The Egyptians used them, in fact, for making either essences, pomades,
or the various coloured pigments with which both men and women painted
the cheeks, lips, eyelids and underneath the eyes, the nails and
palms of the hand. The form and decoration vary in accordance with
the epochs. At the time of the Ramessides, between the fourteenth and
twelfth centuries B.C., fashion introduced Syrian manufactures into
Egypt; later, under the Bubastis and under the Ethiopian kings of the
XXVth Dynasty, some Chaldæan or Ninevite manufactures came in. The five
ladles illustrated here are purely Egyptian in origin and style. The
designs were generally borrowed from the fauna and flora of the valley.
The first has by way of handle a young girl lost among the lotuses,
who is gathering a bud; a tuft of stems from which two full-blown
flowers escape attach the handle to the bowl, the oval of which has its
rounded part outside and the point inside. In the second, the young
girl is framed by two stems of lotus flowers and papyrus, and walks
along playing a long-handled guitar. The next ladle substitutes a
bearer of offerings for the musician, and the fourth has the musician
standing on a boat sailing among the reeds. The last takes the form
of a slave, half bent under an enormous sack. Nothing could be better
than the general design of the decoration. The artisans brought as much
conscience and skill to its execution as the sculptors gave to their
colossal statues. The physiognomy and age of the four young girls are
well characterized. The girl who plucks the lotuses is an _ingénue_:
that state is shown by her carefully plaited hair and her pleated
skirt. Theban ladies wore long skirts, and this is only turned up high
to facilitate walking among the reeds without soiling its edges. The
two musicians, on the contrary, belong to the lower class; one has
only a belt round her hips, the other a short petticoat, carelessly
fastened. The bearer of offerings has the tress of hair falling over
the ear, as was the custom with children, and her belt is her sole
garment. She is one of the slender, slim young girls of whom many may
be seen among the fellahs on the banks of the Nile, and her nudity
does not prevent her from belonging to a respectable family: children
of both sexes only began to wear clothes at the age of puberty.
Lastly, the slave, with his thick lips, flattened nose, bestial jaw,
low forehead, sugar-loaf head, is evidently a caricature of a foreign
prisoner; the brutish, conscientious way in which he lifts his heavy
burden, the angular prominences of the body, the type of the head, the
arrangement of the different parts, remind us of the general aspect of
some terra-cotta grotesques that come from Asia Minor.
[Illustration: PERFUME LADLE.
The Louvre.]
[Illustration: PERFUME LADLE.
The Louvre.]
All the details of nature grouped round and framing the principal
subject, the exact form of the flowers and leaves, the species of the
birds, are very accurate, and sometimes betray wit. Of the three ducks
that the bearer of offerings has tied by their claws, and which hang
over her arm, two are resigned to their fate and go swinging along, the
neck stretched out, the eye wide open; the third lifts its head up and
flutters its wings. The two water-fowl perched on the lotuses listen
at ease, the beaks on their crops, to the lute-player who is passing
near them; experience has taught them that they need not disturb
themselves for songs, and that a young girl is only to be feared if
she is armed. In the bas-reliefs, the sight of a bow or a boomerang
throws them into confusion, just as to-day that of a gun scatters the
crows. The Egyptians knew the habits of the animals who lived in their
land, and took pleasure in minutely observing them. Observation became
instinctive with them, and they gave a striking air of reality to the
least of their productions.
The bowl of the ladles is generally oval. It is edged by a running
decoration between two lines, a waving line, or a more or less
accentuated denticulation. The cavity made in the slave’s burden is of
irregular shape, and the thick border is decorated with lightly carved
flowers and foliage. It was a perfume box rather than a ladle, for
the little hole in the lower part, near the prisoner’s shoulder, held
the hinge of the lid, now lost. The fifth ladle is in the shape of a
quadrangular trough. The bottom, set in four rectangular mouldings, is
covered with waving lines simulating water; the edges represent the
banks of the lake and are covered with aquatic scenes. On the right,
amid the flowers and lotus buds, a little personage is catching birds
with a net; on the left, another is fishing from a boat. They are both
summarily indicated, but are not the less full of life. It is a
miniature reproduction on a wooden ladle of the great scenes of fishing
and bird-catching which are painted in the tombs and the temples.
