A HISTORY OF ART IN ANCIENT EGYPT
FROM THE FRENCH OF GEORGES PERROT,
PROFESSOR IN THE FACULTY OF LETTERS, PARIS; MEMBER OF THE INSTITUTE
AND CHARLES CHIPIEZ.
ILLUSTRATED WITH FIVE HUNDRED AND NINETY-EIGHT ENGRAVINGS IN THE
TEXT, AND FOURTEEN STEEL AND COLOURED PLATES.
_IN TWO VOLUMES.--VOL. I._
TRANSLATED AND EDITED BY
WALTER ARMSTRONG, B. A., OXON.,
AUTHOR OF "ALFRED STEVENS," ETC.
[Illustration]
London: CHAPMAN AND HALL, LIMITED.
New York: A. C. ARMSTRONG AND SON.
1883.
London:
R. CLAY, SONS, AND TAYLOR,
BREAD STREET HILL.
PREFACE.
M. Perrot's name as a classical scholar and archæologist, and M.
Chipiez's as a penetrating critic of architecture, stand so high that
any work from their pens is sure of a warm welcome from all students
of the material remains of antiquity. These volumes are the first
instalment of an undertaking which has for its aim the history and
critical analysis of that great organic growth which, beginning with
the Pharaohs and ending with the Roman Emperors, forms what is called
Antique Art. The reception accorded to this instalment in its original
form is sufficient proof that the eulogium prefixed to the German
translation by an eminent living Egyptologist, Professor Georg Ebers,
is well deserved; "The first section," he says, "of this work, is
broad and comprehensive in conception, and delicate in execution; it
treats Egyptian art in a fashion which has never previously been
approached." In clothing it in a language which will, I hope, enable
it to reach a still wider public, my one endeavour has been that it
should lose as little as possible, either in substance or form.
A certain amount of repetition is inevitable in a work of this kind
when issued, as this was, in parts, and in one place[1] I have
ventured to omit matter which had already been given at some length,
but with that exception I have followed M. Perrot's words as closely
as the difference of idiom would allow. Another kind of repetition,
with which, perhaps, some readers may be inclined to quarrel, forced
itself upon the author as the lesser of two evils. He was compelled
either to sacrifice detail and precision in attempting to carry on at
once the history of all the Egyptian arts and of their connection with
the national religion and civilization, or to go back upon his
footsteps now and again in tracing each art successively from its
birth to its decay. The latter alternative was chosen as the only one
consistent with the final aim of his work.
[1] Page 92, Vol. I.
Stated in a few words, that aim is to trace the course of the great
plastic evolution which culminated in the age of Pericles and came to
an end in that of Marcus Aurelius. That evolution forms a complete
organic whole, with a birthday, a deathday, and an unbroken chain of
cause and effect uniting the two. To objectors who may say that the
art of India, of China, of Japan, should have been included in the
scheme, it may be answered: this is the life, not of two, or three,
but of one. M. Perrot has been careful, therefore, to discriminate
between those characteristics of Egyptian art which may be referred
either to the national beliefs and modes of thought, or to undeveloped
material conditions, such as the want or superstitious disuse of iron,
and those which, being determined by the very nature of the problems
which art has to solve, formed a starting point for the arts of all
later civilizations. By means of well-chosen examples he shows that
the art of the Egyptians went through the same process of development
as those of other and later nationalities, and that the real
distinguishing characteristic of the sculptures and paintings of the
Nile Valley was a continual tendency to simplification and
generalization, arising partly from the habit of mind and hand created
by the hieroglyphic writing, partly from the stubborn nature of the
chief materials employed.
To this characteristic he might, perhaps, have added another, which is
sufficiently remarkable in an art which had at least three thousand
years of vitality, namely, its freedom from individual expression. The
realism of the Egyptians was a broad realism. There is in it no sign
of that research into detail which distinguishes most imitative art
and is to be found even in that of their immediate successors; and
yet, during all those long centuries of alternate renascence and
decay, we find no vestige of an attempt to raise art above imitation.
No suspicion of its expressive power seems to have dawned on the
Egyptian mind, which, so far as the plastic arts were concerned, never
produced anything that in the language of modern criticism could be
called a creation. In this particular Egypt is more closely allied to
those nations of the far east whose art does not come within the scope
of M. Perrot's inquiry, than to the great civilizations which formed
its own posterity.
* * * * *
Before the late troubles intervened to draw attention of a different
kind to the Nile Valley, the finding of a pit full of royal mummies
and sepulchral objects in the western mountain at Thebes had occurred
to give a fresh stimulus to the interest in Egyptian history, and to
encourage those who were doing their best to lead England to take her
proper share in the work of exploration. A short account of this
discovery, which took place after M. Perrot's book was complete, and
of some of the numerous art objects with which it has enriched the
Boulak Museum, will be found in an Appendix to the second volume.
* * * * *
My acknowledgments for generous assistance are due to Dr. Birch, Mr.
Reginald Stuart Poole, and Miss A. B. Edwards.
W. A.
CONTENTS.
INTRODUCTION
TO THE READER
CHAPTER I.
THE GENERAL CHARACTER OF EGYPTIAN CIVILIZATION.
§ 1. Egypt's place in the History of the World
§ 2. The Valley of the Nile and its Inhabitants
§ 3. The Great Divisions of Egyptian History
§ 4. The Constitution of Egyptian Society--Influence of that
Constitution upon Monuments of Art
§ 5. The Egyptian Religion and its Influence upon the Plastic Arts
§ 6. That Egyptian Art did not escape the Law of Change, and that
its History may therefore be written
§ 7. Of the place held in this work by the Monuments of the
Memphite Period, and of the Limits of our Inquiry
CHAPTER II.
PRINCIPLES AND GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF EGYPTIAN ARCHITECTURE.
§ 1. Method to be Employed by us in our Study of this Architecture
§ 2. General Principles of Form
§ 3. General Principles of Construction.--Materials
§ 4. Dressed Construction
§ 5. Compact Construction
§ 6. Construction by Assemblage
§ 7. Decoration
CHAPTER III.
SEPULCHRAL ARCHITECTURE.
§ 1. The Egyptian Belief as to a Future Life and its Influence upon
their Sepulchral Architecture
§ 2. The Tomb under the Ancient Empire
The Mastabas of the Necropolis of Memphis
The Pyramids
§ 3. The Tomb under the Middle Empire
§ 4. The Tomb under the New Empire
CHAPTER IV.
THE SACRED ARCHITECTURE OF EGYPT.
§ 1. The Temple under the Ancient Empire
§ 2. The Temple under the Middle Empire
§ 3. The Temple under the New Empire
§ 4. General Characteristics of the Egyptian Temple
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
COLOURED PLATES.
The Arab Chain, from near Keneh
The Pyramids, from old Cairo
Karnak, bas-reliefs in the Granite Chambers
Seti I., bas-relief at Abydos
General view of Karnak
Perspective view of the Hypostyle Hall, Karnak
Thebes, the plain, with the Colossi of Memnon
FIG.
1. During the Inundation of the Nile
2. Hoeing
3. Ploughing
4. Harvest scene
5. The Bastinado
6. Statue from the Ancient Empire
7. The _Sheikh-el-Beled_
8. Hunting in the Marshes
9. Shadouf
10. The White Crown
11. The Red Crown
12. The Pschent
13. Seti I. in his War-Chariot
14. Rameses II. in adoration before Seti
15. Homage to Amenophis III.
16. Construction of a Temple at Thebes
17. Columns in the Hypostyle Hall, Karnak
18, 19. Scribes registering the yield of the harvest
20. Colossi of Amenophis III.
21. Scribe registering merchandize
22. Boatmen
23. Cattle Drovers
24. Bakers
25. Women at a loom
26. Netting birds
27. Shepherds in the fields
28. Winnowing corn
29. Herdsmen
30. From the tomb of Menofre
31. Water Tournament
32. Mariette's House
33. Amenhotep, or Amenophis III., presented by Phré to Amen-Ra
34. Amen (or Ammon)
35. Ptah
36. Osiris
37. The goddess Bast
38. Painted bas-relief
39. Sekhet
40. Isis-Hathor
41. A Sphinx
42. Touaris
43. Rannu
44. Horus
45. Thoth
46. Sacrifice to Apis
47. Statue from the Ancient Empire
48. Woman kneading dough
49. The Scribe Chaphré
50. The Lady Naï
51. Ouah-ab-ra
52. Sculptor at work upon an arm
53. Sculptor carving a statue
54. Artist painting a statue
55. Isis nursing Horus
56. Chephren
57. Ti, with his wife and son
58. Square building
59. Rectangular and oblong building
60. The Libyan chain, above the Necropolis of Thebes
61. General appearance of an Egyptian Temple
62. Temple of Khons, at Thebes
63. Temple of Khons, Thebes
64. Temple of Khons, Thebes
65. From the second court of Medinet-Abou, Thebes
66. Ramesseum, Thebes
67. The Egyptian Gorge or Cornice
68. Capital and Entablature of the Temple of the Deus Rediculus
at Rome
69. The Egyptian "bond"
70. Double-faced wall
71, 72. Elements of the portico
73. Egyptian construction
74. Element of an off-set arch
75. Arrangement of the courses in an off-set arch
76. Off-set semicircular arch
77. Voussoir
78. Arrangement of voussoirs
79. Semicircular vault
80. Granaries, from a bas-relief
81. Modern pigeon house, Thebes
82. Elements of wooden construction
83. Wooden building (first system)
84. Wooden building (second system)
85. Seti I. striking prisoners of war with his mace
86. Stele of the eleventh dynasty
87. Mummy case from the eighteenth dynasty
88. Man and his wife in the style of the fifth dynasty
89. Sekhem-ka, his wife Ata, and his son Khnem, in the style
of the fifth dynasty
90. Stele of Nefer-oun
91. Preparation of the victims and arrival of funeral gifts
92. Table for offerings
93. Another form of the table for offerings
94. Labourers heaping up ears of corn
95, 96. Sepulchral statuettes
97. Vignette from a _Ritual_ upon papyrus
98. Arrival in Egypt of a company of Asiatic emigrants
99. The tomb of Ti; women, representing the lands of the
deceased, carrying the funeral gifts
100. Lid of the coffin of Entef
101, 102. Scarabs
103, 104. Funerary amulets
105. Pillow
106. Actual condition of a Mastaba. The Tomb of Sabou
107. Three mastabas at Gizeh
108. Restoration of part of the Necropolis of Gizeh
109. The Mastabat-el-Faraoun
110. Entrance to a Mastaba at Sakkarah
111. Lintel of the tomb of Teta
112. Plan of the tomb of Ti
113, 114. Mastaba at Sakkarah
115. Western wall in the chamber of the tomb of Ptah-Hotep
116. Plan of a Mastaba with four serdabs
117. Longitudinal section of the same Mastaba
118. Transverse section through the chamber
119. Transverse section through the serdabs
120. Figures in high relief, from a Mastaba at Gizeh
121. The upper chamber, well, and mummy-chamber
122. Double Mastaba at Gizeh
123. Sarcophagus of Khoo-foo-Ankh
124. Details of the Sarcophagus of Khoo-foo-Ankh
125. Bas-relief from Sakkarah
126. Head of a Mummy
127. Plans of the temples belonging to the Second and Third
Pyramids
128. Plan of the Pyramid of Cheops
129. The Great Pyramid and the small pyramids at its foot
130. The Three Great Pyramids; from the south
131. The Pyramid of Illahoun, horizontal section in perspective
132. Section of the Pyramid of Cheops
133. The southern Pyramid of Dashour
134. Section of the Stepped Pyramid
135. The Stepped Pyramid
136-142. Successive states of a pyramid
143. Section of the Stepped Pyramid at Sakkarah
144. Construction of the Pyramid of Abousir in parallel layers
145. Partial section of the Stepped Pyramid
146. The Pyramid of Meidoum
147. The Mastabat-el-Faraoun
148. Funerary monument represented in the inscriptions
149. Plan and elevation of a pyramid at Meroe
150. Method of closing a gallery by a stone portcullis
151. Portcullis closed
152. Transverse section, in perspective, through the
Sarcophagus-chamber and the discharging chambers of the
Great Pyramid
153. Longitudinal section through the lower chambers
154. Pyramidion
155. The casing of the pyramids
156. Plan of the Pyramids of Gizeh and of that part of the
Necropolis which immediately surrounds them
157. The Sphinx
158. Pyramid with its inclosure, Abousir
159. The river transport of the Mummy
160. Tomb at Abydos
161. Section of the above tomb
162. Tomb at Abydos
163. Section of the above tomb
164. Stele of the eleventh dynasty, Abydos
165. Stele of Pinahsi, priest of Ma; Abydos
166. Façade of a tomb at Beni-Hassan
167. Façade of a tomb at Beni-Hassan, showing some of the
adjoining tombs
168. Interior of a tomb at Beni-Hassan
169. Plan of the above tomb
170. Chess players, Beni-Hassan
171. General plan of Thebes
172. Rameses III. conducting a religious procession, at
Medinet-Abou
173. Rameses III. hunting
174. Rameses II. in battle
175. Painting in a royal tomb at Gournah
176. Amenophis III. presenting an offering to Amen
177. Flaying the funerary victim
178. Entrance to a royal tomb
179. Plan of the tomb of Rameses II.
180. Horizontal section of the same tomb
181. The smaller Sarcophagus-chamber in the tomb of Rameses VI.
182. Entrance to the tomb of Rameses III.
183. Hunting scene upon a tomb at Gournah
184. The weighing of actions
185. Anubis, in a funerary pavilion
186. Plan and section of a royal tomb
187, 188. Theban tombs from the bas-reliefs
189. Theban tomb from a bas-relief
190. A tomb of Apis
191. The tomb of Petamounoph
192. The most simple form of Theban tomb
193. Tomb as represented upon a bas-relief
194. Stele in the Boulak Museum, showing tombs with gardens
about them
195. The sarcophagus of a royal scribe
196. Canopic vase of alabaster
197. View of the grand gallery in the Apis Mausoleum
198. Sepulchral chamber of an Apis bull
199. Section in perspective of "Campbell's tomb"
200. Vertical section in perspective of the Sarcophagus-chamber
of the above tomb
201. A Tomb on El-Assasif
202. The Temple of the Sphinx
203. Interior of the Temple of the Sphinx
204. The Temple of the Sphinx, the Sphinx, and the neighbouring
parts of the Necropolis
205. Ram, or _Kriosphinx_
206. Gateway and boundary wall of a temple
207. Principal façade of the Temple of Luxor
208. The Temple of Khons; horizontal and vertical section
showing the general arrangement of the temple
209. The _Bari_, or sacred boat
210. Portable tabernacle of painted wood
211. Granite tabernacle
212. General plan of the Great Temple at Karnak
213. Longitudinal section of the Temple of Luxor
214. Plan of the anterior portion of the Great Temple at Karnak
215. The Great Temple at Karnak; inner portion
216. Karnak as it is at present
217. Plan of the Temple of Luxor
218. Bird's-eye view of Luxor
219. Plan of the Ramesseum
220. The Ramesseum. Bird's-eye view of the general arrangement
221. General plan of the buildings at Medinet-Abou
222. Plan of the Temple of Thothmes
223. Plan of the Great Temple at Medinet-Abou
224. Plan of the Temple at Abydos
225. Seti, with the attributes of Osiris, between Amen, to whom
he is paying homage, and Chnoum
226. Plan of the Temple of Gournah
227. Façade of the _naos_ of the Temple of Gournah
228. Longitudinal section of the Temple of Gournah, from the
portico of the _naos_ to the back wall
229. Plan of the Temple of Elephantiné
230. View in perspective of the Temple of Elephantiné
231. Longitudinal section of the Temple of Elephantiné
232. Temple of Amenophis III. at Eilithyia
233. Temple of Amenophis III. at Eilithyia; longitudinal section
234. The speos at Addeh
235. The speos at Addeh; longitudinal section
236. Plan of speos at Beit-el-Wali
237. Longitudinal section of the speos at Beit-el-Wali
238. Plan of the hemispeos of Gherf-Hossein
239. Gherf-Hossein; longitudinal section
240. Plan of the hemispeos of Derri
241. Longitudinal section; Derri
242. Façade of the smaller temple at Ipsamboul
243. Plan of the smaller temple
244. Perspective of the principal Chamber in the smaller temple
245. Longitudinal section of the smaller temple
246. Plan of the Great Temple
247. Perspective of the principal Hall in the Great Temple
248. Façade of the Great Temple at Ipsamboul
249. Longitudinal section of the Great Temple
250. Dayr-el-Bahari
251. Restoration in perspective of Dayr-el-Bahari
252. The ruins on the Island of Philæ
253. The battle against the Khetas, Luxor
254. Rameses II. returning in triumph from Syria
255. The goddess Anouké suckling Rameses II., Beit-el-Wali
INTRODUCTION.
I.
The successful interpretation of the ancient writings of Egypt,
Chaldæa, and Persia, which has distinguished our times, makes it
necessary that the history of antiquity should be rewritten. Documents
that for thousands of years lay hidden beneath the soil, and
inscriptions which, like those of Egypt and Persia, long offered
themselves to the gaze of man merely to excite his impotent curiosity,
have now been deciphered and made to render up their secrets for the
guidance of the historian. By the help of those strings of hieroglyphs
and of cuneiform characters, illustrated by paintings and sculptured
reliefs, we are enabled to separate the truth from the falsehood, the
chaff from the wheat, in the narratives of the Greek writers who
busied themselves with those nations of Africa and Asia which preceded
their own in the ways of civilization. Day by day, as new monuments
have been discovered and more certain methods of reading their
inscriptions elaborated, we have added to the knowledge left us by
Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus, to our acquaintance with those empires
on the Euphrates and the Nile which were already in old age when the
Greeks were yet struggling to emerge from their primitive barbarism.
Even in the cases of Greece and Rome, whose histories are supplied in
their main lines by their classic writers, the study of hitherto
neglected writings discloses many new and curious details. The
energetic search for ancient inscriptions, and the scrupulous and
ingenious interpretation of their meaning, which we have witnessed and
are witnessing, have revealed to us many interesting facts of which no
trace is to be found in Thucydides or Xenophon, in Livy or Tacitus;
enabling us to enrich with more than one feature the picture of
private and public life which they have handed down to us. In the
effort to embrace the life of ancient times as a whole, many attempts
have been made to fix the exact place in it occupied by art, but those
attempts have never been absolutely successful, because the
comprehension of works of art, of _plastic_ creations in the widest
significance of that word, demands an amount of special knowledge
which the great majority of historians are without; art has a method
and language of its own, which obliges those who wish to learn it
thoroughly to cultivate their taste by frequenting the principal
museums of Europe, by visiting distant regions at the cost of
considerable trouble and expense, by perpetual reference to the great
collections of engravings, photographs, and other reproductions which
considerations of space and cost prevent the _savant_ from possessing
at home. More than one learned author has never visited Italy or
Greece, or has found no time to examine their museums, each of which
contains but a small portion of the accumulated remains of antique
art. Some connoisseurs do not even live in a capital, but dwell far
from those public libraries, which often contain valuable collections,
and sometimes--when they are not packed away in cellars or at the
binder's--allow them to be studied by the curious.[2] The study of
art, difficult enough in itself, is thus rendered still more arduous
by the obstacles which are thrown in its way. The difficulty of
obtaining materials for self-improvement in this direction affords the
true explanation of the absence, in modern histories of antiquity, of
those laborious researches which have led to such great results since
Winckelmann founded the science of archæology as we know it. To take
the case of Greece, many learned writers have in our time attempted to
retrace its complete history--England, Germany, and France have each
contributed works which, by various merits, have conquered the favour
of Europe. But of all these works the only one which betrays any deep
study of Greek art, and treats it with taste and competence, is that
of M. Ernest Curtius; as for Mr. Grote, he has neither a theoretic
knowledge of art, nor a feeling for it. Here and there, indeed, where
he cannot avoid it, he alludes to the question, but in the fewest and
driest phrases possible. And yet Greece, without its architects, its
sculptors, and its painters, without in fact its passion for beautiful
form, a passion as warm and prolific as its love for poetry, is hardly
Greece at all.
[2] Our national library at the British Museum is, perhaps, the
only one which does not deserve this reproach.--ED.
Much disappointment is thus prepared for those who, without the
leisure to enter deeply into detail, wish to picture to themselves the
various aspects of the ancient world. They are told of revolutions, of
wars and conquests, of the succession of princes; the mechanism of
political and civil institutions is explained to them; "literature,"
we are told, "is the expression of social life," and so the history of
literature is written for us. All this is true enough, but there is
another truth which seems to be always forgotten, that the art of a
people is quite as clear an indication of their sentiments, tastes,
and ideas, as their literature. But on this subject most historians
say little, contenting themselves with the brief mention of certain
works and proper names, and with the summary statement of a few
general ideas which do not even possess the merit of precision. And
where are we to find the information thus refused? Europe possesses
several histories of Greek and Roman literature, written with great
talent and eloquence, such as the work, unhappily left unfinished, of
Ottfried Müller; there are, too, excellent manuals, rich in valuable
facts, such as those of Bernhardy, Baehr, and Teuffel; but where is
there, either in England, in France, or in Germany, a single work
which retraces, in sufficient detail, the whole history of antique
art, following it throughout its progress and into all its
transformations, from its origin to its final decadence, down to the
epoch when Christianity and the barbaric invasions put an end to the
ancient forms of civilization and prepared for the birth of the modern
world, for the evolution of a new society and of a new art?
To this question our neighbours may reply that the _Geschichte der
bildenden Kunst_ of Carl Schnaase[3] does all that we ask. But that
work has one great disadvantage for those who are not Germans. Its
great bulk will almost certainly prevent its ever finding a
translator, while it makes it very tedious reading to a foreigner. It
must, besides, be very difficult, not to say impossible, for a single
writer to treat with equal competence the arts of Asia, of Greece, and
of Rome, of the Middle Ages and of modern times. As one might have
expected, all the parts of such an extensive whole are by no means of
equal value, and the chapters which treat of antique art are the least
satisfactory. Of the eight volumes of which the work consists, two are
devoted to ancient times, and, by general acknowledgment, they are not
the two best. They were revised, indeed, for the second edition, by
two colleagues whom Herr Schnaase called in to his assistance;
oriental art by Carl von Lützow, and that of Greece and Rome by Carl
Friedrichs. But the chapters in which Assyria, Chaldæa, Persia,
Phœnicia, and Egypt are discussed are quite inadequate. No single
question is exhaustively treated. Instead of well-considered personal
views, we have vague guesses and explanations which do nothing to
solve the many problems which perplex archæologists. The illustrations
are not numerous enough to be useful, and, in most cases, they do not
seem to have been taken from the objects themselves. Those which
relate to architecture, especially, have been borrowed from other well
known works, and furnish therefore no new elements for appreciation or
discussion. Finally, the order adopted by the author is not easily
understood. For reasons which have decided us to follow the same
course, and which we will explain farther on, he takes no account of
the extreme east, of China and Japan; but then, why begin with India,
which had no relations with the peoples on the shores of the
Mediterranean until a very late date, and, so far as art was
concerned, rather came under their influence than brought them under
its own?
[3] _Geschichte der bildenden Kunst_, 2nd ed., corrected and
augmented, with wood engravings in the text, 8 vols. 8vo.
1865-1873. The first edition consisted of 7 vols., and appeared
between 1843 and 1864.
The fact is that Schnaase follows a geographical order, which is very
confusing in its results. To give but one example of its absurdity, he
speaks of the Phœnicians before he has said a word of Egypt; now,
we all know that the art of Tyre and Sidon was but a late reflection
from that of Egypt; the workshops of those two famous ports were mere
factories of cheap Egyptian art objects for exportation.
Again, the first part of Herr Schnaase's work is already seventeen
years old, and how many important discoveries have taken place since
1865? Those of Cesnola and Schliemann, for instance, have revealed
numberless points of contact and transmission between one phase of
antique art and another, which were never thought of twenty years ago.
The book therefore is not "down to date." With all the improvements
which a new edition might introduce, that part of it which deals with
antiquity can never be anything but an abridgment with the faults
inherent in that kind of work. It could never have the amplitude of
treatment or the originality which made Winckelmann's _History of Art_
and Ottfried Müller's _Manual of Artistic Archæology_ so successful in
their day.[4]
[4] Germany had long felt the want which Schnaase attempted to
satisfy. As early as 1841 Franz Kugler published his _Handbuch
der Kunstgeschichte_, which embraces the whole history of art
from the earliest times down to our own day. The book was
successful; the fourth edition, revised and corrected by Wilhelm
Lübke (2 vols. 8vo. 1861, Stuttgart), lies before us, but to
give an idea of its inadequacy as a history of ancient art, it
is enough to say that the whole of the antique period, both in
Greece and Asia, occupies no more than 206 pages of the first
volume. The few illustrations are not very good in quality, and
their source is never indicated; the draughtsman has taken
little care to reproduce with fidelity the style of the
originals or to call attention to their peculiarities; finally,
the arrangements adopted betray the defects of a severely
scientific method. The author commences with Celtic monuments
(dolmens and menhirs), and then passes to the structures of
Oceania and America; before commencing upon Egypt he takes us to
Mexico and Yucatan. Lübke, whilst still occupied with the work
of Kugler, wished to supply for the use of students and artists
a book of a more elementary character; he therefore published in
1860 an 8vo volume which he called _Grundriss der
Kunstgeschichte_; the antique here occupies 208 pages out of
720. His plan seems to us to be open to the same objection as
that of Kugler; he follows a geographical instead of an
historical arrangement; he begins with the extreme east; he puts
the Assyrians and the Persians before Egypt, and India before
Assyria. His illustrations are sometimes better than those of
Kugler, but many of the cuts are common to both works.
