How should the science of comparative religion class this form of

faith? Should it be called polytheism or pantheism? The answer is,

perhaps, not of great importance, and this is hardly the place for its

discussion. It is certain that, practically, the Egyptians were

polytheists. The Egyptian priests, indeed, had, by dint of long

reflection, arrived at the comprehension, or at least at the

contemplation, of that First Cause which had started the river of

life--that inexhaustible stream of which the Nile with its fertilising

waves was the concrete image--in its long journey across time and

space. But the devotion of the people themselves never succeeded in

mounting above the minor divinities, above those intermediaries in

whom the divine principle and attributes became personified and put on

the tangibility of body necessary to make them intelligible to

childish understandings. So, too, was it with artists, and for still

more powerful reasons; as by forms only could they express the ideas

which they had conceived. Even in those religions which are most

clearly and openly monotheistic and spiritual, such as Christianity,

art has done something of the same kind. Aided in secret by one of the

most powerful instincts of the human soul, it has succeeded, in spite

of all resistance and protestation, in giving plastic expression to

those parts of our belief which seem least fitted for such treatment;

and it has caused those methods of expression to be so accepted by us

that we see nothing unnatural in the representation under the features

of an old man, of the first Person of the Trinity,--of that Jehovah

who, in the Old Testament, proscribed all graven images with such

impartial rigour; who, in the Evangel, described Himself as "the Truth

and the Life."

In Egypt, both sculptors and painters could multiply their images to

infinity without coming into collision with dogma, without provoking

the regrets or censures of its most severe interpreters. Doctrine did

not condemn these personifications, even when it had been refined and

elaborated by the speculative theologians of Thebes and Heliopolis.

In the interior of the temples, there was a small class of mystics who

took pleasure in contemplating "the 'One' who exists by his own

essential power, the only being who substantially exists." Even then

men tried, as they have often done since, to define the undefinable,

to grasp the incomprehensible, to perceive the supreme "I AM" through

the shifting and transparent veil of natural phenomena. But those

refined metaphysics never touched and influenced the crowd, and never

will. The deity, in order to be perceived by them and to touch their

feelings, must have his unity broken; he must, if the expression be

admissible, be cut up into morsels for them.

By a process of "abstraction" which is as old as religion itself, the

human intelligence is led to consider separately each of the qualities

of existence, each of the forces which it perceives to be at work

either within man himself or in the exterior world. At first it thinks

those forces and qualities are distributed impartially to all

creation. It confounds existence with life. Hence the reign of

_fetishism_, when man believes, as young children do, that thought,

passion, and volition like his own, are to be found in everything he

meets. His own image seems to him reflected as in a mirror with a

thousand converging facets, and he is unable to distinguish the real

condition of things outside it.

Certain celestial and terrestrial bodies make a particularly strong

impression upon his mind by their size, their beauty, by their evil or

beneficial effects upon himself. They fill him with more than the

average gratitude, admiration, or terror. Driven by the illusion which

possesses him, he places the origin of those qualities which seem to

him the highest and most important, in the bodies which have made so

deep an impression upon his senses; to them he attributes the friendly

or hostile influences which alternately excite his desire and his

fear. According to circumstances a fetish might be a mountain, a rock

or a river, a plant or an animal. It might be those heavenly bodies

which exercised much more influence over the life of primitive man

than they do over us; it might be the moon and stars, which tempered

the darkness of the night and diminished its terrors; it might be the

cloud, from whose bosom came rain and thunder; above all, it might be

the sun which returned every morning to light and warm the world.

Differences of climate and race had their modifying effect, but

everywhere one common characteristic is to be found. It was always to

some material and visible object that the human intellect referred

those forces and qualities which it drew from its own consciousness;

forces which, when thus united with something tangible, constituted

the first types of those divine beings whom mankind have so long

adored, to whom they have turned for ages in their hope and fear.

As the years passed away, man advanced beyond his primitive

conceptions. He did not entirely renounce them--we may indeed see

reminiscences of them all around us--but he superimposed others upon

them which were more complex. His powers of observation, still

imperfect though they were, began to insinuate into his mind a

disbelief in the activity of inanimate matter, and those objects which

were nearest to him, which he could touch with his hand, were the

first victims of his disenchantment. Thus began a long course of

intellectual development, the result of which we know, although the

various stages of its progress are difficult to follow at this

distance of time. It appears certain, however, that star worship

formed the transition between _fetishism_ and _polytheism_. Men no

longer attributed vital forces and pre-eminent qualities generally to

bodies with which they themselves were in immediate contact, to stones

and trees; but they found no difficulty in continuing to assign them

to those great luminaries whose distance and beauty placed them, so to

speak outside the material world. As they gradually deprived inanimate

matter of the properties with which they had once gifted it, they

sought for new objects to which they might attach those properties.

These they found in the stars which shone in the firmament century

after century, and knew neither old age nor death; and especially in

the most brilliant, the most beneficent, and the most necessary of

them all, in that sun whose coming they awaited every morning with an

impatience which must once have been mixed with a certain amount of

anxiety.

The attributes which awakened intelligence had taken away from the

inanimate objects of the world could not be left floating in space.

They became gradually and imperceptibly grouped in men's minds around

the great luminary of day, and a bond of union was found for the

different members of the group by endowing the sun with a personality

modelled upon that of man. This operation was favoured by the

constitution of contemporary language, by its idioms made up entirely

of those images and metaphors which, by their frank audacity, surprise

and charm us in the works of the early poets. It commenced with the

first awakening of thought, when man endowed all visible nature with

the bounding life which he felt in his own veins. No effort of

intelligence was required for its commencement or for its prosecution.

The sun became a young hero advancing, full of pride and vigour, upon

the path prepared for him by Aurora; a hero who pursued his daily path

in spite of all obstacle or hindrance, who, when evening came, went to

his rest amid all the glories of an eastern sunset, and amid the

confidence of all that after his hours of sleep he would take up his

eternal task with renewed vigour. He was an invincible warrior. He was

sometimes an angry master, whose glance killed and devoured. He was

above all the untiring benefactor of mankind, the nurse and father of

all life. Whether as Indra or as Amen-Ra, it was the same cry that

went up to him from Egypt and Hindostan; the prayers which we find in

the Vedas and in the papyri, breathe the same sentiments and were

addressed to the same god.[71]

[71] See the fine hymns quoted and translated by M. Maspero in

his _Histoire ancienne_, pp. 30-37.

This solar god and the divinities who resemble him, form the

transition from the simple fetish to complete deities, to those gods

who played such an important part in the Egyptian religion, and

attained to their highest and most complete development in the

Hellenic mythology. In some respects, the luminous globe of the sun

with its compulsory course, belonged to the same category as the

material objects which received the first worship of humanity. But its

brilliance, its tranquil and majestic movement, and the distance which

conceals its real substance from the eye of man, allowed his

imagination to endow it with the purest and noblest characteristics

which the finest examples of humanity could show; while the phenomena

which depend upon its action are so numerous that there was no

hesitation in assigning to it qualities and energies of the most

various kinds.

This type when once established was used for the creation of other

deities, which were all, so to speak, cast in the same mould. As the

intellect became more capable of abstraction and analysis, the

personality and moral individuality of these gods gradually threw off

its astral or physical characteristics, although it never lost all

trace of their existence. It resulted that, both in Egypt and in

Greece, there were deities who were mere entities, the simple

embodiment of some power, some quality, or some virtue. It requires

all the subtle _finesse_ of modern criticism to seek out and

distinguish the obscure roots which attach these divinities to the

naturalistic beliefs of earlier ages. Sometimes absolute certainty is

not to be attained, but we may safely say that a race is polytheistic

when we find these abstract deities among their gods, such deities as

the Ptah, Amen, and Osiris of the Egyptians, and the Apollo and Athenè

of the Greeks.[72]

[72] Several of the bronzes which we reproduce may belong to the

Ptolemaic epoch; but they are repetitions of types and

attributes which had been fixed for many centuries by tradition.

It is in this capacity chiefly that we reproduce them, as

examples of those forms which seemed to the Egyptian imagination

to offer the most satisfactory emblems of their gods.

[Illustration: FIG. 34.--Amen or Ammon, from a bronze in the Louvre.

Height 22·04 inches.]

