Read Ebook: A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol. 2 (of 2) by Chipiez Charles Perrot Georges Armstrong Walter Sir Translator

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CIVIL AND MILITARY ARCHITECTURE. ? 1. The Graphic Processes employed by the Egyptians in their representations of Buildings ? 2. The Palace ? 3. The Egyptian House ? 4. Military Architecture

METHODS OF CONSTRUCTION, THE ORDERS, SECONDARY FORMS. ? 1. An Analysis of Architectural Forms necessary ? 2. Materials ? 3. Construction ? 4. The Arch ? 5. The Pier and Column.--The Egyptian Orders Their Origin General Types of Supports ? 6. The Ordonnance of Egyptian Colonnades ? 7. Monumental Details ? 8. Doors and Windows Doors Windows ? 9. The Illumination of the Temples ? 10. The Obelisks ? 11. The Profession of Architect

SCULPTURE. ? 1. The Origin of Statue-making ? 2. Sculpture under the Ancient Empire ? 3. Sculpture under the First Theban Empire ? 4. Sculpture under the Second Theban Empire ? 5. The Art of the Saite Period ? 6. The Principal Themes of Egyptian Sculpture ? 7. The Technique of the Bas-reliefs ? 8. Gems ? 9. The Principal Conventions in Egyptian Sculpture ? 10. The General Characteristics of the Egyptian Style

PAINTING. ? 1. Technical Processes ? 2. The Figure ? 3. Caricature ? 4. Ornament

THE INDUSTRIAL ARTS. ? 1. Definition and Characteristics of Industrial Art ? 2. Glass and Pottery ? 3. Metal-work and Jewelry ? 4. Woodwork ? 5. The Commerce of Egypt

THE GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF EGYPTIAN ART, AND THE PLACE OF EGYPT IN ART HISTORY

INDEX

FIG.

A HISTORY OF ART IN ANCIENT EGYPT

CIVIL AND MILITARY ARCHITECTURE.

We have seen that sepulchral and religious architecture are represented in Egypt by numerous and well preserved monuments. It is not so in the case of civil and military architecture. Of these, time has spared but very few remains and all that the ancient historians tell us on the subject amounts to very little. Our best aids in the endeavour to fill up this lacuna are the pictures and bas-reliefs of the tombs, in which store-houses, granaries, houses and villas of the Pharaonic period are often figured.

It is not always easy, however, to trace the actual conformation and arrangement of those buildings through the conventionalities employed by the artists, and we must therefore begin by attempting to understand the ideas with which the Egyptians made the representations in question. Their idea was to show all at a single glance; to combine in one view matters which could only be seen in reality from many successive points, such as all the fa?ades of a building, with its external aspect and internal arrangements. This notion may be compared to that which recommends itself to a young child when, in drawing a profile, he insists upon giving it two ears, because when he looks at a front face he sees two ears standing out beyond either cheek.

Let us take as an example a representation of a house from a Theban tomb , and attempt to discover what the artist meant to show us. In the left-hand part of the picture there is no difficulty. In the lower stage we see the external door by which the inclosure surrounding the house is entered; in the two upper divisions there are the trees and climbing plants of the garden. It is when we turn to the house, which occupies two-thirds of the field, that our embarrassments begin. The following explanation is perhaps the best--that, with an artistic license which is not rare in such works, the painter has shown us all the four sides of the building at once. He has spread them out, one after the other, on the wall which he had to decorate. This process may be compared to our method of flattening upon a plane surface the figures which surround a Greek vase, but in modern works of archaeology it is customary to give a sketch of the real form beside the flat projection. No such help is given by the Egyptian painter and we are forced to conjecture the shapes of his buildings as best we can. In this case he was attempting to represent an oblong building. The door by which the procession defiling across the garden is about to enter, is in one of the narrow sides. It is inclosed by the two high shafts between which a woman seems to be awaiting on the threshold the arrival of the guests. On the right we have one of the lateral faces; it is pierced at one angle by a low door, above which are two windows and above them again an open story or terrace with slender columns supporting the roof. Still further to the right, at the extremity of the picture, the second narrow fa?ade is slightly indicated by its angle column and a portal, which appears to be sketched in profile. Want of space alone seems to have prevented the artist from giving as much detail to this portion of his work as to the rest. The left wing, that which is contiguous to the garden, remains to be considered. Those who agree with our interpretation of the artist's aims, will look upon this as the second lateral fa?ade. It presents some difficulty, however, because it shows none of the plain walls which inclose the rest of the building and exclude the eye of the spectator; its walls are left out and leave the interior of the house completely open.