Under the title _Geschichte der Plastik_, Overbeck and Lübke
have each written a comprehensive history of sculpture. [The
word "comprehensive" must here be understood in a strictly
limited sense.--ED.] The word _Plastik_ in the language of
German critics has this special and restricted meaning--it
comprises sculpture only. The work of Overbeck, far superior to
that of Lübke, deserves the success which has attended it; the
third edition, which contains the results of the searches at
Olympia and at Pergamus, is now in course of publication.
Winckelmann's _History of Art among the Ancients_, originally
published in 1764, is one of those rare books which mark an epoch in
the history of the human intellect. The German writer was the first to
formulate the idea, now familiar enough to cultivated intelligences,
that art springs up, flourishes, and decays, with the society to which
it belongs; in a word, that it is possible to write its history.[5]
This great _savant_, whose memory Germany holds in honour as the
father of classic archæology, was not content with stating a
principle: he followed it through to its consequences; he began by
tracing the outlines of the science which he founded, and he never
rested till he had filled them in. However, now that a century has
passed away since it appeared, his great work, which even yet is never
opened without a sentiment of respect, marks a date beyond which
modern curiosity has long penetrated. Winckelmann's knowledge of
Egyptian art was confined to the _pasticcios_ of the Roman epoch, and
to the figures which passed from the villa of Hadrian to the museum of
Cardinal Albani. Chaldæa and Assyria, Persia and Phœnicia, had no
existence for him; even Greece as a whole was not known to him. Her
painted vases were still hidden in Etruscan and Campanian cemeteries;
the few which had found their way to the light had not yet succeeded
in drawing the attention of men who were preoccupied over more
imposing manifestations of the Greek genius. Nearly all Winckelmann's
attention was given to the works of the sculptors, upon which most of
his comprehensive judgments were founded; and yet, even in regard to
them, he was not well-informed. His opportunities of personal
inspection were confined to the figures, mostly of unknown origin,
which filled the Italian galleries. The great majority of these formed
part of the crowd of copies which issued from the workshops of Greece,
for some three centuries or more, to embellish the temples, the
basilicas, and the public baths, the villas and the palaces of the
masters of the world. In the very few instances in which they were
either originals or copies executed with sufficient care to be fair
representations of the original, they never dated from an earlier
epoch than that of Praxiteles, Scopas, and Lysippus. Phidias and
Alcamenes, Pæonius and Polycletus, the great masters of the fifth
century, were only known to the historian by the descriptions and
allusions of the ancient authors.
[5] Winckelmann's History of Ancient Art should be read in
connection with his Remarks upon the History of Art, which is a
kind of supplement to it, and takes the place of that new
edition of which the author's premature and tragic death
deprived the world. It is an answer to the objections which made
themselves heard on every side; the preface to _Monumenti
inediti_ (Rome, 1867, 2 vols. in folio, with 208 plates) should
also be read. The method of Winckelmann is there most clearly
explained. Finally, the student of the life and labours of
Winckelmann may consult with profit the interesting work of Carl
Iusti, _Winckelmann, sein Leben, seine Werke, und seine
Zeitgenossen_, which will give him a clear idea of the state of
archæology at the time when the German _savant_ intervened to
place it upon a higher footing.
In such a case as this the clearest and most precise of verbal
descriptions is of less value than any fragment of marble upon which
the hand of the artist is still to be traced. Who would then have
guessed that the following generation would have the opportunity of
studying those splendid groups of decorative sculpture whose close
relation to the architecture of certain famous temples has taught us
so much? Who in those days dreamt of looking at, still less of
drawing, the statues in the pediments and sculptured friezes of the
Parthenon, of the Thesæum, of the temples at Ægina, at Phigalia, or at
Olympia? Now if Winckelmann was ignorant of these, the real monuments
of classic perfection, it follows that he was hardly competent to
recognise and define true archaism or to distinguish the works of
sculpture which bore the marks of the deliberate, eclectic, and
over-polished taste of the critical epochs. He made the same mistake
in speaking of architecture. It was always, or nearly always, by the
edifices of Rome and Italy, by their arrangement and decoration, that
he pretended to explain and judge the architecture of Greece.
But Winckelmann rendered a great service to art by founding a method
of study which was soon applied by Zoëga[6] and by Ennio Quirino
Visconti,[7] to the description of the works which filled public and
private galleries, or were being continually discovered by excavation.
These two _savants_ classified a vast quantity of facts; thanks to
their incessant labours, the lines of the master's rough sketch were
accented and corrected at more than one point; the divisions which he
had introduced into his picture were marked with greater precision;
the groups which he had begun to form were rendered more coherent and
compact; their features became more precise, more distinct, and more
expressive. This progress was continuous, but after the great wars of
the Revolution and the Empire its march became much more rapid, and
the long peace which saw the growth of so rich a harvest of talent,
was also marked by a great increase in the energy with which all kinds
of historical studies were prosecuted.
[6] Zoëga busied himself greatly with Egypt, and in inaugurating
the study of Coptic prepared the way for Champollion. But the
work which gave him a place among the chief scholars of
Winckelmann is unfinished; the _Bassirilievi antichi di Roma_
(Rome, 2 vols. 4to. 1808) only contains the monuments in the
Villa Albani, engraved by Piroli, with the help of the
celebrated Piranesi. A volume containing most of his essays was
given to the world by Welcker in 1817 (_Abhandlungen
herausgegeben und mit Zusätzen begleitet_, 8vo. Göttingen), who
also published his life and a volume of his correspondence
(Zoëga, _Sammlung seiner Briefe und Beurtheilung seiner Werke_,
2 vols. 8vo. Stuttgart, 1819).
[7] _Il Museo Pio-Clementino_, Visconti, vol. i. 1782; by Enn.
Quir. Visconti, vols. ii. to vii. Rome, 1784-1807. _Museum
Worsleyanum_, 2 vols. folio. London, 1794. _Monumenti Gabini
della Villa Pinciana_, Visconti, 8vo. 1797. _Description des
Antiques du Musée Royal_, begun by Visconti and continued by the
Comte de Clarac. 12mo. Paris, 1820. For the collection of the
materials and the execution of the plates in the _Iconographie
Grecque et Romain_, Visconti took advantage of his opportunities
as director of the _Musée Napoléon_, into which the art
treasures of all Europe, except England, were collected at the
beginning of this century.
But the widest, as well as the most sudden, enlargement of the horizon
was due to a rapid succession of discoveries, some the result of
persevering searches and lucky excavations, others rendered possible
by feats of induction which almost amounted to genius. It seemed as
though a curtain were drawn up, and, behind the rich and brilliant
scenery of Græco-Roman civilization, the real ancient world, the world
of the East, the father of religions and of useful inventions, of the
alphabet and of the plastic arts, were suddenly revealed to us. The
great work which was compiled by the _savants_ who accompanied
Bonaparte to Egypt first introduced the antiquities of that country to
us, and not long afterwards Champollion discovered the key to the
hieroglyphics, and thus enabled us to assign to the monuments of the
country at least a relative date.
A little later Layard and Botta freed Nineveh from the ruins of its
own buildings, and again let in the light upon ancient Assyria. But
yesterday we knew nothing beyond the names of its kings, and yet it
sprang again to the day, its monuments in marvellous preservation, its
history pictured by thousands of figures in relief and narrated by
their accompanying inscriptions. These did not long keep their secrets
to themselves, and their interpretation enables us to classify
chronologically the works of architecture and sculpture which have
been discovered.
The information thus obtained was supplemented by careful exploration
of the ruins in Babylonia, lower Chaldæa, and Susiana. These had been
less tenderly treated by time and by man than the remains of Nineveh.
The imposing ruins of the palace at Persepolis and of the tombs of the
kings, had been known for nearly two centuries, but only by the
inadequate descriptions and feeble drawings of early travellers.
Ker-Porter, Texier, and Flandrin provided us with more accurate and
comprehensive descriptions, and, thanks to their careful copies of the
writings upon the walls of those buildings, and upon the inscribed
stones of Persia and Media, Eugène Burnouf succeeded in reconstructing
the alphabet of Darius and Xerxes.
Thus, to the toils of artists and learned men, who examined the
country from the mountains of Armenia to the low and marshy plains of
Susiana, and from the deserts which border the Euphrates to the rocks
of Media and Persia, and to the philologists who deciphered the texts
and classified the monumental fragments which had travelled so far
from the scene of their creation, we owe our power to describe, upon a
sound basis and from authentic materials, the great civilisation which
was developed in Western Asia, in the basin of the Persian Gulf. There
were still many details which escaped us, but, through the shadows
which every day helped to dissipate, the essential outlines and the
leading masses began to be clearly distinguished, and the local
distinctions which, in such a vast extent of country and so long a
succession of empires, were caused by differences of race, of time,
and of physical conditions, began to be appreciated. But, in spite of
all these differences, the choice of expressive means and their
employment, from Babylon to Nineveh, and from Nineveh to Susa and
Persepolis, presented so many points of striking similarity as to
prove that the various peoples represented by those famous capitals
all sprang from the same original stock. The elements of writing and
of the arts are in each case identical. The alphabets were all formed
upon the same cuneiform principle, notwithstanding the variety in the
languages which they served. In the plastic arts, although the plans
of their buildings vary in obedience to the requirements of different
materials, their sculpture always betrays the same way of looking at
living forms, the same conventions and the same motives. Every work
fashioned by the hand of man which has been discovered within the
boundaries given above, displays community of style and unity of
origin and tradition.
* * * * *
The result of these searches and discoveries was to show clearly that
this ancient civilisation had sprung from two original sources, the
one in the valley of the Nile, the other in Chaldæa. The latter was
the less ancient of the two, and was considerably nearer our own time
than the epoch which witnessed the commencement of the long series of
Egyptian dynasties by the reign of Menes. These two civilizations met
and intermingled through the agency of the Phœnicians, and any
active and prolific interchange of ideas and products began, traces of
which are still to be found both in Egypt and Assyria.
It still remained doubtful, and the doubt has but lately been removed,
how the influence of these two great centres of cultivation was
extended to the still barbarous tribes, the ancestors of the Greeks
and Romans, who inhabited the northern and eastern shores of the
Mediterranean.
It is only within the last twenty years, since the mission of M.
Renan, that Phœnicia has become well-known to us. Several English
and French travellers, Hamilton, Fellows, Texier, among others, had
already, in the first half of the century, described the curious
monuments of Lydia, Phrygia, Cappadocia, and of the still more
picturesque Lycia, whose spoils now enrich the British Museum; people
vaguely conjectured that through those countries had progressed, stage
by stage, from the east to the west, the forms and inventions of a
system of civilization which had been elaborated in the distant
Chaldæa. But it was not till 1861 that an expedition, inspired by the
desire to clear up this very question, succeeded in demonstrating the
_rôle_ actually played by the peoples inhabiting the plateau of Asia
Minor. As for Cyprus, it was but yesterday that the explorations of
Lang and Cesnola revealed it to us, with its art half Egyptian and
half Assyrian, and its cuneiform alphabet pressed into the service of
a Greek dialect. These discoveries have put us on the alert. Not a
year passes without some lucky "find," such as that of the Palæstrina
treasure, in the immediate neighbourhood of Rome, or that made by
Salzmann at Rhodes. These pieces of good fortune allow the
archæologist to supply, one by one, the missing links of the chain
which attaches the arts of Greece and Italy to the earlier
civilizations of Egypt and Assyria.
* * * * *
While the remains of Oriental antiquity were being thus recovered
piece by piece, secrets no less interesting and documents no less
curious were continually coming to the surface to cast new light upon
the history of classic antiquity. First came the marbles of the
Parthenon, transferred by Lord Elgin to the British Museum in 1816.
Both artists and connoisseurs, after a short pause of hesitation,
agreed in asserting that the bas-reliefs of the frieze and the
sculptures of the two pediments excelled anything which had previously
entered into any European museum. Artists declared that they
experienced a sense of beauty never felt before; they were face to
face for the first time with the ideal of the Greeks, as it had been
conceived and realised at that happy period of perfection which
followed the disappearance of the last traces of archaic hardness.
That period was but too short. It was comprised in a single
generation, which was followed by one which made the first steps down
the slope of the decadence. During a single lifetime a crowd of works
were produced which, in spite of differences in material and subject,
were all stamped with the same character of easy and frank nobility,
of sincerity and elegant severity, of simplicity combined with
grandeur. The death, or even the old age of the great men who had
produced these works, was sufficient to lower the standard. Emphasis
and a striving for effect took the place of nobility; under a pretence
of sincerity, artists took to a servile imitation of nature, and
mannerism, with all its weaknesses, began to disfigure their works.
Art remained at a high level in Greece, however, longer than
elsewhere. The word decadence can hardly be pronounced in connection
with the admirable works produced in the fourth century before Christ,
and yet it cannot be denied that, so long as we were without original
examples from the great epoch of Pericles, we were without that most
necessary material for a history of Greek art, a knowledge of the most
masterly, the most pure, and the most elevated of her creations. The
literary historian might as well have attempted to trace the course of
her poetry without having read Sophocles, without having heard of the
_Electra_ or the _Œdipus Rex_.
Attention being once turned in this direction, discoveries followed
each other in rapid succession. The statues from the pediments at
Ægina, so ably restored by Thorwaldsen, were bought to form the
nucleus of the collection at Munich.[8] The study of these statues is
very instructive in making clear to us the paths which sculptors had
to follow in their progress from the stiffness and conventions of
early periods to the ease and amplitude of classic perfection. As for
the friezes from the temple of Apollo Epicurius, near Phigalia, they
too are in the British Museum.[9] Thus brought into immediate
propinquity with the marbles from the Parthenon, with which they are
almost cotemporary, they afford us some curious information. They show
us what the art of Phidias and Alcamenes became when those sculptors
had to work in what we should call "the provinces;" how much they
preserved and how much they lost of their complete excellence when
employed upon buildings erected at less cost and with less care than
those of the capital. So far as the composition is concerned, the
consummate facility and the natural _verve_ of the master who supplied
the sketches and models is never absent, but the execution, which must
have been left to local artists, betrays their inferiority by its
inequalities and general weakness. The same may be said of the figures
with which Alcamenes and Pæonius ornamented the pediments and metopes
of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia. Even before the discoveries at Ægina
and Phigalia, the results of the French expedition to the Morea and
the beautiful fragments of sculpture brought to the Louvre from the
banks of the Alphæus, had given us reason to suspect this inferiority
of provincial art, and the excavations recently undertaken by Germany,
after an interval of about half a century of inaction, have finally
removed all doubts. Neither the statues nor the bas-reliefs, nor any
other part of the decoration of the temple at Olympia, possess the
nobility and purity which distinguish the great buildings on the
Athenian acropolis. They show abundant power and science, but also
perceptible inequalities, and certain signs of that exaggerated
objectivity which we now call realism. Each fresh discovery helps us
to comprehend, not without a certain sense of surprise, how much
freedom and variety Greek art possessed during its best time. There is
none of that dull uniformity which, with other races, distinguishes
most of the works of a single epoch, none of the tyranny of a single
master or school, none of the narrowness of mere _formulæ_.
[8] They were discovered in 1811 amid the ruins of one of the
temples at Ægina, by a company of excavators presided over by
Mr. Cockerell. They were bought by Prince Louis of Bavaria in
1812, and Thorwaldsen was occupied during several years in
putting together and restoring them. They were first exhibited
in the Glyptothek of Munich in 1820.
[9] The _débris_ of the temple at Bassæ was explored by the same
company in the year 1812, and a whole frieze was found, which
was bought by the British Museum in 1815.
The memorable exploration to which we have alluded, and many others
which it would take too long to enumerate, have not only made known to
us the most original and most fertile period of Greek sculpture, but
have given us much information as to that art which, when combined
with the statues of Phidias and Alcamenes, reared those splendid
creations which have been reconstructed with such skill and care by
the artist and the archæologist; we mean Greek architecture at its
best, the purest and the most complete architecture which the world
has yet seen. Every year sees the excellent example set by Stuart and
Revett,[10] in the second half of the eighteenth century, followed by
an increasing number of imitators. The smallest remains of ancient
architecture are measured and drawn with religious care; their
arrangements are explained, their elements are grouped, their
_ensemble_ is restored with a comprehension of their artistic
conditions which steadily gains in certainty and penetration. Blouet's
interesting restorations of Olympia and Phigalia, published in the
account of the French expedition to the Morea,[11] excited the
emulation of the young architects at the French Academy in Rome, and
opened to them a new course of study. Until then they had been
contented with the monumental buildings of Rome and its neighbourhood,
of Latium and Campania; a few of the more adventurous among them had
penetrated as far as Pæstum; but it was not till 1845 that they
ventured to cross the sea and to study the ruins of Greece and
Athens;[12] in later years they have travelled as far as Syria and
Asia Minor in search of objects for their pencils.[13]
[10] _The Antiquities of Athens, Measured and Delineated by J.
Stuart and N. Revett._ Folio. London, 1761.
[11] _Expédition scientifique de Morée, ordonnée par le
Gouvernement Français. Architecture, Sculpture, Inscriptions,
mesurées, dessinées, recueillies et publiées, par_ A. Blouet, A.
Ravoisié, Alph. Poirot, F. Trézel, et Fr. de Gournay. Paris,
1831-7.
[12] The restoration of the temple of Athenè Polias and of the
Parthenon, by Ballu and Paccard, dates from 1845. Since that
time the students of the French Academy have drawn and restored
all the most important monuments of Greece.
[13] One temple at Baalbec was restored in 1865 by M. Moyau; the
Mausoleum of Halicarnassus by M. Bernier in 1878, and the temple
of Athenè at Priene by M. Thomas in 1879.
But the occupants of the Villa Medici were not alone in these
researches. Doubtless, the invaluable publication which contains the
results of their labours, forms the most ample and varied collection
of documents open to the historian of architecture among the ancients.
But many other architects of different nationalities have given their
help to the work of patiently reconstructing the past.[14]
[14] In 1872 this collection consisted of sixty-one
restorations, comprising 691 original drawings upon a very large
scale, and forming fifty-two bound volumes. Thanks to M. Jules
Simon, then Minister of Public Instruction, and M. Charles
Blanc, Director of Fine Arts, the publication of the series in
its entirety was resolved upon. A commission, with M. Ernest
Vinet as secretary, was appointed to superintend the expenditure
of an annual grant of 20,000 francs voted by the Chamber. But
the work progresses very slowly. In 1881 only five sections had
appeared, the most important being the _Restauration des Temples
de Pæstum_, by Labrouste.
Examined thus closely, and by the trained eyes of professional artists
provided with all the necessary instruments, the relics of antiquity
yielded up secrets which would never have been suspected by the casual
observer. Thus Mr. Penrose discovered and explained that those walls
of the Propylæum and of the Parthenon, which seemed straight to the
eye, are in fact planned on a gentle curve;[15] he showed how this
subtle variation was calculated to add to the beauty of the buildings,
and to augment their effect. Hittorf arrived at still more important
results through the minute examination of the Sicilian ruins. He was
the first to describe the important part which painting played in the
decoration of Greek architecture; he affirmed that in many parts of
their buildings the stone or marble was painted over, and that the
various members of the architecture were distinguished by differences
of tint, which gave accent to the mouldings, and force to the figures
in relief. These ideas were too strongly opposed to modern habits of
thought to be received without strong protestations. Their partisans,
too, did something to retard their acceptance by their absolute
fashion of stating their convictions, and by certain unhappy
applications of their system; but the polychromatic principles of the
Greeks are now confirmed by too many facts to be denied.[16]
[15] F. C. PENROSE, _An Investigation of the Principles of
Athenian Architecture_. Folio, with plates. London, 1851.
[16] J. J. HITTORF, _Restitution du Temple d'Empédocle à
Sèlinonte; ou, l'Architecture polychrome chez les Grecs_, 4to.
and plates in folio. Paris, 1851.
Of the three principal branches of ancient art, that of which we know
least is painting, properly speaking; the art of Polygnotus, of
Zeuxis, and of Apelles. Of this we have but few remains, and we are
obliged to take our ideas of its excellence from the descriptions of
ancient authors. We have indeed the wall-paintings of those Campanian
cities which were so long buried under the ashes of Vesuvius;
paintings which were uncovered in great numbers under the Napoleonic
domination, and have in later times been added to every year, in spite
of the indolent fashion in which the excavations have been conducted.
Fragmentary mural paintings of the same kind have also been discovered
in Rome and in a few other neighbourhoods. But after all, great though
the interest may be which attaches to these works, it must not be
forgotten that they are Italian rather than Greek, that they are the
decorations for the most part of small provincial cities, and that
even the best of them, when compared with the productions of the fifth
and fourth centuries before our era, are examples of decadence. At the
most they enable us to recall, with some approach to probable truth,
the taste and technical methods of the Alexandrian school.[17]
Winckelmann and his immediate successors saw the ashes cleared from
the first Pompeian wall-paintings. But they possessed no standards by
which they could define the styles of those great schools of painting
which flourished in Greece between the epoch of the Persian Wars and
the beginning of the Macedonian supremacy; such a definition we may
now however attempt with at least partial success. Since the time of
Winckelmann hundreds and thousands of those painted vases of burnt
clay, which the public persist in calling Etruscan, have been
discovered, classified, described, and explained, in such a manner as
to leave unsolved scarcely any of the problems upon which they could
cast a light.
[17] See upon this subject M. Wolfgang Helbig's _Untersuchungen
ueber die Campanische Wandmalerei_. Leipsic, 1873. M. Boissier
has summed up the leading opinions in this matter in an
interesting article in the _Révue des Deux Mondes_, entitled
_Les Peintures d'Herculaneum et de Pompéi_ (October 1, 1879).
Gerhard led the way in 1831 with his famous report on the Volscian
vases;[18] numerous _savants_ have followed his example, and nearly
every day the series which they have established are enriched by new
discoveries. These vases, as we now know, were made in many places, at
Athens, at Corinth, in the Greek cities of Africa and of Magna Græcia.
They were eagerly sought after by some of the races whom the Greeks
considered barbarous, by the Græco-Scythians of the Crimea, as well as
by the Sabellians and the Etruscans; the latter imitated them now and
then more or less awkwardly, but it is unanimously acknowledged that
they are an essentially Greek product, the product of an art which
sprang up with the first awakening of the Greek genius, and was
extinguished about two hundred years before Christ, when the nation
ceased to be creative and prolific. From analogy with all that has
passed elsewhere we are justified in believing that, in each century,
the painting of these vases, which would belong to what we call the
industrial arts, followed with docility the example set by historical
painters, and that it reproduced, so far as its resources would allow,
the style and taste of their works. If we study each series of vases
in the light of the judgments passed by the ancients upon the most
celebrated painters of Greece, we may find, by a legitimate induction,
traces now of the style of Polygnotus, now of that of Zeuxis, and
again suggestions of the hands of Apelles or Protogenes; a vase here
and there may have even preserved more or less faithful imitations of
the actual works of those masters. These inductions and conjectures
certainly demand both prudence and delicacy of perception, but their
principle is incontestable, and the profit to be obtained from them is
great. In the whole wreck of antiquity there is no loss which lovers
of art find so hard to bear, as the complete annihilation of the works
of those great painters whom the ancients put at least upon the same
level as their most famous sculptors; and who would not rejoice to be
able, by the remains of contemporary though inferior productions, to
trace a reflection, distant and feeble perhaps, but yet faithful so
far as it goes, of a whole art which has been lost to the world?
[18] _Rapporto intorno i Vasi Volcenti_ (_Annali dell' Instituto
di Corrispondenza Archeologica_, vol. iii. p. 5).
The archæologists of the eighteenth century never dreamt of such
researches as these, still less of the results to which they might
lead; few of them suspected what valuable aid might be afforded to the
historian of art and of antique civilization, by the multitude of
small objects--vases, gems, glass, mirrors, bronze plaques and
figures, terra-cotta bas-reliefs, and statuettes--which are now so
eagerly sought after, and which begin to form valuable collections in
most of the great museums of Europe.[19] These objects, which were in
continual use, were manufactured in prodigious quantities for
thousands of years, and their vast numbers gave them a greatly
increased chance of being preserved. In spite of the rough usage of
man, and the slower progress of destruction due to the action of
nature, a certain number of them were sure, from the first, to find
means of escape, and, from so many examples, a few of each type have
therefore come down to us. The small size of these objects also
contributed to preserve them from destruction. In times of war and
revolution the poor and humble ones of the earth easily avoid the
catastrophes which overwhelm those who are richer, more powerful, and
more conspicuous than themselves. So it was with these little
memorials of antiquity. Their insignificance was their salvation in
the overthrow of the civilisation to which they belonged. More
numerous and better sheltered than the masterpieces of fine art, they
survived when the latter perished. Thus it is that so many of the
lighter and more fragile products of industry have survived to our
time, and have made us acquainted with modes of thought and life, and
with forms of plastic expression which we should never have known
without them. The painted vases, for instance, have preserved for us
more than one myth of which no trace can be found in poetry or
sculpture; and as for terra-cottas, to which the Tanagra statuettes
have directed so much attention, we may judge from the labours of M.
