m "m^ :•< .-m '\ IP 1^: m m |_iife;jj. « V o:n45 A HISTORY OF ART IN ANCIENT EGYPT. -f<-' A HISTORY r .i ^ -i Of ^rt in Ancient €ggpt FROM THE FRENCH OF GEORGES PERROT, rROFF.SSOR I.V THE FACULTV OK I.ETrERS, PARIS ; MEMBER OF THE INSTITUTE AND CHARLES CHIPIEZ. ILLUSTRATED WITH FIVE HUNDRED AND NINETY-EIGHT ENGRAVINGS IN THE TEXT, AND FOURTEEN STEEL AND COLOURED PLATES. AV TJVO VOLUMES. -VOL. L TRANSLATED AND EDITED LV WALTER ARMSTRONG, B.A., Oxon. AUTHOR OF "ALFRED STEVENS," ETC. lLon^on : c H a r m a n a n i > h a i. l, i.i m itkd. 1883. • Hontion : R. Clay, Soxs, and Tayiof, BKEAD STREET HILL. Th£ GETTY CENTER UBRARY PREFACE. M. Perrot's name as a classical scholar and archaeologist, and M. Chipiez's as a penetrating critic of architecture, stand so high that any work from their pens is sure of a warm welcome from all students of the material remains of antiquity. These volumes are the first instalment of an undertaking which has for its aim the history and critical analysis of that great organic growth which, beginning with the Pharaohs and ending with the Roman Emperors, forms what is called Antique Art. The reception accorded to this instalment in its original form is sufficient proof that the eulogium prefixed to the German trans- lation by an eminent living Egyptologist, Professor Georg Ebers, is well deserved ; "The first section," he says, "of this work, is broad and comprehensive in conception, and delicate in execution ; it treats Egyptian art in a fashion which has never previously been approached." In clothing it in a language which will, I hope, enable it to reach a still wider public, my one endeavour has been that it should lose as little as possible, either in substance or form. A certain amount of repetition is inevitable in a work of this kind when issued, as this was, in parts, and in one place ^ I have ventured to omit matter which had already been given at some length, but with that exception I have followed M. Perrot's words as closely as the difference of idiom would allow. Another kind of repetition, with which, perhaps, some readers may be inclined to quarrel, forced itself upon the author as the ^ Page 92, Vol. I. VI Preface. lesser of two evils. He was compelled either to sacrifice detail and precision in attempting to carry on at once the history of all the Egyptian arts and of their connection with the national religion and civilization, or to go back upon his footsteps now and aeain in tracine each art successively from its birth to its decav. The latter alternative was chosen as the only one consistent with the final aim of his work. Stated in a few words, that aim is to trace the course of the great plastic evolution which culminated in the age of Pericles and came to an end in that of Marcus Aurelius. That evolution forms a complete organic whole, with a birthday, a deathday, and an unbroken chain of cause and effect uniting the two. To objectors who may say that the art of India, ot China, of Japan, should have been included in the scheme, it may be answered : this is the life, not of two, or three, but of one. M. Perrot has been careful, therefore, to discriminate between those characteristics of Egyptian art which may be referred either to the national beliefs and modes of thought, or to undeveloped material conditions, such as the want or supersti- tious disuse of iron, and those which, being determined by the very nature of the problems which art has to solve, formed a starting point for the arts ot all later civilizations. By means of well-chosen examples he shows that the art of the Egyptians went through the same process of development as those of other and later nationalities, and that the real distingfuishincr characteristic of the sculptures and paintings of the Nile Valley was a continual tendency to simplification and generalization, arising partly from the habit of mind and hand created by the hieroglyphic writing, partly from the stubborn nature of the chief materials employed. To this characteristic he might, perhaps, have added another, which is sufficiently remarkable in an art wliich had at least three thousand years of vitality, namely, its freedom from individual expression. The realism of the Egyptians was a broad realism. There is in it no sign of that research into detail which dis- tingui.shes most imitative art and is to be foimd even in that Preface. vii of their immediate successors ; and yet, during all those long centuries of alternate renascence and decay, we find no vestige of an attempt to raise art above imitation. No suspicion of its expressive power seems to have dawned on the Egyptian mind, which, so iar as the plastic arts were concerned, never produced anything that in the language of modern criticism could be called a creation. In this particular Egypt is more closely allied to those nations ot the far east whose art does not come within the scope of M. Perrot's inquiry, than to the great civilizations which formed its own posterity. Before the late troubles intervened to draw attention of a different kind to the Nile Valley, the finding of a pit full of royal mummies and sepulchral objects in the western mountain at Thebes had occurred to give a fresh stimulus to the interest in Egyptian history, and to encourage those who were doing their best to lead England to take her proper share in the work of exploration. A short account of this discovery, which took place after M. Perrot's book was complete, and of some of the numerous art objects with which it has enriched the Boulak Museum, will be found in an Appendix to the second volume. My acknowledgments for generous assistance are due to Dr. Birch, Mr. Reginald Stuart Poole, and Miss A. B. Edwards. W. A. CONTENTS. PAGE INTRODUCTION i— Ixi TO THE READER Jxiii— Ixiv CHAPTER I. THE GENERAL CHARACTER OF EGYPTIAN CIVILIZATION. § 1. Egypt's place in the History of the World i — 2 § 2. The Valley of the Nile and its Inhabitants 2 — 16 § 3. The Great Divisions of Egyptian History 1 6 — 2 1 § 4. The Constitution of Egyptian Society — Influence of that Constitu- tion upon Monuments of Art 21 — 44 § 5. The Egyptian Religion and its Influence upon the Plastic Arts . . 44 — 69 § 6. That Egyptian Art did not escape the Law of Change, and that its History may therefore be written 70 — 89 § 7. Of the place held in this wotk by the Monuments of the Memphite Period, and of the Limits of our Inquiry 8g — 93 CHAPTER II. PRINCIPLES AND GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF EGYPTIAN ARCHITECTURE. § I. Method to be Employed by us in our Study of this Architecture . 94 — 96 § 2. General Principles of Form 96 — 102 § 3. General Principles of Construction. — Materials 103 — 106 § 4. Dressed Construction ro6 — 113 § 5. Compact Construction 113 — 114 § 6. Construction by Assemblage , . . 114 — ng § 7. Decoration 119— 125 VOL. I. /) X Contents. CHAPTER III. SEPULCHRAL ARCHITECTURE. PAGE § I. The Egyptian Belief as to a Future Life and its Influence upon their Sepulchral Architecture . 126 — 163 § 2. The Tomb under the Ancient Empire 163 — 241 The Mastabas of the Necropolis of Memphis 165 — 189 The Pyramids 189 — 241 § 3. The Tomb under the Middle Empire 241 — 254 § 4. The Tomb under the New Empire 255 — 317 CHAPTER IV. THE SACRED ARCHITECTURE OF EGYPT. § I. The Temple under the Ancient Empire 318 — 333 § 2. The Temple under the Middle Empire 333 — 335 § 3. The Temple under the New Empire 335 — 433 § 4. General Characteristics of the Egyptian Temple 434 — 444 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. COLOURED PLATES. The Arab Chnin, from near Keneli To face page 102 The Pyramids, from old Cairo ,, 102 Karnak, bas-reliefs in the Granite Chambers „ 124 Seti L, bas-relief at Abydos „ 126 General view of Karnak „ 360 Perspective view of the Hypostyle Hall, Karnak „ 368 Thebes, the plain, with the Colossi of Memnon „ 376 FIO. PAGE 1. During the Inundation of the Nile 3 2. Hoeing 4 3. Ploughing 4 4. Harvest scene 5 5. The Bastinado 6 6. Statue from the Ancient Empire 10 7. The S/ieik/i-el-Bekd u 8. Hunting in the !\Larshes 14 9. Shadouf 15 10. The White Crown 16 11. The Red Crown 16 12. The Pschent 16 13. Seti L in his War-Chariot 23 14. Rameses IL in adoration before Seti 25 15. Homage to Amenophis HI 26 16. Construction of a Temple at Thebes 27 17. Columns in the Hypostyle Hall, Karnak 28 18. 19. Scribes registering the yield of the harvest 29 20. Colossi of Amenophis HI 30 21. Scribe registering merchandize 31 22. Boatmen 32 Cattle Drovers 33 n •> xii List of Illustrations. FIG. PAGE 24. Bakers 35 25. Women at a loom 34 26. Netting birds 35 27. Shepherds in the fields 36 28. Winnowing corn 36 29. Herdsmen 37 30. From the tomb of Menofre . . . .■ 39 31. Water Tournament 42 32. Mariette's House 43 33. Amenhotep, or Amenophis HI, presented by Phre to Amen-Ra .... 45 34. Amen (or Amnion) 51 35. Ptah 52 36. Osiris 53 37. The goddess Bast 54 38. Painted bas-relief 58 39. Sekhet 59 40. Isis-Hathor 60 41. A Sphinx 61 42. Touaris 63 43. Ranmi 64 44. Horus 65 45. Thoth 66 46. Sacrifice to Apis 67 47. Statue from the Ancient Empire 73 48. Woman kneading dough 74 49. The Scribe Chaphre 75 50. The Lady Nai 76 51. Ouah-ab-ra 79 52. Sculptor at work upon an arm 81 53. Sculptor carving a statue 83 54. Artist painting a statue 85 55. Isis nursing Horus 87 56. Chephren 90 57. Ti, with his wife and son 91 58. Square building 97 59. Rectangular and oblong building 97 60. The Libyan chain, above the Necropolis of Thebes 98 61. General appearance of an Egyptian Temple 99 62. Temple of Khons, at Thebes 100 63. Temple of Khons, Thebes 100 64. Temple of Khons, Thebes 100 65. From the second court of Medinet-Abou, Thebes loi 66. Ramesseum, Thebes loi 67. The Egyptian Gorge or Cornice 102 68. Capital and Entablature of the Temple of the Deus Rediculus at Rome . 104 69. The Egyptian "bond" 107 70. Double-faced wall 108 List ok Illustrations. xiii FIG. PAGE 71, 72. Elements of the portico 108 73. Egyptian construction 109 74. Element of an off-set arch 11 1 75. Arrangement of the courses in an off-set arch iii 76. Off-set semicircular arch in 77. Voussoir 112 78. Arrangement of voussoirs 112 79. Semicircular vault 112 So. Granaries, from a bas-relief 113 81. Modern pigeon house, Thebes 114 82. Elements of wooden construction 116 83. Wooden building (first system) 117 84. Wooden building (second system) 118 85. Seti I. striking prisoners of war with his mace 124 86. Stele of the eleventh dynasty 131 87. Mummy case from the eighteenth dynasty 137 88. Man and his wife in the style of the fifth dynasty 138 89. Sekhera-ka, his wife Ata, and his son Khnem, in the style of the fifth dynasty 139 90. Stele of Nefer-oun 140 91. Preparation of the victims and arrival of funeral gifts 141 92. Table for offerings 144 93. Another form of the table for offerings 144 94. Labourers heaping up ears of corn 146 95. 96. Sepulchral statuettes 147 97. Vignette from a J*?////;?/ upon papyrus 149 98. Arrival in Egypt of a company of Asiatic emigrants 152, 153 99. The tomb of Ti ; women, representing the lands of the deceased, carrying the funeral gifts 154 100. Lid of the coffin of Entef 158 loi, 102. .Scarabs 159 103, 104. Funerary amulets 159 105. Pillow 160 106. Actual condition of a Mastaba. The Tomb of Sabou 167 107. Three mastabas at Gizeh 168 108. Restoration of part of the Necropolis of Gizeh 169 109. The Mastabat-el-Faraoun 170 no. Entrance to a Mastaba at Sakkarah 171 111. Lintel of the tomb of Tela 172 112. Plan of the tomb of Ti 174 113. 114. Mastaba at Sakkarah 174 115. Western wall in the chamber of the tomb of Ptah-Hotep 175 116. Plan of a Mastaba with four serdabs 178 117. Longitudinal section of the same Mastaba 178 11 8. Transverse section through the chamber 179 119. Transverse section through the serdabs 179 120. Figures in hiy;h relief, from a Mastaba at Gizeh 180 xiv List of Illustrations. FIU. PAGE 12 1. The upper chamber, well, and mummy-chamber i8i 122. Double Mastaba at Gizeh 182 123. Sarcophagus of Khoo-foo-Ankh 183 124. Details of the Sarcophagus of K!ioo-foo-Ankh 184 125. Bas-relief from Sakkarah 185 126. Head of a Mummy 188 127. Plans of the temples belonging to the Second and Third Pyramids ... 193 128. Plan of the Pyramid of Cheops 198 129. The Great Pyramid and the small pyramids at its foot 199 130. The Three Great Pyramids ; from the south 201 131. The Pyramid of lUahoun, horizontal section in perspective 205 132. Section of the Pyramid of Cheops 206 133. The southern Pyramid of Dashour 207 134. Section of the Stepped Pyramid 207 135. The Stepped Pyramid 208 136 — 142. Successive states of a pyramid 209 143. Section of the Stepped Pyramid at Sakk.arah 213 144. Construction of the Pyramid of Abousir in parallel layers 213 145. Partial section of the Stepped Pyramid 214 146. The Pyramid of Meidoum 215 147. The Mastabat-elFaraoun 216 148. Funerary monument represented in the inscriptions 216 149. Plan and elevation of a pyramid at Meroe 219 150. Method of closing a gallery by a stone portcullis 220 151. Portcullis closed 220 152. Transverse section, in perspective, through the Sarcophagus-chamber and the discharging chambers of the Great Pyramid 221 153. Longitudinal section through the lower chambers 222 154. Pyramidion 230 155. The casing of the pyramids 233 156. Plan of the Pyramids of Gizeh and of that part of the Necropolis which immediately surrounds them 237 157. The Sphinx 238 15S. Pyramid with its inclosure, Abousir 239 159. The river transport of the Mummy 243 160. Tomb at Abydos 244 161. Section of the above tomb 244 162. Tomb at Abydos 245 163. Section of the above tomb 245 164. Stele of the eleventh dynasty, Abydos 246 165. Stele of Pinahsi, priest of Ma; Abydos 247 166. Facade of a tomb at Beni-Hassan 250 167. Fagade of a tomb at Beni-Hassan, showing some of the adjoining tombs 251 168. Interior of a tomb at Beni-Hassan 252 169. Plan of the above tomb 252 170. Chess players, Beni-Hassan 253 177. General plan of Thebes 257 List of Illustrations. xv FIG. PAGE 172. Rameses III. conducting a religious procession, at Medinet-Abou . . . 261 173. Rameses III. hunting 265 174. Rameses II. in battle 271 175. Painting in a royal tomb at Gournah 273 176. Amenophis III. presenting an offering to Amen 274 177. Flaying the funerary victim 275 178. Entrance to a royal tomb 277 179. Plan of the tomb of Rameses II 282 iSo. Horizontal section of the same tomb 282 181. The smaller Sarcophagus-chamber in the tomb of Rameses VI 283 182. Entrance to the tomb of Rameses III 284 1S3. Hunting scene upon a tomb at Gournah 2S6 184. The weighing of actions 287 185. Anubis, in a funerary pavilion 288 1S6. Plan and section of a royal tomb 292 187, 188. Theban tombs from the bas-reliel's 294 189. Theban tomb from a bas-relief 295 190. A tomb of Apis 296 191. The tomb of Petamounoph 297 192. The most simple form of Theban tomb 299 193. Tomb as represented upon a bas-relief 299 194. Stele in the Boulak Museum, showing tombs with gardens about them. . 302 195. The sarcophagus of a royal scribe 303 196. Canopic vase of alabaster 305 197. View of the grand gallery in the Apis Mausoleum 306 198. Sepulchral chamber of an Apis bull 308 199. Section in perspective of " Campbell's tomb " 312 200. Vertical section in perspective of the Sarcophagus-chamber of the above tomb 312 201. A Tomb on El-Assasif 313 202. The Temple of the Sphinx 324 203. Interior of the Temple of the Sphinx 325 204. The Temple of the Sphinx, the Sphinx, and the neighbouring parts of the Necropolis 331 205. Ram. or Kriosphinx 336 206. Gateway and boundary wall of a temple 339 207. Principal fa(;ade of the Temple of Luxor 345 208. The Temple of Khons ; horizontal and vertical section showing the general arrangement of the temple 349 209. The Bari, or sacred boat 352 210. Portable tabernacle of painted wood 354 211. Granite tabernacle 355 212. General plan of the Great Temple at Karnak 358 213. Longitudinal section of the Temple of Luxor 361 214. Plan of the anterior portion of the Great Temple at Karnak 363 215. The Great Temple at Karnak; inner portion 367 216. Karnak as it is at present 369 xvi List OF Illustrations. FIG. PAGE 217. Plan of the Temple of Luxor 371 218. Bird's-eye view of Luxor 373 219. Plan of the Ramesseum 377 220. The Ramesseum. Bird's-eye view of the general arrangement .... 379 221. General plan of the buildings at Medinet-Abou 381 222. Plan of the Temple of Thothmes 382 223. Plan of the Great Temple at Medinet-Abou 383 224. Plan of the Temple at Abydos 387 225. Seti, with the attributes of Osiris, between Amen, to whom he is paying homage, and Chnoum 390 226. Plan of the Temple of Gournah 392 227. Facade of the naos of the Temple of Gournah 393 228. Logitudinal section of the Temple of Gournah, from the portico of the naos to the back wall 393 229. Plan of the Temple of Elephantine 396 230. View in perspective of the Temple of Elphantin^ 397 231. Longitudinal section of the Temple of Elephantine 398 232. Temple of Amenophis III. at Eilithyia 401 233. Temple of Amenophis IIL at Eilithyia ; longitudinal section 403 234. The speos at Addeh 406 235. The speos at Addeh ; longitudinal section 406 236. Plan of speos at Beit-el-Wali 407 237. Longitudinal section of the speos at Beit-el-Wali 407 238. Plan of the hemispeos of Gherf-Hossein 408 239. Gherf-Hossein ; longitudinal section I09 240. Plan of the hemispeos of Derri 409 241. Longitudinal section; Derri 409 242. Facade of the smaller temple at Ipsamboul 411 243. Plan of the smaller temple 413 244. Perspective of the principal Chamber in the smaller temple 413 245. Longitudinal section of the smaller temple 413 246. Plan of the Great Temple 413 247. Perspective of the principal Hall in the Great Temple 4x4 248. Fa9ade of the Great Temple at Ipsamboul 415 249. Longitudinal section of the Great Temple 417 250. Dayr-el-Bahari 419 251. Restoration in perspective of Dayr-el-Bahari 423 252. The ruins on the Island of Phite 431 253. The battle against the Khetas, Luxor 436 254. Rameses II. returning in triumph from Syria 437 255. The goddess .■\nouke' suckling Rameses II., Beit-el-Wnli 441 INTRODUCTION. I. The successful interpretation of the ancient writings of Egypt, Chaldsea, and Persia, which has distinguished our times, makes it necessary that the history of antiquity should be rewritten. Documents that for thousands of years lay hidden beneath the soil, and inscriptions which, like those of Egypt and Persia, long offered themselves to the gaze of man merely to excite his impotent curiosity, have now been deciphered and made to render up their secrets for the guidance of the historian. By the help of those strings of hieroglyphs and of cuneiform characters, illustrated by paintings and sculptured reliefs, we are enabled to .separate the truth from the falsehood, the chaff from the wheat, in the narratives of the Greek writers who busied themselves with those nations of Africa and Asia which preceded their own in the ways of civilization. Day by day, as new monuments have been discovered and more certain methods of reading their inscriptions elaborated, we have added to the knowledge left us by Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus, to our acquaintance with those empires on the Euphrates and the Nile which were already in old age when the Greeks were yet struggling to emerge from their primitive barbarism. Even in the cases of Greece and Rome, whose histories are supplied in their main lines by their classic writers, the study of hitherto neglected writings discloses many new and curious VOL. I. h ii Introduction. details. The energetic search for ancient inscriptions, and the scrupulous and ingenious interpretation of their meaning, which we have witnessed and are witnessing, have revealed to us many interesting facts of which no trace is to be found in Thucydides or Xenophon, in Livy or Tacitus ; enabling us to enrich with more than one feature the picture of private and public life which they have handed down to us. In the effort to embrace the life of ancient times as a whole, many attempts have been made to fix the exact place in it occupied by art, but those attempts have never been absolutely successful, because the comprehension of works of art, oi plastic creations in the widest significance of that word, demands an amount of special knowledge which the great majority of his- torians are without ; art has a method and language of its own, which obliges those who wish to learn it thoroughly to cultivate their taste by frequenting the j^rincipal museums of Europe, by visitinof distant resfions at the cost of considerable trouble and expense, by perpetual reference to the great collections of en- gravings, photographs, and other reproductions which considera- tions of space and cost prevent the savant from possessing at home. More than one learned author has never visited Italy or Greece, or has found no time to examine their museums, each of which contains but a small portion of the accumulated remains of antique art. Some connoisseurs do not even live in a capital, but dwell far from those public libraries, which often contain valuable collections, and sometimes — when they are not packed away in cellars or at the binder's — allow them to be studied by the curious.^ The study of art, difficult enough in itself, is thus rendered still more arduous by the obstacles which are thrown in its w^ay. The difficulty of obtaining materials for self-improve- ment in this direction affords the true explanation of the absence, in modern histories of antiquity, of those laborious researches which have led to such great results since Winckelmann founded the science of archceology as we know it. To take the case of Greece, many learned writers have in our time attempted to retrace its complete history — England, Germany, and France have each contributed works which, by various merits, have conquered the favour of Europe. But of all these w'orks the only one which betrays any deep study of Greek art, and treats it with taste and 1 Our national library at the British Museum is, perhaps, the only one which does not deserve this reproach. — Ed. Introduction. iii competence, is that of M. Ernest Curtius ; as for Mr. Grote, he has neither a theoretic knowledge of art, nor a feeHng for it. Here and there, indeed, where he cannot avoid it, he alludes to the question, but in the fewest and driest phrases possible. And yet Greece, without its architects, its sculptors, and its painters, with- out in fact its passion for beautiful form, a passion as warm and prolific as its love for poetry, is hardly Greece at all. Much disappointment is thus prepared for those who, without the leisure to enter deeply into detail, wish to picture to themselves the various aspects of the ancient world. They are told of revolutions, of wars and conquests, of the succession of princes ; the mechanism of political and civil institutions is explained to them ; " literature," we are told, " is the expression of social life," and so the history of literature is written for us. All this is true enough, but there is another truth which seems to be always forgotten, that the art of a people is quite as clear an indication of their sentiments, tastes, and ideas, as their litera- ture. But on this subject most historians say little, contenting themselves with the brief mention of certain works and proper names, and with the summary statement of a few general ideas which do not even possess the merit of precision. And where are we to find the information thus refused ? Europe possesses several histories of Greek and Roman literature, written with great talent and eloquence, such as the work, unhappily left unfinished, of Ottfried Miiller ; there are, too, excellent manuals, rich in valuable facts, such as those of Bernhardy, Baehr, and Teuffel ; but where is there, either in England, in France, or in Germany, a single work which retraces, in sufficient detail, the whole history of antique art, following it throughout its progress and into all its transformations, from its origin to its final decadence, down to the ej^och when Christianity and the barbaric invasions put an end to the ancient forms of civilization and prepared for the birth of the modern world, for the evolution of a new society and of a new art ? To this question our neighbours may reply that the Gcschichfe dcr hildcndcn Kunst of Carl Schnaase ^ does all that we ask. But that work has one great disadvantage for those who are not ' Geschichte der hildcnden Kunst. 2nd ed., corrected and augmented, with wood engravings in the text, 8 vols. 8vo. 1865-1873. The first edition consisted of 7 vols., and appeared between 1S43 and 1864. iv Introduction. Germans. Its great bulk will almost certainly prevent its ever finding a translator, while it makes it very tedious reading to a foreigner. It must, besides, be very difficult, not to say impossible, for a single writer to treat with equal competence the arts of Asia, of Greece, and of Rome, of the Middle Ages and of modern times. As one might have expected, all the parts of such an extensive whole are by no means of equal value, and the chapters which treat of antique art are the least satisfac- tory. Of the eight volumes of which the work consists, two are devoted to ancient times, and, by general acknowledgment, they are not the two best. They were revised, indeed, for the second edition, by two colleagues whom Herr Schnaase called in to his assistance ; oriental art by Carl von Lutzow, and that of Greece and Rome by Carl Friedrichs. But the chapters in which Assyria, Chaldsa, Persia, Phoenicia, and Egypt are discussed are quite inadequate. No single question is exhaustively treated. Instead of well-considered personal views, we have vague guesses and explanations which do nothing to solve the many problems which perplex archaeologists. The illustrations are not numerous enough to be useful, and, in most cases, they do not seem to have been taken from the objects themselves. Those which relate to architecture, especially, have been borrowed from other well known works, and furnish therefore no new elements for appreciation or discussion. Finally, the order adopted by the author is not easily understood. For reasons which have decided us to follow the same course, and which we will explain farther on, he takes no account of the extreme east, of China and Japan ; but then, why begin with India, which had no relations with the peoples on the shores of the Mediterranean until a very late date, and, so far as art was concerned, rather came under their influence than brought them under its own ? The fact is that Schnaase follows a geographical order, which is very confusing in its results. To give but one example of its absurdity, he speaks of the Phcenicians before he has said a word of Egypt ; now, we all know that the art of Tyre and Sidon was but a late reflection from that of Egypt ; the work- shops of those two famous ports were mere factories of cheap Egyptian art objects for exportation. Again, the first part of Herr Schnaase's work is already seventeen years old, and how many important discoveries have taken place Introduction. since 1865 ? Those of Cesnola and Schliemann, for instance, have revealed numberless points of contact and transmission between one phase of antique art and another, which were never thought of twenty years ago. The book therefore is not " down to date." With all the improvements which a new edition might introduce, that part of it which deals with antiquity can never be anything but an abridgment with the faults inherent in that kind of work. It could never have the amplitude of treatment or the originality which made Winckelmann's History of Art and Ottfried Miiller's Manual of Artistic Archcrology so successful in their day.