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DAWN OF ART 
 IN THE ANCIENT WORLD 
 
Dawn of Art 
 
 IN THE 
 
 ANCIENT WORLD 
 
 an attibaeological ©feetcl) 
 
 BY 
 
 WILLIAM MARTIN CONWAY 
 
 SOMETIME ROSCOK PROFESSOR OF ART IN UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, LIVERPOOL, 
 VICTORIA UNIVERSITY 
 
 f/T^ OF TH€ 
 
 '( XJNIVEBSITi: 
 
 Hontioti 
 
 PERCIVAL AND CO. 
 1891 
 
r.33 
 
 
 
 6~/oi43L 
 
PREFACE 
 
 The kernel of the following book is the substance 
 of three lectures, delivered at the Royal Institution 
 in January 1891. These have been entirely rewritten 
 and approximately doubled in length ; but, even in 
 their revised state, they are not to be regarded as 
 forming a handbook, however brief, of the large sub- 
 ject with which they deal. They are, and are intended 
 to be, of a personal character. They present, not a 
 simple and precise survey of known facts with regard 
 to the beginnings of art and civilisation in the ancient 
 world, but rather an account of the deductions, im- 
 pressions, hardy generalisations, and even sometimes 
 (if you will) of the guesses of an individual mind in 
 the presence of those facts. 
 
 Discovery advances apace. Since these sheets 
 have been printed off, important papers have been 
 read at the Oriental Congress, to which reference 
 might have been made in the text. Moreover, Mr. 
 Flinders Petrie's valuable Notes on the Antiquities of 
 
vi Preface. 
 
 Mykenae have appeared in the belated twelfth volume 
 of the Journal of Hellenic Studies. They are in sub- 
 stantial agreement with my own conclusions, but 
 they contain a more accurate approximation to the 
 dates of the different ^Egean remains than has before 
 been arrived at. The following passage (p. 204) is too 
 important not to be quoted : — ' We have been led to 
 place the flourishing period of pre-Hellenic (iEgean) 
 art to about 1500 or 1400 B.C., when intercourse with 
 Egypt was common. The great treasury tombs pro- 
 bably range from this time to 1200, when the Vaphio 
 tomb was built. At about 11 50 the graves were 
 made in the circle at Mykenae, and decadence had 
 already set in. From iioo to Zoo B.C., or until the 
 art was crushed by the Dorian migration, the pre- 
 valent decorations were impressed glass ; and to this 
 age belong the beehive tomb of Menidi and the 
 private tombs of Mykenae, Spata, and Nauplia. The 
 range of this civilisation was from the north of Europe 
 down to Egypt, not only by distant trade, but by 
 familiar intercourse.' 
 
 I regret that I did not read Mr. Frazer's valuable 
 work, The Golden Bough, till these sheets had been 
 
Preface, vii 
 
 printed off ; otherwise I should have referred to the 
 interesting speculations as to the origin and doctrine 
 of Totemism which he there records or suggests. 
 The book, however, is one which no student of the 
 beginnings of art and civilisation can afford to 
 neglect. 
 
 I have reprinted, as the last chapter of this book, 
 an article on the 'Cats of Ancient Egypt,' which 
 originally appeared in the English Illustrated Maga- 
 zine. It amplifies in some respects one or more of 
 the subjects referred to or discussed in the earlier 
 chapters. 
 
 The address on the Succession of Ideals^ printed as 
 introductory chapter to this volume, was originally 
 intended to perform such a function ; but it was to 
 have been followed by a series of chapters dealing in 
 turn with the ideals of all the great art-epochs of the 
 world. Other points of view have, however, in the 
 meantime proved more attractive, and that scheme 
 has been abandoned. The address, as it now stands, 
 is not in perfect harmony with the chapters that 
 follow, but I have preferred to print it as it was 
 written rather than to meddle with the expression of 
 
viii Preface. 
 
 an idea which belongs more to my memory than to 
 my present thoughts. 
 
 In conclusion, I have to thank my friend, Mr. R. 
 Weir Schultz, whose good work on the ancient and 
 Byzantine architecture of Greece is so well known, 
 for employing some of his leisure time in drawing for 
 me all except one of the illustrations to this book. 
 
 W. M. C. 
 
 SCHEVENINGEN, 
 
 September, 1891. 
 
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Typical Ancient Egyptian Shrine, 
 
 91 
 
 Prehistoric Egyptian Shrines, 
 
 94 
 
 Edfu Temple, .... 
 
 96 
 
 Homeric House, 
 
 . 96 
 
 Early Types of Egyptian Columns, 
 
 • 105 
 
 Elephantine Temple, 
 
 . 107 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The Succession of Ideals, . . . . i 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 Art in the Stone Age, . . .18 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 The Invention of Bronze, .... 57 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 The Legacy of Egypt, ..... 82 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 The Legacy OF Chaldea, . . . .117 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 The Heirs of Chaldea, . . . .153 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 The Cats of Ancient Egypt, . . . .172 
 
' No being soever born, or put together, can overcome the dissolution 
 inherent in it ; no such condition can exist. Decay is inherent in all 
 component things; work out your salvation with diligence.' — Gautama. 
 
 ' Jedes erste Gefiihl ist ein Morgenstern, der ohne unterzugehen bald 
 seinen Zauberschimmer verliert und durch das Blau des Tags verhiillt 
 weiter zieht. -Jean Paul. 
 
 * These things can have no being unless they have their being from 
 Thee ; these things which rise and set, and, at their rising, begin as it 
 were to be and grow that they may reach their perfection, and when 
 perfected wax old and perish. And all things grow not old ; but all 
 perish. In truth when they are arising and beginning to be, the more 
 they speed to grow into being, the more they speed towards ceasing to 
 bp. This is the law of them. Thus much hast Thou appointed them, 
 because they are portions of things, which exist not all at once, but by 
 their departures and successions they together complete that universe 
 whereof they are portions. ... If the sense of thy flesh had capacity 
 to comprehend the whole, and had not itself . . . been limited to a 
 part of the whole, thou wouldest desire that whatsoever existeth in the 
 present should pass away, that so the whole might please thee more.'— 
 S. Augustine. 
 
CHAPTER I. 
 
 THE SUCCESSION OF IDEALS.^ 
 
 A SUGGESTIVE kind of picture used to hang 
 in many a mediaeval church. It was painted 
 on both sides of a board. In front were a pair of 
 lovers walking hand in hand through fields gay with 
 Spring. Flowers blossomed about their feet. Birds 
 sang in the budding trees above their heads. Clear 
 were the skies ; fragrant the breezes that lifted the 
 maiden's hair and cooled the brow of her ardent 
 lover. On the reverse was the grim figure of Death, 
 hour-glass and scythe in hand. The thing, pendent 
 from a single cord, hung free in a draughty place, and 
 the air twisted it about hither and thither, so that 
 one side and the other were seen in swift interchange. 
 The history of mankind, as philosophers paint 
 it, may be likened unto this picture. Some flatter us 
 with the belief that it is a tale of progress ; in the 
 mouth of others it is a story of failure. 
 
 1 Delivered in St. George's Hall, Liverpool, as an Address at the 
 opening of the University College Session, 2d Oct. 1886. 
 
 A 
 
2 The Succession of Ideals, 
 
 From the scientific standpoint we behold a record 
 of victory. Knowledge increasing ; man growing 
 in power of self-indulgence ; Nature yielding up her 
 secrets and with them some of her material wealth. 
 We know more of the past than our forefathers did ; 
 perhaps we can predict a little more about the future. 
 We have greater powers of organisation ; more of 
 what is mistaken for possessions or mislabelled 
 knowledge. 
 
 But, with a change of mood, the mental picture 
 turns, and then how different its aspect ! Generation 
 succeeding generation, people following people, race, 
 supplanting race. Each in turn struggling forward 
 after some phantom of hope that it paints for itself. 
 Each failing to attain the millennium of its fancy. 
 Each destroying its forefathers and its companions 
 in the vain struggle. Each vanishing into the past 
 and leaving, it would seem, little but the memory of 
 itself behind. 
 
 All the joy and stimulus of life lies in the sense 
 of growth, of advance, of attaining towards something. 
 Memory is but a feeble glimmer in the lamp of delight. 
 Hope alone kindles true joy — hope culminating in 
 sudden fruition. Then memory comes in to soften 
 the subsequent sorrow, for the passing away and 
 fading of things is the raw material out of which 
 sorrow is made. The first bright day of Spring raises 
 
The Succession of Ideals. 3 
 
 contrary emotions to those produced by the last of 
 Autumn. Budding green on a background of brown 
 is a cheerier sight than the whole spectrum abroad 
 on a fading forest. 
 
 * It is the first mild day of March : 
 
 Each minute sweeter than before, 
 The redbreast sings from the tall larch 
 That stands beside our door. 
 
 There is a blessing in the air 
 
 Which seems a sense of joy to yield 
 
 To the bare trees, and mountains bare, 
 And grass in the green field. 
 
 One moment now may give us more 
 
 Than fifty years of reason : 
 Our minds shall drink at every pore 
 
 The spirit of the season.' 
 
 What a different emotion breathes in these lines from 
 that exhaled by 
 
 ' Those fallen leaves that kept their green, 
 The noble letters of the dead.' 
 
 Hence it comes that we call the powers good which 
 
 effect growth, and those evil which effect decay. As 
 
 Mephisto says : 
 
 * So ist denn alles, was ihr Sunde, 
 Zerstorung, kurz das Bose nennt, 
 Mein eigentliches Element.' 
 
 We are forced to adopt this attitude towards the two 
 great formative powers, the powers of growth and 
 decay, because our thoughts are imprisoned in the 
 
 UNIVEBSITY ) 
 
4 The Succession of Ideals, 
 
 dungeons of time, and we estimate everything by its 
 appearance or effect at some particular moment. 
 
 But in looking back upon the past we may adopt 
 another attitude. We may regard its whole domain 
 as one great area, in which Time, like another space- 
 dimension, merely fixes the position of co-existent 
 things. This is the view which the poet attributes to 
 his friend in the other life, where 
 
 ' No shade can last 
 In that deep dawn behind the tomb, 
 But clear from marge to marge shall bloom 
 
 The eternal landscape of the past ; 
 A lifelong tract of time revealed.' 
 
 From this exalted standpoint Good and Evil assume 
 a new aspect. In Time, they seem to produce 
 growth and decay ; they have the appearance of 
 forces contending one against another. But, in the 
 Eternity of which the poet speaks, their opposition 
 does not exist. Good and Evil become merely the 
 expression of the fact that everything has beginning 
 and end ; that everything is bounded in Time also as 
 well as in Space and not cumbered with a useless 
 infinity. Each nation has its beginning and end, its 
 rise and fall, else would the whole area of the past be 
 full of it, instead of richly peopled in all variety. 
 Each school of thought has beginning and end, else 
 were the wealth of the past nothing and all its pro- 
 ducts samesome. A field in spring-time is fairer for 
 
The Succession of Ideals, 5 
 
 its many flowers than it would be if carpeted by one 
 gigantic corolla ; and just so the variety and multi- 
 plicity of the products of the past are its glory, and 
 that variety and multiplicity arise because all things 
 have both beginning and end, because everything 
 includes within itself the seeds of decay as well as of 
 growth ; for the world would be cursed by Good if 
 it were not blessed with Evil. 
 
 The student of history whose avenue of access to 
 the past is bordered by those existing objects which 
 bygone men moulded into artistic form, cannot fail, 
 sooner or later, to adopt this point of view. The past, 
 apart from its effect upon the present, has a real 
 existence for him, and its power to interest and 
 instruct lies in its endless variety. Works of art are 
 the material expression of their makers' delight 
 Therefore if the ideal and joy of all generations had 
 been the same, art would have been uniform and 
 production might long ago have ceased. But from 
 the beginning up till now men have changed their 
 ideal from age to age by modifying it from moment 
 to moment. The faith of one nation has differed 
 from the faith of another. Enthusiastic preaching 
 founds what infidelity at length destroys. The fetich 
 of the individual was succeeded by the little divinities 
 of the family, the place, or the clan, and they by the 
 nation's god of battle and victory (Ammon, or Asshur, 
 
6 The Succession of Ideals. 
 
 or another), only in their turn to fade away before 
 the great God of all the nations, the World-God of 
 Truth and Justice, till in the fulness of time the 
 Universe-God of Mercy and Love should be re- 
 vealed. 
 
 Equally various have been the things men hoped 
 for. Here at one time they have loved the aspect of 
 repose and power in monumental and everlasting 
 calm ; there at another they have delighted in con- 
 tinuous combat with man or beast. Now they have 
 sold themselves for money, and left a barren record to 
 be their scorn ; or again they have sacrificed their 
 comforts, and even their lives, to raise some structure 
 of heavenly beauty, their glory and their crown for 
 ever in the wide kingdom of the deathless past. Now 
 the home of their fancy and the abiding-place of their 
 faith has been a realm peopled with heroes, majestic 
 in perfection of beauty, faultless in action and serene 
 in thought ; now it has been some mystic place, inde- 
 scribable save by symbolic means, where Majesty un- 
 approachable. Holiness unutterable. Power illimitable 
 have overshadowed and overwhelmed all else by excess 
 of splendour. And yet again with ceaseless fertility 
 Fancy has conjured up other radiant phantoms for 
 her delight. She has pictured to herself, and called 
 upon her servants to endow with enduring form, a 
 heaven of everlasting rapture and mirth amidst 
 
The Succession of Ideals. 7 
 
 ' gardens wherein rivers flow ' ; or the beautiful bower 
 of the gentlest and fairest of queens nursing for ever 
 her faultless babe, with angels of light to be his 
 playfellows and the saints of God to rejoice in him 
 through all the twilight hours of an eternity of 
 summer. Permanence in repose, triumph in victory, 
 perfection of form, grandeur of ideal character, super- 
 human majesty, boundless pity and love, and finally 
 all-round humanity, pure and simple for its own sake 
 — these, and a thousand more, have been the ideals 
 which men have worshipped and loved and fought 
 and died for, painted and sculptured and sung, each 
 in its turn, since man became the creature that 
 we know. 
 
 Moreover, no two nations, whether contempo- 
 rary or not, are circumstanced ahke. Economic con- 
 ditions change. Different countries have different 
 climates, and all the factors of civilisation vary from 
 time to time as well as from place to place. Thus 
 just as no ideal returns to be the goal towards which 
 a second civilisation tends, neither are the conditions 
 ever twice the sartie which determine the manner of 
 an ideal's enshrinement. 
 
 The prehistoric cave-dweller could but scratch 
 images of the beasts of the chase upon the bones 
 which himself had gnawed clean. The early Chal- 
 dean was forced to build with mud and to invent 
 
8 The Succession of Ideals, 
 
 and perfect the art of the potter ; sherds were his 
 vehicle and a few colours his only allies. In the 
 valley of the Nile in the days of the Pharaohs, nature 
 and circumstance combined to force the Egyptians to 
 sculpture in granite and build for the ages ; and the 
 granite re-acted upon the sculptor, chastening his 
 style and solemnising his ideal. The same Provi- 
 dence that formed the Greek gave him stores of 
 purest marble close at hand, and the marble mastered 
 the master that mastered it. The freer and more 
 fanciful temper of the Gothic sculptors of France 
 found fitting and happy scope for exercise in giving 
 less perfect but more varied form than the Greeks 
 attempted to sandstone, which alone nature provided 
 for them in rich profusion. So it has been and must 
 be and will be till man has played out his part, and 
 the universe requires a change even from him. 
 
 Neither again are social and political conditions 
 ever twice the same, and the spiritual and intellectual 
 ideals of a day are always functions of the actual 
 conditions of life. Christianity in imperial Byzantium 
 was different from Christianity in feudal France, and 
 different again from Christianity in commercial Eng- 
 land. Each change in political and social structure 
 that the world passes through is accompanied by and 
 expressed in a revolution or reformation of religious 
 forms, that reformation being sometimes brought about 
 
The Succession of Ideals. 9 
 
 by a gradual alteration in the attitude of indivi- 
 duals, but more often (owing to the mutual depend- 
 ence of religious and political authorities and to the 
 complication of vested interests) involving also political 
 revolution — visible boundary of a world-epoch. 
 
 And just as political structure never again returns 
 the same and is identical in no two countries, neither, 
 even if the same ideal could return, would it find the 
 same expression under new conditions. The hier- 
 archy of heaven to the subjects of the Eastern Empire 
 was a reflection of the powers of the imperial court. 
 Feudal Europe pictured it as organised, even it also, 
 on feudal principles. 
 
 Thus the spiritual and intellectual products of the 
 human mind are different at different times and in 
 different places. It is with humanity as it is with the 
 individual. No one is the same at any two moments. 
 What a man strives and hopes and even lies and sins 
 for at one time may be unattractive, may be hateful 
 to him, at another. No conception returns unmodified 
 to the mind. If an artist could wholly forget some 
 work of his creation he yet could never design the 
 same again. A painter cannot even copy his own 
 pictures without alteration. If an author's manuscript 
 is burnt before publication he cannot reproduce it. 
 Do what he will his work repeated results in some- 
 thing new. The ideals of youth, of middle life, and 
 
lo The Succession of Ideals, 
 
 of age, how they differ one from another ! differ as 
 widely as the ideals of different men. So is it with 
 the individual, so too with the nation, so with the 
 race and the sum of the races. There is nothing that 
 is not new under or above the sun. 
 
 But bygone ideals are often powerful still. That 
 which mankind as a whole, or which nations as a 
 whole, have at any time striven after, in so far as they 
 have attained it, enters into the sum of human posses- 
 sion and may become the property of the individual ; 
 nay, if it has once produced a moulding effect upon 
 the race, heredity stamps the sign of it on the babe 
 unborn. 
 
 Any study if pursued to the end leads on to all 
 other studies. Any fact may be chosen as the centre 
 of all knowledge ; because the universe of possible 
 knowledge is infinite, whilst the area of what is known 
 is bounded on all sides. 
 
 * Sphaera cujus centrum ubique, circumferentia nullibi.' 
 
 But the boundaries of the known are constantly 
 enlarged, first in one direction, then in another, by the 
 passionate striving of men outwards. The goal-point 
 of one generation's endeavour becomes a detail of the 
 possessions of the next. I do not so much refer to 
 the mere brute facts that men win from the unknown ; 
 those are the raw material out of which an ideal, by 
 
The Succession of Ideals. ii 
 
 its formative power, moulds true knowledge — that is 
 to say, in its broadest sense, self-knowledge. A fact 
 must be won from the unknown by the man of 
 science, brought into connection with other facts by 
 the philosopher, finally made strong for good by the 
 idealist — poet, artist, prophet — call him what you 
 please. 
 
 The Ancient Hebrews harmonised the world to 
 their minds by an ideal different from ours. Honestly 
 working in the light of that, they accomplished wonders 
 before their power ceased and their ideal departed. 
 Yet that same ideal still exists and produces its effect 
 upon individuals, forming part of the common stock 
 of our intellectual possessions. So again the Hellenic 
 ideal, fine and potent as it was, failed into the past 
 when it had done its work ; yet it still exists and 
 still produces an effect, but upon the individual in- 
 stead of the race. 
 
 The centre of effort changes, but that which has 
 been a centre ceases not to exist because the forces 
 of humanity bear past it instead of upon it. A fact 
 does not become more true by being known, nor an 
 ideal more fine because men strive towards it. The 
 ideal of a day puts on a more attractive splendour at 
 the time of its culmination, and makes other ideals 
 pale in comparison, but when it shrinks back into the 
 ranks of its fellows of the past its true magnitude 
 
12 The Succession of Ideals. 
 
 becomes for the first time estimable. That * Liberty, 
 Equality, and Fraternity ' ideal for instance, what a 
 coruscating portent it was when it swept over the 
 wondering world ! It is now gathering up its shrunken 
 tail, and in another century or two men will be able 
 to take the just measure of it, compared for instance 
 with its flaming predecessor of the Reformation days. 
 Whatever part of any ideal is true and good 
 remains for ever a possession of mankind, though it 
 will often be found on examination, and perhaps it 
 may always be the case, that whatever is fundamen- 
 tally new in it is not true, and whatever fundamentally 
 true not new. The great value of all ideals lies not 
 in their novelty, but in their harmonising power. It 
 is the possession of a common ideal, unknown though 
 it be to themselves, that makes the varied labours 
 of all the men of one civilisation and day mutually 
 helpful, without any definite intention on their part 
 that it shall be so. The common aim towards truth, 
 which as far as one can judge is the ideal of our 
 civilisation, harmonises the work of men of every 
 science, and with it that of philosophers, historians, 
 and even artists. The labours of geologists, physicists, 
 astronomers, and biologists combine to throw light 
 on the question of the antiquity of man. The 
 engineer investigating the phenomena of non-tidal 
 estuaries prepares a weapon which the historian of 
 
 ^ 
 
The Succession of Ideals. 1 3 
 
 Ancient Egypt uses. Results arrvied at by the 
 embryologist place powerful arguments at the dis- 
 posal of the student of the development of historic 
 and prehistoric schools of art. The common aim 
 towards truth admits of infinite combination with 
 minor ideals of endless variety, but it rules all the 
 work that has any element of reality about it at the 
 present day. Truth indeed is no new discovery : it 
 is wondrous old. Individuals have followed its light, 
 but no civilisation was ever based upon the search 
 after it before, nor by the nature of things well could 
 have been. It was only when science, having ela- 
 borated her methods, was enabled to take the lead, 
 that her virtue could become the leading one ; just 
 as the local god Ammon of Thebes became the great 
 god of Egypt when Thebes raised herself to be the 
 capital of the country. 
 
 Thus a new ideal is not necessarily, and is perhaps 
 never, a new discovery. It is merely that out of the 
 infinity of possible virtues one takes the lead, that 
 amongst the infinity of possible aims one is chiefly 
 sought unto. The value of any ideal depends, at 
 any rate, not upon its novelty but upon the results 
 it produces. That ideal may assuredly be reckoned 
 the most precious which has given the world the 
 noblest lives and enshrined itself in the noblest forms. 
 And that ideal is assuredly the most base which has 
 
14 The Succession of Ideals. 
 
 produced a race of self-seeking men and left behind 
 it no lasting memorials of excellent thought to delight 
 and chasten posterity. Between the ideal of self- 
 sacrifice and the ideal of money-making there is 
 indeed a great gulf fixed. 
 
 Every ideal worthy of the name manages to get 
 itself enshrined in some form that would endure if 
 only men cared to preserve their heritage from the 
 past. What a multitude of glorious possessions we 
 might have, not if our forefathers had devoted more 
 of their energies to making fine things, but if they 
 and we had devoted less to destroying those already 
 made. The mind fails in attempting to grasp some 
 measure of the loss that the world has suffered, not so 
 much from neglect, which is partly excusable, but from 
 wilful and insane destruction. The temple called the 
 Labyrinth, one of the mightiest buildings ever raised, 
 might be standing now in almost perfection of repair, 
 if men had not knocked it over to build miserable 
 dwellings for their transient selves ; and so with half 
 the other temples of Ancient Egypt. The polished 
 granite casing of many colours was stripped from the 
 Great Pyramid only a few centuries ago. The smile 
 of the Sphinx was shot away by the playful bullets 
 of the cultured French. The palaces of Assyria were 
 burnt down. The glorious Parthenon existed long 
 enough in tolerable repair to find itself sent to heaven 
 
The Sticcession of Ideals. 15 
 
 by gunpowder. Some ten thousand marble statues 
 were burnt into lime in the plains of Olympia alone. 
 Almost every one of the battalions of bronze statues ' 
 which Ancient Greece produced has been melted 
 down into cannon or other mean articles ; and, of 
 course, cupidity swiftly disposed of those made of 
 gold and ivory. All the temples and public build- 
 ings of Ancient Rome, with a few minor exceptions, 
 are gone. The indescribable glories of Byzantium 
 can hardly be guessed at. Only a disguised Hagia 
 Sophia remains, a mere trifle from the most wondrous 
 city in ancient Christendom. The monuments of the 
 Middle Ages have fared little better. Some buildings 
 we possess, but how damaged ! Shorn of their colour 
 on wall and window, robbed of their statuary and 
 their furniture. Some paintings, too, but mostly 
 ruined by ignorant and irreverent restoration. The 
 tables of a room would hold all the wonderful rem- 
 nants of work in the precious metals which have 
 come down to us from mediaeval hands. And so 
 one could go on for hours, and the half would not 
 be told. 
 
 All these things have been destroyed, and the 
 world has not been enriched with better, or so good, 
 to take their place. Nor can aught take their place, 
 be it ever so fine, for they were the shrines of bygone 
 ideals, makeable when they were made, and then 
 
1 6 The Succession of Ideals. 
 
 only. He that destroys a thing that another once 
 laboured to make murders a dead man. An honest 
 carpenter may continue the influence of his honesty 
 long after his death, if the work he has done be 
 respected by those privileged to use it. If they wil- 
 fully destroy it, the good man's influence is at an end. 
 The major part of the usefulness and power of many 
 lies in the endurance of their work, and that endur- 
 ance chiefly depends upon the piety of the genera- 
 tions that come after. The work of the dishonest 
 clears itself speedily enough away, thank God ! 
 
 What shall we say, then, of the lost plays of 
 iEschylus and Sophocles, of the Zeus of Pheidias, of 
 Leonardo's equestrian statue of Sforza, and all the 
 infinity of glorious works and deeds which have 
 vanished by the destruction or neglect of men } Are 
 they everlastingly consumed, and is their glory a 
 mere shivering of the air } Who shall make answer 
 as to these things, or speak for any one but himself } 
 
 And yet if some transcendent being from another 
 world were to come and say ' The past is not anni- 
 hilated but only past,' I could not find it in my heart 
 to deny the vision. Let us for a moment adopt that 
 point of view. The poet's * eternal landscape ' then 
 lies somewhere, only we cannot behold it, our dim 
 sense of memory reaching thither alone, whilst sight 
 and feeling are constrained into the present moment. 
 
 J 
 
The Succession of Ideals, 17 
 
 which like a wave across an infinite ocean bears us all 
 along together. Noble deeds that none ever recorded 
 or even saw, they are still there, and (who knows ?) 
 we might one day behold and rejoice in them. 
 Noble lives, dimly remembered, they are all there 
 complete, and all the noble works of men with them, 
 in that eternal garden of the larger universe. There 
 each bygone ideal still exists, with its expressions 
 about it and the heroes that it made. Good indeed 
 that they ' had their day and ceased to be,' else might 
 not others have arisen and added to the glory of the 
 sum of things. 
 
 So we may destroy what we please, and leave 
 behind us whatever wilderness seems to us good to be 
 our record in the face of Eternity. The noble works 
 of noble men once made we may demolish, and so 
 make the desert about us more complete ; their noble 
 deeds once done we may forget ; but works and 
 deeds are beyond our power to annihilate, they have a 
 larger and higher existence there where the hand of 
 man reaches no more back to wither and destroy. 
 Dreaming of such an existence, and of such only, is it 
 possible to say to any man, or race, or civilisation, or 
 ideal, ' Esto perpetua I ' 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 ART IN THE STONE AGE. 
 
 "XT O two categories of intellectual activity seem, at 
 -*- ^ a first glance, more fundamentally sundered 
 than the scientific and the artistic ; and, indeed, it 
 cannot be denied that Art has never been, and can 
 never be in any way, helped by the discoveries, or 
 even the methods, of Science. Increase of know- 
 ledge, by altering that area of the unknown which is 
 in some sense the domain of the Ideal, may, from 
 time to time, modify the range of subject with which 
 Art is concerned ; but at all times the factor making 
 a thing a work of Art resides, not in the subject 
 therein treated or represented, but in the manner or 
 style of the treatment. With this manner or style 
 (which alone is Art) Science can have nothing 
 to do. 
 
 Yet, in another way. Art and Science have, in 
 these latter days, come to be very closely connected. 
 Science, though of proved unhelpfulness to the Artist, 
 
Art and Science, 19 
 
 has manifested herself as supremely valuable to the 
 student of works of Art. KArtists of all countries and 
 periods are conditioned by the circumstances in which 
 their lives are passed, and by the ideas prevalent 
 among the societies and individuals for whom they 
 work. Thus Art - History becomes a function of 
 Social History, and cannot wisely be disregarded 
 by the student of the history of the human race. 
 I Ancient works of art bring us into immediate contact 
 with bygone peoples, and are often the only avenue 
 whereby we can approach far-distant civilisations, 
 lying silent on the verge of time. J Thus the study of 
 Art-History becomes a branch of Scientific inquiry.! 
 It has to be pursued by Scientific methods. Its re- 
 sults are of Scientific importance. It is a chapter, and 
 perhaps the most pregnant chapter, of the science 
 of Anthropology, which seems destined in the near 
 future to no insignificant growth. 
 
 In the following pages stress will be laid as far as 
 possible upon the scientific aspect of the subject under 
 consideration. The reader will be called upon to 
 consider the historical meaning rather than the aesthe- 
 tic charms of the objects referred to. Within the 
 brief limits of space at our disposal it will not be pos- 
 sible to do more than take a rapid survey of the 
 large historical area that has to be traversed ; nor can 
 we consider the many alternative or opposing theories 
 
20 Art in the Stone Age. 
 
 as to individual points which will inevitably tempt 
 us to interesting digressions in all directions. My 
 desire is rather to suggest than to inform. The 
 various areas of prehistoric and early historic archaeo- 
 logy are constantly being expounded by competent 
 specialists. The function which I have chosen for 
 myself is to point out the connections which exist, 
 or may be considered to exist, between one and 
 another of these usually separated areas ; but not 
 to describe or investigate any of them in particular. 
 
 The entire activity of the human race, from the 
 time when man first appeared upon the earth down 
 to the present day, is one and indivisible. Few 
 things have had to be twice invented or twice dis- 
 covered. The ornaments that appear to-day upon 
 our carpets and our wall-papers, or carved in stone 
 upon our buildings, or molten in metal, or woven in 
 fabrics, have a pedigree almost as long as the pedi- 
 gree of man himself Indeed the history of ornament 
 is the main and farthest-reaching member of the his- 
 tory of Art. Rosettes and zigzags, meanders and 
 spirals, foliations, knots, and interlacings, architectural 
 mouldings, and every other form and design ever 
 employed by the most exuberant artistic fancy — they 
 all have a long and intricate history. Each of them 
 was invented once, and once only. Each has been 
 handed on from man to man, from generation to 
 
 i 
 
The Pedigree of Ornament. 2 1 
 
 generation, from race to race. Each has been slowly 
 modified, introduced into fresh combinations, turned 
 to new decorative uses. We, in these modern days, 
 inherit them all, and, alas ! know not, often enough, 
 what use to make of them. 
 
 To trace back to its original home each individual 
 factor of ornament would be to solve the riddle of 
 archaeology, and that we are still far from accom- 
 plishing. We are only just beginning to learn how 
 large a mass of relics of the past the earth has pre- 
 served for us in her ample bosom. The spade is but 
 now commencing its work as a weapon of historical 
 inquiry, and we remain wholly in the dark as to 
 many important and indeed essential matters. 
 