They are, as a fact, plans, but plans made upon a very different principle from those of our day. Certain elements, such as walls, are indicated by simple lines varying in thickness, just as they might be in a modern plan, giving such a result as would be obtained by a horizontal section. But this is the exception. The houses, the trees, and everything with any considerable height, are shown in projection, as they might appear to the eye of a bird flying over them if they had been overthrown by some considerate earthquake, which had laid them flat without doing them any other injury. As a rule all objects so treated are projected in one and the same direction, but here and there exceptions to this are found. In a country villa figured upon one of the tombs at Thebes , one row of trees, that upon the right, is projected at right angles to all the others. The reason for this change in the artist's system is easily seen. Unless he had placed his trees in the fashion shown in the cut, he would not have been able to give a true idea of their number and of the shade which they were calculated to afford.

The process which we have just described is the dominant process in Egyptian figuration. Here and there, as in Fig. 1, it is combined with the vertical section. This combination is conspicuous in the plan found at Tell-el-Amarna, from which we have restored the larger of the two villas which we illustrate farther on. In this plan, as in the case of the Theban house figured on page 3, the artist has been careful to show that there was no want of provision in the house; the wall of the store-room is omitted, and the interior, with its rows of amphorae, is thrown open to our inspection.

No scale is given in any of these plans, so that we are unable to determine either the extent of ground occupied by the buildings and their annexes, or their absolute height. But spaces and heights seem to have been kept in just proportion. The Egyptian draughtsman was prepared for the execution of such a task by education and the traditions of his art, and his eye seems to have been trustworthy.

Accustomed as we are to accuracy and exactitude in such matters, these Egyptian plans disconcert us at first by their mixture of conscience and carelessness, artlessness and skill, by their simultaneous employment of methods which are contradictory in principle. In the end, however, we arrive at a complete understanding with the Egyptian draughtsman, and we are enabled to transcribe into our own language that which he has painfully written with the limited means at his command. In the two restorations of an Egyptian house which we have attempted, there is no arrangement of any importance that is not to be found in the original plan.

Their tombs and temples give us a great idea of the taste and wealth of the Egyptian monarchs. We are tempted to believe that their palaces, by their extent and the luxury of their decoration, must have been worthy of the tombs which they prepared for their own occupation, and the temples which they erected in honour of the gods to whom, as they believed, they owed their glory and prosperity. The imagination places the great sovereigns who constructed the pyramids, the rock tombs of Thebes, the temples of Luxor and Karnak, in splendid palaces constructed of the finest materials which their country afforded.

Since the time of Champollion, a more attentive study of the existing remains, and especially of the inscriptions which they bear, has dissipated that error; egyptologists are now in accord as to the religious character of the great Theban buildings on either bank of the river. But while admitting this, there are some archaeologists who have not been able to clear their minds entirely of an idea which was so long dominant. They contend that the royal habitation must have been an annexe to the temple, and both at Karnak and Luxor they seek to find it in those ill-preserved chambers which may be traced behind the sanctuaries. There the king must have had his dwelling, and his life must have been passed in the courts and hypostyle halls.

Among all the inscriptions which have been discovered in the chambers in question there is not one which supports such an hypothesis. Neither in the remains of Egyptian literature, nor in the works of the Greek historians, is there a passage to be found which tends to show that the king lived in the temple or its dependencies, or that his palace was within the sacred inclosure at all.

