like the great Sphinx. I do not know what they think now that it is
under lock and key in its enclosure, but they were really frightened of
it when it was, so to speak, at large. The ancient Egyptians believed
that statues, human and divine, were animated by a spirit, a _double_,
detached from the soul of the person they represented. The _double_
ate, drank, even spoke at need, and pronounced oracles; it has survived
the religion and civilization of the ancient people, but the changes
that have taken place around it seem to have soured its character.
It plays evil tricks on those who approach its hiding-place, injures
them, at need even kills them: Arab writers have a thousand tales
of persons who suffered because they imprudently attacked a monument
and the spirit that guards it. The means of rendering the _Afrite_
powerless is to destroy, if not the whole statue, at least its face:
that is why so many Pharaohs have their noses broken or faces damaged.
The spirit of Ramses II walked in the palm forest at night, and it was
therefore imprudent to venture in the vicinity at twilight. Every time
that I was obliged to go that way at sunset, my donkey-boy mumbled
prayers and urged on his beast. One evening when I asked him if he was
afraid of some _Afrite_, he entreated me to keep silence, assuring
me that it was ill to speak of such things, and that if I persisted
some accident would happen to me. In fact, my donkey stumbled in the
middle of the forest and threw me against the trunk of a palm-tree: if
the donkey-boy had not caught me and averted the blow, I should have
smashed my head. From that time, whenever there was talk of the danger
in speaking disrespectfully of the spirit that lives in the statue,
what had happened to me was always quoted. The whole of Egypt is full
of analogous superstitions, the greater number of which are derived
from the ancient beliefs, and have been transmitted from generation
to generation from the time of the Pharaohs, the builders of the
Pyramids.[74]
XVI
EGYPTIAN JEWELLERY IN THE LOUVRE[75]
So much has appeared in the newspapers about the treasure unearthed
at Dahchour last year by M. de Morgan, that every one in Europe knows
the number, form, and richness of the objects it comprises; but among
those who have described and justly praised them, how many--I do not
say Englishmen or Germans, but Frenchmen alone--know that the Louvre
possesses a collection of the finest Egyptian jewellery? Mariette was
fortunate enough twice in his life to find a number of magnificent
ornaments of great artistic value on the royal mummies, at the Serapeum
in the tomb of the Apis buried in the reign of Ramses II by the care
of one of the sons of the conqueror, Khâmoîsît, high-priest of Phtah,
and regent of the kingdom for his father, and at Thebes in the coffin
of a queen of the XVIIIth Dynasty, Ahhotpou I, who in her lifetime was
the daughter, sister, wife, and mother of Pharaohs. Mariette, artist
as he was, very skilfully brought out the interest of his discovery,
and the admirable idea it gave of the goldsmiths of the seventeenth
and fourteenth centuries B.C., but he went no further. He had brought
to light so many monuments of importance for the study of political
history and of civilization, that he never had time to dwell much
on the secondary result of his works. The jewellery of Ahhotpou is
preserved in the Boulaq Museum, where thousands of tourists admire it
every winter; that of the Serapeum is placed in the Louvre, and usually
obtains only an absent-minded glance from the few visitors who traverse
the solitudes of the Charles X Museum.
It fills several compartments of a glass case that stands in the centre
of the historic hall. At first we note a large gold mask, unfortunately
damaged, and grouped near it gold chains with five and eight strands
of extraordinary suppleness and perfection; amulets of various shapes
in felspar, red and green jasper, and cornelian; scarabs, a buckle,
an olive, a little column, in the name of Khâmoîsît. A little farther
on a second series from the same source includes pieces, if not in
themselves more finished, more curious and more attractive to a modern
eye; the Lord Psarou, who was present with the prince at the funeral of
an Apis, did honour to the mummy of the sacred bull. I imagine that the
greater number of our contemporaries have but vague notions regarding
the way in which the Egyptians wore jewels. Men or women, their costume
at first was summary enough: the men protected their loins with a cloth
which scarcely reached the knee and left the bust entirely bare; the
women crept inside a clinging smock which reached the ankle, went up to
the pit of the stomach, disclosed the breast, and was kept in place by
two straps over the shoulders. Jewellery served partly to hide what the
stuff left uncovered, at least with the women. A necklace of several
rows encircled the neck and came down to the rise of the breasts; large
rings were round the wrists, the upper part of the arm, and the
lower part of the leg. The hair, or rather the wig, clothed the back
and half the shoulder; a square plaque suspended by a chain of beads
or a leather strap hung down below the necklace into the space between
the two breasts. That is what we call the pectoral. It often looks like
the façade of a temple, surrounded by a torus, and surmounted by a
curved cornice; portraits of gods or sacred emblems were crowded on the
surface, and inscriptions scattered everywhere tell us the name of the
owner, accompanied generally by pious formulas.