We may, then, define polytheism as the partition of the highest

attributes of life between a limited number of agents. The imagination

of man could not give these agents life without at the same time

endowing them with essential natural characteristics and with the

human form, but, nevertheless, it wished to regard them as stronger,

more beautiful and less ephemeral than man. The system had said its

last word and was complete, when it had succeeded in embodying in some

divine personality each of those forces whose combined energy produces

movement in the world or guarantees its duration.

When religious evolution follows its normal course, the work of

reflection goes on, and in course of time makes new discoveries. It

refers, by efforts of conjecture, all phenomena to a certain number of

causes, which it calls gods. It next perceives that these causes, or

gods, are of unequal importance, and so it constitutes them into a

hierarchy. Still later it begins to comprehend that many of these

causes are but different names for one thing, that they form but one

force, the application of a single law. Thus by reduction and

simplification, by logic and analysis, is it carried on to recognize

and proclaim the unity of all cause. And thus monotheism succeeds to

polytheism.

[Illustration: FIG. 35.--Ptah, from a bronze in the Louvre. Actual

size.]

In Egypt, religious speculation arrived on the threshold of this

doctrine. Its depths were dimly perceived, and it was even taught by

the select class of priests who were the philosophers of those days;

but the monotheistic conception never penetrated into the minds of the

great mass of the people.[73] Moreover, by the very method in which

Egyptian mythology described it, it was easily adapted to the national

polytheism, or even to fetish worship. The theory of emanations

reconciled everything. The different gods were but the different

qualities of the eternal substance, the various manifestations of one

creative force. These qualities and energies were revealed by being

imported into the world of form. They took finite shape and were made

comprehensible to the intellect of man by their mysterious birth and

generation. It was necessary, if the existence of the gods were to be

brought home to mankind, that each of them should have a form and a

domicile. Imagination therefore did well in commencing to distinguish

and define the gods; artists were piously occupied when they pursued

the same course. They gave precision of contour to the forms roughly

sketched, and by the established definition which they gave to each

divine figure, we might almost say that they created the gods.

[73] In his work entitled _Des deux Yeux du Disque solaire_, M.

GRÉBAUT seems to have very clearly indicated how far we are

justified in saying that Egyptian religious speculation at times

approached monotheism (_Recueil de Travaux, etc._, t. i. p.

120).

[Illustration: FIG. 36.--Osiris, from a bronze in the Louvre. Height

22·8 inches.]

Their task was, in one sense, more difficult than that of the Greek

artists. When newly born Greek art first began to make representations

of Greek deities, the work of intellectual analysis and abstraction

had already come to a state of maturity which it never reached in

Egypt. The divinities were fewer in number and consequently more fixed

and decided in their individual characteristics. The Egyptian

polytheism was always more mixed, more strongly tinged with fetishism

than that of Greece. Even in those centuries in which the ideas of the

Egyptian people were most elevated and refined, the three successive

stages, which are always found in the development of religious life,

co-existed in the mind of the nation. A few more or less isolated

thinkers were already seeking to formulate monotheism. The _élite_ of

the nation--the king, the priest, and the military class--were adoring

Amen and Ptah, Khons or Khonsu, Mouth, Osiris and Horus, Sekhet, Isis,

Nephtis and many other divinities; all more or less abstract in their

nature, and presiding over special phenomena. As for the lower orders

of the people, they knew the names of these deities and associated

themselves with the great public honours which were paid to them; but

their homage and their faith were more heartily rendered to such

concrete and visible gods as the sacred animals, as the bulls Apis and

Mnevis, the goat of Mendes, the ibis, the hawk, &c. None of the

peculiarities of Egyptian civilization struck Greek travellers with

more amazement than this semiworship of animals.[74]

[74] HERODOTUS, ii. 75-86.

[Illustration: FIG. 37.--The goddess Bast. (From a bronze in the

Louvre. Actual Size.)]

Later theology has succeeded in giving more or less subtle and

specious explanations of these forms of worship. Each of these animals

has been assigned, as symbol or attribute, to one of the greater

deities. As for ourselves we have no doubt that these objects of

popular devotion were no more than ancient fetishes. In the long

prehistoric centuries, while the Egyptian race was occupied in making

good its possession of the Nile valley and bringing it into

cultivation, imagination deified these animals, some for the services

which they rendered, others for the terror which they inspired; and it

was the same with certain vegetables.

We find traces of this phenomenon, which at first seems so

inexplicable, among the other races of antiquity, but it is nowhere

else so marked as it is in Egypt. When Egypt, after being for three

centuries subject to the influence and supremacy of the Greek genius,

had lost all but the shadow of its former independence and national

life; when all the energy and intellectual activity which remained to

it was concentrated at the Greco-Syrian rather than Egyptian

Alexandria, the ancient religion of the race lost all its highest

branches.[75] The aspirations towards monotheism took a form that was

either philosophical and Platonic or Christian; and as for the

cultivated spirits who wished to continue the personification of the

eternal forces of the world and of the laws which govern them, these

laws and forces presented themselves to their minds in the forms which

had been figured and described by the sculptors, painters, and writers

of Greece. They accepted, without hesitation or dispute, the numbers

and physical characteristics of the divine types of Greece. From end

to end of the habitable earth, as the Greeks boasted, the gods of the

Hellenic pantheon absorbed and assimilated all those of other

nationalities; within the boundaries of the Roman Empire, at least,

its polytheism became a kind of universal religion for civilized

humanity, and was adopted by nations of the most diverse origin and

language. The lower classes alone, who read neither Homer nor Hesiod

and were unable to admire the statues of the Greek sculptors, were

kept free from the powerful and softening influence of poetry and art.

They guarded with obstinacy the ancient foundations of their early

faith, and in the void left by the disappearance of the national gods,

their primitive beliefs seem to have put on a new life and to have

enjoyed a restored _prestige_. Thus we may see, in forest clearings,

the ancient but still vigorous stumps of great trees which have been

felled send out fresh shoots to renew their youth.

[75] We do not mean to say that the higher qualities of the

Egyptian religion were then altogether lost. In Roman Egypt the

fetish superstitions were no doubt predominant, but still it had

not lost all that theological erudition which it had accumulated

by its own intellectual energy. In an inscription cut in the

time of Philip the Arab, we find an antique hymn transcribed in

hieroglyphs upon the wall of a temple. We find abstract and

speculative ideas in all those Egyptian books which have come

down to us, in a form which betrays the last two centuries of

the Empire. Alexandria had its Egyptian Serapeum by the side of

its Greek one. Monuments are to be found there which are

Egyptian in every particular. Gnosticism was particularly

successful in Egypt, which was predestined to accept it by the

whole of its past. Certain doctrines of Plotinus are thus best

explained. More than one purely Egyptian notion may be found

interpreted in the works of Alexandrian philosophers and in the

phraseology of Greek philosophy. The principal sanctuaries did

not allow their rites and ceremonies to fall into disuse.

Although Thebes was nothing but a heap of ruins, a dead city

visited for its relics of the past, the worship of Vulcan, that

is of Ptah, at Memphis, was carried on up to the establishment

of Christianity. That of Isis, at Philæ, lasted until the time

of Justinian. Diocletian negotiated a treaty with the Blemmyes,

those people of Nubia who were at one time such redoubtable

soldiers, which guaranteed to them the free use of that temple.

It was not converted into a church until after the destruction

of the Blemmyes by Silco and the Christian kings of Ethiopia.

The old religion and theology of the Egyptians did not expire in

a single day. It was no more killed by the Roman conquest than

it was by that of the Ptolemies. But although its rites did not

cease, and some of its elaborate doctrines still continued to be

transmitted, its vitality had come to an end. It exercised some

remains of influence only on condition of being melted down and

re-modelled in the crucible of Greek philosophy. A little

_coterie_ of thinkers set themselves to complete this

transfusion, but the great mass of the people returned to simple

practices which had been sanctified by thousands of years, and

formed nearly the whole of their religion.

This persistence, this apparent recrudescence of fetishism made itself

felt in Egypt alone. It amazed and scandalized both pagans and

Christians during the early centuries of Christianity. They mocked at

a people who "hardly dared to bite a leek or an onion; who adored

divinities which grew in their own gardens,"[76] and a god which was

nothing but a "beast wallowing on a purple carpet."[77] Guided by a

more critical knowledge of the past, we are now better able to

understand the origin of these beliefs and the secret of their long

duration. We are enabled to account for them by that inexperience

which falsifies all the judgments of infancy, in the race as well as

in the individual; we see that they are the exaggeration of a natural

sentiment, which becomes honourable and worthy of our sympathy when it

is addressed to the useful and laborious helpers of man, to domestic

animals, for instance, such as the cow and the draught ox.

