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

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 1101 lines and 137317 words, and 23 pages

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."

QUINTUS CURTIUS, v. 1, 127.

The house, of which a restoration appears on page 31 , a restoration which is based upon the plan found by Rosellini in a Theban tomb , is generally considered to have been a country villa belonging to the king. We do not concur in that opinion, however. It appears to us quite possible that in the fashionable quarters--if we may use such a phrase--of Memphis and Thebes, the houses of the great may have shewn such combinations of architecture and garden as this. There are trees and creeping plants in front of the house shown in Fig. 1 also. Both are inclosed within a wall pierced by one large door.

Even the houses of the poor seem generally to have had their courtyards, at the back of which a structure was raised consisting of a single story surmounted by a flat roof, to which access was given by an external staircase. This arrangement, which is to be seen in a small model of a house which belongs to the Egyptian collection in the Louvre , does not differ from that which is still in force in the villages of Egypt.

"Egyptian houses were built of crude bricks made of loam mixed with chopped straw. These bricks were usually a foot long and six inches wide. The ceilings of the larger rooms were of indigenous or foreign wood; the smaller rooms were often vaulted.

"Doors and windows opened generally in the middle. They opened inwards, and were fastened by means of bolts and latches. Some of them had wooden locks like those which are still in use in Egypt. Most of the inner doors were closed merely by hangings of some light material. For the decoration we must turn to the pictures in the rock-cut tombs. The walls of the houses were coated with stucco, and painted with religious and domestic scenes. The galleries and columns of the porch were coloured in imitation of stone or granite. The ceilings were covered with what we call arabesques and interlacing ornaments of all kinds, while the floors were strewn with mats woven of many-coloured reeds."

We shall describe the tasteful and convenient furniture which these rooms contained in our chapter upon the industrial arts.

The flat roof seems to have been universal in Egypt. It added to the accommodation of the house, it afforded a pleasant rendezvous for the family in the evening, where they could enjoy the view and the fresh breezes which spring up at sunset. At certain seasons they must have slept there. On the other hand the granaries, barns, and storehouses were almost always dome-shaped . Those which had flat roofs seem to have been very few indeed. This we see in a painting which seems to represent the process of brewing. The Egyptians were great beer drinkers . These brick vaults must have been very thick, and they were well fitted to preserve that equable and comparatively low temperature which is required for the keeping of provisions. The bas-reliefs often show long rows of storehouses one after the other. Their number was no doubt intended to give an idea of their proprietor's wealth. Some of them seem to have had their only opening half-way up their sides and to have been reached by an external incline or flight of steps . A sketch made by M. Bourgoin in a tomb at Sakkarah shows us another form of granary. It is shaped like a stone bottle, it has a door at the ground level and a little window higher up.

HERODOTUS says that they did so in the marshy parts of Lower Egypt.

It is difficult to say what the artist meant by the little oblong mark under these windows. Perhaps it represents an outside balcony by which the window could be reached either for the purposes of inspection or in order to add to the store within.

The Egyptians had country houses as well as those in town, but the structural arrangements were the same in both. The dwelling of the peasant did not differ very greatly from that of the town-bred artisan, while the villas of the wealthy were only distinguished from their houses in the richer quarters of Thebes and Memphis by their more abundant provision of shady groves, parks, and artificial lakes. Their paintings prove conclusively that the Egyptians had carried horticulture to a very high pitch; they even put their more precious trees in pots like those in which we place orange-trees.

These trees must have been planted in large terra-cotta pots, such as are still used in many places for the same purpose.

The Ancient Egyptians have left us very few works of military architecture, and yet, under their great Theban princes, more than one fortress must have been built outside their own country to preserve their supremacy over neighbouring peoples. In the later periods of the empire fortresses were erected in the Delta and in the upper gorges of the Nile, but, unfortunately such works were always carried out in brick and generally in crude brick. The Egyptian architect had at hand in great abundance the finest materials in the world, except marble, and yet they were used by him exclusively for the tomb and the temple. When it was a question of providing an indestructible dwelling for the dead, and so of perpetuating the efficacy of the funeral prayers and offerings, "eternal stone" was not spared; but when less important purposes had to be fulfilled they were content with clay. Baking bricks was a more rapid process than quarrying and dressing stone, and if the house or fortress in which they were used had comparatively slight durability, it was easy enough to replace it with another.