[Illustration: EGYPTIAN JEWELLERY OF THE XIXTH DYNASTY.
The Louvre.]
[Illustration: GOLD PECTORAL INLAID WITH ENAMEL.]
The buckle of Psarou must have served to fasten the linen waistband
which confined the loin-cloth, or the band which went round the head
and kept the head-dress in place. His pectoral is one of the richest
that has come down to us. It is fashioned in a plaque of green basalt,
polished and sculptured with a precision that is astonishing when we
remember how imperfect were the tools at the disposal of the Egyptians.
The central scarab is in very high relief against the flat background,
and the fidelity of the modelling is marvellous: the smallest details
of the head and corslet are rendered with almost scientific truth.
The two women who seem to worship it on the right and left are Isis
and Nephthys, the two sisters of Osiris. The contours of their bodies
are cut in the gold leaf that frames the scarab. Another pectoral of
which I give a reproduction is of less delicate workmanship, but the
technique presents interesting peculiarities. It has openings cut in
it, and the design of the parts is obtained by partitions of a very
supple gold, in which are set the scarab and the coloured glass which
relieve the uprights and cornice of the naos. The scarab is in lapis
lazuli, the dress of the goddesses in brilliant gold, engine-turned to
simulate the stripes of the stuff. The mystical meaning of this design
would not escape any educated Egyptian. The scarab represents the heart
and life of man, where life resides; it is the amulet which ensures
to each man, living or dead, the ownership of his heart. That is why
it was given to wealthy mummies, if not to all mummies: sometimes it
was stuck on to the skin of the corpse with bitumen at the rise of the
neck; sometimes it was set in the centre of a pectoral, lost in the
thickness of the swathings over the chest. As every Egyptian, when he
left this world, was assimilated to Osiris and became Osiris himself,
the heart and the scarab passed as the heart and scarab of Osiris, over
which Isis and Nephthys watched, as they had watched over Osiris; hence
the figures of the two goddesses. They warmed the heart with their
hands, they recited the formulas that prevented it from perishing,
they kept off evil spirits and the magicians who might have seized it
for their dark purposes. Religion provided the artists with a subtle
motive of decoration; while they never went far beyond the primary
idea, they varied its detail and expression with much skill. The women
are sometimes standing, sometimes seated or kneeling; they extend their
arms in front of them, or lift them to their foreheads like mourners,
or let them hang down in token of grief; the scarab rests on a boat
or a lotus flower or an altar, instead of floating in air, as in the
jewel of the Serapeum. Comparative study of all the scenes would prove
once again the Egyptians’ fertility of imagination and their skill in
ringing the changes on the most hackneyed subjects.
[Illustration: PECTORAL OF RAMSES II.
The Louvre.]
[Illustration: PECTORAL IN SHAPE OF A HAWK WITH A RAM’s HEAD.
The Louvre.]
The pectoral in the centre belonged to Ramses II himself, or, at
least, was executed by his order, and as a personal gift in honour of
the Apis that was buried: the cartouche name _Ousirmârî_ is placed
just below the frieze, and serves, so to speak, as a centre for the
composition that fills the inside of the frame. There is first a hawk
with a ram’s head, with spread wings which curve in order to frame the
cartouche: in his claws he holds the seal, the emblem of eternity.
Lower, a large uræus and a vulture spread their wings and enfold both
the hawk and the cartouche in mutual protection. Two _Tats_ symbolize
eternity, and fill up the empty spaces in the decoration in the two
lower corners. The hawk with the ram’s head represents the soul of the
sun, the uræus and the vulture are the patron deities of the South and
the North: together they defend throughout the whole universe the king
whose name stands between their wings, and, by the intermediary of the
king, the dead man whose mummy wears the jewel.
