head-dress and necklace into which the neck fits are common to both
sexes, and on the other, the features, more accentuated than is usual
with a woman, are not so to the point of only fitting a man; directly,
however, they are compared with those of the portraits of Tîyi, we are
bound to confess that the resemblance is slight. Two types of these
have come down to us. In the first, which is by far the most frequent,
her face was remodelled and symbolized in the studios of Thebes in
accordance with the customary formula for queens. The colossal group
of Medinet Habou, recently transported to the Cairo Museum, offers,
perhaps, the best example. There, following the regulations, Tîyi is
furnished with a round, regular face, almond-shaped eyes, good cheeks,
straight nose, smiling mouth, and normal chin: there is something about
her which prevents us from confusing her with the other princesses
of her era, but she has preserved none of the peculiarities that
compose her actual physiognomy. That is no longer the case with the
most individual of the specimens of the second type, the soapstone head
that Petrie discovered at Sinaï, which is now in the Cairo Museum.
The right wing of the wig is wanting, and the nose has been crushed
by an unfortunate blow on the left nostril, without, however, losing
anything of its essential form; a cartouche engraved on the front of
the head-dress tells us the name, and at the first glance the portrait
gives the impression of a good likeness. It is not flattering. If we
are to believe it, Tîyi presented the racial characteristics of the
Berbers or of the women of the Egyptian desert: small eyes puckered
at the temples, a nose with a broad tip and contemptuous nostrils, a
heavy, sulky mouth with turned-down corners, the lower lip dragged back
by a receding chin like that of a semi-negress: the receding chin alone
forbids us to identify her with the original of our Canopic jars. They
have certainly a family likeness, and it could not be otherwise, for if
I am right it is a question of mother and son, but variations are to be
noted in the son which remove him from the type so clearly revealed in
Petrie’s statuette. That type, on the contrary, is preserved intact in
the admirable head in painted wood which has passed into the collection
of Herr Simon of Berlin. We might even say that it is exaggerated,
and that the eyes are more oblique, the cheek-bones more prominent,
the nose more aggressive, the smiling muscles more sharply evident,
the mouth and chin closer to that of a negress. I believe it to be
one of Tîyi’s granddaughters who became queen after the fall of the
Heretic Dynasty: her head-dress, which was originally that of a private
person, was afterwards modified to receive the insignia of royalty.
Was she married to Harmhâbi, to Ramses, or to Setouî I? The deviation
between the group to which she belongs and that of the Canopic jars is
sufficiently great to force us to give up the idea that they represent
one person. In addition, our Canopic sculptures possess only one uræus
on the forehead, as is customary with kings, while the others have
the double uræus which then begins to be the etiquette with queens.
That rule has exceptions, and therefore I shall not deduce too strict
conclusions from it: but the absence of the second uræus is not less a
somewhat strong presumption in favour of the opinion that our Canopic
heads are those of a man and not of a woman.
[Illustration: KING KHOUNIATONOU.
Cairo Museum.]
[Illustration: KING KHOUNIATONOU.
Alabaster Canopic head found at Thebes.]
If, however, they are portraits of a man, the circumstances of their
discovery compel us to declare that he must be the king Khouniatonou;
but how are we to be convinced of this when we remember the grotesque
silhouette that the sculptors of El-Amarna have given him? To believe
them, he would have been physically a sort of degenerate, tall, weakly,
with hips and chest like a woman’s, a neck without consistency, an
absurd head, a flat, almost non-existent forehead, an enormous nose,
an ugly mouth, a massive chin.[62] He seems to have liked these
caricatures, and his friends, imitating him from a desire to flatter
him, altered more or less the shape of their own bodies in order that
they might resemble that of his. Documents of different origins prove,
however, that he was not, or had not always been, the queer figure that
is attributed to him. The Louvre alone possesses two such witnesses.
The first, which came to the Museum in its early days, is a charming
statuette in yellow soapstone. The king is seated, but he has lost the
bottom of the legs, which a modern restorer has skilfully replaced.