Henzey of the value which they possess for archæologists, who, though
unable, like some of our amateurs, to buy them with their weight in
gold, may compare them one with another and study their smallest
details.[20] Those statuettes, which are now classified in museums in
the order of their production, have shown us how narrow and inadequate
were the formulæ by which the early historians of the plastic arts
attempted to define the genius of the Greeks. Even now, the most
accomplished and well-informed critics are not always able to repress
a feeling of astonishment when they examine a collection of
terra-cottas. Some of these figures, no more than a span high,
resemble the marbles of the Parthenon in dignity and grandeur, others
are full of grace and playfulness in their outlines, and show a
capricious _abandon_ which disconcerts for a moment even those who are
least insensible to their charm. At the bases of such works one is apt
to look for the signature of some artist of the Renaissance or of the
eighteenth century. In reality they have existed ever since the fourth
or third century before our era, and yet there is something modern in
their appearance. But an indescribable purity of taste suffices to
betray their real origin to all those who possess knowledge and
delicate perceptions. That origin is still Greece, but Greece in her
lighter and more playful moments, when, leaving the representation of
gods and heroes, she condescends to treat the familiar objects of
domestic life, and does it with an ease of which her great writers,
notably Plato and Aristophanes, had also found the secret, when they
passed from epic tragedy to comedy, from the noblest eloquence to
hearty expressions of enjoyment.
[19] One of the first antiquaries to whom it occurred that the
examination of these little objects might lead to profitable
results was the Comte de Caylus, a _savant_ who is in some
danger of being forgotten, and who deserves that his claims to
our gratitude should be recalled to the public mind. The work in
which he has brought together the fruits of a long life spent in
travelling, in collecting, and in examining the technical
processes of the ancients, both by himself and with the help of
specialists, may be consulted with advantage (_Recueil d'
Antiquites égyptiennes, étrusques, grecques, et romains_, 6
vols. 4to. 1752-64. Supplement, 1 vol. 4to. 1767).
[20] _Recherches sur les Figures de Femmes voilées dans l'Art
Grec_, 4to. Paris, 1873. _Recherches sur un Groupe de Praxitèle,
d'après les Figurines de terre cuite_, 8vo. Paris, 1875. _Les
Figurines antiques de terre cuite du Musée du Louvre_, 4to.
1878, Morel.
These little statues interest the historian for other reasons also.
They sometimes give him, as at Tanagra, the most precise and accurate
information as to dress and social customs: sometimes, as at Tegæa,
they afford particulars of a famous though obscure form of worship, of
a divinity and of rites which are but imperfectly described in the
writings of classic authors.
This extension of knowledge and the great discoveries upon which it
was based, naturally led those who were interested in the study of the
remains of antique civilisation, to feel the necessity of
organisation, of division of labour, and of the importance of ensuring
a steady supply of the best and most trustworthy information.
Societies were therefore founded in many different centres with the
express object of meeting those wants. We cannot, of course, enumerate
them here, nor attempt to estimate their various claims to our
gratitude, but we may be permitted to allude to the good work
accomplished, during fifty years of incessant activity, by the
Association which has perhaps done more than any other for the
progress of archæology, we mean the _Instituto di Corrispondenza
Archeologica_, founded in Rome in 1829, by Bunsen, Gerhard, and the
Duc de Luynes. Thanks to the breadth of view which characterised its
founders, this society has been, ever since its inauguration, an
international one in the best sense of the word; it brings together
for a common end the most eminent European _savants_ and their best
pupils; it finds fellow-labourers and correspondents in every country.
With their aid it soon established a _Bullettino_, where, month by
month, all discoveries of interest made at any point of the
Mediterranean basin were registered; and volumes, called sometimes
_Annali_, sometimes _Memorie_, in which really important discoveries,
and the problems to which they give rise, were discussed. Some of
these dissertations are so elaborate and so full of valuable matter as
to have formed epochs in the history of science. They are accompanied
by fine plates, which, by their size, permit the reproduction of
objects of art on a grander scale, and with more fidelity, than had
been previously attempted.[21]
[21] For the history of the _Instituto Archeologico_, the notice
written for the celebration, in 1879, of the fiftieth
anniversary of its foundation, may be consulted. It is from the
pen of Michaëlis, one of the most learned of modern German
archæologists, and bears the following title: _Storia dell'
Instituto Archeologico Germano, 1829-1879, strenna pubblicata
nell' occasione della festa del 21 Aprile, 1879, dalla direzione
centrale dell' Instituto Archeologico_, 8vo. Roma, 1879. It was
also published in German. An article by M. Ernest Vinet in the
volume entitled _L'Art et l'Archéologie_ (pp. 74-91, 8vo.
Didier, 1874), upon the origin and labours of the _Instituto_,
will also be found interesting.
While the Roman _Instituto_ was thus devoting itself to research, and
assuring to its members the advantages of a regular publicity, these
inquiries were daily attracting a more considerable share of attention
from the other learned bodies of Europe. The _Académie des
Inscriptions et de Belles Lettres_, the Academies of Berlin, Munich,
and Vienna, devoted an ever-increasing portion of their programmes to
such studies. Men began everywhere to understand that the writings of
the classic authors, which had been so exhaustively studied ever since
the Renaissance, were no longer capable of affording fresh
information. In order to learn more of antiquity than the great
scholars of the last three centuries, it was necessary to penetrate
into the past by paths as yet unexplored; it was necessary to
complement and control the evidence of classic authors by that of
public and private inscriptions, engraved upon bronze, marble, or
stone; it was above all necessary to seek for the expression, in their
handiwork, of the wants and ideas, of the personal sentiments and
religious conceptions, of the men of antiquity. There are, in fact,
nations, such as the Etruscans, whose whole literature has perished,
who are only known to us by the relics of their art. Others, like the
Greeks and Latins, have indeed transmitted to us noble masterpieces of
literature; but these masterpieces are few in proportion to those
which time has destroyed. Of the thoughts which they expressed in
their immortal languages, too many have been lost for ever with the
fragile strips of papyrus to which they were confided.
With the ardour for knowledge and the heroic perseverance which are
among the virtues of our time, curiosity has refused to resign itself
to such a loss. It has determined to discover the unpublished, to draw
into the light all that has not perished beyond recovery, to collect
all that the spirit of antiquity has left behind it, either upon works
hitherto unnoticed, or upon those which have been imperfectly
understood. The treasures of epigraphy have been classified and shown
in their full value by Bœckh, Borghesi, and others, and the world
is now able to guess all that history may owe to them. The study,
however, of those remains which bear figured representations is still
more complex and formidable. The language of forms is, in itself, less
definite than that of words, and it becomes very difficult to decipher
when we have no words dealing with the same ideas to help us, when we
possess the art of a people without a line of their literature.
Another difficulty springs from the very abundance and variety of the
materials to our hand. We feel oppressed by the ever-growing
accumulation of facts, and can neither determine where to begin our
work, nor how to leave it off: we cannot see the forest for the trees!
II.
In 1830, when the Roman Institute was founded, the time seemed to have
come for the formulation of all the gathered facts and for their
arrangement into groups, a task which had become much more difficult
than in the time of Winckelmann. To conduct it to a successful
conclusion a rare combination of faculties was required; breadth of
intellect, aided by vast reading and a powerful memory; a
philosophical spirit, capable of wide generalisation, joined to that
passion for accurate detail which distinguishes the philologist; it
demanded one whose taste would survive the trying labour of the
cabinet, a _savant_ and an artist combined in one person. Books do not
teach everything. He who wishes to speak of art with intelligence must
study art objects themselves, must cultivate an intimate acquaintance
with them, and, within himself, a love for beautiful forms. Without
the perceptive powers which such an educational process alone can
give, no man can appreciate the subtle differences which distinguish
styles and schools. He who possesses no ear, who is unable to perceive
the intervals which separate one note from another, who knows that he
can neither recognise nor remember an air, does not, unless he be both
presumptuous and ignorant, dilate upon music, or attempt to write its
history. In the art of design, as in music, no education can supply
the place of natural aptitudes; but the latter are not by themselves
sufficient to form a connoisseur. Something more is necessary to those
who wish to form judgments upon which reliance may be placed, and to
give reasons for them which will bear discussion. A special
preparation must be undergone, the rules and technical processes--that
is to say, the language of art--must be learnt. A connoisseur need not
be able to compose an opera, or to chisel a statue, but he should be
able to read a part, or to decide, for instance, by the appearance of
a copy whether its original were of bronze or marble.
At the end of the last century there was born in Silesia a man who,
while yet in his first youth, gave evidence of a rare combination of
the gifts necessary for the successful accomplishment of the task
which we have described; we mean Carl Ottfried Müller, who has been
called, without any exaggeration, a "scholar of genius."[22] A
disciple of Niebuhr and Bœckh, he excelled all his contemporaries
in his efforts to embrace the whole of antiquity in one view, to trace
out and realise for himself all the varied aspects of ancient
civilisation. As a philologist, he took the greatest pleasure in the
science which weighs words and syllables, which collates manuscripts.
A poet in his hours of leisure, he appreciated both ancient and modern
works of literature. As a young man he studied with passion the
antiques in the Dresden Museum and the gallery of casts belonging to
the University of Gottingen.
[22] LÉO JOUBERT, _Essais de critique et d'histoire_ (Paris,
Firmin-Didot, 1 vol. 1863, p. 4). We shall never cease to regret
that politics have deprived literature of this judicious and
widely instructed critic.
In the last year of his life he traversed Italy and Sicily with
continual delight, and was like one intoxicated with the beauty of
that Athens of which he caught but a glimpse, of that Greece whose sun
so quickly destroyed him.
All this knowledge, all these experiences he hoped to make use of as
the lines and colours for the great picture of ancient Greece which he
meditated, for the canvas upon which he meant to portray the Greek
civilization for the benefit of the moderns, with all its indivisible
unity of social and political life, of literary and artistic
production. In striking him down in his forty-second year, death put
an end to this project, and the great picture, which would have been,
perhaps, one of the capital works of our century, was never executed.
But the preparatory sketches of the master happily remain to us. While
he was employed in collecting materials for the work which he meant to
be his highest title to honour, he was not shut up in silence and
meditation, as a less prolific spirit might have been. His facility of
arrangement and utterance was prodigious; all that he learnt, all new
discoveries that he made or thought he had made, he hastened to make
public, either by direct addresses to the auditors who crowded round
his chair at Gottingen, or by his pen to the readers of the numerous
philosophical periodicals to which he contributed. Like a man who has
travelled much and who loves to tell of what he has seen, he was ever
ready to take the public into his confidence when he embarked upon a
new study. This he generally did by means of papers full of facts and
ideas, written sometimes in German, sometimes in Latin. In his later
years he issued short articles upon archæology and the history of art,
in sufficient number to form five substantial volumes.[23] Besides
this, he gave to the world learned editions of Varro, of Festus, of
the _Eumenides_ of Æschylus; or important monographs like his
_Geschichten hellenischer Stämme und Städte_, including _Orchomenos
und die Minyer_ and _Die Dorier_, the most famous and most actively
discussed of his works; and finally, _Die Etrusker_, a work which was
suggested to him by one of the publications of the Berlin Academy.
There was also _Prolegomena zu einer wissenschaftlichen Mythologie_,
which has been fruitful for good even in its errors, and the
_Geschichte der griechischen Literatur_, &c., which, incomplete as it
is, has never become obsolete. Since the time of Ottfried Müller
several other critics have attempted to rival his achievements, but
they have all lacked his breadth of view and comprehensiveness of
exposition, as well as the versatility with which he combined the most
accurate scientific investigations with a delicate appreciation of the
beauty and originality of the Greek authors.
[23] _Kunstarchæologische Werke._ Berlin, Calvary, 18 mo. 1873.
But of all these works, that which has perhaps rendered the greatest
service to the science of archæology is the _Handbuch der Archæologie
der Kunst_, which was published in Breslau in 1830.[24] Translated
into French, Italian, and English, it at once took its place as the
indispensable guide for all those who wished to learn something of
antique art.[25] In all the universities into which archæology had
made good its entrance, this manual has formed the basis of the
teaching, and also has enabled the pupils to supplement for themselves
the lessons which they learnt from their professors. Even now it has
not been superseded, and to all appearance it will long preserve its
supremacy.
[24] _Handbuch der Archæologie der Kunst_, 1 vol. 8vo.
[25] The French translation, from the pen of M. P. Nicard, forms
three volumes of the collection of handbooks known under the
name of the _Encyclopédie Roret_. It appeared in 1841, so that
the translator was unable to make use of the additions and
corrections with which Welcker enriched the edition of 1848. But
M. Nicard's edition has one great advantage over the German
versions in the complete tables with which it is provided. The
best English translation is that by J. Leitch, the second
edition of which appeared in 1850.--ED.
The form of a _handbuch_ or manual, which Ottfried Müller gave to his
work, was well and favourably known to cultivated Germans, but it was
not so with the French. They had nothing of the kind but worthless
epitomes made to facilitate the passing of University examinations. In
this matter the Germans are better off than any other nation in
Europe. They have manuals in which every branch of history and science
is treated by competent writers with as much care and skill as the
most ambitious publications, a few being original works by savants of
the first order. The arrangement of the _Handbuch_ is very simple. It
opens with an introduction in which the author defines art--more
especially the plastic arts--divides it into classes, and indicates
the principal works to be consulted, namely, those to which he himself
has had continually to refer during the progress of his book. Then
comes the history of Greek and Roman art divided into periods, and
the paragraphs which are devoted to Etruria and the East. To this
historical epitome succeed the theoretical chapters.
He takes antique art as a whole, and studies its constitution, the
materials and processes which it employs, the conditions under which
it works, the characteristics which it gives to form, the subjects of
which it treats, and the partition of its remains over the whole
territory occupied by ancient civilization. Greece, in her best days,
gave most of its care to the representation of those beings, superior
to humanity and yet clothed with human forms, in which her glowing
imagination personified the forces and eternal laws of nature and of
the moral world; it was in striving to create these types, and to
endow them with outward features worthy of their majesty, that Grecian
art produced its noblest and most ideal works. It will, therefore, be
seen that a comprehensive manual had to include a history of those
gods and heroes which, with that of their statues, formed a whole
mythology of art; and this mythology occupies the larger portion of
the second part of the work.
This plan has been often criticised, but we need here make no attempt
to repel or even to discuss the objections which have been brought
against it.
It has doubtless the inconvenience of leading to frequent repetition;
monuments which have been necessarily described and estimated in the
historical division are again mentioned in the chapters which treat of
theory; but a better plan has yet to be found, one which will enable
us to avoid such repetitions without any important sacrifice. The
chief thing in a work of the kind is to be clear and complete, merits
which the _Handbuch_ possesses in the highest degree. Things are
easily found in it, and, by a powerful effort of criticism, the author
has succeeded in classifying and condensing into a single convenient
volume, all the interesting discoveries of several generations of
archæologists. Not that it is a mere compilation, for previous writers
were far from being unanimous as to the dates and significance of the
remains which they had described, and it was necessary to choose
between their different hypotheses, and sometimes to reject them all.
In such cases Müller shows great judgment, and very often the opinion
to which he finally commits himself had been previously unknown.
Without entering into any long discussion he sustains it by a few
shortly stated reasons, which are generally conclusive. The plan of
his book prevents him from launching out, like Winckelmann, into
enthusiastic periods; he makes no attempt at those brilliant
descriptions which in our day seem a little over-coloured; but in the
very brevity of his judgments and his laconic but significant
phraseology, we perceive a sincere and individual emotion, an
independent intellect, a pure though catholic taste. We need say no
more to the objectors who attack the mere form of the book. Its one
real defect is that it was written thirty or forty years too soon. The
second edition, carefully revised and largely augmented, appeared in
1835; it was the last issued during the lifetime of Müller. From that
moment down to the day but lately passed when the excavations at
Olympia and Pergamus were brought to an end, many superb remains of
Greek, Etruscan, and Roman art have risen from their temporary graves
and ranged themselves in our museums. If, however, recent archæology
had made no further discoveries, a few occasional corrections and
additions, at intervals of ten or fifteen years, would have sufficed
to prevent the manual from becoming obsolete. With a little care any
intelligent editor could have satisfactorily performed what was
wanted. For the Græco-Roman period especially Müller had erected so
complete a historical framework that the new discoveries could find
their places in it without any difficulty. Welcker, indeed, published
a third edition in 1848, corrected and completed, partly from the
manuscript notes left by the author in his interleaved copy, partly
from information extracted by the editor from the lectures and other
writings of Müller. But why does Welcker declare, in his advertisement
to the reader, that but for the respect due to a work which had become
classic, he would have modified it much more than he had dared. And
why, for more than thirty years, has his example found no imitators?
Why have we been content to reprint word for word the text of that
third edition?
A few years ago one of the most eminent of our modern archæologists,
Carl Bernhard Stark, was requested by a firm of publishers to
undertake a new revision of the _Handbuch_. Why then, after having
brought his materials together, did he find it more useful, and even
easier, to compose an original work, a new manual which should fulfil
the same requirements on a system of his own devising?--an enterprise
which he would have brought to a successful conclusion had not death
interrupted him after the publication of the first part.[26]
[26] Stark died at Heidelberg in October, 1879. The title of his
work was identical with that of Müller: _Handbuch der
Archæologie der Kunst_. The first 256 pages of the first volume
were published in 1878 with the sub-title: _Einleitender und
grundlegender Theil_ (Leipsic, Engelmann, 8vo). A second
instalment appeared in 1880, by which the introduction was
completed. The entire work, which will not be continued, was to
have formed three volumes. We explained its plan and made some
remarks upon the part already published in the _Revue Critique_
of July 14, 1879.
The answer is easy. The East was not discovered till after the death
of Ottfried Müller. By the East we mean that part of Africa and Asia
which is bordered by the Mediterranean, or is so near to that sea that
constant communication was kept up with its shores; we mean Egypt,
Syrian Phœnicia, and its great colony on the Libyan Coast, Chaldæa
and Assyria, Asia Minor, and those islands of Cyprus and Rhodes which
were so long dependent upon the empires on the neighbouring
continents. It was between 1820 and 1830 that the young _savant_
conceived the ideas which he developed in his works; it was then that
he first took an important part in the discussion as to the origin of
the Greek nation, upon which archæologists had long been engaged. What
part had foreign example taken in the birth and development of the
religion, the arts, the poetry, and the philosophy of Greece, of the
whole Hellenic civilization? How much of it was due to suggestions
derived from those peoples who had so long preceded the Greeks in the
ways of civil life? No historian has answered this question in a more
feeble and narrow spirit than Ottfried Müller; no one has been more
obstinate than he in insisting upon the originality of the Greek
genius, and in believing that the Greek race extracted from its own
inner consciousness all that has made its greatness and glory.
When Müller first attacked this question, Egypt alone had begun to
emerge from the obscurity which still enveloped the ancient
civilization of the East. It was not until three years after his
death, that Botta began to excavate the remains of Assyrian art; and
nothing but the vaguest and most confused information was to be had
about the ruins in Chaldæa. Now, however, we can follow the course of
the Phœnician ships along the Mediterranean, from the Thracian
Bosphorus to the pillars of Hercules. From the traces left by the
commerce and the industries of the Syrians and Carthaginians, we can
estimate the duration of their stay in each of the countries which
they visited, and the amount of influence which they exercised over
the various peoples who were tributary to them. Forty years ago this
was impossible; the writings of ancient authors were our sole source
of knowledge as to the style and taste of Phœnician art, and the
ideas which they imparted were of necessity inexact and incomplete.
Wherever they passed the Phœnicians left behind them numbers of
objects manufactured by them for exportation, and these objects are
now eagerly collected, and the marks of the Sidonian and Carthaginian
makers examined and classified, and thus we are enabled to recognize
and describe the industrial processes and the decorative motives,
which were conveyed to the Greeks and to the races of the Italian
peninsula by the "watery highway" of the Mediterranean. Fifty years
ago the land routes were as little known as those by sea. The roads
were undiscovered which traversed the defiles of the Taurus and the
high plateaux of Asia Minor, to bring to the Greeks of Ionia and
Æolia, those same models, forms, and even ideas, and it was still
impossible to indicate their detours, or to count their stages.
Leake had indeed described, as early as 1821, the tombs of the
Phrygian kings, one of whom bore that name of Midas to which the
Greeks attached so strange a legend;[27] but he had given no drawings
of them, and the work of Steuart,[28] which did not appear till 1842,
was the first from which any definite knowledge of their appearance
could be obtained. Müller knew nothing of the discoveries of Fellows,
of Texier, or of Hamilton; while he was dying in Greece, they were
exploring a far more difficult and dangerous region. A few years
afterwards they drew the attention of European _savants_ to the
remains which they had discovered, dotted about over the country which
extends from the shores of the Ægæan to the furthest depths of
Cappadocia, remains which recall, both by their style and by their
symbolic devices, the rock sculptures of Upper Assyria. The Lycian
remains, which give evidence of a similar inspiration and are now in
the British Museum, were not transported to Europe until after
Müller's death.
[27] _Journal of a Tour in Asia Minor, with Comparative Remarks
on the Ancient and Modern Geography of that Country_ (1 vol. in
8vo. London, Murray, 1821, pp. 31-33).
[28] _A Description of some Ancient Monuments with Inscriptions
still existing in Lydia and Phrygia._ London, 1842, in folio.
The clear intellect of Ottfried Müller easily enabled him to perceive
the absurdity of attempting to explain the birth of Greek art by
direct borrowing from Egypt. He saw that the existing remains in both
countries emphatically negatived such a supposition, but materials
were wanting to him for a right judgment of the intensity and duration
of the influence under which the Greeks of the heroic age worked for
many centuries, influences which came to them partly from the
Phœnicians, the privileged agents of intercourse between Egypt and
the East, partly from the people of Asia Minor, the Cappadocians,
Lycians, Phrygians, and Lydians, all pupils and followers of the
Assyrians, whose dependants they were for the time, and with whom they
communicated by caravan routes. We may thus explain the extravagance
of the hypothesis which Müller advocated in all his writings; and, as
the originality of the Greek intellect displayed itself in the plastic
arts much later than in poetry, the partial falsity of his views and
their incompleteness is much more obvious and harmful in his handbook
than in his history of Greek literature.
In writing the life of any great man and attempting to account for his
actions, it is important to know where he was born, and who were his
parents; to learn the circumstances of his education, and the
surroundings of his youth. The biographer who should have no
information on these points, or none but what was false, would be
likely to fall into serious mistakes and misapprehensions. He would
find great difficulty in explaining his hero's opinions and the
prejudices and sentiments by which he may have been influenced, or he
would give absurd explanations of them. Peculiarities of character and
eccentricities of idea would embarrass him, which, had he but known
the hereditary predisposition, the external circumstances during
infancy and adolescence, the whole course of youthful study, of the
man whose life he was describing, he might easily have understood. It
is the same with the history of a people and of their highest
intellectual manifestations, such as their religion, arts, and
literature.
It was not the fault of Ottfried Müller, it was that of the time in
which he lived, that he was deceived as to the true origin of Greek
art. The baneful effects of his mistake are evident in the very first
pages of the historical section of his work, in the chapters which he
devotes to the archaic period. These chapters are very unsatisfactory.
Attempt, under their guidance alone, to study the contents of one of
those museum saloons where the remains of Oriental art are placed side
by side with those from Etruria and primitive Greece; at every step
you will notice resemblances of one kind or another, similarities
between the general aspects of figures, between the details of forms
and the choice of motives, as well as in the employment of common
symbols and attributes. These resemblances will strike and even
astonish you, and if you are asked how they come to exist among
differences which become ever more and more marked in the succession
of the centuries, you will know not how to reply. In these archaic
remains there are many traits for which those who, like Ottfried
Müller, begin with the history of Greece, are unable to account. He
wishes us to believe that Greece in the beginning was alone in the
world, that she owed all her glory to the organic development of her
unequalled genius, which, he says, "displayed a more intimate
combination than that of any other Aryan nation of the life of
sensibility with that of intelligence, of external with internal
life." He goes no further back than the Greece described to us in the
heroic poems; he never has recourse to such comparisons as we are now
continually making; at most he lets fall at lengthy intervals a few
words which seem to imply that Oriental civilization may have had
something to do with the awakening of Greek thought and the directing
of her first endeavours. He never formally denies her indebtedness,
but he fails to perceive its vast importance, or to declare it with
that authoritative accent which never fails him in the expression of
those ideas which are dear to him, of those truths which he has firmly
grasped.
This tendency is to be seen even in the plan of his work. There is
nothing surprising in the fact that Müller, in 1830, or even in 1835,
had but a slight acquaintance with the art of the Eastern Empires; but
as he thought it necessary not entirely to ignore those peoples in a
book which pretended to treat of antiquity as a whole, it would
perhaps have been better not to have relegated them to a few
paragraphs at the end of his historical section. He knew well enough
that the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Phœnicians, even the
Phrygians and the Lydians were much older than the Greeks; why should
he have postponed their history to that of the decline and fall of
Græco-Roman art? Would it not have been better to put the little he
had to tell us in its proper place, at the beginning of his book?
