remains for us to determine the meaning of the flowering lotuses which
stand at the right and left. As sovereign of the West and of the lands
in which the dead sojourned, she assumed different forms according to
the provinces. In the North the people imagined her under the aspect of
one of those fine sycamores which grow in the midst of the sand on the
borders of the Libyan Desert, rendered green and thick by the hidden
waters sent them by the infiltrations of the Nile. The mysterious
path which leads to the shores of the West brings the _doubles_
to her feet; as soon as they are arrived, the divine soul, lodged in
the trunk, thrust out the half or the whole of her body, and offered
them a vase full of pure water and a tray filled with loaves. If they
accepted her gifts--and they could scarcely refuse them--they confessed
at once that they were her vassals; they were no longer authorized to
return to the living, but the regions of the world beyond the tomb
would open to them. In the nomes of the Saîd where she was imagined to
be a cow, she haunted a fertile marsh situated on the slopes of the
Libyan mountains; whenever a _double_ came to its edge she stretched
forth her head from among the herbage to meet him, and claimed his
homage, and when he had paid it, she allowed him to enter the realms of
the funereal gods. The 186th Chapter[54] of the “Book of the Dead,” a
very favourite one with devout persons under the second Theban Empire,
initiates us into this myth, and the vignette that precedes it shows
us the scene as the Egyptians conceived it: the red or yellow slopes
of the mountain, the tufts of aquatic plants, the cow conferring with
the defunct. The Pharaoh who commissioned our group--or rather the
sculptor who executed it--combined the idea common to all with the
royal concept of the adoption by the goddess, and he expressed the
result therefrom as completely as the processes of his art permitted.
He reduced the marsh to two slender clusters of lotus, and marked the
two chief points of the adoption by means of two little royal figures
and their attributes. The first, as we have seen, wears the costume of
the Pharaohs and has black flesh; standing upright under the animal’s
snout, it faces the spectator. Amenôthes II has just arrived in front
of the cow and addressed to her the prayer in which he conjures her
to aid him in his journey in search of the everlasting cities; his
colour indicates that he is still the slave of death, but the goddess
has already enrolled him among her adherents, and presents him to the
universe as her well-beloved son. That formality over, he slips through
the verdure, kneels down, and crushing the teat in his hand, greedily
puts his lips to it. That is the final rite of the adoption, and also
the pledge of his return to normal existence. Scarcely has he swallowed
the first mouthfuls of milk than life enters his veins; the artist has
represented him naked as a new-born infant, and painted his flesh red,
the colour of the living.
IV
The two forms of Hathor welcoming the dead are not each confined to the
province in which it was born. They gradually spread over the whole
country, not without experiencing diverse fortunes. Hathor in the tree
was reserved for papyri, stelæ, and bas-reliefs. The first idea was
scarcely suitable for statuary, and the cleverest sculptor would have
been embarrassed to derive a large tree from the stone, a goddess lost
in the branches, a person in prayer before the tree and before the
goddess. But it lent itself to painting, and some of the vignettes in
which it is expressed in the excellent copies of the “Book of the Dead”
or on the walls of the Theban hypogeums, show us the admirable way in
which the designers of the new empire used it. Nothing could be more
varied or skilful than the relations they establish between the woman
and the sycamore on the one hand and the dead person on the other. He
is sometimes accompanied by his soul, a big hawk with human head
and arms, which mimics his slightest gestures: while the _double_
receives the elixir of youth in his clasped hands, the soul turns a
runnel aside for his own benefit, and greedily drinks from it. Colour
adds its charm to the composition, and the replicas of the subject to
be seen at Cheîkh Abd-el-Gournah in the hypogeums of the XVIIIth and
XIXth Dynasties would obtain a place of honour in our museums, if it
was permitted to detach them and mount them in separate panels.
[Illustration: PETESOMTOUS AND THE COW HATHOR.]
Hathor in the marshes was entirely suited to the ordinary conditions of
sculpture, and if in some places serious difficulties were presented,
I have indicated how the Theban masters overcame them. She provided a
fairly frequent theme for the studios, and the Cairo Museum possesses
three examples. They are smaller than the Deîr-el-Baharî group, and
do not unite the two concepts of the adoration and the adoption.
