
(see OMBOS and TEMPLES).
Kosheish, 38.
Kummeh, 28.
Kurnet Murraee, 263, 294.
Labyrinth, the, 59.
Lake Moeris, 38-40.
Lakes, sacred, 77.
Lamp, 19, 307 (?).
Lapis-lazuli, 203, 247, 250, 304, 324, 325, 328, 329.
Lasso, 95.
Lattice, 11.
Lead, 304.
Leather, 292, 298-301.
Lefebure, M, 161.
Leopard, 176.
Lewis, Prof. Hayter, 272 (note).
Leyden Museum, 266 (note), 292 (note).
Libations
(see OFFERINGS).
Libyan cliffs and plateau, 39, 113, 207, 209 (note).
Libyans, 21, 207, 209 (note).
Limestone, 42, 47, 65, 76, 107, 113, 127, 132, 135,
138, 139, 140, 147,
148,
166, 169, 192, 195, 200, 224, 232, 236, 252, 253, 254,
265,
312.
Linant, M, 39.
Lindos, 302.
Linen, 130, 286, 302, 314.
Lintels, 9, 26, 46, 47, 150, 151.
Lion, 171, 176, 199, 293, 295, 322.
Lisht, 89, 134, 252.
Loftie, the Rev. W.J., 201 (note). 249 (note).
Looms, 297, 298.
Lotus, 34 (note), 57, 58, 60-61, 62, 64, 116, 180,
247, 254, 266, 268, 269,
271,
273, 277, 278, 279, 281, 299, 316.
Louvre Museum, 208, 214, 215, 224, 226, 227, 239,
240, 266 (note), 271,
275,
278, 295, 308, 313, 316, 322, 331.
Luxor
(see TEMPLES).
Ma
(see GODDESSES).
Magdilu,
(see MIGDOLS).
Magnaura, 320.
Maillet, M., 64.
Malachite, 247, 304.
Mallet, 45, 197, 202.
Manfalut, 144.
Manna
(see TOMB).
Mariette, 64 (note), 129, 210, 227, 271.
Masahirti, 299.
Masonry, 48, 49.
Massarah, 43.
Mastabas, 113-31, Notes 12-14.
(see TOMB and TOMBS).
Masts, 72, 103.
Naga, group from, 244.
Nai, 276.
Naos, 61, 108, 312, 326.
(see SHRINE).
Napata, 144.
Naville, M., 36 and note, 52 (note).
Necho, 267 and note.
Necklace, 249, 276, 322, 325.
(see USEKH).
Nectenebo, 62.
Neferhotep
(see TOMB).
Nefert, 219-20.
Nefertari, 84.
Nefertum
(see GODS).
Negadeh
(see TOMBS).
Negroes, 41, 91.
Neith
(see GODDESSES).
Nekheb
(see GODDESSES).
Nemhotep, dwarf, 225.
Nenka
(see TOMB).
Nephthys
(see GODDESSES).
Nesikhonsu, 264.
Net, 95.
Netemt, 261.
New York Museum, 172.
Niche of tombs, origin of, 152
(see DOOR, SERDAB, and STELA).
Nile, 34, 38, 39, 45, 48, 252, 254, 273.
Niles, the (deities), 91, 92, 228.
Nitocris, daughter of Psammetichus I., 237.
Nomes, represented, 91-2.
Nubia, 28, 47, 66, 82, 259.
Nurri
(see PYRAMIDS).
Oasis, the, 20.
Obelisk, 45, 67, 103-6, 313.
Axum, 106.
Begig, 105.
Fourth Dynasty, 104.
Hatshepsut, 104, 106, 313 and note.
Heliopolis, 104.
Luxor, 104.
Tanis, 104.
Obsidian, 247, 250.
Ocean, celestial, 93.
Ochre, 203.
OEnochoe, glass, 263.
Offerings,—
corn, 97.
milk, 95.
oil, 95.
wine, 95, 97.
(See FEAST, LIBATIONS, TABLES
OF OFFERINGS.)
Oil, 95.
Ombos, 26, 36, 58, 88, 92, 245,
(see KOM OMBO and TEMPLES).
On, genius of, 96.
Osiris
(see GODS).
Ostraka, 36.
Ostrakon, caricature, 172.
Oxen, 123, 128, 153, 175, 182.
Pahurnefer, 214.
