Chapter II: Part 2

The search among the beds of fragments of stone was continued. A few weeks before it was finished, at the end of May, 1908, it produced four groups in schist, the testimony of which fully confirmed that of the alabaster statues. The disposition is the same, with very slight divergences, which do not sensibly modify the aspect of the pieces. Three persons stand side by side against a slab 17 to 23 inches high. Mycerinus is in the middle, his left foot advanced, the waist-cloth fluted on the loins, and on his forehead the white cap of the kingdom of Upper Egypt. He always has a goddess on his right, a Hathor moulded in the sleeveless smock open on the chest, and on her hair the short wig and the _coufieh_. On the top of this head-dress she wears her two cow’s horns and the solar disk. In one of the groups she is walking, her arms hanging down and her hands laid flat on her thighs; in the second, she embraces him with her left arm and presses against him; in the third she holds his right hand in her left. The last of the figures is sometimes a woman, sometimes a man: the man, who is shorter by a third than his companions, walks forward swinging his arms; the two women are at rest, and one of them puts her right arm round the king’s waist, in symmetry with the Hathor on the left. They are geographical entities, nomes, and the standards on their heads tell us their names: the two women personify the nomes of Sistrum and the Dog, the man that of Oxyrrhinchus. The fragments of schist under which they were buried assuredly belong to other groups now destroyed, but how many of them were there in the beginning? The decorative theme of which they formed part is one of which the intention is grasped at the first glance, but if we needed a commentary to explain it, the brief legends at the base would provide the material. They inform us, in fact, that our Hathor is the lady of the Canton of the Sycomore, and that the nome of the Dog, that of the Sistrum, that of Oxyrrhinchus, bring the sovereign all the good things of their territory. Mycerinus, in his quality of king of the Saîd and of the delta, had a right to tribute during his life, and to offerings after his death from the whole country, and on the other hand, Hathor, lady of the Sycomore, is the patron of dead Osirians in the Memphian province where the palaces and tombs of the Pharaohs are. It was natural then that she should serve as the introducer of the delegates of the nomes when they came to pay their tribute to the common master. With rich private individuals, the operation was symbolized on the walls of the funerary chapels by long processions of men or women in bas-relief, each of whom incarnated one of the domains charged with the upkeep of the tomb. Here it was expressed in even a more concrete fashion by two series of groups in rondo-bosso, which were probably developed on the walls in one of the court-yards of the temple of the pyramid. The four which have escaped destruction belonged to the series of the Saîd, as is proved by their names and the head-dress of the sovereign, but those of the delta could not have been omitted without causing regrettable privations to the _double_ in his life beyond the tomb; there were then about forty in all, as many as there were nomes in the whole of Egypt.

Schist. Cairo Museum.]

Schist. Cairo Museum.]

The excellence of those that have survived fills us with regret for those that are lost. At the instant they emerged from the earth, they preserved something of their primitive colouring, but contact with the air and light speedily deprived them of it, and only traces remain on the chest, at the neck, wrists, waist, places protected by the customary ornaments of people of high rank. The gold-leaf with which the necklaces and bracelets were decorated was stolen in times of antiquity, but the thicker layers of paint on which they were placed preserve their contours fairly exactly. It would be easy for us to restore to the whole the aspect it had when fresh and new--a light yellow complexion for the women, and red-brown for the men, black hair, blue or white head-dresses, white crowns, and garments relieved by the tawny brilliance of the jewels. In pieces where everything is so minutely calculated for reality, it is scarcely probable that anything is the effect of chance or of lack of skill; if then the sovereign’s head is too small it is because it was so in reality. In fact, the lack of proportion with the rest of the body is less perceptible here than in the isolated statues, and it is not perceptible at the first glance: but it is soon recognized when the sovereign is compared with his two companions. Not only are their heads larger and more massive than his, but it would seem that the sculptor desired to accentuate the inequality between them by a trick of his craft: he has perceptibly narrowed their shoulders, and the contrast between the small head that surmounts the vast shoulders of Mycerinus with the two large heads that weight the narrow shoulders of the acolytes, emphasizes the deformity that the placing together of three figures on the same level had almost concealed. Study of the schists leads to the same conclusion as that formed of the alabasters. It is the real Mycerinus that contemporaries have bound themselves to transmit to posterity, and they have spared no details which were naturally calculated to make us better acquainted with him. We have only to analyse their works to see him stand before us in his habit as he lived. He was tall, robust, slender, with long legs, powerful shoulders surmounted by a small face, an athlete with the head almost of a child. In addition, projecting eyes, big ears, a short nose, the tip turned up, a sensual mouth with full lips, a chin receding under the artificial beard; the expression of the face is benevolent, even weak. In vain has the sculptor stiffened the backbone and the neck, thrown out the chest, stretched the biceps, clenched the fist, and immobilized the features into a hieratic gravity: he has not succeeded in inculcating the sovereign majesty that makes our Chephrên the ideal Pharaoh, the equal of the gods. He has the sanctimonious appearance of a private individual of good family, but his general bearing is below his condition. We could easily point to a dozen statues, his neighbours in the Cairo Museum, that of Rânafir, for instance, which have a more exalted appearance and a prouder mien.