[Illustration: PERFUME LADLE.
The Louvre.]
[Illustration: PERFUME LADLE.
The Louvre.]
The objects are in wonderful preservation. A lid is lost, a lotus
branch is broken behind the girl who is gathering flowers, one of the
feet of the bearer of offerings is missing. Otherwise they are intact,
and might have just come from the hands of the craftsman. The wood is
of a very fine grain, marvellously adapted to the needs of the chisel.
It has never been painted, but has become darkened with time. The
original colour must have been the golden yellow seen in the cracks of
some pieces of thin wood found in the tombs. None of the ladles show
any signs of wear: they seem to have been deposited new in the tomb
near the dead person, who preserved them new until our day. Like the
rest of the funerary equipment, they were intended for use in the other
world. The lists of offerings mention antimony powder and green paint
among the things sent to the _double_ on festival days: the perfume
ladles and boxes were as necessary in the tomb as they had been on
earth.
I do not think that any survive which we can with certainty attribute
to the time of the Pyramids: but the bas-reliefs of the Memphian tombs
show us the joiners at work, and do not allow us to doubt that the
trade in small wooden objects was very flourishing at that period.
Under the great Theban Dynasties, Egypt exported them by thousands;
imitated in Phœnicia, or even transported directly by the Phœnicians to
the Mediterranean coasts, they transmitted the forms of Oriental art to
the West. It is probable that Theban production--the only one known to
us by dated monuments found in the tombs--entirely ceased, or at least
became almost insignificant, when the greatness of Thebes declined
from the tenth century _B.C._ They were still manufactured at Memphis
and in the important cities of the Delta until the Ptolemies and the
Cæsars. Recent specimens are somewhat rare, and present considerable
differences from those of Theban manufacture. As it was exactly this
Memphian art that almost exclusively supplied the Phœnician market from
the time of Sheshonq, it is vexing that examples are not more abundant:
as we do not possess sufficient, we cannot accurately judge what their
influence was on the arts of the Mediterranean.
The five objects I have been discussing come from the Salt collection.
The Theban tombs where they were found were exploited and emptied at
the beginning of the nineteenth century by collectors and dealers; it
is difficult to find any like them in Egypt now, and those that are
discovered are very inferior to these in delicacy and quality.
[Illustration: PERFUME LADLE.
The Louvre.]
XXII
SOME GREEN BASALT STATUETTES OF THE SAÏTE PERIOD
These statuettes were cut in greenish basalt of fine grain, loved by
the artists of the New Empire and the Saïte Period above all other
stones. They formed part of the Salt collection, and are now exhibited
in the Louvre.
The first represents a Pharaoh, as is proved by the serpent that rises
above his forehead and the hawk’s head that terminates the dagger
passed through his belt. He is standing, and walking quickly, the head
erect on his shoulders, and slightly bent forward in the attitude of a
man who is looking attentively at the point towards which he is going;
the arms are not detached from the body, and hang down along the bust
and the thigh. The composition is excellent, highly finished in spite
of the hardness of the material, and the detail is rendered as freely
as on the colossi of the Theban Period.
The face has a particular character which struck Egyptologists long
since; it is short, wide at the height of the eyes, rounded at the
bottom. The eye is long, prominent, surmounted by strong curved
eyebrows, marked where they join on the forehead by two deep vertical
furrows. The nose is aquiline, short, thick at the end, flanked by
two nostrils the outside walls of which seem to be somewhat thin. The
mouth is widely opened and protrudes; full lips, short chin receding
a little under the shadow of the lips. On his return from his journey
in Egypt, M. de Rougé was struck by the resemblance of this statuette,
till then lying forgotten in the corner of a cupboard, with the
portraits of the Shepherd Kings discovered at Sân by Mariette. Dévéria
cleverly reproduced it in two plates in the _Revue archéologique_.[88]
He asserted what M. de Rougé had admitted as a mere hypothesis: that
it was the portrait of a Shepherd King, and that it belonged to the
disturbed period which immediately preceded the XVIIIth Dynasty. I
must confess that these conclusions do not appear to me to be sound.