Th crude bricks, dried simply in the sun, became disintegrated with time and fell into powder; the kiln dried bricks were carried off from the ruins of one building to be used in another. The few piers or fragments of wall which remain are confused and shapeless. A few blocks of stone, sometimes even a single chip of marble, is enough to enable us to tell the history of a building which has been long destroyed. Such a chip may be the only surviving fragment of the edifice to which it belonged, but it preserves the impression of the chisel which fashioned it, that is of the taste and individuality of the artist who held the chisel. We have nothing of the kind in the case of a brick. Bricks were almost always covered with a coat of stucco, so that nothing was required of them beyond that they should be of the right size and of a certain hardness. It is only by their inscriptions, when they have them, that the dates of these bricks can be determined; when they are without them they tell us nothing at all about the past. Sometimes a brick structure presents, from a distance, an imposing appearance, and the traveller approaches it thinking that he will soon draw all its secrets from it. But after carefully studying and measuring it he is forced to confess that he has failed. It has no trace of decoration, and it is the decoration of an ancient building which tells us its age, its character, and its purpose. Stone, even when greatly broken, allows mouldings to be traced, but bricks preserve nothing; they are as wanting in individual expression as the pebbles which go to make a shingly beech.

Even if it had come down to us in a less fragmentary condition, the military architecture of Egypt would have been far less interesting than that of Greece. The latter country is mountainous; the soil is cut up by valleys and rocky hills; the Greek towns, or, at least, their citadels, occupied the summits of rocky heights which varied greatly in profile and altitude. Hence the military architecture of the country showed great diversity in its combinations. In Egypt the configuration of the soil was not of a nature to provoke any efforts of invention or adaptation. All the cities were in the plain. Fortified posts were distinguished from one another only by the greater or less extent, height, and thickness of their walls. We shall, however, have to call attention to the remains of a few defensive works which, like those established to guard the defiles of the cataracts, were built upon sites different enough from those ordinarily presented by the Nile valley. In these cases we shall find that the Egyptian constructors knew how to adapt their military buildings to the special requirements of the ground.

DIODORUS, i. 45, 6.

THUCYDIDES, i. 104. Cf. HERODOTUS, iii. 94, and DIODORUS, xi. 74. After the Persian conquest it was occupied by the army corps left to ensure the submission of the country.

At Heliopolis they were 64 feet thick , at Sais 48 feet while at Tanis they were only 19 feet.

For our restoration we have had to depend very little upon conjecture. The only flight of fancy in which we have indulged is seen in the extra height which we have given to the tower at the north-eastern angle of the building. It seemed to us probable that at some point upon such a lofty terrace there would be a belvedere or watch-tower to facilitate the proper surveillance of the country round about. For the rest we have merely re-established the upper part of the works and restored its depth to the ditch, which had been filled in by the falling of the parapets. The line of walls and bastions can be easily followed except at one point upon the southern face, where a wide breach exists. The destruction of this part of the wall alone and the clearing of the ground upon which it stood, suggests that it was broken down by man rather than by time. It is probable that the fortress was taken by some Ethiopian conqueror, by Sabaco or Tahraka, and that he took care to render its fortifications useless in a way that could not be easily repaired.

Our view of the fort shows it as it must have appeared from a hill in the Libyan Chain, to the south-west. The engineer lavished all his skill on rendering the castle impregnable from the side of the desert. An attack upon the flank facing the stream was impossible; on that side the walls rested upon precipitous rocks rising sheer from the rapids of the Nile.