^ Winckelmann's History of Art among the Ancients, originally published in 1 764, is one of those rare books which mark an epoch in the history of the human intellect. The German writer was the first to formulate the idea, now familiar enough to cultivated intelligences, that art springs up, flourishes, and decays, with the society to which it belongs ; in a word, that it is possible to write ^ Germany had long felt the want which Schnaase attempted to satisfy. As early as 1841 Franz Kugler published his Handbiich dcr Kiinsfgesc/iidtie, which embraces the whole history of art from the earliest times down, to our own day. The book was successful; the fourth edition, revised and corrected by Wilhelm Liibke (2 vols. 8vo. i86i, Stuttgart), lies before us, but to give an idea of its inadequacy as a history of ancient art, it is enough to say that the whole of the antique period, both in Greece and Asia, occupies no more than 206 pages of the first volume. The few illustrations are rot very good in quality, and their source is never indicated ; the draughtsman has taken little care to reproduce with fidelity the style of the originals or to call attention to their peculiarities ; finally, the arrangements adopted betray the defects of a severely scientific method. The author commences with Celtic monuments (dolmens and menhirs), and then passes to the structures of Oceania and America ; before commencing upon Egypt he takes us to Mexico and Yucatan. Liibke, whilst still occupied with the work of Kugler, wished to supply for the use of students and artists a book of a more elementary character ; he therefore published in i860 an 8vo volume which he called Gnmdriss der KiaistgescliicJite ; the antique here occupies 208 pages out of 720. His plan seems to us to be open to the same objection as that of Kugler ; he follows a geographical instead of an historical arrangement ; he begins with the extreme east ; he puts the Assyrians and the Persians before Egypt, and India before Assyria. His illustrations are sometimes better than those of Kugler, but many of the cuts are common to both works. Under the title Geschictite der Plastili, Overbeck and Liibke have each written a comprehensive history of sculpture. [The word "comprehensive" must here be understood in a strictly limited sense. — Ed.] The word Plastili in the language of German critics has this special and restricted meaning — it comprises sculpture only. The work of Overbeck, far superior to that of Liibke, deserves the success which has attended it ; the tliird edition, which contains the results of the searches at Olympia and at Pergamus, is now in course of publication. vi Introduction. its history.! This great savant, whose memory Germany holds in honour as the father of classic archaeology, was not content with statino- a principle : he followed it through to its consequences ; he beo-an by tracing the outlines of the science which he founded, and he never rested till he had filled them in. However, now that a century has passed away since it appeared, his great work, which even yet is never opened without a sentiment of respect, marks a date beyond which modern curiosity has long penetrated. Winckel- mann's knowledge of Egyptian art was confined to the pasticcios of the Roman epoch, and to the figures which passed from the villa of Hadrian to the museum of Cardinal Albani. Chaldcea and Assyria, Persia and Phoenicia, had no existence for him ; even Greece as a whole was not known to him. Her painted vases were still hidden in Etruscan and Campanian cemeteries ; the few which had found their way to the light had not yet succeeded in drawing the attention of men who were preoccupied over more im- posing manifestations of the Greek genius. Nearly all Winckel- mann's attention was given to the works of the sculptors, upon which most of his comprehensive judgments were founded ; and yet, even in regard to them, he was not well-informed. His opportunities of personal inspection were confined to the figures, mostly of unknown origin, which filled the Italian galleries. The o-reat majority of these formed part of the crowd of copies which issued from the workshops of Greece, for some three centuries or more, to embellish the temples, the basilicas, and the public baths, the villas and the palaces of the masters of the world. In the very few instances in which they were either originals or copies executed with sufficient care to be fair representations of the original, they never dated from an earlier epoch than that of Praxiteles, Scopas, and Lysippus. Phidias and Alcamenes, Psonius and Polycletus, the great 1 Winckelmann's History of Ancient Art should be read in connection with his Remarks upon the History of Art, which is a kind of supplement to it, and takes the place of that new edition of which the author's premature and tragic death deprived the world. It is an answer to the objections which made themselves heard on every side ; the preface to Monimicnti uicditi (Rome, 1867, 2 vols, in folio, with 208 plates) should also be read. The method of Winckelmann is there most clearly explained. Finally, the student of the life and labours of Winckelmann may consult with profit the interesting work of Carl lusti, Whiikdmajin, sein Leben, seine Werke, uiid seine Zeitgenossen, which will give him a clear idea of the state of archfeology at the time when the German savant intervened to place it upon a higher footing. Introduction. vii masters of the fifth century, were only known to the historian by the descriptions and allusions of the ancient authors. In such a case as this the clearest and most precise of verbal descriptions is of less value than any fragment of marble upon which the hand of the artist is still to be traced. Who would then have guessed that the following generation would have the opportunity of studying those splendid groups of decorative sculpture whose close relation to the architecture of certain famous temples has taught us so much ? Who in those days dreamt of looking at, still less of drawing, the statues in the pediments and sculptured friezes of the Parthenon, of the Thesaeum, of the temples at yEgina, at Phigalia, or at Olympia ? Now if Winckel- mann was ignorant of these, the real monuments of classic perfection, it follows that he was hardly competent to recognise and define true archaism or to distinguish the works of sculpture which bore the marks of the deliberate, eclectic, and over-polished taste of the critical epochs. He made the same mistake in speak- ing of architecture. It was always, or nearly always, by the edifices of Rome and Italy, by their arrangement and decoration, that he pretended to e.xplain and judge the architecture of Greece. But Winckelmann rendered a great service to art by foundincr a method of study which was soon applied by Zoega ' and by Ennio Ouirino Visconti,- to the description of the works which filled public and private galleries, or were being continually dis- covered by excavation. These two savants classified a vast quantity of facts ; thanks to their incessant labours, the lines ' Zoega busied himself greatly with Egypt, and in inaugurating the study of Coptic prepared the way for Champollion. But the work which gave him a place among the chief scholars of Winckelmann is unfinished ; the Bassirilievi antichi di Roma (Rome, 2 vols. 4to. 1808) only contains the monuments in the Villa Albani, engraved by Piroli, with the help of the celebrated Piranesi. A volume containing most of his essays was givep to the world by Welcker in 181 7 {Ahhand- lungen heraiisgegeben und mit Zusiifsen hegle'itet, 8vo. Gottingen), who also published his life and a volume of his correspondence (Zoega, Samtnlung seiner Bricfe und Beurthciluug seiner Wcrke. 2 vols. 8vo. Stuttgart, 18 19). 2 // Museo Pio-Cleinentino, Visconti, vol. i. 17S2 ; by Enn. Quir. Visconti, vols, ii. to vii. Rome, 1784 1807 Museum Jl'orsleyunum, 2 vols, folio. London, 1794. Monument i Gahini delta Villa Fiueiana, Visconti, 8vo. 1797. Description des Antiques du Musce Royal, begam by Visconti and continued by the Comte de Clarac. i2mo. Paris, 1820. For the collection of the materials and the execution of the plates in the IconograpJiie Grecque et Remain, Visconti took advantage of his opportunities as director of the Musce Napoleon, into which the art treasures of all Europe, except England, were collected at the beginning of this century. viii Introduction. of the master's rough sketch were accented and corrected at more than one point ; the divisions which he had introduced into his picture were marked with greater precision ; the groups which he had begun to form were rendered more coherent and compact ; their features became more precise, more distinct, and more expressive. This progress was continuous, but after the great wars of the Revohition and the Empire its march be- came much more rapid, and the long peace which saw tlie growth of so rich a harv^est of talent, was also marked by a great increase in the energy with which all kinds of historical studies were prosecuted. But the widest, as well as the most sudden, enlargement of the horizon was due to a rapid succession of discoveries, some the result of persevering searches and lucky excavations, others rendered possible by feats of induction which almost amounted to genius. It seemed as though a curtain were drawn up, and, behind the rich and brilliant scenery of Graeco-Roman civilization, the real ancient world, the world of the East, the father of religions and of useful inventions, of the alphabet and of the plastic arts, were suddenly revealed to us. The great work which was compiled by the savants who accompanied Bona- parte to Egypt iirst introduced the antiquities of that country to us, and not long afterwards Champollion discovered the key to the hieroglyphics, and thus enabled us to assign to the monuments of the country at least a relative date. A little later Layard and Botta freed Nineveh from the ruins of its own buildings, and again let in the light upon ancient Assyria. But yesterday we knew nothing beyond the names of its kings, and yet it sprang again to the day, its monuments in marvellous preservation, its history pictured by thousands of figures in relief and narrated by their accompanying inscriptions. These did not long keep their secrets to themselves, and their in- terpretation enables us to classify chronologically the works of architecture and sculpture which have been discovered. The information thus obtained was supplemented by careful exploration of the ruins in Babylonia, lower Chaldaea, and Susiana. These had been less tenderly treated by time and by man than the remains of Nineveh. The imposing ruins of the palace at Persepolis and of the tombs of the kings, had been known for nearly two centuries, but only by the inadequate Introduction. ix descriptions and feeble drawings of early travellers. Ker- Porter, Texier, and Flandrin provided us with more accurate and com- prehensive descriptions, and, thanks to their careful copies of the writings upon the walls of those buildings, and upon the inscribed stones of Persia and Media, Eugene Burnouf succeeded in reconstructing the alphabet of Darius and Xerxes. Thus, to the toils of artists and learned men, who examined the country from the mountains of Armenia to the low and marshy plains of Susiana, and from the deserts which border the Euphrates to the rocks of Media and Persia, and to the philologists who deciphered the texts and classified the monumental fragments which had travelled so far from the scene of their creation, we owe our power to describe, upon a sound basis and from authentic materials, the great civilisation which was developed in Western Asia, in the basin of the Persian Gulf. There were still many details which escaped us, but, through the shadows which every day helped to dissipate, the essential outlines and the leading masses began to be clearly distinguished, and the local distinc- tions which, in such a vast extent of country and so long a succession of empires, were caused by differences of race, of time, and of physical conditions, began to be appreciated. But, in spite of all these differences, the choice of expressive means and their employment, from Babylon to Nineveh, and from Nineveh to Susa and Persepolis, presented so many points of striking similarity as to prove that the various peoples represented by those famous capitals all sprang from the same original stock. The elements of writing and of the arts are in each case identical. The alphabets were all formed upon the same cuneiform principle, notwithstand- ing the variety in the languages which they served. In the plastic arts, although the plans of their buildings vary in obedience to the requirements of different materials, their sculpture always betrays the same way of looking at living forms, the same conventions and the same motives. Every work fashioned by the hand of man which has been discovered within the boundaries given above, displays community of style and unity of origin and tradition. The result of these searches and discoveries was to show clearly that this ancient civilisation had sprung from two original sources, the one in the valley of the Nile, the other in VOL. I. c Introduction, Chaldsea. The latter was the less ancient of the two, and was considerably nearer our own time than the epoch which witnessed the commencement of the long series of Egyptian dynasties by the reign of Menes. These two civilizations met and inter- mingled through the agency of the Phoenicians, and an active and prolific interchange of ideas and products began, traces of which are still to be found both in Egypt and Assyria. It still remained doubtful, and the doubt has but lately been removed, how the influence of these two great centres of culti- vation was extended to the still barbarous tribes, the ancestors of the Greeks and Romans, who inhabited the northern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean. It is only within the last twenty years, since the mission of M. Renan, that Phoenicia has become well-known to us. Several English and French travellers, Hamilton, Fellows, Texier, among others, had already, in the first half of the century, described the curious monuments of Lydia, Phrygia, Cappadocia, and of the still more picturesque Lycia, whose spoils now enrich the British Museum ; people vaguely conjectured that through those countries had progressed, stage by stage, from the east to the west, the forms and inventions of a system of civilization which had been elaborated in the distant Chaldsea. But it was not till 1 86 1 that an expedition, inspired by the desire to clear up this very question, succeeded in demonstrating the role actually played by the peoples inhabiting the plateau of Asia Minor. As for Cyprus, it was but yesterday that the explorations of Lang and Cesnola revealed it to us, with its art half Egyptian and half Assyrian, and its cuneiform alphabet pressed into the service of a Greek dialect. These discoveries have put us on the alert. Not a year passes without some lucky " find," such as that of the Palsestrina treasure, in the immediate neighbourhood of Rome, or that made by Salzmann at Rhodes. These pieces of good fortune allow the archaeologist to supply, one by one, the missing links of the chain which attaches the arts of Greece and Italy to the earlier civilizations of Egypt and Assyria. While the remains of Oriental antiquity were being thus recovered piece by piece, secrets no less interesting and documents no less curious were continually coming to the surface to cast new light upon the history of classic antiquity. First came the marbles of I Introduction. xi the Parthenon, transferred by Lord Elgin to the British Museum in 1816. Both artists and connoisseurs, after a short pause of hesitation, acfreed in assertino- tliat the bas-reHefs of the frieze and the sculptures of the two pediments excelled anything which had previously entered into any European museum. Artists declared that they e.xperienced a sense of beauty never felt before ; they were face to face for the first time with the ideal of the Greeks, as it had been conceived and realised at that happy period of perfection which followed the disappearance of the last traces of archaic hardness. That period was but too short. It was com- prised in a single generation, which was followed by one which made the first steps down the slope of the decadence. During a single lifetime a crowd of works were produced which, in spite of differences in material and subject, were all stamped with the same character of easy and frank nobility, of sincerity and elegant severity, of simplicity combined w'ith grandeur. The death, or even the old age of the great men who had produced these works, was sufficient to lower the standard. Emphasis and a striving for effect took the place of nobility ; under a pretence of sincerity, artists took to a servile imitation of nature, and mannerism, with all its weaknesses, began to disfigure their works. Art remained at a high level in Greece, however, longer than elsewhere. The word decadence can hardly be pronounced in connection with the admirable works produced in the fourth century before Christ, and yet it cannot be denied that, so long as we were without original examples from the great epoch of Pericles, we were without that most necessary material for a history of Greek art, a knowledge of the most masterly, the most pure, and the most elevated of her creations. The literary historian might as well have attempted to trace the course of her poetry without having read Sophocles, without having heard of the Elcctra or the QLdipus Rex. Attention being once turned in this direction, discoveries followed each other in rapid succession. The statues from the pediments at ^gina, so ably restored by Thorwaldsen, were bousrht to form the nucleus of the collection at Munich.^ The ' They were discovered in 181 1 amid the ruins of one of the temples at ^gina, by a company of excavators presided over by Mr. Cockerel). They were bought by Prince Louis of Bavaria in 1812, and Thorwaldsen was occupied during several years in putting together and restoring them. They wer€ first exhibited in the Glyptothek of Munich in 1820. xii Introduction. study of these statues is very instructive in making clear to us the paths whicli sculptors had to follow in their progress from the stiffness and conventions of early periods to the ease and amplitude of classic perfection. As for the friezes from the temple of Apollo Epicurius, near Phigalia, they too are in the British Museum.^ Thus brought into immediate propinquity with the marbles from the Parthenon, with which they are almost cotem- porary, they afford us some curious information. They show us what the art of Phidias and Alcamenes became when those sculptors had to work in what we should call " the provinces ; " how much they preserved and how much they lost of their complete excellence when employed upon buildings erected at less cost and with less care than those of the capital. So far as the composition is concerned, the consummate facility and the natural verve of the master who supplied the sketches and models is never absent, but the execution, which must have been left to local artists, betrays their inferiority by its inequalities and general weakness. The same may be said of the figures with which Alcamenes and Paeonius ornamented the pediments and metopes of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia. Even before the discoveries at yEgina and Phigalia, the results of the French expedition to the Morea and the beautiful fragments of sculpture brought to the Louvre from the banks of the Alphceus, had given us reason to suspect this inferiority of provincial art, and the excavations recently under- taken by Germany, after an interval of about half a century of inaction, have finally removed all doubts. Neither the statues nor the bas-reliefs, nor any other part of the decoration of the temple at Olympia, possess the nobility and purity which distinguish the great buildings on the Athenian acropolis. They show abundant power and science, but also perceptible inequalities, and certain signs of that exaggerated objectivity which we now call realism. Each fresh discovery helps us to comprehend, not without a cer- tain sense of surprise, how much freedom and variety Greek art possessed during its best time. There is none of that dull uniformity which, with other races, distinguishes most of the works of a single epoch, none of the tyranny of a single master or school, none of the narrowness of mere fonnii/ce. 1 The debris of the temple at Bassae was explored by the same company in the year 1812, and a whole frieze was found, which was bought by the British Museum in 1815. Introduction. xiii The memorable exploration to which we have alluded, and many others which it would take too long to enumerate, have not only made known to us the most original and most fertile period of Greek sculpture, but have given us much information as to that art which, when combined with the statues of Phidias and Alcamenes, reared those splendid creations which have been reconstructed with such skill and care by the artist and the archseologist ; we mean Greek architecture at its best, the purest and the most com- plete architecture which the world has yet seen. Every year sees the excellent example set by Stuart and Revett,^ in the second half of the eighteenth century, followed by an increasing number of imitators. The smallest remains of ancient architecture are measured and drawn with religious care ; their arrangements are explained, their elements are grouped, their ensemble is restored with a comprehension of their artistic conditions which steadily gains in certainty and penetration. Blouet's interesting restora- tions of Olympia and Phigalia, published in the account of the French expedition to the Morea,'^ excited the emulation of the young architects at the French Academy in Rome, and opened to them a new course of study. Until then they had been contented with the monumental buildings of Rome and its neicrhbourhood, of Latium and Campania ; a few of the more adventurous among them had penetrated as far as Pa;stum ; but it was not till 1845 that they ventured to cross the sea and to study the ruins of Greece and Athens ; ^ in later years they have travelled as far as Syria and Asia Minor in search of objects for their pencils.^ But the occupants of the Villa Medici were not alone in these researches. Doubtless, the invaluable publication which contains the results of their labours, forms the most ample and varied collection of documents open to the historian of architecture among the ancients. But many other architects of different 1 The Antiquities of Athens, Measured and Delineated by J. Stuart and N. Revett. Folio. London, 1761. - Expedition seientifique de Moree, ordonn'ee par le Gouvernenient Fran^ais. Architecture, Sculpture, Inscriptions, mesurees, dessinees, recueillies et publices, par A. Blouet, A. Ravoisie, Alph. Poirot, F. Trezel, et Fr. de Gournay. Paris, 183 1-7. 3 The restoration of the temple of Athene Pohas and of the Parthenon, by Ballu and Paccard, dates from 1845. Since that time the students of the French Academy have drawn and restored all the most important monuments of Greece. * One temple at Baalbec was restored in 1865 by M. Moyau ; the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus by M. Bernier in 1878, and the temple of Athene at Priene by M. Thomas in 1879. xiv Introduction.. nationalities have given their help to the work of patiently reconstructing the past.^ Examined thus closely, and by the trained eyes of professional artists provided with all the necessary instruments, the- relics of antiquity yielded up secrets which would never have been suspected by the casual observer. Thus Mr. Penrose discovered and explained that those walls of the Propylseum and of the Parthenon, which seemed straight to the eye, are in fact planned on a gentle curve ; - he showed how this subtle variation was calculated to add to the beauty of the buildings, and to augment their effect. Hittorf arrived at still more important results through the minute examination of the Sicilian ruins. He was the first to describe the important part which painting played in the decoration of Greek architecture ; he affirmed that in many parts of their buildings the stone or marble was painted over, and that the various members of the architecture were distinguished by differences of tint, which gave accent to the mouldings, and force to the figures in relief These ideas were too strongly opposed to modern habits of thought to be received without strong protestations. Their partisans, too, did something to retard their acceptance by their absolute fashion of stating their con- victions, and by certain unhappy applications of their system ; but the polychromatic principles of the Greeks are now confirmed by too many facts to be denied.^ Of the three principal branches of ancient art, that of which we know least is painting, properly speaking ; the art of Poly- gnotus, of Zeuxis, and of Apelles. Of this we have but few remains, and we are obliged to take our ideas of its excellence from the descriptions of ancient authors. We have indeed the 1 In 1872 this collection consisted of sixty-one restorations, comprising 691 original drawings upon a ver}- large scale, and forming fifty-two bound volumes. Thanks to M. Jules Simon, then Minister of Public Instruction, and M. Cliarles Blanc, Director of Fine Arts, the publication of the series in its entirety was resolved upon. A commission, with M. Ernest Vinet as secretary, was appointed to superin- tend the expenditure of an annual grant of 20,000 francs voted by the Chamber. But the work progresses very slowly. In 1S81 only five sections had appeared, the most important being the Rcstauratkm des Temples de Pcesfum, by Labrouste. - F. C. Penrose, An hivestigation of the Prineiples of Athenian Architecture. Folio, with plates. London, 1851. 3 J. J. Hittorf, Restitution du Temple d'Empcdocle h Selinonte; ou, l' Architecture polychrome chez les Grccs, 4to, and plates in folio. Paris, 185 1. Introduction. xv wall-paintings of those Campanian cities which were so long buried under the ashes of Vesuvius ; paintings which were uncovered in great numbers under the Napoleonic domination, and have in later times been added to every year, in spite of the indolent fashion in which the excavations have been conducted. Frae- mentary mural paintings of the same kind have also been discovered in Rome and in a few other neighbourhoods. But after all, great though the interest may be which attaches to these works, it must not be forgotten that they are Italian rather than Greek, that they are the decorations for the most part of small provincial cities, and that even the best of them, when compared with the productions of the fifth and fourth centuries before our era, are examples of decadence. At the most they enable us to recall, with some approach to probable truth, the taste and technical methods of the Alexandrian school.