 The existing distribution of the most ancient and 
 unaltered human races upon the surface of the earth 
 is by some held to prove that man appeared and 
 took possession of all the great continents in Tertiary 
 times. But the earliest discovered traces of human 
 activity, old though they be, are fetched from no such 
 abysmal antiquity. When the archaeological survey 
 of the world, now little more than begun, becomes 
 wider extended and more accurately executed, we shall 
 doubtless discover numerous indications of prehistoric 
 human activity in places which have as yet yielded 
 us no message from the distant past. It is only in 
 the West of Europe that careful investigations have 
 
2 2 Art in the Stone Ape. 
 
 ^ 
 
 been made, and even there the study is but begun. 
 There is no reason for regarding the prehistoric 
 inhabitants of France and England as anything 
 more than representatives of the peoples, their 
 contemporaries, in the rest of the world. They are 
 the most ancient people known to us, but equally 
 developed races may have preceded them elsewhere. 
 Whence they came and whither they went, what was 
 their kindred and who are their descendants, these 
 and the like questions remain undecided, and need 
 not even be considered in this place. 
 
 French archaeologists divide the remains of palaeo- 
 lithic man, which have been discovered in their 
 country, into four groups. The earliest group is re- 
 presented by the finds made at Chelles and Saint- 
 Acheul. The series of objects discovered at Moustier 
 (in the Vezere valley) are characteristic of the second 
 group. The third is represented by objects found in 
 greatest profusion at Solutre (Saone-et-Loire), and 
 Laugerie-Haute (by the Vezere), and the fourth by 
 the finds in the cave called La Madeleine in the 
 Vezere valley.^ The first of these groups stands 
 alone, and belongs to an earlier geological period than 
 the rest. The remainder doubtless overlapped one 
 
 •^ An excellent resuvie of the prehistoric archaeology of France is 
 M. Emile Cartailhac's La France prehistorique (Bibliotheque scienti- 
 fique Internationale), Paris, 1889. 
 
The Che lies Period, 23 
 
 another in point of time ; but, broadly speaking, 
 they too mark successive stages of human develop- 
 ment. 
 
 The men of Chelles and Saint-Acheul are not 
 known to us by their skeletons, but only by the 
 remains of their industry. Rough implements, 
 fashioned by them out of flint, quartz, and other 
 chosen stones, have been discovered in the alluvial 
 deposits of the rivers by whose banks they lived. We 
 learn that they were a race of hunters, dwelling 
 amidst a magnificent fauna, partly arctic, partly 
 tropical in character. The mammoth, rhinoceros, 
 cave-bear, urus, and various other animals now 
 extinct, surrounded them, coming some from Asia, 
 some from Africa, between which and Europe the 
 Mediterranean did not then completely extend. The 
 climate was warm and wet. It was a day of big 
 rivers, big glaciers, and big volcanoes. The valleys 
 and lowlands were filled with a rich vegetation, on 
 which all manner of herbivorous beasts suppOxted 
 themselves in countless numbers. The men of that 
 remote, interglacial age, besides making stone wea- 
 pons, doubtless fashioned implements in wood or bone, 
 and may have occupied their long leisure after a 
 successful hunt by decorating their persons or the 
 things that they used. No specimens of their art 
 (if they had any), but only their stone tools, have 
 
24 Art in the Stone Age, 
 
 come down to us. Traces of peoples in a like stage 
 of civilisation have been found in England, Spain 
 and Portugal, the north and south of Africa, the 
 United States, and India ; but no existing savage 
 tribe can be pointed to as living in the same stage of 
 development. The Chelles period was of immense 
 duration, at least as long as all the other three 
 archaeological periods put together ; and the civilisa- 
 tion that characterised it was widely diffused over the 
 world ; but for the historian of Art this earliest known 
 human stratum is not of interest. 
 n\ The termination of the Chelles epoch was marked 
 by a great climatic change, the commencement of a 
 cold, dry period. The plains of Europe became such 
 as now are the steppes of Asia, and man lived a life 
 like that of the modern Eskimos. A new fauna 
 resulted from the new conditions. The mammoth 
 became rare and presently disappeared ; with him, or 
 before him, went many another beast. Their places 
 were taken by animals suited to the new conditions. 
 Chief amongst these were the wild horse and the 
 reindeer. In the Moustier Cave, by the Vezere, and 
 elsewhere, remains of the human industry of the new 
 period have been discovered. Amongst them are 
 stone implements of the Chelles type, side by side 
 with others of more modern form. At Solutre, 
 Laugerie- Haute, and other places, we are brought 
 
 1 
 
The Reindeer Age. 2 5 
 
 into contact with a more advanced industry. Stone 
 implements take a marked development. One of 
 the same form is no longer employed for tools and 
 weapons. Different forms of tool began to be made for 
 different purposes, and made with remarkable skill. 
 Examples of bone implements, too, are found in no 
 small number. Italy, Belgium, and England contri- 
 bute examples of this stage of human development, 
 which, however, may have been a local rather than a 
 universal phenomenon. Neither the Moustier group, 
 however, nor the Solutre group, contains any objects 
 which can be brought within the area with which the 
 historian of Art is called upon to deal, so that we 
 need not linger over them. 
 
 C The last palaeolithic period, sometimes called the 
 Reindeer Age, affords the earliest material of study 
 for the lover of art. The remains of human industry 
 found in the cave of La Madeleine, in the Vezere 
 valley (Dordogne), are characteristic of this epoch, 
 which is, therefore, sometimes called after that sitel 
 Laugerie-Basse and Cro-Magnon (Dordogne), Massat 
 and Mas d'Azil ( Ariege), Bruniquel (Tarn-et-Garonne), 
 Montgaudier (Charente), Lortel (Hautes-Pyrenees), 
 Sordes (Landes), Chauffont (Vienne), and Veyrier 
 (Savoy), besides Lmany other places in England, 
 Belgium, Switzerland, and Germany, as well as 
 France, have yielded similar objects in considerable 
 
 UNIVERSITl 
 
2 6 Art in the Stone Age. 
 
 number. Amongst them are still better flint imple- 
 ments than those buried in lower deposits, and conse- 
 quently a more elaborate industrial product. Shells 
 from the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, delicately- 
 perforated for stringing or attachment to garments, 
 and the teeth of lions and bears formed into necklaces, 
 prove that the people of La Madeleine were fond of 
 personal adornment.*] They may have tattooed or 
 painted their bodies with the same red colour where- 
 with they sometimes covered the skeletons of their 
 dead. ^They fashioned with visibly increasing dex- 
 terity all manner of barbed bone harpoons for the 
 capture of fish. They made needles of bone, and 
 therefore must have clothed themselves in garments of 
 fur or skin. The existence of shells fetched from dis- 
 tant localities and of implements formed out of im- 
 ported stones, proves that even then a rudimentary 
 commerce had come into existence, the result, perhaps, 
 not so much of barter as of tribal war and the wander- 
 ing of peoples, j The occupations of the men of this 
 important group were hunting and fishing.] They 
 had no domestic animals, made no pottery, and did 
 not cultivate the ground. Those of them whose 
 remains have been discovered lived near the mouth of 
 caves or shelters, to which they may have added 
 wooden outer walls or curtains of skin. Others may 
 have dwelt in skin tents. The reindeer was the chief 
 
The Beginnings of Art, 27 
 
 object of their chase, and prodigious quantities of the 
 bones of that animal have been discovered. They 
 likewise hunted the wild horse, the urus, and what- 
 ever other beasts the fortunes of the day delivered 
 into their hands. 
 
 (We are now interested in this human group, not 
 as huntsmen, but because they, first of men, so far as 
 we yet know, brought down from heaven to earth the 
 divine flame of Art. The choice spirits amongst them 
 occupied the long leisure that a hunter's life may 
 afford, in engraving, with wondrous fidelity and an 
 astounding artistic insight, likenesses of the animals 
 wherewith the chase made them so intimately 
 acquainted. We possess examples of their work 
 wrought upon bone, horn, ivory, or stone, but it can 
 scarcely be doubted that they employed also more 
 perishable substances (such as wood), which have 
 been destroyed in process of time. They not only 
 engraved, but they occasionally sculptured in the 
 round ; and sometimes they even endeavoured to 
 represent the human figure, either alone or in com- 
 pany with animals. One of the most interesting of 
 the engraved bones found in La Madeleine Cave is a 
 famous representation of a mammoth. The reindeer, 
 of course, appears very frequently, and so does the 
 horse. We also possess lifelike images of the seal, 
 the cave-bear, the ibex, and many more. Birds are 
 
2 8 Art in the Stone Age. 
 
 not uncommon, and two or three kinds of fish have 
 been readily recognised.J 
 
 \^The spirit and vivid animation with which these 
 engravings are often carried out are as surprising 
 and delightful as the extraordinary delicacy of the 
 workmanship. The British Museum possesses a tiny 
 likeness of a reindeer's head, scratched upon the frail 
 bone of a bird, which no reproduction can render, 
 and which can only be properly appreciated when 
 the bone is held in the hand and examined through a 
 magnifying glass. In this, and indeed in the majority 
 of examples, we meet with no faltering attempt at 
 rude decoration, but with an art already developed 
 — one with formed conventions, and a possibly long 
 period of groping and study behind it. No traces, 
 however, of any preliminary stages of development 
 have come down to us. ^ It is not merely the excel- 
 lence of the result attained in many instances that 
 astonishes us, it is the visible ease of the attainment, 
 the freedom and certainty of the artist's hand, the 
 trained quickness of his vision, and the wisdom of his 
 choice what to omit and what to emphasise. A 
 natural artistic gift, trained by close observation of 
 nature, such as feebly armed hunters must practise, 
 can alone account for this kind of excellence. /The 
 remarkable comprehension of animal forms pos- 
 sessed by some of these palaeolithic artists is even 
 
 I 
 
Decorative Treatment. 29 
 
 more conspicuously manifested in the case of two 
 horn daggers, one found at Laugerie-Basse, and the 
 other at Bruniquel and now in the British Museum. 
 In both instances the handle is fashioned in the 
 similitude of a reindeer, and the beast is most skilfully- 
 adapted both to the form of the antler out of which 
 it had to be carved and to the purpose which, as a 
 dagger-handle, it had to serve. Portions of a statuette 
 of a urus and the head of a horse (both from Mas 
 d'Azil) are other notable examples of the perfection 
 which these artists sometimes attained in sculpture.^ 
 
 That accurate student, M. Piette,^ informs us, as 
 the result of careful investigation, that this school of 
 art was generated not by the decorative, but by the 
 imitative or creative instinct. Sculpture in the round 
 was more practised in the earlier stages, engraving 
 on flat surfaces in the later. The likenesses of ani- 
 mals came first, then animals and foliation decoratively 
 treated. Linear designs, such as zigzags, chevrons, 
 and the like, and purely geometrical ornaments, came 
 later still. fXast of all, at the very close of the 
 Reindeer Age, we find traces of the simplest linear 
 decoration, no longer engraved, but painted in red 
 colour. Thus decoration arose out of imitation, not 
 imitation out of decoration.^ 
 
 (Though the beasts of the chase formed the main 
 
 ^ See Piette's V Art pendant tAge du Renne. 
 
30 Art in the Stone Age, 
 
 subject of the palaeolithic artist, he did not wholly 
 neglect the human figure. Laugerie-Basse has yielded 
 an ivory statuette of a woman (unfortunately lacking 
 the head), an outline of a woman enceinte^ and one of 
 a man about to strike a dart into an unsuspecting 
 urus. All these figures are nude.'N They do not 
 compare for excellence with the contemporary repre- 
 sentations of animals. The contrast between the 
 hunter and the urus is particularly marked. Man, 
 then, was not yet so interested in himself as in 
 animals. The fact is important. It is true of most 
 undeveloped races, and particularly of hunting 
 races. 
 
 One of the important factors contributory to 
 the religions of historical antiquity was Totemism. 
 Totems are usually, but not always, animals. They 
 have been defined by Mr. Fraser as ' a class of 
 material objects, which a savage regards with super- 
 stitious respect, believing that there exists between 
 him and every member of the class an intimate and 
 altogether special relation.' As a rule all the mem- 
 bers of a tribe or tribal subdivision regard all of one 
 kind of animal as their totems. Ancient Egyptian 
 totems (which by the Historic Period had already 
 developed into, or become identified with, gods) were 
 such as the bull, the cat, the hawk, the jackal, the 
 lizard, and so forth. Sometimes totems are kept as 
 
Toteinism. 3 1 
 
 pets. Savages generally refuse to kill or eat their 
 totem. Occasionally they tattoo their skins with its 
 likeness. They mourn over dead totems as over 
 brothers. They regard themselves as of the kindred 
 of the totem, and often, where Totemism and the 
 cultus of the dead are both accepted, the totem 
 animals are believed to be the abodes of the souls of 
 dead tribesmen. If a tame totem is kept, it is treated 
 with honour and apparently worshipped. Sometimes 
 an image or idol of the totem is preserved with 
 respect, and we shall find that totem-hutches, or the 
 shrines for the images of totems, may have been one 
 of the earliest forms of temple. 
 
 It is far from improbable that the animals depicted 
 by the cave-artists were the totems of the cave- 
 dwellers. If so, palaeolithic man possessed germs of 
 religious emotion such as underlay the ancient religious 
 systems of the Egyptians, the Chaldeans, and even 
 the Hebrews and Greeks. Thus, on the far horizon 
 of time, we behold Art and Religion coming forth 
 hand in hand. If not generated by the same 
 emotions, at any rate the emotions by which they are 
 generated arise in a common atmosphere. No large 
 demand, therefore, is made upon our imagination 
 when we are invited to cross the boundaries of certain 
 knowledge and to behold, or at least to fancy that we 
 behold, in these simple but pathetic monuments of 
 
32 Art in the Stone Age. 
 
 the first known artists of the world, the visible monu- 
 ments of the first religious emotion. 
 
 It must be borne in mind that the remarkable 
 artistic gift, which we have thus briefly discussed, 
 belonged only to the single race of palaeolithic men 
 which inhabited the district of Western Europe 
 bounded on the north by a line drawn through Derby- 
 shire and Belgium, and on the south by the district of 
 the Pyrenees and the Alps. The origins, the affilia- 
 tions, and the fate of this race are unknown to us. 
 Fortunately Laugerie-Basse, Cro-Magnon, and other 
 sites have preserved representative skeletons of this 
 important people, from which we are enabled not 
 only to form a sound opinion as to their physical 
 type, but to divine the character of their funeral rites.^ 
 
 ^ At the Paris Exhibition of 1889 there was shown a model repre- 
 senting the rock-shelter of Laugerie-Basse, at the level of M. Elie 
 Massenat's diggings, restored as far as possible to its ancient state, and 
 peopled with three life-size images of its ancient inhabitants. The 
 proportions of the bodies were taken from actual skeletons discovered 
 on the spot, and the flesh parts were modelled from living people having 
 the same proportions, notably Berbers. A comparison has sometimes 
 been suggested between the artistic product of the Cave-men and that 
 of the Bosjesmans ; with the latter I am wholly unacquainted. The 
 resemblance between the modern Eskimos and the Cave-men is in some 
 respects striking. Both lived by reindeer hunting. There is, however, 
 a marked contrast between them in artistic gift, rendered very evident 
 by Professor Boyd Dawkins' comparison of the two arrow-straighteners. 
 The childish hieroglyphics on the modern example do not even jDelong 
 to the same category of human effort as the graceful foliated decoration 
 of the ancient implement. The hieroglyphics may of course be a kind 
 of petrified tradition handed down from a truly artistic period through 
 generations of degenerate descendants. 
 
PalcBolithic Burials. 33 
 
 Occasional discoveries of portions of human 
 skeletons, apparently belonging to very early palaeo- 
 lithic times, have been made in various localities, but 
 they have usually been so vaguely recorded, and their 
 circumstances have been so inaccurately observed, as 
 to render them useless for scientific purposes.- In a 
 few cases we have been more fortunate. The Baous- 
 ses Rousses caves, overlooking the Mediterranean, 
 near Mentone, have yielded seven skeletons, all of 
 one race. They were most carefully excavated, and 
 important information has been derived from them. 
 The objects buried with the bones make it appear 
 that the men to whom they belonged lived in a stage 
 of civilisation similar to that associated with the 
 Moustier remains. Five skeletons were discovered 
 in the rock-shelter of Cro-Magnon, where they were 
 deposited by people of the Laugerie-Basse period, 
 on the top of thick strata of debris accumulated 
 through long years by people in the Solutre type of 
 civilisation. A skeleton was also found at Laugerie- 
 Basse, and other contemporary burials have been 
 recorded at Bruniquel, Gourdan, Sordes, Raymonden 
 (Dordogne), and other sites. 
 
 In every one of these cases of palaeolithic burial 
 it appears that the bones were not placed in their 
 final resting-places until the flesh had been got rid of. 
 Sometimes the flesh seems to have been scraped ofl", 
 
 C 
 
34 Art in the Stone Age, 
 
 sometimes gnawed off by animals. Now and then 
 a few of the bones were lost in the process. The 
 unfleshed skeleton, with the bones still for the most 
 part kept together by their proper ligaments, was 
 taken and apparently clothed and adorned as it had 
 been in life. It was then laid on the floor of the 
 abode which the survivors still inhabited, and which 
 had probably been the shelter of the deceased. The 
 posture chosen was often that of sleep, the body 
 lying on its side with the arms crossed, and the 
 knees gathered up to the chin. The whole was 
 covered over with a quantity of red powder, and a 
 thin layer of ashes, or the other usual debris of 
 the place, was spread over all. The survivors con- 
 tinued to live their accustomed life with the bones 
 of the dead in their midst. We shall presently see 
 that the habit of unfleshing the skeleton before final 
 burial was continued in neolithic times. A corre- 
 sponding neolithic use of red colour for the decoration 
 of the bones has been observed in Italy by Signor 
 L. Pigorini. 
 
 Why did the palaeolithic folk of Baousses Rous- 
 sds, Cro-Magnon, and Laugerie-Basse bury treasures, 
 which must have been very precious to them, with the 
 bones of their dead ? And why did they keep those 
 bones within the precincts of the abodes in which the 
 deceased Jiad dwelt? The answer can scarcely be 
 
Belief in Ghosts, 35 
 
 doubtful. Because they believed in a ghostly world 
 and some kind of continued ghostly existence. It is 
 argued that when man began to think about death he 
 compared it with states of suspended consciousness, 
 like sleep or fainting. He accounted for these states 
 as produced by the temporary separation from the 
 body of its impalpable double or ghost. In his dreams 
 he was conscious of this ghost of his, and all its won- 
 drous adventures and experiences, the while his body 
 remained heavy and motionless in one place ; but, 
 when he awoke, body and ghost appeared to unite, 
 and the life of the body was in the union. He 
 imagined it would be thus with death also. Hence 
 arose the doctrine of the ghost or double, which we 
 find so highly developed in ancient Egypt, and 
 which serves to explain many of the burial customs 
 of ancient and even prehistoric folk. Death was 
 the separation of the ghost or double from the body. 
 The ghost, impalpable and generally invisible, but in 
 all other respects like the body, and destined some 
 day to be re-united with it, was conceived of as 
 dwelling meanwhile in ghost-land, and there con- 
 tinuing to lead the self-same kind of life that the 
 man had lived upon earth. A short step led to 
 the further generalisation that every material thing, 
 animate or inanimate, possessed a double. The 
 ghost of a man fed on the ghost of food, hunted 
 
36 Art in the Stone Age, 
 
 ghostly animals, and fought ghostly foes with the 
 ghosts of weapons, was clothed with the ghost of 
 clothing, dwelt in the ghost of a house, enjoyed the 
 ghosts of luxuries, married the ghost of a wife, and 
 was served by the ghosts of slaves. From China to 
 the Bay of Biscay we find traces of this belief in 
 ghosts. Hence it came to pass that the bones of a 
 dead man were laid in the very cave or dwelling in 
 which he had lived, or in a barrow or tomb built or 
 hewn into the semblance of it. Hence, too, the 
 implements, weapons, and ornaments he had used 
 in life (or similitudes of them), were buried with 
 him, and sometimes not buried only but broken or 
 destroyed, in order that by such fantastic death 
 their ghosts might be set free for the ghostly user. 
 It is thus, moreover, that we are enabled to explain 
 the presence of food and drink, or of the painted or 
 sculptured likenesses of foods and drinks which many 
 of the most ancient sepulchres contain. If at any 
 time captives, slaves, or wives were sacrificed at the 
 funerals of the powerful, it was but a natural outcome 
 of this theory. The ancient Egyptians, who were 
 always dominated by a fatuous kind of logic, avoided 
 so cruel a practice by burying with the dead painted 
 or sculptured images of the servants a great man 
 required ; and the ghosts of these images, like the 
 ghosts of depicted food, were made serviceable to 
 
Neolithic Civilisation. 37 
 
 the ghost of their owner through an occasional repe- 
 tition, said by a living person on his behalf, of the 
 Stiten-ta-hotpit formula. The mediaeval, and indeed 
 modern, custom of observing saints -days and praying 
 for the dead descends by unbroken sequence from 
 the custom of bringing offerings of food and drink 
 to tombs, and of there reciting the formulae on cer- 
 tain fixed days in the year. Ancestor-worship is a 
 misleading term for this observance ; it was magic 
 ghost-feeding. 
 
 -^n many parts of the world the palaeolithic stage 
 of civilisation was succeeded by one more advanced, 
 characterised by the use of polished in lieu of 
 chipped stone axes. This new stage of development 
 is called the neolithic.^ Somewhere, no doubt, neo- 
 lithic civilisation developed directly out of palaeolithic, 
 but where that development took place we do not 
 yet know. In Europe there appears to be an almost 
 complete gap between the two. Wherever both pa- 
 laeolithic and neolithic remains have been discovered 
 together, they are found to be separated by a bed of 
 natural accumulations deposited during a considerable 
 period, which has left no discoverable traces of the 
 presence of man. Moreover, in the West of Europe 
 neolithic civilisation is found to mark the advent of 
 a new race, of which no examples have been found 
 amongst palaeolithic remains. The palaeolithic Cro- 
 
38 Art in the Stone Age, 
 
 Magnon race did not, however, disappear with the 
 old order of things. Skeletons of the Cro-Magnon 
 type continue to be found, buried in the neolithic 
 manner. But it seems clear that the new civilisation 
 came in with a new and dominant race. This im- 
 portant social change took place concurrently with, 
 or perhaps resulted from, an important alteration in 
 climate and terrestrial form. England now became 
 separated from Europe, and Europe from Africa. 
 The cold, dry period passed away, and the climate 
 we now experience began to prevail. At first there 
 was a greater precipitation of rain and a damper 
 soil consequent upon it than we now have, but 
 in the main Europe may be said at this time to 
 have definitely entered into the conditions that have 
 since endured with little change. Of course the 
 conditions no longer suited the reindeer, the cave- 
 bear, the urus, and animals of that kind. They 
 retreated north-eastwards with the cold, and it has 
 been suggested that the bulk of the hunting races, 
 who were accustomed to live upon them, followed 
 their retreat. The neolithic peoples would thus find 
 Western Europe largely depopulated, as well as 
 excellently^ suited to be the home of the more 
 advanced civilisation they brought with them. 
 
 We have seen that the palaeolithics were hunts- 
 men and little more. The neolithics were farmers 
 
Neolithic Animals, 39 
 
 and masters of many crafts. A The manner of their 
 life was therefore utterly different from that of the 
 palseolithics, and they are represented by very differ- 
 ent remains. These we must pass in brief review 
 before we can approach the question of art. With 
 the neolithics appeared the bulk of the domestic 
 animals, none of which were known in palaeolithic 
 times. Palaeolithic hunters did indeed pursue one 
 type of horse, and the people of Solutre slaughtered 
 such multitudes of it that the bones of some 40,000 
 horses have been discovered amongst their rubbish 
 heaps. But this sort of horse became rare towards 
 the close of the palaeolithic period. It entirely dis- 
 appeared at the commencement of the neolithic 
 epoch, and for a time there was no horse in western 
 Europe. Presently the domestic animal, of the small 
 Shetland pony type, came in, we know not whence, 
 and has maintained itself in our midst ever since, 
 ^he neolithics had the dog for a companion from the 
 earliest time ; in fact he appears to have been their 
 first domestic animal. They afterwards added pigs, 
 goats, sheep, and oxen. They cultivated flax and 
 various kinds of grain. They knew how to spin, 
 weave, grind corn, and make pottery. They were 
 good carpenters, as the wood-built lake-dwellings 
 prove. They mined for flints, and manufactured im- 
 plements in great numbers on the spot, clearly for 
 
40 Art in the Stone Age. 
 
 purposes of trade and exportation. They invented 
 a rudimentary division of labour. They built stone 
 monuments and excavated caverns. They used boats 
 of the dug-out sort, as much as forty feet in length, 
 and with these they went sea-fishing and navigating. 
 [T^olished stone implements found on many islands 
 show that the sea was traversed by people in a 
 neolithic stage of evolution, a conclusion which the 
 study of existing savage races supports. At the time 
 of widest extension of neolithic civilisation it had 
 established itself in the valley of the Nile and other 
 parts of North and South Africa, in the valley of the 
 Tigris and Euphrates, in India, Oceania, North and 
 South America, as well as over all the habitable 
 parts of Europe. Between the close of the exclu- 
 sively palaeolithic period in Western Europe, and the 
 first introduction of bronze there must have inter- 
 vened a very long period, perhaps to be measured 
 in thousands of years. We are able to subdivide this 
 great area of time to a certain extent, but we have 
 as yet attained no approximation whatever to the 
 dates of these divisions. 
 
 The earliest neolithic remains in Europe are those 
 found in the so-called kitchen-middens or rubbish 
 heaps formed around the dwellings of the coastwise 
 eaters of shell-fish. Denmark is the classical ground 
 of the middens. There they have been found in 
 
L ake-Dwellmgs, 4 1 
 
 greatest extension, and excavated with most com- 
 pleteness. Neolithic Portuguese middens, formed by- 
 people of the Cro-Magnon race, have likewise been 
 the subject of accurate investigation. Middens have 
 also been found in Ireland, Sardinia, and France, as 
 well as in Asia, Japan, and North and South America. 
 The midden period in Europe is chronologically an 
 early one. The implements found are of a backward 
 character, and the domestic animals represented are 
 few. The midden folk made little pottery, and that 
 of the feeblest kind. They practised the same burial 
 customs as the later palaeolithic people. 
 
 We now pass from the neolithic dwellers on the 
 sea-coast to the lake-dwellers. Lake-dwellings were 
 apparently communistic villages ; they were built on 
 platforms (supported on multitudes of piles) just above 
 the surface of a lake. Such villages continued to be 
 inhabited down to historic times. There were many 
 of them in Ireland, but it is in Switzerland that 
 the most important early examples have been found. 
 ^The earliest known were in the lakes of East Switzer- 
 land ; remains of these yield only small axes made of 
 rocks from the neighbourhood, and hardly to be called 
 polished. Their pottery is of the poorest, and unorna- 
 mented. Their implements of bone and the like are 
 feebly fashioned. The later dwellings yield fine and 
 well-polished axes, sometimes with a hole for a handle^ 
 
42 Art in the Stone Age, 
 
 and in many cases formed out of jadite and other 
 hard imported stones. The hand-made pottery found 
 with these is of more elaborate form and better work- 
 manship ; there are handles for the attachment of a 
 suspending cord, and the surface is decorated with 
 simple patterns of lines, triangles, and so forth. In the 
 latest lake-dwellings bronze and even iron has taken 
 the place of the more important stone implements.^ 
 
 The bulk of the neolithic peoples, of course, lived 
 neither on lakes nor by the sea-shore, but spread 
 abroad over the more fertile parts of the land. Their 
 chief employment was not hunting, but pasturing 
 cattle and tilling the ground. The majority of the 
 population therefore dwelt in the open country rather 
 than in the midst of forests, which stone axes, how- 
 ever good, could not avail to clear. It was these 
 pastoral and agricultural country folk who raised the 
 great stone monuments to which we must presently 
 refer. Moreover, in the earliest neolithic stage they 
 formed enclosures, surrounded by earthen mounds and 
 ditches, as at Peu-Richard, near Thenac (Charente- 
 Inf ), and other sites in the Vosges. These enclosures 
 look like fortified camps, but it seems probable that 
 they served no military purpose. They may have 
 had some religious use. 
 
 The ordinary neolithic house was a circular hole 
 in the ground, roofed over conically with wood or 
 
Neolithic Dwellings, 43 
 
 thatch, and covered with a mound of earth. Some- 
 times a number of these circular chambers were con- 
 nected together by passages, and thus perhaps formed 
 into a communistic settlement. Innumerable traces 
 of such pit-dwellings have been found in dry upland 
 places in England. They are probably to be con- 
 sidered as a development of the tent rather than of 
 the cave. A fire was made in the midst of the floor, 
 and the smoke escaped through the entrance passage 
 or some hole in the roof Such simple abodes or 
 circular huts of the same form, built on instead of 
 sunk into the ground, were the habitations of the 
 common folk,- in England at any rate, down to the 
 time of Romans, and possibly even later. 
 
 The palaeolithic huntsman, in the intervals of the 
 chase, or when the fish would not bite, was a man of 
 leisure. He had no crops to look after, no cattle to 
 tend, nothing to do. The unsavoury rubbish-heaps 
 that surrounded his dwelling were full of fine antlers 
 and well-scraped bones. What more natural than 
 that, being by nature a person of artistic impulse, he 
 should have picked up one of his pointed flint im- 
 plements and fallen to engraving with it for the mere 
 pleasurable filling of the time, just as the Swiss 
 peasantry to-day take to wood-carving when the 
 winter's snow deprives them of their out-door oc- 
 cupations ? But [neolithic man was a farmer and a 
 
44 ^^^ i^ i^^ Stone Age. 
 
 shepherd, a weaver, a potter, and all manner of things 
 besides. At all times of the day or night there was 
 something for him to do. He had no more time nor 
 inclination for art than has a modern English 
 mechanic. With the exception of a rude kind of 
 architecture and possible arts of singing and personal 
 adornment, the neolithic man practised no arts. In 
 France and all other countries to which our present 
 knowledge extends there is no trace of a continu- 
 ance of the art-traditions of the palaeolithic French 
 race. No doubt these traditions were somewhere con- 
 tinued, but the continuity can as yet be in no wise 
 traced. At all events they were neither appropriated 
 by the incoming neolithics, nor were they carried on 
 by those surviving remnants of the Cro-Magnon race 
 whose skeletons have been found in parts of France 
 and the Iberian peninsula, where they were buried 
 in characteristically neolithic fashion. The neolithic 
 potters did indeed make use of simple linear, zig- 
 zag, triangular, and other incisions to decorate the 
 rough black or brown surfaces of their hand-made 
 and usually round-bottomed pottery ; but the very 
 simplicity and rudeness of this decoration appear 
 to indicate a fresh start and the absence of artistic 
 traditions. 
 