The trace of the walls was a polygon not unlike a capital L. The principal arm was perpendicular to the course of the river. Its flat summit was about 250 feet by 190 feet. The interior was reached by a narrow passage in the thickness of the masonry, the entrance to which was reached by an inclined plane. The entrance is not visible in our illustration but the incline which leads to it is shown. The walls on the three sides which looked landwards were from fifty to eighty feet high, according to the ground. They increased in thickness from twenty-six feet at the base to about twelve or thirteen at the summit. Externally their upper parts fell backwards in such fashion that no ladder, however high, would have availed to reach the parapet. We find a similar arrangement in the walls of a fortress represented at Beni-Hassan .

In this case the inclination is, however, in the lower half of the wall; a device which would be far less efficient in defeating an escalade than that at Semneh.--ED.

When the fortress was prepared for defence the parapets may have been furnished with wooden structures acting as machicolations, whence the besieged could cast javelins and stones and shoot arrows at an enemy attempting to scale or batter the walls. A bas-relief at Thebes which represents the siege of a fortress seems to indicate that the parapets were crowned by wooden erections of some kind .

METHODS OF CONSTRUCTION, THE ORDERS, SECONDARY FORMS.

We have now described the tomb, the temple, and the house in ancient Egypt. We have attempted to define the character of their architecture, and to show how its forms were determined by the religious beliefs, social condition, and manners of the nation, as well as by the climate of the country. We have therefore passed in review the most important architectural creations of a people who were the first to display a real taste and feeling for art.

In order to give a complete idea of Egyptian art, and of the resources at its disposal, we must now take these buildings to pieces and show the elements of which they were composed. The rich variety of supports, the numerous "orders" of pillar and column, the methods employed for decoration and illumination, must each be studied separately. We have commenced by looking at them from a synthetic point of view, but we must finish by a methodical analysis. From such an analysis alone can we obtain the necessary materials for an exhaustive comparison between the art of Egypt and that of the nations which succeeded her upon the stage of history. An examination of the Egyptian remains carries the historian back to a more remote date than can be attained in the case of any other country, and yet he is far from reaching the first springs of Egyptian civilization. Notwithstanding their prodigious antiquity, the most ancient of the monuments that have survived carry us back into the bosom of a society which had long emerged from primitive barbarism. The centuries which saw the building of the Pyramids and the mastabas of the Memphite necropolis had behind them a long and well-filled past. Although we possess no relic from that past, we can divine its character to some extent from the impression which it made upon the taste and fancy of latter ages. Certain effects of which the artists of Memphis were very fond can only be explained by habits contracted during a long course of centuries. In the forms and motives employed by Egyptian architects we shall find more than one example of these survivals from a previous stage of development, such as forms appropriate to wood or metal employed in stone, and childish methods of construction perpetuated without other apparent cause.

In our explanation of the general character of Egyptian architecture we have already enumerated the principal materials of which it disposed, and pointed out the modifications arising from the choice of one or another of those materials. We should not here return to the subject but for a misconception which has gained a wide acceptance.

It is of Mokattam limestone . M. Perrot probably meant to refer to the two upper "chambers," both of which are lined with granite.--ED.

Bricks were employed to a vast extent by the Egyptians. They made them of Nile mud mixed with chopped straw, a combination which is mentioned in the Biblical account of the hardships inflicted upon the Israelites. "And Pharaoh commanded the same day the taskmasters of the people and their officers, saying, Ye shall no more give the people straw to make brick as heretofore; let them go and gather straw for themselves. And the tale of the bricks which they did make heretofore ye shall lay upon them; ye shall not diminish aught thereof, for they be idle."

