A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Volume I Part 13

[109] We here speak of the fauna as a whole, disregarding particular genera and species. It may be said that some particular plant which is to be found both in France and Norway, is much brighter in colour when it grows in the neighbourhood of the pole than in our temperate climate, but this apparent exception only confirms the rule which we have laid down. The plant whose whole season of bloom is comprised between a late spring and an early autumn develops itself much more rapidly than with us, and, granting that it has become so hardened that it is able to resist the long and hard frosts of winter, it receives, during the short summer, much more light and sun than its French or German sister. During those fleeting summers of the north, whose strange charm has been so often described, the sun hardly descends below the horizon; the nights are an hour long, and not six or seven. The colour of flowers is therefore in exact proportion to the amount of light which they receive.

[110] This was perceived by Goethe. In art, as in natural science, he divined beforehand some of the discoveries of our century by the innate force of his genius. He was not surprised by the discovery that the temples of cla.s.sic Sicily were painted in brilliant tones, which concealed the surface of their stone and accentuated the leading lines of their architecture. He was one of the first to accept the views of Hittorf and to proclaim that the architects who had found traces of colours upon the mouldings of Greek buildings were not deceiving themselves and others.

Under a burning and never clouded sun, objects of a neutral colour do not stand out against their background, and their shadows lose a part of their value, "_comme devorees par la diffusion et la reverberation d'une incomparable lumiere_." [111] In Egypt, a column, a minaret, a dome, hardly seem to be modelled as they stand against the depths of the sky. All three seem almost flat. The warm and varied hues with which polychromatic decoration endows buildings help us to distinguish them in such situations from the ground upon which they stand, and to accentuate their different planes. They also compensate, in some degree, for the absence of those strong shadows which elsewhere help to make contours visible. Attention is drawn to the dominant and bounding lines of an architectural composition by contrasts of tint which also serve to give force to wall paintings and bas-reliefs.

[111] We borrow these expressions from M. CH. BLANC, who, when in Egypt, was very much struck with this phenomenon. "Those villages which approach in colour to that Nile mud of which they are composed, hardly stand out at all against the background, unless that be the sky itself or those sunny rocks which reflect the light in such a fas.h.i.+on that they fatigue the most accustomed eyes. I notice here, as I did in Greece, at Cape Sunium, that cupolas and round towers have their modelling almost destroyed by the strong reflections." (_Voyage de la Haute egypte_, 1876, p. 114).

Polychromy is thus a help to our eyes in those countries where a blinding light would otherwise prevent us from appreciating the structural beauties of their architecture. It is by no means peculiar to Egypt, but that country was the first to employ it upon rich and vast undertakings, she employed it more constantly and more universally than any other people, and she carried it to its logical conclusion with a boldness which was quite unique.

The Egyptian habit of sprinkling figures over every surface without regard to its shape, its functions, or those of the ma.s.s to which it belonged, was also peculiar to themselves. Upon the round shaft of the column, upon the bare expanse of the wall, these figures were multiplied and developed to an extent which was limited only by the length of the wall or the height of the column. They were generally painted in bands of equal height, separated one from another by a narrow fillet which indicated the plane upon which the groups of figures had a footing. There is no visible connection between the bands of figures and the structures which they ornament; right and left, above and below, they spread over every surface and pay no attention to the joints and other structural accidents by which they are seamed (Fig. 85 and Pl. III.).

It may be said that these joints were invisible until the pa.s.sage of centuries had laid them bare by destroying the stucco which, especially where sandstone or limestone was used, once veiled the surface of the bare walls.[112] Doubtless this is true; but even in a climate such as that of Egypt, the architect could not believe that a thin coat of plaster would endure as long as the ma.s.sive walls upon which he laid it. We have here a great contrast in principle between the decoration and the architecture of Egypt. In the latter the chief, if not the only aim, seems to have been to make sure of absolute stability, of indefinite duration; and yet these eternal walls are lined with a rich decoration which is spoiled by the fall of a piece of plaster, which is injured by the unavoidable settlings of the masonry and destroyed by the slightest earthquake! Of this we need give but one conclusive instance. Our third plate reproduces that admirable portrait of Seti I., which is the wonder of the temple at Abydos. This beautiful work in relief is sculptured upon the internal faces of four unequal stones in the wall of one of the rooms. The joints may be distinguished, but as yet they have not opened sufficiently to do much damage to the artistic beauty of the work; but it cannot be denied that the preservation of the royal effigy would have been much more certainly a.s.sured if the sculptor had chosen a single stone to work upon, instead of a built-up wall which so many causes would help to destroy.