[76] Porrum et cæpe nefas violare et frangere morsu.

O Sanctas gentes, quibus hæc nascuntur in hortis

Numina!--JUVENAL, xv. 9-11.

[77] CLEMENS ALEXANDRINUS, quoted by Maspero, _Histoire

ancienne_, p. 46.

It would be interesting to know why these beliefs were so curiously

tenacious of life in Egypt; perhaps the reason is to be found in the

prodigious antiquity of Egyptian civilization. That civilization was

the oldest which the world has seen, the least remote from the day of

man's first appearance upon the earth. It may therefore be supposed to

have received more deeply, and maintained more obstinately, those

impressions which characterize the infancy of men as well as of

mankind. Add to this, that other races in their efforts to emerge from

barbarism, were aided and incited by the example of races which had

preceded them on the same road. The inhabitants of the Nile Valley, on

the other hand, were alone in the world for many centuries; they had

to depend entirely upon their own internal forces for the

accomplishment of their emancipation; it is, therefore, hardly

surprising that they should have remained longer than their successors

in that fetish worship which we have asserted to be the first stage of

religious development.[78]

[78] This was perceived by the President de Brosses, a _savant_

with few advantages but a bold and inquiring spirit, to whom the

language is indebted for the use of the term _fetishism_ as a

name for a definite state of religious conception. We can still

read with interest the book which he published anonymously in

1760, under the title: _Du Culte des Dieux fétiches; ou,

Parallèle de l'Ancienne Religion de l'Égypte avec la Religion

actuelle de Nigritie_ (12mo). The study of the fetish elements

of the Egyptian religion has been resumed lately with competent

knowledge and talent by a German egyptologist, Herr Pietschmann,

in an essay which appeared in 1878 in the _Zeitschrift für

Ethnologie_, which is published in Berlin under the direction of

M. Virchow. It is called _Der Ægyptische Fetischdienst und

Götterglaube--Prolegomena zur Ægyptischen Mythologie_ (28 pp.

8vo). A great many judicious observations and curious facts are

to be found in it; the realistic and materialistic character of

the Egyptian conceptions are very well grasped; it is perhaps to

be regretted that the author has not endeavoured to make the

creeds to which he gives this name of _fétichisme_ somewhat

clearer, and to show by what workings of the mind they were

adopted and abandoned. With regard to the Egyptian religion, we

shall find treated, in the excellent _Manuel de l'Histoire des

Religions_, by Tiele, which M. Maurice Vernes has just

translated from the Dutch (1 vol. 12mo, Ernest Leroux, 1880),

views much the same as those which we have just described. The

author denominates the religious state which we call fetishism

_animism_, but he points out the fact that this class of

conceptions had a perennial influence over the Egyptian mind.

"The Egyptian religion," he says, "like the Chinese, was nothing

to begin with but an organised _animism_." He finds traces of

this _animism_ in the worship of the dead, the deification of

the kings, and the adoration of animals. From his point of view

the custom of placing a symbol of the divinity rather than an

image in the temple, must be traced to fetishism (pp. 44 and 45

of the French version).

This stage must never be forgotten, if we wish to understand the part

which art played in the figuring of the Egyptian gods. In most of the

types which it created it mixed up the physical characteristics of man

and beast. Sometimes the head of an animal surmounts the body of a man

or woman; sometimes, though more rarely, the opposite arrangement

obtains. The Sphinx, and the bird with a human head which symbolizes

death, are instances of the latter combination. The usual explanation

of these forms is as follows. When men began to embody for the eye of

others the ideas which they had formed of the divine powers, they

adopted as the foundation for their personifications the noblest

living form they knew, that of man. In the next place they required

some easy method for distinguishing their imaginary beings one from

another. They had to give to each deity some feature which should be

peculiar to him or her self, and should allow of his being at once

identified and called by his own name. The required result was

obtained in a very simple manner, by adding to the constant quantity

the human figure, a varying element in the heads of different animals.

These the fauna of Egypt itself afforded. In the case of each

divinity, the particular animal was selected which had been

consecrated to it, which was its symbol or at least its attribute, and

the head or body, as the case might be, was detached in order to form

part of a complex and imaginary being. The special characteristics of

the animal made use of were so frankly insisted upon that no confusion

could arise between one deity and another. Even a child could not fail

to see the difference between Sekhet, with the head of a cat or a

lioness, and Hathor, with that of a cow.

[Illustration: FIG. 38.--Painted bas-relief. Boulak. (Drawn by

Bourgoin.)]

We do not refuse to accept this explanation, but yet we may express

our surprise that the Egyptians, who were able, even in the days of

the ancient empire, to endow the statues of their kings with so much

purity and nobility of form, were not disgusted by the strangeness of

such combinations, by their extreme grotesqueness, and by the

disagreeable results which they sometimes produced. A certain beauty

may be found in such creations as the Sphinx, and a few others, in

which the human face is allied to the wings of a bird, and the trunk

and posterior members of the most graceful and powerful of quadrupeds.

But could any notion be more unhappy than that of crowning the bust of

a man or woman with the ugly and ponderous head of a crocodile, or

with the slender neck and flat head of a snake?

[Illustration: FIG. 39.--Sekhet. Louvre. (Granite. Height 0·50

metres.)]

Every polytheistic nation attacked this problem in turn, and each

solved it in its own manner. The Hindoos multiplied the human figure

by itself, and painted or carved their gods with three heads and many

pairs of arms and legs, of which proceeding traces are to be found

among the Western Asiatics, the Greeks, and even the Latins. The

Greeks represented all their gods in human form, and yet by the

delicacy of their contours and the general coherence of their

characterization, they were enabled to avoid all confusion between

them. With them, too, costume and attributes helped to mark the

difference. But even where these are absent, our minds are never left

in doubt. Even a fragment of a torso can be at once recognized at

sight as part of a statue of Zeus, of Apollo, or of Bacchus, and a

head of Demeter or Hera would never be confounded with one of Artemis

or Pallas.

[Illustration: FIG. 40.--Isis-Hathor. Louvre. (Bronze. Actual size.)]

It may be said that the artists of Egypt were lacking in the skill

necessary for all this, or that they generalized their forms to such a

degree as to leave no scope for such subtle differences. But, in fact,

we find in their oldest statues a facility of execution which suggests

that, had they chosen, they could have expressed anything which can be

expressed by the chisel. That they did not do so, we know. They

contented themselves with plastic interpretations so rough and awkward

that, perhaps, we should rather seek their explanation in some

hereditary predisposition, some habit of thought and action contracted

in the infancy of the race and fortified by long transmission.

[Illustration: FIG. 41.--A Sphinx; in rose granite. Thirteenth

dynasty. Louvre. Drawn by Saint-Elme Gautier.]

We have already spoken of that which we believe to be the cause of the

peculiar forms under which the Egyptians figured their deities,

namely, the fetish worship, which was the earliest, and for many

centuries the only, form of religion which they possessed. That

worship had struck its roots so deeply into the souls of the people,

that it could not be torn up even when a large part of the nation had

gradually educated itself to the comprehension of the highest

religious conceptions. Its practices never fell into total neglect,

and its influence was so far maintained that during the decadence of

the nation it again became the ruling faith, so that foreign observers

were led to believe that the Egyptian religion began and ended in the

adoration of plants and sacred animals. The eyes and the imagination

being thus educated by immemorial custom, it is not surprising that

even the most cultivated section of the people should have seen

nothing offensive in the representation of their gods sometimes under

the complete form of an animal (Horus is often symbolized under the

likeness of a hawk), sometimes as composite monsters with human bodies

and animal heads.

[Illustration: FIG. 42.--Touaris. Boulak. (Drawn by G. Bénédite.)]

Take, for a moment, the bird to which we have just alluded. The hawk,

like the vulture, plays an important part in Egyptian art. The vulture

symbolizes Maut, the spouse of Amen. It furnishes the sign by which

her name is written, and sometimes, as the symbol of maternity, its

head appears over the brow of the goddess, its wings forming her

head-dress. The goddess Nekheb, who symbolizes the region of the

South, is also represented by a vulture.[79] So it is with the ibis.