Painting, 192-3, 202-6, 292-3.
(see DRAWING, PERSPECTIVE,
WALL-SCENES).
Pakhet
(see GODDESSES).
Palestrina, mosaic, 189-92.
Palette,—
painter’s, 202.
scribe’s, 128, 166, 170.
Palm capital, 58.
Palms, for roofing, 2, 11
(see DATE and DOM PALMS).
Papyri, 64 (note), 160, 167, 170, 171, 172-5, 205.
(see BOOK).
Papyrus, 57, 190, 327.
Pavilion,—
of private house, 17.
of Medinet Habu, 32.
of Nectenebo, Philae, 62.
Pearl, mother-of-, 247.
Pearls, 247.
Pectoral, 322, 323, 326, 327.
Pedishashi, 239, 240.
Pegs, 283.
Pen, 175, 215.
Pepi I., 140, 253, 270.
Pepi II., 133, 140, 142.
Perfumes, 67, 128, 157, 180.
Period,—
Hyksos, 227-8, 307.
Persian, 174, 303.
Ptolemaic, 56, 58, 61, 66, 69-70, 72,
79, 90, 93, 98, 175, 208, 241-3,
249,
290, 303, 315, 332.
Roman, 58, 66, 90, 98, 173, 208, 243-5.
Theban, second, 19 and note.
Peristyle, 67, 74, 83, 84, 106
(see PROCESSIONAL HALL).
Perspective, 177-92.
Pestle and mortar, 170.
Petamenoph
(see TOMB).
Petrie, W.M.F., 7, 10, 12, 45, 64-5, 104, 113, 131,
197, 200, 202, 249,
267,
282, 291, 334 et seq.
Pharaoh, 66, 67, 95-7, 98, 101-3.
Philae
(see TEMPLES).
Phoenicians, 248, 263, 303, 320.
Piankhi I., 34.
Piankhi II., 235 (note).
Pibesa, 237.
Pigments, 202-3.
Pillars, 52, 53-5, 65, 68, 116, 149, 151.
Pincushion, 277.
Pinotem II., 299.
Pinotem III., 299, 332.
Pisebkhanu, 228.
Pithom, i, 36 and note.
Plate, 315-20
(see GOLD and SILVER).
Pliny, 303.
Pohunika
(see TOMB).
Poignards, 327, 328.
Point, 47 (note), 6, 195, 197, 201, 247, 250.
Polymita, 303.
Ponds, 8, 15, 186.
Porch, 13
(see PORTICO).
Porphyry, 42, 247.
Portcullis, in pyramids, 136, Notes 26, 27, 137, 139.
Portico, 13, 16, 51, 54, 57, 60, 67, 116, 149, 150,
152, 206.
Portrait, panel-painting, 291-2.
(see BAS-RELIEF, MUMMY-CASES,
and STATUES).
Posno collection, 308.
Pottery, 166,254-9.
(see GLAZED WARE and VASES).
Priests
Pyramid of,—
Amenemhat III. (Hawara), 143.
Ati, 142.
Khafra (Second Pyramid of Gizeh), 133,
134, 137.
Khufu (Great Pyramid of Gizeh), 133, 134-7.
Menkara (Third Pyramid of Gizeh), 134,
137.
Merenra, 133, 140.
Pepi I., 140.
Pepi II., 133, 140, 142.
Sakkarah, Step, or Great, 138-9, Note
32.
Sneferu (Medum), 132,143-4.
Teti, 140.
Unas, 133, 138, 139-40.
Usertesen I., 143.
Usertesen II. (Illahun), 143.
Pyramidion, 105, 147.
Pyramid-mastaba tombs, 145-8,
Pyramids, 131-45, and Notes, pp, 334-7.
Abusir, 131, 134, 138, 140.
Abydos (Hekalli), 144.
Dahshur, 131, 134, 142.
Esneh (Mohammeriyeh), 144.
Ethiopia (Meroe, Napata, Nurri), 144.
Fayum (Hawara and Illahun), 134, 143.
Gizeh, 131, 133-7, 140.
Lisht, 134, 142.
Manfalut, 144.
Sakkarah, 133, 134, 137, 138-42.
Qodshu, 31.
(see KADESU).
Quarries, 35, 41-5, 132.
Ra
(see GODS).
Ra Harmakhis
(see GODS).