 Some megalithic edifices and artificial grottos 
 in France retain a few simple mural decorations 
 
Neolithic Decoration, 45 
 
 which tell the same tale. There is obviously no long 
 artistic tradition behind them. In certain of the se- 
 pulchral grottos of the Marne, and several dolmens 
 in Normandy and Provence, there is carved on the 
 wall to the left of the entrance, or in the ante-chamber, 
 likewise on the left, a relief intended to represent 
 a female figure. No art could possibly be more 
 primitive. The figure is little more than a diagram, 
 and it is only by comparing one with another that 
 we discover the intended signification. Doubtless 
 some kind of earth or war goddess or divinity of the 
 lower world was symbolised by these rude images.^ 
 She is often accompanied by the representation, in 
 painted relief, of a polished stone axe, mounted in 
 a wooden handle, and such axes are likewise carved 
 in other parts of the sepulchral chambers. The 
 likenesses of polished stone axes of various known 
 types have been found engraved on the walls of 
 many other neolithic funerary monuments. They 
 are now and again accompanied by a cartouche or 
 shield-shaped outline containing mysterious figures 
 which may have had some hieroglyphic significance.^ 
 
 ^ Mr Doughty found in Central Arabia certain inscribed steles, 
 surmounted by a rough semblance of a human face, that immediately 
 recall the rock-cut steles in the Marne grottos. 
 
 2 The circles apparently represent the female bosom ; the horseshoe 
 forms may be abbreviated representations of the impress of a thumb. 
 A pair of circles would signify a woman or goddess, a pair of thumbs 
 
46 Art in the Stone Age. 
 
 Several pairs of footprints, carved in relief, like 
 those ascribed to Buddha or Mohammed, have also 
 been discovered. Finally, the walls of some mega- 
 lithic monuments retain a remarkable rippled decora- 
 tion, just like a series of magnified impressions of the 
 lines on the skin of the human thumb, such as the 
 surface of hand-made pottery would naturally bear. 
 
 rThe neolithics, backward as they were in all the 
 decorative and imitative arts, nevertheless contributed 
 an important element to artistic evolution. They 
 appear to have been the first builders, and the royal 
 art of architecture takes its origin from themj All 
 their monuments which have come down to our days 
 are probably of a funerary nature, and to these we 
 must now turn. The midden folk, as we have seen, 
 appear to have retained the burial customs of the 
 later palaeolithics. They deposited the unfleshed 
 skeletons of their friends in an attitude of repose just 
 below the surface of the ground in the immediate 
 proximity of their abodes. Elsewhere the skeletons, 
 cleaned of flesh, were collected together in a cave. 
 In the Duruthy Cave (Landes) no less than thirty-three 
 skeletons, all of the Cro-Magnon type, were gathered 
 together. Where natural caves were not to be had, 
 artificial ones were constructed. These were either 
 excavated out of rock, if there was in the neighbour- 
 hood any soft enough to yield to neolithic tools ; 
 
Sepulchral Grottos. 47 
 
 otherwise they were built upon the surface of the 
 ground. Artificial grottos, of neolithic date, have 
 been found in many parts of France, especially in La 
 Marne and the surrounding districts. The most im- 
 portant series are cut out of chalk strata in the sides 
 of the Petit-Morin valley. All of them are entered by 
 a horizontal passage leading to some kind of a door- 
 way and a chamber. The grottos that contain many 
 skeletons are usually roughly made ; those of better 
 workmanship contain but few skeletons))and the walls 
 and floors of their entrance-passages give evidence of 
 having been much traversed, doubtless by neolithic 
 visitors coming to bring offerings to the tombs of im- 
 portant men or royal personages. Some of these grot- 
 tos comprise also an ante-chamber and descending 
 passages leading to it from outside, and from it to the 
 inner chamber. There are traces of a door-frame at 
 the chamber entrance, and of the bar that kept the 
 door closed. The skeletons were laid upon flat stones, 
 and sometimes it is clear that the bodies were burnt 
 Cases of incineration are, however, relatively rare. 
 Burning would be merely a rapid process for unflesh- 
 ing the skeleton. When the bodies were burnt, so 
 were the axes which were dedicated to them, and thus 
 passed through the fire into the world of ghosts. The 
 same result was attained by breaking an axe into 
 pieces, and some of the most precious examples have 
 
48 Art in the Stone Age. 
 
 been found thus sacrificed. The ante-chamber, with 
 the figure of the goddess carved upon its wall and the 
 bones of the great dead near at hand, was doubtless the 
 sepulchral chapel, and corresponded to the accessible 
 chamber of an ancient Egyptian tomb. What its 
 furniture, if any, may have been we cannot say. The 
 private chamber of the dead was supplied with many 
 objects intended to be useful to the ghost. Different 
 tombs have yielded ornaments of various kinds, all 
 manner of weapons, pottery once filled with offerings 
 of food, and the like matters. The later we descend 
 in point of time, the more numerous and varied are 
 the objects dedicated in tombs. 
 
 The built stone monuments of the neolithic period 
 in Europe are scattered over France, Spain, the Bri- 
 tish Islands, Denmark, Scandinavia, and the Baltic 
 coasts. Broadly speaking, they are more numerous 
 in the neighbourhood of the sea than inland. They 
 consist, like the grottos, of a passage leading to a 
 chamber. Sometimes the chamber is not distinguish- 
 able from the passage, and sometimes a single passage 
 leads to several chambers, arranged on every variety 
 of plan. Burials are made alike in the chamber and 
 the passage. The whole was often covered with a 
 great mound or tumulus of earth. Whether every 
 dolmen was originally the mere core of a tumulus, 
 and whether every tumulus once contained a chamber 
 
Dolmens, 49 
 
 within it, are questions not answered by all students 
 in the same way. There is no line of division 
 separating the dolmens of the Stone Age from those 
 built after the introduction of bronze ; and it has not 
 yet been found possible to arrange existing dolmens in 
 any chronological sequence nor to trace the develop- 
 ment of the type. Differences may be as often due 
 to local variation as to chronological distribution. It 
 seems scarcely possible to doubt that a dolmen was 
 in the first instance an imitation cave. The simplest 
 form of dolmen consists of a large roof-stone sup- 
 ported on three monolith walls. To erect even a 
 moderate-sized monument of the kind involved the 
 moving of large masses of rock. This could not be 
 done till men had learnt to co-operate together to 
 that end. Observation of backward races and of the 
 most ancient existing monuments, as well as the in- 
 herent probabilities of the case, lead us to conclude 
 that shouting or singing all together was the means 
 by which rhythmic and simultaneous action was at- 
 tained by early man. Song, if this be true, preceded 
 stone-building, and was essential to the growth of 
 architecture. The songs of Orpheus that moved the 
 rocks were the rhythmic cries guiding the tuggings 
 of neolithic man. 
 
 Some neolithic grottos have been found, as at 
 Mizy (Marne), which were dug out of the ground 
 
 D 
 
50 Art in the Stone Age, 
 
 underneath great masses of rock lying on the surface 
 of the soil. The walls in such cases are lined with 
 rough polygonal masonry. It would be extremely 
 interesting to know whether grottos, excavated in 
 the earth under huge boulders and lined with rough 
 masonry of unwrought stones, were made at an 
 earlier time than megalithic dolmens. Did stone 
 architecture arise from megalithic imitation caves, 
 or were those merely a more sumptuous form of 
 tumulus-cavern ; and are chambers lined with walls 
 of builded stones the prototype of the others ? 
 
 If a dolmen was an imitation cave, a neolithic pit 
 dwelling was the prototype of the tumulus. Passage- 
 tombs, lined with rough stones, bear a close resem- 
 blance to pit-dwellings. They developed on the 
 shores of the ^gean into such sepulchres as covered 
 the remains of the chieftains of Mycenae. In Egypt 
 the tumulus cased with or built of stone eventually 
 grew into the giant proportions of the pyramids of 
 the kings ; whilst the mastaba^ the ordinary form of 
 tomb of the upper-class Egyptians of the same age, 
 appears to have been a direct imitation in stone of the 
 small mud-houses of the natives of the Nile valley 
 before the first great development of Egyptian civi- 
 lisation. The rock-cut tombs of Egypt likewise 
 preserved to a late date the traditions of the long- 
 forgotten days when men dwelt in caves. Thus it 
 
Menhirs, 5 1 
 
 has happened in many parts of the world that the 
 tomb, the house of the ghost, has preserved the form 
 of the normal dwelling-place of an earlier stage of 
 civilisation. The Stupas and Dagobas of Buddhist 
 India are only formalised and magnified tumuli, 
 whilst the Tee that crowned them may have found 
 its prototype in a dolmen. 
 
 jWe cannot pass without mention the numerous 
 single upright stones or m enhi rs^ found in so many 
 parts of the world, and some of which at any rate 
 were erected in the neolithic stage of civilisation. 
 There is little to say about them. They were set 
 up for a variety of reasons. Some marked boun- 
 daries, some commemorated events, some had a 
 phallic significance, some were monuments to the 
 dead. They were chiefly interesting because the 
 tradition of their use was continued into historic 
 times and amongst highly developed peoples. )^The 
 Semitic races reverenced Bethels as the symbols of 
 their gods, and the niche within which such a stone 
 was at a later time carved (as near the Nabatean 
 temple at Medain Salih) was the original of the 
 mihrab of all Moslem places of worship. The obe- 
 lisks of Egypt, whose earliest examples have re- 
 cently been found by Mr. Petrie within the temple of 
 Snefru's pyramid at Medum, must have derived their 
 origin from neolithic menhirs. Babylonia and Assyria 
 
52 Art in the Stone Age, 
 
 are not without corresponding examples ; whilst 
 the inscribed and uninscribed columns set up by 
 Asoka, and other ancient Indian kings, descend from 
 similar parentage. Backward races, even down to 
 the present day, continue to set up menhirs scarcely 
 distinguishable from the most ancient examples. 
 
 Cromlechs, or circles and avenues of upright stones, 
 are likewise still erected by semi-savage races as they 
 were by the neolithic and bronze-using people of 
 Western Europe. They do not appear to possess 
 any universal meaning. Some are sepulchral monu- 
 ments, some are set up to commemorate events, or 
 treaties, or important legislative enactments. They 
 are not peculiar to any single race. Apparently 
 those in Brittany belong to an earlier period than 
 those in the Pyrenees. There are many of them in 
 England and many more have been utterly destroyed. 
 In an example like Stonehenge this type may be 
 said to have attained its culmination, and almost to 
 have entered into the domain of art. The problems 
 connected with the date and uses of that monument 
 are however unsolved, and may not admit of solution. 
 Cromlechs did not develop in the hands of civilised 
 man, and were not the germ of any architectural 
 type. The connection which some have desired to 
 establish between stone circles and Buddhist railings 
 is one that will not stand examination. 
 
Trilithons. 53 
 
 There is, however, an element, included in many 
 cromlechs, and sometimes found alone, which may 
 well enough have been an important step in archi- 
 tectural evolution. I refer to the trilithons — two 
 monolith piers set up on end with a stone beam laid 
 across them. Examples of this type, of various un- 
 certain dates, are found in different parts of the world. 
 Now the earliest buildings of shaped stones, belong- 
 ing to historic times, those, namely, of the fourth 
 Egyptian dynasty, consist of an agglomeration of 
 such trilithons forming walls and roof by their con- 
 junction. Stonehenge may not be so ancient as the 
 temples of the Memphite pyramids, but it is an 
 example of an earlier stage of architecture. Its exis- 
 tence suggests that, already in neolithic times, men 
 may have so far learnt the craft of shaping and 
 raising great masses of stone as to be able to set 
 up trilithons of the same type as those still standing 
 on Salisbury Plain. From such trilithons, roughly 
 shaped with stone implements, to a building like the 
 so-called Temple of the Sphinx, the transition is 
 natural and easy ; but it was a transition that could 
 only be accomplished by people armed with better 
 tools than any that can be made out of stone. 
 , The invention of bronze was, in fact, the turning- 
 point in the history not only of architecture, but of 
 all civilisation. Bronze gradually modified, but did 
 
54 ^^^ ^^ ihe Stone Age, 
 
 not suddenly revolutionise the world. There is no 
 hard and fast line to be drawn between the neolithic 
 and the metal-using stages of human development. 
 The one gradually merged into the other at different 
 dates in different localities.^ The races which by 
 commerce obtained possession of metal nevertheless 
 continued to use stone for their commoner tools for 
 thousands of years. Bronze was employed by the 
 builders of the pyramids of Egypt, but the fellahin in 
 the time of Ramses ll. still reaped with stone-edged 
 sickles. /it was the introduction of metal tools that 
 first made architecture possible. Neolithic man built 
 in earth, in wood, and in rough stone, but none of his 
 buildings can properly be described as works of artj 
 Apparently, as we shall see, the origin and spread of 
 writing followed the routes taken by bronze. It is 
 obvious that the possession of metal tools must have 
 made possible an increase in the conveniences and 
 refinements of life, thus reacting favourably upon 
 the senses of man, and helping to refine his tastes. 
 Neither writing, nor sculpture, nor fine dressing of 
 stones for building, nor painting upon prepared sur- 
 faces need be looked for till after the discovery of 1 
 metals. 
 
 The Neolithics with their stone axes were not able 
 to clear the forest lands. Those of them who were 
 hunters or fishermen might live in forests, but the 
 
The River- Basins, 55 
 
 bulk of the pastoral and agricultural folk had to seek 
 the open places of the world. The most highly 
 developed of the pastoral and agricultural Neolithics 
 did in fact flourish, as their existing remains prove, 
 in the open uplands. But when man was armed with 
 iron or bronze he was able to occupy and clear the 
 rich and pleasant places of the earth, where vegetation 
 grows freely, and the impediments to the advance of 
 material civilisation are reduced. Such pleasant and 
 fertile places were the great river-basins and deltas, 
 and especially those of the Nile, the Tigris and 
 Euphrates, the Yangtsekyang, and so forth. /^Those 
 places possessed in greatest profusion the natural 
 resources which could be readily developed by men 
 armed with metal tools.'^ They therefore became the 
 centres of the important civilisations based upon 
 the use of metal, just as in our own day the great 
 coal regions have been the main centres of the new 
 civilisation which the age of steam has brought to the 
 birth. It was the invention of bronze and the, perhaps 
 almost contemporary, discovery of iron that made 
 possible the earliest historic civilisations, from which 
 the civilisations of the present day have come down 
 by unbroken descent. 
 
 — %ere seems to be little doubt that iron was dis- 
 covered and worked in rudimentary fashion at a very 
 early period both in Asia and in Africa. But though 
 
56 Art in the Stone Age, 
 
 iron was known as soon, perhaps, as bronze, it did 
 not become a great factor in civilisation till a com- 
 paratively late date. fBronze was the active civilising 
 agent in antiquity.^ The cardinal fact, therefore, 
 which archaeology has to determine is the position in 
 time and place of the invention of this potent alloy 
 of copper and tin. Where and when was bronze 
 invented ? It is to considerations tending to throw 
 light upon this problem that we must next turn our 
 attention. 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 THE INVENTION OF BRONZE. 
 
 THE part of North Africa through which the 
 Nile flows is known to have been inhabited 
 by people in the palaeolithic stage of develop- 
 ment. General Pitt-Rivers^ found flint implements 
 of palaeolithic form imbedded in deposits dating 
 from a time when climatic conditions reigned other 
 than those which have prevailed in Egypt for at 
 least 6000 years. Mr. Petrie also picked up a 
 water-rolled implement of palaeolithic form on the 
 hills behind Edfu ; and similar discoveries have been 
 made at different times. We know nothing about 
 the transition from palaeolithic to neolithic condi- 
 tions in the Nile valley ; but polished stone imple- 
 ments have been found, doubtless the jetsam of 
 neolithic fish-eating folk settled at points on the 
 river-side. These people were probably akin to some 
 existing African tribes, but we must await further 
 
 ^Journal of the Anthropological Ittstitute, Feb. and May 1879, 
 and May 1882. 
 
58 The Invention of Bronze, 
 
 information before we can attain certainty about 
 this matter. On the rocks near Silsilis and at El 
 Qab and other places, both in Egypt and apparently 
 also in Arabia, there may be seen many graffiti of 
 boats, ostriches, giraffes, and other animals, some of 
 which do not, and under existing conditions could 
 not, live wild in the Egypt of to-day. These graffiti 
 were doubtless scratched, where we still see them, by 
 the neolithic Egyptians ; and it is worth notice, as 
 pointed out by Professor Sayce, that they resemble 
 in design the simple artistic product of the modern 
 Bosjesmans of South Africa. 
 
 We have good reason to conclude that the mass 
 of the united Egyptian race was formed by the con- 
 centration of a number of related totem-tribes or 
 kindreds, such as the cats, the jackals, the serpents, 
 the crocodiles, and so forth. These tribes, in process 
 of time, became welded together, and their totems 
 were thus associated with gods of a more or less 
 local character. By means of civil war, and the 
 resulting dominion of first one locality then another 
 over all the rest, many of the local gods became 
 elevated for a time, in their turn, into the position of 
 supreme deity of the land. Thus by degrees a 
 national pantheon was formed, and ultimately an 
 esoteric Monotheism was evolved' out of that. This 
 is the lesson which we learn from the religion of the 
 
, The Contact of Ideals, 59 
 
 ^ancient Egyptians when examined by aid of modern 
 comparative methods. It may be concluded that the 
 prehistoric totem-tribes were the people who made 
 the graffiti, and lost the polished stone implements 
 
 (hich modern discoverers have found. 
 As every individual is the child of two parents, so 
 every advance in civilisation the offspring of mixed 
 fluences. The progressive races have always been 
 mixed. An isolated tribe remains stationary. It is 
 where tribes of different tendency and varied capacity 
 come in contact that new ideals arise and new civili- 
 sations are created. We are not referring to the 
 mixture of blood which sometimes produces good 
 and sometimes evil results, but to the contact, often 
 hostile, of peoples of different tendency. The con- 
 tinued contact between the Celtic and Teutonic 
 spirits, for instance, has been the parent of modern 
 European civilisation. The contact between East 
 and West has always been the prolific source of the 
 advancement of humanity. That contact is now 
 maintained by elaborate media of communication 
 and commerce. At the dawn of history, it was only 
 when men were actually adjacent that they could 
 so influence one another. The first great civilisa* 
 tions, therefore, arose at places on the margin of 
 contact between the most advanced peoples of the 
 great continents — between the peoples of Asia and 
 
6o The Invention of Bronze, 
 
 Mediterranean Europe in the Euphrates valley, and 
 between the peoples of North Africa and Asia in the 
 Nile valley. This is the cardinal fact that we have 
 to bear in mind. Broadly speaking, we may say 
 that the greatest civilisations are tiiose which inherit 
 from the largest number of fine ancestors, and thus 
 unite the richest variety of tendencies and ideals. 
 The greatness of Greece in the ancient world was, as 
 we shall see, due to the fact that she inherited the 
 traditions in almost equal measure of all the great 
 races that had preceded her upon earth, so that we 
 are not able to point either to Egypt, or to Assyria, 
 or to Babylon or Phoenicia, and call Greece the 
 continuation of this one or that, but we are forced 
 to admit that she united the heritage of all, and 
 numbered all amongst her nearer or more remote 
 ancestry. 
 
 ( The neolithic totem-tribes of Egypt were only 
 one of the parents of Egyptian civilisation ; the other 
 parent was undoubtedly Asiatic.^ The Egyptian race, 
 in historic times, was never a pure race. It contained 
 African elements and Asiatic elements, and these 
 elements varied in proportion at different periods. 
 The Egyptian language would alone suffice to prove 
 this statement. According to one theory, which I 
 am not concerned either to uphold or to refute, the 
 most ancient known intellectual and governing class 
 
tf: 
 
 Egyptian Conset'vatism, 6i 
 
 in Egypt was a white race, akin to that of the con- 
 temporary corresponding class in Chaldea, and this 
 white race was of Asiatic extraction, and ultimately 
 became merged into the general mass of the Egyptian 
 people. But the two facts upon which I do insist 
 re, that in prehistoric times an Asiatic element was 
 troduced both into the population and civilisation 
 of Egypt, and that it was out of the union of the 
 Asiatic and African factors that the historic civilisa- 
 tion of the country arose. 
 
 The Pharaohs of the period of Egypt's culmina- 
 on continued to wear, beneath all their robes of 
 state, the semblance of the simple sporran and lion's 
 tail which had formed all the covering of prehistoric 
 Egyptian chiefs. This is a small but significant 
 example of the conservatism of Egypt, whereby she 
 progressed, not by supplanting one custom by an- 
 other, but by enveloping the old in the new. Owing 
 to this remarkable and almost unique quality, it will 
 doubtless be possible for duly equipped specialists 
 ultimately to reconstruct the main outlines of pre- 
 historic Egyptian civilisation out of their fossilised 
 remains imbedded in historic epochs. Such fossils 
 are totemism, certain fundamental architectural forms, 
 some superstitious uses of flint implements, the titles 
 of gods and kings, objects represented in the sacred 
 writing, and many the like elements that might be 
 
62 The Invention of Bronze. 
 
 catalogued if it were worth while. The question 
 now arises, What part of the early civilisation of 
 Egypt was of Asiatic origin ? I answer, All that 
 depended upon the use of bronze. 
 
 For the sake of clearness in exposition, I shall 
 assume at the outset the truth of this theory, rather 
 than attempt to deduce it as a conclusion. Iron 
 may have been and probably was discovered in Africa 
 at a remote period. Fragments of iron have been 
 found in the Great Pyramid. It is depicted in the 
 most ancient hieroglyphics. Travellers tell us that, 
 over large areas in Africa, iron lies on the surface of 
 the ground in a form very easily reduced, and that 
 the natives know how to fashion objects out of it by 
 simple processes. But tools thus made are inferior 
 to the tools of excellently tempered bronze which 
 were fashioned in prehistoric periods. To make iron 
 into tools, as tough and bearing as sharp an edge 
 as those made of bronze, requires a high degree of 
 knowledge and skill. Iron, therefore, even if known 
 to the prehistoric Africans, did not raise them above 
 the level to which polished stone could bring them. 
 
 Bronze is an alloy of copper and tin. Copper is 
 a common metal, found almost pure in many parts 
 of the world ; tin is very rare. Accomplished miners, 
 like the Phoenicians and Etruscans, doubtless dis- 
 covered it in many places. We know from the Tel- 
 
The Sotcrces of Tin. 63 
 
 el-Amarna tablets that bronze was imported into 
 Egypt from northern Syria in the time of the eigh- 
 teenth dynasty. We know, too, that in ancient days 
 tin was found in the Caucasus and in Khorassan and 
 Bther Central Asian sites. It was also found in Corn- 
 wall, but only in the later period of antiquity. All 
 these places, no doubt, became centres of the bronze 
 industry, but none of them satisfies the demands of 
 the home of the invention of bronze. —There is only 
 one district in the unsubmerged regions of the world 
 where tin exists in exhaustless quantity and easily 
 accessible. This is the Malay peninsula and archi- 
 pelago. Whether during the period of human exist- 
 ence upon the surface of the earth there has ever 
 been a larger area of land above the surface of the 
 sea in those parts, we cannot say. The lost Eden, 
 which General Gordon imagined to lie beneath the 
 surface of the Southern Ocean, might then have been 
 a continuation of this tin-bearing district, and the 
 place of the discovery of bronze. However this may 
 be, all known indications as to the locality of the 
 discovery point somewhere in that direction. On 
 a vaguely defined margin of the distant East rose 
 the morning star of civilisation, which, shining at 
 first but dimly across the sea, appeared to the people 
 of the Euphrates and the Nile, and heralded the 
 new day. 
 
64 The Invention of Bronze. 
 
 The oldest Egyptian traditions are not opposed 
 to this theory. They point to the sacred land of 
 Punt as the place whence their earliest civilisation 
 was derived. Punt was approached from Egypt by 
 ships going down the Red Sea, and may have been 
 a name of varying significance, like Tarshish to the 
 Phoenicians. The south of Arabia, which archaeo- 
 logists are now revealing to us as the land of an 
 ancient civilisation, and the opposite Somali coast 
 would both come under the designation of Punt. In 
 early times Aryan Indians traded by sea with the 
 Gulf of Arabia, and called, in their own tongue, the 
 island Socotra by the name Dvipa Sukhatara^ or the 
 Happy Island. The sea voyage from Aryavarta to 
 the mouth of the Red Sea is not likely to have been 
 first undertaken by a people of inland origin, and we 
 may well regard it as a route established in far earlier 
 times. Thus the term Punt may have included more 
 distant countries than the coasts of the Gulf of Arabia, 
 or at any rate those coasts were probably a halting- 
 place at which the products and traditions of the 
 distant East paused a while on their westward flight. 
 
 It is true that the earliest known Egyptian monu- 
 ments stand in the neighbourhood of Memphis near 
 the root of the Nilotic Delta ; still both tradition and 
 the inherent probabilities of the case indicate that 
 Egyptian civilisation did not originate there, but 
 
Importance of Upper Egypt, 65 
 
 descended from a point higher up the river. Through- 
 out all the time of the ancient empire, though the 
 great buildings and tombs were in the north, we hear 
 but little about Lower Egypt ; it was Upper Egypt 
 that played the principal role. Not until quite late 
 historic times was the whole area of the Delta cleared, 
 drained, irrigated, colonised, and thus raised to be 
 the most important part of the empire. Ancient 
 Egypt was a riverine State, and owed its unity, its 
 stability, and its wealth to that fact. From a number 
 of separate tribes and independent chieftains, repre- 
 sented by the Nomes and nobles of a later day, the 
 upper and lower countries separately developed into 
 kingdoms of somewhat different internal structure. 
 The pious Egyptians, during all the long period 
 when the lordship of the two Egypts was an imperial, 
 or at least an independent power, never obliterated 
 from the constitution of their country the traces of 
 these prehistoric conditions. The union of the two 
 kingdoms was a personal union, and resulted from the 
 office of monarch being filled in both countries by one 
 man. The two countries were not amalgamated into 
 one ; they were merely united under a single monarch. 
 The moment of the union was a momentous one, 
 for from it traditional Egyptian history commences. 
 The Egyptians themselves believed that the monarch 
 of the upper country, whose capital was Tine (Thinis), 
 
 E 
 
66 The Invention of Bronze. 
 
 obtained possession also of the lower kingdom, and 
 thereupon moved his abode northwards and founded 
 the new capital of the united kingdoms at Memphis, 
 on the confines of both. We have thus far, however, 
 searched in vain for any traces of the kings belonging 
 to the first three dynasties of the united empire. 
 But at the close of the third dynasty we are suddenly 
 confronted with the perfectly historical monarch, 
 Snefru. We possess his tomb in the pyramid of 
 Medum, and the tombs of his courtiers in the sur- 
 rounding mastabas. His ^^%y and the record of 
 his victorious campaigns are carved upon the rocks of 
 the Wady Maghara. The sculptured portraits of his 
 contemporaries adorn the museum of Gizeh. Thus 
 we pass out of the world of conjectures and possi- 
 bilities into a region of visible fact Nothing is more 
 astounding, nothing more inexplicable than this sud- 
 den emergence of the ancient life of Egypt from 
 the haze of indefinite tradition into a monumental 
 and tangible reality. It comes unheralded and 
 without preliminary stages. It seems to spring 
 into existence complete. All the main conventions 
 of Egyptian art are manifested in its earliest works. 
 The hieroglyphic writing is there in a form elaborated 
 and complete. The deep mystery in which this 
 phenomenon is shrouded can only be elucidated by 
 future discoveries. 
 
The First Three Dynasties, 67 
 
 What remains of the pyramid of Medum is one of 
 the finest conceivable pieces of masonry. Its stones 
 are so beautifully squared and adjusted that after 
 6000 years they fit together closely enough to deceive 
 superficial travellers into the belief that the whole is 
 quarried in one piece out of the living rock. The 
 pyramids of Gizeh, built by generations immediately 
 succeeding Snefru, are the vastest piles of dressed 
 stone, perfect in workmanship, that the world contains. 
 The men who built these things can scarcely have 
 been the inventors of masonry. Where are the pre- 
 liminary stages of their craft to be observed ? In the 
 whole length of Egypt we have not found one stone 
 upon another, not a rock-cut grotto, not a wrought 
 fragment of any material whatsoever, to which it is 
 possible]]to assign an earlier date than that of the per- 
 fect structures and sculptures of the time of Snefru. 
 And yet the soil of Egypt destroys nothing that is 
 committed to its keeping, and that soil, at all events 
 in the Memphite neighbourhood, has been explored 
 with a thoroughness that has nowhere else been 
 approached. May be the tombs and buildings of the 
 earlier Memphite kings were made of mud-brick, but 
 even so, when the mud-brick mastabas of Snefru's con- 
 temporaries have been preserved, though rifled and 
 utterly neglected, why has not a single scrap of earlier 
 work survived ? Moreover, if all earlier monuments 
 
68 The Invention of Bronze, 
 
 were of mud-brick, the mystery of the origin of 
 stone-building remains unelucidated. 
 
 A more thorough search in Upper Egypt may 
 yet, perhaps, avail to explain the enigma. Tine, its 
 capital, was the ancient predecessor of the sacred city 
 of Abut (Abydos). It lay in the midst of an excep- 
 tionally broad fertile tract between the river and the 
 bordering mountains of the west. But far more impor- 
 tant to it was the neighbourhood of Kobte (Koptos), 
 for from that point on the Nile a relatively short and 
 fairly watered caravan route (known to have been used 
 in the most remote times) leads to Kosseir, on the 
 Red Sea. It was to the command of this caravan 
 route that the greatness, first of Tine, and afterwards 
 of Thebes, was due. Tradition, no doubt rightly, 
 asserted that the goddess Hathor (worshipped at 
 Denderah, close to Kobte) and the god Amen of 
 Thebes were brought to Egypt from Punt. If Punt 
 was the sacred land to Upper Egypt in the same 
 sense that Abut was the sacred city to the whole 
 land — that is to say, if the civilisation which Tine gave 
 to Memphis came to it, broadly speaking, from Punt 
 — then it is not in Egypt that we need look for those 
 preliminary stages of the arts and crafts, no trace of 
 which has the most minute inspection yet availed to 
 discover. This line of reasoning would suggest the 
 conclusion that the characteristic features of the 
 
The Medum Cemetery, 69 
 
 earliest Egyptian civilisation were derived from in- 
 fluences imported from the East by way of the Red 
 Sea and the Wady Hammdmat. If this be true, 
 we shall be forced to abandon the usually received 
 theory according to which the Isthmus of Suez was 
 the route whereby civilised people and influences 
 entered Egypt. 
 