In such architecture as this, in which everything was designed to serve the pleasures of the moment, there was no necessity for stone. The solidity and durability of limestone, sandstone, and granite, were required in the tomb, the eternal dwelling, or for the temples, the homes of the gods. But the palace was no more than a pleasure marquee, it required no material more durable than wood or brick. Painters and sculptors were charged to cover its walls with lively colours and smiling images; it was their business to decorate the stucco of the walls, the planks of acacia, and the slender columns of cedar and palmwood with the most brilliant hues on their palettes and with gold. The ornamentation was as lavish as in the tombs, although in the latter case it had a much better chance of duration. The palaces of the Egyptian sovereigns were worthy of their wealth and power, but the comparative slightness of their materials led to their early disappearance, and no trace of them is left upon the soil of Egypt.

We have chosen for restoration that part of the royal dwelling which corresponds to what is called, in the East, the s?lamlik, and in the West, the reception-rooms. A structure stands before the entrance the purpose of which cannot readily be decided. It might be a reservoir for the use of the palace inmates, or it might be a guard-house; the question must be left open. Behind this structure there is a door between two towers with inclined walls, forming a kind of pylon. There is a narrower doorway near each angle. All three of these entrances open upon a vast rectangular court, which is inclosed laterally by two rows of chambers and at the back by a repetition of the front wall and three doorways already described. This courtyard incloses a smaller one, which is prefaced by a deep colonnaded portico, and incloses an open hall raised considerably above the level of the two courts. The steps by which this hall is reached are clearly shown upon the plan. In the middle of it there is a small structure, which may be one of those tribune-like altars which are represented upon some of the bas-reliefs. Nestor L'H?te gives a sketch of one of these reliefs. It shows a man standing upon a dais with a pile of offerings before him. The same writer describes some existing remains of a similar structure at Karnak: it is a quadrilateral block, to which access was obtained by an inclined plane.

Perhaps the king accomplished some of the religious ceremonies which were among his duties at this point. In order to arrive at the altar from without, three successive gates and boundary walls had to be passed, so that the safety of the sovereign was well guarded.

Upon the Egyptian plan, which forms a basis for these remarks, there is, on the right of the nest of buildings just described, another of more simple arrangement but of still larger extent. There is no apparent communication between the two; they are, indeed, separated by a grove of trees. In front of this second assemblage of buildings there is the same rectangular structure of doubtful purpose, and the same quasi-pylon that we find before the first. Behind the pylon there is a court surrounded on three sides by a double row of apartments, some of which communicate directly with the court, others through an intervening portico. Doubtless, this court was the harem in which the king lived with his wives and children. Ranged round courts in its rear are storehouses, stables, cattle-stables, and other offices, with gardens again beyond them. The finest garden lies immediately behind the block of buildings first described, and is shown in our restoration . Here and there rise light pavilions, whose wooden structure may be divined from the details given by the draughtsman. Colonnades, under which the crowds of servants and underlings could find shelter at night, pervade the whole building. The domestic offices are partly shown in our figure. As to the reception halls , we find nothing that can be identified with them in any of the plans which we have inspected. But it must be remembered that the representations in question are greatly mutilated, and that hitherto they have only been reproduced and published in fragmentary fashion.

In this we are supported by the opinions of MARIETTE and EBERS .

This pavilion is entirely covered with bas-reliefs and hieroglyphic texts. The best way to solve the problem which it offers is to accept the teaching of history, and of all that we know concerning the persistent characteristics of royal life in the East. Even in our own day there are few eastern potentates who do not think it necessary to lay down, on the day after their accession, the foundations of a new palace. The Syrian Emir Beschir did so at Beit-el-din in the Lebanon, and Djezzar-Pacha another at St. Jean d'Acre; so too, in Egypt, Mehemet Ali and his successors built palaces at Choubra and other places in the neighbourhood of Cairo and Alexandria. At Constantinople recent Sultans have spent upon building the last resources of their empire. In these matters the East is the home of change. The son seldom inhabits the dwelling of his father. The Pharaohs and the kings of Nineveh and Babylon must have been touched to some extent with the same mania and eager to enjoy the results of their labour at the earliest moment. The sovereigns of Egypt must have chosen the sites for their palaces within the zone covered by the annual inundations. In any part of Egypt forced labour would rapidly build up the artificial banks necessary to raise the intended buildings above the reach of the highest floods, while in such a situation trees and shrubs would grow almost as fast as the palace walls. In a few years the royal dwelling would be complete, and with its completion would find itself surrounded by smiling parterres and shadowy groves.