Consequently the lotus is wanting and the dedicatory figure at the
cow’s udder. They are the affair of simple private persons who had
no right to proclaim themselves children of the goddess. If they had
attempted to touch the breast of Hathor they would have usurped one of
the privileges of royalty; they appear then only once in each group,
standing or crouching in front of the chest. In one, which is in grey
schist and measures nearly four and a half feet long, the donor has
lost his head and neck, and he lifts up a table of offerings with
both hands in front of him; the cow also is decapitated.[55] No trace
of inscription is to be seen on the pedestal, but the composition is
that of the first Saïte period. The piece, although not the most
mediocre that could be found, lacks originality; it is the work of a
skilful journeyman who had no personal inspiration, and only knew how
to apply the formulas of the school conscientiously. The second group
is in yellowish limestone. It measures not quite three feet in length
and has suffered more than the preceding one.[56] Not only has the
animal’s head been destroyed, but its tail and one of its hind legs
have vanished. The man is mutilated to the point that only one of his
feet remains to prove to us that he was kneeling. He bore a table of
offerings. An inscription engraved on the edge of the pedestal informs
us that he was called Petesomtous, and the name, together with the
style, takes us back to the Saïte period, perhaps to the period of the
Persian domination. The composition is, besides, sufficiently rough,
and it would not deserve any attention if the interest of the subject
did not compensate for its insignificance as a work of art.
[Illustration: PSAMMETICHUS AND THE COW HATHOR.
Three-quarters view.]
The third was celebrated from the moment of its discovery. It is
in green schist, slightly over three feet in length, and under it
in height. It was found by Mariette at Saqqarah, fifty years ago,
in the tomb of a certain Psammetichus, a contemporary of the first
Nectanebo.[57] It was accompanied by two fine statues of Osiris and
Isis,[58] which are the glory of the Cairo Museum, and we owe them
for a certainty to the same artist. The posture of the cow is the
same as that of Deîr-el-Baharî; like her, the head-dress is formed of
the solar disk with the uræus surmounted by two long feathers, but a
_monaît_ fastened round the neck by its chain lies flat on the spine.
Psammetichus stands under the head, his back to the chest, his hands
hanging down over the apron, with the same gesture of submission as
that of Amenôthes II. Besides his name and protocol, the inscriptions
contain a prayer for his happiness, addressed to the benevolent Hathor.
The hardness of the material has prevented the sculptor from completely
freeing the fragile parts: the cow’s legs and belly are sunk in the
stone, as are the back and feet of the man; the head-dress is supported
by a semi-cone set in the back of the neck, and the ears are reinforced
by a pad which doubles their thickness. The sculptor, embarrassed by
the necessity of preserving masses of superfluous material, had the
ingenious idea of treating the lower limbs as a bas-relief. He has
designed them on each side of the panel that supports the belly, so
that Hathor has two chest profiles and a double supply of legs. He
has so cleverly arranged this superabundance of legs that it is not
noticeable at a first glance, and some effort of thought is required
to make sure that it exists. But despite these eccentricities the work
is of rare perfection. Never has such hard stone been manipulated
with greater suppleness; the outlines have a harshness that all the
virtuosity of the execution has not been able to prevent, but the
modelling of the bodies and the faces, both of the animal and of the
man, is of unparalleled delicacy, and the whole breathes serenity
mingled with melancholy. It is, as a piece of animal sculpture, the
best that has come down to us in Saïte art.
V
Nevertheless, it loses when compared with the schist group of the time
of Amenôthes II. The mythological element is less predominant, and
the head gains by not being framed by two tufts of aquatic plants:
but if the religious convention is less encumbering, the artistic
convention and the conventions of the studio come out in a much more
apparent fashion. The Saqqarah group belongs to the Memphian school,
and, as with nearly all the products of that school, the form has
something artificial and impersonal. Hathor is a symbolic cow, the
half-abstract type of Egyptian cows, a type that in the eyes of the
Memphians realized the ideal of the earthly or sacred cow: she has
the elegance, but also the softness and the rather insipid meekness,
which distinguishes the human figures. The Hathor of Naville, on
the contrary, belongs to the Theban school, and possesses the
characteristics that I have described above.[59] The royal studio
whence it came was governed by the theological laws, and was forbidden
to modify in any way the types that, in the course of ages, had been
determined on for revealing the concepts of popular tradition or
learned dogma, but it tried to keep their expression as near to life
as the rites authorized. The artist who produced the Memphian Hathor
chose a pattern from his cartoons, and translated it into stone without
troubling to correct the banal purity by imitating a beast of the
sacred herd. The sculptor to whom we owe the Theban Hathor, on the
contrary, while preserving the ritual arrangement of the parts and
the accumulation of the symbols, has placed them on a real cow,
on the cow, perhaps, that for the moment incarnated the goddess in
the neighbouring temple of Queen Hachopsouîtou. Imagine her without
the emblematic surroundings he was compelled to give her--the heavy
head-dress, the lotus tufts, the two statuettes of the Pharaoh--and you
will have the good motherly creature who goes peaceably to pasture,
and, as she goes, observes everything with her eye, inquisitive and
dreamy at the same time. Neither Greece nor Rome has left us anything
that can be compared with it; we must go to the great sculptors of
animals of our own day to find an equally realistic piece of work.