 Mr. Petrie's investigations in the Mediim cemetery 
 in the spring of 1891, as yet only briefly reported, 
 have brought us for the first time face to face with 
 the mixed races of ancient Egypt. Nothing is more 
 characteristic of races than their method of bury- 
 ing the dead. Amongst the neolithic and some- 
 times amongst the palaeolithic peoples of Europe 
 skeletons were generally crouched upon their sides 
 with the knees up to the chin. * Hitherto/ writes 
 Mr. Petrie, * we have always found Egyptians buried 
 full length ; but most of these earlier bodies (at 
 Mediim) are crouched, many with the knees up 
 to the chin. And I am told that many crouched 
 bodies in large earthen jars were found lately at 
 Gizeh, but were all destroyed. These bodies are 
 always on the left side, with the face east, head north. 
 This proves that a special idea was connected with 
 such burials. But no funereal vessels or head-rests are 
 found with these interments ; only around the body 
 are sometimes a few scraps of charcoal, as if it had 
 
70 The Invention of Bronze, 
 
 been surrounded by live coals at the time of burial. 
 At the same period full-length burial was practised, 
 accompanied by funereal vessels of diorite and 
 alabaster and head-rests. This distinction seems to 
 be connected with the two races — the aborigines and 
 the conquerors, who were not yet fused together.' 
 
 We have spoken of the remarkable excellence of 
 the masonry of the earliest known Egyptian build- 
 ing in stone, but this masonry is not architecture. 
 Neither the great pyramids nor the temples belong- 
 to them possessed, so far as we can gather from their 
 ruins, any architectural qualities. Stone architecture, 
 as will hereafter be shown, did not arise in Egypt 
 till the sixth dynasty. The only architecture, the 
 only artistic building, under the fourth dynasty was 
 in wood. This is remarkable, because in Egypt 
 during all the historic and a long prehistoric period 
 timber has been scarce. The stem of the palm-tree 
 is valueless for purposes of joinery. Wood for build- 
 ing must have been an imported commodity. Never- 
 theless the existence of wood architecture of an 
 elaborate kind in the time of the ancient empire does 
 not admit of doubt. Many an old sarcophagus is 
 dexterously carved in the likeness of the kind of house 
 its owner dwelt in, and still more numerous upon 
 the walls of tomb-chambers are the representations, 
 done in painting or low relief, of pavilions and other 
 
The Oldest Hieroglyphics, 71 
 
 wooden structures, carved and put together with much 
 decorative elaboration. Moreover, we are able to 
 summon the evidence of hieroglyphics on this point. 
 Mr. Petrie, who made an exhaustive study of the 
 most ancient series of hieroglyphic inscriptions, those 
 namely in the MedCim cemetery, pointed out that the 
 sign read da (great) is the representation of the 
 papyrus compounded as a column, with a tenon on 
 the top in the form of an inverted bell — in fact, a 
 column of the same type as the ugly bell-capped 
 columns of the eighteenth dynasty at Karnak. He 
 has also shown that the same kind of support is repre- 
 sented as sustaining the roof of the building in the 
 hieroglyphic heb. In both cases, however, the column 
 is obviously made of wood and not stone. The way 
 in which the tenon of the column is mortised into the 
 curved roof-beam is clearly indicated in heb. We 
 shall hereafter find that the hieroglyphics have pre- 
 served for us likenesses of the light village shrines of 
 very early days ; and it is probable that a careful 
 study of the best early inscriptions would yield 
 further valuable results. As yet, however, I have 
 discovered no trace of any prehistoric stone building. 
 Every indication points to wood and earth as the 
 only building materials employed at the time when 
 hieroglyphic writing was reduced to the earliest form 
 in which we possess it. 
 
72 The Invention of Bronze, 
 
 Mud IS the natural building material of the 
 country, and is universally employed in the Nile 
 valley at the present day, except where European 
 influence extends. An unskilled labourer can puddle 
 and shape some thousand or more large crude bricks 
 in a day, and a short exposure to the Egyptian sun 
 renders them hard enough for building purposes. 
 The wet mud serves for mortar, and so a man can 
 build his own house with little toil. The prehistoric 
 inhabitants of Egypt, the fertile parts of Arabia, and 
 the Tigris and Euphrates plains made their habi- 
 tations in this way. A domestic architecture of 
 stone might have arisen in Egypt, but neither there, 
 nor in the neighbouring parts of Asia, was it possible 
 for an elaborate wood-architecture to have been in- 
 vented and developed. We must look elsewhere for 
 the origin of that. Leaving out of consideration 
 all merely undecorated wood-buildings — the lake- 
 dwellings of Europe, for instance, which may well 
 have had an independent origin, and such wooden 
 huts as the Central Asian and the Mediterranean 
 peoples doubtless employed — it is only in Asia, and 
 especially the southern and warmer parts of Asia, 
 that wood has always been the normal material 
 employed in decorative building. The stone-archi- 
 tecture of India and the East generally has never 
 been anything but a mimicry of wood. Rough log 
 
Wood A rchitecture, 7 3 
 
 luts could doubtless be fashioned with stone imple- 
 ments, but wood-architecture implies the preliminary 
 invention of bronze. In Egypt it was, of course, 
 only employed in the service of the governing class. 
 I conclude, therefore, that the traditions of elaborate 
 wood-architecture, the existence of which in Egypt 
 at remote times is proved by such ancient evidence, 
 were brought to that country by the bronze-using im- 
 migrants, and that, wherever those immigrants them- 
 selves may have come from, the architectural traditions 
 they brought came, ultimately, not from the steppes 
 and highlands of Central Asia, but from the hot 
 and luxurious countries or islands of the south. 
 
 The oldest examples of Egyptian sculpture are 
 likewise instinct with traditions that must have origi- 
 nated when wood was the sculptor's material. Some 
 of the best of them are actually carved in wood, and 
 carved in greater perfection than was ever attained 
 in wood-sculpture in later stages of Egyptian art. 
 The beautifully decorated panels from the tomb of 
 Hosi, to which no later parallel has been discovered, 
 are of special interest in this connection. It must, 
 however, be borne in mind, in the case of sculpture 
 and architecture and all other products of Egyptian 
 civilisation, that, whencesoever the tools, materials, 
 and traditions of workmanship may have been de- 
 rived, the ideal expressed by them arose in Egypt 
 
74 The Invention of Bronze. 
 
 out of the very soil. This ideal of persistence and 
 power in calm and dignified repose was produced by 
 the reaction upon the inhabitants of the Nile valley 
 of the physical circumstances of their surroundings. 
 It came from no other part of the world, and could 
 not be transmitted elsewhere. During its reign great 
 works were produced in its service, the like of which 
 can never again be made. In its pursuit the |)eople 
 of Egypt accomplished the work that was given 
 them to do, discovering and developing those crafts 
 and learnings which were transmissible, and which in 
 due course the Greeks, inheriting, mingled with their 
 other inheritance, and by the sum of all at length 
 availed to enshrine in visible form that ideal of 
 perfect beauty and perfect taste which it was theirs 
 to manifest to a wondering world. 
 
 But there was another country besides Egypt 
 where the introduction of bronze generated a notable, 
 and, in its early stages, probably an independent 
 civilisation. When History sheds her earliest beam 
 of light upon the inhabitants of the alluvial plains, 
 through which Tigris and Euphrates pass into the 
 Persian Gulf, she discloses to us a civilisation at once| 
 complex and old. The year 3800 B.C., when Sargon I. 
 was king in Chaldea, was by no means the date 
 of the dawn of Chaldean civilisation. Behind that 
 remote epoch there lay a long past of laborious 
 
Prehistoric Chaldea, 75 
 
 development, the result of the co-operation of at least 
 three different peoples. It is not likely that we shall 
 soon be able to trace back the line of this develop- 
 ment, or to unravel its threads. Chaldea is not like 
 Egypt. Its climate does not resemble the dry airs 
 of the valley of the Nile. It is not a country of 
 stone. It is not everywhere, approached by clean 
 and changeless desert, safe recipient and preserver of 
 countless records of the past. The Egypt of the 
 the Ancient Empire is with us to-day, and astounds 
 us by the magnitude of its works ; but contemporary 
 Chaldea has long ago been swallowed up within the 
 destroying jaws of time, and we must consider our- 
 selves fortunate if we can painfully gather together 
 the smallest remnants or the most trifling examples 
 of the works of the ancient people of that land. 
 
 Civilisation was not earlier born in Egypt than 
 in Chaldea. It is better to regard the civilisations 
 of the two countries as twin sisters, sprung from a 
 common origin, and constantly influencing one an- 
 other as they grew up. The parent of both was, I 
 maintain, that ancient bronze-using people, the in- 
 ventors of writing, who dwelt in a warm-wooded 
 region somewhere in the south of Asia, and who 
 came into Egypt by way of the Red Sea and the 
 valley of Hammamat. A strong and advancing race, 
 as before has been remarked, results from a mixture 
 
^6 The Invention of Bronze, 
 
 of peoples, just as an advancing civilisation springs 
 from a mixture of ideals. When an isolated tribe 
 dwelling in one locality and climate, and possessing 
 one set of ideas, mixes, or is brought closely in 
 contact with another folk and another set of ideas, 
 a higher civilisation often arises at the point of 
 contact. The great civilisations have always arisen 
 in the meeting-places of ideas. 
 
 It is important to notice that the situation of 
 Chaldea was one favourable to the growth of a 
 mixed race and civilisation. Its fertile plains, the 
 very garden of the world, were bordered by the high- 
 lands of Elam on the north-east, and by the deserts 
 of Arabia on the south-west. It was traversed by 
 two great rivers, the natural highways between the 
 seafaring peoples of the Indian Ocean, and those 
 of the Mediterranean. We should naturally expect 
 Elam to have been the home of a tolerably advanced 
 neolithic people ; and we do, in fact, find there 
 historic traces (dating back to about 3000 B.C.) 
 of an ancient Elamite civilisation diverse in its 
 origins from the Chaldean. Many indications unite 
 to prove that an Elamite factor went to the com- 
 position of the population, the languages, and the 
 civilisation of Chaldea. The deserts and fertile 
 highlands of Arabia, again, were the home of tribes 
 of Semitic nomads. In other countries these people 
 
Prehistoric Chaldea. 77 
 
 leveloped an advanced civilisation, but as long as 
 they remained in their deserts, or in the isolated 
 central plateau of Arabia, they must have closely re- 
 sembled the Bedawin and Nejdeans of to-day. Now, 
 the conditions of their life, and the small resources 
 of the desert, prevent the Bedawin from developing 
 any material civilisation or any of the formative 
 arts ; but, on the other hand, these same conditions 
 have shown themselves favourable to the growth 
 of language and of a noble poetic diction. The 
 astonishing brilliancy of the glories which night 
 displays to dwellers in the desert has ever attracted 
 their attention to the heavenly bodies ; and no people 
 has been environed by circumstances more conducive 
 to the birth of deep religious emotion. The poetry, 
 religion, science, and language of Chaldea gathered 
 an important contribution from that part of the 
 settled population of the country which emigrated 
 from Arabian homes. 
 
 Finally, we must take note of an important and 
 ancient tradition, which points to the sea as the way 
 whereby writing, laws, and a part at least of the 
 religion came into the country. Oannes, the fish-god, 
 brought them. The myth no doubt hides a chapter 
 of world-history. From the earliest times the Chal- 
 deans were seafarers. They circumnavigated Arabia 
 to the Sinaitic peninsula at a remote historic period. 
 
78 The Invention of Bronze, 
 
 Originally the seamen were of a different race from the 
 agricultural population. It is to them, either as mere 
 carriers or as immigrants, that the bringing in of 
 writing, and probably also of bronze, is to be referred. 
 The style of writing which we associate with the 
 peoples of Chaldea and Assyria is that known as 
 cuneiform. It ultimately came to consist of elaborate 
 sets of combinations of wedges. The majority of the 
 inscriptions we possess in this kind of script are 
 impressed upon slabs of clay, which have been har- 
 dened by baking. The conclusion would be obvious, 
 even if we had no proof of its truth, that the wedge- 
 forms were developed to suit the material in which 
 the writing was impressed. The wedges are, in fact, 
 the impressions of the right-angled corner of a quad- 
 rilateral prism of wood. The wedge-shaped letters, 
 out of which all later inscriptions carved in stone are 
 composed, are copies of the normal forms of the 
 writing as developed in the employment of the mate- 
 rials ordinarily used. Now if this writing had been 
 invented in Chaldea (a country lacking in wood), the 
 earliest form of it would have been of the kind dic- 
 tated by the requirements of clay tablets. But such 
 is not the case. The earliest inscriptions are com- 
 posed of linear and not wedge-shaped forms. We 
 must therefore look to some other country than 
 Chaldea as the place of their invention. 
 
Cuneiform Writing, 79 
 
 Further, it is clear that many of these earliest 
 linear groups are abbreviated forms derived from the 
 likenesses of the objects whose names they, in the 
 first instance, represent. In fact, behind the oldest 
 Chaldean writing, as we find it in an inscription of 
 3800 B.C., there lies a developed system of hierogly- 
 phics. Unfortunately we cannot as yet identify many 
 of these hieroglyphics. The sun, a fish, a doorway, 
 and a few more can be identified, but the likeness 
 to any object has in most cases utterly disappeared. 
 The hieroglyphics of Egypt do not throw much light 
 upon the matter, but it seems clear that the oldest 
 Chaldean writing is not a linear form of Egyptian 
 writing, and was not in any way derived from Egypt. 
 The two may have been derived from a common 
 source. The Egyptians, with their conservative in- 
 stincts, maintained the forms of their ancient hiero- 
 glyphics down to Roman times. They added to the 
 number of them, and they invented for secular pur- 
 poses abbreviated and cursive hands, founded upon 
 the hieroglyphics, but they did not abandon the 
 original and sacred forms which the god Thoth gave 
 them. With the Chaldeans it was otherwise, and we 
 can only conjecture what the prehistoric stages of 
 their writing may have been. 
 
 The direct picturing of events is the earliest 
 stage, and this has been employed by many savage 
 
8o The htvention of Bronze, 
 
 races all over the world. A long process of develop- 
 ment, carried through by some inventive race, led to 
 the representation of every word by means of pic- 
 tures. The transition from pictures to arbitrary signs 
 founded upon them must have been largely brought 
 about by the nature of the substances upon which the 
 writing was traced. The forms of the earliest Chal- 
 dean writing suggest, as I have said, that at a still 
 earlier time it had been habitually carved upon wood. 
 Straight lines can doubtless be more readily cut on a 
 wooden surface than curves. Engraved writing upon 
 wood seems to imply the previous invention of some 
 kind of sharp metal tool. We have seen that writing, 
 bronze, wood-architecture, and the worship of some 
 divinities, appear to have been introduced into Egypt 
 from the far East by way of the Red Sea. It now 
 seems not impossible that writing, bronze, and part of 
 the later religion of the country were imported into 
 Chaldea by way of the Persian Gulf. The two con- 
 clusions are in perfect accord, and it may well be that 
 a single civilisation of independent origin in some 
 bronze-manufacturing district contributed important 
 elements to the nascent civilisations of both Egypt 
 and Chaldea, even as it may likewise be true that 
 the governing class in both countries consisted of 
 immigrants of the same Asiatic stock. 
 
 It is possible that, when the spade is thoroughly 
 
 i 
 
The Dravidian Peoples. 8i 
 
 employed as an instrument of historical inquiry, dis- 
 coveries may yet be made as to the ancient history 
 and affiliations of the Dravidian peoples. They 
 must have landed at the southern extremity of 
 India by sea, and not come from the north by 
 land. The languages of the Australian aborigines are 
 stated to possess Dravidian affinities, so that a band 
 of Dravidian influence appears in the most ancient 
 times to have spanned the sea-route from the far East 
 to the Persian and Arabian Gulfs. It must, in truth, 
 be freely confessed that the whole subject treated in 
 the present chapter is one as to which no certainty is 
 yet attainable. The few facts that are known and 
 the few indications that can be deduced seem to 
 point in a certain direction, but any day new mate- 
 rials may be discovered, involving a reconstruction 
 of our ideas about the probabilities of the past. 
 
 The development and discussion of theories is an 
 interesting, and seldom a barren task. It helps to 
 familiarise us with what is already known. It is an 
 aid to the grouping of facts. But theory becomes 
 an absolute impediment to advance if it be put in 
 the place of fact and obstinately maintained, not as 
 a thing provisional and to be lightly disregarded, 
 but as one ascertained, or, still worse, elevated into 
 an article of faith. 
 
 F 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THE LEGACY OF EGYPT. 
 
 "THREES/ says Pliny, *were the first temples.' 
 -*- If this statement were accurate, the history 
 of religious architecture would start from a definite 
 point. Trees, as the shelter of divine spirits, doubt- 
 less fulfilled the function of temples for certain 
 early races, such as the Teutons, and some of the 
 tribes inhabiting the great Indian peninsula. Un- 
 fortunately, these were not the architectural races. 
 The origin of temples does not admit of such single 
 and brief description. Like every complex type, the 
 various types of temple arose out of the union of 
 many elements. A temple was a dwelling-place 
 made by man to be the abode of a god, and was 
 not, in the first instance, a place of worship ; just as 
 a tomb was the house of a ghost, or family of ghosts, 
 and not originally a place for ghost-worship. But, 
 as offerings and ceremonials came to be performed 
 at tombs for the benefit of ghosts, and to pre- 
 vent them from revenging their neglect upon the 
 
The Origin of Temples, %2) 
 
 living, so sacrifices and other sacred ceremonials 
 came to be performed at temples to propitiate the 
 deity, or family of deities, residing within them. 
 And thus it fell out, that just as tombs grew to be 
 more complex in structure and furniture with the 
 development of funerary rites and anniversaries, so 
 the simple type of temple grew more elaborate as 
 the ceremonial observances which had to take place 
 within the sacred precincts increased in complexity. 
 Ideal gods continually outstripped the accomplished 
 presentment of them ; the grandest of earthly edifices 
 was at length too insignificant to be their abode. 
 When a prophet cried, * Behold, the heaven and 
 heaven of heavens cannot contain thee ! ' his words 
 expressed the close of one great chapter of human 
 belief, and saw the departure of the gods to higher 
 regions of the ideal, their transference to a nobler 
 temple of the mind, — a * house not built with hands, 
 eternal in the heavens.' It is only with the earliest 
 stages of this chapter of belief, and with the arts 
 dependent thereupon, that we are now concerned. 
 
 The unseen and the mysterious are cause of 
 terror rather than of stimulating wonder to the savage 
 mind. Undeveloped people, conscious of being 
 surrounded by powers operating invisibly and inex- 
 plicably to them, desire to propitiate those powers, 
 ar to avoid their proximity. When sicknesses 
 
84 The Legacy of Egypt, 
 
 and storms and what not were thought to be male- 
 volent personalities or neglected ghosts, who came 
 haunting the abodes of the living, the thing was 
 to get rid of them, or, at least, confine them to a safe 
 place. Sometimes a boat was loaded with good 
 things, and the spirits of evil were enticed into it 
 and sent adrift. Many a temple may, in the first 
 instance, have been erected to be the home of some 
 troublesome god, who, it was thought, would, if 
 properly housed and attended to in an abode of his 
 own, cease to disturb by his presence the homes of 
 the tribesmen. A good genius, too prone to going 
 a-wandering, might similarly be brought to reside 
 beneficently near the people who desired his ceaseless 
 protection. The natural thing to do was, in either 
 case, to build him a house and there attend him with 
 food at stated times, just as the ghosts of the dead 
 were attended. I conclude, therefore, that the early 
 type of temple in any locality must have been the 
 same as the contemporary type of house, and that 
 the origin of sacrifice, and other associated religious 
 rites, is to be looked for in the analogy between the 
 feeding and propitiating of invisible ghosts, and the! 
 attainment of a similar result in the case of other 
 kinds of invisible beings. The ideas of men about 
 their dead ancestors and kindred have generally' 
 formed part and parcel of their ideas about the gods 
 
The Invention of the Gods. 85 
 
 and the invisible powers, though, in the nature of 
 things, there exists no necessary connection between 
 the two. It may hereafter be shown that religions 
 and the ceremonials of divine worship took their 
 
 ■igin in ghost-feeding and the cultus of the dead. 
 Gods had to be invented before temples could be 
 ought of, and the invention of the gods belongs to 
 a time so deeply buried in the past that almost all 
 trace and memory of it has been lost. Certain 
 backward and probably retrograde races, still exist- 
 ing, know no gods, but amongst them Totemism 
 often exists. Sometimes Totemism is associated 
 with a belief in gods. In no case can we be cer- 
 tain that a belief in gods developed actually out of 
 Totemism. The ancient Egyptians, when history 
 first reveals them to us, had passed beyond the stage 
 of mere Totemism, and were already the worshippers 
 of gods. Some, at any rate, of these gods were of 
 foreign extraction. They were, or till recently had 
 been, for the most part local divinities. With each 
 of them there was associated a sacred animal in a 
 mysterious relation, and this sacred animal had pro- 
 bably at a previous stage been merely the totem of the 
 tribe settled in the locality. Such sacred animals may 
 be considered as gods for all our present intents and 
 purposes. Other races of prehistoric men worshipped 
 fire. Others, again, paid honour to the sun or the 
 
86 The Legacy of Egypt. 
 
 planets, or other prominent heavenly bodies. Deities 
 were elsewhere discovered in streams, woods, and 
 mountains. The great rivers were the manifestation 
 of the divine to the dwellers on their banks ; and 
 all prominent examples of the constructive, repro- 
 ductive, or destructive forces of nature attracted, 
 by means of fear or wonder, the simple worship 
 of early man. In fact, the conception of invisible 
 beings, derived from the belief in ghosts, opened the 
 way to the discovery of a god in every natural 
 phenomenon. 
 
 It was easy enough to build a house for a sacred 
 bull or hawk ; and the genius of a wood, a stream, 
 or locality might, without too great stretch of the 
 imagination, be conceived of as visiting any enclosure 
 set apart for his honour and for the dedication of 
 material gifts to his service. Any hearth might be the 
 home of the god of fire ; but how should man avail to 
 build an abode for the solar king or the royal majesty 
 of the stars ? The problem was one which the ancient 
 priests solved in a manner creditable to their in- 
 genuity, and which finds an echo down to the present 
 day in the orientation of our churches. The first 
 observers of the heavens could not fail to notice the 
 risings and settings, the exits and the entrances, of 
 the heavenly bodies. It was concluded that, like men 
 and animals, the heavenly gods had their diurnal 
 
 I 
 
The Orientation of Temples, 87 
 
 periods of action and repose. The sun-god ' cometh 
 forth like a strong man to run his course.* The 
 beams of his earliest light, striking along the earth 
 and entering the eastward-facing door of a hut, were 
 the footprints of his coming. The light upon the 
 inner wall was the sign of his presence. The shrine, 
 therefore, not of the sun only, but of any other 
 heavenly body, was a house built to face the point of 
 its rising, whatever that might be. Such orientation 
 was doubtless in the first instance roughly accom- 
 plished. By degrees greater accuracy would naturally 
 be aimed at. It would be noticed that the sun from 
 day to day changed the place of his rising, and ap- 
 peared (in the northern hemisphere) at a horizon 
 point more and more north of east as the summer 
 advanced, and more and more south of east with 
 the advance of winter. For a day or two, towards 
 the longest and shortest days of the year, the point 
 of sunrise would stand still, before returning east- 
 ward again, and the summer solstice would mark 
 the period of the sun's greatest power. Observation 
 of ruined temples shows us that many accurately 
 oriented solar temples of ancient days were turned 
 to this point. The dark avenues of the temples of 
 ancient Egypt were stretched, like some great tele- 
 scope, along the ground with uninterrupted passage 
 eastwards from shrine to pylon. Annually, when the 
 
88 The Legacy of Egypt, 
 
 important day approached, the doors were opened 
 and the priests awaited, watching with emotions not 
 hard to conceive the splendid development of the 
 dawn. At length the looked-for moment arrived. 
 The monarch of heaven stepped forth from his mys- 
 terious chamber of night ; his chariot flashed with a 
 blaze of glory along the world, and his majesty for an 
 instant revealed itself within the inmost depths of 
 the shrine of his temple. Small wonder if a wave of 
 religious awe swept over the minds of his worshippers 
 and raised them into communion with the indescrib- 
 able wonder of the universe ! 
 
 The most ancient temples, then, were simple 
 shrines built to imitate houses and to fulfil the same 
 functions. Of course no such early shrines survive ; 
 but have we any indication of what any of them 
 were like ? It is to Egypt that we naturally turn for 
 an answer — Egypt, that often fossilised rather than 
 destroyed the earlier stages alike of her civilisation 
 and her art. The visitor to a normal Egyptian 
 temple of the historic period passes first through the 
 outer pylon or great fagade gate, and thus attains 
 access to an open courtyard which is sometimes sur- 
 rounded by a portico. Beyond this courtyard is a 
 hall, whose flat stone roof is supported on the needful 
 number of columns. Behind this again are the dark 
 and mysterious parts of the temple, the private 
 
 I 
 
Plan of an Egyptian Temple. 89 
 
 chambers of the god. In the midst of these, and 
 often completely separated from all the other cham- 
 bers by a passage surrounding it on all four sides, is 
 the actual shrine. It may have a door at one or both 
 ends, and when the doors were closed it was utterly 
 dark. With the doors open, a person standing in 
 the shrine could look along the avenue of approach 
 from the main entrance, and could behold through 
 successive portals the rising point of sun or star on 
 the far horizon. Sometimes perhaps, through the 
 other doorway, the setting point might likewise be 
 discerned. Such a shrine represented, and in many 
 cases actually preserved, the distinctive features of the 
 complete prehistoric Egyptian temple. In all exist- 
 ing examples the shrine, or Holy of Holies, lies under 
 the same flat stone roof that covers all the inner 
 part of the temple. But observe that in many cases 
 it possesses the remarkable peculiarity that its walls 
 (unlike any others, both of whose faces are protected 
 by a roof) have an external batter or slope, and are 
 surmounted, close under the roof, by the moulding 
 called the Egyptian gorge. What does this indicate ? 
 There can be but one reply. The sloping walls and 
 the moulding at the top have no meaning except as 
 parts of an edifice standing free in the open air. 
 Buried in darkness, under a roof, in a part of the 
 temple inaccessible to the public, they serve no 
 
90 The Legacy of Egypt, 
 
 possible purpose of ornament. Obviously they were 
 retained because the normal form of a shrine had 
 become fixed before the days when shrines were sur- 
 rounded by dark passages and chambers, and when 
 they yet stood free in the open air, in the midst per- 
 haps of a sacred enclosure. In fact, the Holy of 
 Holies of even a late Ptolemaic temple, such as Den- 
 derah, reproduces the form of the ancient Egyptian 
 stone temple.^ 
 
 Close to the monstrous and clumsy building which 
 Ramses III. raised in his own honour at Medinet Abu, 
 near Thebes, there stands a smaller temple of good 
 proportions and graceful detail, inscribed with the 
 name of Thothmes III. A careful examination of this 
 beautiful edifice reveals the fact that its various parts 
 are of several dates. The courtyards of approach were 
 added in Ptolemaic times ; the dark chambers behind 
 the shrine and the passage around it were built by 
 Thothmes III. ; but the shrine itself is a much earlier 
 erection, the date of which we cannot with certainty 
 fix. Thothmes simply built additions on to an exist- 
 ing temple. Mr. Norman Lockyer has shown how, in 
 the case of a temple, accurately oriented at the time I 
 of its foundation towards the rising point of a star, the 
 date of the foundation may be deduced. With suc- 
 ceeding centuries the star's rising point changes its | 
 ^ See the plan of Edfu temple, p. 96. 
 
Medinet Abn. 
 
 91 
 
 position on the horizon, and the temple therefore no 
 longer faces the phenomenon it was intended to ob- 
 serve. Thus Mr. Lockyer accounts for the angle 
 between the axes of the two temples of different date 
 at Medinet Abu. A rough estimate of the date of 
 the older temple makes it, however, much more 
 icient than the time of Thothmes ill. It should 
 
 Typical Ancient Egyptian Shrine. 
 
 also be observed that the existing shrine-chamber has 
 a door at each end. When it stood free in the open 
 air the phenomena of the heavens could thus be 
 observed through both doors ; but when Thothmes 
 added his memorial chambers at the back he rendered 
 the western door useless. I point therefore to this 
 I shrine of Amen in the small temple at Medinet Abu 
 \ as the best existing type of the most ancient Egyp- 
 I tian stone-built temple. 
 
92 The Legacy of Egypt. 
 
 It was a plain stone edifice, oblong on plan, 
 with a door at each end. Its walls had an outward 
 batter or slope, and were crowned above by the 
 Egyptian gorge. Its roof was covered with large flat 
 stones supported directly on the walls. Each of the 
 four angles of the building was protected by a circular 
 moulding, returned under the gorge at the top of the 
 four walls. Nothing could well be simpler or more 
 monumental. Examples of later shrines of exactly 
 the same type doubtless existed in great numbers. 
 One, built for Ramses IL, still stands in the neigh- 
 bourhood of El Qab. It will be immediately ob- 
 served that this form of building, though known 
 only from stone examples, cannot have been invented 
 by masons. It is obviously a form which had be- 
 come fixed when some other building material than 
 stone was commonly employed. There can be no 
 doubt that this building material was crude or sun- 
 dried brick, such as the modern inhabitants of Egypt, 
 and all that part of the world, employ almost exclu- 
 sively to-day. Crude brick is wonderfully easy to 
 make and handle, but it has qualities of its own 
 which a builder must take into account. It is a 
 compressible and friable material. Hence the walls 
 of a crude brick building must be thicker at the 
 bottom than at the top ; this will, of course, be accom- 
 plished by making their outer surfaces slope. The 
 
Crude Brick Buildings. 93 
 
 "angles of such a building would be its weakest part ; 
 they were therefore strengthened with a bundle of 
 sticks or reeds bound together. In the absence of 
 cheap wood a suitable roof could, in rainless Egypt, 
 be made out of a quantity of long reeds or other stiff 
 straw daubed over with a little mud. Their ends, 
 plastered together and jutting out at the upper edge 
 of the walls, would produce the effect of a rough 
 moulding, and would form a decorative finish to the 
 wall. 
 
 y It was the formal imitation in stone of all these 
 features, proper to a crude brick building, which 
 was the foundation of Egyptian architecture ; and I 
 take this opportunity of asserting (in opposition to an 
 opinion widely entertained) that it has always been 
 the attempt to imitate, in one material, forms de- 
 veloped in and proper to another, that has generated 
 and furthered the decorative arts. 
 
 We can even go behind the remote point we have 
 thus inferentially attained, and stand as it were face 
 to face with the simple hut-temples of the prehis- 
 toric village-folk of the Nile valley. The hierogly- 
 phics in the earliest inscriptions depict, in truthful 
 detail, the actual objects whose names were the 
 same as the sounds they represent, or the objects 
 which they ideographically portray. We pos- 
 sess, in the form of determinatives for the word 
 
94 
 
 The Legacy of Egypt. 
 