[112] WILKINSON thought there was always a layer of stucco, even upon the beautiful granite of the obelisks (_Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians_, 2nd ed., 1878, vol. ii. p. 286.) His statement must be treated with great respect. During his long sojourn in Egypt he examined the remains of the ancient civilisation with great care and patience, but yet we think his opinion upon this point must be accepted with some reserve.

There are in the Louvre certain sarcophagi and other objects in hard stone, upon which traces of colour are clearly visible on the sunk beds of the figures and hieroglyphics, while not the slightest vestige of anything of the kind is to be found upon the smooth surface around those carvings. But it is certain that granite was often stuccoed over. MARIETTE has verified that it was so on the obelisk of Hatasu at Thebes; both from the inscription and the appearance of the monument itself he came to the conclusion that it had been gilded from top to bottom, and that the gold had been laid upon a coat of white stucco. "The plain surface," he says, "alone received this costly decoration.

It had been left slightly rough, but the hieroglyphs, which had their beds most carefully polished, preserved the colour and surface of the granite." (_Itineraire_, p. 178.) As for buildings of limestone or sandstone, like the temples of Thebes, they are always coated.

When Egyptian buildings were new and their colour fresh, this method of decoration must have given them a most fascinating brilliancy.

Whether the pencil alone were employed to trace the designs upon the smooth walls, or whether its powers were supplemented by the work of the chisel, these figures, which succeeded each other in thousands upon every wall and pillar, mingled with inscriptions which were in themselves pictures, and dressed in the most vivid colours, must have at once amused the eye and stirred the brain by the variety of their tints and of the scenes which they represented. But in spite of its breadth and vivacity the system had two grave defects.

The first was the fragility of the plaster surface upon which it was displayed. This surface may be compared to a tapestry stretched over the whole interior of the building, and, to continue the comparison, when once any portion of the plaster coat became detached from the wall, there was nothing left but the ground or reverse of the stuff.[113] The design and colour may still be distinguished or divined, but there is a great difference between painted ornament which is subject to such damage and a woven hanging at any time before the threads of the woof have been discoloured and entirely worn out.

The other defect in the system, is its uniformity. It is monotonous and confused in spite of all its richness. It suffers from the absence of that learned balance between plain and decorated surface which the Greeks understood so thoroughly. In the Greek temples, sculptured figures had the more importance in that the eye of the spectator was drawn forcibly to them by the very limitation of the s.p.a.ce reserved for them. They were cut from separate blocks of marble, which, though carefully and skilfully allied with the architecture which they were meant to adorn, did not form an integral part of it. Such figures ran no risk of being cut in two by the opening of the joints between the stones. Although marvellously well adapted to the places for which they were intended, and closely allied to the architecture by their subject as well as their material shape, they yet preserved a life and individuality of their own. To take decorative art as a whole, the Greeks did not make use of so many figures as the Egyptians, but they knew better how to economize the sources of effect, and to preserve their works against the destructive action of time.

[113] _Apropos_ of the Temple of Khons, JOLLOIS and DEVILLIERS (_Description generale de Thebes_, ch. ix.) remark: "It was upon this coat that the hieroglyphs and figures were sculptured....

The contour of the figures is sometimes marked upon the stone beneath, because the depth of the cutting is greater than the thickness of the stucco."

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 85.--Seti I. striking prisoners of war with his mace. Karnak, Thebes. (Champollion, Pl. 294.)]

[Ill.u.s.tration:

J. Sulpis del et sc.

KARNAK BAS-RELIEFS IN THE GRANITE CHAMBERS

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

CHAPTER III.

SEPULCHRAL ARCHITECTURE.

-- 1.--_The Egyptian Belief as to a Future Life and its Influence upon their Sepulchral Architecture._

The most ancient monuments which have yet been discovered in Egypt are the tombs; they have therefore a right to the first place in our sketch of Egyptian architecture.

In every country the forms and characteristics of the sepulchre are determined by the ideas of the natives as to the fate of their bodies and souls after life is over. In order to understand the Egyptian arrangements, we must begin then by inquiring into their notions upon death and its consequences; we must ask whether they believed in another life, and in what kind of life. We shall find a complete answer to our question in the collation of written texts with figured monuments.

In the first period of his intellectual development, man is unable to comprehend any life but that which he experiences in his own person.

He is as yet unable to observe, to a.n.a.lyse or to generalize. He does not perceive the characteristics which distinguish him from things about him, and he sees nothing in nature but a repet.i.tion of himself.