^ Winckelmann and his im- mediate successors saw the ashes cleared from the first Pompeian wall-paintings. But they possessed no standards by which they could define the styles of those great schools of painting which flourished in Greece between the epoch of the Persian Wars and the beginning of the Macedonian supremacy ; such a defi- nition we may now however attempt with at least partial success. Since the time of Winckelmann hundreds and thousands of those painted vases of burnt clay, which the public persist in calling Etruscan, have been discovered, classified, described, and ex- plained, in such a manner as to leave unsolved scarcely any of the problems upon which they could cast a light. Gerhard led the way in 1S31 with his famous report on the Volscian vases ; - numerous savants have followed his example, and nearly every day the series which they have established are enriched by new discoveries. These vases, as we now know, were made in many places, at Athens, at Corinth, in the Greek cities of Africa and of Magna Graecia. They were eagerly sought after by some of the races whom the Greeks considered barbarous, by the Graeco-Scythians of the Crimea, as well as by ' See upon this subject M. Wolfgang Helbig's Untersuchiuigen ueber die Cam- panische Wandmahrei. Leipsic, 1873. M. Boissier has summed up the leading opinions in this matter in an interesting article in the Rrcue des Deux Mondes, entitled Les Peintures d Herculaneum et de /Vw/a (October i, 1879). ^ Rapporfo intonw i Vasi Volcenti {Annali dcW Instituto di Corrispotidenza Archeologica, vol. iii. p. 5). xvi Introduction. the SabelHans and the Etruscans ; the latter imitated them now and then more or less awkwardly, but it is unanimously ac- knowledged that they are an essentially Greek product, the product of an art which sprang up with the first awakening of the Greek genius, and was extinguished about two hundred years before Christ, when the nation ceased to be creative and prolific. From analogy with all that has passed elsewhere we are justified in believing that, in each century, the painting of these vases, which would belong to what we call the industrial arts, followed with docility the example set by historical painters, and that it re- produced, so far as its resources would allow, the style and taste of their works. If we study each series of vases in the light of the judgments passed by the ancients upon the most celebrated painters of Greece, we may find, by a legitimate induction, traces now of the style of Polygnotus, now of that of Zeuxis, and again suggestions of the hands of Apelles or Protogenes ; a vase here and there may have even preserved more or less faithful imitations of the actual works of those masters. These inductions and conjectures certainly demand both prudence and delicacy of per- ception, but their principle is incontestable, and the profit to be obtained from them is great. In the whole wreck of antiquity there is no loss which lovers of art find so hard to bear, as the complete annihilation of the works of those great painters whom the ancients put at least upon the same level as their most famous sculptors ; and who would not rejoice to be able, by the remains of contemporary though inferior productions, to trace a reflection, distant and feeble perhaps, but yet faithful so far as it goes, of a whole art which has been lost to the world ? The archaeologists of the eighteenth century never dreamt of such researches as these, still less of the results to which they might lead ; few of them suspected what valuable aid might be afforded to the historian of art and of antique civilization, by the multitude of small objects — vases, gems, glass, mirrors, bronze plaques and figures, terra-cotta bas-reliefs, and statuettes — which are now so eagerly sought after, and which begin to form valuable collections in most of the great museums of Europe. ^ These 1 One of the first antiquaries to whom it occurred that the examination of these little objects might lead to profitable results was the Comte de Caylus, a savant who is in some danger of being forgotten, and who deserves that his claims to our gratitude should be recalled to the public mind. The work in which he has brought Introduction. xvii objects, which were in continual use, were manufactured in pro- digious quantities for thousands of years, and their vast numbers gave them a greatly increased chance of being preserved. In spite of the rough usage of man, and the slower progress of destruction due to the action of nature, a certain number of them were sure, from the first, to find means of escape, and, from so many examples, a few of each type have therefore come down to us. The small size of these objects also contributed to preserve them from destruction. In times of war and revolution the poor and humble ones of the earth easily avoid the catastrophes which overwhelm those who are richer, more powerful, and more con- spicuous than themselves. So it was with these little memorials of antiquity. Their insignificance was their salvation in the overthrow of the civilisation to which they belonged. More numerous and better sheltered than the masterpieces of fine art, they survived when the latter perished. Thus it is that so many of the lighter and more fragile products of industry have sur- vived to our time, and have made us acquainted with modes of thought and life, and with forms of plastic expression which we should never have known without them. The painted vases, for instance, have preserved for us more than one myth of which no trace can be found in poetry or sculpture ; and as for terra- cottas, to which the Tanagra statuettes have directed so much attention, we may judge from the labours of M. Henzey of the value which they possess for archaeologists, who, though unable, like some of our amateurs, to buy them with their weight in gold, may compare them one with another and study their smallest details.^ Those statuettes, which are now classified in museums in the order of their production, have shown us how narrow and inadequate were the formulae by which the early historians of the plastic arts attempted to define the genius of the Greeks. Even now, the most accomplished and well-informed critics are not always able to repress a feeling of astonishment together the fruits of a long life spent in travelling, in collecting, and in examining the technical processes of the ancients, both by himself and with the help of specialists, may be consulted with advantage {Reciieil d' Aiitiqiiitls egy/Zienucs, c/rusi/iies, grerqucs, et romains, 6 vols. 4to. 1752-64. Supplement, i vol. 4to. 1767). 1 Recherches sitr les Figures de Femmes voili'cs dans I' Art G/ir, 4to. Paris, 1873. Recherches siir un Groiipe de Praxitck, d'aprcs les Figurines de terre cuite, 8vo. Paris, 1875. Les Figurines antiques de terre cuite du Musee du Louvre, 4to. 1878, Morel. VOL. I. d xviii Introduction. when they examine a collection of terra-cottas. Some of these figures, no more than a span high, resemble the marbles of the Parthenon in dignity and grandeur, others are full of grace and playfulness in their outlines, and show a capricious abandon which disconcerts for a moment even those who are least insensible to their charm. At the bases of such works one is apt to look for the signature of some artist of the Renaissance or of the eighteenth century. In reality they have existed ever since the fourth or third century before our era, and yet there is some- thing modern in their appearance. But an indescribable purity of taste suffices to betray their real origin to all those who possess knowledge and delicate perceptions. That origin is still Greece, but Greece in her lighter and more playful moments, when, leaving the representation of gods and heroes, she condescends to treat the familiar objects of domestic life, and does it with an ease of which her great writers, notably Plato and Aristophanes, had also found the secret, when they passed from epic tragedy to comedy, from the noblest eloquence to hearty expressions of enjoyment. These little statues interest the historian for other reasons also. They sometimes give him, as at Tanagra, the most precise and accurate information as to dress and social customs : sometimes, as at Tegaea, they afford particulars of a famous though obscure form of worship, of a divinity and of rites which are but im- perfectly described in the writings of classic authors. This extension of knowledge and the great discoveries upon which it was based, naturally led those who were interested in the study of the remains of antique civilisation, to feel the necessity of organisation, of division of labour, and of the importance of ensuring a steady supply of the best and most trustworthy in- formation. Societies were therefore founded in many different centres with the express object of meeting those wants. We can- not, of course, enumerate them here, nor attempt to estimate their various claims to our gratitude, but we may be permitted to allude to the good work accomplished, during fifty years of incessant activity, by the Association which has perhaps done more than any other for the progress of archaeology, we mean the Instihito di Cot'rispondenza Archeologica, founded in Rome in 1829, by Bunsen, Gerhard, and the Due de Luynes. Thanks to the breadth of view which characterised its founders, this society has Introduction. xix been, ever since its inauguration, an international one in the best sense of the word ; it brings together for a common end the most eminent European savants and their best pupils ; it finds fellow- labourers and correspondents in every country. With their aid it soon established a Bullettino, where, month by month, all discoveries of interest made at any point of the Mediterranean basin were registered ; and volumes, called sometimes Antiali, sometimes Memorie, in which really important discoveries, and the problems to which they give rise, were discussed. Some of these dissertations are so elaborate and so full of valuable matter as to have formed epochs in the history of science. They are accompanied by fine plates, which, by their size, permit the reproduction of objects of art on a grander scale, and with more fidelity, than had been previously attempted.^ While the Roman Instituto was thus devoting itself to research, and assuring to its members the advantages of a regular publicity, these inquiries were daily attracting a more considerable share of attention from the other learned bodies of Europe. The Acadc'mie dcs hiscriptions et de Belles Lellres, the Academies of Berlin, Munich, and Vienna, devoted an ever-increasing portion of their programmes to such studies. Men began everywhere to under- stand that the writings of the classic authors, which had been so exhaustively studied ever since the Renaissance, were no longer capable of affording fresh information. In order to learn more of antiquity than the great scholars of the last three centuries, it was necessary to penetrate into the past by paths as yet unexplored ; it was necessary to complement and control the evidence of classic authors by that of public and private inscriptions, engraved upon bronze, marble, or stone ; it was above all necessary to seek for the expression, in their handiwork, of the wants and ideas, of the personal sentiments and religious conceptions, of the men of antiquity. There are, in fact, nations, such as the Etruscans, ' For the history of the Instituto Archeologico, the notice written for the celebration, in 1879, of the fiftieth anniversary of its foundation, may be consulted. It is from the pen of Michaelis, one of the most learned of modern German archseologists, and bears the following title : Storia deW Instituto Ardicotogico Germano, 1S29-1879, strcnna puhblicata nelF occasione dt'Ua fcsta del 21 Aprile, 1879, dalla direzione centrale dclF Instituto Archeologico, 8vo. Roma, 1S79. It was also published in German. An article by M. Ernest Vinet in the volume entitled L' Art ct V Archeologie (pp. 74-91, 8vo. Didier, 1874), upon the origin and labours of the Instituto, will also be found interesting. XX Introduction. whose whole literature has perished, who are only known to us by the relics of their art. Others, like the Greeks and Latins, have indeed transmitted to us noble masterpieces of literature ; but these masterpieces are few in proportion to those which time has destroyed. Of the thoughts which they expressed in their immortal languages, too many have been lost for ever with the fragile strips of papyrus to which they were confided. With the ardour for knowledge and the heroic perseverance which are among the virtues of our time, curiosity has refused to resign itself to such a loss. It has determined to discover the un- published, to draw into the light all that has not perished beyond recovery, to collect all that the spirit of antiquity has left behind it, either upon works hitherto unnoticed, or upon those which have been imperfectly understood. The treasures of epigraphy have been classified and shown in their full value by Boeckh, Borghesi, and others, and the world is now able to guess all that history may owe to them. The study, however, of those remains which bear figured representations is still more complex and formidable. The language of forms is, in itself, less definite than that of words, and it becomes very difficult to decipher when we have no words dealing with the same ideas to help us, when we possess the art of a people without a line of their literature. Another difficulty springs from the very abundance and variety of the materials to our hand. We feel oppressed by the ever-growing accumulation of facts, and can neither determine where to begin our work, nor how to leave it off : we cannot see the forest for the trees ! II. In 1830, when the Roman Institute was founded, the time seemed to have come for the formulation of all the gathered facts and for their arrangement into groups, a task which had become much more difficult than in the time of Winckelmann. To conduct it to a successful conclusion a rare combination of faculties was required ; breadth of intellect, aided by vast reading and a powerful memory ; a philosophical spirit, capable of wide generalisation, joined to that passion for accurate detail which distinguishes the philologist ; it demanded one whose taste would Introduction. xxi survive the trying labour of the cabinet, a savant and an artist combined in one person. Books do not teach everything. He who wishes to speak of art with intelhgence must study art objects themselves, must cultivate an intimate acquaintance with them, and, within himself, a love for beautiful forms. Without the perceptive powers which such an educational process alone can give, no man can appreciate the subtle differences which dis- tinguish styles and schools. He who possesses no ear, who is unable to perceive the intervals which separate one note from another, who knows that he can neither recognise nor remember an air, does not, unless he be both presumptuous and ignorant, dilate upon music, or attempt to write its history. In the art of design, as in music, no education can supply the place of natural aptitudes ; but the latter are not by themselves sufficient to form a connoisseur. Something more is necessary to those who wish to form judgments upon which reliance may be placed, and to give reasons for them which will bear discussion. A special prepara- tion must be undergone, the rules and technical processes — that is to say, the language of art — must be learnt. A connoisseur need not be able to compose an opera, or to chisel a statue, but he should be able to read a part, or to decide, for instance, by the appearance of a copy whether its original were of bronze or marble. At the end of the last century there was born in Silesia a man who, while yet in his first youth, gave evidence of a rare combina- tion of the gifts necessary for the successful accomplishment of the task which we have described ; we mean Carl Ottfried Miiller, who has been called, without any exaggeration, a " scholar of genius."^ A disciple of Niebuhr and Bceckh, he excelled all his contemporaries in his efforts to embrace the whole of antiquity in one view, to trace out and realise for himself all the varied aspects of ancient civilisation. As a philologist, he took the greatest pleasure in the science which weighs words and syllables, which collates manuscripts. A poet in his hours of leisure, he appre- ciated both ancient and modern works of literature. As a young man he studied with passion the antiques in the Dresden Museum and the gallery of casts belonging to the University of Gottingen. ' Leo JouEERT, £'«vcavators on the sites of ancient and historic cities. Their chances are small of finding- those objects of art which, by their beauty and elegance, repay any amount of toil and expense. The remains which they bring- to light have little to say to our aesthetic perceptions ; they repeat a {q.v! types with an extreme monotony ; but, on the other hand, they carry our thoughts back to a point far nearer the cradle of our race than the myths of early history or even the monumental remains of Egypt and Chalda^a. They cast some slight illumination upon those distant ages of which humanity has preserved no recollection. They people with unknown multitudes those remote epochs into which scientific curiosity had, but yesterday, no desire to penetrate. There can be in all this no real question of chronology, but when from the sands of Abbeville or the caverns of Perigord we dig up the first flint implements or those fragments of bone, of ivory, of reindeer horn, which have preserved to us the first attempts made by man to copy the outlines of living beings, it takes us far beyond those days of which our only knowledge comes from vague xl Introduction. tradition, and still farther beyond those centuries which saw the first struggling dawn of history. We have, then, decided not to embark upon these questions of prehistoric art, because, as the title which we have chosen declares, we propose to write a history, and the word history, when the human race is in question, implies established relations between certain groups of facts and certain portions of time, measured at least with something approaching to probable truth. We do not yet possess, probably we shall never possess, any means of estimating even within five or six thousand years, the actual duration of the stone age. From all analogies progress must have been, in the beginning, exceedingly slow ; like that of a falling body, the rapidity of industrial progress is continually accelerating. This acceleration is not of course quite regular ; the phenomena of social life are too complex, the forces at work are too numerous and sometimes too contrary to allow us to express it by the mathema- tical formula which may be applied to movement in the physical world ; but on the whole this law of constantly accelerated progress holds good, as indeed maybe historically proved. So long as man had to do without metals, each generation, in all probability, added but little to the discoveries of that which preceded it ; most likely after each happy effort many generations succeeded one another without any further attempt to advance. Ever since they have been under our observation, the savage races of the world have been practically stationary except where European commerce has profoundly modified the conditions of their lives. It is probable, therefore, that more centuries rolled away between the first chipped flints and the well polished weapons which succeeded them than between the latter and the earliest use of bronze. But we cannot prove that it was so, nor satisfy those whom probability and a specious hypothesis will not content. Where neither written evidence nor oral tradition exist there can be little question of historic order. The remains of the stone age are not calculated to dissipate the silence which enshrouds those centuries. In the art of a civilized people we find their successive modes of feeling and thought interpreted by expressive forms ; we may even attempt under all reserve to sketch their history with the sole aid of their plastic remains. The chances of error would of course be numerous ; but yet if all other materials had, unhappily, failed us, the attempt Introduction. xli would have been well worth making. The more ancient portions of our prehistoric collections do not offer the same opportunities ; they are too simple and too little varied. The primitive savage who moulded matter to his will with great and painful difficulty, could impress upon it nothing but those gross instincts which are common to man and beast ; we can discover nothing from his works, beyond the means which he employed in his struggles with his enemies, and in his never-ending effort to procure food for himself. The word history cannot then be pronounced in connection with these remote periods, nor can their remains be looked upon in any sense as works of art. Art commences for us with man's first attempts to impress upon matter some form which should be the expression of a sentiment or of an idea. The want of skill shown in these attempts is beside the question ; the mere desire on the part of the workman renders him an artist. The most hideous and disgusting of those idols in stone or terra-cotta which are found in the islands of the Greek Archipelago, at Mycenae and in Boeotia, idols which represent, as we believe, the great goddess mother whose worship the Phoenicians taught to the Greeks, are works of art ; but we are unable to give that title to the axes and arrowheads, the harpoons and fish-hooks, the knives, the pins, the needles, the crowds of various utensils which we see in the glass cases of a pre-historic museum ; all this, interesting though it be to those who wish to study the history of labour, is nothing but an industry, and a rudimentary industry, which is content with supplying the simplest wants. It is not until we reach the sculp- tures of the cave-dwellinofs that we find the first oerms of artistic effort, and in truth, man did not cut the figures of animals upon the handles of his tools and upon those objects which have been called, perhaps a little recklessly, batons of command, for any utilitarian purpose ; it was to give himself pleasure, it was because he found true aesthetic enjoyment in copying and interpreting living nature. Art was born, we may acknowledge, with those first attempts at the representation of life, and it might fairly be expected that our history should commence with them, were it not that they offer no sequence, no starting point for any continuous movement like that which, beginning in Egypt and Chaldaea, was prosecuted in Greece and led in time to such high developments ; even its competent students confess that the art of the cave-men was an isolated episode without fruition or consequence. Specimens of VOL. I. a- xlii Introduction. this art are found at but a few points of the vast surface over which the vestiges of primitive man are spread, and neither in the neohthic age, nor even in that of bronze — both far in advance in other ways of that of the cave-dwelHngs — does it ever seem to have entered into the mind of man to copy the types offered to him by the organic world, still less those of mankind, which, however, had long before been roughly figured in one or two caves in the Dordogne.^ Towards the close of the prehistoric age the taste for ornament becomes very marked, but that ornament is always of the kind which we call geometric. Hardly a single decorative motive is taken from the vegetable world. Like the rude efforts of the cave- men, this decoration proves that those by whom it was imagined and who frequently employed it with such happy results, were not contented with bare utility, but, so far as they could, sought after beauty. A secret instinct worked in them and inspired them with the desire to give some appearance of elegance to the objects which they had in daily use. This geometrical style of decoration prevailed all over central Europe until, in the first place, the move- ments of commerce with Greece and Etruria, and secondly the Roman conquest, introduced the methods of classic art. From what we have said, it will be seen that we could not have passed over in silence this system of ornamentation ; but we .shall again find it in our path when we come to treat of that pre- historic Greece which preceded by perhaps two or three centuries the Greece of Homer. By the help of the discoveries which have been lately made in the Troad, at Mycenae, and in other ancient sites, we shall study the works produced by the ancestors of the Greeks before they went to school to the nations of the East. But even with the discoveries which carry us farthest back, we only reach the end of the period in question, when maritime commerce had already brought to the islands and the mainland of Greece objects of Egyptian, Phcenician or Chaldaic manufacture, but before those objects were sufficiently numerous or the relations with those countries sufficiently intimate to produce any great effect upon the habits of native workmen. Among the deposits to which we have alluded, it is generally possible to distinguish those works which are of foreign origin ; and such works excluded, ' Dktmmaire aichcologique dc la Gaiile, vol. i. Cavernes, figure 28. Al. Bertrand, Archiologie celtiqiie et gauloise {\ vol. 8vo. Didier, 1876, p. 68). Introduction. xliii it is easy to form a sufficiently accurate general idea of the art practised by the forefathers of the historic Greeks — by the Pelas- gians, to use a conventional term. So long as it was left to its own inspiration, Pelasgic art did not differ, in its general character- istics, from that of the various peoples spread over the continent of Europe, and still practised for centuries after the dawn of Greek civilization in the great plains to the north of the Alps and the Danube. Its guiding spirit and its motives are similar. There is the same richness, or rather the same poverty, the same combi- nations produced by a small number of never-changing linear elements. One would say that from the shores of the great ocean and the Baltic to those of the Mediterranean, all the workmen laboured for the same masters. Struck by this resemblance, or rather uniformity, one of the most eminent of German archaeo- logists, Herr Conze, has proposed that this kind of ornament shall be called Indo-European ; he sees, in the universality of the system, a feature common to all branches of the Aryan race, a special characteristic which may serve to distinguish it from the Semites. Objections have been brought against this doctrine of which Herr Conze himself has recognized the gravity ; by numerous examples taken from the art of nations which do not belong to the Aryan family, it has been shown that, human nature being the same everywhere, all those peoples whose development has been normal, neither interrupted nor accelerated by external causes, have, at some period of their lives, turned to the style in question for the decoration of their weapons, of their earthenware, their furniture, their apparel and' their personal ornaments. The less richly endowed among them would have stopped at that point but for the example of their neighbours, who stirred them on to new attempts and further progress ; others advanced without im- pulse from ether sources than their own instincts, they reproduced vegetable and animal forms, and finally the human figure in all its beauty and nobility. It was the same with letters. Among the nations which have made a name in history how few there are that possess a true literature, a poetry at once inspired and critical ! All however, under one form or another, have a popular poetry which is more or less varied and expressive. The trace of this earliest spontaneous effort, of this first naive product of the imagination, never entirely disappears in a literature xliv Introduction. which is Hfe-like and sincere ; it is found even in the most perfect works of its classic period. In the same way the most advanced and refined forms of art draw a part of their motives and effects Irom geometrical decoration. This style therefore should be studied both for its jarinciple and for the resources of which it disposes, but as we shall have to notice it when we treat of Greece, it seems to us better to adjourn till then any discussion of its merits. Both in Greece and Italy approximate dates can be given to the monuments which it ornaments, they can be placed in their proper historical position, which is by no means the case with the objects gleaned throughout central Europe. There is another consideration of still greater importance ; the artistic remains of Greece form an almost unbroken series, from the humble and timid attempts of nascent sculpture to the brilliant masterpieces of Phidias and Polycletus, and show the steps by which the artist succeeds in passing from one style to another, from curves and interlacing lines, from all mere abstract combi- nations, to the imitation of nature, to the representation of bodies which breathe, feel, and speak, which move and struggle. Else- where force has either been wanting for this development, or evidence of the transition has escaped our researches. Nothing can be much more imperfect or more conventional than the figures which we find upon some of the painted vases from Mycenae and Cyprus,' upon which the workman's hand, accustomed to straight lines and circles, or segments of circles, has succeeded in suggesting by those means the figures of birds and fighting men. Nothing could be farther from the subtlety and variety of the contours presented by living organisms. But in spite of all this, art was born with the awakening of this desire to reproduce the beauty and mobility of living forms. All that had preceded it was but the vague murmuring of a wish which had not yet become self conscious ; but, at last' the intellect divined the use to which it might be put, and guessed at the part which might be played by the plastic instincts with which it felt itself endowed. All the rest depended