The long list of Pharaohs includes many sovereigns whose faces present
characteristics very different from those usually attributed to the
Egyptian race, and yet who, all the same, were Egyptians born and bred.
Without entering into the discussion, I will content myself with saying
that several of those who reigned at periods relatively late, Taharqa
(XXVth Dynasty) or Hakori (XXIXth Dynasty) for example, bear a singular
likeness to the sovereign of our statuette in the structure and
expression of the face. I cannot be certain here that it is a question
of one of them, but the general composition reminds me of the style of
the Saïte Period more than of that of the Theban. Without asserting
anything, I am inclined to believe that our Pharaoh lived in the last
centuries of Egyptian independence.
[Illustration: GREEN BASALT STATUETTES OF THE SAÏTE PERIOD.
The Louvre.]
The second fragment is evidently Saïte; the somewhat harsh precision
of the modelling, the heaviness of the head-dress, the roundness
of shoulders and chest, sufficiently prove it. It is broken too high
up for us to determine if it belonged to a standing statue like the
Pharaoh, or a crouching figure like the third monument. It is a perfect
type of the middle-class Egyptian, developed in width rather than in
height.
The shoulders are soft and flabby; the smiling insignificance of the
features, the sinking down of the trunk on the hips and the head on
the shoulders, are just what we should expect in one of the scribes
who led sedentary lives in offices, amid piles of documents, of whom
some bas-reliefs exaggerate the obesity with an evident intention of
caricature. The inscription engraved on the base tells us that he was
named Aî, son of Hapi, and that besides his sacerdotal functions he
possessed the dignity of director of the two store-houses of the money.
The Turin papyrus informs us of the nature of his office. The financial
system of Egypt rested on an entirely different principle from ours:
coins not being yet invented, or only lately come into use at the Saïte
Period, the payment of taxes and of the officials, the transactions
of the State with private individuals, or of private individuals with
each other, were valued and settled in kind. Every Egyptian owed the
Treasury, according to his profession and his fortune, so many fish
if he was a fisherman, so many bushels of grain or head of cattle if
he was an agriculturist; the whole was duly received, registered, and
stored by scribes who, in their turn, put aside for the Pharaoh what
would keep, and used what was perishable for the daily disbursements.
Silver and gold were articles of exchange in the same way as stuffs
or oxen; Pharaoh brought them back in quantities from his expeditions
abroad, and received them from his subjects as the equivalent of their
share of the tax. Gold and silver circulated in powder, in sachets
that contained a definite weight, in thin rings, in the form of
couchant oxen, of half-oxen, of ox or gazelle heads, of jars full or
empty, in curious shapes that generally were of no use in daily life,
and which consequently were only, in spite of their artistic value,
a sort of metallic reserve for the rich. The two store-houses or the
double house of the money formed the treasury in which Pharaoh stored
the quantities of gold and silver that belonged to him: taking into
account the value attached to these metals, the directors of these
establishments must have occupied a fairly high rank in the Egyptian
hierarchy.
But for all that, we must not take the manuscript spread over Aî’s
knees and that he is attentively reading for an account-book, or a
document relating to his business. The portion of the scroll that he
holds in his right hand, placed flat on his knees, is divided into
vertical columns, which, cut by horizontal lines, presents a sort of
chequered surface, the squares of which are not all of the same size.
Each of the larger ones contains the name of an object, and each of the
smaller a number. It is the list of the gifts composing the banquet
offered to the dead person on the day of burial and during the funeral
ceremonies. In the tombs both of the Ancient and the New Empire it is
highly developed, and comprises the most varied materials: clear or
coloured waters, beers of different kinds, wines of four vintages,
seven or nine of the choice pieces of the victim, cakes of all sorts,
essences, cosmetics, stuffs. On the scroll of our scribe where the
space was restricted the list is shortened, and we only find the actual
necessities: water, beer, some meat, a little perfume. It is to that
of the tombs what the usual dinner of a middle-class family is to the
ceremonial banquet of a noble; nevertheless, our scribe reads it
with evident satisfaction: it is the menu of his meals for eternity,
and, however scanty others may deem it, he probably considers it more
pleasurable than that of his terrestrial dinners. We have here the
natural development of the ideas that the Egyptians had of the other
world. From the moment that the _double_ was to feed materially, they
sought to assure it the food of which it had need. The formulas of the
stelæ which mention bread, wine, meat, deciphered by the first comer,
secured the provisioning of the _double_; all that had been desired
for him in reciting it would be assured him in the other world by
virtue of the magic words. For lack of a passer-by to accomplish this
pious duty, it occurred to them to place statues in the tomb which
seemed to repeat for ever a written list held on their knees; this
simulation of a perpetual reading was more than sufficient to nourish
for ever the simulacrum of a man. Here, it is the defunct himself who
renders himself this good office; elsewhere it is a friend, a scribe, a
favourite servant.