 * temple,' at least two images of shrines of prehistoric 
 type. These shrines appear to be built of mud and 
 platted reeds, crowned above with the fringe which 
 I have described as the original of the gorge mould- 
 ing. In one case the building is strengthened with 
 wooden posts at the angles, those in front being tall 
 and corresponding to the great pylon masts of the 
 
 Mariette, Mastabas, 74. 
 
 Mariette, Monuments divers, 18 b. 
 
 historic temples. In both cases a paling marks the 
 limits of the sacred enclosure. These prehistoric 
 shrines were, I conceive, the village temples of the 
 ancient African tribes. Doubtless contemporary 
 with them there were many natural or artificial 
 cave shrines in the rock-walls of the Nile valley. 
 I conclude that the built stone temples of a later 
 date developed out of the mud-brick village shrine, 
 
The Early Type of House, 95 
 
 itself a mere copy of the habitation of the day ; 
 and that the cave or rock-cut shrine was the proto- 
 type of the speos. Thus the habitation of man, 
 whether built upon the surface of the ground or 
 formed by nature or art out of the hill-side, was 
 the prototype alike of tomb and temple ; and so the 
 history of architecture goes back not to trees but 
 to caves and tents. 
 
 The earliest temple, like the earliest abode, was a 
 single chamber or grotto. To this nucleus other parts 
 were by degrees added, as civilisation advanced and 
 human needs became more complex. Where people 
 lived, as in inhospitable climes they were driven to 
 live, in a state of clan-communism they tended to 
 increase the number of chambers in the communal 
 house almost indefinitely. But across the broad strip 
 of the world in which the oldest civilisations arose, 
 clan-communism does not seem to have prevailed. 
 Alike in Egypt, Arabia, Mesopotamia, and all we 
 know of southern Asia, each family lived a separate 
 life in its own house or tent. Such a house prob- 
 ably contained the same three essential parts as still 
 characterise the dwellings of the common folk all over 
 the east, to wit, an open yard, a public chamber, and 
 a private or women's chamber, all included within a 
 single wall. These three parts might be combined 
 and elaborated in a variety of ways. In the case of 
 
96 
 
 The Legacy of Egypt. 
 
 a royal palace they became the khan (the court-yard, 
 offices, and so forth), the seraglio (the men's part), 
 and the harem (the private and women's part). 
 Such was the palace of Ulysses as described in the 
 
 Temple of Edfu, 
 from Maspero. 
 
 Homeric House, 
 
 according to the Odyssey, 
 
 Hell. Jnl vii. 173. 
 
 Odyssey. Entering the main portal the visitor found 
 himself in a court-yard surrounded by a portico ; 
 beyond that was the public chamber with the domes- 
 tic hearth ; beyond that again were the treasury and 
 private chambers of the head of the family and his 
 women-folk. A passage, entered from the courtyard, 
 
The House of the God, 97 
 
 passed all round the men's and women's apart- 
 ; ments, and was enclosed by an outer wall. Compare 
 ' with this the plan of a developed Egyptian temple 
 \ such as Edfu. The similarity is striking. There is 
 ; the same great enclosure wall, the same court-yard of 
 ; entrance surrounded by a portico, then two succes- 
 \ sive reception chambers of magnificent dimensions, 
 ] and finally the shrine and the private chambers and 
 treasuries around it. All that lies behind the court- 
 yard is in this case also surrounded by a passage. 
 
 Thus to the latest time the idea of the Egyptian 
 temple remained the same. It was the house of the 
 god. The inmost chamber was his actual abode, 
 I where his presence was from time to time revealed. 
 Thither he could only be followed by the priests, his 
 servants, or the princes, the members of his family. 
 The Hall of Columns was his guest-chamber, and 
 there he received the worshippers who came to pay 
 him honour. They were for the time being his 
 guests, and enjoyed the ancient rights of a guest. 
 The stranger who entered a man's public chamber 
 with due ceremony, and was accepted by the owner 
 of the abode (the acceptation generally taking the 
 visible form of an offer of food and drink) was 
 regarded as sacred during the continuance of his stay. 
 Hence by analogy there appears to have arisen the 
 right of sanctuary, connected with temples in so 
 
 G 
 
98 The Legacy of Egypt, 
 
 many lands. Sacrifice was the feast shared with a 
 god, Sanctuary was the guest-right in the god's 
 abode. 
 
 We have thus briefly discussed the temple-type 
 which the Egyptians were the first to develop on a 
 large scale, thereby creating their important style of 
 architecture. It is now time to pass to a considera- 
 tion of that style. Observe then, in the first place, 
 that it was indigenous in Egypt. It arose, as we 
 have seen, out of imitation in stone of mud-brick 
 buildings. In all probability stone was used for 
 tombs earlier than for temples. The temple was for 
 the living, and could be rebuilt again and again ; 
 the tomb was for the dead, and impious generations ,; 
 would inevitably suffer it to fall into neglect. Yet 
 it was the * eternal abode ' of a ghost, and was be- 
 lieved to be immensely important to the ghost's 
 welfare. There was, therefoi'e* every encouragement 
 for a man to build his tomb of the most durable 
 materials. It may be that^the actual invention of 
 building with squared stones was made in the Nile 
 valley, in consequence of this desire for sepulchral 
 permanence, but there are difficulties in the way of j 
 this assumption. No doubt Nature has been generous 
 to Egypt of the best building- stone, everywhere easily 
 accessible and inexhaustible in quantity ; still, if 
 stone-building was an Egyptian invention, why do 
 
Snefru s Pyramid Temple, 99 
 
 we find no traces of the early stages of the craft ? 
 The climate of Egypt does not destroy a ruin that 
 lies upon the surface of the soil. Once buried under 
 the desert-sand even paper endures for ever. But 
 the oldest Egyptian stone buildings, Snefru's pyra- 
 mid at Medum and the contemporary sepulchres of 
 his courtiers and family there and at Gizeh, show- 
 no faltering handiwork. On the contrary, for per- 
 fection of masonry the pyramid of Medum can 
 scarcely be surpassed. It may well be, therefore, 
 that the people who brought bronze tools to Egypt 
 likewise brought the developed craft of building in 
 stone. What is equally clear is that they did not 
 bring the art of stone architecture. The art was 
 created in the Nile valley. 
 
 Mr. Petrie's discovery of Snefru's pyramid temple 
 gives a fixed point of departure. He described it 
 as follows, in the Academy ^ in a letter of March 31, 
 1 89 1 : — 'The temple is joined to the east face of 
 the pyramid. The front is about 30 feet wide and 
 9 high, with a door in the south end of the face. 
 A passage parallel to the front, and 20 feet long, 
 leads to the chamber, which is 20 by 7 feet. A 
 wide doorway leads from this into the open-air 
 court built against the pyramid face. The altar of 
 offerings, quite plain, stands in the middle of the 
 court, and an obelisk on either side of it. These 
 
loo The Legacy of Egypt, 
 
 obelisks are over 1 3 feet high, with rounded tops and 
 uninscribed.' — The temple is absolutely undecorated. 
 Its walls are plain and vertical, with no moulding or 
 cornice anywhere. Its roof is flat. There is, there- 
 fore, no art of architecture manifested in this edifice 
 — nothing but the craft of building. The same is 
 again true of the fourth dynasty granite building in 
 the neighbourhood of the Sphinx at Gizeh. There is 
 a certain luxury of material in it, and a remarkable 
 finish of workmanship, but, beyond some simple 
 grooving of the vertical exterior face of the walls, 
 there is no trace whatever of decoration, nor is there 
 any beauty of proportions or other artistic charm. 
 
 Each of the three great pyramids had a temple, 
 corresponding in position to that of Snefru's pyra- 
 mid. All three were clearly similar in style to the 
 granite temple. Fourment (Description d'Heliopolis 
 et de Memphis^ Paris, 1775, p. 259) gives the follow- 
 ing account of them : — * A quelques pas de la second 
 Pyramide, on decouvre les restes d'un temple ; qui 
 en occupoient presque toute la face ; mais ceux que 
 Ton voit tout pres de la troisieme Pyramide, sont 
 beaucoup plus en tiers. On trouve quatre piliers, et 
 on tournoit autour de ces piliers comme par une 
 esp^ce de collaterale : les pierres dont ces temples 
 ^toient batis, avoient 27 pieds de long sur 18 de 
 large, et quatre d'^paisseur. C'est a leur grosseur 
 
Pyramid Temples. loi 
 
 enorme qu'on est redevable de ce qui en reste : ces 
 pierres ^toient rev^tues de marbre granite.' 
 
 According to Mr. Petrie, all these temples were 
 built with a core of megalithic limestone blocks, 
 weighing some 1 00 tons each, over which was a 
 casing of granite or alabaster. The temple of the 
 second pyramid seems, like the granite temple, to 
 have had an open court on its roof. Light was 
 admitted by holes in the roof The doorways were 
 unadorned. Flat walls, monolith piers, and beams 
 of square section supporting flat roof slabs, — in all 
 this there is no trace of architectural art. Plenty of 
 skilful handicraft is implied, but no artistic con- 
 ception. The elaborate proportions of the Great 
 Pyramid are not artistic, for no impression is pro- 
 duced upon the eye by the position of hidden 
 chambers or the slope of passages. One does not 
 see how any style of decoration was to be suggested 
 by stone monoliths lying one upon another ; fancy 
 could not be expected to play with them. She had 
 to begin on something lighter. 
 
 The same lesson is again taught by the private 
 tombs, or mastabas, of the upper classes of the 
 same period. They do not possess separate temples 
 for the presentation of offerings to the ghost, but they 
 often contain chambers specially built for that pur- 
 pose. These have been excavated in great numbers. 
 
I02 The Legacy of Egypt, 
 
 The best of them is the famous tomb of Ti at 
 Sakkarah. No one, however, will claim that as a 
 work of architecture. It is a mere solid mass of 
 masonry traversed by certain ill-proportioned pas- 
 sages, leading to chambers equally ill-proportioned. 
 Square piers are employed when necessary for sup- 
 porting the roof. The walls are covered with a 
 kind of pictorial chronicle of the occupations and 
 property of the ghost of Ti, but this is not decora- 
 tively handled. The beginnings of architecture must 
 be sought elsewhere. We find them in smaller ob- 
 jects of funeral furniture. Stone sarcophagi, such as 
 Khafra's or Khu-fu-ankh's, imitated wooden or crude 
 brick edifices before such imitation was attempted on 
 a larger scale. The stele, or imitation door, through 
 which the ghost passed to receive his victuals, was 
 constantly carved in stone to resemble the ordinary 
 house-doorway of the period. To treat the actual 
 stone portal of a tomb in a similar way was a next 
 step. Thus, by degrees, imitation in stone of features 
 proper to wood and crude brick structures became 
 more and more frequent. 
 
 We saw in the last chapter (p. 71) how the evi- 
 dence of hieroglyphics of the time of Snefru proves 
 that wooden columns, with capitals of the papyrus 
 form, had long been a fixed architectural type. 
 They had been fashioned in wood and used for 
 
The Beginnings of Architecture. 103 
 
 centuries, and perhaps thousands of years, before 
 any architect attempted to copy them in stone. Mr. 
 Petrie noticed {A Season in Egypt, 1887, Plate XXV.), 
 on either side of the doorway of Khufu-kha-f's tomb 
 at Gizeh (fourth dynasty), a graceful column carved 
 in low relief, represented as supporting the lintel. 
 It has a capital, the profile of which is the Egyptian 
 gorge, and it rests on a cushion base (fig. i). Actual 
 columns, mostly rather clumsy in form, are found 
 in some sixth dynasty tombs at Assouan, Isbayda, 
 and elsewhere. Moreover, sixth dynasty doorways 
 are better proportioned, and often very effectively 
 decorated. The interiors, too, of tomb chambers of 
 this period are spacious, and produce a pleasant 
 effect upon a person entering them. If we had a 
 few more remains, or if those we do possess had 
 been more wisely studied, we could generalise more 
 confidently. As things are, it is only possible to 
 express the opinion that, about the time of the sixth 
 dynasty, Egyptian stone-building began to enter the 
 domain of architecture. 
 
 The first great period of stone architecture we 
 know of in Egypt was contemporary with the dura- 
 tion of the Middle Empire. Unfortunately, not a 
 building (except, perhaps, that shrine in the midst of 
 Thothmes' temple at Medinet Abu), nay, scarcely so 
 much as the plan of one, has come down to us from 
 
I04 The Legacy of Egypt, 
 
 that relatively modern age. It is only from the 
 so-called Speos Artemidos and the rock-cut tombs of 
 Beni-Hasan, Assiout, Assouan, and other places, and 
 from a study of certain interesting relics unearthed 
 by Mr. Flinders Petrie at Kahun, that we are enabled 
 to form a sound judgment on the matter. 
 
 The mounds of Medinet Kahun, in the Fayum, 
 which Mr. Petrie excavated, covered the ruins of a 
 town once inhabited by the workmen who built the 
 pyramid and dependent temples of Usertasen II., a 
 king of the twelfth dynasty. The town was aban- 
 doned when the works in question were completed. 
 All objects found in the ruins of the houses must 
 therefore be dated at about 2500 B.C. Now, from 
 many houses Mr. Petrie recovered certain remarkable 
 stands in the form of columns with base and capital, 
 crowned on top of all with a cup or hollowed out into 
 cup form (figs. 2, 3, 4, 5). In the cups were found 
 remnants of bread paste, affording proof that these 
 stands were altars for domestic offerings. Amongst 
 the considerable number of such stands which have 
 been found there are examples of every known type 
 of Egyptian column and capital. Remembering 
 that the inhabitants of Kahun were chiefly masons, 
 actually employed in temple-building, we may well 
 conclude that in these altars we possess repetitions 
 of the types of column employed in the temples of 
 
Early Types of Column. 
 
 105 
 
 pu/vN • a •« ■ 
 
 r. . r , . r . , r , , r 
 
 _l.roo-r. 
 
io6 The Legacy of Egypt, 
 
 Usertasen, and in the marvellous mass of temples, 
 not far distant, which were known to the Greeks by 
 the name Labyrinth. 
 
 From the graceful forms suggested by the models, 
 we are prepared to assume that the buildings of the 
 period must have been characterised by no little 
 architectural charm. We are confirmed in this 
 assumption by what we find in the best rock-cut 
 temple and tombs of the period. The Speos Arte- 
 midos, though it bears no earlier name than that of 
 Queen Hatasu of the eighteenth dynasty, was obvi- 
 ously cut out of the rock at the same time as the 
 neighbouring Beni Hasan tombs, which it closely 
 resembles. It is therefore the oldest existing Egyp- 
 tian temple. It consists of an outer portico, whence 
 a passage leads into the spacious inner chamber, 
 which contains a niche carved in the wall opposite 
 the door. All the parts are excellently proportioned, 
 and the effect of the whole is architecturally fine. 
 Amongst the tombs, that of Ameni, an officer of 
 Usertasen I., is pre-eminent. The conclusions de- 
 rived from these are supported by the evidence of 
 the sadly wrecked sepulchre of Hapzefa at Assi- 
 out, that of Se-Renpu at Assouan, and many more. 
 Every one of these excavated chambers is beautiful 
 in its proportions, and tasteful in the colour and dis- 
 tribution of its decorations. The porticos of approach, 
 
 I 
 
 
The Best Egyptian Period, 
 
 107 
 
 though simple, are always architecturally fine. The 
 proportions of the parts of every member, and of the 
 various members to one another, are excellent. If 
 the designers of tombs were thus gifted with a fine 
 architectural understanding, how much more the 
 architects of a great temple like the Labyrinth, the 
 largest in area that the world ever saw. Small 
 wonder that Greek travellers were so much impressed, 
 not alone by its size, but by its beauty also. 
 
 Temple of Elephantine. 
 
 The great period of Egyptian architecture did 
 not end with the Hyksos invasion. The style was, 
 if I mistake not, a product rather of Upper than of 
 Lower Egypt, and it was Lower Egypt that chiefly 
 suffered from the Hyksos. When, therefore, with 
 the eighteenth dynasty, Upper Egypt, under the 
 leadership of Thebes, again came to the front, the 
 style revived in all its splendour, and in the time of 
 
io8 The Legacy of Egypt, 
 
 Hatasu, Thothmes III., Amenhotep iii., and Kuenaten 
 (the great monotheistical heretic), wonderful works 
 were made. Unfortunately, almost everything of the 
 period has been ruthlessly destroyed. Last to go 
 was the charming little temple at Elephantine, but 
 fortunately not until Napoleon's Commission had 
 made an accurate record of it. What must have 
 been a scarcely less beautiful shrine, behind El Qab, 
 is still standing, and so are portions of Hatasu's 
 funeral temple, known as the Dair el Bahari, whilst 
 two charming temples erected under Thothmes ill., 
 one about the old shrine at Medinet Abu, the other 
 against the north wall of the great enclosure of Kar- 
 nak, are still in an excellent state of preservation. 
 
 Some heavy and bad work was likewise done 
 during the latter part of the eighteenth dynasty, as 
 the portion of the great temple of Luxor, built by 
 Amenhotep III., proves ; but, in the main, the virtues 
 of the style were preserved even into the reign of 
 Seti, of the nineteenth dynasty. The best temple 
 built for him (so far as we can now judge) was the 
 votive temple at Abydos, but it will be observed that 
 in it the charm lies, not in the architecture, but in 
 the wonderful decoration. 
 
 The vice that destroyed the style was the desire 
 for extravagant dimensions. Now, it will be at once 
 perceived that there were limits to the possible size 
 
 I 
 
The Limit of Size. 
 
 of a building in the Egyptian style. The space 
 between any two columns was limited by the length 
 of the monolith beam they had to support, and such 
 beams, if increased in length, had to be likewise 
 greatly increased in area of section and weight, and 
 a slight increase in length beyond a certain point 
 involved a considerable increase in weight. Increase 
 of weight in the roof involved increased thickness in 
 the columns, and, when a certain point was reached, 
 this increase of thickness used up all the space gained 
 by the increased length of the roof-bearing stone 
 beams. A further increase in the thickness of the 
 columns was involved by any increase in their height. 
 It is therefore clear that the larger any chamber of a 
 stone edifice in the Egyptian style was made, beyond 
 a certain point, the g/eater did the ratio of the volume 
 of the solids to the volume of voids become. There 
 was a certain value for this ratio beyond which it 
 could not be carried without producing an ugly result, 
 and, so far as we can now tell, that value was passed 
 in the time of Seti, and thenceforward the style of 
 the architecture of Egypt went from bad to worse. 
 Almost all the temples built for Ramses II., the ' great' 
 Ramses, are frightful monstrosities, worst of all being 
 the Ramesseum, and that Great Hall of Columns 
 added by Seti and Ramses to the temple of Karnak. 
 Through the reign of Ramses III. the decadence 
 
no The Legacy of Egypt, 
 
 continued, and a glance at the lumbering ugliness of 
 the vast temple at Medinet Abu is enough to show 
 the degradation to which the Egyptian style de- 
 scended. Whether the strong Mesopotamian influ- 
 ence, which is so visible in Egypt throughout all the 
 nineteenth dynasty, was the cause of this decadence, 
 is a point as to which I do not care to express more 
 than a suspicion. 
 
 Under the twenty-sixth dynasty all the arts of 
 Egypt revived, and it is not improbable that archi- 
 tecture shared in the movement. Too little, how- 
 ever, remains to decide the question. At the very 
 close of the pagan period, in the reigns of the 
 Ptolemies and the Roman Emperors, the last great 
 school of Egyptian architecture flourished. It is not 
 correct to describe this revival as the result of Greek 
 influence. Greek influence was a factor in it, and an 
 important factor. The Greeks had worked out to 
 ultimate perfection the whole theory of architectural 
 proportion, and good proportion was an essential 
 element in all good Egyptian architecture, as in 
 all architecture whatever. The architects of Egypt 
 maintained the ancient traditions, though, as artists, 
 they could not fail to experience whatever fine in- 
 fluences they came in contact with, but they only 
 gave effect to those influences in so far as they were 
 thereby enabled to develop to an ultimate perfection 
 
The Influence of Egypt. 1 1 1 
 
 the style of their own country. A temple like the 
 charming little Dair el Medinet, near Thebes, shows 
 how fine in detail and proportions a small Ptolemaic 
 edifice could be ; whilst the world-renowned fanes 
 of Edfu, Denderah, and Esneh manifest the sur- 
 passing grandeur which the style was capable of 
 attaining. 
 
 Observe now that architecture was, par excellence^ 
 the Egyptian art which influenced the Greeks. Medi- 
 terranean folk, as Mr. Petrie has shown, were settled 
 in Egypt as early as the twelfth dynasty. There 
 were certainly plenty of them there under the nine- 
 teenth. The excavations at Mycenae have proved 
 that eighteenth dynasty Egyptian pottery was ex- 
 ported to that locality, a portion of a cartouche of 
 Amenhotep III. {Ephemeris, 1888, p. 156) having 
 been found in Tomb 49. The ancient world was not 
 the collection of isolated centres that, till recently, 
 it was pictured to have been ; nor was Egyptian 
 civilisation so very much in advance of contemporary 
 Mediterranean civilisation. Commerce and travel 
 are far older than history. The mutual influences 
 of peoples dwelling in localities relatively widely 
 sundered from one another, were operating even 
 before the discovery of metals. The Greeks, who 
 visited Egypt in the historic period and recorded 
 their observations, tell us that it was the religious 
 
112 The Legacy of Egypt. 
 
 architecture of the country that chiefly impressed 
 them. Others beside the men of Egypt could work 
 metals, make glass and pottery, paint, weave, and all 
 the rest, and did these things at least as well, and 
 in many cases at as early a date as they were 
 done, on the banks of the Nile. But of all races of 
 the earth the Egyptians were first both in time 
 and, amongst their contemporaries, in quality for 
 their stone architecture. The fundamental idea of 
 the best architecture of Greece, the Doric style, was 
 borrowed from Egypt. But a decadent is never an 
 aggressive, conquering style. It was not the mon- 
 strous and hideous buildings of the Ramessides 
 that founded the architecture of the world, for in 
 them there was properly speaking no art. Fine 
 proportion was the root of life in Greek architecture. 
 Whencesoever the Greeks borrowed the different 
 members of their decoration, or what may be called 
 the raw material handled by their art, is a matter 
 of relatively small importance. It is the origin of 
 the principles that guided that handling, the pedi- 
 gree of the style, that is worth the trouble of dis- 
 covery. Herein, then, consists the importance of 
 the architecture of Egypt in the long period that 
 intervened between the opening of the sixth and the 
 close of the eighteenth dynasties. That architecture 
 in all the well-preserved monuments that we can 
 
Egyptian Influence. 113 
 
 investigate or approach manifests the same excellent 
 virtue of proportion which the Greeks elaborated to 
 final and unsurpassed perfection. But for the architec- 
 ture of Egypt the Parthenon could not have existed. 
 
 In the sculptured work of many peoples the 
 influence of the Egyptian canon may be perceived, 
 but this influence is never paramount nor vital. 
 Certain early and, for the most part, very bad Greek 
 sculptures are manifestly attempts in the Egyptian 
 style, but they gave birth to nothing. It was the 
 influence of the East, acting upon the local style 
 developed in metal-work and other embellishments, 
 that generated Greek sculpture. 
 
 In the large domain of decorative art Egypt 
 received as much as she bestowed. Some Egyptian 
 pottery of the finer kind is found on Greek and 
 Etruscan soil ; but then no inconsiderable quantity 
 of Phoenician, ^gean, and even early Italic (black) 
 pottery has been discovered and identified in different 
 parts of Egypt. Trifles such as scarabs were imitated 
 by the Etruscans, and one might point to various 
 other minor imitations made by foreign peoples, and 
 minor influences exerted by Egypt upon foreign arts. 
 The total of the whole was small and unimportant. 
 Only the Phoenicians attempted any systematic imita- 
 tion of Egyptian principles of decoration and design ; 
 and this fact is significant because the Phoenicians 
 
 H 
 
1 14 The Legacy of Egypt, 
 
 were an utterly inartistic people. They were the 
 English of the ancient world. They made cheap 
 forgeries of Egyptian wares, just as in our own day 
 Birmingham forges the trays of Japan or the gods 
 of India ; but these things are done not for enjoy- 
 ment, the only seed of art, but for Mammon, god of 
 modern Philistia. The influence of the Phoenicians 
 upon Art- History was nil^ except in so far as they 
 were common carriers, salesmen, and occasionally 
 imitators of the works of art of other peoples. 
 
 Egyptian art bore to the contemporary arts of the 
 ancient world a relation similar to that now borne 
 by Japanese art to the arts of Europe. Egyp- 
 tian works of art were admired and purchased by 
 other peoples, but they were not imitated, and for the 
 same very good reason that prevents Japanese works 
 of art, though greatly admired, from being directly 
 imitated by good European artists. Japanese art is 
 the outcome of the nature and conditions of life of a 
 remarkable and ancient people. It expresses in all 
 points the ideal of their existence. Its subjects fall 
 within a narrow range. The treatment of them is the 
 outcome of a long and slowly-developed tradition. 
 The education of Japanese artists is moreover ac- 
 complished in slow, complete, and traditional wise. 
 Japanese art, therefore, belongs entirely to Japan, and 
 cannot be imitated elsewhere. All its parts are 
 
Solitary Egypt. 115 
 
 interrelated so completely that one principle, manner, 
 or method cannot be taken away from the rest. 
 Foreigners may admire its spirit, and attempt to 
 infuse something of the same kind into their own 
 work, but its ideals and forms are not and cannot 
 become theirs. 
 
 So it was with Egypt in face of the ancient 
 world. It was a country apart. Its spirit v/as 
 wholly different from that of any other nation. Its 
 civilisation was largely the gift of the Nile and the 
 climate. Nature surrounds the Egyptian with a 
 visibly law-abiding group of powers. It cuts him off 
 by deserts from the rest of the world, and closely 
 unites him by the Nile to all his fellow-countrymen. 
 His life is despotically determined for him by the 
 recurring ways and habits of his river. Hence it 
 came to pass that when the Egyptians were an 
 organised and independent people, working out their 
 own ideas for themselves, they developed a civilisa- 
 tion unique in character, and an art that entirely ex- 
 pressed it. At this art they laboured for some five 
 thousand years, and, but for the inroad of foreign and 
 revolutionary influences in the wake first of Christi- 
 anity and afterwards of Islam, the ancient traditions 
 would have maintained themselves in the Egypt even 
 of to-day, just as traditions almost as ancient have 
 maintained themselves in China. 
 
1 16 The Legacy of Egypt, 
 
 From these facts it will be at once perceived that 
 by however much the art of Egypt was suited to 
 express the Egyptian ideal, by so much was it un- 
 suited to express, or even to enter as a factor into 
 the expression of the ideals of other and differently 
 constituted nations. And all other nations were so 
 very differently constituted from the Egyptians. The 
 Greeks, with their loose confederations, succeeding 
 one another under various hegemonies and names, 
 were most differently constituted of all. In studying 
 the broad bases upon which Greek art rested, it is 
 therefore unnecessary, except in the case of architec- 
 ture, to look for any considerable contribution from 
 Egypt. All that was characteristically Egyptian in 
 the decorative and representative arts of Egypt was 
 firmly rooted in Egyptian soil. 
 
 I 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 THE LEGACY OF CHALDEA. 
 
 IT has already been shown how Chaldean civilisa- 
 tion arose at the meeting-place of the highways 
 of mankind. We have now to manifest the qualities 
 of the art which that civilisation produced, and the 
 influence exercised by it upon the art of the ancient 
 world. A civilisation flourishing where the world's 
 highways met could not but produce far-reaching 
 effects. Its influences may be traced from China in 
 the East to the Pillars of Hercules in the West. No 
 history of the world's science but must take account of 
 the astrologers and priests of the Chaldees ; no history 
 of the world's art but must give a prominent place to 
 the palaces of Assyria, and the produce of the work- 
 shops of Babylon. Religion, science, literature, com- 
 merce, art — upon every one of these did Babylon set 
 the seal of her powerful personality, and the impress 
 can be traced in them at the present day. 
 
 The style of art and the capacity of the artists of 
 ancient Chaldea, at a time variously estimated at 
 
1 1 8 The Legacy of Chaldea. 
 
 from 2500 to 4500 B.C., are best seen in the remark- 
 able series of diorite and porphyry sculptures now in 
 the Louvre. They were discovered at Tello, amongst 
 the ruins of Lagas, by M. de Sarzec. Most of these 
 figures were originally set up by the architect-king 
 Gudea, to be, as it were, his deputies, worshipping 
 for ever in his stead in the temple of Nin-girsu, his 
 divinity. On one of them is an important inscrip- 
 tion, recording how the diorite of which it is made 
 was fetched, apparently in ships, from distant Sinai, 
 and how stones for the temple were brought down the 
 river from the mountains of the north and west, with 
 cedars from Amanus, and other materials from other 
 places not yet identified — a proof of the extent of the 
 commerce, and apparently of the sea-going commerce, 
 of that remote period. 
 
 The quarries from which Gudea fetched his hard 
 stone were probably the same that were worked by 
 the ancient Egyptians as far back as history reaches. 
 We may conclude that the sculptors of the two coun- 
 tries were acquainted with each other's methods. Both 
 employed diamond drills to cut the unruly material of 
 which their chief works had to be formed ; both were 
 forced by the nature of that material to adopt a 
 similar broad treatment of surface, and there may 
 have been much else in common between them. The 
 difference between the ideals of their art is, therefore, 
 
Portrait Statues, 119 
 
 the more remarkable. It was, in fact, a fundamental 
 difference. Figure sculpture arose in Egypt to supply 
 material forms intended to take the place of the body 
 as a support for the ghost in the event of the body 
 being utterly destroyed. In later times the Egyptians 
 invented various uses for portrait statues other than, 
 but developed out of, this primary use. The statues of 
 a man's ancestors found a respected place in his abode, 
 and formed the subject of important ceremonials. 
 The Romans inherited this Egyptian custom, and 
 maintained it down to a late date. An examination 
 of the pictorial representations of ancient Egyptian 
 funeral ceremonies shows what importance was at- 
 tached to everything concerning the statue of the 
 deceased. That statue was intended to endure for 
 'e\;^er. It might be from time to time seen by the 
 man's descendants when they came to make offerings 
 to his ghost, but to be seen was not its primary inten- 
 tion. It was made simply in order that it might 
 exist. By existing and enduring it performed its 
 function. It was not intended as a mere memorial 
 for a man's descendants, but to be of use to the ghost 
 of the man himself and, above all things, to last for 
 ever. The endless repose and persistence of the 
 tomb, therefore, found expression in Egyptian portrait 
 sculpture, and became the controlling ideal of the 
 artist. Statues of the Pharaoh arid other gods might 
 
1 20 The Legacy of Chaldea. 
 
 have been characterised by another spirit, but the 
 cultus of the dead inspired all Egyptian worship, and 
 thus gods and ghosts came to be materialised under 
 the governance of one ideal. 
 