He wears the _coufeh_ with hanging ends, the bust is bare; in
his right hand he holds the hooked staff and the sacred whip emblems
of royalty; the left hand is indolently stretched over the thigh. The
body is young, the muscling supple and thick, and although he sinks
down a little, he has not the squat attitude we know so well. The face
and neck are somewhat slender, and contain the characteristics that,
exaggerated later, lent themselves almost naturally to caricature. It
is, in fact, the effigy of the young king sculptured at Thebes at the
time when he was only Amenôphis IV, but when he demanded that he should
be represented as he was, or as he saw himself, without reference to
the conventional type of the Pharaoh. In the second piece, a statue of
which only the head and shoulders remain, he is some years older. He
is armed for war, and his neck, too slender, has bent under the weight
of the helmet, as if thenceforth incapable of supporting it. It is the
profile of the bas-reliefs of El-Amarna with the rounded spine and the
particular curve that projects the head forward; the forehead, nose and
mouth only differ from those of the statuette in that they are thinner.
A plaster mask in the Cairo Museum which Petrie considers to have
been moulded on the corpse immediately after the sovereign’s death,
but which is undoubtedly a studio model, testifies to a condition of
physiological degeneracy that did not before exist. It presents the
emaciated features of the bas-reliefs and their bony texture, it is
true, but without their extreme exaggerations. When it was question
of a statue, the sculptor forbade himself the liberties that his
colleagues, commissioned to decorate the tombs, allowed themselves
with the master: he represented him just as he was at the moment, and
the physiognomy was sufficiently original for him to be certain of
always deriving from it a work that would force the attention of the
spectators.
[Illustration: QUEEN TÎYI (FULL FACE).
Cairo Museum.]
[Illustration: QUEEN TÎYI (PROFILE).
Cairo Museum.]
[Illustration: PRINCESS OF THE FAMILY OF TÎYI (PROFILE).
Painted wood. Berlin, collection of M. James Simon.]
[Illustration: PRINCESS OF THE FAMILY OF TÎYI (FULL FACE).
Painted wood. Berlin, collection of M. James Simon.]
And now let us compare each of these pieces with our Canopic heads.
The profile of Khouniatonou helmeted is not as strong as theirs,
due perhaps to the contusions undergone by the surface of the stone
during a long sojourn in a damp soil where saltpetre was abundant,
but each of the elements may be superposed and adjusted, forehead,
nose, eyes, mouth, chin, in an absolutely satisfying manner: it
merely seems that the artist of the Canopic heads saw his model in
better health than that of the statue. The resemblance, although less
complete, with the statuette of yellow soapstone is still apparent.
No unprejudiced observer with the series in front of him can come to
any other conclusion than that we have in it portraits of one and
the same man. Leaving out the slight differences due to the chisel,
there is no more deviation between the group of statues and the best
of our heads than there is between that and the three found with it.
There is divergence in one point only: in the two statues the head
bends and leans forward more or less; in the Canopic jars it is erect
without weakness. A moment’s reflection will show that it could not
be otherwise. However greatly we are moved by the beauty of the work,
we must not forget that our four heads belong, not to art pure and
simple, but to industrial art, and that their purpose imposed special
rules on the master who chiselled them. They were prosaic lids for
the receptacles in which the entrails of the Pharaoh were placed, and
it was necessary that the median axis of the vase properly so-called
should coincide exactly with that of the lid. There was a question
of equilibrium to be managed between the two constituent elements of
the Canopic jar; the sculptor must straighten the neck of his
model, and consequently correct the impression of lassitude given by
the statues, by an appearance of vigour. If we examine the portraits
of Khouniatonou and his successors in company of a physician, certain
anatomical details that at the first glance we did not trouble
about--the depression of the temples, the obliquity of the eyes, the
contraction of the sides of the nostrils, the pinching of the mouth,
the attenuation of the neck--assume an etiological value that the
archæologist was far from suspecting. Dr. Baÿ, studying the faces of
Khouniatonou, Touatânkhamânou, and Harmhâbi with me, diagnosed symptoms
of consumption more or less advanced. If Khouniatonou died of the
disease when thirty years old, we need not be greatly surprised.
[Illustration: KING KHOUNIATONOU.
The Louvre.]
I do not insist upon this kind of research, in which I am not
competent, and I leave it to the reader to decide if I have or have
not proved the identity of the person represented by our four heads
to be that of Khouniatonou, the heresiarch. One of them at least is a
masterpiece, and the others possess qualities that assure them a high
place in the estimation of connoisseurs, but to which of the great
Egyptian schools ought we to attribute them? We may hesitate between
two: the Theban, to which most of the artists who filled the royal
laboratories then belonged, and the Hermopolitan, in the province
of which was El-Amarna, the favourite residence of the sovereign.