Schist. Boston Museum.]

And the new schist group that Reisner discovered during the winter of 1909 has not made any change in our opinion necessary. This time Mycerinus is represented with his wife; the lower portions of the two figures had not received the final polish when death intervened, but those of the upper part were finished and are admirable. Mycerinus wears the head-dress of the ordinary _claft_, which squarely frames the face, and his features are those with which we have become familiar in the statues described above; eyes starting from his head, a fixed expression, turned up nose, a large, loose mouth, the lower lip protruding, the physiognomy of a man of the middle class straining to appear dignified. The queen does not appear much more noble, but in looking at her we are disposed to think that she had more intelligence and vivacity. We should not say that she was exactly smiling, but a smile has just passed over her face, and traces of it remain on her lips and in her eyes. She has beautiful round cheeks, a little turned-up nose, a full chin, full lips cleft from top to bottom by a strongly marked furrow: a determined expression shows itself between her narrow, heavy eyelids. She resembles her husband, a fact that is not surprising, since unions between brothers and sisters were not only tolerated but commanded by custom; there is thus every chance that the couple were born of the same father and mother; she has only a greater appearance of strength than he has. Custom exacted that, when a husband and wife were associated in a group, they should not be placed side by side on a level of absolute equality, but that the woman should be given a posture or merely a gesture implying a state of more or less affectionate dependence on the husband; she crouched at his feet, her chest against his knees, or her arm was round his waist or his neck, as if she had no trust except in his protection. Here the queen’s gesture is in conformity with convention, but the manner of its execution contradicts the intention of submission: she leans less against the Pharaoh than she draws him close to her, and looks as if she is protecting him at least as much as he is protecting her. She is his equal in height, and even if she is more slender than he is, as is proper to her sex, her shoulders are as robust. Does it mean that the sculptor has attributed to her the massive shoulders of a man? Not at all: but following the example of his colleagues in the triads, he has cheated a little in order to dissimulate the defect of his model. As doubtless he would not have liked to show a deformed Pharaoh, and as he might not alter features which, after all, were those of a god, he has made the deformity less visible by taking away from the shoulders what was wanted in order to establish a sort of apparent equilibrium between the parts, and so we are brought back by a fresh detour to the point to which the examination of the alabasters and triads had led us. Let us once more conclude that the effigies of the Memphian Pharaohs and their subjects were real portraits of the personages they claimed to reproduce.

Schist. Cairo Museum.]

Schist. Boston Museum.]

They were real, but not realistic unless there was special necessity. I have repeatedly attempted to define the two chief schools of Egyptian sculpture, the Theban and the Memphian. From the beginning the Theban school tends to copy the model brutally, as it was at the moment when it was portrayed. Take the statues of Sanouosrît I or of Sanouosrît III, which lately came to the Cairo Museum. The family likeness between all of them is indubitable, but, according as they come from a Theban or Memphian studio, the features which constitute the complete resemblance are noted in such divergent ways that at the first glance we are inclined to think that it scarcely exists. The Thebans scrupulously marked the thinness of the cheeks, the hardness of the eye, the harshness of the mouth, the heaviness of the jaw, and have exaggerated rather than diminished those points. The Memphians do not neglect them, but have treated them in a more merciful manner, and, from the haggard faces in which the rival school took pleasure, have brought out the happy smiling expression that its own traditions ascribed without exception to all the Pharaohs. We cannot institute comparisons of that kind for the epoch of Mycerinus: the Theban school, if, as is probable, it was then in existence, still sleeps buried beneath the ruins, and we know nothing belonging to it to place by the side of the Memphian. It is sufficient, however, to walk through the rooms of the Cairo Museum reserved for it to be convinced that if the Cheîkh-el-Beled, the Chephrên statues, the royal couple of Meîdoum, the Rânafir statues are portraits and likenesses, they are at the same time idealized portraits according to the formula, the influence of which we have seen in the monuments of the XIIth Dynasty. Whatever the models presented that was too pronounced, was softened in order to give them the serene bearing fitting the imperishable bodies of such noble and respectable persons. They only departed from this routine when there were monstrosities, the entire suppression of which would have been fraught with danger for the immortality of the subject, as in the case of the two dwarfs in the Cairo Museum; but it is not quite certain if even in those cases some modification of the ugliness has not been contrived. What has happened to Mycerinus renders it probable: have we not seen, in fact, that the artist exerted his ingenuity to dissimulate the disturbing exiguity of the head by an artifice? And he must often have taken similar liberties, although we have no actual means of proving it. I will venture to assert it of Chephrên, although almost the half of one of his two statues, that in green serpentine, is a restoration by Vassalli. For if we compare their profiles, we notice that that of the serpentine statue is weaker than that of the diorite statue: the eye is smaller and the chin less authoritative, the tip of the nose recedes a little, and there is a slight resemblance with Mycerinus. The lofty dignity which I noted just now as appearing in the father in contrast to the son may be the result of the Memphians’ determination to idealize their subjects so as to make each of them an almost abstract type of the class to which they belonged.