upon natural gifts, upon time and circumstance ; the march along the road of progress began, and although its rapidity was intermittent, it was certain to arrive, if not always at the ■ ScHLiEMANN, MycemB, see figs. 33 and 213: Cesnola, Cyprus, see pis. 44 and 46. Introduction. xlv production of masterpieces of divine beauty, at least at sufficient competence in painting and modelling to transmit the types of a race and the images of its gods to posterity. The student of plastic art finds in the remains of prehistoric times rather a tendency to the creation of art, than art itself; by postponing our study of this tendency until we come to investigate the origin of Greek and Italian art, we are enabled to avoid all ex- cursion beyond the limits implied by our title, beyond that which is generally called antiquity. The conventional meaning of this word embraces neither the primitive savages who chipped the first flint, nor the cave-men, but it calls up before our eyes the brilliant cities of northern Africa and hither- Asia, of Greece and Italy, with which our school-days have made us familiar ; it reminds us of those nations whose stories we learnt from the sacred and profane authors whose works we read in our youth ; and our thoughts revert to their grandiose monuments of architecture and sculpture, to their masterpieces of poetry and eloquence, to those great works of literature in which we took our first lessons in the art of writing and speaking. Behind all these images and associations the intelligence of an educated man tells him — and the discoveries of science every day make the fact more certain — that in the ancient as in the modern world, the nations which figure upon the stage of history were not isolated ; they each had neighbours who in- fluenced them, or whom they influenced, by commerce or conquest ; each also received something from its predecessors, and in turn transmitted the results'of its labour to those which came after it ; in a word, the work of civilization was continuous and universal. The nations which, for three or four thousand years, w^ere grouped round the basin of the Mediterranean, belonged to one historical system ; to those who take a wide grasp of facts they are but the members and organs of one great body, in which the nervous centres, the sources of life, of movement and of thought, slowly gravitated with the effluxion of time from the east to the west, from Memphis and Babylon to Athens and Rome. As for the populations which, long before the opening of this period and during the whole of its duration, lived on the north of the Danube, the Alps, and the Pyrenees, they do not belong to the same system ; they were attached to it by the Roman conquest, but at a very late period ; not long, indeed, before the triumph of Christianity, the invasion of the barbarians, and the fall of the xlvi Introduction. empire, led to the dissolution of the antique system and the substitution for it, after centuries of confusion and violence, of the wider and more comprehensive civilization of modern Europe, a civilization which was destined to cross every sea and to spread itself over the whole surface of the globe. As soon as the victories of the Roman legions, and the construction of the great roads which united Rome with her most distant provinces, had brought them into constant communication with the maritime cities of the Mediterranean, these barbaric nations, who had neither history, nor letters, nor expressive art, received them from their conquerors, whose very language they all, or nearly all, adopted ; and for all this they gave practically nothing in return. Elsewhere, the old world had almost finished its task. It had exhausted every form in which those ideas and beliefs could be clothed which it had kept unchanged, or little changed, for mil- lenium after millenium. The old world employed such force and vitality as remained to it in giving birth to the new, to that religion which has led to the foundation of our modern social and political systems. These also were to have their modes of expression, rich and sonorous enough, but dominated by analysis ; they were to have arts and literatures, which have given expression to far more complex ideas than those of antiquity. The Celts and Teutons, the Slavs and Scandinavians, all those tribes which the Romans called barbarous, have, in spite of the apparent poverty of their share, made an important contribution to the civilization into which they plunged at so late a period, when they did so much to provide a foundation for those modes of thought and feeling which are only to be found in modern society. These races do not belong, then, to what we call antiquity. They are separated from it by many things ; they have no history, they have neither literary and scientific culture nor anything that deserves the name of art. Hidden behind a thick curtain of moun- tains and forests, sprinkled over vast regions where no towns existed, they remained in their isolation for thousands of years, furnishing to civilization nothing but a few rough materials which they themselves knew not how to use ; they took no part in the work which, throughout those ages, was being prosecuted in the great basin of the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean, in that accumulation of inventions and creations which, fixed and pre- served by writing and realized by art, form the common patrimony Introduction. xlvii of the most civilized portion of tlie human species. When, at a late hour, these nations entered upon the scene, it was as disturbers and destroyers, — and although they helped to found modern society, they produced none of those elements left to us by antiquity and preserved for us by that Rome in whose hands the heritage of Greece was concentrated. We have difterent, but equally valid, reasons for leaving that which is called the far East — -India, China, and Japan — outside the limit of our studies. Those rich and populous countries have, doubtless, a civilization which stretches back nearly as far as that of Egypt and Assyria, a civilization which has produced works both of fine and of industrial art which in many respects equalled those of the nations with which we are now occupied. In all those countries there are buildings which impress by their mass and by the marvellous delicacy of their ornamentation, sculptures of a singular freedom and power, and decorative painting which charms by its skilful use of brilliant colour as well as by the facility and inventive fancy of its design. The representation of the human figure has never reached the purity of line or nobility of expression of a Greek statue, but, on the other hand, the science of decoration has never been carried farther than by the wood-carvers, weavers and embroiderers of Hindostan, and the potters of China and Japan. These styles have their fanatical admirers who see nothing but their brilliant qualities ; they have also their detractors, or at least their severe judges, who are chiefly struck by their shortcomings, but no one attempts to deny that each of those nations possesses an art which is always original, and sometimes of great and rare power. Why then, it may be asked, do we refuse to comprehend the more ancient monuments of India and China, those which by their age belong to the centuries with which we are concerned, in this work ? Our motives may be easily divined. We might allege our incompetence for such an extended task, which would be enough to occupy several lives. But we have a xlviii Introduction. still more decisive reason. Neither Aryan India nor Turanian China belongs to the antiquity which we have defined, and as for Indo-China and Japan they are but annexes to those two great nations ; religion, written characters, the industrial and plastic arts — all came to them from one or the other of those two ereat centres of civilization. So far as China is concerned no doubt or hesitation is possible. Down almost to our own days China and its satellites had no deal- ings with the western group of nations. It is a human family which has lived in voluntary isolation from the rest of its species. It is separated from western mankind by the largest of the continents, by deserts, by the highest mountains in the world, by seas once impassable, finally, by that contempt and hatred of everything foreign which such conditions of existence are calculated to engen- der. In the course of her long and laborious existence China has invented many things. She was the first to discover several of those instruments and processes which, in the hands of Europeans, have, in a few centuries, changed the face of the world ; not only did she fail to make good use of her inventions, she guarded them so closely that the West had to invent them anew. We may cite printing as an example ; nearly two hundred years before our era the Chinese printed with blocks of wood. On the other hand, every useful discovery made in the period and by the group of nations to whom we mean to confine our attention, from the time of Menes and Ourkham, the first historic kings of Egypt and Chaldaea, to the latest of the Roman Emperors, has been turned to the profit of others than its authors, and forms, so to speak, part of the public wealth. A single alphabet, that which the Phoenicians extracted from one of the forms of Egyptian writing, made the tour of the Mediterra- nean, and served all the nations of the ancient world in turn for preserving their thoughts and the idiom of their language. A system of numerals, of weights and measures, was invented in Babylon and travelled across western Asia to be adopted by the Greeks, and, through the mediation of the Greek astronomers and geographers, has given us the sexagesimal division which we still employ for the partition of a circumference into degrees, minutes and seconds. From this point of view, then, there is a profound difference between Egypt or Chaldsea, and China. The most remote epochs in the history of China do not belong to antiquity as we have Introduction, xlix defined the term. Without knowing it or wishing it, all those nations included in our plan laboured for their neighbours and for their successors. Read as a whole, their history proves to us that they each played a part in the gradual elaboration of civilized life which was absolutely necessary to the total result. But when China is in question our impression is very different, our intellects are quite equal to imagining what the world would have been like had that Empire been absolutely destroyed centuries ago, with all its art, literature, and material wealth. Rightly or Avrongly, we should not expect such a catastrophe to have had any great effect upon civilization ; we should have been the poorer by a few beautiful plates and vases, and should have had to do without tea, and that would have been the sum of our loss. The case of India is different. Less remote than China, bathed by an ocean which bore the fleets of Egypt, Chaldsea, Persia, Greece and Rome, she was never beyond the reach of the western nations. The Assyrians, the Persians, and the Greeks carried their arms into the basin of the Indus, some portions of which were annexed for a time to those Empires which had their centre in the valley of the Euphrates and stretched westwards as far as the Mediterranean. There was a continuous comincr and ofoine of cara- vans across the plateau of Iran and the deserts which lie between it and the oases of Bactriana, Aria, and Arachosia, and through the passes which lead down to what is now called the Punjab ; between the ports of the Arabian and Persian gulfs and those of the lower Indus and the Malabar coast, a continual commercial movement went on which, though fluctuating with time, was nev'er entirely interrupted. From the latter regions western Asia drew her supplies of aromatic spices, of metals, of precious woods, of jewels, and other treasures, all of which came mainly by the sea route. All this, however, was but the supply of the raw material for Egyptian, Assyrian, and Phoenician industries. There is no evi- dence that up to the very last days of antique civilization the inhabitants of Hindostan with all their depths and originality of thought ever exercised such influence upon their neighbours as could have made itself felt as far as Greece. The grand lyric poetry of the Yedas, the epics and dramas of the following epoch, the religious and philosophical speculations, those learned grammatical analyses which are now admired by philologists, all the rich and VOL, I. h 1 Introduction. brilliant intellectual development of a race akin to the Greeks and in many ways no less richly endowed, remained shut up in that basin of the Ganges into which no stranger penetrated until the time of the Mohammedan conquest. Neither Egyptians, Arabs nor Phoenicians reached the true centres of Hindoo civilization ; they merely visited those sea-board towns where the mixed population was more occupied with commerce than with intellectual pursuits. The conquerors previous to Alexander did no more than reach the gates of India and reconnoitre its approaches, while Alexander himself failed to penetrate beyond the vestibule. Let us suppose that the career of the Macedonian hero had not been cut short by the fatigues and terrors of his soldiers. So far as we can judge from what Megasthenes tells us of Palibothra, the capital of Kalacjoka, the most powerful sovereign in the valley of the Ganges in the time of Seleucus Nicator, the Greeks would not, even in that favoured region, have found buildings which they could have studied with any profit, either for their plan, construction, or decoration. Recent researches have proved Meoasthenes to be an intelligent observer and an accurate narrator, and he tells us that in the richest parts of the country the Hindoos of his time had nothing better than wooden houses, or huts of pise or rough concrete. The palace of the sovereign, at Palibothra, impressed the traveller by its situation, its great extent, and the richness of its apartments. It was built upon an artificial, terraced mound, in the midst of a vast garden. It was composed of a series of buildings surrounded by porticos, which contained large reception halls separated from one another by courtyards in which peacocks and tame panthers wandered at will. The columns of the principal saloons were gilt. The general aspect was very imposing. The arrangements seem to have had much in common with those of the Assyrian and Persian palaces. But there was one capital distinction between the two ; at Palibothra the residence of the sovereign, like those of his subjects, was built of wood. With its commanding position, and the fine masses of verdure with which it was surrounded, it must have produced a happy and picturesque effect, but, after all, it was little more than a collection of kiosques. Architecture, worthy of the name, began with the employment of those solid and durable materials which defend Introduction. H themselves against destruction by their weight and constructive repose. The other arts could not have been much more advanced. Ignorant as they were of the working of stone for building, these people can hardly have been sculptors, and as to their painting, we have no information. There is, moreover, no allusion to works of painting or sculpture in their epics and dramas, there are none of those descriptions of pictures and statues which, in the writings of the Greek poets and dramatists, show us that the development of the plastic arts followed closely upon that of poetry. This difference between the two races may perhaps be exjDlained by the opposition between their religions and, consequently, their poetry. In giving to their gods the forms and features of men, the oldest of the Greek singers sketched in advance the figures to be afterwards created by their painters and sculptors. Homer furnished the sketch from which Phidias took his type of the Olympian Jupiter. It was not so with the Vedic hymns. In them the persons of the gods had neither consistence nor tangibility. They are distinguished now by one set of qualities and again by another ; each of the immortals who sat down to the banquet on Olympus, had his or her own personal physiognomy, described by poets and interpreted by artists, but it was not so with the Hindoo deities. The Hindoo genius had none of the Greek faculty for clear and well-defined imagery ; it betrays a certain vagueness and want of definition which is not to be combined with a complete aptitude for the arts of design. It is the business of these arts to render ideas by forms, and a well marked limit is the essence of form, which is beautiful and expressive in proportion as its contours are clearly and accurately drawn. Indian art then, for the reasons which we have given, and others which are unknown, was only in its cradle in the time of Alexander, while the artists of Greece were in full possession of all their powers ; they had already produced inimitable master-pieces in each of the great divisions of art, and yet their creative force was far from being exhausted. It was the age of Lysippus and Apelles ; of those great architects who, in the temples of Asia Minor, renewed the youth of the Ionic order by their bold and ingenious innovations. Under such conditions, what would the effect have been, had these two forms of civilization entered Hi Introduction. into close relations with each other ? In all probability the result would have been similar to that which ensued when the ancestors of the Greeks began to deal with the more civilized Phoenicians and the people of Asia Minor. But in the case of the Hindoos, as we have said, the disciples had a less, instead of a o-reater, aptitude for the plastic arts than their teachers, and, moreover, the contact between the two was never complete nor was it of long duration. The only frontier upon which the inter- change of idea was frequent and continuous was the north-west, which divided India from that Bactrian kingdom of which we know little more than the mere names of its princes and the date of its fall. But before the end of the second century B.C. this outpost of Hellenism had fallen before the attacks of those barbarians whom we call the Saci. In such an isolated position it could not long hope to maintain itself, especially after the rise of the Parthian monarchy had separated it from the empire of the Seleucidae. Its existence must always have been precarious, and the mere fact that it did not succumb until the year 136 B.C. is enough to prove that several of its sovereigns must have been remarkable men. Should their annals ever be discovered they would probably form one of the strangest and most interesting episodes in the history of the Greek race. Through the obscurity in which all the details are enveloped we can clearly perceive that those princes were men of taste. They were, as was natural, attached to the literature and the arts which reminded them of their superior origin and of that distant fatherland with which year after year it became more difficult to communicate. Athough they were obliged, in order to defend themselves against so many enemies, to employ those mercenary soldiers, Athenians, Thebans, Spartans and Cretans, which then overran Asia, and to pay them dearly for their services, they also called skilful artists to their court and kept them there at great expense ; the beautiful coins which have preserved their images down to our day are evidence of this, the decoration of their cities, of their temples, and of their palaces must have been in keeping with these ; everywhere no doubt were Corinthian and Ionic buildings, statues of the Greek gods and heroes mixed with those portraits and historic groups which had been multiplied by the scholars of Lysippus, wall paintings, and perhaps some of those easel pictures signed by famous masters, for which the heirs of Introduction. liii Alexander were such keen competitors. Artisans, who had followed the Greek armies in their march towards the East with the object of supplying the wants of any colonies which might be established in those distant regions, reproduced upon their vases and in their terra-cotta figures the motives of the painting, the sculpture, and the architecture which they left behind ; goldsmiths, jewellers and armourers cut, chased, and stamped them in metal. And it was not only the Greek colonists who employed their skill. Like the Scythian tribes among whom the Greek cities of the Eu.xine were planted, the nations to the north of India were astonished and delighted by the elegance of their ornament and the variety of its forms. They imported from Bactriana these products of an art which was wanting to them, and soon set themselves, with the help perhaps of foreign artists settled amonsf them, to imitate Grecian desio-n in the courts of the Indian rajahs. That this was so is proved by those coins which bear on their reverse such Hindoo symbols as Siva with his bull, and on their obverse Greek inscriptions, and by the remains of what is now called Grsco-Buddhic art, an art which seems to have flourished in the upper valley of the Indus in the third or second century before our era. These remains, formerly much neglected, are now attracting much attention. They have been carefully studied and described by Cunningham ^ ; Dr. Curtius has described them and published reproductions of the most curious among them.- They are found in the north of the Punjab upon a few ancient sites where excavations have been made. Some of them have been transported to Europe in the collection of Dr. Leitner, while others remain in the museums of Peshawur, Lahore, and Calcutta.^ In those sacred buildings which have been examined the plan of the Greek temple has not been adopted, but the isolated members of Greek architecture and the most characteristic details of its ornament are everywhere made use of. It is the same with the sculpture ; in the selection of types, in the arrangement of drapery, in the design, there is the same mixture of Greek taste with that of India, of elements borrowed from foreign, and those drawn from ' ArchcEological Survey of India, 3 vols. 1871-73. ^ ArchcBologisdu Zeitung, 1876, p. 90. Die Griechische Kunst in Indien. ^ The Louvre has lately acquired some curious examples of this art. liv Introduction. the national, beliefs. The helmeted Athene and Helios in his quadriga figure by the side of Buddha. Traces of the same influence are to be found in a less marked degree in other parts of India. Near the mouth of the Indus and upon the Malabar coast, the native sculptors and architects were able to obtain more than one useful suggestion, more than one precious hint as to their technique, from the works of art brought in the ships of maritime traders. It is even possible that Greek workmen may thus have been introduced into seaport towns, and there employed upon the decoration of palaces and temples. However this may be it is incontestable that all the important sacred edifices of that region, whether stone-built or carved in the living rock, date from a period more recent than that of Alexander, and that most of them show details which imply acquaintance with Greek architectural forms and their imitation. We are thus on all hands forced to this conclusion : that, in the domain of the plastic arts, Greece owed nothing to India, with which she made ac- quaintance very late and at a period when she had no need to take lessons from others. That, moreover, India had little or nothing to give ; that her arts were not developed till after her early relations with Greece, and it would even seem that her first stimulus was derived from the models which Greece put within her reach. From all this it will be seen that we need not go as far as China, or even as the Punjab, in order to explain the origin of Greek art. During the period with which we are concerned, China might as well have been in the planet Saturn for all she had to do with the ancient world, and we need refer to her no more, except now and then perhaps for purposes of illustration. W'e cannot treat India quite in the same fashion, because there were, as we have said, certain points of contact and reciprocal influences at work between her and the group of nations we are about to treat. But as Greece borrowed nothing from India, at least in the matter of art, the little which we shall have to say of the products of the Hindoos will not be connected with our discussion of the origin of Greek art. A curious though hardly an important episode in history, is seen in the reaction by which the Greek genius, when arrived at maturity, threw itself at the command of Alexander upon that East from which it had received its first lessons. Introduction. Iv None of those philosophical discussions to which Ottfried Muller and Stark thought it necessary to give so large a place will be found in our introduction ; both of those authors devoted a long chapter to the definition of art and its principal manifestations. Stark went so far as to discuss, with much patience and ingenuity, the definitions of art and of its essential forms which had been given by previous writers. We shall attempt nothing of the kind ; we have not undertaken a work of criticism or aesthetic demonstration. We wish to build up the history of ancient civilization through the study, description, and comparison of its plastic remains. Neither do we feel sure that, in such a question as this, definitions do not lead to confusion rather than to clearness. When short, they are vague and obscure, and only acquire precision through distinctions and developments which have to be discussed at length ; and again they generally lead, on one hand or the other, either to objections or reservations. 0?iinis dcfinitio in jure periailosa, says an old maxim, which is certainly true in matters of art. Why should we attempt, unless we are obliged, to define terms which awake sufficiently clear and distinct ideas in all cultivated minds .'' No satisfactory definition has ever been given of the word architecture, and yet, when we use it, every one knows what we mean. Architecture, sculpture, painting, each of these sounds has a precise meaning for those to whom our work is addressed, and we may say the same of certain other expressions, such as industrial arts, decoration, style, historical painting, genre painting, landscape painting, which will often be found in our pages. We must refer those who want definitions of these phrases to the Graniinaire dcs Arts du Dessin of M. Charles Blanc and kindred works. It will suffice for us that these words should be taken in the ordinary meaning which they bear in the conversation of cultivated men. If our ideas of art and its different branches diverge here and there from those which are commonly received, those divergencies will become evident, and will be discussed and justified to the best of our ability as the work proceeds. But on all occasions we shall do our best to avoid the abstract and pedantic terminology which makes Ottfried Muller's first chapter so difficult to read. We have now declared the aim of our work and the route which Ivi Introduction. we propose to follow. In order to increase our chances of success, I have sought and obtained the collaboration of j\I. Charles Chipiez, whose special knowledge is well calculated to neutralise my own deficiencies. To his Histoire critique des Origines ct de la Foi'niatioii des Ordrcs grecqiics, was awarded, in 1877, one of the highest prizes of the Academie des Inscriptions, and in the Salons of 1878 and 1879 he confirmed his double reputation as a skilful draughtsman and a learned theorist ; his Essais de Restoration d'uii Temple grecque hypHhre, et des tours a dtages^ de la Chaldde, was much noticed and discussed by connoisseurs. It would not be fitting, however, to praise it here. I must confine myself to saying how fortunate I am in having obtained a help which I have found more helpful, more single-minded, more complete, than I had dared to hope for. In all that has to do with architecture, I have not written a line until after consulting M. Chipiez upon all technical points. He has also taken an active part in the revision of the text of certain chapters. As for the plates and illustrations in the text, we have together chosen the objects to be represented, and M. Chipiez, as a professional man and able draughtsman, has personally superintended the execution of the drawings. It remains for me to explain the role which we have assigned to our illustrations. VI. In the single edition of his great work which appeared during his own lifetime, Winckelmann inserted but a small number of illustrations, and those for ornament rather than for instruction. One of his translators, M. Huber, tells us that their execution gave great dissatisfaction to the author.