This curious prejudice makes the study of a whole series of important
works more difficult and less fruitful. It prevents him from grasping
the true origin of many decorative forms which, coming originally from
the East, were adopted by the Greeks and carried to perfection by
their unerring taste, were perpetuated in classic art, and thence
transferred to that of modern times; and this, bad though it is, is
not the worst result of Müller's misapprehension. His inversion of the
true chronological order makes a violent break in the continuity of
the phenomena and obscures their mutual relations. There is no
sequence in a story so broken up, falsified, and turned back upon
itself. You will there seek in vain for that which we mean to strive
after in this present history of antique art--a regular and
uninterrupted development, which in spite of a few more or less
brusque oscillations and periods of apparent sterility, carried the
civilization of the East into the West, setting up as its principal
and successive centres, Memphis, Thebes, Babylon, Nineveh, Sidon,
Carthage, Miletus and the cities of Ionia, Corinth and Athens,
Alexandria, Antioch, Pergamus, and finally Rome, the disciple and heir
of Greece.
Ottfried Müller saw clearly enough the long and intimate connection
between Greece and Rome, but he did not comprehend--and perhaps in the
then state of knowledge it was impossible that he should
comprehend--that the bonds were no less close which bound the Hellenic
civilization to the far more ancient system which was born upon the
banks of the Nile, and crept up the valleys of the Tigris and
Euphrates, to spread itself over the plains of Iran on the one hand
and of Asia Minor on the other; while the Phœnicians carried it,
with the alphabet which they had invented and the forms of their own
worship of Astarte, over the whole basin of the Mediterranean. His
error lay in his arbitrary isolation of Greece, in dragging her from
the soil in which her roots were deeply imbedded, from which she had
drawn her first nourishment and the primary elements of that varied
and luxuriant vegetation which, in due time, became covered with the
fairest hues of art and poetry.
III.
Thanks to the numerous discoveries of the last fifty years, and to the
comparisons which they have suggested, thanks also to the theories for
which they afford a basis, history has been at last enabled to render
justice to certain nations whose activity had never before been
properly understood, to give to them their proper place in the
civilization of ancient times. But Greece--the Greece which Ottfried
Müller worshipped, and for which he was too ready to sacrifice her
predecessors and teachers, to whom she herself was more just in her
early legends--has lost nothing by the more exact information which is
now at our command. Served by her situation on the confines of Europe
and Asia and not far from Africa, by the superiority of the genius of
her people and the marvellous aptitudes of her language, Greece was
able to arrange and classify previous discoveries and to bring them to
perfection, to protect from destruction and oblivion the machinery of
progress, the processes of art, the newly-born scientific methods, in
a word, all the complex and fragile apparatus of civilization which
was so often threatened with final destruction, and which has more
than once been overwhelmed for a time in epochs of national conflict
and social decadence.
This is not the place for insistence upon all that Greece has
accomplished in the domains of pure thought, philosophy, and science,
nor even for calling attention to her literature. We are writing the
history of the arts and not that of letters, a history which we wish
to conduct to the point where Müller left off, to the commencement of
those centuries which are called the Middle Ages; and Greece will
occupy by far the most important place in our work. We shall endeavour
to bring the same care and conscience, the same striving after
accuracy, into every division of our history; but the monuments of
Greece will be examined and described in much greater detail than
those of Egypt and Assyria, or even those of Etruria and Latium. It
was our love for Greece that drove us to this undertaking; we desire
and hope to make her life better known, to show a side of it which is
not to be found in the works of her great writers, to give to our
readers new and better reasons for loving and admiring her than they
have had before. A combination of circumstances that is unique in the
history of the world gave to the contemporaries of Pericles and
Alexander the power of approaching more nearly to perfection, in their
works of art, than men of any other race or any other epoch. In no
other place or time have ideas been so clearly and completely
interpreted by form; in no other place or time have the intellectual
qualities been so closely wedded to a strong love for beauty and a
keen sensibility to it. It results from this that the works of the
Greek artists, mutilated by time and accident as they are, serve as
models and teachers for our painters and sculptors, a _rôle_ which
they will continue to fill until the end of time. They form a school,
not, as some have thought, to enable us to dispense with nature, the
indispensable and eternal master, but to incite to such an ardent and
intelligent study of her beauties, as may lead to the creation of
great works, works capable, like those of the Greeks, of giving
visible expression to the highest thoughts.
As the Greeks excelled all other nations in the width and depth of
their æsthetic sentiments; as their architects, their sculptors, and
their painters, were superior both to their pupils and their masters,
to the orientals on the one hand, and the Etruscans and the Latins on
the other, we need feel no surprise at their central and dominating
position in the history of antique art. Other national styles and
artistic manifestations will pass before the eye of the reader in
their due order and succession; they will all be found interesting,
because they show to us the continual struggle of man against matter,
and we shall endeavour to distinguish each by its peculiar and
essential characteristics, and to illustrate it by the most striking
remains which it has left behind. But each style and nationality will
for us have an importance in proportion to the closeness of its
connection with the art of Greece. In the case of those oriental races
which were the teachers of the Greeks, we shall ask how much they
contributed to the foundations of Greek art and to its ultimate
perfection; in the case of the ancient Italians, we shall endeavour to
estimate and describe the ability shown by them in apprehending the
lessons of their instructors, and the skill with which they drew from
their teachers a method for the expression of their own peculiar wants
and feelings and for the satisfaction of their own æsthetic desires.
The study of oriental art will really, therefore, be merely an
introduction to our history as a whole, but an introduction which is
absolutely required by our plan of treatment, and which will be
completely embodied in the work. The history of Etruscan and Roman art
will be its natural and necessary epilogue.
This explanation will show how far, and for what reasons we mean to
separate ourselves from our illustrious predecessor. We admit, as he
did, we even proclaim with enthusiasm, the pre-eminence of Greece, the
originality of its genius and the superiority of its works of plastic
art; but we cannot follow him in his arbitrary isolation of Greece,
which he suspends, so to speak, in air. Our age is the age of history;
it interests itself above all others in the sequence of social
phenomena and their organic development, an evolution which Hegel
explained by the laws of thought. It would be more than absurd in
these days to accept Greek art as a thing self-created in its full
perfection, without attempting to discover and explain the slow and
careful stages by which it arrived at its apogee in the Athens of
Pericles. In this history of ours of which we are attempting to sketch
the form, we must, in order to get at the true origin of Greek art,
penetrate far beyond its apparent origin; to describe the springing of
Greek civilization, we must first study the early history of those
races which surround the eastern basin of the Mediterranean.
The Greece which we call ancient entered late into history, when
civilization had already a long past behind it, a past of many
centuries. In this sense, the words which, as we are told by Plato, a
priest of Saïs addressed to Solon, were perfectly true, "You Greeks,
you are but children!"[29] In comparison with Egypt, with Chaldæa,
with Phœnicia, Greece is almost modern: the age of Pericles is
nearer to our day than to that which saw the birth of Egyptian
civilization.
[29] _Timæus_, p. 22.
Appearing thus lately upon the scene, when the genius of man had, by
efforts continued without intermission through a long procession of
centuries, arrived at the power of giving clear and definite
expression to his thoughts, by means either of articulate sounds and
the symbols which represent them or by the aid of plastic forms, the
Greeks could only have remained ignorant of all that had been achieved
before their time if they had sprung into existence in some distant
and isolated corner of the world, or in some inaccessible island.
Their actual situation was a very different one. In the earliest
epoch of which we have any record we find them established in a
peninsula, which is on one hand upon the very borders of Asia, and
upon another seems to hold out a hand to Africa by the innumerable
islands which surround its shores. Between the shores of this
peninsula and those of Asia, these islands are sprinkled so thickly
over the narrow seas that nature seems to have intended them for
stepping-stones which should tempt the least venturesome to cross from
one continent to the other.
The Greek race thus found itself, by the accident of its geographical
situation, in contact with the Egyptian, Assyrian, and Median empires,
the masters of the Eastern Mediterranean; while the insular or
peninsular character of most of the region which it inhabited,
together with the numerous colonies attached to the surrounding coasts
like vessels at anchor, had the effect of greatly multiplying the
points of contact. The Greek frontier was thus one of abnormal extent,
and was, moreover, always open, always ready to receive foreign ideas
and influences. Her eyes were ever turned outwards; the Greek
nationality was not one of those which remain for ages inaccessible to
foreign merchandize and modes of thought.
Such being the situation of Greece, it could not but happen, that, as
soon as the Greek race drew itself clear from primitive barbarism, the
fertile germs of art,--examples, models, processes,--should penetrate
into the country from the neighbouring East by all the channels of
communication which we have mentioned. Seeing how far civilization had
advanced, would it not have been absurd for the Greeks to have turned
a deaf ear and a blind eye to the experience of their predecessors; to
have begun again at the beginning? Was it not better to take up the
work at the point where it had been left, and to make use, for future
developments, of those which had already been established? Man
progresses as fast as he can; as soon as he learns any new method of
satisfying his wants and ameliorating his life, he makes use of it; he
makes use of it at first in its original form, but with years and
experience he improves it and brings it nearer to perfection.
Thus then, the more we study the past, the more surely do we recognize
the truth contained in those myths and traditions which betray the
influence exercised upon Greece by the people of Egypt, Syria, and
Asia Minor. To confine ourselves to the plastic arts, the historian
of Greek art discovers _survivals_, forms and motives which had been
employed in previous centuries and earlier civilizations, in exact
proportion to the accuracy of his researches, and to the number of his
elements for comparison. He also finds that the Greeks borrowed from
the same instructors those industrial processes which, although not in
themselves artistic, are among the antecedent conditions of art;
namely, metallurgy, ceramics, smith's work, glass-making, weaving,
embroidery, stone-working and carving, in a word all those trades
which seem so simple when their secrets are known, but which,
nevertheless, represent the accumulated efforts of countless unknown
inventors.
It was not only the material outfit of civilization that the Greeks
borrowed from their predecessors; they obtained, together with that
alphabet which represents the principal sounds of the voice by a few
special signs, another alphabet which has been happily named the
_alphabet of art_, certain necessary conventions, combinations of
line, ornaments, decorative forms, a crowd of plastic elements which
they had employed in the expression of their own ideas and sentiments.
Even after Greek art had reached perfection and was in the full
enjoyment of her own individuality, we still find traces of these
early borrowings. Sometimes it is a decorative motive, like the
sphinx, the griffin, the palm-leaf, and many others, which, invented
on the banks of the Nile or the Tigris, were transported to Greece and
there preserved to be handed down to our modern ornamentist. The
nearer we get to the fountain head of Greek art, the more we are
struck with these resemblances, which are something beyond mere
coincidences. The deeper we penetrate into what is called archaism,
the more numerous do those features become which are common to
oriental, especially Assyrian, art, and that of Greece. We find
analogous methods of indicating the human skeleton, of accenting its
articulations, of representing the drapery with which the forms are
covered. Greek taste had not yet so transformed the details of
ornamentation as to prevent us from recognizing the motives which
commerce had brought for its use over the waves of the Ægean or the
mountains of Asia Minor. The marks of their origin are continually
visible, and yet a practised eye can perceive that the Greeks were
never satisfied, like the Phœnicians, with merely combining in
various proportions the materials furnished by the artisans of Egypt
or Assyria; the facilities of such a soulless and indiscriminating
eclecticism as that could not satisfy the ambitions of a race that
already possessed the poetry of Hesiod and Homer.
The art of Greece was profoundly original in the best sense of the
word. It was far superior to all that went before it; it alone
deserved to become classic, that is, to furnish a body of rules and
laws capable of being transmitted by teaching. In what does its
superiority consist? How does its originality show itself, and how can
its existence be explained? These are the questions which we propose
to answer; but in order to arrive at a just conclusion we must begin
with the study of those nations to whom the Greeks went to school, and
of whose art they were the heirs and continuers. We should be unable
to grasp the exclusively Greek features of Greek art did we not begin
by defining the foreign elements which have taken their part in the
work, and that we can only do by going back to the civilizations in
which they were produced; we must endeavour to penetrate into the
spirit of those civilizations, to discover whence they started and how
far they progressed; we must first define their ideas of the
beautiful, and then show, by well-chosen examples, by what means and
with how great a measure of success, they realised their own
conception.
* * * * *
We undertake this long detour in order that we may arrive in Greece
instructed by all that we have learnt on the way, and prepared to
understand and to judge; but during the whole voyage our eyes will be
turned towards Greece, as those of the traveller towards his
long-desired goal. Our route will conduct us from the shores of the
Nile to those of the Euphrates and Tigris, over the plains of Medea
and Persia and Asia Minor to the shores of Phœnicia, to Cyprus and
Rhodes. But beyond the obelisks and pyramids of Egypt, beyond the
towers of Chaldæa and the domes of Nineveh, the lofty colonnades of
Persepolis, the fortresses and rock-cut tombs of Phrygia and Lycia,
beyond the huge ramparts of the cities of Syria, we shall never cease
to perceive on the horizon the sacred rock of the Athenian acropolis;
we shall see it before us, as our history of the past advances,
lifting into the azure sky the elegant severity of its marble
porticoes, the majesty of those pediments where live and breathe the
gods of Homer and Phidias.
When we have crossed the threshold of the Propylæa, and have visited
the Parthenon, the Erecthæum, and the temple of the Wingless Victory;
when we have seen all Greece become covered with monuments of
architecture and sculpture, which, without rivalling those of Athens
in purity of line or finesse of execution, bear the impress of the
same style and the same taste; when we have seen Praxiteles and Scopas
succeed to Phidias and Polycletus, will it not cost us a struggle to
quit the scene of so many wonders and conclude our voyage? If we leave
the Athens of Cimon, of Pericles, and Lycurgus, for the pompous
capitals of the heirs of Alexander; if we cross the sea to visit Veii
and Clusium, to describe the Etruscan cemeteries with the fantastic
magnificence of their decoration; if at last we find ourselves in
imperial Rome, among its basilicas, its baths, its amphitheatres, and
all the sumptuous evidence of its luxury, we shall now and again turn
our eyes with regret to what we have left behind; and, although we
shall endeavour to comprehend and to judge with the liberality and
largeness of taste and sympathy which is the honour of contemporary
criticism, we shall sometimes sigh for that ideal of pure and
sovereign beauty which we adored in Greece; and shall feel, now and
again, the nostalgia of the exile.
IV.
In this sketch of our plan, we have reserved no place for the art
which is called _prehistoric_, the art of the caverns and the lake
dwellings. This omission may surprise some of our readers, and we
therefore beg to submit for their consideration the reasons which,
after grave reflection, have induced us to refrain from retracing the
first steps of human industry, from describing the first
manifestations of the plastic instinct of mankind.
We are actuated by neither indifference nor disdain. We fully
appreciate the importance of such researches, and of the results to
which they have led. No sooner had it entered into the mind of man to
look for and collect the humble remains upon which so many centuries
had looked with indifference, than they were found almost everywhere,
thickly dispersed near the surface of the earth, heaped among the
bones of deer in the grottoes for which men and animals had once
contended, buried in peat marshes and sandy shores, sometimes even
sprinkled upon the surface of the fields and country roads. Pieces of
flint, bone, or horn, fashioned into instruments of the chase, into
fishhooks, and domestic utensils; shells, perforated teeth, amber
balls which were once strung upon necklaces and bracelets; fragments
of rough tissue and of skin garments; seeds and carbonized fruits;
earthen vessels made by hand and dried in the sun or simply in the
open air. In some of the cave dwellings, bones and pieces of horn have
been found upon which the figures of animals are carved with a truth
and spirit which allow their species to be at once and certainly
recognized.
But none of these remains bear the slightest trace of a system of
signs for the transmission of ideas or recollections; there is nothing
which suggests writing; and, more significant still, there is a
complete absence of metal. All this is evidence that the remains in
question belong to a very remote antiquity, to a period much nearer
the primitive barbarism than to the civilization of Egypt and Chaldæa,
to say nothing of that of Greece and Rome. The comparative method,
which has done so much for natural science, has also taken these
remains in hand, has attempted to classify them and to gain from them
some notion of the life led by the early human families which
manufactured them. These arms, tools, and instruments which have been
recovered from the soil of the old and cultivated nations of Europe,
have been carefully compared with similar objects still in use by the
savage races which people the far corners of the world. These
comparisons have enabled us to decide the former use of each of the
objects discovered. By collating the observations of the various
travellers who have visited the savage races in question, we have been
enabled to form for ourselves a probably truthful picture, so far as
it goes, of the life and social habits of those primitive Europeans
who made use of similar tools and weapons. And that is not all. The
general character of those early periods being established, further
examination brought to light the local differences which prevailed
then as now. Thus the proneness to plastic imitation seems to have
been peculiar to a few tribes--although traces of this taste are found
elsewhere, it is nowhere so marked as among those primitive
cave-dwellers of Perigord whom Christy and Edouard Lartet have so
patiently studied.
By dint of careful classification and comparison, we have been enabled
to follow the march of progress through those countless centuries
whose number will never be known to us, whose total would, perhaps,
oppress our imaginations if we knew it; we have been enabled to
discover the slow steps by which mankind raised itself from the
earliest, almost shapeless, flint axe, found with the bones of the
mammoth in the quaternary alluvial deposits, to the rich and varied
equipment of "lacustrian civilization," as it has sometimes been
called. In this unlimited field, of which one side at least must ever
be lost in unfathomable obscurity, the main divisions have been
traced; the stone age has been defined and divided into the
_palæolithic_ and _neolithic_ epochs; the age of bronze followed, and
then came the iron age. With the appearance of the former metal the
tribes of northern and central Europe established a connection with
the civilized races which surrounded the Mediterranean, and with iron
we are in the full classic period.
We can never be too grateful for the persevering labours of those who
have carried on these researches in every corner of Europe; their
deserts are all the greater from the fact that they could never count
upon those agreeable surprises which come now and then to reward
excavators on the sites of ancient and historic cities. Their chances
are small of finding those objects of art which, by their beauty and
elegance, repay any amount of toil and expense. The remains which they
bring to light have little to say to our æsthetic perceptions; they
repeat a few types with an extreme monotony; but, on the other hand,
they carry our thoughts back to a point far nearer the cradle of our
race than the myths of early history or even the monumental remains of
Egypt and Chaldæa. They cast some slight illumination upon those
distant ages of which humanity has preserved no recollection. They
people with unknown multitudes those remote epochs into which
scientific curiosity had, but yesterday, no desire to penetrate. There
can be in all this no real question of chronology, but when from the
sands of Abbeville or the caverns of Perigord we dig up the first
flint implements or those fragments of bone, of ivory, of reindeer
horn, which have preserved to us the first attempts made by man to
copy the outlines of living beings, it takes us far beyond those days
of which our only knowledge comes from vague tradition, and still
farther beyond those centuries which saw the first struggling dawn of
history.
* * * * *
We have, then, decided not to embark upon these questions of
prehistoric art, because, as the title which we have chosen declares,
we propose to write a _history_, and the word history, when the human
race is in question, implies established relations between certain
groups of facts and certain portions of time, measured at least with
something approaching to probable truth.
We do not yet possess, probably we shall never possess, any means of
estimating even within five or six thousand years, the actual duration
of the stone age. From all analogies progress must have been, in the
beginning, exceedingly slow; like that of a falling body, the rapidity
of industrial progress is continually accelerating. This acceleration
is not of course quite regular; the phenomena of social life are too
complex, the forces at work are too numerous and sometimes too
contrary to allow us to express it by the mathematical formula which
may be applied to movement in the physical world; but on the whole
this law of constantly accelerated progress holds good, as indeed may
be historically proved. So long as man had to do without metals, each
generation, in all probability, added but little to the discoveries of
that which preceded it; most likely after each happy effort many
generations succeeded one another without any further attempt to
advance. Ever since they have been under our observation, the savage
races of the world have been practically stationary except where
European commerce has profoundly modified the conditions of their
lives. It is probable, therefore, that more centuries rolled away
between the first chipped flints and the well polished weapons which
succeeded them than between the latter and the earliest use of bronze.
But we cannot prove that it was so, nor satisfy those whom probability
and a specious hypothesis will not content. Where neither written
evidence nor oral tradition exist there can be little question of
historic order. The remains of the stone age are not calculated to
dissipate the silence which enshrouds those centuries. In the art of a
civilized people we find their successive modes of feeling and thought
interpreted by expressive forms; we may even attempt under all reserve
to sketch their history with the sole aid of their plastic remains.
The chances of error would of course be numerous; but yet if all other
materials had, unhappily, failed us, the attempt would have been well
worth making. The more ancient portions of our prehistoric collections
do not offer the same opportunities; they are too simple and too
little varied. The primitive savage who moulded matter to his will
with great and painful difficulty, could impress upon it nothing but
those gross instincts which are common to man and beast; we can
discover nothing from his works, beyond the means which he employed in
his struggles with his enemies, and in his never-ending effort to
procure food for himself.
The word history cannot then be pronounced in connection with these
remote periods, nor can their remains be looked upon in any sense as
works of art. Art commences for us with man's first attempts to
impress upon matter some form which should be the expression of a
sentiment or of an idea. The want of skill shown in these attempts is
beside the question; the mere desire on the part of the workman
renders him an artist. The most hideous and disgusting of those idols
in stone or terra-cotta which are found in the islands of the Greek
Archipelago, at Mycenæ and in Bœotia, idols which represent, as we
believe, the great goddess mother whose worship the Phœnicians
taught to the Greeks, are works of art; but we are unable to give that
title to the axes and arrowheads, the harpoons and fish-hooks, the
knives, the pins, the needles, the crowds of various utensils which we
see in the glass cases of a pre-historic museum; all this, interesting
though it be to those who wish to study the history of labour, is
nothing but an industry, and a rudimentary industry, which is content
with supplying the simplest wants. It is not until we reach the
sculptures of the cave-dwellings that we find the first germs of
artistic effort, and in truth, man did not cut the figures of animals
upon the handles of his tools and upon those objects which have been
called, perhaps a little recklessly, batons of command, for any
utilitarian purpose; it was to give himself pleasure, it was because
he found true æsthetic enjoyment in copying and interpreting living
nature. Art was born, we may acknowledge, with those first attempts at
the representation of life, and it might fairly be expected that our
history should commence with them, were it not that they offer no
sequence, no starting point for any continuous movement like that
which, beginning in Egypt and Chaldæa, was prosecuted in Greece and
led in time to such high developments; even its competent students
confess that the art of the cave-men was an isolated episode without
fruition or consequence. Specimens of this art are found at but a few
points of the vast surface over which the vestiges of primitive man
are spread, and neither in the neolithic age, nor even in that of
bronze--both far in advance in other ways of that of the
cave-dwellings--does it ever seem to have entered into the mind of man
to copy the types offered to him by the organic world, still less
those of mankind, which, however, had long before been roughly figured
in one or two caves in the Dordogne.[30]
[30] _Dictionnaire archéologique de la Gaule_, vol. i.,
Cavernes, figure 28. Al. BERTRAND, _Archéologie celtique et
gauloise_ (1 vol. 8vo. Didier, 1876, p. 68).
Towards the close of the prehistoric age the taste for ornament
becomes very marked, but that ornament is always of the kind which we
call geometric. Hardly a single decorative motive is taken from the
vegetable world. Like the rude efforts of the cave-men, this
decoration proves that those by whom it was imagined and who
frequently employed it with such happy results, were not contented
with bare utility, but, so far as they could, sought after beauty. A
secret instinct worked in them and inspired them with the desire to
give some appearance of elegance to the objects which they had in
daily use. This geometrical style of decoration prevailed all over
central Europe until, in the first place, the movements of commerce
with Greece and Etruria, and secondly the Roman conquest, introduced
the methods of classic art.
From what we have said, it will be seen that we could not have passed
over in silence this system of ornamentation; but we shall again find
it in our path when we come to treat of that prehistoric Greece which
preceded by perhaps two or three centuries the Greece of Homer. By the
help of the discoveries which have been lately made in the Troad, at
Mycenæ, and in other ancient sites, we shall study the works produced
by the ancestors of the Greeks before they went to school to the
nations of the East. But even with the discoveries which carry us
farthest back, we only reach the end of the period in question, when
maritime commerce had already brought to the islands and the mainland
of Greece objects of Egyptian, Phœnician or Chaldaic manufacture,
but before those objects were sufficiently numerous or the relations
with those countries sufficiently intimate to produce any great effect
upon the habits of native workmen. Among the deposits to which we have
alluded, it is generally possible to distinguish those works which are
of foreign origin; and such works excluded, it is easy to form a
sufficiently accurate general idea of the art practised by the
forefathers of the historic Greeks--by the Pelasgians, to use a
conventional term. So long as it was left to its own inspiration,
Pelasgic art did not differ, in its general characteristics, from that
of the various peoples spread over the continent of Europe, and still
practised for centuries after the dawn of Greek civilization in the
great plains to the north of the Alps and the Danube. Its guiding
spirit and its motives are similar. There is the same richness, or
rather the same poverty, the same combinations produced by a small
number of never-changing linear elements. One would say that from the
shores of the great ocean and the Baltic to those of the
Mediterranean, all the workmen laboured for the same masters. Struck
by this resemblance, or rather uniformity, one of the most eminent of
German archæologists, Herr Conze, has proposed that this kind of
ornament shall be called Indo-European; he sees, in the universality
of the system, a feature common to all branches of the Aryan race, a
special characteristic which may serve to distinguish it from the
Semites.