As might be expected, the alabasters of Mycerinus are a long way from equalling the schists. Indeed, whenever we find statues of a person in different materials, it is seldom that those most difficult to work in are not also the best. Petrie concluded that in all periods Egypt had a school of sculpture in limestone and soft stones, and one in granite and hard stones. But who would think of classifying modern sculptors in different schools according as they used bronze or marble? In Egypt, as in later times, the instruction given to learners prepared them to practise the complete calling, whatever the special branch to which they later confined themselves might be, but as the handling of certain stones required a more extended practice, care was taken in the workshops to entrust them to the most expert. That is evidently what happened in the case of Mycerinus. His alabasters are certainly very estimable; but those to whom we owe them were not skilled virtuosi, and if they acquitted themselves of their task honourably, they only produced ordinary work. Those who executed the schists were much more skilled. I will not venture to assert that they entirely triumphed over their material: the bodies of princes and gods sculptured in matter so unyielding and of so gloomy a tone present a rigidity of contour which we feel as keenly as we do the lack of colour which would enliven them. They almost repel any one who sees them for the first time, but the repulsion once overcome, they reveal themselves as perfect of their kind. The artist has done what he wished with the ungrateful material, and has handled it with the same suppleness as if he had been kneading the most ductile clay. The women are especially remarkable with their full round shoulders, their small breasts placed low, the belly strong and well designed, the thighs full and graceful, the legs vigorous, one of the most elegant types created by Memphian Egypt. It does not equal the diorite Chephrên, nor the Cheîkh-el-Beled, nor the Crouching Scribe, nor the lady of Meîdoum, but it is not so far removed from them, and few pieces take so high a rank in the work of the old Memphian school.

Schist. Boston Museum.]

III

A SCRIBE’S HEAD

OF THE IVTH OR VTH DYNASTY

(_The Louvre_)

The inventories give no indication of the origin of this head. So little was its source suspected that for a long time it was believed to be of Peruvian work: M. de Longpérier with his usual tact restored it to its rightful place in the Egyptian series.[12] At the first glance the style is seen to be that of the ancient Memphian Empire: it has evidently been detached from a statue found in one of the necropolises of Saqqarah. The absence of the plinth and the parts which usually bear the inscription prevents us from knowing the name of the individual it represents, a scribe contemporary, or very nearly, with the celebrated Crouching Scribe. A narrow and somewhat receding forehead, a long prominent eye slightly drawn up towards the temples, snub-nose, thin nostrils, accentuated cheekbones, thin cheeks, large mouth with full lips, a firm rounded chin, do not make a flattering portrait but certainly an exact one. The material is the excellent limestone of Tourah painted bright red: the technique shows delicacy and skill rare even at that period of admirable artists.

Almost all the statues of mere private individuals come from temples or tombs. The right of setting up a statue in the temples belonged exclusively to the king; so the greater number of those we have offer a special formula: “_Granted as a favour_ on the part of the king to a son of so and so,”[13] sometimes too the favour is qualified as _great_ or _very great_. It was then by some exceptional title, in reward of services rendered, or by a caprice of royalty, that an Egyptian was authorized to place his portrait in a temple, whether of his native city or of some other town, to the god for whom he professed a special devotion. The great feudal lords, who all more or less aspired to possess royal rights, sometimes took the liberty of setting up a statue of themselves without the preliminary permission of Pharaoh; but in spite of these usurpations of the royal prerogative, the number is relatively small. Civil wars, foreign invasions, the ruin of towns, the destruction of idols by the Christians, contributed to make private statues coming from temples rare in our museums.[14]

The Louvre.]