It was certainly the latter school that worked at the hypogeums and
sculptured the pictures. We find in them its defects: harsh, rough
composition, a tendency to caricature the human form and to multiply
comic episodes; but also its good qualities: suppleness, movement,
life, freedom of execution. The few figures in alto-relievo that have
escaped destruction, those, for instance, that accompany two of the
large front stelæ, are of the same style as the bas-reliefs, but we
do not find in them any of the characteristics that we have noted as
proper to the monuments of the Louvre or to our Canopic jars. Just
as the others show an unfinished, worn aspect, these are carefully
finished in the least details: it is the perfect chiselling and high
polish of the Theban masters and their strong, dignified way of posing
the figure and expressing the physiognomy of the model. Whoever has
seen the statues of Thoutmôsis III, Amenôthes II, the so-called Taîa,
and Touatânkhamânou in the Cairo Museum will not doubt for a moment
that our four heads are from the hands of persons belonging to the same
school: they belong to the Theban school, and more particularly, I
think, to that portion of the Theban school which, a few years later,
decorated the temple of Gournah, the Memnonium of Abydos, and the
hypogeum of Setouî I.
[Illustration: KING KHOUNIATONOU.
Fragment of a stone statue. The Louvre.]
XIV
A HEAD OF THE PHARAOH HARMHABI
(_Boulaq Museum_)
The whole is composed of about ten pieces, collected in 1860 in one
of the halls of the temple of Karnak, and put together with plaster,
for good or ill, by one of the workmen belonging to the Museum. The
cementing was not always done with rigorous accuracy, and one of the
largest fragments, that which forms the centre of the head-dress, is
slightly out of the perpendicular. Last year I tried to remedy the
awkwardness of the restorer, but without success; if an attempt was
made to separate the badly joined pieces, there would be a risk of
reducing them to powder. But the irregularities in the joining are
sufficiently slight not to injure the general aspect. In its present
condition it is just the mutilated bust of a king with the uræus and
the double crown on the brow; the broken object that leans against the
left side is the end of a staff of office, terminated with a ram’s
head, the emblem of Khnoum or Theban Amon. If we would form some idea
of what the body was like, it is sufficient to look at any of the
statues with the insignia that adorn the museums, that of Ramses II at
Boulaq[63] or of Setouî I in the Louvre.[64] The king was standing,
with his back against a sort of pillar covered with inscriptions,
and holding the staff in his hand: as he looked in certain religious
ceremonies when he escorted the ark of Amon-Râ through the halls and
court-yards of the temple. What remain of the hieroglyphic legends do
not give any name. Mariette was tempted to recognize it as Menephtah,
son of Ramses II,[65] but he has not anywhere explained the motives
that led him to that identification. The lugubrious tone of the black
granite spoils the first impression, but an examination, even if only a
superficial one, soon reveals the subtlety of the work. The head, under
the enormous pschent, is full of charm and delicacy. The face is young,
with an expression of gentle melancholy rare among the Pharaohs of the
great Theban period. The nose is straight, thin, and well attached to
the forehead; the long eye turns up at the temples. The wide, full
lips, somewhat tightened at the corners as if for smiling, are boldly
cut with sharply defined edges. The chin is scarcely rendered heavy by
the weight of the artificial beard. Every detail is treated with as
much skill as if the sculptor had been manipulating a soft stone like
limestone, and not one of the materials that offer all the obstacles
possible to the chisel. The sureness of the execution is carried so
far that the spectator forgets the difficulty of the work in order to
think solely of its intrinsic value. It is a pity that Egyptian artists
did not sign their works: the name of the master to whom we owe this
deserves to have come down to us.
[Illustration: HEAD OF THE PHARAOH HARMHABI.
Black granite.]