Here again the figures are designed in panels of gold encrusted with
coloured pastes or small pieces of cut stones. The whole is rich,
elegant, harmonious. The three principal motives grow in proportion
as they descend to the lower part of the picture, according to an
admirably calculated progression. The cartouche with its dull gold
occupies the centre; below it the hawk forms a first band of iridescent
tones, the lines of which, slightly curved back, correct the stiffness
of the long sides of the cartouche; the uræus and vulture, one pair of
wings seems to serve for both, envelop the hawk and the cartouche in a
semicircle of enamels, the tones of which pass from red and green to
dark blue, with a boldness and a feeling for colour that does honour
to the taste of the workman. If the general aspect makes an impression
of heaviness, it is not his fault; the form of the jewel imposed
by religious tradition is so rigid in itself that no combination
can correct the effect beyond a certain point. The rectangular or
square frame, the cornice at the top, the two rams’ heads which fit
in below the cornice, form a squat and massive whole. To fill the
interior suitably, it is impossible to avoid adding to the heaviness;
in manipulating the empty spaces a slender and narrow appearance is
procured, as in one at least of the pectorals of Dahchour. The type
of the jewels has its origin in the same ideas or notions whence
Egyptian architecture and sculpture are derived: it is monumental,
and seems to have been conceived for the use of gigantic beings. The
usual dimensions of the pectoral are too enormous for the adornment of
ordinary men and women. They only come into their own on the breasts
of the Theban colossi: the immensity of the stone body on which their
image is sculptured lightens them and seems to bring out their exact
proportions.
Sometimes the Egyptians left aside the square form bequeathed to them
by their ancestors; the sacred bird left his cage when he could.
Mariette found two of these simplified pectorals at the Serapeum, both
of which represent a hawk: the first has its ordinary head and bends
its wings back, the other has assumed the ram’s head and keeps its
wings straight. It has the same wealth and the same elegance of line
as in the other objects of similar source, but the motive, rid of the
enamelled frame in which it was stifled, possesses more charm and is
better suited to humanity. The execution is wonderful, and the ram’s
head, in particular, surpasses in suppleness of workmanship all that is
so far known. It is cut in a little ingot of pure gold, but it is not
the material that is of most value: the old chaser knew how to model
it broadly, and has given it as faithful an expression as if he had cut
it life-size in a block of granite or limestone. It is no longer, as
everywhere else, industrial art: it is art pure and simple. Mariette,
and he understood, considered that he had never come across anything
approaching this among the Egyptian jewellery he had seen. The gold
ring also belongs to Ramses II. The two little horses who prance on
the bezel were celebrated in history. They were called _Nourit_ and
_Anaîtis-contented_, and were harnessed to the royal chariot on the day
of the battle of Qodshou, when Ramses II charged in person the Khitas
who had surprised him. The Pharaoh remembered the service they rendered
him on that memorable occasion. The chiselling, although not so good as
that of the hawk with the ram’s head, is very fine: it reproduces very
boldly the particular attributes of Egyptian horses, their exaggerated
mane, rather thin body, slightly swollen extremities. It is true that
the rings, as a rule, are not adorned with subjects in such strong
relief: the bezel is composed of a scarab or a metal cartouche turning
on a pivot, sometimes engraved with the name of the wearer of the
jewel, but more often with a pious formula or a series of symbols of
obscure meaning by way of inscription. The larger number of the rings
we see in the museums belonged to mummies, and are amulets that give
the dead man some sort of power over the inhabitants of the other
world: a small number only were used by their owners in their lifetime.
They are seals, affixed to deeds like our stamps, just as we affix
our signature. They are in every material: gold, electron, silver,
bronze, copper, enamel, even in wood, according to the wealth of the
individual; some are veritable masterpieces of engraving, but many
possess no more artistic value than the common copper seals bought
ready prepared at our stationers’.