But, on the other hand, those that come from cemeteries are very numerous. Every tomb that was somewhat cared for in the ancient or new empire contained several which represented the defunct alone, or accompanied by the principal members of his family. They were not always placed in the same spot: in the IVth Dynasty they were sometimes placed in the outer court, in the open air, sometimes also in the chapel, where on certain days the family celebrated the worship of the ancestor. Most often they were imprisoned in a narrow chamber, with a lofty ceiling, something like a corridor, and for that reason called _Serdâb_ by the Arabs. Sometimes the _Serdâb_ is lost in the masonry and does not communicate with any of the other chambers. Sometimes it is connected with the funerary chapel by a sort of quadrangular pipe, so small that a hand can scarcely be inserted.[15] The priests would burn incense near the orifice, pour libations, present offerings, murmur prayers, and everything was supposed to penetrate to the little apartment. Some of these _Serdâb_ contained one or two statues at most, others would contain twenty. Some are in wood or hard stone, but the greater number are in painted limestone. Seated or standing, crouching or in the attitude of walking, they all claim to be portraits--portraits of the dead man, of his wife, of his children, of his servants. If they were more often found in places where they would have been visible, their presence would be explained by the pleasure members of a family would feel in seeing the features of those they had loved. But they are generally walled up for all eternity in hidden corners where no one would ever penetrate: we must seek other reasons.

The Egyptians formed a somewhat coarse idea of the human soul. They regarded it as an exact reproduction of the body of each individual, formed of a substance less dense than flesh and bones, but susceptible to the sight, feeling, and touch. The _double_, or to call it by the name they gave it, the _ka_, was subject, though in a lesser degree than its terrestrial type, to all the infirmities of our life: it drank, ate, clothed itself, anointed itself with perfumes, came and went in its tomb, required furniture, a house, servants, an income. A man must be assured beyond the tomb of the possession of all the wealth he had enjoyed in the world, under penalty of being condemned to an eternity of unspeakable misery. His family’s first obligation towards him was to provide him with a durable body; they therefore mummified his mortal remains to the best of their ability, and buried the mummy at the bottom of a pit where it could only be reached with the greatest difficulty. The body, however, in spite of the care taken in preparing it, only very remotely recalled the form of the living person. It was, besides, unique and easily destroyed: it could be broken, methodically dismembered, and the pieces scattered or burnt. If it disappeared, what would become of the _double_? For its support statues were provided, representing the exact form of the individual. Effigies in wood, limestone, hard stone, bronze, were more solid than the mummy, and there was nothing to prevent the manufacture of any number of them desired. One body was a single chance of durability for the _double_: twenty gave it twenty chances. And that is the explanation of the astonishing number of statues sometimes found in one tomb. The piety of the relatives multiplied the images, and consequently the supports, the imperishable bodies, of the _double_ would, by themselves alone, almost assure him immortality.[16]

Both in the temples and hypogeums, the statues of private persons were intended to serve as a support to the soul. The consecration they received animated them, so to speak, and made them substitutes for the defunct: the offerings destined for the other world were served to them. The tomb of a rich man possessed a veritable chapel to which a special body of priests was attached, formed of _hon-ka_ or _priests of the double_. At the sacramental festivals the _priests of the double_ performed the necessary rites, they looked after the upkeep of the edifice and administered its revenues. The statues of the towns themselves demanded particular care. Indeed, the clergy of the temple in which they were placed claimed their part in the advantages derived from ancestor worship: veritable acts of donation were drawn up in their favour, in which were specified the part they were to play in the ceremonies, the quantity of the offerings that fell to their share for the service rendered, the number of days in the year consecrated to each statue. “Agreement between Prince Hapi-T’aufi and the _hour-priests_ of the temple of Anubis, master of Siout, in regard to one white loaf that each must give to the statue of the prince, under the hand of the _ka-priest_, the 18th Thot, the day of the festival of _Ouaga_,[17] and also the gifts which every tomb owes to its lord; afterwards in regard to the ceremony of kindling the flame, and the procession that they ought to make with the _ka-priest_ while he celebrates the service in honour of the defunct, and that they march to the north corner of the temple on the day of kindling the flame. For that Hapi-T’aufi gives the _hour-priests_ a bushel of corn from each of the fields belonging to the tomb, the firstfruits of the harvest of the prince’s domain, as each commoner in Siout is accustomed to do from the firstfruits of his harvest, for every peasant always makes a gift from the firstfruits of his harvest to the temple.”[18] The ceremonial is set out in detail, and the monument tells us how, and under what conditions, a dead person is fed in Egypt. The loaves, meat and corn were placed in front of the statue by the priests: thence they reached the gods, who, after taking their part, transmitted the rest to the _double_.

