The solemn title must not terrify the reader. M. Ernest Feydeau's book
is, in spite of its title, most attractive reading. In his case science
does not mean weariness, as happens too often. The author of "Funeral
Customs and Sepulture among the Ancient Nations" desired to be
understood of all, and everybody may profit by his long and careful
researches. He has not sealed his work with seven seals, as if it were
an apocalyptic volume, to be understood by adepts only; he has sought
clearness, distinctness, colour, and he has given to archaeology the
plastic form which it almost always lacks. What is the use of heaping
together materials in disorder, stones which are not made to form part
of a building, colours which are not turned into pictures? What does the
public, for whom, after all, books are meant, get out of so many obscure
works, cryptic dissertations, deep researches, with which learned
authors seem to mask entrances, as the ancient Egyptians--the comparison
is a proper one here--masked the entrances to their tombs and their
mummy pits so that no one might penetrate into them? What is the use of
carving in darkness endless panels of hieroglyphs which no eye is to
behold and the key to which one keeps for one's self? M. Ernest Feydeau
is bold enough to desire to be an artist as well as a scholar; for
picturesqueness in no wise detracts from accuracy, though erudites
generally affect to believe the contrary. Did not Augustin Thierry draw
his intensely living, animated, dramatic, and yet thoroughly true
"Stories of the Merovingian Times" from the colourless, diffuse,
ill-composed history of Gregory of Tours? Did not Sauval's unreadable
work become "Notre-Dame de Paris" in Victor Hugo's hands? Did not Walter
Scott, by his novels, Shakespeare by his dramas, render the greatest
services to history by giving life to dead chronicles, by putting into
flesh and blood heroes on whom forgetfulness had scattered its dust in
the solitude of libraries? Does any one suppose that the chroniclers of
the future will not consult Balzac to advantage, and look upon his work
as a precious mine of documents? How great would be the interest excited
by a similar account, domestic, intimate and familiar, by a Greek or a
Roman author? We can have some idea of this from the fragments of
Petronius and the Tales of Apuleius, which tell us more about life in
the days of antiquity than the gravest writers, who often forget men
while dwelling upon facts.
In an essay on the history of manners and customs which forms the
introduction to his book, M. Ernest Feydeau has discussed this question
of colour applied to science with much spirit, logic, and eloquence. He
proves that it is possible, without falling into novel writing, without
indulging in imaginativeness, and while preserving the gravity and the
authority of history, to group around facts, by the intelligent reading
of texts, by the study and the comparison of the monuments, the manners,
the customs, the books of vanished races, to show man at a particular
time, to put as a background to each event the landscape, the city, or
the interior in which it occurred, and in the conqueror's hand the
weapon which he really carried. Ideas have forms, events take place amid
certain surroundings, individuals wear costumes which archaeology,
properly understood, can restore to them. That is its proper task.
History draws the outline with a graver, archaeology must fill it in with
colour. Understood in this way, history makes the past present. The
innovating archaeologist, by an apparently paradoxical inspiration, has
asked of death the secret of life; he has studied the tomb, which has
yielded up to him not only the mysteries of destruction, but the customs
and the national life of all the nations of antiquity. The sepulchre has
faithfully preserved what the memory of man has forgotten and what has
been lost in scattered libraries. The tomb alone, opening its sombre
lips, has replied to the questions of to-day; it knows what historians
do not know; it is impartial, and has no interest in lying, apart from
the innocent imposture of the epitaph. Each generation, as it sinks
forever under the ground, after having lived and moved for a few moments
on its surface, inscribes upon the walls of its funeral dwelling the
true expression of its acts, its beliefs, its customs, its arts, its
luxuries, its individuality, all that was seen then and that shall never
again be seen, and then the hand of man rolls boulders, the desert heaps
up sand, the waters of the stream deposit mud upon the forgotten
entrance to the necropolis. The pits are filled up, the subterranean
passages are effaced, the tombs sink and disappear under the dust of
empires. A thousand, two thousand, three thousand, four thousand years
pass by, and a lucky stroke of the pick reveals a whole nation within a
coffin.
The ancients, differing in this respect from the moderns, spent their
life in preparing their last dwelling. The history of their funerals
contains, therefore, the germ of their whole history. But that history,
full of intimate details, mysterious facts, and documents at times
enigmatical, is not to be written like the other form of history which
men are satisfied to repeat from age to age. It is amazing how many
years the author had to spend in study and research in order to write
his book, to bring together his materials, to analyse and to compare
them.
After having clearly defined what he means by archaeology, the author
enters upon his subject. Going back to the beginnings of the world, he
depicts the amazement and the grief of man when for the first time he
saw his fellow-man die. The entrance on earth of that unknown and
terrible power which has since been called death is solemn and tragical.