 The sculpture of ancient Chaldea conveys us 
 into a different spiritual atmosphere. Gudea's figures 
 are not musty of the tomb, but are, and were intended 
 to be, instinct with living worship. They were to 
 stand before Nin-girsu for ever, a visible incorpora- 
 tion of Gudea's worship and prayer. They were to 
 be seen of gods and men. In action as well as form 
 they had need to be recognisable. It is true that the 
 Egyptian sculptors under the fifth dynasty attained 
 no inconsiderable skill in the representation of the 
 simpler attitudes and gestures of the human figure, 
 but this cannot be said of Egyptian sculptors as a 
 whole. If the head was a likeness, that sufficed. 
 The figure was constructed according to a simple 
 scheme, and not studied from the life. But the 
 Chaldean artist desired to make the stone live, and 
 therefore studied minutely from the living model. 
 This is apparent not only in the truthful detail 
 observable in the extremities, but still more in the 
 vivid look of life which many of these broken images 
 retain. Moreover the heads that have survived are 
 clearly portraits, one perhaps of a Semite, the other 
 (with a turban) of an Elamite. The aspect of vitality 
 
The Ideal of Strength, 1 2 1 
 
 is attained partly by the just rendering of a simple 
 but natural pose, partly by the honesty of the artist's 
 attempt to reproduce the main forms of the muscles 
 in the nude parts of the figure. Gudea is made to 
 look like a strong man, like one whose blow would be 
 effective. He is a man of war worshipping a warlike 
 divinity. The Egyptian ideal of the tomb was not 
 a warlike ideal. The ghostly inhabitants of Amenti 
 did not fight their way to bliss, but relied upon 
 the wiles and magic of priestcraft to bring them safe 
 into the Boat of the Sun. The people of Tigris 
 and Euphrates were no such mild folk. They were 
 fighters, and their admiring fancy conceived of no 
 figure that was not strong. Herein is struck the 
 key-note of the Chaldeo- Assyrian school of sculpture. 
 This was the quality that made their art potent, and 
 carried its influences afar. 
 
 We deal with the Chaldeo-Assyrian school as 
 one, because Assyria, so far as we yet know, bor- 
 rowed her art, and even perhaps hired her artists, 
 from Chaldea. In Chaldea the style seems to have 
 arisen — Chaldea the meeting-place of men, where 
 various influences could marry and produce. Out 
 of Chaldea went forth the colony that founded the 
 Semitic kingdom of Assyria, and out of Chaldea 
 went forth the art called Assyrian. It is likely 
 enough that in a mixed population like the Chaldean 
 
122 The Legacy of Chaldea, 
 
 the artistic class and the fighting and governing class 
 were racially distinct, even as they are in England 
 to-day. The fighting and governing Englishman, 
 who has founded a world empire, is in a general way 
 recognised as the inheritor (doubtless from a mixed 
 ancestry) of Teutonic characteristics ; the artistic 
 English are often described as Celtic, a word that 
 in modern use only means not Teuton. In early 
 days the Semitic element in Chaldea was small. 
 Chaldean art was certainly not of Semitic origin. 
 Gradually the Semitic folk increased until finally 
 they became the dominant class in the country. In 
 Assyria their predominance was still more marked. 
 Though Chaldean art was not created either by or 
 for the Semites, but developed under the hands of 
 Accadians and Sumerians, its subject-matter was 
 greatly influenced and by degrees almost entirely 
 dictated by Semitic patrons. Gudea liked to have 
 himself recognisably portrayed ; but when the Se- 
 mites gained the upper hand, they no longer de- 
 manded nor perhaps even permitted portraiture. 
 The persistent Semitic superstition connected with 
 the Evil Eye has always tended to make the East 
 iconoclastic. The laws of the ancient Hebrews 
 prohibited portraiture in the most uncompromising 
 fashion. Mohammedanism adopted and spread wide 
 the same restriction. For a time the influence of the 
 
Assyrian Sculpture. 123 
 
 East availed to impose iconoclasm even upon the 
 orthodox Christian Church. It need not, therefore, 
 be matter for surprise if in all Assyrian art we find 
 no example of portraiture. The temples of Egypt 
 were filled with the likenesses of the reigning 
 Pharaoh ; there were many images, but not one like- 
 ness of a king of Assyria in all the area of his 
 domains. 
 
 But if the individual traits of the king's likeness 
 might not be reproduced by Assyrian artists, they 
 were, on the other hand, encouraged to make typical 
 representations of men of all classes. The walls of 
 Assyrian palaces were covered with painted bas- 
 reliefs, either of talismanic import or descriptive of 
 the great events of war, worship, and the chase, 
 wherein the king had been concerned. Whether the 
 particular monarch were Sargon, or Esarhaddon, or 
 Assurbanipal, he was represented under the guise of 
 the ideal Assyrian ; and the self-same type was 
 multiplied in the case of every Assyrian general or 
 soldier who found place within the design. The 
 same head, repeated again and again, varying indeed 
 somewhat from generation to generation, as all ideal 
 types must vary, did duty also for the heads of the 
 great winged lions or bulls, and of human-headed 
 divinities ; and what is true of the heads is likewise 
 true of bodies and limbs. The Assyrian artist had 
 
1 24 The Legacy of Chaldea, 
 
 to chronicle his histories of war and the chase by 
 means of a number of typical figures. The same 
 man, indefinitely multiplied, went a-hunting and 
 slaughtered lions, or wild asses, or gazelles, or what- 
 ever they might be. However much the positions 
 and movements of individual animals might vary, 
 the animals themselves were in every case typically 
 conceived, and repeated as often as required. The 
 importance of this peculiar restriction, in its effect 
 upon the artistic treatment of the human figure, will 
 be at once apparent. Only the common wall-decora- 
 tions in Egypt were made up of images of the aver- 
 age man ; the best works of Egyptian art dealt with 
 the individual, as witness the Ramses II. at Turin, or 
 the royal portrait heads of the eighteenth dynasty in 
 the Gizeh Museum. Assyrian artists were forced 
 away from the individual to the ideal, and the ideal 
 imposed upon them was one of strength and life. 
 Not a man with feeble arm or wasted form were 
 they allowed to depict. They were called upon to 
 make visible many a cruel action, and much that was 
 gross, but nothing weak or unmanly. The Assyrian 
 ideal of divinity included a similar mixture of 
 qualities, little admirable to modern tastes, which are 
 inclined to err somewhat in the opposite direction. 
 An Assyrian's god was always strong, and full of 
 the rage, the life, the power, and the cruelty of war. 
 
 I 
 
Study of Nature, 125 
 
 The human form seemed insufficient to embody his 
 qualities. His swiftness was as the eagle's, his 
 strength as the strength of a lion or a bull ; only his 
 intelligence and foresight were gathered from man. 
 Thus it came to pass that Oriental artists were led 
 to develop that remarkable series of creatures half- 
 man, half-beast, or of mixed bestial forms, which in 
 due course spread over the world, and were imitated 
 in many other countries. Angels, cloven-footed 
 fiends, sirens, centaurs, sphinxes, and all the rest of 
 the imaginary fauna of the heavens and hells of 
 human belief can be traced back to the artists of 
 Mesopotamia, or the men who instructed them. 
 
 The Assyrian ideal of vital strength, the ideal of 
 a nation or caste of warriors, was of course, in every 
 respect, more potent than the silence and repose of 
 the tombs of Egypt. Assyrian artists were kept by 
 it in contact with nature, and with nature in those 
 forms that manifest most plainly the power and 
 glory of life. Working, as they did, almost wholly 
 for the princes and commanders of the people, it 
 was for them to clothe in visible form what their 
 patrons enjoyed to remember and recount. Their 
 function was similar to that of the makers of sagas 
 in Viking days. Their masters were proudest of 
 their battles and their hunts, the march of armies 
 and the slaughter of foes, bestial or human. It was 
 
126 The Legacy of Chaldea. 
 
 under these conditions that the palaces of the kings 
 of Assyria were decorated with that vast series of 
 pictorial bas-reliefs, some of which form a chief glory 
 of the British Museum. 
 
 A comparison between the treatment of the lion 
 in Egyptian and Assyrian art plainly manifests the 
 contrast between the ideals of the two schools. The 
 British Museum contains specimens of both, to wit, 
 a pair of recumbent lions of the time of Amen- 
 hotep III., and one standing and roaring from a 
 gateway of Assurnazirpal's palace. The Egyptian 
 lion is powerful and yet serene, full of dignity 
 wrapped in repose. He, like the Assyrian, was 
 made as fitting ornament for a royal doorway ; he 
 is there to repel an enemy, but the might of the king 
 is such that no enemy dare approach to attack him ; 
 the lion, therefore, has but to watch, and is called 
 on for no violent display of strength. The lion of 
 Assyria, on the contrary, roars, and is eager for the 
 attack. He is not content to await and defend ; he 
 is hungry for prey. Like his master, he desires to 
 plunge at once into a combat, to find some enemy 
 for the delight of destroying him. It will be remem- 
 bered that Amenhotep III. was the greatest lion- 
 hunter among the Pharaohs of Egypt. His lion- 
 hunts in Mesopotamia were events of which he was 
 very proud, and he recorded them in numerous small 
 
Hunting Scenes, 127 
 
 inscriptions, which his faithful courtiers buried with 
 them in their graves. But mere inscriptions would 
 have been poor comfort to Assurbanipal, king of 
 Assyria, who, for his part, caused himself to be sur- 
 rounded in his palace with life-like representations of 
 the details of the hunt, wherein we can still behold 
 lion and lioness in their royal paradise, or issuing 
 forth upon the field of combat, or chased by men on 
 horse and foot, or slain with arrows or swords in 
 hand-to-hand combat — sport, indeed, worthy of a 
 king! 
 
 Here was a school of art inspired by no merely 
 local ideal or tribal creed, but founded upon nature, 
 and upon nature in a mood that awakens the sym- 
 pathies of all men. It was an art well suited to 
 spread its influences afar. It did, in fact, so spread 
 them. Even Egypt felt the effect. Hunting scenes of 
 visibly Oriental character were caused by Ramses III. 
 to be sculptured on the walls of his temple at Medinet 
 Abu. We shall find that the kings of ^gean States 
 drank wine, at even an earlier date, out of golden 
 goblets upon which the hunting of the wild bull was 
 embossed, evidently under Oriental influence, with 
 a freedom of treatment and a truth to nature that 
 cannot but excite our utmost admiration. A few 
 remnants of the wall paintings of the palace at 
 Tiryns tell the same tale. Not only was the manner 
 
128 The Legacy of Chaldea. 
 
 of Assyrian art capable of universal imitation, but 
 its subjects were of world-wide interest. War, the 
 chase, the feast, with the combined delights of wine, 
 woman, and song ! It may have been often cruel and 
 even immoral in tendency — some king of Assyria 
 drinking, with the head of his slaughtered enemy 
 for pleasant prospect — but after all it was an art 
 that suited the humour of a day of passion. Small 
 wonder that the Phoenicians should have found its 
 productions a more profitable commodity to spread 
 abroad amongst the peoples of the West than those 
 of the religious and local art of Egypt. 
 
 The religious architecture of Chaldea and Assyria 
 produced little effect upon the Western world, though 
 it seems probable that its influence was carried to the 
 far East. Without devoting space here to the con- 
 sideration of the nature of Chaldean religion, it will 
 suffice to note that its ceremonial was largely con- 
 cerned with observation of the heavenly bodies. The 
 divine powers and beings which the Chaldean ima- 
 gination conceived of as present on all sides, the 
 spirits of winds, storms, floods, and every kind of 
 devastating meteor, included amongst their most 
 powerful kindred the monarchs of the solar, lunar, 
 and planetary spheres, whose influences for weal or 
 woe were believed to be great upon men. In Egypt 
 the light of those heavenly bodies that were specially 
 
Chaldean Temples. 129 
 
 adored or observed was, as it were, enticed into the 
 recesses of a noble shrine, built long and low upon 
 the ground. In Chaldea, a horizon often obscured 
 with mists prevented the rising of the stars from 
 being well observed from the level ground. Temples 
 had therefore to be many stories high and raised 
 upon mounds. This doubtless was the reason why, 
 in flat Chaldea, the staged tower or Zigguratt became 
 the typical temple form. We may search through 
 all the Western world and we shall find no staged 
 towers in any way resembling those of Babylon, 
 except the minaret in the Mosque of Ibn Tulun. 
 Even the temples of Phoenicia were not in the least 
 of the Babylonian type. It was Egypt and not 
 Chaldea that first worked out the plan of the normal 
 Western temple. 
 
 The reason for this is not far to seek. Chaldea 
 was a country without wealth either of stone or wood 
 — a flat alluvial plain, rich in all manner of verdure 
 and pleasant crops wherever irrigation extended, but 
 with no forests and no quarries. Great buildings, 
 therefore, in Babylon and the cities of the plain, were 
 perforce formed of brick, and in the first instance 
 of brick sun-dried. Casing stones of alabaster or 
 other rock might be imported for decoration, espe- 
 cially of interiors, but the bulk of every building, 
 whether temple or palace, had to be of brick. The 
 
 UNIVEBSITl j 
 
1 30 The Legacy of Chaldea. 
 
 Babylonians, therefore, developed brick architecture 
 to a high perfection. Both they and the Egyptians 
 knew the principle of the arch, but as an architectural 
 feature it was not a favourite with them. It seems, 
 however, that vaults and domes were employed by 
 Chaldeans and Assyrians more frequently than by 
 the Egyptians to roof over chambers in palaces and 
 houses. The development of the dome appears to 
 have been ultimately effected in Babylonia or its 
 neighbourhood ; and if false domes are found in 
 the tombs of Mycenae or elsewhere, the fact may be 
 taken as pointing to Oriental influence. But the West 
 did not want temples of the Chaldean type. They 
 would have been meaningless in any Western country. 
 A great artificial hill is striking when it rises out of a 
 plain, but can produce no effect in a hilly country. 
 Moreover, the West was not provided with soil and 
 sun for the making of crude bricks ; nor, if it had 
 been, was that material strong enough to resist the 
 attacks of a changeful climate. Where stone is 
 easily accessible, temples will not be built of crude 
 brick by any wealthy people. Considerable altera- 
 tions of temperature, and still more of moisture, must 
 rapidly destroy a building made of such frail material. 
 The West, therefore, was driven to build in wood 
 or stone, and naturally experienced in this the influ- 
 ence of the great stone-building country of Egypt. 
 It derived details of architectural decoration from 
 
 I 
 
The Palaces of A ssyria. 1 3 1 
 
 the East ; but the main traditions came from 
 Egypt. 
 
 After all, it was not their temples, but their palaces 
 that were of chief architectural interest to the ma- 
 jority of the warlike kings of the East. The palaces 
 of Egypt are utterly destroyed, and it is much if we 
 can guess at some vague semblance of them ; they 
 appear to have been light structures not intended 
 to endure, and perhaps mainly built of wood. Doubt- 
 less they were luxurious, but they did not vie with 
 temples and tombs in monumental splendour. The 
 attention bestowed by a king of Egypt upon the gods 
 and the future life was concentrated by the kings of 
 the East upon themselves and their life in this world. 
 Whilst Pharaoh was constructing his * eternal abode,' 
 the king of Assyria was building and adorning a 
 palace for his mundane delights. Every king seems 
 to have built himself a new palace, and thus from 
 generation to generation the art of palace-building 
 was practised, and doubtless steadily developed. 
 
 It is unfortunate that excavations have not yet 
 revealed to us the entire plan and, arrangements of the 
 most ancient Chaldean palaces. Tantalising portions 
 of plans have been recovered, but the search for 
 sculpture and museum treasures has proved more 
 attractive to excavators than the search for mere 
 architectural facts. The expense of moving the vast 
 masses of earth of which these palace-ruins consist 
 
132 The Legacy of Chaldea. 
 
 must likewise be borne in mind. The only palace 
 that has been at all thoroughly explored from an 
 architectural point of view is that of Sargon at Khorsa- 
 bad, built towards the end of the eighth century before 
 Christ. It is an example of the fully developed palace 
 type from which we can argue back to the earlier and 
 simpler forms. For our present needs it will suffice to 
 state that the building was raised upon a vast artificial 
 base, that it was a one-storied, flat-roofed structure, 
 and that it consisted (broadly speaking) of three main 
 groups of chambers, each group being associated with 
 a courtyard of its own. One of these groups formed 
 the palace proper, one was devoted to the harem, and 
 one consisted of stables, storehouses, offices, and the 
 abodes of soldiers, servants, and all manner of atten- 
 dants. There was also a zigguratt attached. A de- 
 tailed examination of any of these groups of cham- 
 bers shows that the palace unit was a courtyard with 
 one or two chambers leading into it. In fact, the same 
 unit of abode developed under the influence of Egyp- 
 tian priestcraft into the great temples of the Nile, and 
 under the demands of Assyrian luxury and ambition 
 into the palaces of Nineveh, 
 
 It is clear that a huge crude-brick structure, like 
 Sargon's palace at Khorsabad, with massive walls 
 and vaulted, domed, or flat coverings to its chambers, 
 can have possessed little purely architectural charm. 
 
 I 
 
Palace Decoration, 133 
 
 Indeed its only architectural features were buttresses, 
 battlements, and the simple breaking up of the large 
 wall-surfaces by means of a kind of panelling com- 
 mon in Chaldea, and which finds a sort of parallel in 
 the grooved decoration carved on the outer wall-sur- 
 faces of ancient Egyptian temples. So that the palaces 
 of Assyria and Babylon must have derived their 
 beauty not from structural but from applied decora- 
 tion. Many indications lead us to believe that such 
 applied decoration was of the most sumptuous charac- 
 ter. It is needless to refer at length to the majestic 
 winged lions and bulls, human-headed, which must 
 have added great dignity to the vaulted gateways, 
 so important in every Oriental public building ; nor 
 need we delay over the panelling of carved and painted 
 alabaster slabs, which seem to have been, in Assyria 
 at any rate, the customary and doubtless magnificent 
 decoration of the lower part of the walls in state 
 chambers and corridors. The decorative arts whose 
 importance it is essential to emphasise are those that 
 arose in the special service of brick. 
 
 The most important of these was the art of making 
 glazed and coloured earthenware, which has flourished 
 in the East during thousands of years, in the hands 
 of Babylonians, Persians, Syrians, Chinese, and Arabs. 
 The tombs and rubbish-heaps of Egypt have yielded 
 multitudes of small and often most beautiful objects 
 
1 34 The Legacy of Chaldea. 
 
 of all dates, made in glazed earthenware or so-called 
 porcelain and sometimes both exquisite in colour and 
 wonderful for minute finish. A chamber in the step- 
 pyramid at Sakkarah was decorated with glazed tiles, 
 apparently under the Ancient Empire, and it seems 
 possible that tiles were used to adorn the private 
 houses of ancient Egypt. But glazed earthenware 
 was not largely developed in Egypt as a mural decora- 
 tion, and it is a remarkable fact that the only impor- 
 tant Egyptian building we know of, the temple at 
 Tel-el-Yahoodeh, which depended upon glazed ware 
 for much of its decoration, was built by the same 
 Ramses III. who imitated Mesopotamian sculpture 
 on the walls of his ugly temple at Medinet Abu, 
 and Mesopotamian architecture in the neighbouring 
 Pavilion. Chaldea is the country of glazed mural 
 decorations. The very walls of Babylon are said to 
 have been embellished with the representations of 
 animals and the like, in bright colours upon glazed 
 bricks. The successive stages of Mesopotamian zig- 
 giiratts were usually decorated in order with the 
 colours emblematic of the seven planets, and tiles may 
 have been the colouring material employed. Sir A. 
 H. Layard's discoveries at Nimroud show how elabo- 
 rate were some of the painted tiles that decorated 
 palace interiors. Similar revelations were made at 
 Khorsabad, where sufficient remains of coloured brick 
 
 
Coloured Tiles. 135 
 
 decoration were recovered from some of the harem 
 chambers to give authority for a fair restoration of the 
 general decorative scheme, with its imposing yellow 
 lions, bulls, eagles, and the like, finely relieved against 
 a blue ground and framed within a border of yellow 
 and white rosettes. Bands of well-designed tile-decora- 
 tion carried round the face of an arch show that, in 
 Sargon's day at any rate, Assyrian architects had 
 learned to give architectural value to that feature, 
 apparently so despised in the ancient world. The 
 Persians adopted Babylonian methods of wall deco- 
 ration with glazed brick, as they adopted so much 
 else that was Babylonian, and it is from the ruins of 
 Susa (excavated by M. and Mme. Dieulafoy), that have 
 come the best-known examples of this noble art, now 
 so admirably set up in the Louvre. In the hands of 
 Hellenistic and other workmen, their successors (Sassa- 
 nian, Syrian, Egyptian, and Persian), the art was further 
 developed, and continued down to modern times. 
 
 Prhe crude brick walls of Mesopotamia were not 
 dependent, for colour decoration, only upon the some- 
 what elaborate and expensive process of encasement 
 in glazed tiles. They were doubtless more commonly 
 embellished with a thin coating of stucco washed over 
 with paint. Many remnants of this perishable kind 
 of decoration have fortunately survived, and doubtless 
 the earth hides many more. [ Nimroud has yielded a 
 
136 The Legacy of Chaldea, 
 
 beautiful example of such art, and we may safely con- 
 clude that it was widely employed to give to the chief 
 buildings of Assyria and Chaldea that glory of colour 
 for which the East seems always to crave. 
 
 Envious Time, that has robbed us of so much 
 of the beauty of the past, has perhaps in nothing 
 been more cruel than in accomplishing the almost 
 total destruction of artistic textile fabrics. A few 
 crude remnants of woven stuff have been rescued 
 from the charred and drowned ruins of the lake- 
 dwellings of Central Europe. Egypt too has yielded 
 up a great quantity of mummy-cloth, in some in- 
 stances wonderfully fine. Specimens of elaborately 
 woven tissues of the Roman and Byzantine periods 
 have likewise been recovered from Coptic graves. 
 But all these things taken together do not amount 
 to much. Where are the carpets, the hangings, the 
 splendid raiment of the Byzantine palaces and court ? 
 Where is the least trace of the priceless fabrics woven 
 at Tyre and dyed in Tyrian purple? Who shall 
 show us so much as a fragment of the robes of Solo- 
 mon, arrayed in all his glory ? How are we to arrive 
 at a conception of the splendid stuffs that existed in 
 profusion even so late as the times of the Sassan- 
 ians ? and if these are beyond us, how much more the 
 fabrics that decorated the personages and the palaces 
 of the courts of Assyria and Babylon ! Yet nothing 
 
Babylonian Textiles. 137 
 
 is more certain than that embroidery of the most ela- 
 borate kind and carpets woven with artistic designs 
 were constantly employed in Chaldea and Assyria 
 from early times. Pliny refers to no modern inven- 
 tion when he says : * Colores diversos picturce intexere 
 Babylon maxima celebravit et nomen imposuit ' (N. H. 
 viii. 74). Marduk-idin-akhi is represented on a stele 
 in the British Museum as robed from head to foot in 
 garments embroidered all over, and the most ancient 
 Chaldean cylinders prove that this was, even in their 
 day, the custom of the wealthy. Fortunately, As- 
 syrian bas-reliefs have preserved for us the general 
 aspect of some of the state costumes worn by the 
 kings of Assyria, and thus we are enabled to affirm 
 that embroidery was employed not merely in simple 
 lines and geometrical patterns, but to give effect to 
 designs of much grace and complexity, wherein were 
 included winged genii, trees-of-life, and all the other 
 typical subjects which we find carved upon Assyrian 
 walls. The effect of commerce and the chances of 
 war would doubtless be to spread such materials 
 abroad in the courts of the West. The kings of those 
 days were eager to acquire objects of personal adorn- 
 ment, and if the finest embroideries were made in 
 Babylon, Babylonian work would be most sought after. 
 By this means the principles of Chaldean design, and 
 such motives as winged genii, rosettes, battlement 
 
138 The Legacy of Chaldea. 
 
 borders, and the like, might be carried to distant 
 places, there to become objects of wonder, or even 
 of imitation. India, when she first appears in his- 
 tory and down to the present day, has always been 
 a chief home of the textile industries. Bearing in 
 mind the commercial connection, which seems from 
 the earliest times to have linked India and Chaldea 
 together, this fact is specially noteworthy. Shall 
 we ever know which country was earliest in giving 
 artistic development to the crafts of the weaver and 
 the needlewoman ? Our present knowledge fails to 
 throw any light on the question. 
 
 Objects made in gold, lead, iron, copper, and 
 bronze, found in the oldest Chaldean tombs, show 
 how early the Chaldeans learnt to work the chief 
 metals. Bronze implements of use and decorated 
 objects of luxury were made by them probably at a 
 time when metal-work elsewhere was only in its 
 crudest beginnings. Assyria, situated closer than 
 the Chaldean low country to the metalliferous moun- 
 tains, may well have been a very early centre of this 
 industry, and not improbably owed its political de- 
 velopment to the metallurgic skill of its people. It 
 was in Assyria that iron, considered precious by the 
 ancient Chaldeans and used only for ornament, be- 
 came the chief metal for the manufacture of tools and 
 weapons. The wealth of Assyria was probably as 
 
 I 
 
Metal- Work, 139 
 
 much due to the export of metal manufactures as 
 to military power resulting from the possession of 
 the best weapons in the world at the time. The 
 famous remains of the Balawat gates, in the British 
 Museum, show to how high a point of development 
 the craftsmen of Mesopotamia carried artistic metal- 
 work ; nor are there lacking fragments of bronze 
 furniture-fittings, vase-handles, and what not, to con- 
 firm their evidence. The Phoenicians in due season 
 imitated their Oriental masters in this art, as in all 
 others that it paid them to traffic in with the peoples 
 of the West, and so Mesopotamian principles of design 
 were spread abroad. Sidonian merchants carried the 
 influences of Assyrian art to Cyprus and the shores 
 of the /^gean, and Phoenician dishes of Assyrian type 
 have even been yielded by the tombs of the ancient 
 peoples of Italy. 
 
 We have spoken of the luxury of the palaces of 
 the kings of Babylon and Assyria. When the sove- 
 reign went to war it is not to be supposed that he 
 utterly left this luxury behind him. Many indica- 
 tions exist to prove that the camp life of an Assyrian 
 king was marked by much elaboration of circum- 
 stance. It may well be imagined that his tents were 
 bright with many-coloured hangings, and carpeted 
 with the choicest produce of Babylonian looms. The 
 same would be, to a less extent, true of the tents of 
 
140 The Legacy of Chaldea, 
 
 his chief officers and courtiers. Assyrian bas-reliefs 
 preserve for us the form of the tents themselves, and 
 lead us to suspect that they may have had an in- 
 fluence on the development of architecture. It will 
 suffice to mention that wooden poles, bound about 
 above and below with metal bands, the ends of which 
 were decoratively curled into spirals, were used as 
 their supports. This form of pole originated in 
 Chaldea, and is represented as constituting part of a 
 tent-like canopy over a god in a very early Chaldean 
 bas-relief in the British Museum. Such pavilions 
 seem to have been much used both in Chaldea and 
 Assyria, and the annual campaigns of the Assyrian 
 armies must have familiarised the peoples of the sur- 
 rounding countries with their appearance. We know 
 from Assyrian bas-reliefs that permanent buildings 
 were made in imitation of these portable pavilions, and 
 ultimately stone columns and capitals were formed 
 after the fashion which wood and metal had dictated. 
 The Ionic capital of later days was only a further 
 development of this type, and so, once again, we per- 
 ceive a main feature of stone architecture to have 
 arisen from copying in stone forms designed to suit 
 the qualities of another material. 
 
 Over these and the like details we cannot, however, 
 afford to pause ; the reader will find them discussed 
 at length in the classic works on ancient Oriental art. 
 
 J 
 
The Influence of Chaldea. 141 
 
 It is less important for us to catalogue the details of 
 Chaldean art-tradition, which were borrowed by this 
 and the other nation of the East or West, than to 
 consider by what agencies the radiation of Chaldean 
 influence was spread abroad over so large a portion of 
 the world. Such facts as that the Egyptians of the 
 New Empire took to employing pairs of animals face 
 to face as a motive of decoration, or that traces of the 
 numerical system of Babylon are found imbedded in 
 the early Teutonic languages, are only important as 
 manifesting the wide extension of Chaldean influence 
 and the moulding force exerted by it upon the art, 
 and, therefore, also upon the whole civilisation, of 
 contemporary or later nations. We have already 
 shown how the ideal of living strength of the 
 Chaldeo-Assyrian school of art was suited for wide 
 assimilation, and we have noted the importance of 
 the central and accessible position of Babylonia and 
 Assyria for spreading that ideal. We have now 
 briefly to point out, in conclusion, how political con- 
 ditions worked towards the same end. 
 
 Bearing in mind that, at such dates as from five 
 to two thousand years before Christ, nations armed 
 with metal tools and weapons, and acquainted with 
 methods of working metals, could not fail to be the 
 centres of political power and of a spreading civilisa- 
 tion, we might almost be surprised not to find world- 
 
142 The Legacy of Chaldea. 
 
 empire sooner falling to the share of either Egypt 
 or Babylon. The hindrance to such a result was 
 doubtless the natural law which decrees that human 
 development shall only result from a succession of 
 ideals — a succession, as it were, of births, each the 
 offspring of a double parentage ; so that no single 
 power or civilising unit can ever dominate the world, 
 seeing that, when remaining alone, it is condemned 
 to sterility, and only by combination with others 
 can it cause advance. The contacts and rivalries of 
 Chaldeans, Egyptians, Elamites, Assyrians, Hittites, 
 Phoenicians, and the rest, married local ideals toge- 
 ther, and enabled births of successive generations of 
 ideals and the evolution of civilisation. 
 
 The ancient world, when we first know anything 
 about it, seems to have been the home of a number 
 of small tribes, each owning a little territory — a 
 village and the surrounding land — and each being 
 practically independent of another, though many 
 were after a fashion allied together by ties of kin- 
 dred. We can dimly perceive that by a process of 
 concentration, accompanied by plenty of fighting, 
 such tribes gradually gathered into small kingdoms. 
 Upper Egypt, Lower Egypt, Shumir, Accad, Elam, 
 and the like, were such nuclei of political organisation 
 whose early existence we can faintly perceive. The 
 deepest stratum to which history has yet penetrated 
 
 i 
 
The Organisation of Kingdoms. 143 
 
 overlay this stage, and the first historical period 
 manifests to us the union of kingdoms into still 
 larger governments. Upper and Lower Egypt were 
 united under a single governor before the year 4000 
 B.C., and it seems probable that then contemporary 
 Chaldea, though like Egypt preserving the tribal 
 organisation as an internal structure, was already 
 organised into a single State. It was in these States 
 that the work of nation-making went on. Various 
 races were welded together in them into nations of 
 distinct individuality. Broadly speaking, it is true 
 to say that this was the work of the fourth and 
 third millenniums before Christ Throughout the 
 whole of that time it is useless to look for imperial 
 powers. The co-operation and subordination of 
 men were only so far organised as to enable a 
 relatively small tract of country to be administered 
 for the common good of its inhabitants, and even 
 that was only possible when the parts of the country 
 were linked together by a navigable river. Civilisa- 
 tion arose in river-basins, not so much because of the 
 fertility of the lands, but because the river enabled 
 local interests to be subordinated to general needs. 
 