The largest of these jewels passed through so many hands before
reaching the Louvre that they have sensibly suffered: the panels are
warped or even broken, the enamels or encrusted plaques are here
and there worn off. The Dahchour jewellery, coming direct from the
excavation, has preserved an appearance of freshness which has not
a little contributed to increase the admiration of the public: the
objects seem scarcely to have left the hands of the goldsmith who
fashioned them, and the surprise we experience in finding them still so
fresh after more than four thousand years renders us indulgent towards
the imperfections that a close examination soon reveals. Their extreme
antiquity, and quite rightly, counts for much in the appreciation they
receive. It is indeed strange to confirm that from the twenty-fifth
century B.C. the Egyptians had carried the technique of precious metals
and the art of making jewellery to a very high degree of perfection.
This was, of course, already known, for it is not infrequent to find
rings, fragments of necklaces, isolated pectorals, some of which
perhaps go back to the Ancient Empire, while others belong to the Roman
period or betray Byzantine influence: our museums possess them by tens,
and there is scarcely a private collection that has not a certain
number of them. But these isolated objects do not attract the attention
of the public; to rouse its curiosity it is necessary that some happy
chance should bring to light a considerable treasure in which specimens
of all the types usually collected piece by piece are placed together.
Fortunately, these finds are not so rare as might be imagined: if
Gizeh can boast of possessing the substance of Dahchour and the queen
Ahhotpou, the Berlin Museum has the admirable ornaments that Ferlini
obtained from one of the Ethiopian pyramids; the Leyden Museum and the
British Museum shared the spoils of one of the Antouf kings of the XIth
Dynasty; and the Louvre carefully preserves the jewels of the Serapeum,
the most beautiful of all.
XVII
THE TREASURE OF ZAGAZIG[76]
I
Once more chance has served us well. Workmen who were making a railway
embankment on the site of ancient Bubastis discovered, on September 22,
1906, a real treasure of jewellery and Egyptian goldsmiths’ work in the
ruins of a brick house. They hoped to profit by the find themselves,
but one of our watchmen had seen them; he took no action, however, at
the moment, for fear of being ill-treated: the next day he reported
the matter to the native inspector, Mohammed Effendi Chabân, who at
once put the police on their track and informed his chief, Mr. Edgar,
inspector-general of the antiquities in the provinces of the delta.
Investigations were made in likely places, while the police searched
the workmen’s houses and recovered some of the pieces that had been
carried off. Several that escaped them fell later into the hands of a
dealer in Cairo: a gold strainer, three undecorated silver phials, a
large chased gold ring which strengthened the neck of a silver vase,
fragments of silver cups, all, except the gold ring, of no artistic
value. The two most valuable, a silver vase with a goat in gold as
handle and a gold goblet in the form of a half-opened lotus, were
seized at the house of the fellahs, Moursi Hassaneîn and Es-Sayed Eîd,
before they had sold them to a local Greek _bakal_. He immediately
claimed them of us as his personal property that, failing our
unfortunate interference, he would have acquired for ready money. As no
reply was vouchsafed to his summons, he went to law with us. The affair
dragged on for some weeks, during which Mr. Edgar had the railway works
carefully watched. At last, on October 17th, a workman with a blow of
his pick-axe laid bare several fragments of silver vases: he tried to
conceal them, but our _ghafirs_ prevented him, and the search proceeded
under the protection of the police: the objects lay in a heap, gold
between two layers of silver; the same evening they were in safety.
The work was carried out so quickly that nothing was lost, and there
was no reason for any one to contest our right to the windfall. To
bring this story to an end, I may add that on November 4th the court of
Zagazig found the two fellahs guilty of theft, and condemned them to
imprisonment and to pay half the costs. But the _bakal_ still persisted
in his claim, and rumour soon spread among the natives that he had
gained his suit in the Court of Appeal: we had been forced to deliver
up to him the objects of the litigation under penalty of a considerable
fine for each day of delay. The dealers never hesitate to spread lies
of this sort among the people: they thereby enhance their prestige with
the fellahs, and uphold them in the notion that they have nothing to
fear from the “Service des Antiquités.”