The body is lying there motionless and cold amid its brethren, who are
amazed at the sleep which they cannot break, at the livid pallor and the
stiffness of the limbs. Horror succeeds surprise when the signs of
decomposition become visible. The body is concealed under leaves, under
stones heaped up within caverns, and each one wonders with terror
whether that death is an exceptional case, or whether the same fate
awaits every one in a more or less distant future. Deaths become more
numerous as the primitive family grows older, and at last the conviction
comes that it is an inevitable fate. The remembrance of the ancestors,
the apparition of their ghosts in the wonders of dreams, the anxiety as
to the fate of the soul after the destruction of the body, give rise,
along with the presentiment of another life, to the first idea of God.
Death teaches eternity and proves irrefragably the existence of a power
superior to that of man. The belief in metempsychosis, in the migration
of the soul, in other spheres, in reward and punishment according to the
works done by men in the flesh, arose among nations in accordance with
the degree of civilisation which they had attained. Among the least
civilised these doctrines exist in a state of confusion, remain vague,
uncouth, surcharged with superstition and peculiarities. Nevertheless,
everywhere the mystery of the tomb is venerated.
It may be affirmed that no nation was so preoccupied with death as
ancient Egypt. It is a strange sight to behold that people preparing its
tomb from childhood, refusing to yield up its dust to the elements, and
struggling against destruction with invincible obstinacy. Just as the
layers of Nile mud have overlaid one another since the birth of time,
the generations of Egypt are ranged in order at the bottom of the mummy
pits of the hypogea and the pyramids of the necropolis, their bodies
intact--for the worm of the tomb dare not attack them, repelled as it is
by the bitter bituminous odours. But for the sacrilegious devastations
of man, that dead people would be found complete, and its numberless
multitudes might cover the earth. Imagination is staggered when it
attempts to calculate the probable numbers; if Egyptian civilisation had
lasted ten centuries longer, the dead would have ended by expelling the
living from their native land. The necropolis would have invaded the
city, and the stark mummies in their bandages would have stood up by the
wall of the hearth.
You cannot have forgotten the marvellous chapter on "A Bird's-eye view
of Paris," an amazing restoration by a poet, in which archaeology itself,
in spite of the progress it has made, would find it difficult to
discover a flaw. Well, what Victor Hugo has done for mediaeval Paris, M.
Ernest Feydeau has attempted for the Thebes of the Pharaohs, and his
restoration, as complete as it is possible for it to be, and which no
historian had attempted, stands out before us as sharply as a plan in
relief, and with all the perspective of a panorama. Thebes of the
Hundred Gates, as Homer called it,--antiquity has told us nothing more
about this ancestress of capitals; but M. Ernest Feydeau takes us
walking with him through the city of Rameses; he shows us all its
monuments, its temples, its palaces, the dwellings of the inhabitants,
the gardens, the harbour, the fleet of vessels; he draws and colours the
costumes of the people; he enters the harems, and shows us the
travelling musicians, the dancers, the enslaved nations which built for
the Egyptians, the soldiers manoeuvring on the parade ground, the
processions of Ammon, the foreign peoples which come seeking refuge and
corn, the caravans of thirty-five hundred years ago bringing in the
tribute. Then he describes the colleges of priests, the quarters
inhabited by the embalmers, the minutest details of the embalming
processes, the funeral rites, the construction of the thousands of
hypogea and mummy pits which are to receive the mummies. Finally he
shows us, passing through the streets of that strange city, the funeral
procession of a royal scribe upon its catafalque, drawn by oxen,--the
numberless mourners, the hosts of servants bearing alms and offerings. I
regret that the length of that passage does not allow of my quoting it
in full and enabling the reader to mark the union of a beautiful style
with scientific knowledge. Unquestionably no modern traveller has ever
given a more picturesque description of any existing city,
Constantinople, Rome, or Cairo. The artist seems to be seated upon the
terrace of a palace, drawing and painting from nature as if he were a
contemporary of Rameses, and as if the sands had not covered with their
shroud, through which show a few gigantic ruins, the city forever
vanished. And yet he indulges in no chance supposition, in no rash
padding. Every detail he gives is supported by the most authentic
documents. M. Ernest Feydeau put aside every doubtful piece of
information and all that appeared susceptible of being interpreted in
more than one way. He seems to have been anxious to forestall the
suspicious mistrust of scholars, who object to having the dry results of
erudition clothed in poetic language, and who do not believe that a
treatise on archaeology can possibly be read with as much interest as a
novel.