We should not have looked for a palace in such a situation. We may add that the site of the pavilion is not large enough to accommodate the household of a king. It is closely circumscribed by the temple of Thothmes and its propylaea on the right, and by that of Rameses at the back, so that its dimensions would have seemed even more insignificant than they are in comparison with those gigantic fabrics. The greatest width of the pavilion is not more than about 80 feet and its greatest depth than 72, and the small court which almost cuts the building into two parts occupies a good third of the surface inclosed by these measurements. Taken altogether, the three stories could not have contained more than about ten chambers, some of which were rather closets than anything more ambitious. In spite of the comparative simplicity of modern domestic arrangements a middle-class family of our day would be cramped in such a dwelling. How then could a Pharaoh, with the swarm of idlers who surrounded him, attempt to take up his residence in it?

But whether it is to be considered a palace or a fortress, this is the proper place to study the details of this curious edifice. It forms, indeed, part of an assemblage of funerary buildings, and its situation is immediately in front of a temple, facts which might suggest that its arrangements ought to have been discussed in an earlier chapter. But these arrangements are in fact imitated from those of the ordinary dwellings of the living. Its economy is not that of either tomb or temple. The superposition of one story upon another is found in neither of those classes of buildings but it is found both in military and domestic architecture. So, too, with the mode of lighting the various apartments. The darkness of the tomb is complete, the illumination of the temple is far from brilliant, in its more sacred parts it is almost as dark as the tomb. Prayers could be said to Osiris without inconvenience by the scanty daylight which found its way through the narrow doorway of the sepulchral chapel, but the active pleasures of life required a broader day. We find, therefore, that the pavilion was lighted by windows, real windows, and some of them very large. Nothing is more rare, in the buildings which have come down to us from the pharaonic epochs, than such windows; but then most of those buildings are either tombs or temples. Civil architecture in Egypt had to fulfil pretty much the same requirements as in other countries. It was, therefore, obliged to employ the means which have been found necessary in every other country and at every other period.

The employment of the window is not the only structural peculiarity in the pavilion of Medinet-Abou: upon the walls which surround the small court, and between the first and second stories, there are carved stone brackets or consoles, supporting flat slabs of stone. It has sometimes been asserted that these brackets formed supports for masts upon which a velarium was stretched across the court. But neither in engravings nor in photographs have we been able to discover the slightest trace of the holes which would be necessary for the insertion of such masts.

But, leaving their purpose on one side, we must call attention to the curious sculptures which are interposed between the upper and lower slabs of these brackets. They are in the shape of grotesque busts, resting upon the lower slab and supporting the upper one with their heads. In the wall above a kind of framed tablet is inserted. In these figures, which are now very much worn and corroded by exposure, we have a repetition of those prisoners of war which occur frequently upon the neighbouring bas-reliefs in similar uncomfortable positions. Such a motive is entirely in place in a building which, by the general features of its architecture, seems a combination of fortress and triumphal arch.

It is difficult to admit that such a building as this was never utilized. We may well believe that it was never built for permanent occupation, but we must not therefore conclude that chambers so well lighted and so richly decorated were without their proper and well-defined uses. The floors of the first and second stories have disappeared, but that they once existed is proved by the staircase, part of which is still in place. The floors were of wood; the stairs of stone. The general economy of the building shows that it was intended that every room, from the ground-floor to the topmost story, should be used when occasion arose. It is possible that they were employed as reception rooms for the princes and vassal chiefs who came together several times a year for the celebration of funerary rites. In chambers richly decorated like these, and, doubtless, richly furnished also, people of rank could meet together and await at their ease their turn to take part in the ceremonies.