It supplies the character by which the name Thoth is written, and that

god is figured with the head of an Ibis. The part played by these

birds in the representation of the gods, both in the plastic arts and

in writing, is to be explained by the sentiments of gratitude and

religious veneration of which they were the objects, sentiments which

were the natural outcome of the practical services which they rendered

to mankind.

[79] PIERRET, _Dictionnaire d'Archéologie Égyptienne_.

[Illustration: FIG. 43.--Rannu (from Wilkinson).]

When the early fathers of the nation first established themselves upon

the banks of the Nile, they found invaluable allies in those energetic

birds of prey, and the alliance has been continued to their latest

descendants. After the annual inundation the damp earth was overrun by

toads and frogs, by snakes and lizards and all kinds of creeping

things. Fishes, left by the retreating flood in pools which were soon

dried up by the blazing sun, perished, and, decomposing, rendered the

air noisome and malarious. In addition to this there were the corpses

of wild and domestic animals, and the offal of every kind which

accumulated round the dwellings of the peasantry and rapidly became

putrid under the sun of Egypt. If left to decompose they would soon

have bred a pestilence, and in those days human effort was not to be

reckoned upon in the work of sanitation. To birds of prey, then, was

assigned the indispensable work of elimination and transformation, an

office which they yet fill satisfactorily in the towns and villages of

Africa. Thanks to their appetite and to the powerful wings which

carried them in a twinkling to wherever their presence was required,

the multiplication of the inferior animals was kept within due limits,

and decomposing matter was recalled into the service of organic life.

Had these unpaid scavengers but struck work for a day, the plague, as

Michelet puts it, would soon have become the only inhabitant of the

country.[80]

[80] See in _L'Oiseau_ the chapter-headed _L'Épuration_. With

his genius for history and poetry Michelet has well understood

the sentiment which gave birth to these primitive forms of

worship, forms which have too long provoked unjust contempt. The

whole of this beautiful chapter should be read; we shall only

quote a few lines: "In America the law protects these public

benefactors. Egyptian law does still more for them--it respects

them and loves them. Although they no longer enjoy their ancient

worship, they receive the friendly hospitality of man as in the

time of Pharaoh. If you ask an Egyptian fellah why he allows

himself to be besieged and deafened by birds, why he patiently

suffers the insolence of the crow perched upon the horn of the

buffalo, on the hump of a camel, or fighting upon the date-trees

and shaking down the fruit, he will say nothing. Birds are

allowed to do anything. Older than the Pyramids, they are the

ancients of the country. Man's existence depends upon them, upon

the persevering labour of the ibis, the stork, the crow and the

vulture."

[Illustration: FIG. 44.--Horus; from a bronze in the Posno collection.

(Height 38 inches.)]

The worship of the hawk, the vulture, and the ibis, had, then,

preceded by many centuries that of the gods who correspond to the

personages of the Hellenic pantheon. Rooted by long custom in the

minds of the people, it did not excite the ire of the wise men of

Heliopolis or Thebes. The doctrine of emanation and of successive

incarnations of the deity, permitted their theology to explain and to

accept anything, even those things which at a later epoch seemed

nothing more than the grossest creations of popular superstition.

These objects of veneration were therefore enabled to maintain their

places by the side of the superior gods, to represent them in written

characters and in plastic creations, and, in the latter case, to be

blended with the forms of man himself. To us, accustomed as we are to

the types created by Greek anthropomorphism, these figures are

surprising; but to the Egyptians they seemed perfectly natural, for

they offered the characteristic features of the animals which they had

loved, respected, and adored ever since the birth of their

civilization.

[Illustration: FIG. 45.--Thoth. Louvre. Enamelled clay. Actual size.]

It is difficult for us to see things with the same eyes as the

contemporaries of Cheops or even of Rameses; to enter into their ideas

and sentiments so as to feel with them and to think with their brains.

Let us attempt to do so for a moment; let us make one of those

intellectual efforts which are demanded from the historian, and we

shall then understand how it was, that the Egyptians were not offended

by a combination of two classes of forms which, to us, seem so

differently constituted and so unequal in dignity. The deity took the

form of an animal and revealed himself in it, just as he took that of

a man, or of a statue which he was supposed to animate, and to which

he was attached. In one of his most curious and most penetrating

essays, M. Maspero explains that the sacred animal was--like the king,

the son of Amen; like the statue fashioned by the hands of a

sculptor--the manifestation of the deity, the strength and support of

his life, his _double_, to use an expression dear to the Egyptians.

At Memphis, Apis repeated and constantly renewed the life of Ptah; he

was, in a word, his living statue.[81]

[81] MASPERO, _Notes sur différents Points de Grammaire et

d'Histoire dans le Recueil de Travaux relatifs à la Philologie

et à l'Archéologie égyptienne et assyrienne_, vol. i. p. 157.

Egyptian art was, then, the faithful and skilful interpretation of the

ideas of the people. What the Egyptians wished to say, that they did

say with great clearness and a rare happiness of plastic expression.

To accuse them, as they have been sometimes accused, of a want of

taste, would be to form a very narrow conception of art, to sin

against both the method and the spirit of modern criticism. This

latter seeks for originality and admires it, and all art which is at

once powerful and sincere arouses its interest. We do not, however,

wish to deny that their conception of divinity is less favourable to

the plastic arts than the anthropomorphism of the Greeks. No more

simple method of distinguishing one god from another could well be

imagined than that of giving to each, as his exclusive property, the

head of some well-known animal; the employment of such an unmistakable

sign rendered the task of the artist too easy, in giving him assurance

that his meaning would be understood at a glance without any

particular effort on his part.

[Illustration: FIG. 46.--Sacrifice to Apis, from Mariette.]

The value of an artistic result is in proportion to the difficulty of

its achievement. The Greek sculptor had nothing beyond the bodily form

and the features of man with which to give a distinct individuality to

each god and goddess of his mythology; he was therefore obliged to

make use of the most delicate and subtle distinctions of feature and

contour. This necessity was a great incentive to perfection; it drove

him to study the human form with a continuous energy which, unhappily

for himself, was not required of the Egyptian sculptor or painter.

Art and religion have ever been so closely allied that it was

necessary that we should give some account of the original

characteristics of the Egyptian beliefs, but we shall make no attempt

to describe, or even to enumerate, the chief divinities of the

Egyptian pantheon; such an attempt would be foreign to the purposes

which we have in view. We have, however, already mentioned most of the

chief deities of Egypt, and we shall have occasion to draw the

attention of our readers to others, in speaking of the tombs and

temples, the statues and bas-reliefs, of the country. Now, each of

these gods began by being no more than the local divinity of some

particular nome or city. As a city grew in importance, so did its

peculiar god, and sometimes it came about that both a dynasty of kings

and a divinity were imposed upon Egypt by the power of what we may

call their native city. In the course of time a number of successive

deities thus held the supreme place, each of whom preserved, even

after his fall, some of the dignity which he had acquired during his

period of supremacy.

The two first dynasties, the authors of Egyptian unity, had their

capital in the nome of Abydos, the nome which contained the tomb of

Osiris; and it was in their reign that, from one end to the other of

the Nile valley, spread the worship of that god; of that Osiris who,

with Isis, seemed to Herodotus to be the only deity whom all the

Egyptians combined to adore.[82] Under the following dynasties, whose

capital was Memphis, Ptah rose into the first place; but, as if by a

kind of compromise, his dignity is combined with that of the great god

of Abydos under the names of Ptah-Osiris and Ptah-Sokar-Osiris. Toum,

the chief deity of Heliopolis, never rose above the second rank

because Heliopolis itself was neither a royal city nor even the

birthplace of any powerful dynasty. During all this period we hear

nothing of Amen, the local deity of Thebes; his name is hardly to be

found upon any monument earlier than the eleventh dynasty, but, with

the rise of the Theban empire he began to be a conspicuous figure in

Egypt. During the domination of the Hyksos, their national deity,

Soutekh or Set, overshadowed the ancient divinities of the soil; but

the final victory of Thebes under Ahmes I. installed Amen as the

national god, and we shall see hereafter what magnificent temples were

raised in his honour by the kings of the brilliant Theban dynasties.