It remains to see who was the king whose portrait he has transmitted
to us. When a Pharaoh ascended the throne, the sculptors of the city
where he then was, Memphis, Thebes, Tanis, or another, hastened to make
a certain number of copies of his portrait, full face or in profile;
these were immediately sent into the provinces, in order that his
face might be everywhere substituted for that of the former sovereign
on the buildings in course of erection. Thus in the Boulaq Museum we
have several series of royal heads, some discovered at Tanis,[66]
some in the Fayoum,[67] others at Memphis,[68] which show what was
the procedure in such a case. The type, once carefully fixed, did not
change during the whole of the reign. Ramses II, who was nearly a
hundred years old when he died, after reigning for sixty-seven years,
kept the features of a young man even to his latest monuments. The
rule contains numerous exceptions, especially when it is a question
of statues commissioned in one of the capitals of the country, and
executed by artists who could see their subject at close quarters and
register the changes time produced in his face. Of the two Chephrên
exhibited at Boulaq, one is young and smiling,[69] the other old and
saddened by age.[70] But if there are examples of sovereigns who,
ascending the throne early, were sometimes represented as they were at
different periods of their life, I know of none who were rejuvenated
by the sculptors when they reached the throne at a late age. The head
of the statue with which we are here concerned is that of a young man,
almost a youth, and that is sufficient for me to rule out Menephtah.
Menephtah was fifty at least when he succeeded his father,[71] and his
portrait, as it is to be seen at Karnak, does not in any way resemble
the personage whose image is preserved in the Boulaq statue. The other
princes of the XIXth and XXth Dynasties, Setouî II, Siphtah Menephtah,
Amenmeses, Setinakht, of whom we have only a few poor portraits, have
no more claim to be commended than their great predecessors Setouî
I or Ramses II: the disturbed times in which they lived scarcely
admitted of works of careful composition. Like Menephtah, Ramses
I was too old at his accession, and besides, we have his portrait
at Gournah. And, moreover, the style of the piece recalls at first
sight that of the Turin statues belonging to the XVIIIth Dynasty,
and then we must eliminate _a priori_ a certain number of statues
of which we possess the exact description. Neither Ahmôsis I, nor
the Thouthmôsis, nor the Amenhotpou have anything in common with our
personage; and for even a stronger reason we cannot recognize in him
the characteristic physiognomy of Khounaton and Aî. Proceeding from one
exclusion to another, we come to restrict the choice to three princes,
Touatânkhâmonou, Sânakht, and Harmhabi. Sânakht had only an ephemeral
reign; Touatânkhâmonou has only left us insignificant monuments;
Harmhabi, on the contrary, appears to have been one of the most
important sovereigns of his time. A young man at the accession, he
restored the temples of Amon despoiled by his heretic predecessors, and
re-established the Egyptian power that had been weakened for a moment
in Syria and Ethiopia. Last year and this year I cleared away the
rubbish from two of the pylons he had built and decorated at Karnak;
his portrait was sculptured on them numerous times, and the outlines
are sufficiently well preserved for us to see in the king of the
bas-reliefs the original of the Boulaq bust. I attribute the statue of
which Mariette found the remains to Harmhabi, the Armaïs of the Greeks.
In conclusion, I may observe that the fragments, when carefully
examined, show no trace of having been broken by a hammer; the statue
was not destroyed by the hand of man, the case with a certain number
of the monuments at Karnak. The great earthquake of the year 27 B.C.,
which put the temple of Amon almost into the condition in which we see
it, brought down the ceilings of the halls; all the objects underneath
were injured by the blocks or architraves then violently thrown to the
ground and crushed under the weight of the ruins. Our Harmhabi did not
escape the common lot: it needed Mariette’s great patience to restore
the little we possess of him.
XV
THE COLOSSUS OF RAMSES II AT BEDRECHEÎN[72]
Ramses II, Sesostris, having restored the portions of the great
temple of Phtah at Memphis, which bordered the sacred lake on the
west and south, had colossi erected in front of the doors, destined
to perpetuate his memory and his features for all “who should come
after him on the earth, priests, magicians, scribes,” and who should
recite a prayer to the gods on his behalf. The sacristans appointed
as guides to the profane, and the dragomans who act as showmen of the
wonders of Egypt, never fail to draw the tourist’s attention to these
statues; it gives them an opportunity to relate some amusing story like
those collected by Herodotus and transmitted to us by him as authentic
history. One day Darius I wished to consecrate his image in the
neighbourhood, but the high priest opposed his purpose: “Sesostris,” he
said, “has conquered all the nations that obey you, and the Scythians
to boot, on whom you never succeeded in inflicting much harm. There
is then no reason why your monument should be placed by the side of
that of a Pharaoh whom you have neither surpassed nor equalled!” When
Memphis fell and became Christian, the fame of the colossi died away.