^ In our days, on the other hand, those who undertake a work of this kind make use of the great progress which has taken place in engraving and typography, to insert numerous figures in their text, to which they offer an indispensable and animated commentary. Without their help many descriptions and observations might remain unnecessarily obscure and doubtful. When forms are to be defined and com.- pared, mere words, in whatever language spoken or written, can never suffice. ' Histoire del Art ; Huber's preface to his translation, p. xxxii. Introduction. Ivii With well chosen phrases we may awake the recollections of others, and give renewed life to any impression which they may have received from some striking natural phenomenon or some fine work of art. Their imaginations will call up for a moment some landscape, picture, or statue which has formerly charmed them. But if we wish to explain the complicated plan of some great building, its design and its proportions, the slightest sketch will be of more use than the longest and most minute descriptions. So it will, if we wish to make clear the character- istics which distinguish one style from another, the Assyrian from the Egyptian, the archaic Greek style from that of the Phidian epoch or of the decadence, an Ionic column from the Erechtheum from one of the same order treated by a Roman architect. Between the contour of a figure from a Memphite bas-relief and that of one from Nineveh, what difference is there .'' A tenth of an inch more or less, a slight difference in the sweep of a line in order to mark more strongly the junction of the thigh and the knee. If we placed three nude torsos side by side, one of the si.xth century, another of the fifth century, and the third of the time of Hadrian, a practised eye would at once assign its true date to each, in accordance with the manner in which the skeleton was indicated under the fiesh, and the muscles drawn over it and attached to it. Supposing that the same model had served all three artists, it would show in the one case a lively sentiment of form combined with some dryness and rigidity ; in another a freer, larger, and more subtle treatment, and in the third a want of vigour and firmness : but it would be difficult to give by words a clear idea of what caused the difference. Between the contour which satisfies us and that which does not there is hardly the difference of a hair ; by leaning a little harder with the chisel the aspect of the one surface might have been made identical with the other. By its double astragali, by the fine chiselling of its gorgerin, by the elegant curve which unites the two volutes, and by the general delicacy of its ornament, a capital from the Erechtheum is distinguished above a Roman Ionic capital ; it is at once finer in design and richer in ornamentation : by the side of it a capital from the theatre of Marcellus or the Coliseum would look mean and poor. The whole history of art consists of the succession of subtle changes like these, and it would be impossible to convey them to VOL. I. / Iviii IXTRODUCTIOX. the reader by the utmost precision of technical language or the most brilliant and life-like descriptions. The best thing that can be done is to make one's remarks in the presence of the statues, pictures and buildings concerned. But it is rarely that we find ourselves in such favourable conditions for teaching and explaining our ideas. But, in default of the objects themselves, we may at least give the most faithful images of them which can be obtained, and that we shall attempt to do throughout the course of this history. We shall, then, give a large number of figures, in which absolute accuracy and justice of proportion will be aimed at rather than picturesque effects. It is not very long since, in collections of drawings from antique remains, they were all presented under one aspect, so far as the subtleties of style were concerned. The hand of the engraver spread a technical uniformity over them all in which differences of school and date disappeared, just as the delicate carvings and coloured ornament of the middle asfes and the renaissance, which gave to each building an individuality of its own, were reduced to dull monotony by the undiscriminating brush of the whitewasher. It seemed to the artist natural enough to clothe the monuments of the past in the style of his own day — and it required much less care than would have been needed for the successful expression of all the diversities of style in his models. We have now, however, grown more exacting. We demand from the draughtsman who pretends to interpret a work of art the same devotion and the same self-sacrifice as from the writer who is charged with the translation of a work of literature from one language into another — we require him to forget himself, so that we may say of him, as the Latin poet says of his Proteus : " Omnia transformat sese in miracuia rerum." We require him to change his style with every change of subject, to copy the gesture, the accent, and even the faults of his model ; to be Chinese in China, Greek in Greece, and Tuscan when he takes us to Siena or Florence. But we have indicated an ideal which is not often reached. Every one of us has his preferences and natural affinities, every artist his own methods and personal modes of thought. One will be conspicuous for his interpretation of the nobility and purity of the antique, another for his treatment of oriental art or of the elecrance of our eighteenth I Introduction. lix century. But the mere enunciation of the principle is of vahie, for a great effect follows the praise which those who treat their model with scrupulous and intelligent respect are sure to obtain, and the blame to which they who are less conscientious expose themselves. Fidelity in interpretation is, in fact, the honesty of the draughts- man ; it may become, if carried to a great height, his honour, and even his glory. So far as we are concerned, we demand it from all those who are associated with us in this task ; and, so far as e.xistinof methods will allow, we shall see that we obtain it. Unless our illustrations had that merit they would obscure the te.\t instead of making it more comprehensible. Our readers would search in vain for the features and characteristics to which we might call their attention, and many of our remarks and theories would become difficult to understand. We should be in the same position as an incompetent barrister who has made a bad choice oi witnesses ; witnesses who, when in the box, prove either to know nothing or to know only facts which tell against the party who has called them. Our aim in choosing our illustrations will be to place before our readers good reproductions of most of the objects which are discussed in our text. We shall, of course, be unable to figure everything that is of interest, but we can at least ensure that those figures which we give shall each be interesting in some particular or another. So far as possible, we shall select for illustration such objects as have not previously been reproduced, or have been ill reproduced, or have been figured in works which are difficult of access. We shall sometimes, of course, find it necessary to reproduce some famous statue or some building which is familiar to most people ; but even then we shall endeavour to give renewed interest to their beauties by displaying them under some fresh aspect and by increased care in the delineation of their forms. Views in perspective, of which we shall make frequent use, give the general aspect of buildings with much greater truth and completeness than a mere plan, or a picturesque sketch of ruinous remains, or even than an elevation. Most of the more important perspectives and restorations due to the learned pencil of M. Chipiez will be given in plates separate from the text, as well as the most curious or significant of the works in sculpture or painting to which we shall have to refer. Ix Introduction. Some of these plates will be coloured. But the majority of our illustrations will consist of engravings upon zinc and wood, which will not, we hope, fall short of their more elaborate companions in honesty and fidelity. From the earliest Egyptian dynasties and from fabled Chaldaea to imperial Rome, from the Pyramids and the Tower of Babel to the Coliseum, from the Statue of Chephren and the bas-reliefs of Shalmaneser III. to the busts of the Caesars, from the painted decorations of the tomb of Ti, and the enamelled bricks of Nineveh to the wall-paintings of Pompeii, we shall review in due succession all the forms which the great nations of antiquity made use of to express their beliefs, to give shape to their ideas, to satisfy their instincts for luxury and their taste for beauty, to lodge their p-ods and their kina^s, and to transmit their own likenesses to posterity. We propose to trace and explain the origin of, and to describe, without eesthetic dissertations or excessive use of technical terms, those processes which imply the practice of art ; the creation and descent of forms ; the continual changes, sometimes slight and sometimes great, which they underwent in passing from one people to another, until, among the Greeks, they arrived at the most happy and complete perfection which the world has seen. We hope, too, by the judicious choice and careful execution of our figures, to give a fair idea of this course of development even to those artists who have neither time nor patience to follow our criticisms and descriptions. I conceived the plan of this history, of which the first instalment is now submitted to the public, at the time when M. Wallon, who is secretary to the Acaddmie des hiscriptions et Bclles-Lettres, entrusted me with the inauguration, at the Sorbonne, of the teaching of classic archceology. But before it could be realized two conditions had to be fulfilled. I had to find an associate in the work, a companion who would help me in the necessary labour and study, and I found him among my auditors in those first lectures at the Sorbonne. I had also to find a publisher who would understand the wants of the public and of the critics in such a matter. In this, too, I have succeeded, and I am free to undertake a work which is, I hope, destined to carry far beyond the narrow limits of a Parisian lecture room, the methods and Introduction. ixi principal results of a science, which, having made good its claims to the gratitude of mankind, is progressing with a step which becomes daily more assured. The task is an arduous one, and the continual discoveries which are reported from nearly every quarter of the ancient world, make it heavier every day. As for my colleague and m\'self, we have resisfned ourselves in advance to seeingf omissions and defects pointed out even by the most benevolent critics, but we are convinced that in spite of such imperfections as it may contain, our work will do good service, and will cause one of the aspects of ancient civilization to be better understood. This conviction will sustain us through the labours which, perhaps with some temerity, we have taken upon us. How far shall we be allowed to conduct our history .'' That we cannot tell, but we may v'enture to promise that it shall be the chief occupation and the dearest study of all that remains to us of life and strength. Georges Perrot. Ct^U/ TO THE READER. We have been in some doubt as to whetlier we should append a special biblio- graphy to each section of this work, but after mature reflection we have decided against it. We shall, of course, consider the art of each of the races of antiquity in less detail than if we had undertaken a monograph upon Egyptian, upon Assyrian, or upon Phoenician art ; but yet it is our ambition to neglect no source of information which is likely to be really valuable. From many of the books and papers which we. shall have to consult we may reproduce nothing but their titles, but we hope that no important work will escape us altogether, and in every case we shall give references which may be easily verified. Under these circumstances a formal list of works would be a mere repetition of our notes and would only have the effect of giving a useless bulk to our volumes. Whenever our drawings have not been taken directly from the originals we have been careful to indicate the source from which we obtained them, and we have made a point of borrowing only from authors of undoubted authorit)'. Those illustrations which bear neither an artist's name nor the title of a book have been engraved from photographs. As for the perspectives and restorations supplied by M. Chipiez, they are in every case founded upon the study and comparison of all accessible documents ; but it would take too long to indicate in each of these drawings how much has been borrowed from special publications and how much has been founded upon photographic evidence. JNI. Chipiez has sometimes employed the ordinary perspective, sometimes that which is called axonometric jierspective. The difference will be at once perceived. Egyptologists may, perhaps, find mistakes in the hieroglyphs which occur in our illustrations. These hieroglyphs have been as a rule exactly transcribed, but we do not pretend to offer a collection of texts ; we have only reproduced these characters on account of their decorative value, and because without them we could not have the general appearance of this or that monument. It will thus be seen that our object is not aflected by a mistake or two in such matters. We may here express our gratitude to all those who have interested themselves ill our enterprise and who have helped us to make our work complete. Our dear and lamented Mariette had promised us his most earnest help. During the winter that we passed in Egypt, while he still enjoyed some remains of strength and voice, we obtained from his conversation and his letters some precious pieces of informa- tion. We have cited the works of M. Maspero on almost every page, and yet we l.\iv To THE Reader. have learnt more from his conversation than from his writings. Before his departure for Egypt — whither he went to succeed Mariette — M. Maspero was our perpetual counsellor and referee ; whenever we were embarrassed we appealed to his well ordered, accurate, and unbiased knowledge. We are also deeply indebted to M. Pierret, the learned conservateur of the Louvre ; not only has he done everytliing to facilitate the work of our draughtsmen in the great museum, he has also helped us frequently with his advice and his accumulated knowledge. M. Arthur Rhond has lent us a plan of the temple_ of the Sphinx, and M. Ernest Desjardins a view of the interior of that building. The artists who have visited Egypt have helped us as cordially as the learned men who have deciphered its inscriptions. M. Gerome opened his portfolios and allowed us to take three of those drawings, which express with such truthful precision the character of Egyptian landscape from them. M. Hector Leroux was as generous as M. Gerome, and if we have taken but one illustration from his sketch-books it is because the arrangements for this volume were complete before we had the chance of looking through them. M. Brune has allowed us to reproduce his plans of Karnak and Medinet-Abou. We have had occasion, in the work itself, to express our acknowledgments to MM. J. Bourgoin, G. Be'nedite, and Saint-Elme Gautier, who have drawn for us the principal monuments of the Boulak ar.d Lou\Te Museums. For the architecture we must name M. A. Gue'rin, a pupil of M. Chipiez, who prepared the drawings under the direction of his master, and M. Tomaszkievicz, whose light and skilful point has so well engraved them. If the process of engraving upon zinc has given results which, as we hope, will satisfy our readers, much of the honour belongs to the untiring care of M. Comte, whose process has been employed ; all these plates have been reviewed and retouched by him with minute care. The steel engravings are by MM. Ramus, Hibon, Guillaumot pfere and Sulpis. In order that the polychromatic decoration of the Egyptians should be rendered with truth and precision in its refined tones and complicated line, we begged M. Sulpis to make use of a process which had almost fallen into disuse from its difficulty and want of rapidity; we mean that which is called aquatint. Our plates II., XIII., and XIV. will perhaps convince our readers that its results are superior to those of chromo-lithography, which is now so widely employed. ADDITIONS AND CORRECTIONS. Vol. I. Page 69, li>ie 15 from fool, Jor " Cleanthe " read " Cleanthes." „ ,, 182, „ 2, for "a.i" rmii " of." ,, ,, 264, no/e 2, for "Vhy^ico" rmd " Physcon." „ ,, 276, /itie 17, di'Me "like." ,, for " Sait " read " Saite i'assim." Vol. II. Appendix, p. 411. The papyrus of Notemit was divided by Mustapha-Aga, British consul at Thebes " lio gave half to the Prince of Wales and half to the Khedive. The Khedive gave his half to the Louvre ; that of the Prince of Wales is now exhibited in the British Museum. ,, Page 413. Professor Lepsius has published a paper in a recent number of the Zeitschrift fiir Aigyptische Sprache in which he points out that one of the leather bands, or traces, of Pinotem II. has been in the Turin Museum for many years. He saw it there first \i\ 1845. TheDayr-el-Bahari vault must, therefore, have been known at that time. A HISTORY OF ART IN ANCIENT EGYPT CHAPTER I. THE GENERAL CHARACTER OF EGYPTIAN CIVILIZATION. - v^ I. Egypt' s Place in tJic History of the ]]'orld. Egypt is the eldest daughter of civilization. In undertakincr to group the great nations of antiquity and to present them in their proper order, in attempting to assign to each its due share in the continuous and unremitting labour of progress until the birth of Christianity, we have no alternative but to commence with the country of the Pharaohs. In studying the past of mankind, we have the choice of several points of view. We may attempt to determine the meaning and value of the religious conceptions which succeeded one another during that period, or we may give our attention rather to the literature, the arts and the sciences, to those inventions which in time have done so much to emancipate mankind from natural trammels and to make him master of his destiny. One writer will confine himself to a description of manners, and social and political institutions ; another to the enumeration and explanation of the various changes brought on by internal revolutions, by wars and conquests ; to what Bossuet calls " la suite ties empires." Finally, he who has the highest ambition of all will attempt to unite all these various features into a single picture, so as to show, as a whole, the creative activity of a race and the onward VOL. I. K A History of Art in Anxient Egypt. movements of its orenius in the continual search for " the best." But in any case the commencement must be made with Egypt. It is Egypt that has preserved the earhest attempts of man towards outward expression ; it is in Egypt that those monuments e.xist which contain the first permanent manifestation of thought by written characters or plastic ^ forms ; and it is in Egypt that the historian of antique art will find the earliest materials for study. But, in the first place, we must give some account of the curious conditions under which the people lived who constructed and ornamented so many imposing monuments. We must begin, then, by describing the circumstances and the race characteristics under which this early civilization was developed. § 2. The Valley of the Nile and its Inhabitants. The first traveller in Egypt of which we have any record is Herodotus ; he sums up, in an often quoted phrase, the impression which that land of wonders made upon him : " Egypt," he says, "is a present from the Nile."- The truth could not be better expressed. " Had the equatorial rains not been compelled to win for themselves a passage to the Mediterranean, a passage upon which they deposited the mud which they had accumulated on their long journey, Egypt would not have existed. Egypt began by being the bed of a torrent ; the soil was raised by slow degrees .... man appeared there when, by the slow accumu- lation of fertile earth, the country at last became equal to his support . . . . '^ Other rivers do no more than afford humidity for their immediate borders, or, in very low-lying districts, for a certain narrow stretch of country on each hand. When they overflow their banks it is in a violent and irregular fashion, involving wide- spread ruin and destruction. Great floods are feared as public 1 The word " plastic " is used throughout this work in its widest significance, and is not confined to works "in the round." — Ed. ^ Herodotus, ii. 7. = Marieite, ItitKiain- de la haute Egypte, p. 10 (edition of 1872, i vol. .Mexandria, Moures). The Vallev of the Nile and its Inhabitants. 3 misfortunes. It is very different with the Nile. Every year, at a date which can be ahnost exactly foretold, it begins to rise slowly and to spread gently over the land. It rises by degrees until its surface is eight or nine metres above low-water mark ; ^ it then begins to fall with the same tranquillity, but not until it has deposited, upon the lands over which it has flowed, a thick layer of fertile mud which can be turned over easily with the lightest plough, and in which every seed will germinate, every plant spring up with extraordinary vigour and rapidity. MM ^^^^^l^'Z^^^Wy" ■■sfe ■--^-^f;aiJ;^i»lfi^^.;:v^.J^-- Fig. I. — Pui'iiig the Inuiiflalinn of the Nile. Thus nature has greatly facilitated the labour of the Egyptian agriculturist ; the river take- upon itself the irrigation of the country for the whole width of its \'alley, and the preparation of the soil for the autumnal seed-time ; it restores the virtue annually taken out of the ground by the crops. Each year it brings with it more fertility than can be exhausted in the twelve months, so 1 The river should rise to this height upon the Nilometerat Cairo if there is to be a " good Nile." In upper Egypt the banks of the river are n-.uch higher than in middle Egypt. In order to flow over those banks it must rise to a height of some eleven or twelve metres, and unless it rises more than thirteen metres it will not have a proper eftect. A History of Art in Ancient Egypt. that there is a constantly accumulating capital, on both banks of the river, of the richest vegetable earth. r'lG. 2. — Hoeing ; Beni-Hastan. (Champollion, pi. 381 liis.^) Thus the first tribes established themselves in the country under singularly favourable conditions ; thanks to the timely help m\\L Fig. 3. — Ploughing; from the Necropolis of Memphis. (Descip/ion d< V Eg) fie, ant. V., pi. 17.) of the river they found themselves assured of an easy existence. - We know how often the lives of those tribes who live by fishing ' This work of Chanipollion's, to which we are greatly indebted, is entitled : Monu- inenls de l' Egypte et de la A'ulnc, 4 vols. foUo. It contains 511 plates, partly coloured, and was published between the years 1833 and 1845. The drawings for the plates were made by members of the great scientific expedition of which Champollion was the head. Many of those drawings were from the pencil of Nestor L'Hote, one of those who have most sympathetically rendered the Egyptian monuments. 2 This advantage was thoroughly appreciated by the ancients. Diodorus Siculus, speaking of the Egyptians, says that "At the beginning of all things, the first men were born in Egypt, in consequence of the happy climate of the country and the physical properties of the Nile, whose waters, by their natural fertility and their power of producing various kinds of aliment, were welt fitted to nourish the first The Valley of the Nile and its Inhabitants. 5 and the chase are oppressed by care ; there are some days when game is not to be found, and they die of hunger. Those who live a pastoral life are also exposed to cruel hardships from the destruction of their flocks and herds by those epidemics against which even modern science sometimes struggles in vain. As for agricultural populations, they are everywhere, except in Egypt, at the mercy of the weather ; seasons which are either too dry or too wet may reduce them to famine, for in those distant times local famines were far more fatal than in these days, when facility of transport and elaborate commercial connections ensure that where the demand is, thither the supply will be taken. In Egypt the success of the crops varied with the height of the Nile, but they never failed altogether. In bad years the peasant Fig. 4. — Harvest scene ; from a tomb at Gizeli. (CbampoUion, pi. 417.) may have had the baton of the tax-collector to fear, but he always had a few onions or a few ears of maize to preserve him from starvation.