His successor would no doubt have been Aten, the solar disc, had

Tell-el-Amarna, the new capital of Amenophis IV., and the worship

which was there inaugurated, enjoyed a less ephemeral existence; but

Thebes and Amen soon regained their supremacy. Again, when the

Egyptian centre of gravity was transported to the Delta, the local

deities of the district, and especially Neith, conquered the first

place in the religious sentiments of the people. Under the Persians

they returned to Amen, as to the protector who could give back to the

nation its former independence and power. Under the Ptolemies, Horus

and Hathor were in the ascendant, and later still, under the Roman

emperors, the worship of the Isis of Philæ became popular and was

prolonged in that island sanctuary until the sixth century of our era.

[82] HERODOTUS, ii. 42.

The movement of religious thought in Egypt was very different from

what we shall find in Greece. We find no god, like that of the

Hellenes, whose pre-eminence dates back to the remote origin of the

Aryan race, a pre-eminence which was never menaced or questioned;[83]

we find no Zeus, no Jupiter, whose godhead was conceived from century

to century in an ever larger and more purified spirit, until at last

it was defined in the famous hymn of Cleanthe as that "which governed

all things according to law." We have pointed out how greatly the

Greek artists profited by their efforts to endow the piety of their

countrymen with an image of this great and good being, which should be

worthy of the popular faith in him as the father of gods and men. The

Egyptian artist could find no such inspiration in a long succession of

gods, no one of whom succeeded in concentrating supreme power in his

hands. No such ideal existed for them as that which the popular

conscience and the genius of the national poets created in the lord of

Olympus. Neither Thebes nor Sais could give birth to a Phidias; to an

artist who should feel himself spurred on by the work of all previous

generations to produce a masterpiece in which the highest religious

conception, to which the intelligence of the race had mounted by slow

degrees, should be realized in visible form.

[83] JAMES DARMESTETER, _Le Dieu supréme dans la Mythologie

indo-européenne_ (in the _Revue de l'Histoire des Religions_,

1880).

§ 6. _That Egyptian Art did not escape the Law of Change, and that its

History may therefore be written._

It may be well, before embarking upon the study of Egyptian

architecture, sculpture, and painting, to dispel a prejudice which in

spite of recent discoveries still exists in some minds; we mean, the

belief in the immobility of Egyptian art. This mistake is a very

ancient one. The Greeks were the first to make it, and they

transmitted their error to us. In regard to this we must cite the

famous passage of Plato[84]:--"Long ago they appear to have recognized

the very principle of which we are now speaking--that their young

citizens must be habituated to forms and strains of virtue. These they

fixed, and exhibited patterns of them in their temples; and no painter

or artist is allowed to innovate upon them, or to leave the

traditional forms and invent new ones. To this day no alteration is

allowed, either in these arts or in music, at all. And you will find

that their works of art are painted or moulded in the same forms that

they had ten thousand years ago--(this is literally true and no

exaggeration)--their ancient paintings and sculptures are not a whit

better or worse than the work of to-day, but are made with just the

same skill."

[84] τὴν αὐτὴν δὲ τέχνην ἀπειργασμένα, etc. Laws, 656. D. E. [We

have quoted from Professor Jowett's English version, p. 226,

vol. v.--ED.]

This strange assertion was long accepted without question even in

modern times. We need not go back to the archæologists of the last

century, whose credulity is to be accounted for by their lack of

materials for the formation of a better judgment. In 1828 in his first

lecture at the Bibliothèque Royale, Raoul-Rochette turned his

attention to Egypt. He had before his eyes, in the Parisian museums

and in the _Description de l'Égypte_, works which dated from the

finest periods of the Theban dynasties, although the still more

ancient monuments which now form the glory of the Boulak Museum were

not yet discovered; he might have perceived and pointed out the

difference between the statues of Ousourtesen, Thothmes, and Rameses

on the one hand, and those of the Sait epoch; still more should he

have remarked upon the characteristics which distinguish the

monuments of independent Egypt from those which were erected under the

Ptolemies and the Roman emperors. What he did say, however, and say

with consummate confidence was: "From the first of the Pharaohs to the

last of the Ptolemies, the art of Egypt never varied."[85]

[85] _Cours d'Archéologie_, 8vo. 1829, pp. 10, 11. This critic's

ideas upon Egyptian art were both superficial and false.

"Egyptian art," he says, "never attempted any realistic

imitation." We even find sentences utterly devoid of meaning,

such as, for instance, "The fundamental principle of Egyptian

art was the absence of art." (p. 12.)

Such crude notions as this can no longer be upheld. M. Marriette

protests in the following almost indignant terms against certain

utterances of M. Renan which seemed to him to imply the same doctrine.

"M. Renan loves[86] to represent ancient Egypt as a sort of China,

walled in and fortified against the exterior world, immovable, old

even in its infancy, and arrived by a single spring at a degree of

civilization which it never surpassed. He looks upon the country as a

great plain, green indeed and fertile, but without accidents of

contour to break the monotony of the landscape. And yet Egypt had

periods of grandeur and decadence more marked than those of other

countries. Her civilization went through all the different phases; it

went through many complete transformations, it had its sudden moments

of brilliancy and its epochs of eclipse. Its art was not so stationary

as to prevent us from writing its history. The influence of Egypt was

felt from Mesopotamia to the equator. Thothmes, in a word, was no

Chinaman. Egypt perished because in attacking foreign nations she

provoked a reaction which was fatal to her."[87]

[86] See the _Revue des Deux Mondes_ of April 1, 1865.

[87] _Voyage dans la Haute Égypte_, vol. i.

Now that we are enabled to contrast the statues of the Ptolemaic

period with those of the pyramid builders, we find nothing surprising

in Mariette's language; but even before these means of study were open

to us, criticism should have cast more than doubt upon the assertions

of Plato; it should have appealed from a theory which was at variance

with all historical analogies to the monuments themselves to tell the

truth, to those monuments which were best known and understood. Was it

likely, was it possible, that such a people as that which created

these monuments, should remain for more than forty centuries

unaffected by the law of continual, even if almost insensible, change?

What right have we thus to place Egypt and China apart from the rest

of humanity? There are, it is true, some peoples who are more attached

than others to traditional customs and ancient institutions; they are

more conservative, to use the modern phrase. But, although their

evolution is a slower process, it is there; our eyes cannot perceive

any movement in the small hand of a watch, but yet it does move

exactly in the same fashion as that which marks the seconds. Upon the

banks of the Peiho as upon those of the Nile, upon the whole surface

of our planet, man _is_ not; he _becomes_, to borrow one of the

favourite expressions of German philosophy. History can admit no

exception to this law either for China or Egypt. In the cases of both

those countries there is a certain illusion, which is to be explained

by our ignorance. We are not well enough acquainted with them to grasp

the different periods of their political and social, their artistic

and literary development. For one who is too far off or very

short-sighted the details of the most varied landscape become

obliterated or confused; waste land and smiling fields are blended

together; hollows and hillocks lose the vigour of their contours.

China, as we have said, does not enter into our purview; and as for

Egypt, the deeper we penetrate into her history the more are we

convinced that her long career was troubled by moments of crisis

similar to those which have come to other human societies. The

narratives of the Greek historians give us reason to suspect that it

was so, and the monuments which have been discovered insist upon the

same truth, and compel us to accept it. For certain epochs these are

very abundant, beautiful, and varied. Afterwards they become rare and

clumsy, or altogether wanting; and again they reappear in great

numbers and in their full nobility, but with a different general

character. These contrasts and temporary eclipses occur again and

again. How, then, can we doubt that here, as elsewhere, there were

alternations of grandeur and poverty, of periods of conquest and

expansion and epochs of civil war or of defeat by foreign invaders?

May we not believe that through the clouds which obscure the causes of

such changes we may catch glimpses of those periods of decadence and

renascence which, following one upon the other, exhausted in the end

the genius of the race?

Let us take a single example--the most striking of all. "After the

sixth dynasty all documents cease; they are absolutely wanting until

the eleventh, the first of the Middle Empire. This is one of those

sudden interruptions in the history of Egypt which may be compared to

the temporary disappearance of those curious rivers which run partly

underground."[88]

[88] M. MELCHOIR DE VOGÜÉ, _Chez les Pharaons_ (_Revue des Deux

Mondes_ of Jan. 15, 1877).

[Illustration: FIG. 47.--Statue from the Ancient Empire, in limestone.

Boulak. Drawn by Bourgoin.]