We now understand why the statues that do not represent gods are always and uniquely portraits as exact as the artists could render them. Each was a stone body; not an ideal body in which only beauty of form or expression was sought, but a real body in which care should be taken neither to add nor take away anything. If the body of flesh had been ugly, the body of stone must be ugly in the same way, otherwise the _double_ would not find the support it needed. The statue from which the head preserved in the Louvre was broken off was, undoubtedly, the faithful portrait of the individual whose name was engraved on it: if the realism of the expression is somewhat brutal, it is the fault of the model, who had not taken care to be handsome, and not that of the sculptor, who would have been guilty of a sort of impiety if he had altered the physiognomy of his model in the least detail.

IV

SKHEMKA, HIS WIFE AND SON

A GROUP FOUND AT MEMPHIS

(_The Louvre_)

Skhemka lived at Memphis at the end of the Vth Dynasty. He was attached to the administration of the domains, and was buried in the necropolis of Saqqarah. His tomb, discovered by Mariette during the excavations of the Serapeum, furnished three pretty statues to the Louvre.[19] I knew the group reproduced here at a time when the coating that covered it had suffered very little; the galleries of Europe possess nothing to be compared with it for finish of execution.

I shall not say much of the principal personage: he possesses all the qualities and all the defects to which we are accustomed in the work of the sculptors of the Ancient Empire. The modelling of the torso, arms, and legs is excellent, of the foot mediocre, of the hands execrable; the head lives, alive and intelligent under the large wig, with its rows of braids one above the other, which frames it. The two accessory statues are charming in design and composition. On the left Ati, the dead man’s wife, stands leaning against the back of the seat embracing her husband’s leg. The face and limbs are painted yellow in accordance with a convention almost always respected in Egypt.[20] A layer of bright red denotes the tan that the sun lays on the men’s skin; the light yellow reproduces the more delicate shade induced by the indoor life of the women. The hair, parted over the forehead, falls in two masses alongside the cheeks. The sleeveless dress is open in front, and the opening extends in a point to between the two breasts: the stuff exactly follows the lines of the body, and the skirt ends a little above the ankle. The position of the breasts is indicated by a special design; all the rest from the waist to the feet is embroidered with ornaments in colour, imitating the network of glass beads to be seen in the museums.[21] A necklace with two rows and bracelets complete the costume. On the right, Knom, son of Skhemka and Ati, serves as a pendant to his mother: he is naked except for a necklace round the bottom of his neck and a little square amulet that falls on his chest. The grace and charm of the figures cannot be too much admired. Although of small dimensions, the artist has endowed them with the physiognomy and features suited to their age with as much exactness as if he had been dealing with a colossus. The firm flesh and rounded but muscular limbs of the woman in her prime, and the chubby flesh and soft limbs of the child, are treated equally happily. The mother’s face has a smiling charm, the son’s a naïve and wondering grace: the Egyptian chisel did not often work with so much intelligence and lightness.

Limestone. The Louvre.]

The gesture with which each of the two small people embraces the leg of the big one is not an artifice of composition, a simple way of attaching the subordinate elements of the group to the principal one. It is often to be found in turning over the plates of Lepsius’s fine work.[22] The inscriptions repeatedly state of the wife that “she loved her husband,” and the artists reveal it in action. Seated or standing by his side, she puts her hand on his shoulder or her arm round his neck; crouching or kneeling, she leans against him, her breast pressed against his leg, her cheek leaning against his knee. And it is not only in the privacy of the home that she treats him with this affectionate abandon, but in public, before the servants or the assembled vassals, while he is inspecting his lands and reviewing his possessions.[23]

In the same way it is rare to find a personage without his children, “who love him,” at his feet or by his side, from the little, naked long-haired boy, like Knom, to the grown-up sons and married daughters. To sum up, the sculptor to whom we owe the Louvre monument has carved in stone a scene of contemporary life. He shows us Skhemka, Ati, and Knom grouped as they were every day: and what is conventional in his work is not the grouping of the three people, but the disproportion in stature between the husband and wife, and between the mother and son.