[Illustration: PSAMMETICHUS AND THE COW HATHOR.
From the right-hand side of the group.]
XII
THE STATUETTE OF AMENÔPHIS IV
(_The Louvre_)
The statuette originally formed part of a group. The lower part has
been fairly skilfully restored in modern times: the upper comes
from the Salt collection,[60] and, like most of the objects of that
collection, was found at Thebes. It represents Amenôphis IV of the
XVIIIth Dynasty, the first in date of the Pharaohs we are accustomed to
name the heretic kings.
In making only a cursory examination we are struck by the ways in
which it differs from the royal statuettes that have come down to us.
The Pharaohs are usually seated with the head erect, the bust firm,
in a posture of stiff dignity which did not lack grandeur. Here the
royal stiffness has almost wholly disappeared. The head leans slightly
forward, the bust sinks down, it seems as if the body, powerless to
hold itself up, is going to slip off the seat; the abandon of the
posture is in entire harmony with the character of the person. The back
is slightly rounded, the hips are larger than are suitable for a man,
the belly and chest inflated; the breasts are round like those of a
woman, the puffed-out torso is wrinkled in folds of fat, the face
is weak and good-natured. In all that, the artist has set aside the
æsthetic rules usual in Egypt. If it were not for the awkward angle
formed by the arm that holds the sceptre and the whip, and the bad
execution of the hand that rests on the left thigh, his work might be
quoted as an excellent specimen of what a conscientious sculptor could
do at the best moments of Theban art between Thoutmôsis III and Setouî
I.
[Illustration: AMENÔPHIS IV.
The Louvre.]
I do not believe that in the long series of Pharaohs there is a prince
who has been so badly treated by contemporary scholars as he has been,
and about whom they have allowed greater rein to their imagination. At
first, the roundness of his body and the exaggeration of his breast
caused him to be taken for a woman: for a long time Champollion
characterized him as a queen, and was only convinced of his error
with difficulty. Later, Mariette thought he recognized in him the
exterior signs of a eunuch. Contemporary monuments assign him a wife
and children, and we can find a way of reconciling this embarrassing
posterity with the new theory. It suffices to suppose that, after
having been married and become the father of four daughters, he went
to war with one of those African tribes that have preserved to this
day the custom of castrating their prisoners: having fallen into their
hands, he would have left them as we see him. Some Egyptologists have
accused him of being an idiot, the more moderate only regard him as a
fanatic. Born of a foreign mother, the white Taîa, brought up by her
to worship Canaanitish deities, he had scarcely ascended the throne
before he wished officially to replace the worship of Amon by that of
the solar disk, whose Egyptian name, Aton, perhaps reminded him of the
Syrian name Adoni or Adonaï. This story is well imagined, but to me it
seems more than doubtful. Two proofs have been advanced concerning the
foreign origin of Taîa: the pink colour of her cheeks and the curious
form of the names used in her family. The flesh of Egyptian women was
always painted pale yellow: if Taîa is pink, it is because she was
fairer than they, and consequently of exotic birth. The argument was
specious, but it is not permissible to repeat it to-day. For it has
been discovered that in the time of Amenôphis II and Amenôphis III
the artists for some years employed pink tones for the flesh of their
personages, both men and women, and the confirmation of that fact takes
away any value from the reasoning deduced from Taîa’s colour. Taîa has
pink flesh in the monuments because the fashion of the day required
that she should so have it, and not because she possessed the fair
complexion of the northerner. As to the names of the members of her
family, Iouaa, Touaa, they do not seem to me to be Asiatic. Doubtless
they are not constructed in the Theban manner, but they are found, and
many like them, in the tombs of the Ancient Empire. Far from proving
a Canaanitish or Libyan extraction, they take us back to the oldest
periods of the history of Egypt and denote a Memphian or Heliopolitan
origin.