^ beings who received the breath of Hfe. ... It is evident that from the foundation of the world Egypt was, of all countries, the most favourable to the generation of men and women, by the excellent constitution of its soil " (i. 10). ' In all ages the rod has, in Egypt, played an important part in the collection of the ^taxes. In this connection M. Lieblein has quoted a passage from the well- known letter from the chief guardian of the archives of Ameneman to the scribe Pentaour, in which he says : " The scribe of the port arrives at the station ; he collects the tax ; there are agents with rattans, and negroes with branches of palm ; they say ' Give us some corn ! ' and they are not to be repulsed. The peasant is bound and sent to the canal ; he is driven on with violence, his wife is bound in his presence, his children are stripped ; as for his neighbours, they are far off and ar^; busy over their own harvest." (Les Rccits de Recolte dans rancienne Egyptc, comme Elements chronologique, in Recueil de Travaux relatifs a la FhiMo':;ie et a V Archiologie ejyptiennes et assyrieiines, t. i. p. 149). A History of Art in Ancient Ei.vit. The first condition of civilization is a certain measure of security for life. Now, thanks to the beneficent action of the king of rivers, that condition was created sooner in Egypt than elsewhere. In the valley of the Nile man found himself able, for the first time, to calculate upon the forces of nature and to turn them to his certain profit. It is easy then to understand that Egypt saw the birth of the most ancient of those civilizations whose plastic arts we propose to study. Another favourable condition is to be found in the isolation of the country. The tribes who setded there in centuries so remote that they are beyond tradition and even calculation, could live in peace, hidden as it were in a narrow valley and protected on all sides, partly by deserts, partly by an impassable sea. It Fig. 5. — The liastin.ado ; Beni-Hass.in. (Ch.iinpollion, pi. 390. ) would perhaps be well to give some idea of the natural features of their country before commencing our study of their art. The terms, Loivcr-, Middle-, and U(^pcr-Egypt, the Delta, and Ethiopia will continually recur in these pages, as also will the names of Tanis and Sais, Memphis and Heliopolis, Abydos and Thebes, and of many other cities ; it is important therefore that our readers should know exactly what is meant by each of these time-honoured designations ; it is necessary that they should at least be able to find upon the map those cities which by their respective periods of supremacy represent the successive epochs of Egyptian histor)-. " Egypt is that country which, stretching from north to south, occupies the north-east angle of Africa, or Libya as the ancients The Valley of the Nile and its Inhabitants. called it. It is joined to Asia by the isthmus of Suez. It is bounded on the east by that isthmus and the Red Sea ; on the south by Nubia, the Ethiopia of the Greeks, which is traversed by the Nile before its entrance into Egypt at the cataracts of Syene ; on the west by the desert sprinkled here and there with a few oases, and on the north by the Mediterranean. The desert stretches as far north on the west of the country as the Red Sea does on the east. " It penetrates moreover far into the interior of Egypt itself. Strictly speaking Egypt consists simply of that part of this corner of Africa over which the n-aters of the Nile flow durinij the inundation, to which may be added those districts to which the water is carried by irrigation. All outside this zone is uninhabited, and produces neither corn nor vegetables nor trees nor even grass. No water is to be found there beyond a lew wells, all more or less exposed to exhaustion in an ever-parching atmosphere. In Upper Egypt rain is an extremely rare phenomenon. Sand and rock cover the whole country, except the actual valley of the Nile. Up to the point where the river divides into several arms, that is to say for more than three-quarters of the whole length of Egypt, this valley never exceeds an average width of more than four or five leagues. In a kw districts it is even narrower than this. For almost its whole length it is shut in between two mountain chains, that on the east called the Arab, that on the west the Libyan chain. Tht-se mountains, especially towards the south, sometimes close in and form defiles. On the other hand, in Middle Egypt the Libyan chain falls back and becomes lower, allow'ing the passage of the canal which carries the fertilizing waters into the Fayoum, the province in which the remains of the famous reservoir which the Greek writers called Lake Mceris exist. Egypt, which was little more than a glen higher up, here widens out to a more imposing size. A little below Cairo, the present capital of Egypt, situated not far from the site of ancient Memphis, the Nile divides into two branches, one of which, the Rosetta branch, turns to the north-west, the other, that ot Damietta, to the north and north-east .... The ancients knew five others which, since their time, have either been obliterated or at least have become non-navirable .... All these branches took their names from towns situated near their mouths. A large number of less important watercourses threaded their way through 8 A History of Art in Ancient Egypt. Lower Egypt ; but as the earth there is marshy, their channels have shifted greatly from age to age and still go on changing. The Nile forms several lagunes near the sea, shut in by long tono-ues of earth and sand, and communicating with the Mediter- ranean by openings here and there. The space comprised between the two most distant branches of the river is called the Delta, on account of its triangular form, which is similar to that of a capital Greek delta (A)." ^ At one time the waves of the Mediterranean washed the foot of the sandy plateau which is now crowned by the Great Pyramid ; the Nile flowed into the sea at that time slightly to the north of the site upon which Memphis was afterwards built. With the slow passage of time the particles of earth which it brought down from the mountains of Abyssinia were deposited as mud banks upon the coast, and gradually filling up the gulf, created instead wide marshy plains intersected by lakes. Here and there ancient sand ridges indicate the successive water- courses. The never-ceasing industry of its floods had already, at the earliest historic period, carried the mouths of the Nile far beyond the normal line of the neighbouring coasts. The Egyptian priests — whose words have been preserved for us by- Herodotus — had a true idea as to how this vast plain had been created, a plain which now comprises twenty-three thousand square kilometres and is continually being added to ; but they were strangely deceived when they thought and declared that Menes or Mena, the first of all kings, found ahnost all Egypt under the waters. The sea, they said, penetrated in those days beyond the site of Memphis, and the remainder of the country, the district of Thebes excepted, was an unhealthy morass.- The Delta had, in fact, existed long before the appearance of Menes, and perhaps it may have shown pretty much its present form when the Egyptian race first appeared in the valley of the Nile.^ As to the origin of that race, we need not enter at length into a question so purely ethnographical. It is now generally allowed that they were connected with the white races of Europe 1 RoBiou, Histoire anciaine dcs Pcuples de /' Orient^ cli. \. - Herodotus, ii. 4. ■* Maspero, Histoire ancienite dcs Peuples de f Orient, pp. 6 and 7. In such general explanations as are unavoidable -we shall content ourselves with paraphrasing M. Maspero. The Valley of the Nile and its Inhabitants. 9 and Western Asia ; the anatomical examination of the bodies recovered from the most ancient tombs, and the study of their statues, bas-rehefs, and pictures, all point to this conclusion. If we take away individual peculiarities these monuments furnish us with the following common type of the race even in the most remote epochs : — " The average Egyptian was tall, thin, active. He had large and powerful shoulders,^ a muscular chest, sinewy arms termi- nating in long and nervous hands, narrow hips, and thin muscular legs. His knees and calves were nervous and muscular, as is generally the case with a pedestrian race ; his feet were long, thin, and flattened, by his habit of going barefoot. The head, often too large and powerful for the body, was mild, and even sad in its expression. His forehead was square and perhaps a little low, his nose short and round ; his eyes were large and well opened, his cheeks full and round, his lips thick but not turned out like a negro's ; his rather large mouth bore an habitually soft and sorrowful expression. These features are to be found in most of the statues of the ancient and middle empires, and in all the later epochs. Even to the present day the peasants, or fellahs, have almost everywhere preserved the physiognomj" of their ancestors, although the ujDper classes have lost it by repeated intermarriage with strangers." - When Mariette discovered in the necropolis at Memphis the famous wooden statue of a man standing and holding in his hand the baton of authority, the peasants of Sakkarah recog- nised at once the feature and attitude of one of themselves, of the rustic dignitary who managed the corvdcs and apportioned the taxation. An astonished fellah cried out : " The Sheikh-el- Beled ! " His companions took up the cry, and the statue has been known by that name ever since.'^ Increased knowledge of the Egyptian language has enabled us to carry our researches much farther than Champollion and his successors. By many of its roots, by its system of pronouns, 1 Their exceptional breadth of shoulder has been confirmed by an examination of the skeletons in the mummies. See on this subject a curious note in Bondmi's Some ObsciTal'wns on the Skeleton of an Egyptian Mumiuy ( Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archaolcgv, vol. iv. pp. 251 — 253). '- Maspero, Histoire ancicmie, p. 16. ^ Notice lies principaux Monuments exposes dans les Galcries provisoires dii Musee d' Antiquites egyptiennes de S. A. le Vice-Roi, ci Boulaq (1876), No. 492. The actual statue holds the baton in its left hand. VOL. I. C • lO A History of Art in Ancient Egypt. by its nouns of number, and by some of the arrangements of its conjugations, it seems to have been attached to the Semitic family of languages. Some of the idioms of these Semitic tongues are found in Egyptian in a rudimentary state. From this it has been concluded that Egyptian and its cognate languages, after having belonged to that group, separated from it at a very early period, while their grammatical system was still in course of formation. Thus, dis- united and subjected to diverse influences, the two families made a different use of the elements which they possessed in common. There would thus seem to have been a community of root between the Egyptians on the one part and the Arabs, Hebrews, and Phoenicians on the other, but the separation took place at such an early period, that the tribes who came to establish themselves in the valley of the Nile had both the time and the opportunity to acquire a very particular and original physi- ognomy of their own. The Egyptians are therefore said to belong to the proto-Semitic races. F'lG. 6. — Statue from the Ancient Empire, in calcareous stone. (Boulak.') Drawn by G. Benedite. This opinion has been sustained with more or less plausi- bility by MM. Lepsius, Benfey, and Bunsen, and accepted by 1 Notice des priucipaux Monuincuts exposes dans les Galeries provisoires dii Musee d'A7itic/uiles egyptiennes de S. A. le Vice-Roi, a Boulaq (1S76), p. 582. With the exception of a few woodcuts from photographs the contents of the museums at Cairo and Boulak have been reproduced from drawings by M. J. Bourgoin. The Boulak Museum will be referred to by the simple word Boulak. The reproductions of objects in the Louvre are all from the pencil of M. Saint-Elme Gautier. Fig. T.—The S/iiii-A-i/-Be/(rf. (Coulak.) Ilrawii b) J. liourgoin. The Valley of the Nile and its Inhabitants. 13 M. Maspero.^ But other critics of equal authority are more impressed by the differences than by the resemblances, which, however, they neither deny nor explain. M. Renan prefers to rank the Copts, the Tuaregs, and the Berbers in a family which he would call Chamitic, and to which he would refer most of the idioms of Northern Africa. '-^ A comparison of the languages is, then, insufficient to decide the question of origin. The people whose physical characteristics we have described and whose idiom we have defined, came from Asia, to all appear- ance, by the Isthmus of Suez. Perhaps they found established on the banks of the Nile another race, probably black, and indieenous to the African continent.^ If this were so the new comers forced the earlier occupants of the country southwards without mixing with them, and set themselves resolutely to the work of improvement. Egypt must then have presented a very different sight from its richness and fertility of to-day. The river when left to itself, was perpetually changing its bed, and even in its highest floods it failed to reach certain parts of the valley, which remained unproductive ; in other districts it remained so long that it changed the soil into swamp. The Delta, half of it drowned in the waters of the Nile, the other half under those of the Mediterranean, was simply a huge morass dotted here and there with sandy islands and waving with papyrus, reeds, and lotus, across which the river worked its sluggish and uncertain way ; upon both banks the desert swallowed up all the soil left untouched by the yearly inun- dations. From the crowding vegetation of a tropical marsh to the most absolute aridity was but a step. Little by little the new comers learnt to control the course of the floods, to bank them in and to carry them to the farthest corners of the valley, and Egypt gradually arose out of the waters and became in the hand of man one of the best adapted countries in the world for the development of a great civilization."* How many generations did it require to create the country and the nation ? We cannot tell. But we may affirm that a 1 Maspero, Histoire ancienne, p. 1 7. - Histoire des Langiies shnitiques, Book i. ch. ii. § 4. ^ See Lepsius, Veber die Annalime ei?ies sogenanntcn prehistorischen Steinaltcrs in ^^gypten (in the Zcitschrijt fiir ^-Egyplische Sprache, 1870, p. 113, et seq.). * Maspero, p. 18. H A History of Art in Ancient Egypt. commencement was made by the simultaneous establishment at several different points of small independent states, each of which had its own laws and its own form of worship. These districts remained almost unchanged in number and in their respective boundaries almost up to the end of the ancient world. Their union under one sceptre formed the kingdom of the Pharaohs, Fig. 8. — Hunting in the Mar: lies ; from a 1 ns-relief in the tcmb of Ti. the country of Khemi, but their primitive divisions did not there- fore disappear ; the small independent states became provinces and were the foundation of those local administrative districts which the Greeks called tnviics. Besides this division into districts, the Egyptians had one other, and only one — the di\ision into Lower Egypt, or the The Valley of the Nile and its Inhabitants. 15 North Country {Tomera, or To-incJi), and into Upper Egypt, or the South Country {To-rcs). Lower Egypt consisted of the Delta ; Upper Egypt stretched from the southernmost point of the Delta to the first cataract. This division has the advantage of corresponding exactly to the configuration of the country ; moreover, it preserves the memory of a period before the time of Menes, during which Egypt was divided into two separate kingdoms — that of the North and that of the South, a division which in later times had often a decisive influence upon the course of events. This state of things was of sufficiently long duration to leave an ineffaceable trace upon the official language of Egypt, and upon that which we may call its blazonry, or heraldic imagery. The sovereigns who united the whole territory under l'"lG. 9. — Sliadouf : machine for irrigating the land above the le%'el of the canals. one sceptre are always called, in the royal protocols, the lords of Upper and Low^er Eg}'pt ; they carry on their heads two crowns, each appropriate to one of the two great divisions of their united kingdom. That of Upper Egypt is known to Egyptologists as the white crown, because of the colour which it bears upon painted monuments ; that of the North is called the red crown, for a similar reason. Combined with one another they form the complete regal head-dress ordinarily called the pschent. In the hieroglyphics Northern Egypt is indicated b)- the papyrus ; Southern by the lotus. During the Ptolemaic epoch a new administrative division into Upper, IMiddle, and Lower Egypt was established. The Middle i6 A History of Art in Ancient Egypt. Egypt of the Greek geographers began at the southern point of the Delta, and extended to a Httle south of Hermopohs. Althouorh this latter division was not established until after the centuries which saw the birth of those monuments with which we shall have to deal, we shall make frequent use of it, as it will facilitate and render more definite our topographical expla- nations. For the contemporaries of the Pharaohs both Memphis Fu;. 10. — The White Crouu. Fig. ii. — 1 he Red Crown. Fig. 12. — The I'scheiil. and Thebes belong to Upper Egypt, and if we adopted their method of speech we should be under the continual necessity of stopping the narration to define geographical positions ; but with the tri-partite division we may speak of Beni-Hassan as in Middle, and Abydos as in Upper Egypt, and thus give a sufficient idea of their relative positions. ^ 3- The Great Divisions of Egyptian History. In enumerating and analysing the remains of Egyptian art, we- shall classify them chronologically as well as locally. The monuments of the plastic arts will be arranged into groups de- termined by the periods of their occurrence, as well as by their geographical distribution. We must refer our readers to the works of M. Maspero and others for the lists of kings and dynasties, and for the chief events of each reign, but it will be convenient for us to give here a summary of the principal epochs in Egyptian history. Each of those epochs corresponds to an artistic period with a The Great Divisions of Egyptian History. 17 special character and individuality of its own. The following paragraphs taken from the history of M. Maspero give all the necessary information in a brief form. " In the last years of the prehistoric period, the sacerdotal class had obtained a supremacy over the other classes of the nation. A man called Menes (Menha or Mena in the Egyptian texts) destroyed this supremacy and lounded the Egyptian monarchy. " This monarchy existed for at least four thousand years, under thirty consecutive dynasties, from the reign of Menes to that of Nectanebo (340 years before our era). This interval of time, the longest of which political history takes note, is usually divided into three parts : the Ancient Empire, from the first to the eleventh d)-nast)' ; the Middle Empire, from the eleventh dynasty to the in- vasion of the Hyksos or Shepherds ; the Nevj Empire from the shepherd kings to the Persian conquest. This division is incon- venient in one respect ; it takes too little account of the sequence of historical events. " There were indeed, three great revolutions in the historical development of Egypt. At the beginning of its long succession of human dynasties (the Egyptians, like other peoples, placed a number of dynasties of divine rulers before their first human king) tlie political centre of the country was at Memphis ; Memphis was the capital and the burying-place of the kings ; Memphis imposed sovereigns upon the rest of the country and was the chief market for Egyptian commerce and industry. With the commencement of the sixth dynasty, the centre of gravity began to shift southwards. During the ninth and tenth dynasties it rested at Heracleopolis, in Middle Egypt, and in the time of the eleventh dynasty, it fixed itself at Thebes. From that period onwards Thebes was the capital of the country and furnished the sovereign. From the eleventh to the twenty-first all the Egyptian dynasties were Theban with the single exception of the fourteenth Xoite dynasty. At the time of the shepherd invasion, the Thebaid became the citadel of Egyptian nationality, and its princes, after centuries of war against the intruders, finally succeeded in freeing the whole valley of the Nile for the benefit of the eighteenth dynasty, which opened the era of great foreign wars. " Under the nineteenth dynasty an inverse movement to that of the first period carried the political centre of the country back towards the north. With the twenty-first Tanite dynasty, Thebes VOL. I. D 1 8 A History of Art in Ancient Egypt. ceased to be the capital, and the cities of the Delta, Tanis, Bubastis, Mendes, Sebennytos, and above all Sais, rose into equal or superior importance. From that time the political life of the country con- centrated itself in the maritime districts. The nomcs of the Thebaid, ruined by the Ethiopian and Assyrian invasions, lost their influence ; and Thebes itself fell into ruin and became nothing more than a rcndezvojis for curious travellers. " I propose, therefore, to divide Egyptian history into three periods, each corresponding to the political supremacy of one town or province over the whole of Egypt : — " First Period, Memphite (the first ten dynasties). The supremacy of Memphis and of the sovereigns furnished by her. " Second Period, Theban (from the eleventh to the twentieth dynasties inclusive). Supremacy of Thebes and the Theban kings. This period is divided into two sub-periods by the Shepherd dynasties. ''a. The old Theban empire, from the eleventh to the sixteenth dynasties. '' b. The neio Theban empire, from the sixteenth to the twentieth dynasties. " Third Period, Salt (from the twenty-first to the thirtieth dynasties, inclusive). Supremacy of Sais and the other cities of the Delta. This period is divided into two by the Persian invasion : — " First Sail period, from the twenty-first to the twent)'-sixth dynasties. '' Second Sail period, horn the twenty-seventh to the thirtieth dynasties." ^ Mariette places the accession of Mena or Menes at about the fiftieth century before our era, while Bunsen and other Egyptologists bring forward his date to 3,600 or 3,500 B.C. as they believe some of the dynasties of Manetho to have been contemporary with each other. Neither Mariette nor Maspero deny that Egypt, in the course of its long existence, was often partitioned between jDrinces who reigned in Upper and Lower Egypt respectively; but, guided ^ Histoire ancicnne des Peuples dc r Orient, ■\^. <-,2,. We believe that the division proposed by M. Maspero is, in fact, the best. It is the most suggestive of the truth as to the successive displacements of the political centre and the movement of history. We .shall, however, have no hesitation in making use of the terms Aiicienf, Midille, and New Empire, as occasion arises. The Great Divisions ok Egvptiax History. 19 by circumstances which need not be described here, they incline to believe that INIanetho confined himself to enumerating those dynasties which were looked upon as the legitimate ones. The work of elimination which has been attempted by certain modern savaii/s, must have been undertaken, to a certain extent, in Egypt itself; and some of the collateral dynasties must have been effaced and passed over in silence, because the monuments still remaining preserve the names of reigning families which are ignored by history. Whatever may be thought of this initial date, Egypt remains, as has been so well said by JNI. Renan, " a lighthouse in the profourd darkness of remote antiquity." Its period of greatest power was long anterior to the earliest traditions of the Greek race ; the reign of Thothmes III., who, according to a contemporary expression, "drew his frontiers where he pleased," is placed by common con- sent in the seventeenth century, B.C. The Egyptian empire then comprised Abyssinia, the Soudan, Nubia, Syria, Mesopotamia, part of Arabia, Khurdistan, and Armenia. Eounded by the kings of the eighteenth dynasty, this greatness was maintained by those of the nineteenth. To this dynasty belonged Rameses II., the Sesostris of the Greeks, who flourished in the fifteenth century. It was the superiority of its civilization, even more than the valour of its princes and soldiers, which made Egypt supreme over Western Asia. This supremacy declined during the twenty-first and twenty- second dynasties, but, at the same time, Egyptian chronology becomes more certain as opportunities of comparison with the facts of Hebrew history increase. The date of 980, within a year or two, may be given with confidence as that of the accession of Sheshonk I., the contemporary of Solomon and Rehoboam. From that date onwards, the constant struggles between Egypt and its neighbours, especially with Assyria, multiply our opportunities for synchronic comparison. In the seventh century the country was opened to the Greeks, the real creators of history, who brought with them their inquiring spirit and their love for exactitude. After the accession of Psemethek I., the founder of the twenty- sixth dynasty, in 656, our historical materials are abundant. For that we must thank the Greek travellers who penetrated every- where, taking notes which they afterwards amplified into narratives. It is a singular thing, that even as late as the Ptolemies, when the 20 A History of Art in Ancient Egypt. power of the Macedonian monarcliy was fully developed, the Egyptians never seem to have felt the want of what we call an era, of some definite point from which they could measure the course of time and the progress of the centuries. " They were satisfied with calculating by the years of the reigning sovereign, and even those calculations had no certain point of departure. Sometimes they counted from the commencement of the year which had witnessed the death of his predecessor, sometimes from the day of his own coronation. The most careful calculations will therefore fail to enable modern science to restore to the Egyptians that which, in fact, they never possessed." ^ Even thus summarily stated, these historical indications are enough to show how little foundation there is for the opinion which was held by the ancient Greeks, and too long accepted by modern historians. It was, they said, from Ethiopia that Egyptian civilization had come. A colony of Ethiopian priests from the island of Meroe in Upper Nubia, had introduced their religion, their written characters, their art and their civil institutions into the country. The exact opposite of this is the truth. "It was the Egyptians who advanced up the banks of the Nile to found cities, fortresses, and temples in Ethiopia ; it was the Egyptians who carried their civilization into the midst of savage negro tribes. The error was caused by the fact that at one epoch in the history of Egypt the Ethiopians played an important part. " If it were true that Egypt owed its political existence to Ethiopia, we should be able to find in the latter country monuments of a more remote antiquity, and as we descended the Nile, we should find the remains comparatively modern ; but, strangely enough, the study of all these monuments incontestably proves that the sequence of towns, holy places, and tombs, constructed by the Egyptians on the banks of their river, follow each other in such chronological order that the oldest remains, the Pyramids, are found in the north, in Lower Egypt, near the southern point of the Delta. The nearer our steps take us to the cataracts of Ethiopia, the less ancient do the monuments become. They show- ever increasing signs of the decadence of art, of taste, and of the love for beauty. Finally, the art of Ethiopia, such as its still existing monuments reveal it to us, is entirely wanting in originality. A glance is sufficient to tell us that it represents the degeneracy only ' Mariette, Apercn de F Histoire dEgyptc, p. 66. The Constitution of Egyptian Society. 2 1 of the Egyptian style, that the spirit of Egyptian forms has been weakly grasped, and that their execution is generally mediocre." ^ We may condense all these views into a simple and easily remembered formula ; we may say that as ■:ac inoitnt tozoards the springs of the Nile, uc descend the current of time. Thebes is younger than Memphis, and Meroe than Thebes. The river which Egypt worshipped, and by which the walls of its cities were bathed, flowed from the centre of Africa, from the south to the north ; but the stream of civilization flowed in the other direction, until it was lost in the country of the negro, in the mysterious depths of Ethiopia. The springs of this latter stream must be sought in that district where the waters of the Nile, as if tired by their long journey, divide into several arms before falling into the sea ; in that district near the modern capital, over which stretch the long shadows of the Pyramids. § 4. TJie Constitution of Egyptian Society — Infiience of that Constitution upon Monuments of Art. During the long sequence of centuries which we have divided into three great periods, the national centre of gravity was more than once displaced. The capital was at one time in Middle Egypt, at another in Upper, and at a third period in Lower Egypt, in accordance with its political necessities. At one period the nation had nothing to fear from external enemies, at others it had to turn a bold front to Asia or Ethiopia. At various times Egypt had to submit to her foreign foes ; to the shepherd invaders, to the kings of Assyria and Persia, to the princes of Ethiopia, and finally to Alexander, to whom she lost her independence never again to recover it. And yet it appears that the character and social condition of the race never underwent any great change. At the time of the pyramid-builders, Egypt was the most absolute monarch}- that ever existed, and so she remained till her final conquest. ^ Brugsch-Bey, Histoire de f Egypt, pp. 6 and 7. Maspero's Hisfoire ancienne, p. 382, may also be consulted upon the character of the Ethiopian kingdom and the monuments of Napata. A good idea of this process of degradation may be gained by merely glancing through the plates to part v. of Lepsius's Denknuclcr ; plate 6, for example, shows what the caryatid became at Napata. 2 2 A History of Art in Ancient Egypt. " Successor and descendant of the deities who once reigned over the valley of the Nile, the king v/as the living manifestation and incarnation of God : child of the sun {Se Rd), as he took care to proclaim whenever he wrote his name, the blood of the gods flowed in his veins and assured to him the sovereign power." ^ He was ihe priest above all others. Such a form of worship as that of Egypt, required no doubt a large sacerdotal class, each member of which had his own special function in the complicated and gorgeous ceremonies in which he took part ; but the king alone, at least in the principal temples, had the right to enter the sanctuary and to open the door of the kind of chapel in which the symbolical representation of the divinity was kept ; he alone saw the god face to face, and spoke to him in the name of his people.'