The study of these three little monuments brings out very happily one
of the qualities of Egyptian art: the skill with which the least of
artists, in reproducing in a sometimes realistic manner the portrait
of individuals, understood how to seize the physiognomy and bearing
characteristic of their craft or of their social rank. Compare the
submissive and sheepish face of the crouching scribe with the bold
carriage and imperious head of the Pharaoh: the contrast is striking.
With the scribe, all the muscles are relaxed; the whole body is bent,
as with a man accustomed to obey and resigned to endure everything from
his superiors. With the Pharaoh, the modelling is firm, the figure
upright, the mien haughty; we feel that here is a person accustomed
from childhood to walk upright in the midst of bowed backs. It is
unfortunate that the legend has disappeared with the lower part of
the second statuette; comparing it with several other monuments in
the Louvre, it reminds me of several priests of the Saïte Period. The
hardness in the eye and the corners of the lips is the same, the same
furrow surrounds the nostril and the mouth, the outer walls of the nose
are compressed in a similar fashion; in spite of the loss of the name
and titles, I am tempted to think that the individual who bears on
his face in so high a degree the peculiarities of the Egyptian priest
belonged to the sacerdotal caste.
XXIII
A FIND OF SAÏTE JEWELS AT SAQQARAH[89]
As soon as I returned to my old post, I resumed the excavations of
the pyramids at the point where I had left them in 1886. I had then
made a systematic search of the entrance into the funerary vaults:
it was now necessary to seek out the exterior chapels, the caves,
the secondary pyramids or the mastabas, which, shut in by a walled
enclosure, completed the burial-place. At the end of November, 1899, I
placed workmen round Ounas, and as I found it impossible to direct the
operations myself with the requisite care, I entrusted the surveillance
of them to M. Alexandre Barsanti, the curator-restorer of the Museum,
with detailed instructions. The campaign then begun was only ended in
the last days of May, 1900, and the account of it will be published
elsewhere. I now wish to draw the attention of amateurs and scholars to
the discovery of a mass of Saïte jewels.
The progress of the clearing away revealed the existence of a series of
intact tombs at the south of the pyramid. The last of those that had
been opened belonged to a very high personage named Zannehibou, in his
lifetime commandant of the king’s boats. The mummy, a block of shining
bitumen, was at once recognised as a very rich one. At the height of
the face it had a large gold mask which fitted on the front part of the
head like the _cartonnage_ case usual with mummies of the second Saïte
Period. It had a broad necklace round its neck of beads of gold and of
green felspar or of lapis lazuli mounted with gold thread, and fastened
to it were numerous amulets, also of gold. Below the necklace, on the
chest, an image of the goddess Nouît, in gold, spread its wings. A
network of gold and felspar hung down to the hip, and from the image of
the Nouît to the ankles might be read, on a long band of gold-leaf, the
usual inscriptions in relief: the name of the dead man, his filiation,
with short formulas of prayer. Two gold figures of Isis and Nephthys
were sewn on the chest, two leaves of gold cut as sandals were fitted
to the soles of the feet; a silver plaque with a line engraving of a
mystic eye for the incision whence the entrails had been extracted,
gold cases for the twenty fingers and toes, completed this magnificent
decoration. Everything that with the lower classes of the same period
would have been in cardboard, or gilded paste, or enamelled clay, was
pure gold and fine stones with Zannehibou. The find, estimated by
weight alone, would be valuable, but what gave it inestimable worth
was the delicate and artistic workmanship of the greater number of the
objects. A few of them, like the sandals and the finger-cases, are only
worth the raw metal; the rest are the work of veritable artists. The
inscriptions of the legs, the winged Nouît, the Isis and the Nephthys,
the mask, are stamped, and although the mask and the two goddesses were
miserably crushed by the lid when the sarcophagus was closed, the
mould of hard stone which was used to fix them was so delicately cut
that the best-preserved pieces, the winged Nouît, for instance, may be
quoted as the highest degree of perfection that could be attained by
that process. The amulet in shape of a necklace is only a leaf cut with
the chisel, on which a chapter of the “Book of the Dead” is engraved
with the graving needle. The vulture amulet is a small, thin plaque, on
one side of which the stamped figure of a vulture with spread wings has
been stuck, while on the other the chapter of the “Book of the Dead”
has been engraved, as with the necklace. It is all of good workmanship,
but in the amulets hanging on the real necklace of the mummy the
goldsmith has surpassed himself.