If, as everything indicates, Taîa is not a foreigner, we no longer have
any cause to seek beyond Egypt for the motives that made Amenôphis
IV decide to proscribe the worship of Amon. In fact, the religion of
Aton that he professed is indigenous in its formulas and ceremonies.
Aton is the solar disk, the shining globe lighted every morning in
the east in order to be extinguished every evening in the west; for
some theologians it was the visible body in which Râ, the solar god
_par excellence_, was the soul; for others the actual god, and not the
shining manifestation of the god. The Theban priesthood had adopted the
first theory, which better harmonized with its monotheistic tendencies,
and it had developed it to the utmost: it had fused together all the
forms of the divinity, and only recognized in it the aspects, the
diverse conditions of one and the same being who was the soul of the
Sun, Amonrâ. The schools of Memphis and Heliopolis, older than those of
Thebes, had remained more closely attached to the ancient polytheism,
and interpreted its doctrines in a more material sense. A fact that,
so far, no one has ever brought forward, proves incontestably that the
worship rendered by Amenôphis IV to Aton was connected with that of the
sun as practised at Heliopolis: the high priest of Aton, the supreme
head of the royal religion, bore the same official name and the same
titles as that of Râ at Heliopolis.
If, however, the monuments tell us that the worship of Aton was a
form of the most ancient worship of Râ, they do not so far assist us
to determine the points of detail in which it differed. The solar
disk of Amenôphis IV, the supreme god Aton, is recognized by the rays
terminating in hands that he darts on the earth: the hands brandish the
anserated cross, and bring life to everything that exists. I am not
sure that Amenôphis IV invented this imagery: I like to think that in
that, as in everything, he was bound to follow tradition. The prayers
that accompany the figure of the god, the ceremonies celebrated in his
name, are all Egyptian; they present that character of seriousness and
sometimes of licence to be observed at Denderah, and in all the places
where the sombre myth of dead Osiris does not rule. The bas-reliefs
that have preserved its physiognomy for us might serve as an
illustration for the picture drawn by Herodotus of the great festival
of Bubastis.
Having said that, it may be asked what motives impelled Amenôphis IV
to deny the gods of his fore-fathers and to embrace a Heliopolitan
religion. It should be noted at once that his father, Amenôphis
III, had already set the example of a special affection for solar
worships other than that of Amon: we may then believe that Amenôphis
IV as a child was brought up in particular devotion for Râ, and that
later, a natural result of his early education, he was desirous of
imposing his favourite deity on his subjects. But I do not think that
religious faith was the sole, or even the principal reason of his cruel
persecution of the priests and partisans of Amon; politics probably
were chiefly responsible. Amon was, above all, the patron of Thebes:
he had made the greatness of the Theban Dynasties, and they, in their
turn, had exalted him above all his compeers. The conquests in Syria
and Ethiopia had not been without benefit for Egypt in general, but
they had been specially advantageous to Amon; the greater part of
the booty had passed into his coffers, his priests filled the public
offices, and his chief prophet was the highest personage of the empire
after the reigning sovereign. Had there been under Thoutmôsis IV an
attempt similar to that which delivered the last Ramessides to the
pontiffs of Amon and which raised Hrihor to the throne? I do not know;
but I believe the desire to counterbalance their power weighed heavily
in the favour shown by Amenôphis III to other divinities, and that a
definite wish to overturn not only Amon, but especially his clergy,
induced Amenôphis IV to thrust Aton into the first rank. He did not
recoil from any means that would lead to success. As the destiny of
Amon was indissolubly bound up with that of Thebes, so long as Thebes
was the capital, Amon and his priests would keep the supremacy.
Amenôphis IV, after changing his name, which was a profession of faith
in the excellence of Amon, for that of Khounaton, “splendour of Aton,”
founded a new capital which he called the city of Aton; he installed
there a new priesthood which he richly endowed, and then erased the
name of Amon from all the monuments throughout Egypt and even at
Thebes. But the worship of Amon had its roots too deeply implanted in
the land, and his priests were too powerful, for the king to prevail
against them. When he was dead, his successors gave up the struggle:
Aton returned into obscurity, his city was deserted, and the name of
the king, proscribed by sacerdotal hatred, vanished with the buildings
on which it had been engraved.