This manufacture was remarkable for its extreme rapidity--an excellent brick earth was to be found at almost any point in the Nile valley. An unpractised labourer can easily make a thousand bricks a day; after a week's practice he can make twelve hundred, and, if paid "by the piece" as many as eighteen hundred a day. Sometimes drying in the sun was thought sufficient; the result was a crude brick which was endowed with no little power of resistance and endurance in such a climate as that of Egypt. When baked bricks were required the operation was a little complicated as they each had to pass through the kiln. Egyptian bricks were usually very large. Those of a pyramid in the neighbourhood of Memphis average 15 inches long by 7 wide and 4-3/4 inches thick. After the commencement of the Theban epoch they were often stamped with the royal oval--as the Roman bricks had the names of the consuls impressed upon them--and thus they have preserved the dates at which the buildings of which they form part were erected .

LEPSIUS has reproduced a certain number of these stamped bricks.

In spite of the bad quality of Egyptian timber the earliest efforts at construction made by the ancestors of the people were made in wood. Their dwellings cannot have been very unlike those which the traveller even yet encounters in Nubia. These are cabins with walls formed of palm branches interlaced and plastered over with clay and straw. Their roofs are branches or planks from the same tree laid horizontally across. In Lower Egypt, upon the borders of Lake Menzaleh, the huts of the people are formed of long and thick faggots of reeds. Wherever wood was abundant and the rain less to be feared than the heat of the sun, the first dwelling was a hut of branches. The manufacture of bricks required a good deal more patience, calculation, and effort, than to plant a few boughs in the soil and weave them together.

We do not mean to pretend that earth, either in the form of bricks or pis?, did not very soon come into use when men began to form shelters for themselves, but it seems certain that wooden construction was developed before any other. It was the first to aim at ornament, and to show anything which could be called a style. This is proved by the fact that the most ancient works in stone have no appropriate character of their own; they owe such decorative qualities as they possess to their docile imitation of works in the less durable material.

We may take the sarcophagus of Mycerinus as an example of this. That sarcophagus had a short but adventurous career after its discovery by Colonel Howard Vyse in 1837. It was then empty, but in a state of perfect preservation, with the exception of the lid, which was broken, but could be easily restored. The precious relic was removed from the pyramid and embarked, together with the wooden coffin of the king, on board a merchant ship at Alexandria. On her voyage to England the ship was wrecked off Carthagena, and the sarcophagus lost. The coffin floated and was saved. Happily the sarcophagus had been accurately drawn, and we are enabled to give a perspective view of it compiled from Perring's elevations .

From its appearance no one would guess that this sarcophagus was of basalt. The whole of its forms were appropriate to wooden construction alone. Each of its longer sides was divided into three compartments by four groups of minute pilasters, slight in salience, and crowned by a kind of entablature formed of four transverse members which were unequal in length and relief. The lower parts of the three compartments consist of a kind of false door with very complicated jambs. Above this there are deeply cut hollows with cross bars, suggesting windows, and still higher a number of fillets run along the whole length of the sarcophagus. The little pilasters are separated by narrow panels, which terminate in an ornament which could readily be cut in wood by the chisel, viz., in that double lotus-leaf which is so universally present in the more ancient tombs.

The ends of the sarcophagus were similar to the sides, except that they had only one compartment. The corners and the upper edge, exclusive of the lid, are carved into a cylindrical moulding which resembles the rounded and tied angles of a wooden case. The upper member of the whole, a bold cornice, is the only element which it is not easy to refer to the traditions of wooden construction.

The foregoing observations may be applied with equal justice to the sarcophagus of Khoo-foo-Ankh figured on pp. 183, 184, vol. i. It is of the same period, and displays the same arrangement of panels and fillets, the same lotus-leaf ornament, and the same imitation of a barred window. There is no cornice or gorge at the top, but the upper part of the flat sides is decorated with the perpendicular grooves which are found in the hollow of the cornice elsewhere. In wood this ornament, which was well adapted to add richness to the cornice by the shadows which it cast, could easily be made with a gouge; so that even if the gorge itself was not borrowed from wooden construction its ornamentation may well have originated in that way.