-^ The pre-eminent dignity of this priestly office did not, however, prevent the king from taking his proper share in war or political affairs generally. The army of scribes and various functionaries, whose titles may still be read upon the most ancient monuments of the country, depended upon him for their orders from one end of the country to the other, and in war, it was he who led the serried battalions of the Egyptian army. The king was thus a supreme pontif, the immediate chief of all civil and military officers ; and, as the people believed that his career was directed by the gods with whom he held converse, he became to them a visible deity and, in the words of an inscription, "the representative of Ra among the living." His divinity, begun on earth, was completed and rendered perpetual in another life. All the dead Pharaohs became gods, so that the Egyptian pantheon obtained a new deity at the death of each sovereign. The deceased Pharaohs thus constituted a series of gods to whom the reigning sovereign would of course address himself when he had anything to ask ; hence the 1 Maspero, Histoire ancieiiiie, p. 58. This affiliation of the king to the god was more than a figure of speech. In an inscription which is reproduced both at Ipsamboul and at Medinet-Abou, Ptah is made to speak in the following terms of Rameses II. and Rameses III. respectively: "I am thy father, as a god I have begotten thee ; all thy members are divine ; when I approached thy I'oyal mother I took upon me the form of the sacred ram of Mendes " (hne 3rd). This curious te.xt has lately been interpreted by E. Naville {Society of Biblical Archceology, vol. vii. pp. iig-138). The monarchy of the Incas was founded upon an almost identical belief. ^ See the account of the visit to Heliopolis of the conquering Ethiopian, Piankhi- Mer-Amen ; we shall quote the text of this famous inscription in our chapter upon the Egyptian temple. '^^^., - vt The Constitution of Egyptian Society. 25 monuments upon which we find living Pharaohs offering worship to their predecessors.^ The prestige which such a theory of royalty was calculated to give to the Egyptian kings may easily be imagined. They obtained more than respect ; they were the objects of adoration, of idolatry. Brought up from infancy in this religious veneration, to which their hereditary qualities also inclined them, generation succeeded generation among the Egyptians, without any attempt to rebel against the royal authority or even to dispute it. Ancient Egypt, like its modern descendant, was now and then the scene of military revolts. These were generally provoked by the presence of foreign mercenaries, sometimes by their want of discipline and licence, sometimes by the jealousy which they inspired in the native soldiery ; but never, from the time of Menes to that of Tewfik-Pacha, has the civil population, whether of the town or of the fields, shown any desire to obtain the slightest guarantee for what we should call their rights and liberties. Dur- ing all those thousands of years not the faintest trace is to be discovered of that EiG. 14. — Raineses II. iu adoration before Seti. From Abydos (Mariette). spirit from which sprung the republican constitutions of Greece and ancient Italy, a spirit which, in yet later times, has led to the parliamentary governments of Christian Europe. The Egyptian labourer or artisan never dreamt of calling in question the orders of any one who might be master for the time. Absolute obedience to the will of a sincrle man — such was the constant and instinctive national habit, and by it every movement of the social machine, under foreign and native kings alike, was regulated. From the construction of the pyramids of Cheops and Chephren, and the cutting of a new canal between the two seas under Nekau, to the Mahmoudieh canal of Mehemet-Ali and that abortive ' Fr. Lenormant, Manuel d Histoire ancienne, t. i, pp. 485-4S6. The most celebrated of these is tlie famous Chamber of Ancestors from Karnak, which is now preserved in the Bibliothique Nationak at Paris. VOL. I. E 26 A History of Art in Ancient Egypt. enterprise, the barrage of the Nile, the only method thought of for obtaining the necessary labour was compulsion.^ An order is received by the governor, who has it proclaimed from one village to another throughout his province ; next day the whole male population is driven, like a troop of sheep, to the workshops. Each man carries a bag or basket which holds his provisions for a fortnight or a month, as the case may be ; a few dry cakes, onions, garlic, and Egyptian beans, as the Greeks called the species of almond which is contained in the fruit of the lotus. Old men and children, all had to obey the summons. The more vigorous and skilful among them dressed and put in place the blocks of granite or limestone ; the weakest were useful for the transport of the rubbish to a distance, for carrying clay and water from the N ile to Fig. 15 — Homage to Amenophis III. (From Prisse.-) the brickmakers, for arranging the bricks in the sun so that they might be dried and hardened. Under the stimulus of the rod, this multitude worked well and obediently under the directions of the architect's foreman and of skilled artisans who were permanently employed upon the work ; they did all that could be done by men without special education. At the end of a certain period they were relieved by fresh levies 1 The beaters for tlie great hunts which took place in the Delta and the Fayoum were procured in the same fashion. These hunts were among the favourite pleasures of the kings and the great lords. See Maspero, Le PaJ>y?-us Mallet, p. 58 (in Recueil de Travaux, etc. t. i). ^ The work to which we here refer is the Histoire de r Art Egyptien iaprcs les Monuments, 2 vols, folio. Arthus Bertrand, 1S78. As the plates are not numbered, we can only refer to them generally. The Constitution of Egyptian Society. 27 from another province, and all who had not succumbed to the hard and continuous work, returned to their own places. Those who died were buried in hasty graves dug in the sands of the desert by the natives of their own village. The massive grandeur of some of the Egyptian monuments is only to be explained by this levy en masse of every available pair of hands. The kings of the ancient empire, at least, were unable to dispose of those prisoners of war captured in myriads, in whole races, by the Assyrian kings, and apparently employed by them in the construction of Nineveh. Now, it is impossible that such works as the Pyramids could have been begun and finished in the course of a single reign by free and remunerated labour, even if it had the help of numerous slaves. Certain arrangements in their design and the marvellously exact execution of the more important details of the masonry, prove that architects Flc. 16. — Construction of a Temple at Thebes. (From Prisse.) of great ability and skilful workmen were, indeed, employed upon those gigantic works ; but the great bulk of the task must have required the collective effort of a whole population ; of a popu- lation devoting themselves night and day to complete the work when once begun, like ants over their subterranean city or bees over their comb. Even supposing that history had been silent upon this subject, the architect could easily divine, from these monuments them- selves, how they had been constructed. Cast your eyes upon the ruins of the Athenian Acropolis ; their dimensions will seem to you small in the extreme if you compare them with the buildings of Egypt and Assyria ; on the other hand their workmanship is equally careful throughout ; it is as exact and perfect in the concealed parts of the structure as in those v> hich 28 A History of Art in Ancient Egypt. were to be visible, in the structural details as in the ornamental painting and sculpture. By these signs you may recognize at once, that, from its foundation to its completion, the whole work was in the hands of artisans whom long practice had made perfect in their trade, and that each single individual among them had Fig. 17. — Columns in the Hypostyle Hall, Karnak. made it a point of honour to acquit himself worthily of the task entrusted to him. In the gangs of docile labourers who succeeded each other in the workshops of Memphis or Thebes, there was, of course, a certain sprinkling of men who had become qualified by The Constitution of Egyptian Society. 29 experience for the special worlc upon which they were employed ; but the great majority were men suddenly taken from very different occupations, from the oar, the plough, the management of cattle ; who therefore could have nothing but their unskilled labour to bestow. To such men as these a great part of the work had perforce to be confided, in order that it might be complete at the required time. In spite of the strictest supervision, the almost religious care in the placing and fixing of masonry, v/hich might be fairly expected from the practised members of a trade guild, could not be ensured. Hence the singular inequalities and inconsistences which have been noticed in most of the great ya I i^ T M. 1' sis I nin n!n . J _ nln i Figs. iS, 19. — Scribes registering the yieU of the^ harvest. From a tomb at Sakkarah. (Coulak, 9;^ inches high. Drawn hy Bourgoin. ) Egyptian buildings ; sometimes it is the foundations which are in fault, and, by their sinking, have compromised the safety of the whole building ; ^ sometimes it is the built up columns of masonry, which, when deprived by time of their coating of stucco, appear 1 "The foundations of tlie great temple at Abydos, commenced by Seti I. and finished by Rameses If., consist of but a single course of generally ill-balanced masonry. Hence the settling which has taken place, and the deep fissure which divides the building in the direction of its major axis." — Mariette, Voyage dans la Haute-Egyple, p. 59. The same writer speaks of Karnak in a similar strain : "The Pharaonic temples are built, as a rule, with extreme carelessness. The western pylon, for instance, fell because it was hollow, which made the inclination of the walls a source of w-eakness instead of strength." — Itineraire, p. 179. .^o A History of Art in Ancient Egypt. very poor and mean. The infinite foresight and self-respect, the passionate love for perfection for its own sake, which is charac- teristic of Greek work at its best time, is not here to be found. Fig. 20. — Colossi of Amenophis III. (statues of Memnoii) at Thebes. But this defect was inseparable from the system under which the Egyptian buildings were erected. The absolute and dreaded master whose gesture, whose single word, was sufficient to depopulate a province and to fill quarries The Constitution of Egyptian Societv. and workshops with thousands of men, the sovereign who, in spite of his mortahty, was looked up to by his people as one so near akin to the gods as to be hardly distinguishable from them, the high priest and father of his people, the king before whom all heads were bent to the earth ; filled with his own glory and majesty the buildings which he caused to spring, as if by magic, from the earth. Kis effigy was everywhere. Seated in the form of colossal statues in front of the temples, in bas-reliefs upon pylons, upon the walls of porticos and pillared halls, he was represented sometimes offering homage to the gods, sometimes leading his troops to battle or bringing them home victorious. The supreme efforts of architect and sculptor were directed to constructing for their prince a tomb which should excel all others in magnificence and durability, or to Immortalizing him by a statue which should raise its head as much above its rivals as the royal Fig. 21. — Scribe registering merchandize. Sakkarah. (gj inches higli. Drawn by Bourgoin. ^ power surpassed the power and dignity of ordinary men. The art of Egypt was, in this sense, a monarchical art ; and in so being- it was the direct expression of the sentiments and ideas of the society which had to create it from its foundations. After the king came the priests, the soldiers, and the scribes or royal functionaries, each receiving authority directly from the king and superintending the execution of his orders. These three groups formed what we may call the upper class of Egyptian society. The soil was entirely In their hands. They possessed among them the whole valley of the Nile, with the exception of the roval domain. The aoTiculturists were inere serfs attached to the soil. They cultivated, for a payment In kind, the lands belonging to the privileged classes. They changed masters with the lands upon which they lived, which they were not allowed to quit without the permission of the local authorities. A History of Art in Ancient Egypt. Their position did not greatly differ from that of the modern fellahs, who cultivate the Egyptian soil for the benefit of the effendis, beys, and pachas or for that of the sovereign, who is still the greatest landowner in the country. The shepherds, the fishermen and boatmen of the Nile, the artisans and shopkeepers of the cities were in a similar condition. They lived upon their gains in the same way as the peasant upon the share of the harvest which custom reserved for his use. As a natural consequence of their life in a city and of the character of their occupations, small traders and artisans enjoyed more liberty and independence, more power of coming and going than the Fig. 22. — Boatmen, Tomb of Ra-ka-pou, 5'h dyna>ty. (Doulak, l6 inches high. Drawn by Bourgoin.) asfriculturists, althouoh leral riohts were the same in both cases. The burden of forced labour must have pressed less heavily upon the latter class, and they must have had better opportunities of escaping from it altogether. In consequence of a mistaken interpretation of historic evidence, it was long believed that the Egyptians had castes, like the Hindoos. This notion has been dispelled by more careful study of their remains. The vigorous separation of classes according to their social functions, the enforced heredity of professions, and the prohibition of intermarriage between the different groups, never obtained a footing in Egypt. We often find, in Egyptian The Coxstitutiox of Egyptian Society. 33 writings, two members of a single family attached one to the civil service and the other to the army, or the daughter of a general Fig. 23. — Cattle Drovers. From the tomb of I!a-k.i-pou, Sakkarah, 5th dynasty. (Boulak. Drawn by Bjm-goin.) marrying the son of a priest. Nay, it often happens that the offices of soldier and priest, of priest and civil servant, or of civil Fig. 24. — Bakers. From a tomb. (Boulak, 9I inches liigh. Bourgoin.) servant and soldier, are united in the person of a single individual. In families which did not belong to these aristocratic classes there VOL. I. F 34 A History of Art in Ancient Egypt. was, in all probability, more heredity of occupation ; in the ordi- nary course the paternal employment fixed that of the children, but yet there was nothing approaching- to an absolute rule. The various trades were formed into corporations or guilds, rather than castes in the strict sense of the word. From this it resulted that great natural talents, fortunate circumstances, or the favour of the sovereign could raise a man of the lowest class up to the highest dignities of the state. In the latter days of the monarchy we have an example of this in the case of Amasis, who, born among the dregs of the population, finally raised himself to the throne.' Fig. 25. — Women at a loom. From a tomb at Beni-Hassan. (Champollion, 381 bis ) Such events were of frequent occurrence in all those oriental monarchies where the will of the sovereign was the supreme and undisputed law. Even in our own days, similar things have 1 Herodotus, ii. 172. For an earlier epoch, see the history of a certain Ahmes, son of Abouna, as it is narrated upon his sepulchral inscription, which dates from the reign of Amosis, the founder of the eighteenth dynasty (De Rouge, Memoire siir r Inscription d' Ahnies, Chef des Nautoniers, d,\.o. 1851, and Brugsch, Histoire dEgypte, t. i. p. So). Starting as a piivate soldier for the war against the Shepherds, undertaken for the re-conquest of Avaris, he was noticed by the king for hts frequent acts of gallantry, and promoted until he finally became something in the nature of high admiral. The Constitution of Egyptian Society. 35 taken place in Turkey and Persia to tiie surprise of none but Europeans. When the master of all is placed so high above his fellow men that his subjects seem mere human dust about his feet, his caprice is quite sufficient to raise the most insignificant of its atoms to a level with the most illustrious. The priests of the highest rank, the generals and officers of the army and the great civil functionaries, while they made no eftort to rival the splendour of the royal creations, consecrated steles, images of the deity, and chapels, at their own expense. It was upon their tombs, however, that most of their care was lavished. These tombs furnish numberless themes of great interest to the historian. The tombs of the Memphite kings have not preserved for us anything that can fairly be called sculpture. All that we Fig. 26. — Netting birds. From a tomb. (Boulak. Drawn by Bourgoin.) know of the style and methods of that art in those early times we owe to the burial-places which the members of the governing classes were in the habit of preparing during their lifetime in the necropolis of Memphis. We may say the same of the early centuries of the Middle Empire. The Egypt of the great kings belonging to the twelfth dynasty has been preserved for us upon the tombs of Ameni and Num-Hotep, the governors of the iioii/cs in which they were buried. It is to the burial chambers at Gizeh, at Sakkarah, at Meidoum, and at Beni-Hassan that we must go for complete types of sepulchral architecture at those epochs ; to the statues in the recesses of their massive walls and to the bas-reliefs in their narrow chambers, we must turn for those features of early Egyptian civilization which remained for many centuries A History of Art in A.nxient Egypt. without material change ; by these monuments we are enabled to build up piece by piece a trustworthy representation of the Egyptian people both in their labours and in their pleasures. Finally it is from these tombs of priv'ate individuals that the best works of Egyptian artists have been obtained, the works in which they Fig. 27. — Shepherds in the held.-;. From a tomb at Sakkarah. (Boulak. 8j mches h.^ii. Drawn by Bourgoin.) approached most nearly to the ideal which they pursued for so many centuries. Thanks to these monuments erected at the expense of the great lords and rich burghers of Egypt, thanks also to the climate and to Fig. 28. — Wimiowhig corn. From a tomb at Sakkarah. (Boulak. Drawn by Bourgoin.) the desert sand which has preserved them without material injury, the art of Egypt appears to us more comprehensive and varied than that of any other nation of which we shall have to treat ; than that of Assyria for instance, which represents little but scenes of battle and conquest. A faithful mirror of Egyptian society, it has The Constitution of Egyptian Society. il preserved for us an exhaustive record of the never-ceasing- activity which created and preserved the wealth of the country ; it has not even neglected the games and various pleasures in wdiich the laborious Egyptian sought for his well earned repose. The king indeed, preserved his first place by the importance of the religious bLiildings which he raised, by the size of his tomb, and by the lleisrht 1 2? iiicher. fi ,( W %i V;" J \Sf^^]f)i)i\i.lm :sL Fig. 29. — Herdsmen. From a tomb at Sakkai-ali, Sth clyn.isty. (Boulalc.) number and dimensions of the reproductions of his features ; re- productions which show him in the various aspects demanded by the complex nature of the civilization over which he presided. But in the large number of isolated figures, groups, and scenes which have come down to us, we have illustrations of all classes that helped in the work of national development, from the plough- man with his ox, to the scribe crouching, cross-legged, upon his 38 A History of Art in Ancient Egypt. mat, from the shepherd with his flock or the hunter pushing his shallop through the brakes of papyrus, to the directors of the great public works and the princes of the blood who governed conquered provinces or guarded the frontiers of the country at the head of ever faithful armies. The art of Egypt resembled that of Greece in being a complete and catholic art, seeing everything and taking an interest in every- thing. It was sensitive to military glory, and at the same time it did not scorn to portray the peaceful life of the fields. It set itself with all sincerity to interpret the monarchical sentiment in its most enthusiastic and exaggerated form, but while it placed kings and princes above and almost apart from humanity, it did not forget the " humble and meek," on the contrary, it frankly depicted them in their professional attitudes, with all those ineffaceable character- istics, both of face and figure which the practice of some special trade so certainly imparts. Looked at from this point of view Egyptian art was popular, it might even be called democratic, but that such a phrase would sound curious when used in con- nection with the most absolute monarchy which the world has ever seen. This absolute power, however, does not seem, speaking generally, to have been put in force in a hard or oppressive manner either by the king himself or by his agents. M. Maspero and others who, like him, live in intimate communion with the ancient Egyptians, declare that they were by no means unhappy. They tell us that the confidences whispered to them in the pictured tomb-houses of Sakkarah and Memphis complain of no misery, from the time of Mena to that of Psemethek, except during a few violent reigns and a few moments of national crisis. The country suffered only on those comparatively rare occasions when the sceptre passed into the hands of an incapable master or into those of some insatiable warrior who thought only of satisfying his own ambition, and sacrificed to the day the resources of the future. Egypt, with her river, her teeming soil and her splendid climate, found life easy as long as she enjoyed an easy and capable administration. She then gave to her princes almost without an effort all they could desire or demand. It was one of the fundamental principles of Egyptian morality that those who were powerful should treat the poor and feeble with kindness and consideration. Their sepulchral inscriptions tell us The Constitution of Egyptian Society. 39 that their kings and princes of the blood, their feudal lords and functionaries of every grade, made it a point of honour to observe this rule. They \vere not content with strict justice, they practised a bountiful charity which reminds us of that which is the chief beauty of the Christian's morality. The " Book of the Dead" — that passport for Egyptians into the other world which is found upon every mummy — gives us the most simple, and at the same time the most complete description of this virtue. " I have given bread to the hungry, I have given water to the thirsty, I have clothed the naked ... I have not calumniated the slave in the ears of his master." The lengthy panegyrics of which some epitaphs consist, are, in reality no more than amplifications of this Fig. 30. — From the tomb of Menofre, at Sakkarah. (ChampoUion, pi. 408.) theme. "As for me, I have been the staff of the old man, the nurse of the infant, the help of the distressed, a warm shelter for all who were cold in the Thebaid, the bread and sustenance of the down-trodden, of whom there is no lack in Middle Egypt, and their protector against the barbarians."^ The prince Entef relates that he has " arrested the arm of the violent, used brute force to those who used brute force, showed hauteur to the haughty, and lowered the shoulders of those who raised them up," that he himself on the other hand, " was a man in a thousand, wise, learned, and of a sound and truthful judgment, knowing the fool from the wise man, paying ' Louvre, c. i. Cf. Maspero, un Gouvcrntur de Thihes au temps de la dotizi'eme dynastie. 40 A HisTOKY OF Art in Ancient Egypt. attention to the skilful and turning his back upon the ignorant, . . . the father of the miserable and the mother of the motherless, the terror of the cruel, the protector of the disinherited, the defender of those whose goods were coveted by men stronger than them- selves, the husband of the widow, the asylum of the orphan." ^ Amoni, hereditary prince of the nome of Meh, talks in the same fashion. " I have caused sorrow to no youth under age, I have despoiled no widow, nor have I repelled any labourer, I have imprisoned no shepherd, I have never taken for the labour gangs the serfs of him who had but five, there have been no paupers, nor has any man or woman starved in my time ; for, although there have been years of scarcity, I have caused all the tillable land in Meh to be tilled, from the northern frontier to that of the south, and have made such arrangements and such provision for the people that there has been no famine among them ; I have given to the widow and to the married woman alike, and I have never made any distinction between the great and the small in my gifts. - Doubtless these laudatory self-descriptions may be exaggerated in some respects ; hyperbole has ever been a favourite figure with the composers of epitaphs, and those of Egypt formed no exception to the rule. As M. Maspero remarks in connection with this question, " The man as he is, often differs very greatly from the man as he thinks he is." But we may safely say that the Egyptian realized some portion of the ideal which he set before himself If only to obtain admiration and esteem, he would practice, to a certain extent, the virtues of which he boasted. Many signs combine to tell us that the Egyptians of all classes possessed a large fund of tenderness and good-will. The master was often both clement and charitable ; the peasant, the servant, and the slave, were patient and cheerful, and that in spite of the fatisfue of labours which could never enrich them. In a country so favoured by nature, men had so few wants that they had no experience of all that is implied by that doleful word ' Quoted by ]\Iaspero, Confarncc siir I' Histoire des Ames dans l' Egypie andenrte, dapris les Monumcnis du Musk du Louvre {Association scicntifique de France, Bulletin hcbdomadaire, No. 594; 23 Mars, 1879). " Translated by Maspero {la Grande Liscription de Beni-Hassan, in the Recueil de Travaux rclalifs a la Fhilclogie it h FAu/teologte egyptienne et assyrienne (t. i. PP- 173-174)- The Constitution of Egyptian Society. 