When historians, living as long after our nineteenth century as we do

after the epochs of Memphite and Theban supremacy in Egypt, come to

treat the history of the past, they will perhaps look upon the ages

which rolled away between the fall of Græco-Roman civilization and the

revival of learning in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as no

longer than that which divided the ancient from the middle empire of

Egypt, or the latter from the dynasties of Thebes. In the distant

future men will know, in a vague fashion, that between the fall of

Rome and the discovery of printing, or that of America, there were

great movements among the nations, and an apparent recoil of

civilization; but memory and imagination will leap without effort over

the gap, over that period which we call the Middle Ages. The Roman

empire will seem to touch our modern civilization, and many of the

differences which strike us so strongly will be imperceptible. They

will perceive that we had a new religion and new inventions, but they

will take more account of the resemblances than of the differences.

Our languages, manners, laws, and forms of government will seem to

them continuations of those of Greece and Rome. In that which we call

antiquity, and in Christian Europe, they will find similar literary

habits and standards of criticism, the same judicial nomenclature, the

same terms for monarchy, empire, and republic, the same titles for

kings and Cæsars. These different civilizations are like star

clusters. To us who are among them they seem distinct enough, but to

generations which are divided from them by a vast space of time they

will seem to form but one nebulous body.

[Illustration: FIG. 48.--Woman kneading dough. Statuette from the

Ancient Empire, in limestone. Drawn by Bourgoin.]

[Illustration: FIG. 49.--The Scribe Chaphré. Fifth dynasty. Boulak.

Limestone.]

Egypt, then, had her great convulsions like the rest of the world. She

met with disasters, and underwent periods of confusion like those

which overtook the nations of the West between the reigns of Trajan

and Charlemagne. Wars and invasions, the action and reaction of

civilization, had upon her the same influence as upon them, and, in

transforming her sentiments and ideas, caused their plastic expression

to pass through a series of changes in taste and style. The Theban

tomb of the time of Rameses is very different from that of Memphis and

the ancient empire; the new empire constructed no buildings like the

greater pyramids, but its temples were larger and more magnificent

than any of their predecessors. It was the same with sculpture. A

cultivated eye has no need to run to inscriptions to enable it to

distinguish between works of the ancient and of the middle empire; nor

will it confound works created in either of those periods with those

of the Sait epoch. The differences are almost as well marked as those

which enable archæologists to distinguish a torso of the time of

Phidias from one of the school of Praxiteles or Lysippus. These

differences it will be our duty to describe hereafter, but our readers

may perhaps discover them for themselves if they examine the

illustrations to this chapter, which are arranged in chronological

order.

Variety is universal in Egypt, local variety as well as that of

different periods. Language had its dialects as well as art. The

pronunciation of Upper and that of Lower Egypt was quite dissimilar,

except in the case of a few letters. In the same way different cities

had distinct schools of sculpture and painting, which were

distinguished from one another by their traditional methods of

conception and execution. Neither under Ousourtesen nor under Rameses,

had art the same character in the cities of the Delta, in Memphis, and

in Thebes. Among the works in sculpture executed for Rameses II.,

those of Abydos were more elegant and refined than those of Thebes.

[Illustration: FIG. 50.--The Lady Naï. Wooden statue from the 19th or

20th dynasty. Louvre.]

How, then, are we to explain the error committed by Plato, and by him

transmitted to posterity? The explanation is easy. The Greeks visited

Egypt too late in its history to form a true judgment. In Plato's time

the Egyptians were still trying, by violent but spasmodic efforts, to

reconquer the independence which had been destroyed by the successor

of Cyrus. But the moment was at hand when even these intermittent

struggles were to be abandoned, and they were to finally succumb to

sovereigns of foreign blood. Their still brilliant civilization might

deceive a passing stranger, but the decadence had commenced--a

decadence slow indeed, but none the more remediable.

Some years after the visit of Plato, the two Nectanebos, more

especially the second, devoted themselves with energetic ardour to the

restoration of the ancient buildings of the country and to the

construction of new ones, such as the temple at Philæ. Buildings

signed with their name are to be found all over Egypt; but these

simultaneous undertakings seem to betray a sense of vanishing power,

an uncertainty of the morrow, a feverish activity seeking to deceive

itself and to hide its own weakness. Nothing could be more precarious

than the political conditions under which this activity was displayed.

The independence of the country was maintained by the dearly bought

services of Spartan and Athenian mercenaries. Twice already had Persia

crushed Egyptian revolts, and she was, perhaps, but watching her

opportunity to cast the hordes of Asia upon the unhappy country for a

third time. Ill obeyed as he was, the "Great King" could always find

troops to take part in the spoiling of a country whose riches had

proved so inexhaustible. And if, by any remote chance, the Persians

should fail in their enterprise, another and a graver danger would

menace the Egyptian monarchy from the rapid growth of the Greek power

in the Mediterranean. Since the period of the Persian wars, the

language, the literature, the arts, the mythology of Greece, had

spread with great rapidity; and the moment might be foreseen when a

supremacy founded upon intellectual worth would be confirmed by

military triumph and the creation of a vast Hellenic empire. The

conquest of Egypt was begun by the Ionian soldiers and merchants who

were introduced into the Nile valley by Psemethek; it was bloodlessly

completed by the arms of Alexander. For three centuries the Egyptians

had been accustomed to see the Greeks freely coming and going among

them as merchants, as mercenary officers, as travellers eager for

instruction. The latter posed as disciples before the priests of

Memphis and Heliopolis, and freely expressed a warmth of admiration

which could not fail to flatter the national vanity. The Greeks would

be better masters than their rivals from Persia. From them the

Egyptians would, at least, obtain good administration and complete

freedom in the exercise of their religion in return for their taxes.

The Greeks were clear-sighted enough to understand their own

interests; they were too philosophical and large minded for any

fanatical persecution of, or even hindrance to, the national religion;

they were too much of connoisseurs to fail in respect to a form of

civilization whose prodigious antiquity they divined, and before which

the most eminent among them were ever inclined to bow, like youths

before an old man, or a parvenu before the descendant of a long line

of kings.

Thus Egypt gradually fell into the hands of strangers after the

commencement of the fourth century before Christ. Ethiopians,

Assyrians and Persians had by turns overrun the country. Great numbers

of the Phœnicians had established themselves in it, and, after the

fall of Jerusalem and Samaria, many Jews followed their example.

Finally, the Greeks came in by thousands through the breaches which

their predecessors had made, penetrating into all parts, and making

everywhere felt the superiority of a people who had, by appropriating

the useful results obtained in a long succession of centuries by more

ancient races, become wealthier, stronger, and better instructed than

any of their forerunners.

Thus Egypt lost her power of national rejuvenation, her power of

rising again after calamity. She existed on through the centuries by

mere force of habit, but she lived no more. Her population was so

homogeneous, and her institutions were so solid, that the social

conditions of the country could not be changed in a day or even in a

century. The teachings of her religion had been established by so long

a course of development, and the hands of her artists were so well

practised, that the monumental types which had been created in more

fertile periods of her history were reproduced until a late date, in a

machine-like and instinctive fashion. Imagination was dead, and the

best that could be hoped for was the faithful repetition of those

forms which the genius of the race had conceived in its last moments

of original thought.

Under the Sait princes, under the Psemetheks and Nekau, under Apries

and Amasis, Egypt was delivered from her enemies and again became

mistress of Syria and of the Island of Cyprus. She thus recovered

confidence in herself and in her future, and a period ensued which had

an art of its own with distinctive features which we shall endeavour

to trace. In the intervals of precarious repose which characterized

the Persian domination, the Egyptians had leisure neither to invent

nor to improve. They copied, as well as they could, the monuments of

the twenty-sixth dynasty. Art became a mere collection of technical

precepts, kept together and transmitted in the intercourse of the

studio, by instruction and practice; it became a mere matter of

routine implying, perhaps, great technical skill, but displaying no

sincere and personal feeling. Nature was no longer studied or cared

for. Artists knew that the human figure should be divided into so many

parts. They knew that in the representation of this or that god a

certain attitude or attribute was necessary; and they carved the

statues required of them after the traditional recipes. Thus Egyptian

art became conventional, and so it remained to the end. So it was in

the time of Diodorus. The sculptors whom that historian saw at work in

Memphis and Thebes, during the reign of Augustus, carved a statue as a

modern mechanic would make the different parts of a machine; they

worked with a rapidity and an easy decision more characteristic of the

precise workman than of the artist.[89] Thought was no longer

necessary to them. The due proportions and measurements had been

ascertained and fixed many centuries before their time.

[89] DIODORUS, i. 98, 7, 8.