If still further proofs be required of the imitative character of this early stone architecture, we shall find them in the door of a tomb . Nothing can be clearer than the way in which the lintel obtained its peculiar character. It is formed of a thick slab engaged at each end in the upright beams of stone which form the jambs. This slab appears beyond the jambs, and ends in a deep groove, which divides them from the walls. Underneath the lintel, and well within the shadow which it casts, there is another and more curious slab; it is, in shape, a thick cylinder, corresponding in length to the width of the door. In the deep groove already mentioned the ends of the spindles or trunnions upon which it is supported are suggested. They are not, indeed, in their right places: they are too near the face of the building. The workman would have had to make the groove very deep in order to show them in their proper places, and he was therefore content to hint at them with sufficient clearness to enable those who saw them to understand what they meant.

Tombs have been found at Gizeh and Sakkarah, which are referred to the second and third dynasties. The king Persen, whose name occurs in some of the inscriptions upon these tombs, belongs to that remote period. In many of these tombs the ceiling is carved to represent trunks of palm-trees; even the roughnesses of the bark being reproduced. Most of the sepulchres in which these details have been noticed are subterranean, but they are also to be discovered in a chamber in the tomb of Ti. It is probable that if more mastabas had come down to us with their roofs intact we should find many instances of this kind of decoration.

Our Figures 38 and 39 are taken from another tomb, and show varieties of that ornament which is universally employed as a finial to the panels we have mentioned. In its most careful form it consists of two petals united by a band, which allows the deep slit characteristic of the leaves of all aquatic plants to be clearly visible.

This motive seems to have had peculiar value in the eyes of the Egyptians. It is also found in the tombs at Thebes, and its persistence may, perhaps, be accounted for by the association of the lotus with ideas of a new birth and resurrection. Under the Rameses and their successors it was, with the exception of the vertical and horizontal grooves , the only reminiscence of wooden construction preserved by stone architecture. In the doors of the rock-cut tombs at Thebes no trace of the circular beam, nor of any other characteristic of the joiner-inspired stone-carving of early times, is to be found. The Egyptian architects had by that time learnt to use stone and granite in a fashion suggested by their own capabilities. We see, however, by the representations preserved for us by the bas-reliefs, that wooden construction maintained the character which belonged to it during the first days of the Ancient Empire .

We know from the pyramids, from the temple of the sphinx, and from some of the mastabas, that the Egyptian workmen were thoroughly efficient in the cutting and dressing of stone, even in the time of the first monarchs. However far we go back in the history of Egypt we find no trace of any method of construction corresponding to that which is called Cyclopean in the case of the Greeks. We find no walls built like those of Tiryns, with huge and shapeless masses of rock, the interstices being filled in with small stones. We do not even find polygonal masonry--by which we mean walls formed of stone dressed with the chisel, but with irregular joints, and with stones of very different size and shape placed in juxtaposition with one another. In the ancient citadels of Greece and Italy this kind of construction is to be found in every variety, but in Egypt the stones are always arranged into horizontal courses. Here and there the vertical joints are not quite vertical, and sometimes we find stones which rise higher, or sink lower, than the course to which they belong, tying it to the one above it or below it. Such accidents as these do not, however, affect the general rule, which was to keep each course self-contained and parallel with the soil. All these varieties in Egyptian masonry may be seen in a horizontal section of the first pylon at Karnak . This pylon is in such a ruined state that by means of photographs taken from different sides we can form a very exact idea of its internal composition.

This pylon dates from the Ptolemies, but if there was anything that did not change in Egypt, it was their processes of construction.

Great care in execution, and great size in the units of construction, are only to be found in comparatively few of the Egyptian monuments. We have already remarked upon the painstaking skill with which the granite or limestone casing of the chambers and passages in the Gizeh pyramids was fixed. Certain buildings of the Theban period, such as the vaulted chapels in the Great Temple at Abydos, and the courts of Medinet-Abou, are notable for excellence of a similar kind. Everything, however, must in this respect give way to the Grand Gallery in the pyramid of Cheops.