As I have said, the Egyptians have left us no books, and had they done
so the art of deciphering hieroglyphics or even phonetic or demotic
writing is not yet assured enough to allow of absolute trust being put
in it. Happily the Egyptians performed a work of such mightiness that it
amazes the beholder. By the side of the hieroglyphic inscriptions they
carved on the walls of palaces and temples, on the sides of pylons, the
faces of the corridors and the bays of funeral chambers, on the faces of
the sarcophagi and on the stelae, on the covers and the interior
cartonnages of the mummies,--in short, on every smooth surface of rock,
whether sandstone or granite, basalt or porphyry, with an ineffaceable
line coloured with tints that the long succession of ages has not
faded,--scenes in which we find in detail the habits and customs and the
ceremonies of the oldest civilisation in the world. It seems as if those
strange and mysterious people, foreseeing the difficulty which posterity
would experience in deciphering their hieroglyphics, intrusted their
translation to drawing, and made the hypogea tell the secret kept by
the papyri.
Royal ceremonies, triumphal entries, the payments of tribute, all the
incidents of military life, of agriculture, sport, fishing, banqueting,
dances, the intimate life of the harem, all is reproduced in these
endless paintings, so clearly drawn, with the difference in races,
variety of types, shape of chariots, of weapons, of arms, of furniture,
of utensils, of food, of plants, still clearly visible to-day. A maker
of musical instruments could certainly make a harp, a lyre, or a sistrum
from the pattern of those upon which are playing the female musicians at
the funeral repast represented in one of the tombs of the necropolis of
Thebes. The model of a dog-cart in a plate of modern carriages is not
drawn more accurately than the profile of the chariot seen in the
funeral procession of the ecclesiastical scribe of Amenoph III, a king
of the eighteenth dynasty.
The author has not confined himself to these purely material details. He
has examined the funeral papyri which, more or less valuable, are found
with each mummy; he has carefully studied the allegorical signs which
represent the judgment of the soul, the good and evil deeds of which
are weighed before Osiris and the forty-two judges, and thus he has
mastered the mysterious beliefs of the Egyptians on the question of the
future life. The soul, whether it was conducted to Amenti or driven into
the infernal regions--that is, towards the West--by the dog-headed
monkeys, who appear to have been a sort of daemons charged with the
carrying out of sentences,--the soul was, nevertheless, not freed from
all connection with the body; its relative immortality depended in some
sort upon the integrity of the latter; the alteration, the deprivation
of one of the limbs was supposed to be felt by the soul, the form of
whose impalpable spectre would have been mutilated and could not have
traversed, wanting a leg or an arm, the cycle of migrations or
metempsychoses. Hence the religious care taken of the human remains, the
infallible methods and the minute precautions of the embalmers, the
perfect solidity and the secret location of the tombs, of which the
priests alone possessed the plan, the constant thought of eternity in
death which characterised in so striking a manner the ancient Egyptians
and makes them a nation apart, incomprehensible to modern nations, which
are generally so eager to give back to the earth and to cause to
disappear the generations which have preceded them.
During his long and intimate acquaintance with Egypt, M. Ernest Feydeau,
who is not only an archaeologist but also a poet, after he had sounded
the mysteries of the old kingdom of the Pharaohs, became passionately
attached to that art which the Greek ideal--which nevertheless is
indebted to it for more than one lesson--has caused us to despise too
much. He has understood, both as a painter and a sculptor, a beauty
which is so different from our own standard and which is yet so real.
Hathor, the Egyptian Venus, seems to him as beautiful as the Venus of
Milo. Without entirely sharing that feeling, I confess to admiring
greatly the clean outline, so pure, so slender, and so full of life. In
spite of the hieratic restrictions which did not allow the consecrated
attitude to be varied, art shows out in more than one direction. There
is a beauty of a strange and penetrating charm foreign to our own habits
in the heads with their delicate profiles, their great eyes made larger
by the use of antimony, the somewhat thick lips with their faint, dreamy
pout, or their vague smile resembling that of the sphinx, in the
rounded cheeks upon which hang broad discs of gold, in the brows shaded
by lotus flowers, in the temples framed in by the narrow tresses of the
hair, powdered with blue powder, which are shown in funeral processions.
How youthful, how fresh, how pure are the tall, slender bodies, the
swelling bosoms, the supple waists, the narrow hips of these dancers and
musicians who beat time with their long, slender fingers and their long,
narrow feet. The Etruscans themselves have never produced anything more
light, more graceful, and more elegant upon the bodies of their finest
vases, and in more than one famous Greek bas-relief can be recognised
attitudes and gestures borrowed from the frescoes of the necropolis and
the tombs of Egypt. It is from Egypt also that Greece took, while
diminishing their huge size, its Doric and Ionic orders and its
Corinthian capital, in which the acanthus takes the place of the lotus
flower.
[Transcriber's Note:
The following spelling and punctuation errors have been corrected:
Page 9: " has been added before "I." ("I have a presentiment that)
Page 46: ' was removed before "Amset." (the man's head of Amset)
Page 232: A period was added after "foot." (would disdain to set foot.)
Page 246: "Taia" changed to "Taia." (Twea, Taia, Amense,)
Page 349: "forty-twa" changed to "forty-two." (Osiris and the forty-two
judges,)