[Illustration: NECKLACE AMULET. VULTURE AMULET.]
[Illustration: GOLD PALM-TREE. BOAT OF SOKARIS.]
[Illustration: RAM’S HEAD. GOLD HAWK. HAWK WITH HUMAN HEAD. HAWK WITH
RAM’S HEAD.]
[Illustration: VULTURE. ISIS WITH THE CHILD. CROUCHING NEÎTH.]
They are extraordinarily small, and in order to show the detail I
have had the illustrations made twice the actual size, a proceeding
that weakens the contours and the modelling. To realize their beauty
it is necessary to have held them in the hand. The palm-tree, which
has lost some leaves, is a unique object, more curious than elegant,
but the mystic boat which is beside it, unique also so far, is a
prodigy of delicate chiselling. It is the boat of the god Sokaris,
a boat of most archaic construction, and which was already used for
the accomplishment of the sacred rites under the Thinite Dynasty. The
belly is broad and round, the stern rather heavy, but the bows very
light and much decorated. It rests on a sort of side-ladder of beams
and ropes, which is itself built on to a sledge: it was pulled along
in the public ceremonies by means of a rope put through a hole made
in the curved front of the sledge. The decoration and the equipage
are most curious. On the bow is a gazelle’s head with straight horns
turned to the interior, and along the prow a row of divergent plates
of thin metal, the use of which is not very clear: it is as if the
carcase of the gazelle was opened and showed the ribs fixed on the
spine. At the back, to terminate the poop, there is a ram’s head with
curved horns. In the middle, on an oblong rectangular pedestal, a hawk
proudly perches; behind him are the four oar-rudders, two on each side;
in front of him six little hawks ascend in procession, two by two,
towards the gazelle’s head, led by a Nile fish placed edgeways on its
ventral fin. For the moment I will not attempt to explain the meaning
of these emblems, but what we can never grow tired of admiring is the
cleverness with which the craftsman has grouped these widely differing
elements into an harmonious whole, and especially the extraordinary
skill with which he worked his metal. His gazelle’s head, a mere
fraction of an inch in size, is of as proud a bearing as if it were
of natural size: everything is exact, intelligent; the curve of the
forehead, the flattening of the snout, the expression of the face, even
to the natural pout of the creature. Each of the six hawks preserves
its individual physiognomy, and the fish itself, reduced in size as it
is, has the exact shape of the big Nile perch, and not that of any sort
of fish.
Similar qualities are to be seen in the neighbouring pieces, in
the ram’s head, the ordinary hawk, the hawk with a human head, and
that with a ram’s head, and in the vulture. The seated Isis who
nurses her child on her lap and the crouching Neîth have their usual
characteristics of resignation and gentleness, and at the same time
the simplicity of line that lends so dignified an air to the smallest
Egyptian figures. It has all been chiselled out of the ingot itself,
and the detail cut with so minute a point that we ask where the artisan
could have obtained it.
[Illustration: MONKEYS WORSHIPPING THE EMBLEM OF OSIRIS.]
[Illustration: VULTURE WITH EXTENDED WINGS. HAWK WITH EXTENDED WINGS.]
[Illustration: THE SOUL (FRONT VIEW).]
[Illustration: THE SOUL (BACK VIEW).]