The treasure safe, we had to take note of the condition in which it
reached us. At the first glance, two very different series were
perceived: one, which comprised the jewellery and the gold or silver
vases of most skilful workmanship, went back to the XIXth Dynasty; the
other was composed exclusively of silver plate, the coarseness of which
betrayed a much more recent period. Although it was all found at two
separate times, and in two places somewhat distant from each other,
did it originally form one collection? As we have seen, the whole made
a heap among the débris of two or three jars which were themselves
broken in the course of centuries under the continuous pressure of
the earth; the objects seemed to have been heaped up irregularly,
the most valuable in the middle, the others forming a bed above and
below. We had even still adhering to a large fragment of pottery a stem
partly of hardened mud and partly of metal, in which we recognized
on a precipitate of less ancient earrings and bracelets, the remains
of several Pharaonic goblets. How can it be explained that relics of
such different epochs should be found in the same place? Many of them
are intact, but others have purposely been clipped or broken, and the
fragments melted down; they are also mixed with plates of pliant silver
and with ingots coming from goldsmiths’ workshops like those that still
exist. We know what happens not only in Egypt but in European countries
when peasants dig up treasure while ploughing their land: they take
it to a jeweller, who buys it of them by weight, throws it into the
melting-pot, scarcely ever troubling about the loss thus caused to
art or science, and transforms it into modern horrors. It is to some
adventure of the sort that we owe the possession of our find. A fellah
who lived, I imagine, during the time of the Roman domination, found in
the ruins near Zagazig, if not at Zagazig itself, silver objects which
he sold to a native goldsmith who destroyed some of them for the
needs of his craft, and kept the others either to give to a collector
or to use himself in the same way as the first lot when that should
be exhausted. Did local sedition or the sack of the city by a hostile
army compel him to hide his property in two different places? His
goods, once hidden under the earth, were not again drawn forth, and we
received them from him, almost without an intermediary, sixteen months
ago.
[Illustration: SILVER BRACELETS AND EARRING.]
[Illustration: GOLD EARRING FROM THE TREASURE OF ZAGAZIG.]
II
I will say nothing of the rubbish of his own fabrication. The types
are already those of present-day Egypt, and we could easily swear that
most of them were manufactured for sale to the fellahs, at most, twenty
years ago: earrings in the form of pendants or oblong rings, to the
lower part of which eight or ten metal beads are soldered in bunches;
rings with flat bezels, ornamented or left plain for a name to be
engraved; bracelets formed of a simple reed of silver foil, thinned at
each end and covered with a network of lozenges fixed by two or three
marks hollowed out by the chisel and lacking elegance, the ends, cut
off straight, nearly meet when the piece is finished, but they do not
join, and so facilitate the putting of the bracelet on the wrist. It
is the honest work of a man who did not spare his material, but only
knew just enough of his craft to please easily satisfied customers;
the taste of the good people of Bubastis who bought these things was
not of a discriminating sort, or they may have found their market only
in the people’s quarters. There are much better things of the kind in
the Cairo Museum, and if the new-found treasure had only yielded such
objects, it would have been at once despatched to the _salle de vente_
for the delight of tourists.
The contrast is striking as soon as we pass to what comes down from
the Pharaonic age. Not that it can be placed among the best we know
in that kind. The age of Ramses II is already marked by a less sure
taste than that of the ages that preceded it, and I cannot compare it
with the Dahchour objects nor with those of Queen Ahhotpou. One of the
necklaces is the common breastplate of five rows of little tubes in
stone and enamel, decorated with a fringe of gold egg-shaped ornaments
encrusted with coloured stone. Another necklace, also of gold, with its
eight rows of bottle-shaped pendants hanging to little chains of tiny
beads, would be somewhat out of keeping with the others if that was
its original form, but the parts had been separated, and we remounted
them ourselves in order to preserve them with less risk of loss. Five
lenticular earrings are formed of two convex gold pellicles closed at
the circumference and joined by a border of filigree, stamped in the
centre with a rosette, the leaves of which are grouped round a gold
or enamel button; a gold tube soldered to the inside and grooved in
the furrow of a screw passed through the lobe, and was fastened to an
invisible button which, pressed against the flesh, kept the jewel in
its place. There was also a bracelet in minute particles of metal and
enamel, like those of Ahhotpou and the princesses of Dahchour, but only
the clasp has come down to us, a sliding clasp of a most primitive
character, with no value except for the gold. The best thing in the
series was undoubtedly the pair of gold and lapis lazuli bracelets on
which may be read the cartouche name Ousimares--Osymandyas--of Ramses
II.
[Illustration: ONE OF RAMSES II’S BRACELETS (OPEN).]
[Illustration: ONE OF RAMSES II’S BRACELETS (CLOSED).]