Objections have been brought against this doctrine of which Herr Conze
himself has recognized the gravity; by numerous examples taken from
the art of nations which do not belong to the Aryan family, it has
been shown that, human nature being the same everywhere, all those
peoples whose development has been normal, neither interrupted nor
accelerated by external causes, have, at some period of their lives,
turned to the style in question for the decoration of their weapons,
of their earthenware, their furniture, their apparel and their
personal ornaments. The less richly endowed among them would have
stopped at that point but for the example of their neighbours, who
stirred them on to new attempts and further progress; others advanced
without impulse from other sources than their own instincts, they
reproduced vegetable and animal forms, and finally the human figure in
all its beauty and nobility. It was the same with letters. Among the
nations which have made a name in history how few there are that
possess a true literature, a poetry at once inspired and critical! All
however, under one form or another, have a popular poetry which is
more or less varied and expressive.
The trace of this earliest spontaneous effort, of this first naïve
product of the imagination, never entirely disappears in a literature
which is life-like and sincere; it is found even in the most perfect
works of its classic period. In the same way the most advanced and
refined forms of art draw a part of their motives and effects from
geometrical decoration. This style therefore should be studied both
for its principle and for the resources of which it disposes, but as
we shall have to notice it when we treat of Greece, it seems to us
better to adjourn till then any discussion of its merits. Both in
Greece and Italy approximate dates can be given to the monuments which
it ornaments, they can be placed in their proper historical position,
which is by no means the case with the objects gleaned throughout
central Europe.
* * * * *
There is another consideration of still greater importance; the
artistic remains of Greece form an almost unbroken series, from the
humble and timid attempts of nascent sculpture to the brilliant
masterpieces of Phidias and Polycletus, and show the steps by which
the artist succeeds in passing from one style to another, from curves
and interlacing lines, from all mere abstract combinations, to the
imitation of nature, to the representation of bodies which breathe,
feel, and speak, which move and struggle. Elsewhere force has either
been wanting for this development, or evidence of the transition has
escaped our researches. Nothing can be much more imperfect or more
conventional than the figures which we find upon some of the painted
vases from Mycenæ and Cyprus,[31] upon which the workman's hand,
accustomed to straight lines and circles, or segments of circles, has
succeeded in suggesting by those means the figures of birds and
fighting men. Nothing could be farther from the subtlety and variety
of the contours presented by living organisms. But in spite of all
this, art was born with the awakening of this desire to reproduce the
beauty and mobility of living forms. All that had preceded it was but
the vague murmuring of a wish which had not yet become self conscious;
but, at last the intellect divined the use to which it might be put,
and guessed at the part which might be played by the plastic instincts
with which it felt itself endowed. All the rest depended upon natural
gifts, upon time and circumstance; the march along the road of
progress began, and although its rapidity was intermittent, it was
certain to arrive, if not always at the production of masterpieces of
divine beauty, at least at sufficient competence in painting and
modelling to transmit the types of a race and the images of its gods
to posterity.
[31] SCHLIEMANN, _Mycenæ_, see figs. 33 and 213; CESNOLA,
_Cyprus_, see pls. 44 and 46.
The student of plastic art finds in the remains of prehistoric times
rather a tendency to the creation of art, than art itself; by
postponing our study of this tendency until we come to investigate the
origin of Greek and Italian art, we are enabled to avoid all excursion
beyond the limits implied by our title, beyond that which is generally
called antiquity. The conventional meaning of this word embraces
neither the primitive savages who chipped the first flint, nor the
cave-men, but it calls up before our eyes the brilliant cities of
northern Africa and hither-Asia, of Greece and Italy, with which our
school-days have made us familiar; it reminds us of those nations
whose stories we learnt from the sacred and profane authors whose
works we read in our youth; and our thoughts revert to their grandiose
monuments of architecture and sculpture, to their masterpieces of
poetry and eloquence, to those great works of literature in which we
took our first lessons in the art of writing and speaking. Behind all
these images and associations the intelligence of an educated man
tells him--and the discoveries of science every day make the fact more
certain--that in the ancient as in the modern world, the nations which
figure upon the stage of history were not isolated; they each had
neighbours who influenced them, or whom they influenced, by commerce
or conquest; each also received something from its predecessors, and
in turn transmitted the results of its labour to those which came
after it; in a word, the work of civilization was continuous and
universal. The nations which, for three or four thousand years, were
grouped round the basin of the Mediterranean, belonged to one
historical system; to those who take a wide grasp of facts they are
but the members and organs of one great body, in which the nervous
centres, the sources of life, of movement and of thought, slowly
gravitated with the effluxion of time from the east to the west, from
Memphis and Babylon to Athens and Rome.
As for the populations which, long before the opening of this period
and during the whole of its duration, lived on the north of the
Danube, the Alps, and the Pyrenees, they do not belong to the same
system; they were attached to it by the Roman conquest, but at a very
late period; not long, indeed, before the triumph of Christianity, the
invasion of the barbarians, and the fall of the empire, led to the
dissolution of the antique system and the substitution for it, after
centuries of confusion and violence, of the wider and more
comprehensive civilization of modern Europe, a civilization which was
destined to cross every sea and to spread itself over the whole
surface of the globe. As soon as the victories of the Roman legions,
and the construction of the great roads which united Rome with her
most distant provinces, had brought them into constant communication
with the maritime cities of the Mediterranean, these barbaric nations,
who had neither history, nor letters, nor expressive art, received
them from their conquerors, whose very language they all, or nearly
all, adopted; and for all this they gave practically nothing in
return. Elsewhere, the old world had almost finished its task. It had
exhausted every form in which those ideas and beliefs could be clothed
which it had kept unchanged, or little changed, for millenium after
millenium. The old world employed such force and vitality as remained
to it in giving birth to the new, to that religion which has led to
the foundation of our modern social and political systems. These also
were to have their modes of expression, rich and sonorous enough, but
dominated by analysis; they were to have arts and literatures, which
have given expression to far more complex ideas than those of
antiquity. The Celts and Teutons, the Slavs and Scandinavians, all
those tribes which the Romans called barbarous, have, in spite of the
apparent poverty of their share, made an important contribution to the
civilization into which they plunged at so late a period, when they
did so much to provide a foundation for those modes of thought and
feeling which are only to be found in modern society.
These races do not belong, then, to what we call antiquity. They are
separated from it by many things; they have no history, they have
neither literary and scientific culture nor anything that deserves the
name of art. Hidden behind a thick curtain of mountains and forests,
sprinkled over vast regions where no towns existed, they remained in
their isolation for thousands of years, furnishing to civilization
nothing but a few rough materials which they themselves knew not how
to use; they took no part in the work which, throughout those ages,
was being prosecuted in the great basin of the Persian Gulf and the
Mediterranean, in that accumulation of inventions and creations which,
fixed and preserved by writing and realized by art, form the common
patrimony of the most civilized portion of the human species. When,
at a late hour, these nations entered upon the scene, it was as
disturbers and destroyers,--and although they helped to found modern
society, they produced none of those elements left to us by antiquity
and preserved for us by that Rome in whose hands the heritage of
Greece was concentrated.
V.
We have different, but equally valid, reasons for leaving that which
is called the far East--India, China, and Japan--outside the limit of
our studies. Those rich and populous countries have, doubtless, a
civilization which stretches back nearly as far as that of Egypt and
Assyria, a civilization which has produced works both of fine and of
industrial art which in many respects equalled those of the nations
with which we are now occupied. In all those countries there are
buildings which impress by their mass and by the marvellous delicacy
of their ornamentation, sculptures of a singular freedom and power,
and decorative painting which charms by its skilful use of brilliant
colour as well as by the facility and inventive fancy of its design.
The representation of the human figure has never reached the purity of
line or nobility of expression of a Greek statue, but, on the other
hand, the science of decoration has never been carried farther than by
the wood-carvers, weavers and embroiderers of Hindostan, and the
potters of China and Japan.
These styles have their fanatical admirers who see nothing but their
brilliant qualities; they have also their detractors, or at least
their severe judges, who are chiefly struck by their shortcomings, but
no one attempts to deny that each of those nations possesses an art
which is always original, and sometimes of great and rare power. Why
then, it may be asked, do we refuse to comprehend the more ancient
monuments of India and China, those which by their age belong to the
centuries with which we are concerned, in this work? Our motives may
be easily divined.
We might allege our incompetence for such an extended task, which
would be enough to occupy several lives. But we have a still more
decisive reason. Neither Aryan India nor Turanian China belongs to the
antiquity which we have defined, and as for Indo-China and Japan they
are but annexes to those two great nations; religion, written
characters, the industrial and plastic arts--all came to them from one
or the other of those two great centres of civilization.
So far as China is concerned no doubt or hesitation is possible. Down
almost to our own days China and its satellites had no dealings with
the western group of nations. It is a human family which has lived in
voluntary isolation from the rest of its species. It is separated from
western mankind by the largest of the continents, by deserts, by the
highest mountains in the world, by seas once impassable, finally, by
that contempt and hatred of everything foreign which such conditions
of existence are calculated to engender. In the course of her long and
laborious existence China has invented many things. She was the first
to discover several of those instruments and processes which, in the
hands of Europeans, have, in a few centuries, changed the face of the
world; not only did she fail to make good use of her inventions, she
guarded them so closely that the West had to invent them anew. We may
cite printing as an example; nearly two hundred years before our era
the Chinese printed with blocks of wood. On the other hand, every
useful discovery made in the period and by the group of nations to
whom we mean to confine our attention, from the time of Menes and
Ourkham, the first historic kings of Egypt and Chaldæa, to the latest
of the Roman Emperors, has been turned to the profit of others than
its authors, and forms, so to speak, part of the public wealth. A
single alphabet, that which the Phœnicians extracted from one of
the forms of Egyptian writing, made the tour of the Mediterranean, and
served all the nations of the ancient world in turn for preserving
their thoughts and the idiom of their language. A system of numerals,
of weights and measures, was invented in Babylon and travelled across
Western Asia to be adopted by the Greeks, and, through the mediation
of the Greek astronomers and geographers, has given us the sexagesimal
division which we still employ for the partition of a circumference
into degrees, minutes and seconds.
From this point of view, then, there is a profound difference between
Egypt or Chaldæa, and China. The most remote epochs in the history of
China do not belong to antiquity as we have defined the term. Without
knowing it or wishing it, all those nations included in our plan
laboured for their neighbours and for their successors. Read as a
whole, their history proves to us that they each played a part in the
gradual elaboration of civilized life which was absolutely necessary
to the total result. But when China is in question our impression is
very different, our intellects are quite equal to imagining what the
world would have been like had that Empire been absolutely destroyed
centuries ago, with all its art, literature, and material wealth.
Rightly or wrongly, we should not expect such a catastrophe to have
had any great effect upon civilization; we should have been the poorer
by a few beautiful plates and vases, and should have had to do without
tea, and that would have been the sum of our loss.
* * * * *
The case of India is different. Less remote than China, bathed by an
ocean which bore the fleets of Egypt, Chaldæa, Persia, Greece and
Rome, she was never beyond the reach of the western nations. The
Assyrians, the Persians, and the Greeks carried their arms into the
basin of the Indus, some portions of which were annexed for a time to
those Empires which had their centre in the valley of the Euphrates
and stretched westwards as far as the Mediterranean. There was a
continuous coming and going of caravans across the plateau of Iran and
the deserts which lie between it and the oases of Bactriana, Aria, and
Arachosia, and through the passes which lead down to what is now
called the Punjab; between the ports of the Arabian and Persian gulfs
and those of the lower Indus and the Malabar coast, a continual
commercial movement went on which, though fluctuating with time, was
never entirely interrupted. From the latter regions western Asia drew
her supplies of aromatic spices, of metals, of precious woods, of
jewels, and other treasures, all of which came mainly by the sea
route.
All this, however, was but the supply of the raw material for
Egyptian, Assyrian, and Phœnician industries. There is no evidence
that up to the very last days of antique civilization the inhabitants
of Hindostan with all their depths and originality of thought ever
exercised such influence upon their neighbours as could have made
itself felt as far as Greece. The grand lyric poetry of the Vedas, the
epics and dramas of the following epoch, the religious and
philosophical speculations, those learned grammatical analyses which
are now admired by philologists, all the rich and brilliant
intellectual development of a race akin to the Greeks and in many ways
no less richly endowed, remained shut up in that basin of the Ganges
into which no stranger penetrated until the time of the Mohammedan
conquest. Neither Egyptians, Arabs nor Phœnicians reached the true
centres of Hindoo civilization; they merely visited those sea-board
towns where the mixed population was more occupied with commerce than
with intellectual pursuits. The conquerors previous to Alexander did
no more than reach the gates of India and reconnoitre its approaches,
while Alexander himself failed to penetrate beyond the vestibule.
Let us suppose that the career of the Macedonian hero had not been cut
short by the fatigues and terrors of his soldiers. So far as we can
judge from what Megasthenes tells us of Palibothra, the capital of
Kalaçoka, the most powerful sovereign in the valley of the Ganges in
the time of Seleucus Nicator, the Greeks would not, even in that
favoured region, have found buildings which they could have studied
with any profit, either for their plan, construction, or decoration.
Recent researches have proved Megasthenes to be an intelligent
observer and an accurate narrator, and he tells us that in the richest
parts of the country the Hindoos of his time had nothing better than
wooden houses, or huts of pisè or rough concrete. The palace of the
sovereign, at Palibothra, impressed the traveller by its situation,
its great extent, and the richness of its apartments. It was built
upon an artificial, terraced mound, in the midst of a vast garden. It
was composed of a series of buildings surrounded by porticos, which
contained large reception halls separated from one another by
courtyards in which peacocks and tame panthers wandered at will. The
columns of the principal saloons were gilt. The general aspect was
very imposing. The arrangements seem to have had much in common with
those of the Assyrian and Persian palaces. But there was one capital
distinction between the two; at Palibothra the residence of the
sovereign, like those of his subjects, was built of wood. With its
commanding position, and the fine masses of verdure with which it was
surrounded, it must have produced a happy and picturesque effect, but,
after all, it was little more than a collection of kiosques.
Architecture, worthy of the name, began with the employment of those
solid and durable materials which defend themselves against
destruction by their weight and constructive repose.
The other arts could not have been much more advanced. Ignorant as
they were of the working of stone for building, these people can
hardly have been sculptors, and as to their painting, we have no
information. There is, moreover, no allusion to works of painting or
sculpture in their epics and dramas, there are none of those
descriptions of pictures and statues which, in the writings of the
Greek poets and dramatists, show us that the development of the
plastic arts followed closely upon that of poetry. This difference
between the two races may perhaps be explained by the opposition
between their religions and, consequently, their poetry. In giving to
their gods the forms and features of men, the oldest of the Greek
singers sketched in advance the figures to be afterwards created by
their painters and sculptors. Homer furnished the sketch from which
Phidias took his type of the Olympian Jupiter. It was not so with the
Vedic hymns. In them the persons of the gods had neither consistence
nor tangibility. They are distinguished now by one set of qualities
and again by another; each of the immortals who sat down to the
banquet on Olympus, had his or her own personal physiognomy, described
by poets and interpreted by artists, but it was not so with the Hindoo
deities. The Hindoo genius had none of the Greek faculty for clear and
well-defined imagery; it betrays a certain vagueness and want of
definition which is not to be combined with a complete aptitude for
the arts of design. It is the business of these arts to render ideas
by forms, and a well marked limit is the essence of form, which is
beautiful and expressive in proportion as its contours are clearly and
accurately drawn.
Indian art then, for the reasons which we have given, and others which
are unknown, was only in its cradle in the time of Alexander, while
the artists of Greece were in full possession of all their powers;
they had already produced inimitable master-pieces in each of the
great divisions of art, and yet their creative force was far from
being exhausted. It was the age of Lysippus and Apelles; of those
great architects who, in the temples of Asia Minor, renewed the youth
of the Ionic order by their bold and ingenious innovations. Under such
conditions, what would the effect have been, had these two forms of
civilization entered into close relations with each other? In all
probability the result would have been similar to that which ensued
when the ancestors of the Greeks began to deal with the more civilized
Phœnicians and the people of Asia Minor. But in the case of the
Hindoos, as we have said, the disciples had a less, instead of a
greater, aptitude for the plastic arts than their teachers, and,
moreover, the contact between the two was never complete nor was it of
long duration. The only frontier upon which the interchange of idea
was frequent and continuous was the north-west, which divided India
from that Bactrian kingdom of which we know little more than the mere
names of its princes and the date of its fall. But before the end of
the second century B.C. this outpost of Hellenism had fallen before
the attacks of those barbarians whom we call the Saci. In such an
isolated position it could not long hope to maintain itself,
especially after the rise of the Parthian monarchy had separated it
from the empire of the Seleucidæ. Its existence must always have been
precarious, and the mere fact that it did not succumb until the year
136 B.C. is enough to prove that several of its sovereigns must have
been remarkable men. Should their annals ever be discovered they would
probably form one of the strangest and most interesting episodes in
the history of the Greek race.
Through the obscurity in which all the details are enveloped we can
clearly perceive that those princes were men of taste. They were, as
was natural, attached to the literature and the arts which reminded
them of their superior origin and of that distant fatherland with
which year after year it became more difficult to communicate.
Although they were obliged, in order to defend themselves against so
many enemies, to employ those mercenary soldiers, Athenians, Thebans,
Spartans and Cretans, which then overran Asia, and to pay them dearly
for their services, they also called skilful artists to their court
and kept them there at great expense; the beautiful coins which have
preserved their images down to our day are evidence of this, the
decoration of their cities, of their temples, and of their palaces
must have been in keeping with these; everywhere no doubt were
Corinthian and Ionic buildings, statues of the Greek gods and heroes
mixed with those portraits and historic groups which had been
multiplied by the scholars of Lysippus, wall paintings, and perhaps
some of those easel pictures signed by famous masters, for which the
heirs of Alexander were such keen competitors. Artisans, who had
followed the Greek armies in their march towards the East with the
object of supplying the wants of any colonies which might be
established in those distant regions, reproduced upon their vases and
in their terra-cotta figures the motives of the painting, the
sculpture, and the architecture which they left behind; goldsmiths,
jewellers and armourers cut, chased, and stamped them in metal. And it
was not only the Greek colonists who employed their skill. Like the
Scythian tribes among whom the Greek cities of the Euxine were
planted, the nations to the north of India were astonished and
delighted by the elegance of their ornament and the variety of its
forms. They imported from Bactriana these products of an art which was
wanting to them, and soon set themselves, with the help perhaps of
foreign artists settled among them, to imitate Grecian design in the
courts of the Indian rajahs.
That this was so is proved by those coins which bear on their reverse
such Hindoo symbols as Siva with his bull, and on their obverse Greek
inscriptions, and by the remains of what is now called Græco-Buddhic
art, an art which seems to have flourished in the upper valley of the
Indus in the third or second century before our era. These remains,
formerly much neglected, are now attracting much attention. They have
been carefully studied and described by Cunningham[32]; Dr. Curtius
has described them and published reproductions of the most curious
among them.[33] They are found in the north of the Punjab upon a few
ancient sites where excavations have been made. Some of them have been
transported to Europe in the collection of Dr. Leitner, while others
remain in the museums of Peshawur, Lahore, and Calcutta.[34] In those
sacred buildings which have been examined the plan of the Greek temple
has not been adopted, but the isolated members of Greek architecture
and the most characteristic details of its ornament are everywhere
made use of. It is the same with the sculpture; in the selection of
types, in the arrangement of drapery, in the design, there is the same
mixture of Greek taste with that of India, of elements borrowed from
foreign, and those drawn from the national, beliefs. The helmeted
Athené and Helios in his quadriga figure by the side of Buddha.
[32] _Archæological Survey of India_, 3 vols. 1871-73.
[33] _Archæologische Zeitung_, 1876, p. 90. _Die Griechische
Kunst in Indien._
[34] The Louvre has lately acquired some curious examples of
this art.
Traces of the same influence are to be found in a less marked degree
in other parts of India. Near the mouth of the Indus and upon the
Malabar coast, the native sculptors and architects were able to obtain
more than one useful suggestion, more than one precious hint as to
their technique, from the works of art brought in the ships of
maritime traders. It is even possible that Greek workmen may thus have
been introduced into seaport towns, and there employed upon the
decoration of palaces and temples. However this may be it is
incontestable that all the important sacred edifices of that region,
whether stone-built or carved in the living rock, date from a period
more recent than that of Alexander, and that most of them show details
which imply acquaintance with Greek architectural forms and their
imitation. We are thus on all hands forced to this conclusion: that,
in the domain of the plastic arts, Greece owed nothing to India, with
which she made acquaintance very late and at a period when she had no
need to take lessons from others. That, moreover, India had little or
nothing to give; that her arts were not developed till after her early
relations with Greece, and it would even seem that her first stimulus
was derived from the models which Greece put within her reach.
* * * * *
From all this it will be seen that we need not go as far as China, or
even as the Punjab, in order to explain the origin of Greek art.
During the period with which we are concerned, China might as well
have been in the planet Saturn for all she had to do with the ancient
world, and we need refer to her no more, except now and then perhaps
for purposes of illustration. We cannot treat India quite in the same
fashion, because there were, as we have said, certain points of
contact and reciprocal influences at work between her and the group of
nations we are about to treat. But as Greece borrowed nothing from
India, at least in the matter of art, the little which we shall have
to say of the products of the Hindoos will not be connected with our
discussion of the origin of Greek art. A curious though hardly an
important episode in history, is seen in the reaction by which the
Greek genius, when arrived at maturity, threw itself at the command of
Alexander upon that East from which it had received its first
lessons.
None of those philosophical discussions to which Ottfried Müller and
Stark thought it necessary to give so large a place will be found in
our introduction; both of those authors devoted a long chapter to the
definition of art and its principal manifestations. Stark went so far
as to discuss, with much patience and ingenuity, the definitions of
art and of its essential forms which had been given by previous
writers. We shall attempt nothing of the kind; we have not undertaken
a work of criticism or æsthetic demonstration. We wish to build up the
history of ancient civilization through the study, description, and
comparison of its plastic remains.
Neither do we feel sure that, in such a question as this, definitions
do not lead to confusion rather than to clearness. When short, they
are vague and obscure, and only acquire precision through distinctions
and developments which have to be discussed at length; and again they
generally lead, on one hand or the other, either to objections or
reservations. _Omnis definitio in jure periculosa_, says an old maxim,
which is certainly true in matters of art. Why should we attempt,
unless we are obliged, to define terms which awake sufficiently clear
and distinct ideas in all cultivated minds? No satisfactory definition
has ever been given of the word _architecture_, and yet, when we use
it, every one knows what we mean. Architecture, sculpture, painting,
each of these sounds has a precise meaning for those to whom our work
is addressed, and we may say the same of certain other expressions,
such as _industrial arts_, _decoration_, _style_, _historical
painting_, _genre painting_, _landscape painting_, which will often be
found in our pages. We must refer those who want definitions of these
phrases to the _Grammaire des Arts du Dessin_ of M. Charles Blanc and
kindred works. It will suffice for us that these words should be taken
in the ordinary meaning which they bear in the conversation of
cultivated men. If our ideas of art and its different branches diverge
here and there from those which are commonly received, those
divergencies will become evident, and will be discussed and justified
to the best of our ability as the work proceeds. But on all occasions
we shall do our best to avoid the abstract and pedantic terminology
which makes Ottfried Müller's first chapter so difficult to read.
* * * * *
We have now declared the aim of our work and the route which we
propose to follow. In order to increase our chances of success, I have
sought and obtained the collaboration of M. Charles Chipiez, whose
special knowledge is well calculated to neutralise my own
deficiencies. To his _Histoire critique des Origines et de la
Formation des Ordres grecques_, was awarded, in 1877, one of the
highest prizes of the Académie des Inscriptions, and in the Salons of
1878 and 1879 he confirmed his double reputation as a skilful
draughtsman and a learned theorist; his _Essais de Restoration d'un
Temple grecque hypèthre, et des tours à étages de la Chaldée_, was
much noticed and discussed by connoisseurs. It would not be fitting,
however, to praise it here. I must confine myself to saying how
fortunate I am in having obtained a help which I have found more
helpful, more single-minded, more complete, than I had dared to hope
for. In all that has to do with architecture, I have not written a
line until after consulting M. Chipiez upon all technical points. He
has also taken an active part in the revision of the text of certain
chapters. As for the plates and illustrations in the text, we have
together chosen the objects to be represented, and M. Chipiez, as a
professional man and able draughtsman, has personally superintended
the execution of the drawings. It remains for me to explain the _rôle_
which we have assigned to our illustrations.
VI.
In the single edition of his great work which appeared during his own
lifetime, Winckelmann inserted but a small number of illustrations,
and those for ornament rather than for instruction. One of his
translators, M. Huber, tells us that their execution gave great
dissatisfaction to the author.[35] In our days, on the other hand,
those who undertake a work of this kind make use of the great progress
which has taken place in engraving and typography, to insert numerous
figures in their text, to which they offer an indispensable and
animated commentary. Without their help many descriptions and
observations might remain unnecessarily obscure and doubtful. When
forms are to be defined and compared, mere words, in whatever language
spoken or written, can never suffice.
[35] _Histoire de l'Art_; Huber's preface to his translation,
p. xxxii.