He is therefore incapable of distinguis.h.i.+ng between life such as he leads it and mere existence. He dreams of no other way of being than his own. As such is the tendency of his intellect, nothing could be more natural or more logical than the conception to which it leads him in presence of the problem offered to him every time that a corpse descends into the grave. M. Maspero has so thoroughly understood the originality of the solution adopted by the Egyptians that we cannot do better, in attempting to explain the hypothesis, at once gross and subtle, to which they had recourse for consolation, than borrow his rendering of the texts which throw light upon this subject, together with some of the reflections which those texts suggested to him.[114]

[114] "_Conference sur l'Histoire des ames dans l'egypte ancienne, d'apres les Monuments du Musee du Louvre_," in the _Bulletin hebdomadaire de l'a.s.sociation scientifique de France_, No. 594. M. Maspero has often and exhaustively treated this subject, especially in his numerous lectures at the College de France. Those lectures afforded the material for the remarkable paper in the _Journal asiatique_ ent.i.tled, "_etude sur quelques Peintures et sur quelques Textes relatifs aux Funerailles_"

(numbers for May, June, 1878, for December-June, and November, December, 1879, and May-June, 1880). These articles have been republished in a single volume with important corrections and additions (Maisonneuve, 1880).

[Ill.u.s.tration:

J. Sulpis del et sc.

SETI I BAS-RELIEF AT ABYDOS

Were we to affirm that during thousands of years no change took place in the ideas of the Egyptians upon a future life, we should not be believed, and, as a fact, those ideas underwent a continual process of refinement. Under the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties, during those centuries when the limits of Egyptian empire and Egyptian thought were carried farthest afield, we find traces of doctrines which offer notable variations, and even, when closely examined, actual contradictions. These are successive answers made during a long course of time to the eternal and never-changing enigma. As they became more capable of philosophic speculation the Egyptians modified their definition of the soul, and, by a necessary consequence, of the manner in which its persistence after death must be understood, and as always happens in such a case, these successive conceptions are super-imposed one upon another; the last comer did not dethrone its predecessor but became inextricably blended with it in the popular imagination.

We refer all those who wish to follow minutely this curious development of the Egyptian intellect to the subtle a.n.a.lysis of M.

Maspero. That historian has applied himself to the apprehension of every delicate shade of meaning in a system of thought which has to be grasped through the veil thrown around it by extreme difficulties of language and written character, but at the same time he has never attempted to endow it with a precision or logical completeness to which it had no claim. By well chosen comparisons and ill.u.s.trations he enables us to understand how the Egyptian contented himself with vague notions, and how he managed to harmonize ideas which seem to us inconsistent.

We shall not enter into those details. We shall not seek to determine the sense which the Egyptians attached, after a certain period, to the word _bai_,[115] which has been translated _soul_, nor the distinction between it and _khou_, luminousness, which the soul seems to have enveloped like a garment. We shall not follow the soul and its internal light in its subterranean journey across _Ament_, the Egyptian Hades, to which it entered by a cleft, _Pega_, to the west of Abydos, which was the only portal to the kingdom of the shades; nor shall we accompany them in the successive transformations which made them acquainted with every corner of the earth and sky in the infinite series of their _becomes_ (to use the Egyptian expression); what we have to do is to trace out the most ancient of their religious conceptions, the conception which, like the first teachings of infancy, was so deeply engraved upon the soul and intellect of the race as to exercise a much stronger influence than the later more abstract and more philosophical theories, which were superimposed upon it. In this primitive conception we ought to find the determining cause of the Egyptian form of tomb. Its const.i.tution was already settled in the time of the ancient Empire, and, from the Memphite dynasties until the end, it remained unchanged in principle. In this const.i.tution we shall find embodied the essential idea adopted by the Egyptians when they first attempted to find some eternal element in man, or, at least, some element which should resist the annihilation of death for a period much longer than the few days which make up our mortal life.

[115] Or _ba_.--ED.

The Egyptians called that which does not perish as the dying man draws his last sigh, the _ka_, a term which M. Maspero has rendered as the _double_. "This _double_ was a duplicate of the body in a matter less dense than that of the body, a projection, coloured but aerial, of the individual, reproducing him feature for feature, a child if coming from a child, a woman if from a woman, and a man if from a man."[116]

[116] _Conference_, p. 381. Mr. Herbert Spencer, in the first chapters of his _Principles of Sociology_, has given a curious and plausible explanation of how this conception of a _double_ was formed. He finds its origin chiefly in the phenomena of sleep, of dreams, and of the faintness caused by wounds or illness. He shows how these more or less transitory suspensions of animation led men to suppose that death was nothing but a prolonged interruption of life. He also thinks that the actual shadow cast by a man's body contributed to the formation of that belief. But had it no other elements which belonged to the general disposition of humanity in those early periods of intellectual life? Into that question we cannot enter here further than to say that Mr. Spencer's pages make us acquainted with numerous facts which prove that the beliefs in question were not confined to a single race, but were common to all humanity.