 When we approach the year 2300 B.C., we may 
 consider that the consolidation of tribes into king- 
 doms, and the rudimentary organisation of those 
 kingdoms for attack and defence, had taken place as 
 
144 The Legacy of Chaldea. 
 
 far as the most advanced area of the world was 
 concerned. We thus approach the age of empires 
 and conquests. Elam seems to have been the first 
 imperial power. About 2300 B.C. Elam went forth 
 conquering and to conquer. She captured all Chal- 
 dea, and spread her power westward almost to the 
 shores of the Levant. This was no mere plundering 
 raid, but apparently a great movement of organised 
 warfare and annexation, accompanied by much 
 moving of peoples. It was in this epoch that the 
 Phoenicians settled on the shores of the Mediter- 
 ranean and the Hyksos conquered Egypt. The 
 Hittites may have advanced along the same wave of 
 movement, and perhaps the Etruscans themselves 
 were carried forward by it. The Elamite ascendancy 
 lasted for some three hundred years. During this 
 period the science of government began to be de- 
 veloped, and rulers learnt in rudimentary fashion how 
 to govern a conquered people and to administer a 
 conquered province. Perhaps it was at this time 
 that the method was invented of carrying whole 
 peoples captive and moving them from one country 
 to another, a method which did more in its day for 
 the mingling together and developing of mankind 
 than any other. 
 
 Babylon was the first to reassert her local inde- 
 pendence. About 2000 B.C. Hammurabi raised her 
 
The Empire of Egypt, 145 
 
 from subjection and made her the centre of a new 
 national activity. The Hittites must have begun 
 their stage of expansion about the same time, and 
 the Phoenicians, under the leadership of Sidon, cannot 
 have been far behind. It was not till 1662 B.C., or 
 thereabouts, that the chiefs of Upper Egypt were able 
 to expel the hated foreigners from the lower country, 
 and to unite both Egypts again under a govern- 
 ment free from foreign control. The tide of conquest 
 was now turned backwards. Egypt took the leading 
 role. She carried her victorious arms southwards 
 into the heart of Africa. She annexed once more 
 the country at the head of the Red Sea. She con- 
 quered, and for a long time held a great part of 
 Syria, and her armies were victorious as far as the 
 banks of the Euphrates. The kings of the eighteenth 
 dynasty Were the heroes of this great achievement, 
 and if the name of any one of them is to be especially 
 remembered in connection with it, let it be the name 
 of the great general Dhutmes III. (Thothmes), con- 
 queror at Megiddo, whose bodily remains, yet pre- 
 serving somewhat of majesty, are kept under glass 
 in the Gizeh Museum to tickle the flippant wit of 
 tourists. The tablets recovered from Tel-el-Amarna 
 enable us to form a slight idea of the organisation of 
 this large empire. They prove that the rudiments of 
 governmental machinery already existed. Such as 
 
 K 
 
146 The Legacy of Ckaldea. 
 
 they were, they sufficed to hold the empire together, 
 with some fluctuations of size, for five centuries or more. 
 
 Whilst Egypt was thus taking the lead, and was 
 governing an important area of the world, other 
 countries were likewise steadily advancing. In the 
 Mediterranean the maritime peoples were becoming 
 civilised and strong. The ^gean was the home of 
 a powerful confederation. The Phoenicians were in- 
 creasing their power westwards. The Hittites were 
 extending their sway over northern Syria, and per- 
 haps into the heart of Asia Minor. The peoples of 
 Sardinia and Italy appear not to have been far behind 
 in the race. In the fertile lands between the Tigris 
 and the Zagros mountains the kingdom of Assyria 
 was already existent, though it gave little indication 
 of the greatness that the future had in store for it. 
 Shalmanezer I. founded Kaleh in the thirteenth 
 century, and his son made a victorious expedition 
 against Babylon about the year 1300 B.C. 
 
 During the twelfth century the pendulum began 
 to swing in the opposite direction. Authority left 
 Egypt, and tended thenceforward to pass into the 
 hands of her rivals. About the year 1 100 B.C. the 
 foundation of Gades marked the approaching culmina- 
 tion of Phoenician power. Tiglath-Pileser L, th6 first 
 Assyrian monarch whose authority stretched from the 
 sources of the Tigris to the shores of the Persian 
 
i 
 
 The Empire of Assyria, 147 
 
 Gulf, reigned about the same time {circa B.C. 1120- 
 1 100). After him, indeed, there is an historical blank 
 of about two hundred years ; but he was the herald 
 of the future greatness of his country. During these 
 two centuries the Hittite power began to fail in Syria, 
 and that of the Aramaeans increased ; Tyre sup- 
 planted Sidon as Phoenician leader ; and the Jews be- 
 came strong under David and Solomon (mid-tenth 
 century B.C.). 
 
 At length (B.C. 884-860) Assurnazirpal, king of 
 Assyria, appeared upon the scene and inaugurated 
 a new era of conquest. He made raids in various 
 directions, and enlarged the territory of his kingdom 
 and its wealth. Shalmanezer II. (B.C. 860-824) and 
 the other monarchs of this dynasty, repeatedly in- 
 vaded with victorious result the kingdoms of Syria 
 and the cities of the West, as well as other countries 
 to the north and east. They received tribute from 
 Phoenicians, Jews, proto-Armenians, Chaldeans, and 
 even the Medes, whose name first appears in an in- 
 scription of Raman-nirari III. Ultimately the dynasty 
 was worn out while Assyria was still in the heyday 
 of her strength. The usurper, Tiglath-Pileser II. 
 (745-727 B.C.), carried her to the front again. In his 
 hands and those of his immediate successors, govern- 
 mental centralisation was made a settled policy. Con- 
 quered districts were, if possible, annexed, not merely 
 
148 The Legacy of Ckaldea. 
 
 devastated and plundered. Thus the bonds by which 
 neighbouring districts were held to Assyria were 
 strengthened, and new areas were added to those 
 over which Assyrian influence extended. Meanwhile 
 Egypt was becoming continuously weaker, and was 
 even for a time conquered and governed by a dynasty 
 of the ' vile Kush ' of Ethiopia. This court was a 
 hot-bed of anti-Oriental intrigue. In due time Sargon 
 (722-705 B.C.) met and defeated the armies of Egypt. 
 His son, Sennacherib (705-681 B.C.), maintained this 
 advantage of the East over the West ; but it was 
 reserved for Esarhaddon (681-668 B.C.) to actually 
 conquer Egypt, and reduce it to the position of a 
 kingdom dependent upon Assyria. It was now that 
 the power of Assyria culminated. Nineveh ruled at 
 this time from the Persian Gulf to the Levant. The 
 chiefs of Cyprus and the kings of Lydia did homage 
 to her power. All the neighbouring hill-countries to 
 the north, all the districts of Syria, the tribes of 
 Arabia, and perhaps the people of Nejd and Yemen, 
 as well as the inhabitants of the Nile valley, were 
 governed more or less directly by the mighty king of 
 Assyria. 
 
 But a new spirit was already abroad in the world, 
 and great changes were at hand. The peoples of the 
 mountainous regions to the north were developing, 
 and their development presaged the end of Assyrian 
 
 J 
 
The Egyptia7i Renascence, 
 
 149 
 
 supremacy. Assurbanipal (668-626 B.C.) felt his king- 
 dom totter, and his successors beheld it fall (606 B.C.), 
 and the pride of Nineveh for ever humbled in the 
 dust. A great Scythian invasion, which swept out 
 from Asia, covered Asia Minor, and perhaps even for 
 a time engulfed Assyria, was the agent that shattered 
 the imperial power. The rest of the work of de- 
 struction was done when a coalition of Babylonian 
 and Median armies attacked Assyria, and captured 
 Nineveh after a two years' siege. 
 
 About this time Egypt enjoyed a period of repose, 
 and under the famous twenty-sixth dynasty her native 
 art and civilisation experienced a short but brilliant 
 renascence. It was now that Greek settlers obtained 
 a firm and recognised footing in the Delta, and 
 that the commercial connection between Egypt and 
 the Greeks received so considerable a development. 
 Pharaoh Neco even made a successful Syrian cam- 
 paign, and held the country for three years. His 
 triumph was but short-lived. For a time the Eastern 
 power had been crippled, but it presently appeared 
 that the failure was but temporary, and merely 
 marked the transference of the centre of authority 
 eastwards. Babylon, under the leadership of Nebu- 
 chadnezzar, soon asserted her pre-eminence ; the 
 Egyptian armies were defeated at the battle of 
 Carchemish (605 B.C.) ; Jerusalem and Tyre were 
 
1 50 The Legacy of Chaldea, 
 
 besieged, both eventually taken (586 or 585 B.C.); 
 and Egypt was overrun (B.C. 568). Then it became 
 Babylon's turn to fail, and the star of the Medes and 
 Persians appeared in the ascendant. Persia on the 
 one hand ; Lydia, Babylon, and Egypt on the other : 
 such were the powers that faced one another. The 
 Medes and Persians, under the leadership of Cyrus 
 (550 B.C.) and his son Cambyses (529 B.C.), conquered 
 their opponents and brought them within the bounds 
 of an empire larger and better organised than any 
 that had preceded it. It lasted about two centuries, 
 and then fell before the conquering and organising 
 genius of Alexander the Great. Thus the torch of 
 empire, illuminating ever wider areas, and borne with 
 increasing steadfastness, was passed on from hand to 
 hand — from Elam to Egypt, from Egypt to Assyria, 
 from Assyria to Babylon, from Babylon to Persia, from 
 Persia to Macedonia — till ultimately it was caught 
 up and for so many centuries held by all-conquering 
 Rome, who inherited the bravery and the govern- 
 mental skill of all her predecessors, and became the 
 schoolmistress teaching law and orderly living to all 
 succeeding nations and generations of men. 
 
 From this rapid sketch of the course of events in 
 the ancient world it becomes evident why Egypt con- 
 tributed relatively so little and Chaldea so much to 
 the art-traditions of the world. The tide of advancing 
 
I 
 
 Trade-Routes, 151 
 
 civilisation could not but follow the great trade-route 
 which led from the Persian Gulf to the Levant. At 
 one end of this trade-route were the Chaldeans and 
 at the other end the Phoenicians, both being sea- 
 farers. This trade-route left Egypt on one side. At 
 no time did Egypt control it. Her raids and an- 
 nexations in Syria had no such purpose in view. It 
 appears to have been the Assyrians who made the 
 holding of this trade-route a part of their fixed policy. 
 That accounted for their continual fighting with the 
 peoples at each end of it for control over them, 
 whilst they were content merely to frighten and keep 
 back the peoples who flanked the route, and could 
 come down plundering upon it. What Assyria 
 had done Babylon continued. The world had then 
 learnt its lesson. The kings of the twenty-sixth 
 Egyptian dynasty, during their short tenure of power, 
 directed their policy in accordance with the interests 
 of commerce. Hence it was that the art of the 
 Egyptian Renascence did in fact for a time produce 
 no inconsiderable influence upon the maritime peoples 
 of the Mediterranean. Meanwhile another and most 
 important trade-route had been developed in the 
 north, connecting the table-land of Iran with the 
 Black Sea. Greece controlled one end of it, just 
 as Phoenicia controlled one end of the Euphrates 
 valley route. But Persia was completely impregnated 
 
152 The Legacy of Chaldea. 
 
 from the earliest times with Chaldean influence, and 
 so by this route also Chaldean traditions were carried 
 westwards. 
 
 Thus we find here, as in all other cases, that the 
 history of art is merely a function of political and 
 social history. The main physical features of the 
 earth's surface determine the ebb and flow of popula- 
 tion, and aflbrd at different times and under diff*erent 
 conditions wealth and supremacy to this race and the 
 other that chances among them. Civilisation thus 
 takes on many forms, and art is a part of it ; now 
 developing in the hands of an advancing race, now 
 failing in those of one whose day is passed. Regarded 
 thus, art history is an exponent — nay, is the clearest 
 and most certain exponent — of human development. 
 By means of it the eye can be educated to perceive 
 in some trifling fragment of carved stone or ham- 
 mered brass the traces of world-movements that have 
 shattered nations and destroyed empires. 
 
I 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 ; THE HEIRS OF CHALDEA. 
 
 IN the preceding chapter Assyrian art has been 
 treated as a mere branch of the art of Chaldea. 
 Such indeed it appears to have been. But we must 
 bear in mind that the population of the countries 
 of the alluvial Tigris and Euphrates plain was not 
 homogeneous with that of Assyria. Assyria was only 
 in part colonised from the lower country ; and the 
 Assyrian and Chaldean peoples were formed out 
 of different ethnical mixtures. Assyria therefore 
 must be counted the first-born son of Chaldea. If 
 Chaldea had preserved for us a larger number of 
 monuments we should have been able to trace the 
 development of the domestic style of art upon Chal- 
 dean soil. But, as things are, we are forced to call 
 Assyria in to witness to the nature of the contem- 
 porary development of the Chaldean style, instead of 
 treating the history of art in Assyria as the history 
 of a dependent or derived school. 
 
 When discussing Egyptian art we took occasion 
 
1 54 The Heirs of Ckaldea, 
 
 to notice how, during the eighteenth and nineteenth 
 Egyptian dynasties — that is to say, before Assyria had 
 emerged from obscurity — the influence of the Chaldean 
 style was felt and manifested by Egyptian artists. It 
 is greatly to be hoped that the progress of investi- 
 gation may hereafter enable us to define the nature 
 and amount of this influence with more clearness 
 than is yet possible. We perceive that many of the 
 characteristic differences between the art of the New 
 and Middle Empires are due to the introduction of 
 an Asiatic element. Composite animals such as the 
 Sphinx were unknown before the time of the New 
 Empire. It is more than probable that if we could 
 recover some Egyptian palace of the later period we 
 should find in it a likeness to the contemporary royal 
 residences of Chaldea. As has before been hinted, it 
 seems more than possible that the degradation of 
 Egyptian architecture, which began towards the end 
 of the reign of the eighteenth dynasty, was an evil 
 effect of Oriental influence transcending its proper 
 domain. 
 
 If Egypt at the height of her power was thus 
 sensitive to the Oriental ideal, it is not difficult to 
 imagine how overwhelming must have been its effect 
 upon less developed and less geographically distant 
 peoples. A few years hence we shall doubtless be 
 able to speak with more certainty about these matters, 
 
 I 
 
Arabia, 
 
 but the outlines of future knowledge are already 
 drawn. The east and south coasts of Arabia and the 
 fertile central plateau, now called Nejd, must have 
 been inhabited at an early period by people not far 
 behind the great nations in civilisation. No ancient 
 monuments have yet been described in these regions, 
 but we gather from early inscriptions that as far 
 back as 3000 B.C. Arabia was the home of organised 
 government. Arabian civilisation must have been in- 
 fluenced from the first both by Egypt and Assyria, 
 and if at a vastly later date we find in Arabia rock- 
 cut monuments (like those at Meddin Salih) wherein 
 Egyptian and Oriental traditions are mingled, it is 
 practically certain that a similar mixture of foreign 
 elements was characteristic of earlier periods in the 
 same locality. The Bedawin of the desert between 
 Nejd and Mesopotamia contributed an important 
 element to the Chaldean race, and doubtless acted as 
 a medium of commercial and intellectual communica- 
 tion between the sand-girt island of central Arabia 
 and the plains of Shinar. The much-navigating Chal- 
 deans would, of course, be in constant communication 
 with the Arabian coast-regions, and thus Chaldean 
 influence cannot but have been spread both around 
 and across the land of Arabia. 
 
 It is probably hopeless to expect ever to learn 
 much about any ancient traffic between India and 
 
156 The Heirs of Chaldea, 
 
 the commercial cities of the Persian Gulf. That 
 such traffic did exist can scarcely be doubted. The 
 stitched vessels of the Persian Gulf continued in use 
 down to a recent time.^ They are thus described by 
 Marco Polo. 
 
 ' Their ships are wretched affairs, and many of 
 them get lost ; for they have no iron fastenings, and 
 are only stitched together with twine made from the 
 husk of the Indian nut. They beat this husk until it 
 becomes like horse-hair, and from that they spin 
 twine, and with this stitch the planks of the ships 
 together. It keeps well, and is not corroded by the 
 sea-water, but it will not stand well in a storm. The 
 ships are not pitched, but are rubbed with fish-oil. 
 They have one mast, one sail, and one rudder, and 
 have no deck, but only a cover spread over the cargo 
 when loaded. This cover consists of hides, and on 
 the top of these hides they put the horses which they 
 take to India for sale. They have no iron to make 
 nails of, and for this reason they use only wooden 
 trenails in their shipbuilding, and then stitch the 
 planks with twine.' Such boats must have been 
 devised in neolithic days, and doubtless in the like of 
 them ancient Chaldean seamen laid the foundations 
 of the world's commerce, and kept India in touch 
 with Babylonian markets. 
 
 ^ See Yule's Marco Polo^ i. 102, 109. 
 
 J 
 
Central Asia. 157 
 
 Eastward of Chaldea were the uplands of Elam, 
 to which we have already so frequently referred. 
 The connection between Elam and Mesopotamia 
 was at all times close. There was in both countries 
 a kindred element of population from prehistoric 
 times. Whatever Chaldea may in the first instance 
 have borrowed from Elam, she ultimately repaid a 
 hundred-fold. Elamites, Medes, and Persians took 
 their writing, their civilisation, and their art from the 
 cities of the plain. Through Elam passed that great 
 trade-route from Central Asia whose importance we 
 are only just beginning to realise. We can vaguely 
 perceive that Chaldean influences overspread all the 
 regions of what was afterwards Persia at a date con- 
 siderably earlier than 2000 B.C. By that time the 
 foremost tribes of Central Asia, inhabiting perhaps 
 the fertile valleys of the Oxus and Jaxartes, owned 
 all the elements of the kind of civilisation which 
 Chaldea had then carried to the furthest point. 
 Modern investigation has shown that the * Hundred 
 Families,' the Pi-Sing, who introduced civilisation 
 into China, were an ofi*shoot of the Bak tribes,, 
 dwelling west of the high Pamir plateau. They 
 carried to China the Chaldean method of writing and 
 the Accadian names for the points of the compass,, 
 for government officials, for sacrifice and ritual obser- 
 vances, and for the objects and methods of astrology^ 
 
158 The Heirs of C ha Idea, 
 
 and divination. In fact, they took the civilisation of 
 Chaldea to China, and thereby founded a new civili- 
 sation in the furthest East. 
 
 If Chaldea was thus potent across the whole vast 
 continent of Asia, it is not surprising to find that 
 her ascendancy over her immediate neighbours was 
 complete. Media and Persia did not emerge from 
 obscurity till a late date ; but when that emergence 
 took place, when under Cyrus they conquered and 
 for two centuries administered the Western Orient, 
 they did but attempt to reproduce in their capital 
 cities the glories of Babylon and the luxury and 
 magnificence of Nineveh. Persian writing was a 
 variety of the wedge script. All the conventions of 
 Persian art were borrowed from Mesopotamia, though 
 a few Egyptian forms were added. The excavated 
 ruins of Susa and Persepolis have only served to 
 repeat with added emphasis the lesson taught by 
 Phoenicia and Greece, that it is to the plains of 
 Shumer and Accad that we must look for the centre 
 of the civilising force that first availed to tame the 
 EWorld. 
 
 Passing westwards to the head-waters of the 
 Tigris, where, in the hill country about Lakes Van 
 and Urumieh, the proto-Armenians dwelt in the time 
 of the Assyrian hegemony, we find the same ubi- 
 •quitous system of writing scored upon the rocks, and 
 
The Hittites, 159 
 
 the same artistic conventions perpetuated in bas- 
 reliefs. Van imitated Nineveh as Nineveh imitated 
 Babylon ; and, had not impassable mountains inter- 
 vened, Chaldean traditions would assuredly have 
 spread northwards along this route also. 
 
 If we transfer our observation to the banks of the 
 Euphrates, and trace that river upwards along its 
 beneficent course, we shall find the same state of 
 things maintained. Here, between the river and the 
 Levant, was the centre of Hittite power at the time 
 of its culmination, which was simultaneous with the 
 culmination of Egypt. The Hittites, as we have 
 before remarked, may well have formed part of that 
 great human wave which passed westwards at least 
 as early as the third millennium before Christ. 
 They had a form of hieroglyphic writing which 
 was not derived from the script either of Egypt or 
 Chaldea, though all three may have been offshoots of 
 the same primal root. The beginnings of Hittite 
 civilisation must, therefore, have been very ancient. 
 Future discoveries may possibly prove that other and 
 more famous systems of writing, the Cypriote for 
 instance, were derived from the Hittites. It is clear 
 that these tribes were not of a Semitic stock. Never- 
 theless they experienced the influence of Chaldea, as 
 their art plainly testifies. At present we perceive 
 them but dimly, standing as they do upon the misty 
 
1 6o The Heirs of Chaldea. 
 
 verges of history. Egypt fought them, and did but 
 divide the honours of the combat. At a later time 
 the Hittites had to yield to the might of Assyria ; 
 but before that took place the centre of their power 
 had been transferred westwards. They had con- 
 quered and overrun Asia Minor. They left their 
 mark on the slopes of Taurus, by the banks of Halys, 
 and even on the far-distant margin of the iEgean 
 Sea. Their sculptured bas-reliefs are unfortunately 
 few in number. Such as they are, however, they 
 manifest an original ideal, influenced by, but not 
 derived from, the Egyptian and Chaldean. There 
 are traces in it of a direct contact with nature, of an 
 original manner of looking at nature, which may not 
 have been without influence upon Ionian, and thereby 
 upon early Greek art. Ephesus was originally a 
 Hittite settlement. Ephesian Artemis was the trans- 
 formed Hittite goddess Atargatis, herself in turn 
 derived from the same origin as Ishtar of Babylon 
 and Ashtoreth of the Phoenicians. The ancient 
 Hittite founders of civilisation in Asia Minor appear 
 as the Amazons in Greek tradition. It was in Lydia 
 that that civilisation attained its latest .developments. 
 Hittites, or rather people possessing a civilisation of 
 the type we now call Hittite, met the maritime 
 Greeks on the shores of the -^gean somewhere about 
 1000 B.C. Two centuries or more later an Aryan 
 
The Phoenicians, i6i 
 
 people, whose kindred remained behind in Thrace, 
 crossed the Bosporus and supplanted the older race 
 in Phrygia. These were the Phrygians of the historic 
 period. Their art has been the subject of much 
 recent research, not always recorded in the most 
 lucid manner. It is an extremely important art, 
 because in it we find a remarkable mixture of tradi- 
 tions and continuing influences derived apparently 
 both from East and West, and its influence upon 
 Greek art is known to have been considerable. 
 
 We have thus reached the shores of the -/Egean, 
 but before entering upon its waters we must turn 
 back and bestow attention upon the Phoenician 
 inhabitants of the east coast of the Levant. Their 
 influence upon the development of art is, I am con- 
 vinced, consistently overrated. Ancient tradition and 
 the excavations of Mr. Theodore Bent alike point 
 to the Bahrein Islands in the Persian Gulf as an 
 early home of this people. It is possible enough 
 that the dwellers in the lands known to the Egyp- 
 tians as Punt — that is to say, the regions on either 
 shore of the Arabian Gulf — were of the same kindred. 
 The date at which they arrived on the Syrian coast 
 is not known, but it appears to have been about 
 2000 B.C. By what route they came is likewise un- 
 known. They were an unpleasant and inartistic 
 race, wholly given up to manufacture and trade ; 
 
 L 
 
1 62 The Heirs of Chaldea. 
 
 willing enough for piracy or slave-hunting, but not 
 otherwise fond of war ; above all things commercially 
 enterprising and clever. The world owes them no 
 inconsiderable debt. They developed a system of 
 municipal government which other nations borrowed. 
 They made all manner of industrial inventions, 
 especially in matters of metal-working, mining, and 
 perhaps dyeing. It is usual to ascribe to them the 
 simplification of previous systems of writing to a 
 mere alphabetic form. Doubtless they developed 
 to some extent the conventions of trade, money- 
 lending, and the like, for which, however, we are 
 chiefly indebted to Babylon. In fact, the Phoenicians 
 did a number of useful but for the most part unlovely 
 things. They made plenty of human sacrifices, they 
 indulged in periodic religious festivals of the vilest sort, 
 they sprinkled the Mediterranean over with centres 
 of debauchery dignified under the name of temples, 
 and for a time they did the carrying-trade for the 
 Western world and became very rich in consequence. 
 It was usual to assume that Mediterranean civili- 
 sation began with the Phoenicians. The Greeks and 
 benighted peoples of the West were all believed to 
 have derived their first ideas of art from Phoenician 
 imports. But it now appears that the Mediterran- 
 ean may not, after all, have been so far behind its 
 Eastern neighbours as this would imply. There were 
 
The Pkcenictans, 163 
 
 maritime folk in the Mediterranean before the coming 
 of the Phcenicians, and it seems Hkely, as we shall find, 
 that some of these maritime folk were brought in con- 
 tact with Egypt at an early date. Such art, there- 
 fore, as the Phoenicians practised, was not necessarily 
 the seed of all the arts of the West. Oriental art- 
 traditions reached Ionian shores without Phoenician 
 help. Still the Phcenicians as carriers did convey 
 to Western markets works of art, or things professing 
 to be such, and so it becomes interesting to inquire 
 of what nature these works were. 
 
 Phoenician cargoes were doubtless mainly com- 
 posed of objects of utility, the woven and other pro- 
 duce of the workshops of Phoenician cities. The metal 
 work they took for barter must oftenest have been in 
 the form of tools or weapons, or at most vases or orna- 
 ments for the person made of gold or other precious 
 metal. They, of course, bartered with Egypt, and so 
 came to deal in Egyptian goods, which were invariably 
 embellished with decoration. The home markets of 
 Phoenicia were likewise filled with Chaldean and other 
 Oriental products. The glorious woven fabrics of 
 Babylon must have been imitated by Tyrian looms 
 and needles. Probably enough it was Phoenician ships 
 that carried Qede beer to Egypt, from the breweries 
 of south-east Asia Minor in Ramesside days.^ One 
 ^ Erman's ^gypten^ p. 270. 
 
164 The Heirs of Chaldea. 
 
 way and another the great Phoenician cities must 
 always have contained plenty of the beautifully made 
 and decorated goods of both Egyptian and Chaldean 
 manufacture. Their connection with the East was, of 
 course, a much closer one than their connection with 
 Egypt, for their kindred lived eastwards, and their 
 religion and civilisation were thoroughly Oriental. 
 Hence it came naturally to pass that when they took 
 in hand to decorate any object of their own manufac- 
 ture, they, being themselves wholly lacking in decora- 
 tive invention, were content to copy the decoration 
 from some Egyptian or Oriental object. And their 
 copying was not done either skilfully or with good 
 feeling, but blunderingly, and in such a spirit as might, 
 now-a-days, be expected in an average Anglo-Saxon 
 mechanic. 
 
 The best Phoenician decorative work we know of 
 is exemplified by the vases and dishes of metal which 
 have been found in Assyrian ruins as well as on 
 several Mediterranean sites. The elements of the 
 decoration have been borrowed from Egypt and 
 Assyria, and impartially mingled together. The 
 makers of these dishes probably meant them to be 
 mistaken for Mesopotamian or Egyptian manufacture. 
 The ancients were not above making colourable 
 imitations of other people's work. That very beer of 
 Qede, for instance, was forged by Egyptian brewers. 
 
The Phoenicians, 165 
 
 Probably enough the pushing Phoenicians sold imita- 
 tions of whatever there was demand for. Like modern 
 Birmingham, they may even have done business in 
 idols ; but an idol has always to be made in the style 
 of art understood of the purchaser, not in the style of 
 the country of the seller. Pottery mannikins of a 
 rude sort, and now and then a bronze figure of no 
 artistic merit were about all the sculpture that the 
 ships of Tarshish can have carried to the West. All 
 Phoenician art, that we know of, was bad, because it 
 was made not to be admired by cultivated men, but 
 to be sold to the less cultivated. But bad art, being 
 necessarily dead, can engender nothing. The folk 
 with whom the Phoenicians traded may by their 
 agency have been brought in contact with certain 
 forms and conventions of decorative treatment, but 
 they cannot have been impregnated by Phoenician 
 traders with the idea of art. Artistic strivings and 
 ideals must have been awakened in the Mediterranean 
 peoples by some other agency or set of agencies. It 
 remains for us, in conclusion, to attempt to point out 
 what they were or may have been. 
 
 The excavations of Mr. Flinders Petrie ^ in Egypt, 
 supplementing those of Dr. Schliemann on various 
 iEgean sites, have proved that civilisation of an 
 advanced character existed in the islands of the 
 ^ See Mr. Petrie's most important article in the /^tf//^«?V/<7«r«a/, vol. xi. 
 
1 66 The Heirs of Chaldea. 
 
 Mediterranean in the middle of the second millen- 
 nium before Christ, and probably still earlier. One 
 of Egypt's most constant enemies was a confedera- 
 tion of Libyan tribes with maritime peoples from the 
 north shores and islands of the Mediterranean. Egypt 
 at her culminating period stood between the Libyan 
 league on the one hand, and the Hittite league on the 
 other. The Libyan league was already strong in the 
 time of Amenhotep III., and included the maritime 
 contingent. It is, therefore, not surprising to find in 
 a Mycense tomb of this period a piece of Egyptian 
 ware bearing the cartouche of Amenhotep. Much 
 discussion has taken place as to the particular dis- 
 tricts and islands which, at different times, sent con- 
 tingents to the naval expeditions of the league. 
 Broadly speaking, we seem justified in concluding that 
 Cyprus, the south coast of Asia Minor, Crete, the 
 shores and islands of the -^gean, Sicily, Sardinia, 
 Etruria, and other Italian regions, were represented 
 at different times, and may at any rate be counted as 
 having been all alike at a remote period the homes of 
 a kind of civilisation that was neither Egyptian nor 
 Chaldean, but was peculiar to themselves. Civilisa- 
 tion therefore and maritime activity cannot possibly 
 have owed their westward introduction to Phoenician 
 activity. The Mediterranean must have been navi- 
 gated by ships before ever the Phoenicians gazed upon 
 
The Mediterranean Peoples, 167 
 
 its waters. The Phoenicians in their turn did the 
 carrying-trade between Egypt and iEgean ports, but 
 that trade originated in pre- Phoenician days. Here- 
 after it will probably be proved that many of the pots 
 recovered alike from Cypriote, ^gean, and Italic 
 sites were actually made on the soil of Egypt and ex- 
 ported to those places. But they were not exported 
 to a set of savages, who could have had no use for 
 them. They were taken in exchange for something 
 which it must have required organisation to collect 
 and prepare. The neolithic civilisation of the West 
 developed along its own local lines. When bronze 
 was introduced the development continued its steady 
 progress, and a distinct Western type of culture was 
 thus evolved. There is no reason for believing that 
 Egypt was far in advance of the rest of the Mediter- 
 ranean basin. The Egyptian soil preserves what the 
 climates of other countries destroy. The Mediter- 
 ranean peoples may not have reached quite the same 
 stage of advance as the Egyptians at the time of the 
 Ancient Empire, but they were not necessarily far 
 behind. 
 