With well chosen phrases we may awake the recollections of others, and
give renewed life to any impression which they may have received from
some striking natural phenomenon or some fine work of art. Their
imaginations will call up for a moment some landscape, picture, or
statue which has formerly charmed them. But if we wish to explain the
complicated plan of some great building, its design and its
proportions, the slightest sketch will be of more use than the longest
and most minute descriptions. So it will, if we wish to make clear the
characteristics which distinguish one style from another, the Assyrian
from the Egyptian, the archaic Greek style from that of the Phidian
epoch or of the decadence, an Ionic column from the Erechtheum from
one of the same order treated by a Roman architect. Between the
contour of a figure from a Memphite bas-relief and that of one from
Nineveh, what difference is there? A tenth of an inch more or less, a
slight difference in the sweep of a line in order to mark more
strongly the junction of the thigh and the knee. If we placed three
nude torsos side by side, one of the sixth century, another of the
fifth century, and the third of the time of Hadrian, a practised eye
would at once assign its true date to each, in accordance with the
manner in which the skeleton was indicated under the flesh, and the
muscles drawn over it and attached to it. Supposing that the same
model had served all three artists, it would show in the one case a
lively sentiment of form combined with some dryness and rigidity; in
another a freer, larger, and more subtle treatment, and in the third a
want of vigour and firmness: but it would be difficult to give by
words a clear idea of what caused the difference. Between the contour
which satisfies us and that which does not there is hardly the
difference of a hair; by leaning a little harder with the chisel the
aspect of the one surface might have been made identical with the
other. By its double astragali, by the fine chiselling of its
gorgerin, by the elegant curve which unites the two volutes, and by
the general delicacy of its ornament, a capital from the Erechtheum is
distinguished above a Roman Ionic capital; it is at once finer in
design and richer in ornamentation: by the side of it a capital from
the theatre of Marcellus or the Coliseum would look mean and poor.
The whole history of art consists of the succession of subtle changes
like these, and it would be impossible to convey them to the reader
by the utmost precision of technical language or the most brilliant
and life-like descriptions. The best thing that can be done is to make
one's remarks in the presence of the statues, pictures and buildings
concerned. But it is rarely that we find ourselves in such favourable
conditions for teaching and explaining our ideas. But, in default of
the objects themselves, we may at least give the most faithful images
of them which can be obtained, and that we shall attempt to do
throughout the course of this history.
We shall, then, give a large number of figures, in which absolute
accuracy and justice of proportion will be aimed at rather than
picturesque effects. It is not very long since, in collections of
drawings from antique remains, they were all presented under one
aspect, so far as the subtleties of style were concerned. The hand of
the engraver spread a technical uniformity over them all in which
differences of school and date disappeared, just as the delicate
carvings and coloured ornament of the middle ages and the renaissance,
which gave to each building an individuality of its own, were reduced
to dull monotony by the undiscriminating brush of the whitewasher. It
seemed to the artist natural enough to clothe the monuments of the
past in the style of his own day--and it required much less care than
would have been needed for the successful expression of all the
diversities of style in his models. We have now, however, grown more
exacting. We demand from the draughtsman who pretends to interpret a
work of art the same devotion and the same self-sacrifice as from the
writer who is charged with the translation of a work of literature
from one language into another--we require him to forget himself, so
that we may say of him, as the Latin poet says of his _Proteus_:
"_Omnia transformat sese in miracula rerum._"
We require him to change his style with every change of subject, to
copy the gesture, the accent, and even the faults of his model; to be
Chinese in China, Greek in Greece, and Tuscan when he takes us to
Siena or Florence. But we have indicated an ideal which is not often
reached. Every one of us has his preferences and natural affinities,
every artist his own methods and personal modes of thought. One will
be conspicuous for his interpretation of the nobility and purity of
the antique, another for his treatment of oriental art or of the
elegance of our eighteenth century. But the mere enunciation of the
principle is of value, for a great effect follows the praise which
those who treat their model with scrupulous and intelligent respect
are sure to obtain, and the blame to which they who are less
conscientious expose themselves.
Fidelity in interpretation is, in fact, the honesty of the
draughtsman; it may become, if carried to a great height, his honour,
and even his glory. So far as we are concerned, we demand it from all
those who are associated with us in this task; and, so far as existing
methods will allow, we shall see that we obtain it. Unless our
illustrations had that merit they would obscure the text instead of
making it more comprehensible. Our readers would search in vain for
the features and characteristics to which we might call their
attention, and many of our remarks and theories would become difficult
to understand. We should be in the same position as an incompetent
barrister who has made a bad choice of witnesses; witnesses who, when
in the box, prove either to know nothing or to know only facts which
tell against the party who has called them.
Our aim in choosing our illustrations will be to place before our
readers good reproductions of most of the objects which are discussed
in our text. We shall, of course, be unable to figure everything that
is of interest, but we can at least ensure that those figures which we
give shall each be interesting in some particular or another. So far
as possible, we shall select for illustration such objects as have not
previously been reproduced, or have been ill reproduced, or have been
figured in works which are difficult of access. We shall sometimes, of
course, find it necessary to reproduce some famous statue or some
building which is familiar to most people; but even then we shall
endeavour to give renewed interest to their beauties by displaying
them under some fresh aspect and by increased care in the delineation
of their forms. Views in perspective, of which we shall make frequent
use, give the general aspect of buildings with much greater truth and
completeness than a mere plan, or a picturesque sketch of ruinous
remains, or even than an elevation.
Most of the more important perspectives and restorations due to the
learned pencil of M. Chipiez will be given in plates separate from the
text, as well as the most curious or significant of the works in
sculpture or painting to which we shall have to refer. Some of these
plates will be coloured. But the majority of our illustrations will
consist of engravings upon zinc and wood, which will not, we hope,
fall short of their more elaborate companions in honesty and fidelity.
* * * * *
From the earliest Egyptian dynasties and from fabled Chaldæa to
imperial Rome, from the Pyramids and the Tower of Babel to the
Coliseum, from the Statue of Chephren and the bas-reliefs of
Shalmaneser III, to the busts of the Cæsars, from the painted
decorations of the tomb of Ti, and the enamelled bricks of Nineveh to
the wall-paintings of Pompeii, we shall review in due succession all
the forms which the great nations of antiquity made use of to express
their beliefs, to give shape to their ideas, to satisfy their
instincts for luxury and their taste for beauty, to lodge their gods
and their kings, and to transmit their own likenesses to posterity.
We propose to trace and explain the origin of, and to describe,
without æsthetic dissertations or excessive use of technical terms,
those processes which imply the practice of art; the creation and
descent of forms; the continual changes, sometimes slight and
sometimes great, which they underwent in passing from one people to
another, until, among the Greeks, they arrived at the most happy and
complete perfection which the world has seen. We hope, too, by the
judicious choice and careful execution of our figures, to give a fair
idea of this course of development even to those artists who have
neither time nor patience to follow our criticisms and descriptions.
I conceived the plan of this history, of which the first instalment is
now submitted to the public, at the time when M. Wallon, who is
secretary to the _Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres_,
entrusted me with the inauguration, at the Sorbonne, of the teaching
of classic archæology. But before it could be realized two conditions
had to be fulfilled. I had to find an associate in the work, a
companion who would help me in the necessary labour and study, and I
found him among my auditors in those first lectures at the Sorbonne. I
had also to find a publisher who would understand the wants of the
public and of the critics in such a matter. In this, too, I have
succeeded, and I am free to undertake a work which is, I hope,
destined to carry far beyond the narrow limits of a Parisian lecture
room, the methods and principal results of a science, which, having
made good its claims to the gratitude of mankind, is progressing with
a step which becomes daily more assured. The task is an arduous one,
and the continual discoveries which are reported from nearly every
quarter of the ancient world, make it heavier every day. As for my
colleague and myself, we have resigned ourselves in advance to seeing
omissions and defects pointed out even by the most benevolent critics,
but we are convinced that in spite of such imperfections as it may
contain, our work will do good service, and will cause one of the
aspects of ancient civilization to be better understood. This
conviction will sustain us through the labours which, perhaps with
some temerity, we have taken upon us. How far shall we be allowed to
conduct our history? That we cannot tell, but we may venture to
promise that it shall be the chief occupation and the dearest study of
all that remains to us of life and strength.
GEORGES PERROT.
TO THE READER.
We have been in some doubt as to whether we should append a special
bibliography to each section of this work, but after mature reflection
we have decided against it. We shall, of course, consider the art of
each of the races of antiquity in less detail than if we had
undertaken a monograph upon Egyptian, upon Assyrian, or upon
Phœnician art; but yet it is our ambition to neglect no source of
information which is likely to be really valuable. From many of the
books and papers which we shall have to consult we may reproduce
nothing but their titles, but we hope that no important work will
escape us altogether, and in every case we shall give references which
may be easily verified. Under these circumstances a formal list of
works would be a mere repetition of our notes and would only have the
effect of giving a useless bulk to our volumes.
Whenever our drawings have not been taken directly from the originals
we have been careful to indicate the source from which we obtained
them, and we have made a point of borrowing only from authors of
undoubted authority. Those illustrations which bear neither an
artist's name nor the title of a book have been engraved from
photographs. As for the perspectives and restorations supplied by M.
Chipiez, they are in every case founded upon the study and comparison
of all accessible documents; but it would take too long to indicate in
each of these drawings how much has been borrowed from special
publications and how much has been founded upon photographic evidence.
M. Chipiez has sometimes employed the ordinary perspective, sometimes
that which is called axonometric perspective. The difference will be
at once perceived.
Egyptologists may, perhaps, find mistakes in the hieroglyphs which
occur in our illustrations. These hieroglyphs have been as a rule
exactly transcribed, but we do not pretend to offer a collection of
texts; we have only reproduced these characters on account of their
decorative value, and because without them we could not have the
general appearance of this or that monument. It will thus be seen that
our object is not affected by a mistake or two in such matters.
We may here express our gratitude to all those who have interested
themselves in our enterprise and who have helped us to make our work
complete. Our dear and lamented Mariette had promised us his most
earnest help. During the winter that we passed in Egypt, while he
still enjoyed some remains of strength and voice, we obtained from his
conversation and his letters some precious pieces of information. We
have cited the works of M. Maspero on almost every page, and yet we
have learnt more from his conversation than from his writings. Before
his departure for Egypt--whither he went to succeed Mariette--M.
Maspero was our perpetual counsellor and referee; whenever we were
embarrassed we appealed to his well ordered, accurate, and unbiased
knowledge. We are also deeply indebted to M. Pierret, the learned
_conservateur_ of the Louvre; not only has he done everything to
facilitate the work of our draughtsmen in the great museum, he has
also helped us frequently with his advice and his accumulated
knowledge. M. Arthur Rhôné has lent us a plan of the temple of the
Sphinx, and M. Ernest Desjardins a view of the interior of that
building.
The artists who have visited Egypt have helped us as cordially as the
learned men who have deciphered its inscriptions. M. Gerome opened his
portfolios and allowed us to take three of those drawings, which
express with such truthful precision the character of Egyptian
landscape from them. M. Hector Leroux was as generous as M. Gerome,
and if we have taken but one illustration from his sketch-books it is
because the arrangements for this volume were complete before we had
the chance of looking through them. M. Brune has allowed us to
reproduce his plans of Karnak and Medinet-Abou.
We have had occasion, in the work itself, to express our
acknowledgments to MM. J. Bourgoin, G. Bénédite, and Saint-Elme
Gautier, who have drawn for us the principal monuments of the Boulak
and Louvre Museums. For the architecture we must name M. A. Guérin, a
pupil of M. Chipiez, who prepared the drawings under the direction of
his master, and M. Tomaszkievicz, whose light and skilful point has so
well engraved them. If the process of engraving upon zinc has given
results which, as we hope, will satisfy our readers, much of the
honour belongs to the untiring care of M. Comte, whose process has
been employed; all these plates have been reviewed and retouched by
him with minute care. The steel engravings are by MM. Ramus, Hibon,
Guillaumot père and Sulpis. In order that the polychromatic decoration
of the Egyptians should be rendered with truth and precision in its
refined tones and complicated line, we begged M. Sulpis to make use of
a process which had almost fallen into disuse from its difficulty and
want of rapidity; we mean that which is called _aquatint_. Our plates
II, XIII, and XIV will perhaps convince our readers that its results
are superior to those of chromo-lithography, which is now so widely
employed.
A HISTORY OF ART IN ANCIENT EGYPT
CHAPTER I.
THE GENERAL CHARACTER OF EGYPTIAN CIVILIZATION.
§ 1. _Egypt's Place in The History of the World._
Egypt is the eldest daughter of civilization. In undertaking to group
the great nations of antiquity and to present them in their proper
order, in attempting to assign to each its due share in the continuous
and unremitting labour of progress until the birth of Christianity, we
have no alternative but to commence with the country of the Pharaohs.
In studying the past of mankind, we have the choice of several points
of view. We may attempt to determine the meaning and value of the
religious conceptions which succeeded one another during that period,
or we may give our attention rather to the literature, the arts and
the sciences, to those inventions which in time have done so much to
emancipate mankind from natural trammels and to make him master of his
destiny. One writer will confine himself to a description of manners,
and social and political institutions; another to the enumeration and
explanation of the various changes brought on by internal revolutions,
by wars and conquests; to what Bossuet calls "_la suite des empires_."
Finally, he who has the highest ambition of all will attempt to unite
all these various features into a single picture, so as to show, as a
whole, the creative activity of a race and the onward movements of
its genius in the continual search for "the best." But in any case the
commencement must be made with Egypt. It is Egypt that has preserved
the earliest attempts of man towards outward expression; it is in
Egypt that those monuments exist which contain the first permanent
manifestation of thought by written characters or plastic[36] forms;
and it is in Egypt that the historian of antique art will find the
earliest materials for study.
[36] The word "plastic" is used throughout this work in its
widest significance, and is not confined to works "in the
round."--ED.
But, in the first place, we must give some account of the curious
conditions under which the people lived who constructed and ornamented
so many imposing monuments. We must begin, then, by describing the
circumstances and the race characteristics under which this early
civilization was developed.
§ 2. _The Valley of the Nile and its Inhabitants._
The first traveller in Egypt of which we have any record is Herodotus;
he sums up, in an often quoted phrase, the impression which that land
of wonders made upon him: "Egypt," he says, "is a present from the
Nile."[37] The truth could not be better expressed. "Had the
equatorial rains not been compelled to win for themselves a passage to
the Mediterranean, a passage upon which they deposited the mud which
they had accumulated on their long journey, Egypt would not have
existed. Egypt began by being the bed of a torrent; the soil was
raised by slow degrees ... man appeared there when, by the slow
accumulation of fertile earth, the country at last became equal to his
support...."[38]
[37] HERODOTUS, ii. 7.
[38] MARIETTE, _Itineraire de la haute Égypte_, p. 10 (edition
of 1872, 1 vol. Alexandria, Mourès).
Other rivers do no more than afford humidity for their immediate
borders, or, in very low-lying districts, for a certain narrow stretch
of country on each hand. When they overflow their banks it is in a
violent and irregular fashion, involving wide-spread ruin and
destruction. Great floods are feared as public misfortunes. It is
very different with the Nile. Every year, at a date which can be
almost exactly foretold, it begins to rise slowly and to spread gently
over the land. It rises by degrees until its surface is eight or nine
metres above low-water mark;[39] it then begins to fall with the same
tranquillity, but not until it has deposited, upon the lands over
which it has flowed, a thick layer of fertile mud which can be turned
over easily with the lightest plough, and in which every seed will
germinate, every plant spring up with extraordinary vigour and
rapidity.
[39] The river should rise to this height upon the Nilometer at
Cairo if there is to be a "good Nile." In upper Egypt the banks
of the river are much higher than in middle Egypt. In order to
flow over those banks it must rise to a height of some eleven or
twelve metres, and unless it rises more than thirteen metres it
will not have a proper effect.
[Illustration: FIG. 1.--During the Inundation of the Nile.]
Thus nature has greatly facilitated the labour of the Egyptian
agriculturist; the river takes upon itself the irrigation of the
country for the whole width of its valley, and the preparation of the
soil for the autumnal seed-time; it restores the virtue annually taken
out of the ground by the crops. Each year it brings with it more
fertility than can be exhausted in the twelve months, so that there
is a constantly accumulating capital, on both banks of the river, of
the richest vegetable earth.
[Illustration: FIG. 2.--Hoeing; Beni-Hassan. (Champollion, pl. 381
_bis_.[40])]
[40] This work of Champollion's, to which we are greatly
indebted, is entitled: _Monuments de l'Égypte et de la Nubie_, 4
vols. folio. It contains 511 plates, partly coloured, and was
published between the years 1833 and 1845. The drawings for the
plates were made by members of the great scientific expedition
of which Champollion was the head. Many of those drawings were
from the pencil of Nestor L'Hôte, one of those who have most
sympathetically rendered the Egyptian monuments.
[Illustration: FIG. 3.--Ploughing; from the Necropolis of Memphis.
(_Description de l'Égypte_, ant. V., pl. 17.)]
Thus the first tribes established themselves in the country under
singularly favourable conditions; thanks to the timely help of the
river they found themselves assured of an easy existence.[41] We know
how often the lives of those tribes who live by fishing and the chase
are oppressed by care; there are some days when game is not to be
found, and they die of hunger. Those who live a pastoral life are also
exposed to cruel hardships from the destruction of their flocks and
herds by those epidemics against which even modern science sometimes
struggles in vain. As for agricultural populations, they are
everywhere, except in Egypt, at the mercy of the weather; seasons
which are either too dry or too wet may reduce them to famine, for in
those distant times local famines were far more fatal than in these
days, when facility of transport and elaborate commercial connections
ensure that where the demand is, thither the supply will be taken. In
Egypt the success of the crops varied with the height of the Nile, but
they never failed altogether. In bad years the peasant may have had
the baton of the tax-collector to fear, but he always had a few onions
or a few ears of maize to preserve him from starvation.[42]
[41] This advantage was thoroughly appreciated by the ancients.
Diodorus Siculus, speaking of the Egyptians, says that "At the
beginning of all things, the first men were born in Egypt, in
consequence of the happy climate of the country and the physical
properties of the Nile, whose waters, by their natural fertility
and their power of producing various kinds of aliment, were well
fitted to nourish the first beings who received the breath of
life.... It is evident that from the foundation of the world
Egypt was, of all countries, the most favourable to the
generation of men and women, by the excellent constitution of
its soil" (i. 10).
[42] In all ages the rod has, in Egypt, played an important part
in the collection of the taxes. In this connection M. Lieblein
has quoted a passage from the well-known letter from the chief
guardian of the archives of Ameneman to the scribe Pentaour, in
which he says: "The scribe of the port arrives at the station;
he collects the tax; there are agents with rattans, and negroes
with branches of palm; they say 'Give us some corn!' and they
are not to be repulsed. The peasant is bound and sent to the
canal; he is driven on with violence, his wife is bound in his
presence, his children are stripped; as for his neighbours, they
are far off and are busy over their own harvest." (_Les Récits
de Recolte dans l'ancienne Égypte, comme Éléments
chronologique_, in _Recueil de Travaux relatifs à la Philologie
et à l'Archéologie égyptiennes et assyriennes_, t. i. p. 149).
[Illustration: FIG. 4.--Harvest scene; from a tomb at Gizeh.
(Champollion, pl. 417.)]
The first condition of civilization is a certain measure of security
for life. Now, thanks to the beneficent action of the king of rivers,
that condition was created sooner in Egypt than elsewhere. In the
valley of the Nile man found himself able, for the first time, to
calculate upon the forces of nature and to turn them to his certain
profit. It is easy then to understand that Egypt saw the birth of the
most ancient of those civilizations whose plastic arts we propose to
study.
[Illustration: FIG. 5.--The Bastinado; Beni-Hassan. (Champollion, pl.
390.)]
Another favourable condition is to be found in the isolation of the
country. The tribes who settled there in centuries so remote that they
are beyond tradition and even calculation, could live in peace, hidden
as it were in a narrow valley and protected on all sides, partly by
deserts, partly by an impassable sea. It would perhaps be well to give
some idea of the natural features of their country before commencing
our study of their art. The terms, _Lower-_, _Middle-_, and
_Upper-Egypt_, the _Delta_, and _Ethiopia_ will continually recur in
these pages, as also will the names of Tanis and Sais, Memphis and
Heliopolis, Abydos and Thebes, and of many other cities; it is
important therefore that our readers should know exactly what is meant
by each of these time-honoured designations; it is necessary that they
should at least be able to find upon the map those cities which by
their respective periods of supremacy represent the successive epochs
of Egyptian history.
"Egypt is that country which, stretching from north to south, occupies
the north-east angle of Africa, or Libya as the ancients called it.
It is joined to Asia by the isthmus of Suez. It is bounded on the east
by that isthmus and the Red Sea; on the south by Nubia, the Ethiopia
of the Greeks, which is traversed by the Nile before its entrance into
Egypt at the cataracts of Syene; on the west by the desert sprinkled
here and there with a few oases, and on the north by the
Mediterranean. The desert stretches as far north on the west of the
country as the Red Sea does on the east.
"It penetrates moreover far into the interior of Egypt itself.
Strictly speaking Egypt consists simply of that part of this corner of
Africa over which the waters of the Nile flow during the inundation,
to which may be added those districts to which the water is carried by
irrigation. All outside this zone is uninhabited, and produces neither
corn nor vegetables nor trees nor even grass. No water is to be found
there beyond a few wells, all more or less exposed to exhaustion in an
ever-parching atmosphere. In Upper Egypt rain is an extremely rare
phenomenon. Sand and rock cover the whole country, except the actual
valley of the Nile. Up to the point where the river divides into
several arms, that is to say for more than three-quarters of the whole
length of Egypt, this valley never exceeds an average width of more
than four or five leagues. In a few districts it is even narrower than
this. For almost its whole length it is shut in between two mountain
chains, that on the east called the Arab, that on the west the Libyan
chain. These mountains, especially towards the south, sometimes close
in and form defiles. On the other hand, in Middle Egypt the Libyan
chain falls back and becomes lower, allowing the passage of the canal
which carries the fertilizing waters into the Fayoum, the province in
which the remains of the famous reservoir which the Greek writers
called Lake Mœris exist. Egypt, which was little more than a glen
higher up, here widens out to a more imposing size. A little below
Cairo, the present capital of Egypt, situated not far from the site of
ancient Memphis, the Nile divides into two branches, one of which, the
Rosetta branch, turns to the north-west, the other, that of Damietta,
to the north and north-east.... The ancients knew five others which,
since their time, have either been obliterated or at least have become
non-navigable.... All these branches took their names from towns
situated near their mouths. A large number of less important
watercourses threaded their way through Lower Egypt; but as the earth
there is marshy, their channels have shifted greatly from age to age
and still go on changing. The Nile forms several lagunes near the sea,
shut in by long tongues of earth and sand, and communicating with the
Mediterranean by openings here and there. The space comprised between
the two most distant branches of the river is called the Delta, on
account of its triangular form, which is similar to that of a capital
Greek _delta_ (Δ)."[43]
[43] ROBIOU, _Histoire ancienne des Peuples de l'Orient_, ch.
v.
At one time the waves of the Mediterranean washed the foot of the
sandy plateau which is now crowned by the Great Pyramid; the Nile
flowed into the sea at that time slightly to the north of the site
upon which Memphis was afterwards built. With the slow passage of time
the particles of earth which it brought down from the mountains of
Abyssinia were deposited as mud banks upon the coast, and gradually
filling up the gulf, created instead wide marshy plains intersected by
lakes. Here and there ancient sand ridges indicate the successive
watercourses. The never-ceasing industry of its floods had already, at
the earliest historic period, carried the mouths of the Nile far
beyond the normal line of the neighbouring coasts. The Egyptian
priests--whose words have been preserved for us by Herodotus--had a
true idea as to how this vast plain had been created, a plain which
now comprises twenty-three thousand square kilometres and is
continually being added to; but they were strangely deceived when they
thought and declared that Menes or Ména, the first of all kings, found
almost all Egypt under the waters. The sea, they said, penetrated in
those days beyond the site of Memphis, and the remainder of the
country, the district of Thebes excepted, was an unhealthy morass.[44]
The Delta had, in fact, existed long before the appearance of Menes,
and perhaps it may have shown pretty much its present form when the
Egyptian race first appeared in the valley of the Nile.[45]
[44] HERODOTUS, ii. 4.
[45] MASPERO, _Histoire ancienne des Peuples de l'Orient_, pp. 6
and 7. In such general explanations as are unavoidable we shall
content ourselves with paraphrasing M. Maspero.
As to the origin of that race, we need not enter at length into a
question so purely ethnographical. It is now generally allowed that
they were connected with the white races of Europe and Western Asia;
the anatomical examination of the bodies recovered from the most
ancient tombs, and the study of their statues, bas-reliefs, and
pictures, all point to this conclusion. If we take away individual
peculiarities these monuments furnish us with the following common
type of the race even in the most remote epochs:--
"The average Egyptian was tall, thin, active. He had large and
powerful shoulders,[46] a muscular chest, sinewy arms terminating in
long and nervous hands, narrow hips, and thin muscular legs. His knees
and calves were nervous and muscular, as is generally the case with a
pedestrian race; his feet were long, thin, and flattened, by his habit
of going barefoot. The head, often too large and powerful for the
body, was mild, and even sad in its expression. His forehead was
square and perhaps a little low, his nose short and round; his eyes
were large and well opened, his cheeks full and round, his lips thick
but not turned out like a negro's; his rather large mouth bore an
habitually soft and sorrowful expression. These features are to be
found in most of the statues of the ancient and middle empires, and in
all the later epochs. Even to the present day the peasants, or
_fellahs_, have almost everywhere preserved the physiognomy of their
ancestors, although the upper classes have lost it by repeated
intermarriage with strangers."[47]
[46] Their exceptional breadth of shoulder has been confirmed by
an examination of the skeletons in the mummies. See on this
subject a curious note in BONOMI's _Some Observations on the
Skeleton of an Egyptian Mummy_ (_Transactions of the Society of
Biblical Archæology_, vol. iv. pp. 251-253).