This _double_ had to be installed in a lodging suitable to its existence, had to be surrounded by objects which it had used in its former state, had to be supplied with the food which was necessary for the sustenance of its life. And all these things it obtained from the piety of its relations, who, on fixed days, brought them to the threshold of the _good dwelling_ or the _eternal dwelling_, which were the phrases used by the Egyptians.[117] By these offerings alone could the hungry and thirsty phantom which had replaced the living man be kept alive. The first duty of the survivors was to take care that this dependent existence should not be extinguished by their neglect, to provide food and drink for the support, if we may use such a phrase, of the precarious life of the dead, who would otherwise be irritated against them and use the almost G.o.dlike power attributed to his mysterious condition for the punishment of his ungrateful posterity.[118]

[117] This expression, which is very common in the Egyptian texts, seems to have made a great impression upon the Greek travellers. The following pa.s.sage of DIODORUS is well known: "This refers to the beliefs of the natives, who look upon the life upon earth as a thing of minor importance, but set a high value upon those virtues of which the memory is perpetuated after death. They call their houses hotels, in view of the short time they have to spend in them, while they call their tombs their _eternal dwellings_" (i. 51).

[118] The dead were put under the protection of, and, as it were, combined with, Osiris; they talked of _the Osiris so and so_ in naming one who was dead.

This conception is not peculiar to Egypt. The _double_ of the Egyptian sepulchral records corresponds exactly to the e?d????[119] of the Greeks and the _umbra_ of the Latins. Both Greeks and Latins believed that when the funeral rites had been duly accomplished, this image or shadow entered upon the possession of a subterranean dwelling and began a life which was no more than the continuation of that in the light.[120] The dead thus remained in close relation with the living, on the one hand by the nourishment which they received, on the other by the protection which they afforded; even in the funeral repast they took their parts, in the strictest sense of the word, in the eating and drinking.[121] They looked impatiently forward to these supplies because, for a moment, they awoke their dormant thoughts and feelings and gave them glimpses of the true life, the life above ground and in the suns.h.i.+ne.[122] If they were kept waiting too long they became angry and revenged themselves upon those who had caused their sufferings. Woe to the family or city which was not careful to interest the dead in its stability and thus to a.s.sociate them with its prosperity![123]

[119] ??d??a ?a??t?? (_Il._ xxiii. 72; _Od._ xi. 476; xxiv.

14).

[120] This belief is clearly stated in a pa.s.sage from Cicero quoted by Fustel: "Sub terra censebant reliquam vitam agi mortuorum" (_Tusc._ i. 16). This belief was so strong that it subsisted even after the universal establishment of the custom of burning the bodies of the dead.

[121] Texts to this effect abound. FUSTEL brought the more remarkable of them together in his _Cite antique_ (p. 14). We shall be content with quoting three: "Son of Peleus," said Neoptolemus, "take this drink which is grateful to the dead; come and drink this blood" (Hecuba, 536). Electra says when she pours a libation: "This drink has penetrated the earth; my father has received it" (Choephor, 162). And listen to the prayer of Orestes to his dead father: "Oh my father, if I live thou shalt have rich banquets; if I die thou wilt have no portion of those smoking feasts which nourish the dead"

(Choephor, 482-484). Upon the strange persistence of this belief, traces of which are still found in Eastern Europe, in Albania, in Thessaly, and Epirus, the works of HEUZEY (_Mission archeologique de Macedoine_, p. 156), and ALBERT DUMONT (_le Balkan et l'Adriatique_, pp. 354-356), may be consulted. Some curious details relating to the funeral feasts of the Chinese are to be found in the _Comptes rendus de l'Academie des Inscriptions_, 1877, p. 325. There are some striking points of resemblance between the religion of China and that of ancient Egypt; in both one and the other the same want of power to develop may be found. Taking them as a whole, both the Chinese and the Egyptians failed to emerge from the condition of fetichism.

[122] In the eleventh book of the Odyssey it is only after "they have drunk deep draughts of black blood" that the shades are capable of recognising Ulysses, of understanding what he says and answering. The blood they swallowed restored their intelligence and powers of thought.

[123] The speeches of the Greek orators are full of proofs that these beliefs had a great hold upon the popular mind, even as late as the time of Demosthenes. In contested cases of adoption they always laid great stress upon the dangers which would menace the city if a family was allowed to become extinct for want of precautions against the failure of the hereditary line; there would then be some neglected tomb where the dead never received the visits of gift-bringing friends, a neglect which would be visited upon the city as a whole as the accomplice in such abandonment. Such an argument and others like it may not seem to us to be of great judicial value, but the talent of an Isaeus understood how to make it tell with an audience, or we should not find it so often repeated in his pleadings (see G.

PERROT, _L'eloquence politique et judiciare a Athenes. Les Precurseurs de Demosthene_, pp. 359-364).