41 poverty, with us. The pure skies and brilliant sunshine, the deep draughts of Nile water, and the moments of repose under the shadows of the sycamores, the freshness of the evening bath, the starry night with its reinvigorating breezes, were all enjoyments which the poorest could share. We need feel no surprise therefore at the vivacity with which one of the most learned of the historians of Egypt, Brugsch-Bey, protests against the common misconception of the Egyptians " as a race grave, serious, morose, exclusive, religious, thinking much of the next world, and little of this ; living, in a word, like the Trappists of former days. Are we to believe," he cries, " that this majestic river and the fertile soil through which it flows, this azure sky with its unclouded sun, produced a nation of living mummies, a race of solemn philosophers who looked upon life in this world as a burden to be shuffled off as quickly as possible ? Travel over Egypt ; examine the scenes painted and sculptured upon the walls of sepulchral chambers ; read the inscriptions carved upon stone or traced in ink upon the rolls of papyrus, and you will find yourself compelled to modify the false notions you have imbibed as to the Egyptian philosophers. Nothing could be more cheerful, more amusing or more frank, than the social life of this pleasure- loving people. Far from wishing to die, they prayed to the gods for a long life and a happy old age ; they prayed that, " if possible, they might live to the perfect age of one hundred and ten." They were addicted to all kinds of pleasures. They drank, they sang, they danced, they were fond of excursions into the country, where the sports of hunting and fishing were specially reserved for the upper class. As a natural effect of this desire for enjoyment, gay conversation and pleasantry which was sometimes rather free, jokes and what we should call chaff, were much in vogue : even their tombs were not sacred from their desire for a jest." ^ The worst government, the sternest oppression, could never ex- tinguish this natural gaiety ; it was too intimately connected with the climate and the natural conditions of the country, conditions which had never changed since the days of Menes. Never were the Egyptians more roughly treated than under Mehemet Ali and the late viceroy ; their condition was compared, with justice, to that of the negroes in Carolina and Virginia, who, before the American civil war, laboured under the whips of their drivers, and ' Brugsch-Bf.v, Histoire d'Ei:yf>fe,\i\). 14. 15. VOL. I. c. 42 A History of Art in Ancient Egypt. enjoyed no more of the fruits of their own labour than what was barely sufficient to keep life in their bodies. Torn from their homes and kept by force In the public works, the fellahs died in thousands ; those who remained in the fields had to pay the taxes one or two years in advance ; they were never out of debt, nominally, to the public treasury, and the rattan of the collector extorted from them such savings as they might make during years of plenty, up to the last coin. But still laughter did not cease in Egypt ! Look, for instance, at the children in the streets of Cairo who let out mounts to sight-seeing Europeans. Let the tourist trot or gallop as he will, when he stops he finds his donkey-boy by his side, full of spirits and good humour ; and yet perhaps while Fic. 31. — Water Tournament, from a tomb at Khoum-el-Alimar. (From Prisse.) running behind his " fare " he has been making his midday meal upon a few grains of maize tied up in a corner of his shirt. In 1862 I returned from Asia Minor in company with M. Edmond Guillaume, the architect, and I\L Jules Delbet, the doctor, of our expedition to Ancyra. We took the longest way home, by Syria and Egypt. At Cairo, Mariette, after having shown us the museum at Boulak, wished to introduce us to his own " Serapeum." He took us for a night to his house in the desert, and showed us the galleries of the tomb of Apis by torchlight. We passed the next afternoon in inspecting those excavations in the necropolis of Sakkarah which have led to the recovery of so many wonders of Egyptian art. The works were carried on by the labour of four hundred children and vouths, summoned by the corvc'c for fifteen The Constitution' of Egyptian Society. 43 days at a time from some district, I forget which, of Middle Egypt.. At sunset these young labourers quitted their \vork and seated themselves in groups, according to their native villages, upon the still warm sand. Each drew from a little sack, containing his provision for two or three weeks, a dry cake ; those whose parents were comfortably off had also, perhaps, a leek or a raw onion. But e\'en for such gourmands as those, the repast was not a long one. Supper over, they chattered for a time, and then went to rest ; the bigger and stronger among them took possession of some abandoned caves, the others stretched themselves upon the bare earth ; but, before going to sleep they sang ; they formed Fig. 32. — Mariette's Home. themselves into two choirs who alternated and answered one another, and this they kept up to an advanced hour of the night. I shall never forget the charm of that night in the desert, nor the weird aspect of the moonlight upon the sea of sand. Were it not that no star was reflected upon its surface, and that no ray scintillated as it does even on the calmest sea, we might have thought ourselves in mid ocean. Sleep came to me reluctantly. While I listened to the alternate rise and fall of the chorus outside, I reflected upon how little those children required ; upon the slender wants of their fathers and mothers, who, like them, sink into their nightly sleep with a song upon their lips. I compared this easy happiness with the restless and complicated 44 A History of Art in Ancient Egypt. existence which we should find, at the end of a few days, in the ambitious cities of the West, and I regretted that our year of travel, our twelve months of unrestrained life in the desert or the forest, had come to an end. ^ 5. — The Egyptian Rcligio)i and its Injhicncc upon the Plastic Arts. We have still to notice the profoundly religious character of Egyptian art. " The first thing that excites our surprise, when we examine the reproductions of Egyptian monuments which have been published in our day, is the extraordinary number of scenes of sacrifice and worship which have come down to us. In the collection of plates which we owe to contemporary archaeologists, we can hardly find one which does not contain the figure of some deity, receiving with impassive countenance the prayers or offerings of a prostrate king or priest. One would say that a country with so many sacred pictures and sculjitures, must have been inhabited by gods, and by just enough men for the service of their temples.^ The Egyptians were a devout people. Either by natural tendency or by force of education, they saw God pervading the whole of their universe ; they lived in Him and for Him. Their imaginations were full of His greatness, their words of His praise, and their literature was in great part inspired by gratitude for the benefits which He showered upon them. Most of their manuscripts which have come down to us treat of religious matters, and even in those which are ostensibly concerned only with profane subjects, mythological names and allusions occur on every page, almost at every line." - An examination into the primitive religious beliefs of the Egyptians is full of difficulty. In discovering new papyri, in ' The saying of one of the characters of Petronius might be appHed to Egypt : " This country is so thickly peopled with divinities that it is easier to find a god than a man." The place held by religious observances in the daily life of Egypt is clearly indicated by Hkrodotus (ii. 37): "The Egyptians," he says, "are very religious; they surpass all other nations in the adoration with which they regard their deities." ^ Maspero, Hiitotre anciennc, pp. 26, 27. The Egyptian Religion and the Plastic Arts. 45 determining the signification of signs which have Ijeen puzzHng egyptologists, the inquirer will undoubtedly do good work, and N "mMiji^m^M^mHmmmM Fig. 33. — Amenliotep or Amenophis III. presented by Phre to Amen-Ra ; Thebes. (Champollion, pL 344.) will establish facts which are sure not to lack interest and even importance ; but even when documents abound and when every 46 A History of Art in Ancient Egypt. separate word they contain is understood, even then it is very difficult to penetrate to the root of their meaning. A ghmpse will be caught of it, I admit, by one of those efforts of inductive divination which distinguish modern research ; but even then it will remain to explain the primitive and only half-understood notions of five or six thousand years ago in the philosophical vocabularies of to-day. It is here that the most difficult and irksome part of the task begins. We who represent the old age, or, perhaps, the prime, of humanity, think of these matters and speak of them as abstractions, while the Egyptians, who were children compared to us, thought of them under concrete forms. Their very ideals were material, more or less vague and refined perhaps, but still material. Their only conception of a deity was of a figure larger, more vigorous and more beautiful than mortals ; the powers and attributes with which it was endowed were all physical. If we attempt to express their conceptions in abstract terms, we falsify their meaning. We cannot avoid altering it to a certain e.xtent, for exact equivalents are not to be found, and, in spite of all precautions, we give to the confused and childish ideas of ancient religion, a precision which is entirely modern. If, under these reserves, we study the Egyptian theology in its most learned and refined form — namely, that which it attained during the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties — we shall dimly perceive that it implies a belief in the unity of the First Cause of all life. But this belief is obscured behind the numerous gods who are, in fact, emanations from its substance and manifestations of its indefatigable activity. It is in the person of these gods that the divine essence takes form. Each of them has his own name, his own figure, and his own special share in the management of the universe ; each of them presides over the production of some particular order of phenomena and insures their regularity. These gods are related to each other as fathers, mothers, and sons. They thus form a vast hierarchy of beings, superior to man, and each enjoying a dignity corresponding to his rank in the series. There is, so to speak, most of divinity in those who are nearest to the "one God in heaven or earth who was not begotten." These deities are divided into groups of three, each group constituting a family, like those of earth, consisting of father, mother, and son. Thus from triad to triad, the concealed god develops his sovereign powers to all eternity, or, to use an The Egyptian Religion and the Plastic Arts. 47 expression clear to the religious schools of ancient Egypt, " he creates his own members, which are themselves gods."^ 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 mountinof 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 lor such treatment ; and it has caused those methods of expression to be so accepted by us that we see nothing unnatural in the represent- ation 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 " tlie 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 ' This formula frequently occurs in the texts. To cite but one occasion, we find upon a Theban invocation to Amen, translated by P.PihRRET {Rccueil de Travaux relatifs a la Philologie et a V Archeologie egyptienne el assyrienne, t. i. \). 70), at the third line of the inscription : " Sculptor, thou modelest thine own members; thou begettest them, not having thyself been begotten." 48 A History of Art ix Ancient Egypt. theologians of Thebes and HeHopoHs. 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 re- turned 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 The Egyptian Religion and the Plastic Arts. 49 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 super imposed others upon them which were more complex. His powers of observa- tion, 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 /t'//s/iis;u ^wdi 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 con- tinuing 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 ha\'e 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 VOL. I. H 50 A History of Art i\ Anxient Egypt. 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 pro- secution. 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 \'^edas and in the papyri, breathe the same sentiments and were addressed to the same god.^ 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 person:ility and moral individuality of these gods gradually threw off its astral or physical characteristics, although it never lost all trace of their e.xistence. It resulted that, both in Egypt and in Greece, there were deities who were mere entities, the 1 See the fine hymns quoted and translated by M. Maspero in his Histoire anciaiitc, pji. 30-37. The Egyptian Religion and the Plastic Arts. 51 simple embodiment oi some power, some quality, or some virtue. It requires all the subtle Jiiicssc of modern criticism to seek out and distinguish the obscure roots which attach these divinities to the natu- ralistic beliefs of earlier aees. Sometimes absolute certainty is not to be at- tained, but Ave may safely say that a race is poly- theistic when we find these abstract deities among their gods, such deities as the Ptah, Amen, and Osiris of the Egyptians, and the Apollo and Athene of the Greeks.^ We may, then, define polytheism as the partition of the highest attributes oi life between a limited number of agents. The imagination of man could not give these agents life without at the same time en- dowing 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 lu 34- —Amen or Auimnn, fruin a bronze in ihe Lc.iure. Height 22^04 inches. 1 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. 5^ A History of Art in Anciext Egypt. 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 appli- cation 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. 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 con- ception never penetrated into the minds of the great mass of the people. 1 Moreover, by the very method in which Egyptian myth- ology described it, it was easily adapted to the^ national poly- theism, or even to fetish worship. The theory of emanations Fig. 35 — Pt.ili, from a bronze in the Louvre. Actual size. 1 In his work entitled Des deux Yeux dii Disque solaire, M. Grebaut seems to have very clearly indicated how far we are justified in saying that Egyptian religious s|)eculation at times approached monotheism (Rccueil de Travaux, efc, t. i. p. 120). The EovrxiAN Religion and the Plastic Arts. 53 reconciled everything. The different gods were but the different quahties of the eternal substance, the various manifestations of one creative force. These qualities and energies were revealed by being imported into the world ot 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 eods were to be brought home to mankind, that each of them should have a form and a domicile. I magi- nation therefore did well in com- mencinof 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. Their task was, in one sense, more difficult than that of the Greek artists. When newly born Greek art first began to make re- presentations 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 conse- quently 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 Fig, 36. — Osiris, from a bronze in the Louvre. Height 22"8 inches. 54 A History of Art in Ancient Egypt. 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 dlitc of the nation — the king, the priest, and the military class — were adoring Amen and Ptah, Khons or Khonsu, INIouth, Osiris and Horus, Sekhet, Isis, Nephtisand many other divinities ; all more or less abstract in their nature, and presiding over special phe- non'vina. 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 eods 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 semi- worship of animals.^ Later theology has suc- ceeded in giving more or less subtle and specious explana- tions 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 ' Herodotus, ii. 75-86. Fig. 37. — The goddess Bast. (From a bronze in the Louvre. Actual size.) The EoYrTLAN Religion and the Plastic Arts. 55 brineine it into cultivation, imasfination 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 indepen- dence and national liie ; 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.^ The aspirations towards mono- theism took a form that was either philosophical and Platonic or Christian ; and as tor the cultivated spirits who wished to continue ' We do not mean to say that the higher (luahties of the Egyptian rehgion 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 hooks 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. Gnostic- ism was particuLirly successful in Egypt, which was predestined to accept it by the whole of its past. Certain doctrines of Plotinus are thus best explained. More llian 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 Memjihis, was carried on up to the establisli- ment of Christianity. That of Isis. at Phila;, lasted until the time of Justinian. Diocletian negotiated a treaty with the Blemmyes. those peoi)le 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 Egyjjtians did not exjiire 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 do>vn and re-modelled in the crucible of Greek philosophy. A little colerie 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 j-ears, and formed nearly the whole of their religion. 56 A History of Art in Ancient Egvi'T. 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 orisjin and lanwuao-e. 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. 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 (jrew in their own Qrardens," ^ and a god which was nothing but a " beast wallowing on a purple carpet." '-^ 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. ' Porrum et ciEpe nefas violare et frangere morsu. O Sanctas gentes, qiiibus haec nascuntur in hortis Numina ! — Juvenal, xv. 9-11. - Ci.EMEXs .Alexaxdrinus, quoted by Maspero, Histoirc ancienne, p. 46. The Egyptian Religion and the Plastic Arts. 57 It would be interesting to know why these beHefs 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 deeph', and maintained more obstinately, tliose impressions which characterize the infancy of men as well as of mankiaid. Add to this, that other races in their eftorts 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 V^alley, on the other hand, were alone in the world for many centuries ; they had to depend entirely upon their own internal forces for the accomplish- ment 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.^ This stage must never be forgotten, if we wish to understand the jaart which art played in the figuring of the. Egyptian gods. 1 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 tlie 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 : Di/ Culte des Dieiix fetiches ; on, Parall'ele de fAncienue Jieligioii de F Egypte avccla Religion actuelle de Nigritie (i3mo). 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 apjjeared in 1878 in the Zeit- schrift/iir Ethnologic, which is published in Berlin under the direction of M. Virchow. It is called Dcr ^gyptische Fetischdiinst und Gotlerglaube — Prolegomena c?/r ALgy ptischen 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 fctichisme 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 I'Histoire des Religions, by Tiele, which M. Maurice Yernes has just translated from the Dutch (i vol i2mo, 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 worshij) of the dead, the deifica- tion of the king.s, 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). VOL. \. I 58 A History of Art in Ancient Egypt. 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 Fig. 38.- -Painted bas-relief. Boiilak. (Drawn by Bourgoin.) Egypt itself afforded. In the case of each divinity, the par- ticular 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. We do not refuse to accept this explanation, but yet we may express our surprise that the Egyptians, who were able, even In The Egyptian Religion and the Plastic Arts. 59 the days of the ancient empire, to endow the statues of their kings with so much purity and nobihty of form, were not disgusted by the strangeness of such combinations, by their extreme grotesque- ness, and by the disagreeable results which they sometimes produced. A certain beauty may be found in such creations as Fig. 39. — Sekhet. Louvre. (Granite. Height o '50 metres.) the Sphin.x, 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 6o A History of Art in Ancient Egypt. or woman with the ug-ly with the slender neck and Fig. 40. — Isis-Hathor. Louvre. (Bronze. Actual size.) the chisel. That they tented themselves with awkward that, perhaps, and ponderous head of a crocodile, or flat head of a snake ? 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 o-eneral coherence of their character- o ization, 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. 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 did not do so, we know. They con- plastic interpretations so rough and we should rather seek their explanation 3 J3 a. en The Egyptian Religiox and the Plastic Arts. in some hereditary predisposition, some habit of thought and action contracted in the infancy of the race and fortified by long transmission. 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 re- ligious conceptions. Its practices never fell into total neglect, and its influence was so far maintained that during the decadence of the nation it a^ain became the ruling faith, so that foreign observers were led to believe that the Egyptian religion began and ended in the adora- tion of plants and sacred animals. The eyes and the imagination being thus educated by immemorial custom, it is not surprising that even the most culti- vated section of the people should have seen nothing offensive in the representa- tion 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. 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.^ So it is with the ibis. It supplies the character by which the name Thoth is written, and that god is figured with the 1 PiERRET, Dictionnnire (T ArcJieoIogie Egyptienne Fig. 42 — Touaris. Boulak. ( Drawn by G. Benedite. ) 64 A History of Art in Ancient Egypt. head of an Ibis. The part played by these birds in the repre- sentation of the gods, both in the plastic arts and in writing, is to be explained by the sentiments of gratitude and religious venera- tion of which they were the objects, sentiments which were the natural outcome of the practical services which they rendered to mankind. 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 pesti- ^1 / lence, 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 in- dispensable work of elimination and transforma- tion, an office which they yet fill satisfactorily (from Wilkinson). in the towus and villages of Africa. Thanks to their appetite and to the powerful wings which carried them in a twinkling to wherever their presence was re- quired, 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. ^ 1 See in LOismti the chapter-headed L Epuration. 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 Egj-ptian fellah why he allows himself to be besieged The Egyptian Religion and the Plastic Arts. 65 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 In;. 44. — HoiiH ; from .1 bronze in the Posno collection. (Height 3S inches men of Heliopolis or Thebes. The doctrine of emanation and of successive incarnations of the deity, permitted their theology to and deafened by birds, why he patiently suffers the insoknce 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 fiuit, 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." VOL. I. K 66 A History of Art in Ancient Egypt. 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 repre- sent 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 anthro- pomorphism, these figures are sur- prising ; 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. It is difficidt for us to see things with the same eyes as the con- temporaries 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 de- manded 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 tf.e deity, the strength and support of his life, his Fi< 45. — 'I'hoth. Louvre. I'ln.imelltd clav. Actual .size. The Egyptian Religion and the Plastic Arts. 67 dotibli\ to use an expression dear to the Egyptians. At .Memphis, Apis repeated and constantly renewed the Hfe of Ptah ; he was, in a word, his living statue.^ 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 concep- _.^^^;.jYiT,. ;,--.. ^ tion of divinitv is less favourable ^/i"*t^:"ri?i:Cjtrji^.-~. ,V^^•X to the plastic arts than the anthro- ^^^M0^'^^^^^^^^^'^'^^\ pomorphism of the Greeks. No /a^p||v^ more simple method of dis- ! '^^\^'f'^^^"~T-^^Tf^^^-^ tinguishing one god from another [U fAv^;|]?'^r^ii:a^-\?=^t/"^^ could well be imagined than that V'' '^■-^\\^Mfi\%'Xv^J^'^\,\\-'X of giving to each, as his ex- clusive property, the head ot some well-known animal; the • {■(Tyi''.y|J2;|f(5J >->- employment of such an unmis- ? p||^J^ii lii^^^^xf^^^t^'^^i takable sign rendered the task i ^'^Wj^^^^^ of the artist too easy, in giving [|\^;^"^'''^''|i^)^'fc^ him assurance that his meaninof /^'-^L_^y^'^\ ' F^l:a2^:.:=:r4.' would be understood at a glance ■^-r;*';^— -^- — -^^ - .ii_jv., without any particular effort on Fig. 46.— Sacrifice to Apis, from Marictte. his part. 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. ' Maspero, Notes siir diffcients Points de Gramma ire et d' Histoirc dans /<■ Reciidl de Travaux rdatifs a la Philologie et a F Archcologie egyptiennc et assyrienne. vol. i. y. 157. 68 A History of Art in Ancient Egypt. 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 speak- ing 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. ^ 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 1 Herodotus, ii. 42. The Egyptian Religion and the Plastic Arts. 69 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 I sis of Philae became popular and was prolonged in that island sanctuary until the sixth century of our era. The movement of religious thought in Egypt was very different from what we shall find in Greece. We find no frod, 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;^ we find no Zeus, no Jupiter, whose godhead was conceived from ccntur)- 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 croverned all thinofs accordincr to law." We ha\-e 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 laith 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 bv slow defrrees, should be realized in visible form. 1 James Darmesteter, Ze Dieu supreme dans la Myihohgie iiido-europ'ccnne (in the Revue de V Histoire des Religions, i88o). yo A History of Art in Anxtent Egytt. § 6. T/ia/ 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 ^ : — " 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 exaggera- tion) — 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." This strange assertion was long accepted without question even in modern times. We need not go back to the archaeologists of the last century, whose credulity is to be accounted for by their lack of materials for the formation of a better judgment. In 1S28 in his first lecture at the Bibliotheque Royale, Raoul-Rochette turned his attention to Egypt. He had before his eyes, in the Parisian museums and in the Description, de I Egypte, 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 - Ty)V avTTiv hi T€^'r)v aTrnpyaa-fj-iva, etc. Laws, 656. D. E. [Wc have quoted from Professor Jowett's English version, p. 226, vol. v. — Ed.] Change Observable in Egyptian Art. 71 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 t^gypt never varied." ^ 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'-^ 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." ^ 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 monu- ments, should remain for more than forty centuries unaffected by the law of continual, even if almost insensible, change ? ' Coi/rs tfAri/uvwgie, 8\o. 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.) - See the Rente des Deux Mondes of April i, 1865. ^ Voyage dans la Haute Egypte, \ol. i. 72 A History of Art in Ancient Egypt. 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 decomcs, 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 vioour 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 nobilitj', 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 alter- nations of grandeur and poverty, of periods of conquest and expansion and epochs of civil war or of defeat by foreign in- vaders ? 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 absoluteh' Change Observable in Egyptian Art. /J wanting until tlie eleventli, the first of tlie Middle Empire. This is one of those sudden interruptions in the history ot EtTypt which may be compared to the temporary disappearance of those curious rivers which run pardy underground."^ Fig. 47. — Statue from the Ancient Empire, in limestone. Boulak. Drawn by Bomgoin. When historians, hving 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 ' M. Melchoir de Vogue, C/iez ks Phanwm {Rnue des D