When it perished and its temple of Phtah was dismantled stone by
stone to serve for the building of Cairo, they were thrown down, and
for the most part cut up into grindstones, whence they passed into the
lime-kiln. One of them, however, thrown from its pedestal and lying
face downwards on the ground, was covered with rubbish, and preserved
from destruction by that happy chance. Brought to light by Caviglia
at the beginning of the nineteenth century, it had the good luck to
please travellers, and owed it to them to have escaped the mania for
destruction that possesses the fellahs.
[Illustration: THE HALF-BURIED COLOSSUS OF RAMSES II.]
[Illustration: THE COLOSSUS OF RAMSES II EMERGING FROM THE EARTH.]
All Europeans in turn who have visited Egypt have admired it. It lies
along the side of the path under the palm-trees of Bedrecheîn at the
bottom of a muddy ditch. At the period of the inundation, water fills
it and covers the statue for some weeks; then it gradually reappears,
the shoulder and the leg first, then the bust and face, until it is
all high and dry again in its hole. Its Pharaoh was standing, walking,
the arms close against the sides. The name of Ramses II is to be read
on the cartouche engraved on the buckle of the waistband that fastened
his petticoat. Nitre has destroyed one side of the face and body, but
what remains suffices to show the excellence of the work. The profile
is that of the young Ramses, with low forehead, large aquiline nose,
rather a large mouth, and a haughty expression. The base is at some
distance off, and farther away still, to the south, a smaller colossus
in wood, débris of walls, and fragments of statues point out the
position of ancient chambers. The palm forest which flourishes on the
site harasses excavation and prevents us from reconstituting the plan.
The building or group of buildings that our colossus adorned went
along the south bank of the sacred reservoir on which the mysteries of
Phtah and the Memphian gods were celebrated on the canonical days. In
spite of the long period of time, alluvial matter has not succeeded
in entirely filling the lake. The place is marked by a noticeable
depression, and the earth which fills it, instead of being planted with
date-trees, is sown with corn; it is like a square basin the edges of
which are drawn downwards from the surrounding ground. The rise of
the river partly restores the original aspect of the spot, but the
setting of porticoes and pylons which framed it has vanished; it is
replaced by clumps of big trees, under which is situated the village of
Tell-el-Khanzîr.
It seems that Mohammed-Ali formerly gave Ramses II to England; the
fact is not exactly proven, and to admit it definitely a more serious
authority than that of one or several of the “Travellers’ Guides to
Egypt” would be required. The English have not availed themselves of
the doubtful tradition to remove the colossus: they were satisfied
to set it up again. They did not succeed at the first attempt, and
two trials made by Messrs. Garwood and Anderson failed ignominiously
enough. General Stephenson, who long commanded the army, was more
successful. He first had the ambitious project of setting the statue on
its feet again, but as the subscription opened for that purpose did not
produce sufficient money, he contented himself with raising it up above
the level of the inundation. The operations, conducted by Major Arthur
Bagnold, of the Engineers, were begun on January 20, 1887.[73] Having
drawn off the water, he applied eight lifting jacks of differing force
along the body: the effort was directed alternately to the head and
the feet: as soon as the whole mass was raised a little more than a
foot and a half, huge beams were slipped underneath, and the hollow was
filled up with broken potsherds collected in the ruins of the ancient
city, reduced to tiny pieces and beaten so as to form a compact bed.
The work was finished on April 16th. The colossus now lies on its back,
the face to the sky. A pent-house shelters the head; a thick brick wall
surrounds it and protects it from the gaze of the inquisitive crowd.
Its guardian dwells beside it in a small two-roomed house where Major
Bagnold installed him, and he only shows it to visitors on payment of
two Egyptian piastres: it costs about sixpence to see it at the bottom
of the new funnel in which it is plunged. The “Service des Antiquités”
employs a portion of the tax in keeping it in good condition. Another
Ramses in granite and a stele of Apries found in the neighbourhood were
afterwards placed there, and complete the little open air museum.