HERODOTUS, ii. 148; DIODORUS SICULUS, i. 64; STRABO, xvii. 37.

But we are by no means sure that the ruins in the Fayoum are those of the Labyrinth. These ruins, which were first discovered and described by Jomard and Caristie, and afterwards in greater detail by Lepsius, are upon the western slope of the Libyan chain, about four miles and a half east-by-south from Medinet-el-Fayoum, at a point which must have been on the borders of Lake Moeris, if the position of that lake as defined by Linant de Bellefonds be accepted. Mariette did not admit that the ruins in question were those of the vast building which was counted among the seven wonders of the world. "I know," he once said to us, "where the Labyrinth is: it is under the crops of the Fayoum. I shall dig it up some day if Heaven gives me a long enough life."

The plan and description of the building discovered by Lepsius hardly correspond with the account of Strabo and with what we learn from other antique sources as to the magnificence of the Labyrinth and the vast bulk of the materials of which it was composed. We shall, therefore, reproduce neither the plan of Lepsius nor the text of the Greek geographer. The latter gives no measurements either of height or length, and under such circumstances any attempt to restore the building, from an architectural point of view would be futile.

The palace in Egypt was but a house larger and richer in its decorations than the others. The observations which we have made upon it may be applied to the dwelling-places of private individuals, who enjoyed, in proportion to their resources, the same comforts and conveniences as the sovereign or the hereditary princes of the nomes. The house was a palace in small, its arrangements and construction were inspired by the same wants, by the same national habits, by the same climatic and other natural conditions.

Diodorus and Josephus tell us that the population of Egypt proper, from Alexandria to Philae, was 7,000,000 at the time of the Roman Empire, and there is reason to believe that it was still larger at the time of the nation's greatest prosperity under the princes of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties. A large proportion of the Egyptian people lived in small towns and open villages, besides which there were a few very large towns. That Sais, Memphis, and Thebes were great cities we know from the words of the ancient historians, from the vast spaces covered by their ruins, and from the extent of their cemeteries.

DIODORUS, i. 31, 6.--JOSEPHUS speaks of a population of seven millions and a half, exclusive of the inhabitants of Alexandria.

Neither the Greek nor the Egyptian texts give us any information as to the appearance of an Egyptian town, the way in which its buildings were arranged, or their average size and height. The Greek travellers do not seem to have been sufficiently impressed by anything of the kind to think it worthy of record. The sites of these ancient cities have hardly ever been examined from this point of view, and perhaps little would be discovered if such an examination were to take place. In every country the ordinary dwelling-house is constructed of small materials, and the day arrives, sooner or later, when it succumbs to the action of the weather.

It is only under exceptional circumstances that the private house leaves ruins behind it from which much can be learnt. Pompeii, under its shroud of ashes and fine dust, is a case in point. Sometimes, also, when the house has entirely disappeared, interesting facts may be gleaned as to its extent and arrangement. Instances of this are to be seen at Athens, where, upon several of the hills which were formerly included within its walls, may be traced the foundations of private dwellings cut in the living rock. Neither of these favourable conditions existed in the valley of the Nile.

The sands of the deserts would, no doubt, have guarded the houses of Memphis and Thebes as effectually as the cinders of Vesuvius did those of the little Roman town, if they had had but the same chance. We know how thoroughly they protected the dwellings of the dead upon the plateau of Gizeh, but the homes of the living were built close to the river and not upon the borders of the desert, and we can neither hope to find dead cities under the Egyptian sands, nor such indications of their domestic architecture as those which may sometimes be gleaned in mountainous countries.

Their situation upon the banks of the river, or not far from it, made it necessary for Egyptian cities to be placed upon artificial mounds or embankments, which should raise them above the inundation. Those modern villages, which are not built upon the slopes of the mountain, are protected in the same fashion.