[47] MASPERO, _Histoire ancienne_, p. 16.
When Mariette discovered in the necropolis at Memphis the famous
wooden statue of a man standing and holding in his hand the baton of
authority, the peasants of Sakkarah recognised at once the feature and
attitude of one of themselves, of the rustic dignitary who managed the
_corvées_ and apportioned the taxation. An astonished fellah cried
out: "The Sheikh-el-Beled!" His companions took up the cry, and the
statue has been known by that name ever since.[48]
[48] _Notice des principaux Monuments exposés dans les Galeries
provisoires du Musée d' Antiquités égyptiennes de S. A. le
Vice-Roi, à Boulaq_ (1876), No. 492. The actual statue holds the
_bâton_ in its left hand.
Increased knowledge of the Egyptian language has enabled us to carry
our researches much farther than Champollion and his successors. By
many of its roots, by its system of pronouns, by its nouns of number,
and by some of the arrangements of its conjugations, it seems to have
been attached to the Semitic family of languages. Some of the idioms
of these Semitic tongues are found in Egyptian in a rudimentary state.
From this it has been concluded that Egyptian and its cognate
languages, after having belonged to that group, separated from it at a
very early period, while their grammatical system was still in course
of formation. Thus, disunited and subjected to diverse influences, the
two families made a different use of the elements which they possessed
in common.
There would thus seem to have been a community of root between the
Egyptians on the one part and the Arabs, Hebrews, and Phœnicians on
the other, but the separation took place at such an early period, that
the tribes who came to establish themselves in the valley of the Nile
had both the time and the opportunity to acquire a very particular and
original physiognomy of their own. The Egyptians are therefore said to
belong to the proto-Semitic races.
[Illustration: FIG. 6.--Statue from the Ancient Empire, in calcareous
stone. (Boulak.[49]) Drawn by G. Bénédite.]
[49] _Notice des principaux Monuments exposés dans les Galeries
provisoires du Musée d' Antiquités égyptiennes de S. A. le
Vice-Roi, à Boulaq_ (1876), p. 582. With the exception of a few
woodcuts from photographs the contents of the museums at Cairo
and Boulak have been reproduced from drawings by M. J. Bourgoin.
The Boulak Museum will be referred to by the simple word Boulak.
The reproductions of objects in the Louvre are all from the
pencil of M. Saint-Elme Gautier.
This opinion has been sustained with more or less plausibility by MM.
Lepsius, Benfey, and Bunsen, and accepted by M. Maspero.[50] But
other critics of equal authority are more impressed by the differences
than by the resemblances, which, however, they neither deny nor
explain. M. Renan prefers to rank the Copts, the Tuaregs, and the
Berbers in a family which he would call Chamitic, and to which he
would refer most of the idioms of Northern Africa.[51] A comparison of
the languages is, then, insufficient to decide the question of origin.
[50] MASPERO, _Histoire ancienne_, p. 17.
[51] _Histoire des Langues sémitiques_, Book i. ch. ii. § 4.
[Illustration: FIG. 7.--The _Sheikh-el-Beled_. (Boulak.) Drawn by J.
Bourgoin.]
The people whose physical characteristics we have described and whose
idiom we have defined, came from Asia, to all appearance, by the
Isthmus of Suez. Perhaps they found established on the banks of the
Nile another race, probably black, and indigenous to the African
continent.[52] If this were so the new comers forced the earlier
occupants of the country southwards without mixing with them, and set
themselves resolutely to the work of improvement. Egypt must then have
presented a very different sight from its richness and fertility of
to-day. The river when left to itself, was perpetually changing its
bed, and even in its highest floods it failed to reach certain parts
of the valley, which remained unproductive; in other districts it
remained so long that it changed the soil into swamp. The Delta, half
of it drowned in the waters of the Nile, the other half under those of
the Mediterranean, was simply a huge morass dotted here and there with
sandy islands and waving with papyrus, reeds, and lotus, across which
the river worked its sluggish and uncertain way; upon both banks the
desert swallowed up all the soil left untouched by the yearly
inundations. From the crowding vegetation of a tropical marsh to the
most absolute aridity was but a step. Little by little the new comers
learnt to control the course of the floods, to bank them in and to
carry them to the farthest corners of the valley, and Egypt gradually
arose out of the waters and became in the hand of man one of the best
adapted countries in the world for the development of a great
civilization.[53]
[52] See LEPSIUS, _Ueber die Annahme eines sogenannten
prehistorischen Steinalters in Ægypten_ (in the _Zeitschrift für
Ægyptische Sprache_, 1870, p. 113, et seq.).
[53] MASPERO, p. 18.
How many generations did it require to create the country and the
nation? We cannot tell. But we may affirm that a commencement was
made by the simultaneous establishment at several different points of
small independent states, each of which had its own laws and its own
form of worship. These districts remained almost unchanged in number
and in their respective boundaries almost up to the end of the ancient
world. Their union under one sceptre formed the kingdom of the
Pharaohs, the country of Khemi, but their primitive divisions did not
therefore disappear; the small independent states became provinces and
were the foundation of those local administrative districts which the
Greeks called _nomes_.
[Illustration: FIG. 8.--Hunting in the Marshes; from a bas-relief in
the tomb of Ti.]
Besides this division into districts, the Egyptians had one other, and
only one--the division into Lower Egypt, or the North Country
(_Tomera_, or _To-meh_), and into Upper Egypt, or the South Country
(_To-res_). Lower Egypt consisted of the Delta; Upper Egypt stretched
from the southernmost point of the Delta to the first cataract. This
division has the advantage of corresponding exactly to the
configuration of the country; moreover, it preserves the memory of a
period before the time of Menes, during which Egypt was divided into
two separate kingdoms--that of the North and that of the South, a
division which in later times had often a decisive influence upon the
course of events. This state of things was of sufficiently long
duration to leave an ineffaceable trace upon the official language of
Egypt, and upon that which we may call its blazonry, or heraldic
imagery. The sovereigns who united the whole territory under one
sceptre are always called, in the royal protocols, the lords of Upper
and Lower Egypt; they carry on their heads two crowns, each
appropriate to one of the two great divisions of their united kingdom.
That of Upper Egypt is known to egyptologists as the White crown,
because of the colour which it bears upon painted monuments; that of
the North is called the red crown, for a similar reason. Combined with
one another they form the complete regal head-dress ordinarily called
the pschent. In the hieroglyphics Northern Egypt is indicated by the
papyrus; Southern by the lotus.
[Illustration: FIG. 9.--Shadouf; machine for irrigating the land above
the level of the canals.]
During the Ptolemaic epoch a new administrative division into Upper,
Middle, and Lower Egypt was established. The Middle Egypt of the
Greek geographers began at the southern point of the Delta, and
extended to a little south of Hermopolis. Although this latter
division was not established until after the centuries which saw the
birth of those monuments with which we shall have to deal, we shall
make frequent use of it, as it will facilitate and render more
definite our topographical explanations. For the contemporaries of the
Pharaohs both Memphis and Thebes belong to Upper Egypt, and if we
adopted their method of speech we should be under the continual
necessity of stopping the narration to define geographical positions;
but with the tri-partite division we may speak of Beni-Hassan as in
Middle, and Abydos as in Upper Egypt, and thus give a sufficient idea
of their relative positions.
[Illustration: FIG. 10.--The White Crown.]
[Illustration: FIG. 11.--The Red Crown.]
[Illustration: FIG. 12.--The Pschent.]
§ 3. _The Great Divisions of Egyptian History._
In enumerating and analysing the remains of Egyptian art, we shall
classify them chronologically as well as locally. The monuments of the
plastic arts will be arranged into groups determined by the periods of
their occurrence, as well as by their geographical distribution. We
must refer our readers to the works of M. Maspero and others for the
lists of kings and dynasties, and for the chief events of each reign,
but it will be convenient for us to give here a summary of the
principal epochs in Egyptian history. Each of those epochs corresponds
to an artistic period with a special character and individuality of
its own. The following paragraphs taken from the history of M. Maspero
give all the necessary information in a brief form.
"In the last years of the prehistoric period, the sacerdotal class had
obtained a supremacy over the other classes of the nation. A man
called Menes (Menha or Ména in the Egyptian texts) destroyed this
supremacy and founded the Egyptian monarchy.
"This monarchy existed for at least four thousand years, under thirty
consecutive dynasties, from the reign of Menes to that of Nectanebo
(340 years before our era). This interval of time, the longest of
which political history takes note, is usually divided into three
parts: the _Ancient Empire_, from the first to the eleventh dynasty;
the _Middle Empire_, from the eleventh dynasty to the invasion of the
Hyksos or Shepherds; the _New Empire_ from the shepherd kings to the
Persian conquest. This division is inconvenient in one respect; it
takes too little account of the sequence of historical events.
"There were indeed, three great revolutions in the historical
development of Egypt. At the beginning of its long succession of human
dynasties (the Egyptians, like other peoples, placed a number of
dynasties of divine rulers before their first human king) the
political centre of the country was at Memphis; Memphis was the
capital and the burying-place of the kings; Memphis imposed sovereigns
upon the rest of the country and was the chief market for Egyptian
commerce and industry. With the commencement of the sixth dynasty, the
centre of gravity began to shift southwards. During the ninth and
tenth dynasties it rested at Heracleopolis, in Middle Egypt, and in
the time of the eleventh dynasty, it fixed itself at Thebes. From that
period onwards Thebes was the capital of the country and furnished the
sovereign. From the eleventh to the twenty-first all the Egyptian
dynasties were Theban with the single exception of the fourteenth
Xoite dynasty. At the time of the shepherd invasion, the Thebaïd
became the citadel of Egyptian nationality, and its princes, after
centuries of war against the intruders, finally succeeded in freeing
the whole valley of the Nile for the benefit of the eighteenth
dynasty, which opened the era of great foreign wars.
"Under the nineteenth dynasty an inverse movement to that of the first
period carried the political centre of the country back towards the
north. With the twenty-first Tanite dynasty, Thebes ceased to be the
capital, and the cities of the Delta, Tanis, Bubastis, Mendes,
Sebennytos, and above all Sais, rose into equal or superior
importance. From that time the political life of the country
concentrated itself in the maritime districts. The _nomes_ of the
Thebaïd, ruined by the Ethiopian and Assyrian invasions, lost their
influence; and Thebes itself fell into ruin and became nothing more
than a _rendezvous_ for curious travellers.
"I propose, therefore, to divide Egyptian history into three periods,
each corresponding to the political supremacy of one town or province
over the whole of Egypt:--
"FIRST PERIOD, Memphite (the first ten dynasties). The supremacy of
Memphis and of the sovereigns furnished by her.
"SECOND PERIOD, Theban (from the eleventh to the twentieth dynasties
inclusive). Supremacy of Thebes and the Theban kings. This period is
divided into two sub-periods by the Shepherd dynasties.
"_a. The old Theban empire_, from the eleventh to the sixteenth
dynasties.
"_b. The new Theban empire_, from the sixteenth to the twentieth
dynasties.
"THIRD PERIOD, Sait (from the twenty-first to the thirtieth dynasties,
inclusive). Supremacy of Sais and the other cities of the Delta. This
period is divided into two by the Persian invasion:--
"_First Sait period_, from the twenty-first to the twenty-sixth
dynasties.
"_Second Sait period_, from the twenty-seventh to the thirtieth
dynasties."[54]
[54] _Histoire ancienne des Peuples de l'Orient_, p. 53. We
believe that the division proposed by M. Maspero is, in fact,
the best. It is the most suggestive of the truth as to the
successive displacements of the political centre and the
movement of history. We shall, however, have no hesitation in
making use of the terms _Ancient_, _Middle_, and _New Empire_,
as occasion arises.
Mariette places the accession of Ména or Menes at about the fiftieth
century before our era, while Bunsen and other Egyptologists bring
forward his date to 3,600 or 3,500 B.C. as they believe some of the
dynasties of Manetho to have been contemporary with each other.
Neither Mariette nor Maspero deny that Egypt, in the course of its
long existence, was often partitioned between princes who reigned in
Upper and Lower Egypt respectively; but, guided by circumstances
which need not be described here, they incline to believe that Manetho
confined himself to enumerating those dynasties which were looked upon
as the legitimate ones. The work of elimination which has been
attempted by certain modern _savants_, must have been undertaken, to a
certain extent, in Egypt itself; and some of the collateral dynasties
must have been effaced and passed over in silence, because the
monuments still remaining preserve the names of reigning families
which are ignored by history.
Whatever may be thought of this initial date, Egypt remains, as has
been so well said by M. Renan, "a lighthouse in the profound darkness
of remote antiquity." Its period of greatest power was long anterior
to the earliest traditions of the Greek race; the reign of Thothmes
III., who, according to a contemporary expression, "drew his frontiers
where he pleased," is placed by common consent in the seventeenth
century, B.C. The Egyptian empire then comprised Abyssinia, the
Soudan, Nubia, Syria, Mesopotamia, part of Arabia, Khurdistan, and
Armenia. Founded by the kings of the eighteenth dynasty, this
greatness was maintained by those of the nineteenth. To this dynasty
belonged Rameses II., the Sesostris of the Greeks, who flourished in
the fifteenth century. It was the superiority of its civilization,
even more than the valour of its princes and soldiers, which made
Egypt supreme over Western Asia.
This supremacy declined during the twenty-first and twenty-second
dynasties, but, at the same time, Egyptian chronology becomes more
certain as opportunities of comparison with the facts of Hebrew
history increase. The date of 980, within a year or two, may be given
with confidence as that of the accession of Sheshonk I., the
contemporary of Solomon and Rehoboam. From that date onwards, the
constant struggles between Egypt and its neighbours, especially with
Assyria, multiply our opportunities for synchronic comparison. In the
seventh century the country was opened to the Greeks, the real
creators of history, who brought with them their inquiring spirit and
their love for exactitude. After the accession of Psemethek I., the
founder of the twenty-sixth dynasty, in 656, our historical materials
are abundant. For that we must thank the Greek travellers who
penetrated everywhere, taking notes which they afterwards amplified
into narratives. It is a singular thing, that even as late as the
Ptolemies, when the power of the Macedonian monarchy was fully
developed, the Egyptians never seem to have felt the want of what we
call an _era_, of some definite point from which they could measure
the course of time and the progress of the centuries. "They were
satisfied with calculating by the years of the reigning sovereign, and
even those calculations had no certain point of departure. Sometimes
they counted from the commencement of the year which had witnessed the
death of his predecessor, sometimes from the day of his own
coronation. The most careful calculations will therefore fail to
enable modern science to restore to the Egyptians that which, in fact,
they never possessed."[55]
[55] MARIETTE, _Aperçu de l'Histoire d'Égypte_, p. 66.
Even thus summarily stated, these historical indications are enough to
show how little foundation there is for the opinion which was held by
the ancient Greeks, and too long accepted by modern historians. It
was, they said, from Ethiopia that Egyptian civilization had come. A
colony of Ethiopian priests from the island of Meroè in Upper Nubia,
had introduced their religion, their written characters, their art and
their civil institutions into the country. The exact opposite of this
is the truth. "It was the Egyptians who advanced up the banks of the
Nile to found cities, fortresses, and temples in Ethiopia; it was the
Egyptians who carried their civilization into the midst of savage
negro tribes. The error was caused by the fact that at one epoch in
the history of Egypt the Ethiopians played an important part.
"If it were true that Egypt owed its political existence to Ethiopia,
we should be able to find in the latter country monuments of a more
remote antiquity, and as we descended the Nile, we should find the
remains comparatively modern; but, strangely enough, the study of all
these monuments incontestably proves that the sequence of towns, holy
places, and tombs, constructed by the Egyptians on the banks of their
river, follow each other in such chronological order that the oldest
remains, the Pyramids, are found in the north, in Lower Egypt, near
the southern point of the Delta. The nearer our steps take us to the
cataracts of Ethiopia, the less ancient do the monuments become. They
show ever increasing signs of the decadence of art, of taste, and of
the love for beauty. Finally, the art of Ethiopia, such as its still
existing monuments reveal it to us, is entirely wanting in
originality. A glance is sufficient to tell us that it represents the
degeneracy only of the Egyptian style, that the spirit of Egyptian
forms has been weakly grasped, and that their execution is generally
mediocre."[56]
[56] BRUGSCH-BEY, _Histoire de l'Égypt_, pp. 6 and 7. Maspero's
_Histoire ancienne_, p. 382, may also be consulted upon the
character of the Ethiopian kingdom and the monuments of Napata.
A good idea of this process of degradation may be gained by
merely glancing through the plates to part v. of Lepsius's
_Denkmæler_; plate 6, for example, shows what the caryatid
became at Napata.
We may condense all these views into a simple and easily remembered
formula; we may say that _as we mount towards the springs of the Nile,
we descend the current of time_. Thebes is younger than Memphis, and
Meroè than Thebes. The river which Egypt worshipped, and by which the
walls of its cities were bathed, flowed from the centre of Africa,
from the south to the north; but the stream of civilization flowed in
the other direction, until it was lost in the country of the negro, in
the mysterious depths of Ethiopia. The springs of this latter stream
must be sought in that district where the waters of the Nile, as if
tired by their long journey, divide into several arms before falling
into the sea; in that district near the modern capital, over which
stretch the long shadows of the Pyramids.
§ 4. _The Constitution of Egyptian Society--Influence of that
Constitution upon Monuments of Art._
During the long sequence of centuries which we have divided into three
great periods, the national centre of gravity was more than once
displaced. The capital was at one time in Middle Egypt, at another in
Upper, and at a third period in Lower Egypt, in accordance with its
political necessities. At one period the nation had nothing to fear
from external enemies, at others it had to turn a bold front to Asia
or Ethiopia. At various times Egypt had to submit to her foreign foes;
to the shepherd invaders, to the kings of Assyria and Persia, to the
princes of Ethiopia, and finally to Alexander, to whom she lost her
independence never again to recover it. And yet it appears that the
character and social condition of the race never underwent any great
change. At the time of the pyramid-builders, Egypt was the most
absolute monarchy that ever existed, and so she remained till her
final conquest.
"Successor and descendant of the deities who once reigned over the
valley of the Nile, the king was the living manifestation and
incarnation of God: child of the sun (_Se Râ_), as he took care to
proclaim whenever he wrote his name, the blood of the gods flowed in
his veins and assured to him the sovereign power."[57] He was _the
priest_ above all others. Such a form of worship as that of Egypt,
required no doubt a large sacerdotal class, each member of which had
his own special function in the complicated and gorgeous ceremonies in
which he took part; but the king alone, at least in the principal
temples, had the right to enter the sanctuary and to open the door of
the kind of chapel in which the symbolical representation of the
divinity was kept; he alone saw the god face to face, and spoke to him
in the name of his people.[58] The pre-eminent dignity of this
priestly office did not, however, prevent the king from taking his
proper share in war or political affairs generally. The army of
scribes and various functionaries, whose titles may still be read upon
the most ancient monuments of the country, depended upon him for their
orders from one end of the country to the other, and in war, it was he
who led the serried battalions of the Egyptian army. The king was thus
a supreme pontif, the immediate chief of all civil and military
officers; and, as the people believed that his career was directed by
the gods with whom he held converse, he became to them a visible deity
and, in the words of an inscription, "the representative of Râ among
the living." His divinity, begun on earth, was completed and rendered
perpetual in another life. All the dead Pharaohs became gods, so that
the Egyptian pantheon obtained a new deity at the death of each
sovereign. The deceased Pharaohs thus constituted a series of gods to
whom the reigning sovereign would of course address himself when he
had anything to ask; hence the monuments upon which we find living
Pharaohs offering worship to their predecessors.[59]
[57] MASPERO, _Histoire ancienne_, p. 58. This affiliation of
the king to the god was more than a figure of speech. In an
inscription which is reproduced both at Ipsamboul and at
Medinet-Abou, Ptah is made to speak in the following terms of
Rameses II. and Rameses III. respectively: "I am thy father, as
a god I have begotten thee; all thy members are divine; when I
approached thy royal mother I took upon me the form of the
sacred ram of Mendes" (line 3rd). This curious text has lately
been interpreted by E. Naville (_Society of Biblical
Archæology_, vol. vii. pp. 119-138). The monarchy of the Incas
was founded upon an almost identical belief.
[58] See the account of the visit to Heliopolis of the
conquering Ethiopian, Piankhi-Mer-Amen; we shall quote the text
of this famous inscription in our chapter upon the Egyptian
temple.
[59] FR. LENORMANT, _Manuel d'Histoire ancienne_, t. 1, pp.
485-486. The most celebrated of these is the famous _Chamber of
Ancestors_ from Karnak, which is now preserved in the
_Bibliothèque Nationale_ at Paris.
[Illustration: FIG. 13.--Seti I. in his War-Chariot, bas-relief at
Thebes. (Champollion, pl. 297.)]
[Illustration: FIG. 14.--Rameses II. in adoration before Seti. From
Abydos (Mariette).]
The prestige which such a theory of royalty was calculated to give to
the Egyptian kings may easily be imagined. They obtained more than
respect; they were the objects of adoration, of idolatry. Brought up
from infancy in this religious veneration, to which their hereditary
qualities also inclined them, generation succeeded generation among
the Egyptians, without any attempt to rebel against the royal
authority or even to dispute it. Ancient Egypt, like its modern
descendant, was now and then the scene of military revolts. These were
generally provoked by the presence of foreign mercenaries, sometimes
by their want of discipline and licence, sometimes by the jealousy
which they inspired in the native soldiery; but never, from the time
of Menes to that of Tewfik-Pacha, has the civil population, whether of
the town or of the fields, shown any desire to obtain the slightest
guarantee for what we should call their rights and liberties. During
all those thousands of years not the faintest trace is to be
discovered of that spirit from which sprung the republican
constitutions of Greece and ancient Italy, a spirit which, in yet
later times, has led to the parliamentary governments of Christian
Europe. The Egyptian labourer or artisan never dreamt of calling in
question the orders of any one who might be master for the time.
Absolute obedience to the will of a single man--such was the constant
and instinctive national habit, and by it every movement of the social
machine, under foreign and native kings alike, was regulated.
From the construction of the pyramids of Cheops and Chephren, and the
cutting of a new canal between the two seas under Nekau, to the
Mahmoudieh canal of Mehemet-Ali and that abortive enterprise, the
barrage of the Nile, the only method thought of for obtaining the
necessary labour was compulsion.[60] An order is received by the
governor, who has it proclaimed from one village to another throughout
his province; next day the whole male population is driven, like a
troop of sheep, to the workshops. Each man carries a bag or basket
which holds his provisions for a fortnight or a month, as the case may
be; a few dry cakes, onions, garlic, and _Egyptian beans_, as the
Greeks called the species of almond which is contained in the fruit of
the lotus. Old men and children, all had to obey the summons. The more
vigorous and skilful among them dressed and put in place the blocks of
granite or limestone; the weakest were useful for the transport of the
rubbish to a distance, for carrying clay and water from the Nile to
the brickmakers, for arranging the bricks in the sun so that they
might be dried and hardened.
[60] The beaters for the great hunts which took place in the
Delta and the Fayoum were procured in the same fashion. These
hunts were among the favourite pleasures of the kings and the
great lords. See MASPERO, _Le Papyrus Mallet_, p. 58 (in
_Recueil de Travaux_, etc. t. 1).
[Illustration: FIG. 15.--Homage to Amenophis III. (From Prisse.[61])]
[61] The work to which we here refer is the _Histoire de l'Art
Égyptien d'après les Monuments_, 2 vols. folio. Arthus Bertrand,
1878. As the plates are not numbered, we can only refer to them
generally.
Under the stimulus of the rod, this multitude worked well and
obediently under the directions of the architect's foreman and of
skilled artisans who were permanently employed upon the work; they did
all that could be done by men without special education. At the end of
a certain period they were relieved by fresh levies from another
province, and all who had not succumbed to the hard and continuous
work, returned to their own places. Those who died were buried in
hasty graves dug in the sands of the desert by the natives of their
own village.
The massive grandeur of some of the Egyptian monuments is only to be
explained by this levy _en masse_ of every available pair of hands.
The kings of the ancient empire, at least, were unable to dispose of
those prisoners of war captured in myriads, in whole races, by the
Assyrian kings, and apparently employed by them in the construction of
Nineveh. Now, it is impossible that such works as the Pyramids could
have been begun and finished in the course of a single reign by free
and remunerated labour, even if it had the help of numerous slaves.
Certain arrangements in their design and the marvellously exact
execution of the more important details of the masonry, prove that
architects of great ability and skilful workmen were, indeed, employed
upon those gigantic works; but the great bulk of the task must have
required the collective effort of a whole population; of a population
devoting themselves night and day to complete the work when once
begun, like ants over their subterranean city or bees over their comb.
[Illustration: FIG. 16.--Construction of a Temple at Thebes. (From
Prisse.)]