 The early Mediterranean civilisation, of which we 
 have been speaking, appears to have attained its 
 fullest development on the shores and islands of the 
 iEgean probably about the year 1 500 B.C., or, at all 
 events, at a point of time earlier than the culmination 
 
1 68 The Heirs of Chaldea. 
 
 of Phoenician power. The art of this period has been 
 revealed to us by Schliemann and his followers. We 
 find that it must rank alongside of the contemporary 
 arts of Egypt and Chaldea ; and that not as an art 
 derived from them, but as one of essentially inde- 
 pendent origin. Of course it felt the effect of Oriental 
 influences, and of Egyptian influences too, as any 
 independent art school might, but it was not like 
 Phoenician art, a mere collection of borrowings and 
 imitations. There was an independent Western ideal 
 inspiring it. Such indications as I have, as yet, 
 been able myself to trace seem to suggest that the 
 Egyptian influence came first into the field, and 
 that it consisted in the transfer of technical processes 
 rather than of a set of artistic conventions. If we 
 knew more about the art of the Hittites and Cappa- 
 docians in the second thousand years before Christ, 
 we might find elements common to it, and the ancient 
 art of the iEgean. The relics gathered from the 
 lowest stratum at Hissarlik bear a close resemblance 
 to work of the neolithic stage of industry in Europe. 
 It is not till we reach the remains of the second 
 city that Oriental influence makes itself strongly felt. 
 This influence is found in the forms of many of the 
 smaller objects discovered, and in the architecture. 
 The plan of the palace and the form of the gates are 
 Oriental. Still more is this true in the case of the 
 
Etruscan Art 169 
 
 ruins of Tiryns, where the palace-plan is of wholly 
 Oriental character. The domed tombs at Mycenae 
 were likewise of Oriental type — attempts to imitate, 
 in stone, a style of building proper to constructions 
 in clay, such as were habitually set up in Mesopo- 
 tamia. The later we come down, the more clearly 
 felt does Oriental influence make itself, and this 
 because, down to the days of Alexander the Great, 
 it was an abiding and even a growing factor in 
 Western civilisation. The splendid pair of embossed 
 gold cups, recently discovered upon Peloponnesian soil 
 in the Vaphio tomb, may, perhaps, show traces of 
 Oriental influence, but the traces are slight. The 
 art that is in them, and in that fine silver-lead head 
 of an elk found by Schliemann in a Mycenae tomb, 
 as well as in the inlaid dagger likewise from Mycenae 
 and the remnants of wall-painting from Tiryns, is a 
 powerful and an independent art, which owed helpful 
 influence, no doubt, to contact with one and another 
 foreign ideal, but which was not derived from any 
 of the more famous schools known to us, nor from 
 the mixture of their influences. 
 
 It seems probable that Etruscan art in its earliest 
 stages was more closely allied to .-Egean art than 
 any other school. A few objects recovered from the 
 lowest Hissarlik stratum present a peculiar similarity 
 to certain later Etruscan types, and this is also true 
 
lyo The Heirs of Chaldea. 
 
 of the pottery of the third city. Such indications do 
 not, as yet, exist in sufficient number for us to be 
 able to found a theory upon them, but, as far as they 
 go, they are in harmony with the inherent proba- 
 bilities of the case, and confirm us in looking for a 
 school of Mediterranean art, and a Mediterranean 
 civilisation born in the West, and, to a consider- 
 able extent, independent of Egyptian and Oriental 
 influences. 
 
 It appears to have been the discovery of bronze 
 which gave to the East a wonderful start in civilisa- 
 tion, and carried it for thousands of years ahead of 
 the West. Nothing is more plain than that the 
 knowledge of metals spread from the East, and that 
 civilisation thenceforward followed the same lines. 
 But before metals were known there was civilisation 
 of another /sort. As yet we have no reason for sup- 
 posin^/that this civilisation did not exist as early, 
 and/>was not as highly developed, in Europe as on 
 anjX/other continent. Navigation was born before 
 .N fl^^ discovery of metals. The South Seas in historic 
 \ tfrne were navigated in their whole immense width 
 >/ by people in a polished-stone stage of industrial 
 development. When, therefore, centres of bronze- 
 using civilisation arose in Chaldea and Egypt, and 
 very soon afterwards in Syria, there may well have 
 existed by the fertile shores of the Western Sea a 
 
 /\ 
 
The Effect of Metals. 
 
 171 
 
 gifted and not unorganised folk ready to avail them- 
 selves of metals, as soon as they had the chance, and 
 thenceforward to compete with their more fortunate 
 and, for centuries, slightly more advanced contempo- 
 raries in the East. 
 
CHAPTER VII. 
 
 THE CATS OF ANCIENT EGYPT. 
 
 T T has been said with truth that one of the greatest 
 ^ triumphs of human perseverance is the domes- 
 tication of the cat. No tame animal has lost less of 
 its native dignity or maintained more of its ancient 
 reserve. The domestic cat might rebel to-morrow. 
 We could not reach it for capture, nor beat it into 
 submission. We could only kill it if it did not 
 consent to be harmless and to make itself at home. 
 Nothing but the experience of countless generations 
 of cats that they would not be harmed by man, can 
 have produced the result we now universally observe. 
 Where and when did this taming of the least tamable 
 of animals take place ? The monuments of ancient 
 Egypt enable us to answer the question. 
 
 In prehistoric times the religion of the Egyptians 
 was pure and simple Totemism. Probably in those 
 days the inhabitants of Egypt were not united under 
 
Totems, 
 
 any common government, but consisted of a number 
 of small tribes or clans, each of one kindred. Every 
 such clan or kindred had its totem. The members 
 of a totem clan commonly regard themselves as actu- 
 ally descended from the totem. If the totem (as is 
 most frequently the case) is an animal, the savage 
 will not, as a rule, kill nor eat it. On the contrary 
 he venerates, and, to the eyes of civilised men, appears 
 to worship it, though of course the whole conception 
 of worship only arises at a more advanced stage of 
 human development than that to which Totemism 
 belongs. 
 
 The cat was the totem of some ancient Egyptian 
 clan. Other clans venerated the bull, the crocodile, 
 the hawk, the jackal, the cobra, the lizard, and so 
 forth. Observation of existing totem-tribes in Africa, 
 Australia, and elsewhere, shows us that one or more 
 representatives of the totem are often fed or even 
 kept alive in captivity by the tribe. Thus Mr. Frazer 
 tells us that * amongst the Narrinyeri, in South Aus- 
 tralia, men of the snake clan sometimes catch snakes, 
 pull out their teeth or sew up their mouths, and keep 
 them as pets. In a pigeon clan of Samoa a pigeon 
 was carefully kept and fed. Amongst the Kalang in 
 Java, whose totem is the red dog, each family as a 
 rule keeps one of these animals, which they will on 
 no account allow to be struck or ill-used by any one.* 
 
174 1^^^ C^i^ of Ancient Egypt, 
 
 The ancient Egyptian cat clan doubtless treated cats 
 as the Kalang treat red dogs. 
 
 But ancient Egypt did not remain for ever a dis- 
 organised assemblage of tribes. Thanks to warfare 
 between clan and clan a nation was gradually welded 
 together out of these savage units. In the main each 
 clan settled down as a village. Some villages grew 
 in importance, and became towns, dominating the 
 surrounding districts. Now one town and now an- 
 other (as the fortunes of war dictated) won the posi- 
 tion of capital of the country. A victorious town 
 tended to enforce universal respect for its particular 
 totem. We conclude that at some time the cat tribe 
 became the head of Egypt. At all events very early 
 indeed the cat became a totem venerated all along 
 the Nile. So also did the ibis, the hawk, the beetle, 
 the asp, and other animals. Cicero says that no one 
 ever heard of an Egyptian killing a cat ; the remark 
 might be made at the present day with almost equal 
 truth. Herodotus relates that, when a fire occurred 
 in Egypt, the people's first idea was to save the cats 
 and to prevent them from leaping into the flames. 
 But though cats were thus universally venerated, an 
 especial reverence was paid to them in certain places, 
 and of these Bubastis (in the Delta) was chief. Likely 
 enough that city may have been founded in the night 
 of the past by the prehistoric cat clan. 
 
BuriaL 
 
 Not only were cats preserved from injury, re- 
 spected, and petted during life, but they were buried 
 with honour and mourned when dead. Many a 
 parallel may be found to this custom of the ancient 
 Egyptians. For instance, in Samoa, to quote once 
 more from Mr. Frazer, * If a man of the owl totem 
 found a dead owl by the roadside, he would sit down 
 and weep over it and beat his forehead with stones 
 till the blood flowed. The bird would then be 
 wrapped up and buried with as much ceremony as 
 if it had been a human being.' The Egyptians' idea 
 of respectable burial implied preliminary mummifica- 
 tion. According to their notion, a living man con- 
 sisted of a body, a ka or ghost, a ba or soul, a 
 shadow, and a * luminous.'^ At death these com- 
 ponent parts were broken up and set adrift. It 
 was believed that some day all of them would come 
 together again and there would be a resurrection ; 
 this, however, could only happen if all the parts were 
 preserved. Some of them might be destroyed by 
 command of the infernal powers ; that, of course, 
 could not be prevented by surviving relatives. They 
 could only help to keep the ka going. ' This ka^ or 
 ghost, seems to have been the element in which 
 
 ^ The Rabbins say that the human soul has five forms — Nephesh 
 the bodily soul, Ruach the spirit, Neshama the more celestial soul, 
 Chaja the life, Jechida the solitary. 
 
176 The Cats of Ancient Egypt. 
 
 the life was specially believed to reside. It was an 
 impalpable double of the man's body ; it was, in fact, 
 the mediaeval, or for that matter the modern, ghost. 
 To keep it alive it had to be fed with the ghost of 
 food, clothed in the ghost of clothing, and housed in 
 the ghost of a house ; it might be pleased and amused 
 by the ghosts of luxuries and games, and served by 
 the ghosts of slaves. The ingenuity of the ancient 
 Egyptians may be measured by the fact that they 
 not only invented the double, but found out how to 
 supply it with all these things. 
 
 The ghost or double of a body (in ancient Egypt) 
 had, however, to have a material something to be the 
 double of. The actual body was, of course, best ; 
 second best was an image of it made in some lasting 
 substance. Hence arose mummification to preserve 
 the body, and portrait sculpture to replace it if de- 
 stroyed. Such statues are called ka statues. If 
 the mummy were destroyed, the ka could still be 
 kept in existence by means of them. A rich man 
 was mummied in costly style, had many ka statues, 
 and was buried in an elaborate tomb ; a poor man 
 was merely dipped in bitumen, rolled in a few yards 
 of common stuff, and hidden in the desert sand. 
 
 As with men, so with cats ; they too had their ka 
 and all the rest of it, and their ka had likewise to 
 be kept from annihilation against the great day of 
 
* Ka ' Statues, 
 
 resurrection of cats, crocodiles, and men. A rich 
 man's cat was elaborately mummied, wound round and 
 round with stuff, and cunningly plaited over with linen 
 ribbons dyed two different colours. His head was 
 encased in a rough kind of papier machcy and that 
 was covered with linen and painted, even gilt some- 
 times, the ears always carefully pricked up. The 
 mummy might be enclosed in a bronze box with a 
 bronze ka statue of the cat seated on the top. Even 
 finer burial might await a particularly grand cat, as 
 we shall presently see. A poor man's cat was rolled 
 up in a simple lump,, but the rolling was respect- 
 fully done, which is more than one can say about 
 many a poor ancient Egyptian's body brought to 
 light in these excavating days. 
 
 In very early times — that is to say, anywhere 
 from four to ten thousand years before Christ — the 
 Egyptian cat was the straightforward totem we have 
 described. It is only fair to say that in the historical 
 period he occupied a more ambiguous position. The 
 Egyptians were not the stationary people they are 
 vulgarly believed to have been. They developed 
 now and again, when circumstances were favourable : 
 altogether they developed a good deal. Their religion 
 occupied much of their time and a remarkable share 
 of the attention of their most educated class. It was 
 far from being an unchanging, stereotyped religion. 
 
 M 
 
178 The Cats of Ancient Egypt, 
 
 It began as pure and simple Totemism coupled with 
 ancestor worship. The gods were ranged by the side 
 of the totems, and as there were tribal and afterwards 
 local totems, so there came to be local gods. Each 
 of these gods, whether home-made or of foreign im- 
 portation, had a sacred animal attached to him. This 
 animal was the totem he had supplanted. Out of 
 the cats arose the goddess Pasht, the local goddess 
 of the city which the Greeks called Bubastis, and 
 whose modern successor we call Zagazig. Like the 
 cats, the goddess Pasht came to be venerated all 
 over Egypt. When the most important local gods 
 (that is to say, the gods of the most powerful cities) 
 were united into a national Egyptian pantheon, Pasht 
 was amongst the number. 
 
 A local god or goddess might be without any 
 particular character, but what would be the use of a 
 pantheon of gods all one like another ? Of course 
 differences were marked amongst them. One be- 
 came god of agriculture, another of death, and so on. 
 Pasht, for her part, was lady of love, and corre- 
 sponded in a crude sort of a way to that much nobler 
 conception, the Aphrodite of the Greeks. She was 
 represented as a woman with a cat's head. Another 
 goddess, who can scarcely be differentiated from her, 
 is the lioness-headed Sekhet. 
 
 Egypt possessed many temples to one or other 
 
Beni-Hasan, 1 79 
 
 of these goddesses. First amongst them was the 
 great temple of Bubastis, the ruins of which have 
 so recently been laid bare. It was called by Hero- 
 dotus the most pleasing of all the temples of Egypt. 
 A festival of an exceedingly merry and immoral 
 character was celebrated there to the yearly delight 
 of thousands of Egyptians. Cat mummies and cat 
 ka statues have been found in many parts of Egypt, 
 but, till recently, ninety-nine out of a hundred of 
 them came from Bubastis. In the summer of 1888, 
 however, an enormous find of cats was made near 
 Beni-Hasan — a place some hundred miles or so 
 south of Cairo, and well known for its wonderful 
 rock-cut tombs. That an important cats' burying- 
 place would exist somewhere thereabouts might have 
 been predicted from the fact that a rock-cut temple, 
 the famous Speos ArtemidoSy exists in the immediate 
 neighbourhood, and this temple was dedicated to 
 Pasht. Cats must, therefore, have been specially 
 venerated in the ancient city. 
 
 The plain on the east bank of the Nile at Beni- 
 Hasan is about a mile wide. It is bounded by a 
 range of precipitous hills. A flat-bottomed side 
 valley opens eastward through the hills at this point. 
 The traveller mounting his donkey at the modern 
 village rides for about half a mile across cultivated 
 land, and for another half mile across desert, passing 
 
i8o The Cats of Ancient Egypt, 
 
 on the way first the modern human burying-place, 
 and shortly afterwards the ancient cemetery of the 
 cats. He then enters the side valley (whose steep 
 walls and floor are barren as the moon), and after 
 advancing up it about a quarter of a mile he finds 
 the fagade of the artificial cave-temple, the Speos 
 Artemidos, conspicuous at the base of the mountain 
 on his right hand. 
 
 It is the simplest conceivable piece of rock-cut 
 architecture. The slope of the hill is squared up verti- 
 cally for a front. An open portico, consisting originally 
 of two rows of four piers each, is, with the roof which 
 they support, cut out of the solid limestone rock. A 
 short narrow passage leads thence straight into the 
 hill to an oblong chamber. A raised niche cut in the 
 far wall opposite the entrance was the actual shrine 
 of the goddess. A figure of Pasht was sculptured on 
 one side of this niche, and another was painted on the 
 other side. The temple was probably cut out of the 
 hill in very ancient times, for it closely resembles 
 the neighbouring twelfth dynasty tombs. Queen 
 Hatasu (of the eighteenth dynasty) inscribed her 
 name upon it, but her successor, Thothmes III., had 
 that erased and his own substituted. Seti L, the 
 father of Ramses II., added some decorative sculp- 
 ture. Such was the home of the great cat of the 
 district, for in all these temples a representative of 
 
The Speos A rtemidos, 1 8 1 
 
 the totem class was kept in honour. Doubtless the 
 head cat of Pasht's temple was a very grand cat 
 indeed. She would live a life of dignified luxury, and 
 dying she would be buried with royal magnificence. 
 
 For three or four thousand years the cat-mummies 
 of Beni-Hasan lay undisturbed, awaiting the resurrec- 
 tion ; now a resurrection has come to them, but other 
 than they looked forward to. The archangel that 
 heralded it was an Egyptian /^//^^ from the neigh- 
 bouring village. By some chance one day this genius 
 dug a hole, somewhere in the level floor of the desert, 
 and struck — cats ! Not one or two here and there, 
 but dozens, hundreds, hundreds of thousands, a layer 
 of them, a stratum thicker than most coal-seams in 
 a series of pits ten to twenty cats deep, mummy 
 squeezed against mummy tight as herrings in a barrel. 
 The discovery meant wealth for somebody, probably 
 not the finder, but the head-man of the village. A 
 systematic exploration of the pits was undertaken. 
 The surface sand was stripped off, and the cats were 
 laid bare. All sorts and conditions of them then ap- 
 peared — the commoner sort caked together in black 
 lumps, out of which here a grinning face, there a furry 
 paw, or a backbone or row of ribs of some ancient 
 puss, stood prominently forth. The better cats and 
 kittens emerged in astonishing numbers, and with all 
 their wrappings as fresh as if they had been put into 
 
1 82 The Cats of Ancient Egypt, 
 
 the ground a week, and not thirty centuries before. 
 Now and again an elaborately plaited mummy turned 
 up ; still more rarely one with a gilded face (of such 
 I myself found three lying about). As far as I can 
 learn only three cat ka statues have as yet been 
 found. Two of these are small bronze figures. The 
 third is a life-size bronze, a hollow casting, inside 
 which the actual cat was buried. One or more 
 bronze statuettes of Osiris, god of the dead, were 
 likewise (I believe) found among the cats. All 
 these objects are in the author's possession. 
 
 The plundering of the cemetery was a sight to 
 see, but one had to stand well to windward. The 
 village children came from day to day and provided 
 themselves with the most attractive mummies they 
 could find. These they took down to the river bank 
 to sell for the smallest coin to passing travellers. 
 Often they took to playing or fighting together with 
 them on the way, and then the ancient fur began to 
 fly as for three thousand years it had never been 
 called upon to do. The path became strewn with 
 mummy cloth and bits of cats' skulls and bones and 
 fur in horrid profusion, and the wind blew the frag- 
 ments about and carried the stink afar. This was 
 only the illicit part of the business. The bulk of 
 the old totems went another way. Some contractor 
 came along and offered so much a pound for their 
 
I 
 
 A Cemetery Pillaged, 183 
 
 bones to make into something — soap or tooth-powder, 
 I dare say, or even paint. So men went systemati- 
 cally to work, peeled cat after cat of its wrappings, 
 stripped off the brittle fur, and piled the bones in 
 black heaps a yard or more high, looking from the 
 distance like a kind of rotting haycocks scattered 
 on the sandy plain. The rags and other refuse, it 
 appears, make excellent manure, and donkey loads 
 of them were carried off to the fields to serve that 
 useful, if unromantic, purpose. 
 
 It cannot be too much regretted that no respon- 
 sible Egyptologist watched the excavation of this 
 extraordinary burying-place. The fellahin were left 
 to do it after their own fashion. Fortunately they 
 know that every * antica ' has a money value, and 
 these, therefore, they hoard for sale. But no record 
 as to how they were buried is forthcoming. The 
 life-size bronze cat, for instance, is a most remarkable 
 creature. It must have been buried in a box, on 
 which, doubtless, some inscription was painted, but 
 no box was preserved, nor could I get any exact 
 information as to how, when, where, or by whom the 
 cat was taken out of the ground. The same was also 
 the case with the two small bronze cats, and a seated 
 figure of Osiris in bronze of the usual twenty-sixth 
 dynasty type. One can only, therefore, judge these 
 remains from internal evidence. None of the cats 
 
184 The Cats of Ancient Egypt, 
 
 have collars engraved on their necks, nor are their 
 ears pierced for earrings. They are all more or less 
 life-like images of the animal, without any accessories 
 whatever. They sit more upright than the cats of 
 Bubastis. 
 
 The big cat is the only one that need be described 
 in any detail. She sits bolt upright (some eighteen 
 and a half inches high), with her forelegs very straight 
 and rigid, and her paws set close together. Her neck 
 is long and perfectly cylindrical. Her head is practi- 
 cally a sphere, with a face patched on to the front. 
 She is, in fact, almost the mathematical abstraction 
 of a cat reduced to its simplest forms. The inside 
 of her body is hollow, and in it the cat's mummy 
 was buried. Only the unmistakable smell and a few 
 scraps of mummy cloth remained behind when I 
 first saw the creature. The whole thing, legs and 
 all, was cast in one piece, the cores of clay, about 
 which the forelegs are cast, being still inside them. 
 The right leg has cracked ; moisture has at some 
 time found its way to the clay within, which has 
 swollen and burst the whole limb wide open. An in- 
 teresting feature about this cat is that the whole body 
 of it was thinly plastered over with a fine coating of 
 gesso, and that this was gilded.^ Alabaster eyes were 
 
 ^ There is a fine upright figure of Osiris in bronze at Leyden, which 
 is plastered and gilt in a similar fashion. 
 
The Great Cat, 
 
 185 
 
 also introduced. Most of the gilded gesso and one 
 of the eyes remain. The maker of the cat did not 
 intend it to be gilt. This is evident not only because 
 the modelling of the face is entirely altered by the 
 plaster, which is thereabouts quite thick, but because 
 the whiskers were indicated by tooling about the 
 mouth, and this tooling the gesso^ before bits of it 
 flaked off, entirely hid. 
 
 A cat buried with such exceptional magnificence 
 can have been no ordinary beast. It seems hardly 
 too much to assume that it was the temple cat of its 
 day, the sacred animal of that Speos Artemidos which 
 all travellers in Egypt go to see. As such, at all 
 events, the owner finds pleasure in regarding it. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Abydos, 68, 1 08. 
 iEgean Art, 127, 167, 168. 
 Ancient History, Sketch of, 1 42. 
 Arabia, 76, 148, 155. 
 Architecture, Beginning of, 99, 103, 
 
 112. 
 Assyria, 146. 
 Assyrian Art, 121, 123, 125, 153. 
 
 Iron- work, 138. 
 
 Palaces, 131. 
 
 Babylon, Rise of, 144. 
 
 Babylonian Textiles, 136. 
 
 Bak Tribes, 157. 
 
 Beni- Hasan, 104, 106, 179. 
 
 Bronze, Invention of, 53, 62, 170. 
 
 Bruniquel, Prehistoric remains from, 
 
 25. 29, 33- 
 Bubastis, 179. 
 Buddhist Rails, 52. 
 
 Cats of Egypt, 172. 
 Central Asia, 157. 
 Chaldea, Situation of, 76. 
 Chaldean Architecture, 128. 
 
 > Art, Ideal of, 120. 
 
 Civilisation, Origin of, 74, 77. 
 
 Chelles, Prehistoric Remains found 
 
 at, 22, 23. 
 China, 157. 
 Coloured Tiles, 134. 
 Columns, Early Types of, 103, 104. 
 
 Cro-Magnon, Prehistoric Remains 
 
 from, 25, 32, 33, 38, 41, 46. 
 Cromlechs, 52. 
 Crude Brick, 72, 92, 129. 
 Cuneiform Writing, 78. 
 
 Dair-el-Bahari, 108. 
 
 Dair-el-Medinet, no. 
 
 Dolmens, 48. 
 
 Domestic Animals in Prehistoric 
 
 Times, 39. 
 Doric Architecture, 112. 
 Dra vidian Peoples, 81. 
 
 Edfu, 57, 96, III. 
 
 Egypt, Prehistoric Remains from, 
 
 57. 
 Egyptian Civilisation, Earliest 
 
 centre of, 65. 
 
 , Origin of, 60, 75, 103. 
 
 Influence, 112. 
 
 Sculpture, 119, 124, 126. 
 
 Shrines, Earliest form of, 89. 
 
 Temples, 97. 
 
 El Qab, 92, 108. 
 Elam, 76, 144, 157. 
 Elephantine Temple, 107, 108. 
 Etruscans, 113, 169. 
 
 Ghosts, Belief in, 35, 84, 175, 176. 
 Gods, Invention of, 85. 
 Granite Temple at Gizeh, 100. 
 
i88 
 
 Index, 
 
 Greeks in Egypt, iii, 149, 
 Gudea, 118, 120. 
 
 Habitations, Early Types of, 42, 
 
 95- 
 Hissarlik, 168, 169. 
 Hittites, 144, 145, 146, 159. 
 Homeric House, 96. 
 Hyksos, 107, 144. 
 
 India, 138, 156. 
 
 Ionic Capitals, Origin of, 140. 
 
 Iron, Discovery of, 55, 62. 
 
 Japanese Art, 114. 
 
 Ka, 175. 
 Kahun, 104. 
 Karnak, 71, 108, 109. 
 Khorsabad, 132, 134. 
 Kitchen-middens, 40. 
 
 La Madeline Cave, Prehistoric 
 Remains from, 22, 25, 26, 27. 
 
 Labyrinth, 106. 
 
 Lagas Remains, 118. 
 
 Lake-dwellings, 41. 
 
 Laugerie-Basse, Prehistoric remains 
 from, 25, 29, 32, 33. 
 
 Laugerie-Haute, Prehistoric Re- 
 mains from, 22, 24. 
 
 Libyan Tribes, 166. 
 
 Luxor, 108. 
 
 Mastabas, ioi. 
 
 Medinet Abu, Temple of Ramses 
 
 III., 90, 109, 127. 
 Temple of Thothmes ill., 90, 
 
 103, 108. 
 Mediterranean Civilisation, 11 1, 
 
 146, 162. 
 Medfim, 51, 69, 71. 
 
 MedAm Pyramid, 67, 99. 
 
 Pyramid-Temple, 99. 
 
 Memphis, Foundation of, 66. 
 
 Menhirs, 51. 
 
 Mentone, Prehistoric Remains from, 
 
 33. 
 Mesopotamian Influence, 151, 154, 
 
 etc. 
 Moustier, Prehistoric Remains from, 
 
 22, 24, 33. 
 Mycenae, 50, iii, 169. 
 
 Navigation in early times, 40, 
 
 77, 156, 166, 170. 
 Neolithic Art, 44. 
 
 Burials, 46, 69. 
 
 Dwellings, 42. 
 
 Industry, 37, 43, 54. 
 
 Cannes, 77. 
 
 Obelisks, 51. 
 
 Ornament, The Pedigree of, 20. 
 
 Palaeolithic Art, 27, 43. 
 
 Burials, 33. 
 
 Industry, 22, 57. 
 
 Pasht, 178. 
 
 Passage Tombs, 50. 
 
 Persia, 150, 158. 
 
 Phoenicians, 113, 145, 146, 151, 
 
 161. 
 Phrygia, 161. 
 Pi-Sing, 157. 
 Pottery, Neolithic, 41. 
 Ptolemaic, Architecture, no. 
 Punt, 64, 68, 161. 
 Pyramid Temples, 99, lOO. 
 Pyramids, 50, 6*]^ 70. 
 
 Qede Beer, 163, 164. 
 
 Reindeer Age, 25. 
 
Index. 
 
 189 
 
 Saint-Acheul, Prehistoric Re- 
 mains from, 22, 23. 
 
 Sakkarah Pyramid, 134. 
 
 Scythian Invasion, 149. 
 
 Semitic Influence on Art, 122. 
 
 Snefru, 66. 
 
 Socotra, 64. 
 
 Solutr6, Prehistoric remains from, 
 22, 24, 33, 39. 
 
 Speos Artemidos, 104, 106, 179, 
 180. 
 
 Stonehenge, 52. 
 
 Stupas, 51. 
 
 Susa, 135, 158. 
 
 Tel-el-AmarnaTablets,62,i45. 
 Tel-el- Yahoodeh, 134. 
 Tello Sculptures, 118. 
 Temples, Orientation of, 87, 90. 
 
 Temples, Origin of, 82, 95. 
 Tertiary Man, 21. 
 Thebes, 68. 
 Ti, Tomb of, 102. 
 Tin, Sources of, 62. 
 Tiryns, 127, 169. 
 Totemism, 30, 85, 173, 175. 
 Trade-Routes, 150, 151, 157. 
 Trilithons, 53. 
 
 Van, 158. 
 Vaphio Cups, 169. 
 
 WadyHammamat Trade-route, 
 
 69. 
 Wood Architecture, 72. 
 Writing, Invention of, 54> 79- 
 
 ZiGGURATTS, 1 29, 1 34. 
 
WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 
 
 I 
 
 The Woodcutters of the Netherlands in the Fifteenth Century. 
 In Three Parts, (i) History of the Woodcutters. (2) Catalogue 
 of the Woodcuts. (3) List of the Books containing Woodcuts. 
 Cambridge University Press, 1884. 8vo. 
 
 The Gallery of Art of the Royal Institution, Liverpool. With 
 Twelve Autotypes. London and Liverpool, 1885. Folio. 
 
 The Artistic Development of Reynolds and Gainsborough. With 
 Illustrations. London, 1886. 8vo. 
 
 Early Flemish Artists and their Predecessors on the Lovver 
 Rhine. With Twenty-nine Illustrations. London, 1887. 8vo. 
 
 Exhibition of Reproductions of the Works of Raphael in the 
 Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool: Catalogue of Raphael's known 
 Drawings, Pictures and Frescoes. Liverpool, 1887. 
 
 Literary Remains of Albrecht Diirer ; with Transcripts from the 
 British Museum Manuscripts, and Notes upon them by LiNA 
 ECKENSTEIN. Cambridge University Press, 1889. 8vo. 
 
 Climbers' Guide to the Central Pennine Alps. London, 1890. 
 Small 8vo. 
 
 Climbers' Guide to the Eastern Pennine Alps. London, 1891. 
 Small 8vo. 
 
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