The tradition has survived of the great works undertaken during the period of national prosperity in order to provide this elevated bed for the chief cities of the country. According to Herodotus and Diodorus, Sesostris and Sabaco, that is to say the great Theban princes and the Ethiopian conquerors, were both occupied with this work of raising the level of the towns. Some idea of the way in which these works were carried out has been gained by excavations upon the sites of a few cities. When a new district was to be added to a city the ground was prepared by building with crude brick a number of long and thick walls parallel to one another; then cross walls at right angles with the first, chessboard fashion. The square pits thus constructed were filled with earth, broken stone, or anything else within reach. The foundations of the future city or district were laid upon the mass thus obtained, and profited by the operation both in health and amenity. The cities of Memphis and Thebes both seem to have been built in this manner.

HERODOTUS, ii. 137; DIODORUS, i. 57.

As a rule this is all that we learn by excavating on these ancient sites. The materials of the houses themselves have either fallen into dust, or, in a country which has been thickly populated since long before the commencement of history, have been used over and over again in other works. The inevitable destruction has been rendered more rapid and complete by the fellah's habit of opening up any mounds which he has reason to believe ancient, for the sake of the fertilizing properties they possess.

In the case of Thebes we cannot point out, even to this slight extent, the arrangement of the city. We cannot tell where the palaces of the king and the dwellings of the great were situated. All that we know is that the city properly speaking, the Diospolis of the Greeks, so called on account of the great temple of Amen which formed its centre, was on the right bank of the river; that its houses were massed round those two great sacred inclosures which we now call Karnak and Luxor; that it was intersected by wide streets, those which united Karnak and Luxor to each other and to the river being bordered with sphinxes. These great streets were the ?????? of the Greek writers; others they called ???????? ????, king's street. The blocks of houses which bordered these great causeways were intersected by narrow lanes. The quarter on the left bank of the river was a sort of suburb inhabited chiefly by priests, embalmers, and others practising those lugubrious branches of industry which are connected with the burial of the dead. The whole of this western city was known in the time of the Ptolemies and the Romans as the Memnonia.

We shall not attempt to discuss the few hints given by the Greek writers as to the extent of Thebes. Even if they were less vague and contradictory than they are, they would tell us little as to the density of the population. Diodorus says that there were once houses of four and five stories high at Thebes, but he did not see them himself, and it is to the time of the fabulous monarch Busiris that he attributes them. In painted representations we never find a house of more than three stories, and they are very rare. As a rule we find a ground-floor, one floor above that, and a covered flat roof on the top.

DIODORUS talks of a circumference of 140 stades , without telling us whether his measurement applies to the whole of Thebes, or only to the city on the right bank. STRABO says that "an idea of the size of the ancient city may be formed from the fact that its existing monuments cover a space which is not less than 80 stades in length ." This latter statement indicates a circumference much greater than that given by Diodorus. DIODORUS gives to Memphis a circumference of 150 stades .

DIODORUS, i. 45, 5.

In a tale translated by M. MASPERO , a princess is shut up in a house of which the windows are 70 cubits above the ground. She is to be given to him who is bold and skilful enough to scale her windows. Such a height must therefore have seemed quite fabulous to the Egyptians, as did that of the tower which is so common in our popular fairy stories.

It does not seem likely that, even in the important streets, the houses of the rich made much architectural show on the outside. Thebes and Memphis probably resembled those modern Oriental towns in which the streets are bordered with massive structures in which hardly any openings beside the doors are to be seen. The houses figured in the bas-reliefs are often surrounded by a crenellated wall, and stand in the middle of a court or garden.

When a man was at all easy in his circumstances he chose for his dwelling a house in which all elegance and artistic elaboration was reserved for himself--a bare wall was turned to the noise of the street. Houses constructed upon such a principle covered, of course, a proportionally large space of ground. The walls of Babylon inclosed fields, gardens, and vineyards; and it is probable that much of the land embraced by those of Thebes was occupied in similar fashion by those inclosures round the dwellings of the rich, which might be compared to an Anglo-Indian "compound."

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