But here, again, he is only conforming to a prevailing tradition of his art. In all the tombs of every period, the master of the hypogeum is generally of the height of the wall, while servants, friends, sons, and wives are only of the height of one of the rows. The king, in the warlike paintings of the temples, is of colossal size, while the others, friends or enemies, beside him, look like a crowd of pigmies. In that case we might imagine that the difference in size showed only the difference of rank, but the explanation does not suffice elsewhere. A slave married for her beauty preserved something of the inferiority of her former condition; a princess of the blood royal, united in marriage to a private individual, did not therefore renounce her royal rank. If inequality of stature corresponded to inequality of rank, the sculptor would have made the first smaller and the second bigger than her husband. They did not, however, do that: slave or princess, they gave the wife a stature sometimes equal but more often lower than that of the husband.[24] Thus the treatment does not show social distinction; the woman was legally on the same level as the man. If the master of the tomb is alone in his height, it is merely because he alone is at home in the tomb, and it was desired to show in him the one master, the personage who must be protected against the dangers of the other world: so he was designed of large size, as we underline a word in a sentence in order to emphasize it.

In fact, the sculptor, in modelling his work, thought of the necessities of the life beyond the tomb. Skhemka’s wife living might be superior to Skhemka by fortune or birth, and so take precedence of him; before the dead Skhemka she was only a subordinate personage. Egyptian theology supposed, it would seem, that the wife was as indispensable to the man after as during life, and that is why she is represented by his side on the walls of his tomb; but, as she is only an accessory there, the sculptor and the painter are free to treat her as they understand the matter. If the husband demanded it, they gave both the same stature, seated them on the same seat, made no sort of difference between them. But if he expressed no wish, they could either suppress her altogether or relegate her to the background and give her the dimensions of her son, as they did with Ati, in order that she may lean against the seat on which her husband is enthroned.

V

THE CROUCHING SCRIBE

VTH DYNASTY

(_The Louvre_)

He was found by Mariette in the tomb of Skhemka in 1851, during the soundings which preceded the discovery of the Serapeum. He is now in the Louvre, in the centre of the “Salle civile” of the Egyptian Gallery, surrounded by show-case tables. His attitude, in conjunction with the unfortunate place assigned him, makes him look like a fellah dealer in antiquities seated in the midst of his goods, patiently waiting for customers. The red paint, which was perfect when he was brought to the Louvre, has worn off in places with the coating on which it was applied, and so the whity colour of the limestone shows through here and there; the cross light from the two windows falls on him in such a way as almost to efface the modelling of the shoulders and chest: ordinary visitors, for whom there is nothing to mark it, scarcely look at it, and pass it by in complete indifference to the fact that one of the masterpieces of Egyptian sculpture is before them.

The Louvre.]

Does he represent the great lord in whose tomb he was found? Other statues that entered the Louvre with his bear the name of Skhemka and pass for the faithful portrait of that personage.[25] If, as their careful composition leads us to believe, that claim is justified, the Crouching Scribe was only one of the numerous relatives or servants named in the inscriptions of the chapel. The people of the Ancient Empire had the custom of shutting up in the _Serdâb_,[26] by the side of the statue of the dead person, those of other individuals belonging to his family or his household. They are mourners, both men and women crouching down, one hand hanging or cast on the ground about to pick up the dust in sign of mourning, the other held in front of the face and plunged into the hair;[27] women who crush the grain on the stone; servants who thrust their arm into an amphora, probably to coat it with pitch before pouring in the beer or wine. Ours is a scribe: his legs bent under him and placed flat on the ground in one of those positions familiar to Orientals, but almost impossible for Europeans, the bust upright and well-balanced on the hips, the head raised; reed in hand, and the sheet of papyrus spread over his knees, he still waits, at an interval of 6,000 years, for his master to resume the interrupted dictation. The paintings in the contemporary tombs tell us a hundred times rather than once what he is preparing to write. In order to sustain himself in the other world, the great Egyptian lord received on appointed days the offerings due to him from the domains attached to his tomb: one was to bring bread, one meat, others wine, cakes, fruit. It was quite a big piece of bookkeeping, identical with that usual in his lifetime. The scribes of flesh and blood entered the real revenues as they came in; the scribe of stone rendered the same service to the master of stone whom he attended for ever.

We cannot say that our scribe was handsome in his lifetime, but the truth and vigour of his portrait compensates largely for what he lacks in beauty. The face is almost square, and the strongly accentuated features indicate a man in his prime; the large mouth with thin lips is slightly raised at the corners and almost disappears in the prominent muscles that frame it; the cheeks are rather hard and bony; the ears are thick and heavy, and stand out awkwardly from the head; and the low brow is crowned with coarse, short hair. The eye is well opened, and owes its special vivacity to an artifice of the ancient sculptor. The stone in which it is set has been cut away and the hollow filled with black and white enamel; a bronze mounting marks the edges of the eyelids, while a little silver nail[28] fastened under the crystal at the bottom of the eyeball receives the light, and reflecting it, simulates the pupil of a real eye. It is difficult to imagine the striking effect that this combination may produce in certain circumstances. When Mariette cleared out the tomb of Râhotpou at Meîdoum, the first ray of light which entered the tomb, that had been closed for 6,000 years, fell on the forehead of two statues leaning against the wall of the _Serdâb_, and made the eyes sparkle so brilliantly that the fellahs threw down their tools and fled in terror. Recovered from their fear, they wanted to destroy the statues, persuaded that they contained an evil genius, and were only prevented from doing so at the point of the pistol. More than one statue of the Ancient Empire, intact at the moment of its discovery, was mutilated for the same reason that nearly proved fatal to those of Meîdoum. In the bad light in which the Crouching Scribe is placed, the eyeball does not shine with a sufficiently strong sparkle, but it really does seem to have life in it and to follow the visitor with its look.

The rest of the body is equally full of expression. The flesh hangs a little, as is fitting with a man of a certain age whose occupations prevent exercise. The arms and back are good in detail; the lean bony hands have fingers of a greater length than is usual; the rendering of the knee is minute and exact in a way rarely found elsewhere in Egyptian art. The whole body is, so to speak, governed by the animation of the physiognomy, and under the influence of the same feeling of expectation that dominates it: the muscles of the arm, bust, and shoulder are only partly at rest, ready at the first signal to resume the task that has been begun. No work better refutes the reproach of stiffness usually made in regard to Egyptian art. Let us add that it is unique in Europe, and that we must go to Boulaq for pieces fine enough to sustain comparison without disadvantage. But it is not enough to possess a masterpiece, it is still more important to preserve it. In its present position the Crouching Scribe runs more risks than formerly in Egypt. The thousands of years spent buried beneath the sand in a hypogeum on the tableland of Saqqarah thoroughly dried up the limestone of which it is made. Transported to our damp climate, and submitted to its sudden changes of temperature, it is only too much exposed to deterioration. It should not have been installed without protection and naked, so to say, in the centre of a room, between two large doors always open, round about which there are perpetual draughts. The curators at Turin have placed the fine limestone statue of Amenôphis I possessed by the Museum in a tightly closed glass cage, and to that protection is due the fact that the Pharaoh has preserved its epidermis and colour intact; the expense is not so great that the Louvre would be impoverished by authorizing a similar proceeding. The demotic inscriptions of the Serapeum are carefully placed under glass, and the precaution is praiseworthy, although it makes the study of them impossible; it is then high time to take similar precautions with the Scribe. The damp has already acted on it a little; the red coating has been loosened and has fallen away in some places. If the mechanical work of destruction is allowed to proceed it will soon be in the same condition as the three statues of Sapouî and his wife, and the Louvre will have lost one of the finest pieces of sculpture Egypt has given us.

In comparing it with the statues of Skhemka that we have already described,[29] we are led to ask why the statue of a subordinate person should be so superior to that of his master. The Egyptians knew nothing of what we term art and the artist’s profession: their sculptors were persons who cut stone with more or less skill, but whose work, always subordinated to the plan of a building, or to theological considerations, did not possess the absolute value belonging to the least important statue of classical antiquity or of modern times. The effigy of an individual was placed in his tomb, not because it was beautiful, but because it represented him and served as a support to his _double_. The question of skill or artistic feeling was a subordinate one, and we find twenty statues of the same person, some of which are of finished workmanship and others coarse sketches: whether a masterpiece or not, the stone body equally served its purpose. Skhemka fell into the hands of a merely conscientious workman, his scribe into those of a highly skilled craftsman. I imagine that they cared little enough if the sculptor brought more or less talent to his task: so long as the resemblance was there, they asked for nothing more.