The Egypt of the early Pharaohs set more than one good example which later generations failed to follow. The extraordinary number of buildings which the great Theban princes carried on at one and the same time, from the depths of Nubia to the shores of the Mediterranean, made their subjects more easily satisfied in the matter of architectural thoroughness. The habit of covering every plain surface with a brilliant polychromatic decoration contributed to the same result. The workmen were always hurried. There were hardly hands enough for all the undertakings on foot at once. How, then, could they be expected to lavish minute care upon joints which were destined to be hidden behind a coat of stucco? We never encounter in Egyptian buildings any of those graceful varieties of masonry which have been adopted from time to time by all those artistic nations that have left their stonework bare. None of the various kinds of rustication, none of the alternation of square with oblong blocks, none of that undeviating regularity in the height of the courses and in the direction of the joints which by itself is enough to give beauty to a building, is to be found in the work of Egyptian masons.

It was for similar motives that the Egyptians did not, as a rule, care to use very large stones. Their obelisks and colossal statues prove that they knew how to quarry and raise blocks of enormous size, but they never made those efforts except when they had good reason to do so. They did not care to exhaust themselves with dragging huge stones up on to their buildings, where they would ever after be lost to sight under the stucco. In the most carefully built Theban edifices the average size of the stones hardly exceeds that of the materials which are used by our modern architects. A single course was from 30 to 38 inches high, and the length of the blocks varied between 5 feet and rather more than 8. In the great pylon of Karnak the lintel over the doorway is a stone beam more than 25 feet long. In the hypostyle hall the architraves of the central aisle are at least 29 feet long. It is said that some attain a length of nearly 32 feet.

It would seem, then, that monolithic columns were in fashion during the early centuries of the second Theban empire, but that, in later times, the general custom was to build up columns, sometimes for their whole height, of moderately sized, and sometimes of very small stones .

The columns at Luxor are constructed in courses. The joints of the stone are worked carefully for only about a third of their whole diameter. Their centres are slightly hollowed out and filled in with a mortar of pounded brick which has become friable.

To all that concerns the quality of the building similar remarks may be applied. We have mentioned a few examples of careful and scientific construction, but, as a rule, Egyptian buildings were put together in a fashion that was careless in the extreme. The foundations were neither wide enough nor deep enough. It is not until we come to the remains of the Ptolemaic period, such as the temples at Edfou and Denderah, that we discover foundations sinking 16 or 18 feet into the ground. The Pharaonic temples were laid upon the surface rather than solidly rooted in the soil. Mariette attributes the destruction which has overtaken the temples at Karnak less to the violence of man or to earthquakes than to inherent faults of construction, and to the want of foresight shown by their architects in not placing them at a sufficient elevation above the inundations. For many centuries the waters of the Nile have reached the walls of the temples by infiltration, and have gradually eaten away the sandstone of which they are composed. "Similar causes produce similar effects, and the time may be easily foreseen when the superb hypostyle hall will yield to the attacks of its enemy, and its columns, already eaten through for three quarters of their thickness, will fall as those of the western court have fallen."

At the time when Karnak was built there were in the country buildings which were from ten to fifteen centuries old, to which the architects of the time might have turned for information upon doubtful points. In them the gradual rising of the valley level must have been clearly shown. This want of foresight need cause us, however, no great surprise; but it is otherwise with the carelessness of the architects in arranging their plans, and in failing to compel the workmen to follow those plans when made. "Except in a few rare instances," says Mariette, "the Egyptian workman was far from deserving the reputation he has gained for precision and care in the execution of his task. Only those who have personally measured the tombs and temples of Egypt know how often, for instance, the opposite walls of a single chamber are unequal in height."

We see, then, that in many buildings the Egyptians employed methods which demanded no little patience, skill, and attention from the workman, but as a rule they preferred to work in a more expeditious and less careful fashion. They used a cement made of sand and lime; traces of it are everywhere found, both in the ruins of Thebes and in the pyramids, between the blocks of limestone and sandstone. Still more did bricks require the use of mortar, which in their case was often little more than mud.

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet