A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Volume II Part 14

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 160.--Method of lighting one of the rooms in the Temple of Khons. _Description_, iii. 55.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 161.--Light openings in a lateral aisle of the Hypostyle Hall in the Ramesseum. From a photograph.]

The Ptolemaic Temple of Edfou is much more generously treated in the matter of light. Its flat roof is pierced by two large rectangular openings resembling the _compluvium_ of a Pompeian house, and making it, in a certain sense, hypaethral. No example of such an arrangement has been met with in the Pharaonic temples. It is possible that its principle was directly borrowed from the Greeks. It is hardly so consistent with the national ideas and traditions as the _claustra_.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 162.--The Temple of Amada.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 163.--_Claustra_, from a painting.]

Palaces and private houses were, as we have said, better lighted than the temples. The ill.u.s.trations in the preceding chapter show private houses with their windows. Some of those houses had windows formed of stone _claustra_. The window copied by Champollion[142] from the walls of a small chamber in the Temple of Thothmes at Medinet-Abou (Fig.

163), shows this, as well as an opening in the house ill.u.s.trated in Fig. 19, which we here reproduce upon a larger scale (Fig. 164). We do the same for a window belonging to the building shown in Fig. 1. It is closed by a mat which was raised, no doubt, by means of a roller and cords (Fig. 165).

[142] _Notices Descriptives_, p. 332, fig. 2.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 164.--Window of a house in the form of _claustra_.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 165.--Window closed by a mat.]

-- 10. _The Obelisks._

We cannot bring our a.n.a.lysis of the forms and motives of Egyptian architecture to an end without mentioning a monumental type which is peculiar to Egypt, that of the _obelisks_. These are granite monoliths[143] of great height, square on plan, dressed on all four faces, and slightly tapering from base to summit. They usually terminate in a small pyramid, whose rapidly sloping sides contrast strongly with the gentle inclination of the main block beneath. This small pyramid is called the pyramidion.

[143] In front of the sphinxes which stand before the great pylon at Karnak there are two small obelisks of sandstone.

The tall and slender shapes of these monoliths and their pointed summits have led to their being compared, in popular language, with needles and spindles.[144] The first Greeks who visited the country and found a monumental type so unlike anything they had at home, wished to convey a good idea of it to their compatriots; they accordingly made use of the word ?e???, a spindle. It is difficult to understand how their descendants came to prefer ?e??s???, a little spindle.[145] A diminutive hardly seems the right kind of word under the circ.u.mstances; an augmentative would, perhaps, have been better. But it was this diminutive that the Romans borrowed from the Greeks of Alexandria and transmitted to the modern world.

[144] The Italians call them _guglie_, needles, and the Arabs _micellet Faraoun_, Pharaoh's needles. The obelisks now in London and New York respectively, which were taken by the Romans from the ruins of Heliopolis, in order to be erected in front of the Caesareum at Alexandria, were known as Cleopatra's Needles.

Herodotus only used the expression, ?e???. ?? t? te??e?

?e??? ?st?s? e????? ??????? (ii. 172; also ii. 111).

[145] DIODORUS (i. 57, 59), always uses the word ?e??s???. The termination is certainly that of a diminutive. See AD. REGNIER, _Traite de la Formation des Mots dans la Langue Grecque_, p.

207.

This is not the place for an inquiry into the meaning of the obelisk.

It may symbolize, as we have often been told, the ray of the sun, or it may be an emblem of Amen-Generator.[146] It seems to be well established, that in the time of the New Empire at least, it was used to write the syllable _men_, which signified _firmness_ or _stability_.[147]

[146] DE ROUGe, _etude sur les Monuments de Karnak_.

[147] PIERRET, _Dictionnaire d'Archeologie egyptienne_.

The usual situation of the obelisks was in front of the first pylon of the temples. There they stood in couples, one upon each side of the entrance. Those instances where they are found, as at Karnak, surrounded by the buildings of the temple, are easily explained. The two obelisks in the caryatid court were erected during the eighteenth dynasty, at a time when those parts of the temple which lie between the obelisks and the outer wall were not yet in existence. The obelisks of Hatasu, when first erected, were in front of the Temple of Amen as it was left by the early sovereigns of the eighteenth dynasty.

But the obelisk was not the exclusive property of the temples. Some little ones of limestone have been found in the mastabas,[148] and Mariette has described those which formerly stood in front of the royal tombs belonging to the eleventh dynasty, in the Theban necropolis. He has published the inscription which covers the four faces of one of these obelisks, a monolith some ten feet nine inches high.[149] Obelisks seem also to have been employed for the decoration of palaces, as we may conclude from a Theban painting in which one appears before the princ.i.p.al entrance to a villa surrounded with beautiful gardens.[150] Judging by the sizes of people in the same painting, this obelisk must have been about thirteen feet high.

[148] A small funerary obelisk, about two feet high, is now in the museum of Berlin. It is figured in the _Denkmaeler_, part ii.

pl. 88. It was found in a Gizeh tomb dating from the fifth dynasty.

[149] MARIETTE, _Monuments Divers_, pl. 50. The obelisks ill.u.s.trated in this chapter are all drawn to the same scale in order to facilitate comparison.

[150] WILKINSON, _Manners and Customs_, etc., p. 396.

Diodorus speaks of obelisks erected by Sesostris which were 120 cubits, nearly 180 feet, high;[151] and different texts allude to monoliths which were 130, 117, and 114 feet high. We have some difficulty in accepting the first of these figures. The obelisk of Hatasu, at Karnak, which is the tallest known, is 108 feet 10 inches in height.[152] That which is still standing at Matarieh, on the site of the ancient Heliopolis, is only 67 feet 4 inches high. But the fact that it is the oldest of the colossal obelisks of Egypt makes it more interesting than some which surpa.s.s it in size (Fig. 167). It bears the name of Ousourtesen I., of the twelfth dynasty. As a rule, the inscriptions cut upon the four sides of those obelisks which are complete are very insignificant. They consist of little but pompous enumerations of the royal t.i.tles.[153]

[151] DIODORUS, i. 57.

[152] Recent measurement has shown that the height given on page 105, Vol. I., is incorrect.--ED.

[153] In the _Dictionnaire d'Archeologie egyptienne_ of M.

PIERRET, a translation of the hieroglyphics upon one side of the Paris obelisk will be found under the word _Obelisque_. The _Athenaeum_ for October 27, 1877, contains a complete translation of the inscription upon the London obelisk, by DR. BIRCH.--ED.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 166.--Funerary obelisk in the Necropolis of Thebes. From Mariette.[154]]

[154] _Monuments Divers_, pl. 50.

The two obelisks erected by Rameses II. in front of the first pylon at Luxor were slightly unequal in height. One was 83 feet 4 inches, the other 78 feet 5 inches. To hide this difference to some extent they were set upon bases also of unequal height, and the shorter was placed slightly in advance of its companion, _i.e._ slightly nearer to the spectator approaching the temple by the dromos.[155] By these means they hoped to make the difference between the two less conspicuous.

This difference may have been caused by any slight accident, or by the discovery of a flaw in the granite during the operation of cutting it in the quarry. In dealing with huge blocks like these, such _contretemps_ must have been frequent.

[155] _Description, Antiquites_, vol. ii. pp. 371-373. In our view of Luxor on page 345 we have restored the base of the larger obelisk after that belonging to the one now at Paris. We were without any other means of ascertaining its form.

The smaller of the two obelisks was chosen for transport to Paris in 1836. In its present situation on the Place de la Concorde it is separated from the sculptured base upon which it stood at Luxor. The northern and southern faces of that pedestal were each ornamented with four cynocephali adoring the rising sun; the other two had figures of the G.o.d Nile presenting offerings to Amen (Fig. 168).

In order to restore this and other obelisks to the form which they enjoyed in the days of the Pharaohs we should have to give them back their original summits as well as their pedestals. Hittorf has shown that these probably consisted of caps of gilded copper fitted over the pyramidion,[156] in those cases where the latter was not ornamented with carved figures. A curious pa.s.sage in Abd-al-latif, which has been often cited, proves that the pyramid of Ousourtesen preserved its cap as late as the thirteenth century. "The summit," says the Arab historian, "is covered with a kind of funnel-shaped copper cap, which descends about three cubits from the apex. The weather of so many centuries has made the copper green and rusty, and some of the green has run down the shaft of the obelisk."[157] In the plate attached to his essay, Hittorf gives us a plan and elevation of the pyramidion of the smaller obelisk of Luxor. He shows how its broken and irregular ma.s.s implies a metallic covering, a covering whose existence is moreover proved by the groove or rebate, about an inch and a half deep, which runs round the summit of the shaft. His Figs. 3 and 4 show that this groove was carefully polished. His conclusions have failed to find acceptance in some quarters. It has been a.s.serted that the rays of the sun, striking upon such a surface, would be reflected in a dazzling fas.h.i.+on, and that the general effect would have been unsatisfactory. The Egyptians had no such fear. They made lavish use of gold in the decoration of their buildings. According to the inscription which covers the four sides of the pedestal under the obelisk of Hatasu at Karnak, the pyramidion was covered "with pure gold taken from the chiefs of the nations," which seems to imply either a cap of gilded copper, like that of the obelisk at Heliopolis, or a golden sphere upon the very apex. An object of this latter kind is figured in some of the bas-reliefs at Sakkarah. Besides this there is no doubt that the obelisk in question was gilded from head to foot.

"We remark, in the first place, that the beds of the hieroglyphs were carefully polished; secondly, that the four faces of the obelisk itself were left comparatively rough, from which we should conclude that the latter alone received this costly embellishment, the hieroglyphs preserving the natural colour of the granite."[158]

[156] _Precis sur les Pyramidions de Bronze dore Employes par les Anciens egyptiens comme couronnement de quelques-uns de leurs Obelisques_, etc. J. J. HITTORF, 8vo, 1836.

[157] ABD-AL-LATIF, _Relation de l'egypte_; French translation by Silvestre de Sacy, published in 4to, in 1810, p. 181.--ED.

[158] MARIETTE, _Itineraire de la Haute-egypte_, third edition, p. 142.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 167.--The obelisk of Ousourtesen. _Description_, v. 26.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 168.--The obelisk in the Place de la Concorde, restored to its original base. From Prisse.]

In that transplantation of which the Ptolemies first set the example, the obelisk at Paris was deprived of its original pedestal, as we have seen; it was erected in an open s.p.a.ce of such extent that its dimensions seem almost insignificant; it was placed upon a pedestal which, neither in dimensions nor design, has anything Egyptian about it: and finally it was deprived of its metal finial. It can therefore give but little idea of the effect which the obelisks produced while they still remained in the places for which they were designed. The artistic instinct of Theophile Gautier was quite alive to this fact when he penned his fanciful but charming lines on the _Nostalgie d'Obelisque_.

A curious fact has been ascertained in connection with the obelisks of Luxor. Their faces present a slight convexity, the total protuberance at the base being rather more than an inch and three-tenths. It is probable that the same arrangement would be found in other obelisks if they were carefully examined. Its explanation is easy. If the surfaces had been absolute planes they would have been made to appear concave by the sharpness of the corners. It was necessary, therefore, to give them a gentle entasis which should gradually diminish towards the summit, completely disappearing by the time the pyramidion was reached.[159]

[159] _Description_, _Antiquites_, vol. ii. p. 369.--CHARLES BLANC, _Voyage dans la Haute-egypte_, p. 150.

The obelisk at Beggig, in the Fayoum, offers a singular variant upon the type which we have described. It was formerly a monolith about 43 feet high; it is now overthrown and broken into two pieces. It bears the ovals of Ousourtesen I., and would seem, therefore, to be contemporary with the obelisk at Heliopolis.[160] Its peculiarity consists in its shape. It is a rectangular oblong, instead of a square, on plan. Two of its sides are 6 feet 9 inches wide, and the other two about 4 feet. It has no pyramidion. The summit is rounded from front to back, forming a ridge, and the upper part of its princ.i.p.al faces are filled with sculptures in low relief (Fig 170).

All this makes it resemble a gigantic stele rather than an obelisk (Fig. 169).

[160] For an interesting description of the present state and curious situation of this obelisk, see _The Land of Khemi_, by LAURENCE OLIPHANT, pp. 98-100, (Blackwood. 1882).--ED.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 169.--The obelisk of Beggig. From the elevation of Lepsius.[161]]

[161] _Denkmaeler_, part ii. pl. 119.