[Illustration: FIG. 51.--Ouah-ab-ra, 26th dynasty. Louvre. Grey

granite, height 37 inches.]

But research must still precede discovery. We admit that a day arrived

when convention was supreme in Egyptian art, but it could not have

begun with convention any more than the arts of other nations. We must

here define the terms which we shall have occasion to employ. Every

work of art is an interpretation of nature. Let us take the example of

the human figure. In the works of a single period and of a single

people, it is always full of striking similarity; and yet two original

artists never look at it with the same eyes. One will look at it in

certain aspects and will bring out certain qualities, which another,

although his contemporary and fellow-countryman, will leave in the

obscurity of shadows. One will devote himself to the beauty of form,

another to the accidents of colour or the expression of passion and

thought. The original remains the same, although its interpretations

are so various. And these varieties become still more marked when we

compare the arts of different races or of different periods--the art

of Egypt with that of Assyria or Greece, antique art with that of

modern times.

On the other hand, the great resemblance which the arts of a single

time and country bear to each other, is accounted for by the fact that

their creators look upon the external facts of life through a glass,

if we may put it so, tinted with the colours of the national genius.

They bring to their study of an eternal model the same transient

prejudices, the same preoccupations, the same desires. And yet among

those highly gifted races where art holds or has held a lofty place,

groups of artists are formed, either successively or simultaneously,

which we call schools. Each of these groups professes to make a fresh

reference to nature, to interpret her works more faithfully than its

predecessors, and to draw from them typical forms which shall be more

expressive of the real desires and sentiments of the public for which

it caters. Between the works of these different schools, there are,

however, many similarities, which are to be explained by the identity

of race and belief. There are also diversities which are caused either

by different conditions or by the influence of some master spirit.

Wherever these schools spring up, art lives, moves, and progresses.

But sooner or later comes a time when this ardour comes to an end, and

exhaustion takes its place. The civilization to which it belongs

becomes old and languid, and its creative power ceases like the

imperceptible sinking of a flood. Now, it often happens that just

before this period of lassitude, in the last days of reproductive

strength and healthy maturity, a rich and brilliant school springs up,

which interprets the characteristic sentiments of the civilization to

which it belongs, with the greatest vigour and by admirably selected

means. If such an interpretation be found satisfactory at all points,

why should a better be sought for at the risk of choosing a worse?

This question is but a confession of impotence on the part of those

who ask it. From that moment convention will be supreme, and

convention in the sense of an artificial set of rules which will

release the artist from his obligation of continual reference to

nature.

[Illustration: FIG. 52.--Sculptor at work upon an arm, Thebes.

(Champollion, pl. 180.)]

Such a revolution is not the work of a day. Art requires time thus to

inclose itself in mere mechanical dexterity. As a nation grows old,

its art, like its literature, continually becomes more and more

conventional. Every great period or school leaves to the generations

that come after it types which have made a vivid impression upon taste

and imagination. As time goes on these types become more numerous and

more brilliant, and their prestige increases until it becomes little

less than tyranny. Society can only escape from its thrall at the

expense of some great religious or philosophical revolution, or by the

infusion of new blood from without. And these changes western

civilization had to undergo in the early centuries of our era, in the

establishment of Christianity, the invasion of the barbarians, and the

fall of the Roman Empire.

Thanks to the peculiar circumstances of the country, Egyptian society

was enabled to maintain the originality of its genius and the vitality

of its institutions with unusual success. After each period of

internal commotion or foreign invasion, the Egyptians set themselves

to renew the chain of their national traditions. In spite of the

foreign elements which had been received among them, the great mass of

the people remained the same down to the latest days of antiquity.

Heterogeneous constituents were absorbed by the nation without leaving

any apparent trace. The ideas which the people had formed for

themselves of the ultimate destiny of humanity were developed, indeed,

and in successive ages varied slightly in general colour, but in none

of their variations did they give rise to a new religion, as

Brahmanism gave birth to Buddhism.

As often as a new dynasty of kings succeeded in driving out the

foreign conqueror and in re-establishing the unity of the kingdom, so

often was there a complete restoration. The aim which they had in view

was ever to restore, in all its parts, a _régime_ which was founded

upon national pride. Enjoying a civilization which for ages had been

alone in the world, it was in its full and glorious past that

Egyptian society found the ideal to which it clung in spite of all

obstacles and misfortunes. Its gaze was turned backwards towards those

early sovereigns who seemed transfigured by distance, but whose

presence in the memory kept alive the perpetual worship which had been

vowed to them.

[Illustration: FIG. 53.--Sculptor carving a statue, Thebes.

(Champollion, pl. 180.)]

Every restoration is inspired by a more or less blind and

superstitious reverence for the past. This has often been asserted in

connection with politics and religion, and the assertion is equally

true in respect to art. Each of those dynasties to which Egypt owed

its political restoration, set themselves to repair the temples which

had been destroyed, and to replace upon their pedestals the statues of

gods or ancestors which had been overthrown. When new temples and new

statues were to be erected, the first idea of the artists employed was

to study the ancient monuments and to try to equal them. As long as

Egypt preserved her vitality, the wants of the present and external

influences no doubt had their effect in introducing certain changes,

both in the arrangement of her buildings, and in the modelling,

movement, and expression of the statues which adorned them. Ancient

types were not servilely copied, but the temptation to borrow from

them a point of departure, at least, for new attempts at progression,

was too strong to be resisted. It was necessary that all buildings and

statues should be in harmony with the remains which subsisted from

previous ages, and from this it resulted that each new creative effort

began by imitating what had gone before. The 'school' in process of

foundation accepted on trust the architectural disposition left by its

predecessor, as well as its methods of looking at nature. And this is

equivalent to saying that, from its first moment, it must have been

conventional in a certain degree.

This conventionality must have increased at every fresh renascence,

because each new development had its own processes to transmit to

posterity as well as those of its ancestors. After each recoil or

pause in the progress of art, the weight of the past must have seemed

heavier to those who attempted to revive the onward movement. On the

one hand, the more ancient of the traditional elements had acquired,

by their constant and often repeated transmission, a prestige and

authority which placed them above discussion; on the other, the legacy

of admitted principles and processes was continually increasing, until

it became a source of embarrassment to the artist, and of destruction

to his liberty. When at last the decadence of the race had advanced so

far that all initiative power and independence of thought had

disappeared, the time arrived when convention was everything, like one

of those elaborate rituals which regulate every word, and even gesture

of the officiating priest. When Plato visited Egypt, the schools of

sculpture were nothing more than institutions for teaching pupils, who

were remarkable for docility and for dexterity of hand, to transmit to

their successors an assemblage of precepts and receipts which provided

for every contingency and left no room for the exercise of fancy or

discretion.

At that very time Greek art was progressing with a power and rapidity

which has never been rivalled. To the school of Phidias, a school

established in that Athens which yet possessed so many works of the

archaic period, had succeeded those of Praxiteles and Scopas. The

Greeks found means to improve, or at least to innovate, upon

perfection itself. Plato did not, and could not, perceive, in his

hasty journey through the Egyptian cities, that they too had seen

their periods of change, their different schools and developments of

style, less marked, perhaps, than those of Greece, and certainly less

rapid, but yet quite perceptible to the practised observer. We are now

in a better position to estimate these differences. Monuments have

been brought before our eyes such as Plato never saw; namely, the

statues of the ancient empire which were hidden for so many ages in

the thickness of walls or in the depths of sepulchral pits. Even now

these statues have not reached the age of ten thousand years so

persistently attributed by the Greek philosopher to the early works

which he did see, works which seemed to him exactly the same as those

which were being made in his presence. But although the statues of the

early empire were then no more than some thirty centuries old, Plato

could not have helped seeing, if he had seen them at all, that they

were quite distinct from the works which the sculptors of Nectanebo

had in progress, always supposing that he looked at them with

reasonable attention. The art of the pyramid builders, an art which

possesses in a very high degree certain qualities for which the

Egyptians have been too commonly refused credit, is known to us

chiefly through the excavations of Mariette and the contents of the

Boulak museum. But even before Cheops, Chefren, and their subjects had

risen from their tombs, the historian might have divined by analogy,

and described by no very bold conjecture, the essential

characteristics of Egyptian art during its first centuries. Whether we

speak of an individual, of a school, or of a people, every artistic

career which follows its natural course and is not rudely broken

through, ends sooner or later in conventionality, in that which is

technically called _mannerism_. But mannerism is never the beginning

of art. Art always begins by humble and sincere attempts to render

what it sees. Its awkwardness is at first extreme and its power of

imitation very imperfect. But it is not discouraged; it tries

different processes; it takes account now of one, now of another

aspect of life; it consults nature incessantly and humbly, taking note

of her answers and modifying its work in obedience to their teaching.