His attempt was not without influence on art. The necropolis of
El-Amarna has told us the names of two of the sculptors who helped
to adorn the city during its brief existence. Their works are
distinguished from earlier ones by a greater freedom of composition,
and particularly by greater realism in the reproduction of the persons.
The Amenôphis IV of the Louvre does honour to their talent; it is the
more valuable since their works, treated with great ferocity by the
Theban reaction, have become very rare. We have a certain number of
bas-reliefs more or less mutilated, but very few statues; that of the
Louvre is, so far, a unique work of its kind.
XIII
FOUR CANOPIC HEADS FOUND IN THE VALLEY OF THE KINGS AT THEBES[61]
Among the principal objects discovered by Theodore Davis in 1907 in the
Valley of the Kings, in the secret chamber where the heretic Pharaoh
Khouniatonou was buried with an equipment partly consisting of objects
that had belonged to his mother, Tîyi, there are four alabaster Canopic
jars of a rare perfection even for that period of perfect execution.
The body of the jar is a little longer than is usual, slender at the
base, bulging out at the top, with a polish at once unobtrusive and
pleasing to the eye. An inscription had been engraved on it, and so far
as may be judged by the place it occupied, was the ordinary dedication
to the deities protecting the entrails; but it has been effaced, then
the place smoothed over, and tinted with the colour of the surrounding
part. The touching up is accomplished with so much skill that we can
only here and there, beneath the transparence of the glazing, guess
at a few marks of the old writing. The four lids are in the form of
a human head, a very refined head framed in the short wig with close
rows of little flat locks of hair: a golden uræus, now vanished, stood
on the forehead. As the face is beardless, and the whole of the
equipment except the coffin bears the name of Tîyi, the Canopic jars
have been attributed to the queen. I do not share that opinion; I
maintain that they belonged to the Pharaoh, and that we should see his
authentic portrait in them.
[Illustration: KING KHOUNIATONOU.
Alabaster Canopic head found at Thebes.]
[Illustration: KING KHOUNIATONOU.
Alabaster Canopic head found at Thebes.]
No one who has seen the four heads side by side will doubt that they
represent one and the same person. The insignificant differences to be
noticed between them are caused by unimportant technical details, or by
breakages in the stone, or by the action of damp, or the different way
in which time has treated the materials of which the eyes were formed.
The eyebrows consist of a fillet of blue enamel encrusted on the edge
of the arch, and the eye, properly so-called, is also designated by
a blue fillet, which includes a cornea in white limestone, relieved
with red at the corners, and an iris of black stone. In some, the
eyebrow is gone. In others the iris has fallen, leaving blind one or
both the eyes, or, the whole having been displaced, the eye has been
brought forward as if the person was suffering from the beginning of
an exophthalmic goître. Very different expressions of countenance are
the result, but under them all the same face is quickly recognized: a
longish oval, rather thin at the bottom, a somewhat narrow forehead, a
straight nose, thin where it joins the face and turned up at the end
almost like Roxelana’s, delicate wide-opened nostrils, the sides thin
and nervous, a short upper lip, a small but full mouth, a bony chin,
pointed and heavy, joined to the neck by a rather harsh line. None
of the heads have been entirely respected by time, and one of them
has lost its nose, but by good luck, rare in archæology, the best in
composition is also that which has suffered least: if the enamel of
the eyelids is wanting, the eyes are intact and the epidermis without
scratches. I do not think that there exists in the Egyptian sculpture
of that period a more energetic or living physiognomy: the mouth is
closed as if to retain the words that desire to escape, the nostrils
are inflated and palpitate, the eyes look keenly and frankly into
those of the visitor. With age, the alabaster has taken on the dull
complexion of the great Egyptian ladies, always protected by the veil,
which the sun can never burn. So that it is not surprising that many
should have felt in looking at them that they were heads of a woman,
and, knowing the circumstances of the discovery, imagined that they saw
the most celebrated woman there had then been in the Egyptian Empire,
the queen-dowager Tîyi.
[Illustration: KING KHOUNIATONOU.
Alabaster Canopic head found at Thebes.]