Raemka, 220
(see SHEIKH EL BELED).
Rahotep, 214, 219.
Ram, 88, 89, 199.
Rameses I., 78, 158.
Rameses II. (Sesostris), 47, 52, 78, 80, 84, 86, 101,
103, 158, 188, 202,
226,
231, 232, 234, 235, 287-8, 321, 331.
Rameses III., 4, 32-3, 87, 101, 184, 194, 195, 270,
272, 301, 306, 321.
Rameses IV., 160.
Rameses IX., 331.
Ramesseum, the, 36, 37, 47, 57, 60, 62, 72, 92, 100,
103, 159, 187, 234,
265.
Ramessides, the, 1, 23, 109, 153, 168, 235, 266, 290,
320.
Ramparts, 24, 30, 33, 87.
Ranefer, 214, 218.
Rats, 171, 259.
Red Sea, emerald mines, 41.
Redesiyeh, 229.
Reed brush, 171.
Reeds, 180, 266.
Rekhmara
(see TOMB).
Renaissance, 175, 235-40, 290.
Repousse work
(see GOLD, JEWELLERY, SILVER).
Reservoir, 38-41, 252
(see DAMS, DIKES, IRRIGATION).
Rhind, A.H., 293 and note.
Rings, 267, 305, 321-2, 331.
Roads, 30, 34, 35, 41.
Rock-cut temples and tombs
(see SPEOS and TOMBS).
Roofs, 2, 9, 10, 11, 32, 51, 90.
Rouge, M. le Vicomte de, 109 (note).
Sa, amulet, 237 (note).
Sabuah, Wady
(see TEMPLES).
Sacrifices, 95, 97.
(see FEAST and OFFERINGS).
Sails of leather-work, 301.
Sais, 26, 266.
Sakkarah, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 126,
129, 130 (note), 133,
134,
137, 138, 140, 144, 158, 189, 197, 204, 217, 221, 226,
Uaga, feast of, 118.
Uahabra, 269 (note).
(see APRIES and HOPHRA).
Uati
(see GODDESSES).
Una
(see TOMB).
Unas, 133, 138, 139, 163.
Uraeus (basilisk), 61, 201, 294.
Usekh, 326-7.
Usertesen I, 76, 143.
Usertesen II., 7, 143, 322.
Usertesen III., 28, 226, 322, 323.
Ushabtiu, 167, 253, 257, 266.
Uta, amulet, 247-8.
Varnish, 203-4, 305.
Vases,—–
Ancient Empire, 255, 256.
bronze, 305.
canopic, 167, 252-3, 258, 292.
decoration of, 256, 257, 258, 259.
libation, 292, 310.
silver and gold, 316-20.
situlae, 307.
terra-cotta, 114, 166.
toilet, 253-4.
(See BRONZE, GLASS, GLAZED
WARE, GOLD, POTTERY, SILVER.)
Vaulting, 6 and note, 36, 51,
145, 146, 150, 151.
Vauquelin, M., 304.
Venus, 243.
Vermilion, 203.
Vienna Museum, 272.
Vulture, 92, 299, 301, 315, 325.
Vyse, Col. Howard., 137
Wady Gerraweh, 40.
Genneh, 41.
Sabuah
(see HEMI-SPEOS).
Wages, 35.
Wall-scenes, 3, 9, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19,
21, 24, 30, 31, 35, 36,
91,
92, 97, 99, 120, 122, 124, 130, 152-6, 162-5, 177,
178, 179-
92,
193, 194, 195, 260, 284, 295, 296, 297, 298, 300, 301,
313,
318,
319, 320.
(see BAS-RELIEF and PAINTING).
Washhouse, 12.
Weavers, 124, 297-8.
Wheel, potter’s, 255.
Wig, 236, 275, 276, 286, 308, 310, 332.
Wilkinson, Sir Gardner, 295, 303, 305.
Wilson, Sir E., 128 (note).
Windows, 9, 11, 50, 65, 70, 144.
Wine, 35, 36, 97, 180.
Wood, 25, 50, 66, 169, 205, 210-11, 214 and note,
224, 235, 274-7.
(see CABINET-MAKING, MUMMY-CASES,
STATUETTES, STATUES).
Zagazig, 332.
Zaru (Selle), 34 and note.
Zodiacal circle of Denderah, 93, 94.
Zowyet el Aryan, 134.