This teaching is not always rightly understood, but it is ever

received with docility and good faith.

[Illustration: FIG. 54.--Artist painting a statue, Thebes.

(Champollion, pl. 180.)]

Every work which bears the marks of frank and loyal effort is

interesting; but the moment in an artistic career which gives birth to

real _chefs d'œuvre_ is towards the end of that period, when the

eye has become sure, and the hand sufficiently well practised, for the

faithful interpretation of any model whose beauty or original

expression may have caught the fancy. Success is then achieved, always

provided that the model is never lost sight of or studied with

anything short of passionate devotion. But the time comes when this

devotion is relaxed. The artist thinks that such constant reference to

nature is no longer required when he has made his final choice between

the different methods which his art employs. In devoting himself to

the reproduction of certain features for which he has a marked

preference, he has himself produced types which he thenceforward takes

pleasure in repeating, as if they were in themselves an epitome of

nature's infinite diversity.

In the case of Egypt, even those discoveries which carry us back

farthest do not enable us to grasp, as we can in the case of

Greece, the first attempts at plastic expression, the first rude

efforts of the modeller or painter; but they carry us to the end of

that period which, in the case of other countries, we call archaic;

and above all they transport us into the centre of the epoch which was

to Egypt what the fifth century was to Greece, namely, the age of

perfection. The Egyptian people had already lived so long and worked

so hard that they could not free their work from certain common and

irrepressible characteristics. In the plastic arts and in poetry they

had their own style, and that style was both individual and original

in an extraordinary degree. This style was already formed, but it was

not yet robbed of its vitality by indolent content or petrified by

mannerism; it had neither renounced its freedom nor said its last

word.

[Illustration: FIG. 55.--Isis nursing Horus. Ptolemaic bronze; in the

Louvre. Height, 19 inches.]

§ 7. _Of the place held in this work by the monuments of the Memphite

period, and of the limits of our inquiry._

It will be found that a very large space in the present work, some may

say too large a space, is devoted to the pre-conventional art of the

ancient empire. We had reasons for taking such a course, and reasons

that may be easily divined.

This early art is much less known than that of the later epochs. While

the great museums of Europe are filled with statues and reliefs from

Thebes, or, at least, contemporary with the Theban and Sait dynasties,

monuments from the Memphite period are still rare out of Egypt. Thanks

to Mariette and Lepsius, Paris and Berlin are not without remarkable

examples of the art in question, but it is in Egypt itself, at the

Boulak museum, that any detailed study must be made. It is there that

the masterpieces of an art whose very existence was unsuspected by

Champollion, are to be found; the Chephren, the two statues from

Meidoum, the bas-reliefs from the tomb of Ti, and many others of

similar style and value. These figures have been drawn for our readers

by two skilful artists, MM. Bourgoin and Bénédite. They have rendered

with fidelity and sincerity more than one object which had never

before been reproduced, either by photography or otherwise. A few

specimens of these treasures, selected by him who had been the means

of bringing them to light and whom we now mourn, were seen at the

Universal Exhibitions of 1867 and 1878, but they soon returned to

Cairo, and western archæologists had but slight opportunity to become

acquainted with their characteristics.

The art of the early dynasties has thus been practically ignored by

those who have never visited Egypt. The lifelike and enthusiastic

descriptions of M. Eugene Melchior de Vogüé and others have done

something to arouse the attention of connoisseurs; but in such a

matter the slightest sketch, provided it be correct so far as it goes,

is of more value, as a definition of style, than the most picturesque

or eloquent writing.

These reflections would by themselves justify our efforts to

incorporate in our pages, reproductions of all the more important

objects with which the necropolis at Memphis has enriched the museum

at Boulak; but we were impelled by other motives also. The extant

monuments of the ancient empire are less numerous than those of the

Theban and Sait dynasties; they are of comparatively modest

dimensions, and, with rare exceptions they all belong to one category,

that of works relating to death and burial. They also have a special

interest of their own. They enable us to protest, and to give tangible

justification for our protestations, against a prejudice which dates

back to a remote antiquity; even if all evidence had perished the

critic would have no great difficulty in casting doubt upon assertions

which were in themselves extremely improbable, but his task is

rendered much easier when he is able to point to existing monuments in

support of his contention, and his pleasure is great in seeing the

certainty of his critical methods borne out, and Egyptian art

replacing itself, as if of its own motion, under the normal conditions

of historic development.

[Illustration: FIG. 56.--Chephren. Sketched by Bourgoin. See also Fig.

460.]

This volume, then, will treat of the remains of early Egyptian art at

a length which would seem at first sight out of due proportion to

their number, but later ages will also be represented by a series of

monuments, which will bring us down to the Persian conquest. This

limit will hardly be over-passed in our choice of examples for study,

and that for two reasons.

The first is, that at the latter period the evolution of Egyptian art

was complete, it had created all that it could and had become a slave

to its own past. Disposing under the Ptolemies of all the resources of

a great empire, it indeed introduced certain architectural changes

which do not seem to have been borrowed from previous buildings, but

those changes were of no very great importance and were mostly in

matters of detail. In sculpture and painting we can easily see that it

abandoned itself to mere copying, to the repetition of a lesson learnt

by rote. Whatever had to be done, was done in accordance with fixed

tradition, and one monument only differed from another in the amount

of care and manual dexterity bestowed upon it.

[Illustration: FIG. 57.--Ti, with his wife and son.]

Our second reason is this, that Egypt was opened to the Greeks in the

time of the Sait princes. From the year 650 B.C. onwards, there was

constant communication between Ionia and the cities of the Delta. If

at any time Greek art borrowed directly from that of Egypt, it was

during the second half of the seventh century and the first half of

the sixth. By the end of the sixth century, it had become so original

and so skilful in the management of its selected methods of expression

that it could not have been very receptive to foreign influences.

After the Persian wars such influences would be still more powerless.

In the Ptolemaic era the state of things was reversed; Greece imposed

her language, her literature, her religious conceptions and their

visible symbols upon the whole eastern world. Even then the art of

Egypt could defend, and even perpetuate itself, by the power of custom

and of a tradition which had been handed down through so many

centuries, but the day was past when it could provoke imitation.

As for the indirect borrowings of forms and motives which Greece

received from Egypt through the Phœnicians, their transmission had

come to an end before the Persian conquest, even before the time of

Psemethek. Egypt was represented, either immediately or through the

imitative powers of the Syrian manufacturers, in the first textiles,

jewels, and vases of clay or metal, carried by the Sidonian merchants

to the savage ancestors of the Greeks. In this roundabout manner she

had probably more influence over Greece than in their periods of more

direct communication. The rays kindled upon her hearth, the earliest

of civilization, fell upon the Hellenic isles as refracted rays, after

passing through the varied media of Chaldæa, Assyria or Phœnicia.

Thus if we wish thoroughly to understand Greece, we must start from

Memphis and go through Babylon and Nineveh, Tyre and Sidon. But Greece

will be the aim of our voyage, and Egypt will interest us less on her

own account than on account of that unique and unrivalled people who

inherited her inventions and discoveries, and made them the foundation

for a productiveness in which are summarized all the useful labours of

antiquity. Egyptian art will be followed by us down to the moment in

which it lost its creative force and with it its prestige. We shall

rarely have occasion to speak of the Ptolemaic remains of Egyptian

art. Now and then we shall go to them for examples when any particular

detail which we desire to mention has not been preserved for us by

earlier monuments, but even then we shall require to have good reasons

for believing that such detail did in fact originate in the creative

periods of the national history.

The Egypt of the Pharaohs has not even yet been entirely explored. Are

we to believe that the splendid edifices reared in the cities of the

Delta, and especially at Sais, by the twenty-sixth dynasty, have

perished to the last stone? We are loth to think that it is so, but no

remains have yet been discovered. Some day, perhaps, well directed

excavations may bring to light the temples which Herodotus so greatly

admired; and who knows but that we may find in them more than one of

those motives and arrangements which at present are only known to

exist in the buildings of the Ptolemies and of the Roman emperors?