Even supposing that history had been silent upon this subject, the
architect could easily divine, from these monuments themselves, how
they had been constructed. Cast your eyes upon the ruins of the
Athenian Acropolis; their dimensions will seem to you small in the
extreme if you compare them with the buildings of Egypt and Assyria;
on the other hand their workmanship is equally careful throughout; it
is as exact and perfect in the concealed parts of the structure as in
those which were to be visible, in the structural details as in the
ornamental painting and sculpture. By these signs you may recognize at
once, that, from its foundation to its completion, the whole work was
in the hands of artisans whom long practice had made perfect in their
trade, and that each single individual among them had made it a point
of honour to acquit himself worthily of the task entrusted to him. In
the gangs of docile labourers who succeeded each other in the
workshops of Memphis or Thebes, there was, of course, a certain
sprinkling of men who had become qualified by experience for the
special work upon which they were employed; but the great majority
were men suddenly taken from very different occupations, from the oar,
the plough, the management of cattle; who therefore could have nothing
but their unskilled labour to bestow. To such men as these a great
part of the work had perforce to be confided, in order that it might
be complete at the required time. In spite of the strictest
supervision, the almost religious care in the placing and fixing of
masonry, which might be fairly expected from the practised members of
a trade guild, could not be ensured. Hence the singular inequalities
and inconsistences which have been noticed in most of the great
Egyptian buildings; sometimes it is the foundations which are in
fault, and, by their sinking, have compromised the safety of the whole
building;[62] sometimes it is the built up columns of masonry, which,
when deprived by time of their coating of stucco, appear very poor
and mean. The infinite foresight and self-respect, the passionate love
for perfection for its own sake, which is characteristic of Greek work
at its best time, is not here to be found. But this defect was
inseparable from the system under which the Egyptian buildings were
erected.
[62] "The foundations of the great temple at Abydos, commenced
by Seti I. and finished by Rameses II., consist of but a single
course of generally ill-balanced masonry. Hence the settling
which has taken place, and the deep fissure which divides the
building in the direction of its major axis."--MARIETTE, _Voyage
dans la Haute-Égypte_, p. 59. The same writer speaks of Karnak
in a similar strain: "The Pharaonic temples are built, as a
rule, with extreme carelessness. The western pylon, for
instance, fell because it was hollow, which made the inclination
of the walls a source of weakness instead of
strength."--_Itineraire_, p. 179.
[Illustration: FIG. 17.--Columns in the Hypostyle Hall, Karnak.]
[Illustration: FIGS. 18, 19.--Scribes registering the yield of the
harvest. From a tomb at Sakkarah. (Boulak, 9-1/2 inches high. Drawn by
Bourgoin.)]
[Illustration: FIG. 20.--Colossi of Amenophis III. (statues of Memnon)
at Thebes.]
The absolute and dreaded master whose gesture, whose single word, was
sufficient to depopulate a province and to fill quarries and
workshops with thousands of men, the sovereign who, in spite of his
mortality, was looked up to by his people as one so near akin to the
gods as to be hardly distinguishable from them, the high priest and
father of his people, the king before whom all heads were bent to the
earth; filled with his own glory and majesty the buildings which he
caused to spring, as if by magic, from the earth. His effigy was
everywhere. Seated in the form of colossal statues in front of the
temples, in bas-reliefs upon pylons, upon the walls of porticos and
pillared halls, he was represented sometimes offering homage to the
gods, sometimes leading his troops to battle or bringing them home
victorious. The supreme efforts of architect and sculptor were
directed to constructing for their prince a tomb which should excel
all others in magnificence and durability, or to immortalizing him by
a statue which should raise its head as much above its rivals as the
royal power surpassed the power and dignity of ordinary men. The art
of Egypt was, in this sense, a monarchical art; and in so being it was
the direct expression of the sentiments and ideas of the society which
had to create it from its foundations.
[Illustration: FIG. 21.--Scribe registering merchandize. Sakkarah.
(9-1/2 inches high. Drawn by Bourgoin.)]
After the king came the priests, the soldiers, and the scribes or
royal functionaries, each receiving authority directly from the king
and superintending the execution of his orders. These three groups
formed what we may call the upper class of Egyptian society. The soil
was entirely in their hands. They possessed among them the whole
valley of the Nile, with the exception of the royal domain. The
agriculturists were mere serfs attached to the soil. They cultivated,
for a payment in kind, the lands belonging to the privileged classes.
They changed masters with the lands upon which they lived, which they
were not allowed to quit without the permission of the local
authorities.
Their position did not greatly differ from that of the modern fellahs,
who cultivate the Egyptian soil for the benefit of the effendis, beys,
and pachas or for that of the sovereign, who is still the greatest
landowner in the country.
[Illustration: FIG. 22.--Boatmen. Tomb of Ra-ka-pou, 5th dynasty.
(Boulak, 16 inches high. Drawn by Bourgoin.)]
The shepherds, the fishermen and boatmen of the Nile, the artisans and
shopkeepers of the cities were in a similar condition. They lived upon
their gains in the same way as the peasant upon the share of the
harvest which custom reserved for his use. As a natural consequence of
their life in a city and of the character of their occupations, small
traders and artisans enjoyed more liberty and independence, more power
of coming and going than the agriculturists, although legal rights
were the same in both cases. The burden of forced labour must have
pressed less heavily upon the latter class, and they must have had
better opportunities of escaping from it altogether.
In consequence of a mistaken interpretation of historic evidence, it
was long believed that the Egyptians had castes, like the Hindoos.
This notion has been dispelled by more careful study of their remains.
The vigorous separation of classes according to their social
functions, the enforced heredity of professions, and the prohibition
of intermarriage between the different groups, never obtained a
footing in Egypt. We often find, in Egyptian writings, two members of
a single family attached one to the civil service and the other to the
army, or the daughter of a general marrying the son of a priest. Nay,
it often happens that the offices of soldier and priest, of priest and
civil servant, or of civil servant and soldier, are united in the
person of a single individual. In families which did not belong to
these aristocratic classes there was, in all probability, more
heredity of occupation; in the ordinary course the paternal employment
fixed that of the children, but yet there was nothing approaching to
an absolute rule. The various trades were formed into corporations or
guilds, rather than castes in the strict sense of the word. From this
it resulted that great natural talents, fortunate circumstances, or
the favour of the sovereign could raise a man of the lowest class up
to the highest dignities of the state. In the latter days of the
monarchy we have an example of this in the case of Amasis, who, born
among the dregs of the population, finally raised himself to the
throne.[63] Such events were of frequent occurrence in all those
oriental monarchies where the will of the sovereign was the supreme
and undisputed law. Even in our own days, similar things have taken
place in Turkey and Persia to the surprise of none but Europeans. When
the master of all is placed so high above his fellow men that his
subjects seem mere human dust about his feet, his caprice is quite
sufficient to raise the most insignificant of its atoms to a level
with the most illustrious.
[63] HERODOTUS, ii. 172. For an earlier epoch, see the history
of a certain Ahmes, son of Abouna, as it is narrated upon his
sepulchral inscription, which dates from the reign of Amosis,
the founder of the eighteenth dynasty (DE ROUGÉ, _Mémoire sur
l'Inscription d'Ahmes, Chef des Nautoniers_, 4to. 1851, and
Brugsch, _Histoire d'Égypte_, t. i. p. 80). Starting as a
private soldier for the war against the Shepherds, undertaken
for the re-conquest of Avaris, he was noticed by the king for
his frequent acts of gallantry, and promoted until he finally
became something in the nature of high admiral.
[Illustration: FIG. 23.--Cattle Drovers. From the tomb of Ra-ka-pou,
Sakkarah, 5th dynasty. (Boulak. Drawn by Bourgoin.)]
[Illustration: FIG. 24.--Bakers. From a tomb. (Boulak, 9-1/2 inches
high. Bourgoin.)]
[Illustration: FIG. 25.--Women at a loom. From a tomb at Beni-Hassan.
(Champollion, 381 bis)]
[Illustration: FIG. 26.--Netting birds. From a tomb. (Boulak. Drawn by
Bourgoin.)]
The priests of the highest rank, the generals and officers of the army
and the great civil functionaries, while they made no effort to rival
the splendour of the royal creations, consecrated steles, images of
the deity, and chapels, at their own expense. It was upon their tombs,
however, that most of their care was lavished. These tombs furnish
numberless themes of great interest to the historian. The tombs of the
Memphite kings have not preserved for us anything that can fairly be
called sculpture. All that we know of the style and methods of that
art in those early times we owe to the burial-places which the members
of the governing classes were in the habit of preparing during their
lifetime in the necropolis of Memphis. We may say the same of the
early centuries of the Middle Empire. The Egypt of the great kings
belonging to the twelfth dynasty has been preserved for us upon the
tombs of Ameni and Num-Hotep, the governors of the _nomes_ in which
they were buried. It is to the burial chambers at Gizeh, at Sakkarah,
at Meidoum, and at Beni-Hassan that we must go for complete types of
sepulchral architecture at those epochs; to the statues in the
recesses of their massive walls and to the bas-reliefs in their narrow
chambers, we must turn for those features of early Egyptian
civilization which remained for many centuries without material
change; by these monuments we are enabled to build up piece by piece a
trustworthy representation of the Egyptian people both in their
labours and in their pleasures. Finally it is from these tombs of
private individuals that the best works of Egyptian artists have been
obtained, the works in which they approached most nearly to the ideal
which they pursued for so many centuries.
[Illustration: FIG. 27.--Shepherds in the fields. From a tomb at
Sakkarah. (Boulak. 8-3/4 inches high. Drawn by Bourgoin.)]
[Illustration: FIG. 28.--Winnowing corn. From a tomb at Sakkarah.
(Boulak. Drawn by Bourgoin.)]
Thanks to these monuments erected at the expense of the great lords
and rich burghers of Egypt, thanks also to the climate and to the
desert sand which has preserved them without material injury, the art
of Egypt appears to us more comprehensive and varied than that of any
other nation of which we shall have to treat; than that of Assyria for
instance, which represents little but scenes of battle and conquest. A
faithful mirror of Egyptian society, it has preserved for us an
exhaustive record of the never-ceasing activity which created and
preserved the wealth of the country; it has not even neglected the
games and various pleasures in which the laborious Egyptian sought for
his well earned repose. The king indeed, preserved his first place by
the importance of the religious buildings which he raised, by the size
of his tomb, and by the number and dimensions of the reproductions of
his features; reproductions which show him in the various aspects
demanded by the complex nature of the civilization over which he
presided. But in the large number of isolated figures, groups, and
scenes which have come down to us, we have illustrations of all
classes that helped in the work of national development, from the
ploughman with his ox, to the scribe crouching, cross-legged, upon
his mat, from the shepherd with his flock or the hunter pushing his
shallop through the brakes of papyrus, to the directors of the great
public works and the princes of the blood who governed conquered
provinces or guarded the frontiers of the country at the head of ever
faithful armies.
[Illustration: Height 12-3/4 inches.
Height 6-1/3 inches.
FIG. 29.--Herdsman. From a tomb at Sakkarah, 5th dynasty. (Boulak.)]
The art of Egypt resembled that of Greece in being a complete and
catholic art, seeing everything and taking an interest in everything.
It was sensitive to military glory, and at the same time it did not
scorn to portray the peaceful life of the fields. It set itself with
all sincerity to interpret the monarchical sentiment in its most
enthusiastic and exaggerated form, but while it placed kings and
princes above and almost apart from humanity, it did not forget the
"humble and meek," on the contrary, it frankly depicted them in their
professional attitudes, with all those ineffaceable characteristics,
both of face and figure which the practice of some special trade so
certainly imparts. Looked at from this point of view Egyptian art was
popular, it might even be called democratic, but that such a phrase
would sound curious when used in connection with the most absolute
monarchy which the world has ever seen.
This absolute power, however, does not seem, speaking generally, to
have been put in force in a hard or oppressive manner either by the
king himself or by his agents. M. Maspero and others who, like him,
live in intimate communion with the ancient Egyptians, declare that
they were by no means unhappy. They tell us that the confidences
whispered to them in the pictured tomb-houses of Sakkarah and Memphis
complain of no misery, from the time of Mena to that of Psemethek,
except during a few violent reigns and a few moments of national
crisis. The country suffered only on those comparatively rare
occasions when the sceptre passed into the hands of an incapable
master or into those of some insatiable warrior who thought only of
satisfying his own ambition, and sacrificed to the day the resources
of the future. Egypt, with her river, her teeming soil and her
splendid climate, found life easy as long as she enjoyed an easy and
capable administration. She then gave to her princes almost without an
effort all they could desire or demand.
It was one of the fundamental principles of Egyptian morality that
those who were powerful should treat the poor and feeble with kindness
and consideration. Their sepulchral inscriptions tell us that their
kings and princes of the blood, their feudal lords and functionaries
of every grade, made it a point of honour to observe this rule. They
were not content with strict justice, they practised a bountiful
charity which reminds us of that which is the chief beauty of the
Christian's morality. The "Book of the Dead"--that passport for
Egyptians into the other world which is found upon every mummy--gives
us the most simple, and at the same time the most complete description
of this virtue. "I have given bread to the hungry, I have given water
to the thirsty, I have clothed the naked ... I have not calumniated
the slave in the ears of his master." The lengthy panegyrics of which
some epitaphs consist, are, in reality no more than amplifications of
this theme. "As for me, I have been the staff of the old man, the
nurse of the infant, the help of the distressed, a warm shelter for
all who were cold in the Thebaïd, the bread and sustenance of the
down-trodden, of whom there is no lack in Middle Egypt, and their
protector against the barbarians."[64] The prince Entef relates that
he has "arrested the arm of the violent, used brute force to those who
used brute force, showed hauteur to the haughty, and lowered the
shoulders of those who raised them up," that he himself on the other
hand, "was a man in a thousand, wise, learned, and of a sound and
truthful judgment, knowing the fool from the wise man, paying
attention to the skilful and turning his back upon the ignorant, ...
the father of the miserable and the mother of the motherless, the
terror of the cruel, the protector of the disinherited, the defender
of those whose goods were coveted by men stronger than themselves, the
husband of the widow, the asylum of the orphan."[65]
[64] Louvre, c. i. Cf. MASPERO, _un Gouverneur de Thèbes au
temps de la douzième dynastie_.
[65] Quoted by MASPERO, _Conférence sur l'Histoire des Âmes dans
l'Égypte ancienne, d'après les Monuments du Musée du Louvre_
(_Association scientifique de France, Bulletin hebdomadaire_,
No. 594; _23 Mars, 1879_).
[Illustration: FIG. 30.--From the tomb of Menofre, at Sakkarah.
(Champollion, pl. 408.)]
Amoni, hereditary prince of the nome of Meh, talks in the same
fashion. "I have caused sorrow to no youth under age, I have despoiled
no widow, nor have I repelled any labourer, I have imprisoned no
shepherd, I have never taken for the labour gangs the serfs of him who
had but five, there have been no paupers, nor has any man or woman
starved in my time; for, although there have been years of scarcity, I
have caused all the tillable land in Meh to be tilled, from the
northern frontier to that of the south, and have made such
arrangements and such provision for the people that there has been no
famine among them; I have given to the widow and to the married woman
alike, and I have never made any distinction between the great and the
small in my gifts."[66]
[66] Translated by MASPERO (_la Grande Inscription de
Beni-Hassan_ in the _Recueil de Travaux relatifs à la Philologie
et à l'Archéologie égyptienne et assyrienne_ (t. i. pp.
173-174)).
Doubtless these laudatory self-descriptions may be exaggerated in some
respects; hyperbole has ever been a favourite figure with the
composers of epitaphs, and those of Egypt formed no exception to the
rule. As M. Maspero remarks in connection with this question, "The man
as he is, often differs very greatly from the man as he thinks he is."
But we may safely say that the Egyptian realized some portion of the
ideal which he set before himself. If only to obtain admiration and
esteem, he would practice, to a certain extent, the virtues of which
he boasted. Many signs combine to tell us that the Egyptians of all
classes possessed a large fund of tenderness and good-will. The master
was often both clement and charitable; the peasant, the servant, and
the slave, were patient and cheerful, and that in spite of the fatigue
of labours which could never enrich them. In a country so favoured by
nature, men had so few wants that they had no experience of all that
is implied by that doleful word poverty, with us. The pure skies and
brilliant sunshine, the deep draughts of Nile water, and the moments
of repose under the shadows of the sycamores, the freshness of the
evening bath, the starry night with its reinvigorating breezes, were
all enjoyments which the poorest could share.
We need feel no surprise therefore at the vivacity with which one of
the most learned of the historians of Egypt, Brugsch-Bey, protests
against the common misconception of the Egyptians "as a race grave,
serious, morose, exclusive, religious, thinking much of the next
world, and little of this; living, in a word, like the Trappists of
former days. Are we to believe," he cries, "that this majestic river
and the fertile soil through which it flows, this azure sky with its
unclouded sun, produced a nation of living mummies, a race of solemn
philosophers who looked upon life in this world as a burden to be
shuffled off as quickly as possible? Travel over Egypt; examine the
scenes painted and sculptured upon the walls of sepulchral chambers;
read the inscriptions carved upon stone or traced in ink upon the
rolls of papyrus, and you will find yourself compelled to modify the
false notions you have imbibed as to the Egyptian philosophers.
Nothing could be more cheerful, more amusing or more frank, than the
social life of this pleasure-loving people. Far from wishing to die,
they prayed to the gods for a long life and a happy old age; they
prayed that, 'if possible, they might live to the perfect age of one
hundred and ten.' They were addicted to all kinds of pleasures. They
drank, they sang, they danced, they were fond of excursions into the
country, where the sports of hunting and fishing were specially
reserved for the upper class. As a natural effect of this desire for
enjoyment, gay conversation and pleasantry which was sometimes rather
free, jokes and what we should call chaff, were much in vogue: even
their tombs were not sacred from their desire for a jest."[67]
[67] BRUGSCH-BEY, _Histoire d'Égypte_, pp. 14, 15.
The worst government, the sternest oppression, could never extinguish
this natural gaiety; it was too intimately connected with the climate
and the natural conditions of the country, conditions which had never
changed since the days of Menes. Never were the Egyptians more roughly
treated than under Mehemet Ali and the late viceroy; their condition
was compared, with justice, to that of the negroes in Carolina and
Virginia, who, before the American civil war, laboured under the whips
of their drivers, and enjoyed no more of the fruits of their own
labour than what was barely sufficient to keep life in their bodies.
Torn from their homes and kept by force in the public works, the
fellahs died in thousands; those who remained in the fields had to pay
the taxes one or two years in advance; they were never out of debt,
nominally, to the public treasury, and the rattan of the collector
extorted from them such savings as they might make during years of
plenty, up to the last coin. But still laughter did not cease in
Egypt! Look, for instance, at the children in the streets of Cairo who
let out mounts to sight-seeing Europeans. Let the tourist trot or
gallop as he will, when he stops he finds his donkey-boy by his side,
full of spirits and good humour; and yet perhaps while running behind
his "fare" he has been making his midday meal upon a few grains of
maize tied up in a corner of his shirt.
[Illustration: FIG. 31.--Water Tournament, from a tomb at
Khoum-el-Ahmar. (From Prisse.)]
In 1862 I returned from Asia Minor in company with M. Edmond
Guillaume, the architect, and M. Jules Delbet, the doctor, of our
expedition to Ancyra. We took the longest way home, by Syria and
Egypt. At Cairo, Mariette, after having shown us the museum at Boulak,
wished to introduce us to his own "Serapeum." He took us for a night
to his house in the desert, and showed us the galleries of the tomb of
Apis by torchlight. We passed the next afternoon in inspecting those
excavations in the necropolis of Sakkarah which have led to the
recovery of so many wonders of Egyptian art. The works were carried on
by the labour of four hundred children and youths, summoned by the
_corvée_ for fifteen days at a time from some district, I forget
which, of Middle Egypt. At sunset these young labourers quitted their
work and seated themselves in groups, according to their native
villages, upon the still warm sand. Each drew from a little sack,
containing his provision for two or three weeks, a dry cake; those
whose parents were comfortably off had also, perhaps, a leek or a raw
onion. But even for such _gourmands_ as those, the repast was not a
long one. Supper over, they chattered for a time, and then went to
rest; the bigger and stronger among them took possession of some
abandoned caves, the others stretched themselves upon the bare earth;
but, before going to sleep they sang; they formed themselves into two
choirs who alternated and answered one another, and this they kept up
to an advanced hour of the night.
[Illustration: FIG. 32.--Mariette's House.]
I shall never forget the charm of that night in the desert, nor the
weird aspect of the moonlight upon the sea of sand. Were it not that
no star was reflected upon its surface, and that no ray scintillated
as it does even on the calmest sea, we might have thought ourselves in
mid ocean. Sleep came to me reluctantly. While I listened to the
alternate rise and fall of the chorus outside, I reflected upon how
little those children required; upon the slender wants of their
fathers and mothers, who, like them, sink into their nightly sleep
with a song upon their lips. I compared this easy happiness with the
restless and complicated existence which we should find, at the end
of a few days, in the ambitious cities of the West, and I regretted
that our year of travel, our twelve months of unrestrained life in the
desert or the forest, had come to an end.
§ 5.--_The Egyptian Religion and its Influence upon the Plastic Arts._
We have still to notice the profoundly religious character of Egyptian
art. "The first thing that excites our surprise, when we examine the
reproductions of Egyptian monuments which have been published in our
day, is the extraordinary number of scenes of sacrifice and worship
which have come down to us. In the collection of plates which we owe
to contemporary archæologists, we can hardly find one which does not
contain the figure of some deity, receiving with impassive countenance
the prayers or offerings of a prostrate king or priest. One would say
that a country with so many sacred pictures and sculptures, must have
been inhabited by gods, and by just enough men for the service of
their temples.[68] The Egyptians were a devout people. Either by
natural tendency or by force of education, they saw God pervading the
whole of their universe; they lived in Him and for Him. Their
imaginations were full of His greatness, their words of His praise,
and their literature was in great part inspired by gratitude for the
benefits which He showered upon them. Most of their manuscripts which
have come down to us treat of religious matters, and even in those
which are ostensibly concerned only with profane subjects,
mythological names and allusions occur on every page, almost at every
line."[69]
[68] The saying of one of the characters of Petronius might be
applied to Egypt: "This country is so thickly peopled with
divinities that it is easier to find a god than a man." The
place held by religious observances in the daily life of Egypt
is clearly indicated by HERODOTUS (ii. 37): "The Egyptians," he
says, "are very religious; they surpass all other nations in the
adoration with which they regard their deities."
[69] MASPERO, _Histoire ancienne_, pp. 26, 27.
An examination into the primitive religious beliefs of the Egyptians
is full of difficulty. In discovering new papyri, in determining the
signification of signs which have been puzzling egyptologists, the
inquirer will undoubtedly do good work, and will establish facts which
are sure not to lack interest and even importance; but even when
documents abound and when every separate word they contain is
understood, even then it is very difficult to penetrate to the root of
their meaning. A glimpse will be caught of it, I admit, by one of
those efforts of inductive divination which distinguish modern
research; but even then it will remain to explain the primitive and
only half-understood notions of five or six thousand years ago in the
philosophical vocabularies of to-day. It is here that the most
difficult and irksome part of the task begins. We who represent the
old age, or, perhaps, the prime, of humanity, think of these matters
and speak of them as abstractions, while the Egyptians, who were
children compared to us, thought of them under concrete forms. Their
very ideals were material, more or less vague and refined perhaps, but
still material. Their only conception of a deity was of a figure
larger, more vigorous and more beautiful than mortals; the powers and
attributes with which it was endowed were all physical. If we attempt
to express their conceptions in abstract terms, we falsify their
meaning. We cannot avoid altering it to a certain extent, for exact
equivalents are not to be found, and, in spite of all precautions, we
give to the confused and childish ideas of ancient religion, a
precision which is entirely modern.
[Illustration: FIG. 33.--Amenhotep or Amenophis III. presented by Phré
to Amen-Ra; Thebes. (Champollion, pl. 344.)]
If, under these reserves, we study the Egyptian theology in its most
learned and refined form--namely, that which it attained during the
eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties--we shall dimly perceive that it
implies a belief in the unity of the First Cause of all life. But this
belief is obscured behind the numerous gods who are, in fact,
emanations from its substance and manifestations of its indefatigable
activity. It is in the person of these gods that the divine essence
takes form. Each of them has his own name, his own figure, and his own
special share in the management of the universe; each of them presides
over the production of some particular order of phenomena and insures
their regularity. These gods are related to each other as fathers,
mothers, and sons. They thus form a vast hierarchy of beings, superior
to man, and each enjoying a dignity corresponding to his rank in the
series. There is, so to speak, most of divinity in those who are
nearest to the "one God in heaven or earth who was not begotten."
These deities are divided into groups of three, each group
constituting a family, like those of earth, consisting of father,
mother, and son. Thus from triad to triad, the concealed god develops
his sovereign powers to all eternity, or, to use an expression dear
to the religious schools of ancient Egypt, "he creates his own
members, which are themselves gods."[70]
[70] This formula frequently occurs in the texts. To cite but
one occasion, we find upon a Theban invocation to Amen,
translated by P. PIERRET (_Recueil de Travaux relatifs à la
Philologie et à l'Archéologie égyptienne et assyrienne_, t. i.
p. 70), at the third line of the inscription: "Sculptor, thou
modelest thine own members; thou begettest them, not having
thyself been begotten."