VI

THE NEW SCRIBE OF THE GIZEH MUSEUM[30]

The excavations undertaken by M. de Morgan in the northern part of the necropolis of Saqqarah have recently brought to light a mastaba in fine white stone, near the tomb of Sabou, a little to the east of Mariette’s old house. No architectural façade or chapels accessible to the living were found, only a narrow corridor that plunges into the masonry from north to south with 5° deviation to the east. The walls had been prepared and made smooth to receive the usual decoration, but when the mason had completed his task, the sculptor, it would seem, had no time to begin his. None of the sketches with the chisel or brush customarily found in the unfinished tombs of all periods are to be seen. Two large stelæ, or, if it is preferred, two niches in the form of doors, had been prepared in the right-hand wall, and a statue stood in front of each in the same spot where the Egyptian workmen had placed them on the day of the funeral. The first represents a man seated squarely on a stool, wearing the loin-cloth, and on his head a wig with rows of small curls one above the other.

Painted limestone.]

The bust and legs are bare; the fore-arms and hands rest on the knees, the right hand closed with the thumb sticking out, the left flat with the tips of the fingers reaching beyond the hem of the loin-cloth. So far as may be judged from a photograph, the general style is somewhat weak; but the detail of the knee, the structure of the leg and foot, are carefully rendered, the chest and back stand out by the excellent modelling, the head, weighted as it is by the coiffure, is attached to the shoulder with an easy and not ungraceful vivacity. The face is not in good relief, and has a sheepish expression, but the mouth is smiling, and the eyes of quartz and crystal have an extraordinarily gentle expression. Taken altogether it is a very good piece of Egyptian portraiture, and would be a valuable addition to any museum.[31]

The new scribe was crouching in front of the second stele.[32] He measures in height almost the same as his colleague in the Louvre, and sufficiently resembles him to permit both being described in almost similar terms. The legs are bent under and are flat on the ground, the bust upright and well balanced on the hips, the head raised, the hand armed with the reed, and in its place on the open papyrus sheet; they are both waiting at an interval of 6,000 years for the master to resume the interrupted dictation.[33] The professional gesture and attitude are reproduced with a truth that leaves nothing to be desired: it is not only a scribe whom we have before us, it is the scribe as the Egyptians knew him from the beginning of their history. The skill with which the sculptors have brought out and co-ordinated the general features belonging to each class of society is largely responsible for the impression of monotony produced by their works on modern spectators. That impression is lessened and nearly effaced, if we look a little more closely and see how carefully the sculptors have noted and reproduced the details of form and bearing that make up the physiognomy proper to each of the individuals who live in the same social surroundings or practise the same profession. Our two scribes do not cross their legs in identical fashion; he of the Louvre puts the right leg in front, he of Gizeh the left. There is no fixed choice, and children at first tuck their legs under without thought of preference for one or the other; soon they acquire a habit which makes them keep to the position once adopted, and in the East to-day you find people who put either the left or right leg in front, and just a few who put either one or the other indifferently. The Louvre scribe flattens out the hand that holds the reed, the man of Gizeh sinks down, and his back is slightly bent. This shows the habit of the individual, and is not a question of age, for a glance at the two statues shows that the Gizeh scribe is younger than his colleague of the Louvre: he is not out of the thirties, while the other is certainly over forty.

Indeed, the age of the two men is an important point of which we must not lose sight, if we desire to judge soberly the real value of the two works. I have heard archæologists, when comparing them, regret that the scribe of Gizeh does not show the same abundance of carefully studied anatomical detail as the scribe of the Louvre; that therein lies the real inferiority of the first, whether it was that the sculptor was less conversant with the anatomy of the human body than with that of the face, or that time had pressed, and he had contented himself with giving his subject the conventional body that for the most part sufficed in funerary statues. The care, as I have pointed out, with which the small details of the attitude are expressed shows that the reproach is undeserved, and that the artist has worked to give a portrait complete from top to toe, and not only to reproduce a head on a conventional body. The roundness of the form preserves the appearance of the original, and shows, realistically, the age the subject was at the time of his death, or at least at the period of life at which his relatives desired to have a portrait of him. In the best facsimile something of the delicacy of the monument itself must be lost, and in spite of the great care taken in engraving it, its original aspect is not entirely preserved. I think, however, that in looking closely at it there can still be seen in many places the artistic, supple workmanship by which the chisel expressed the delicacy and vigour of the model. The most vigorous fellah of our day, when young and in good health, has apparently slender muscles that do not stand out: like those of the porters of Boulaq, one of whom without aid moved a stone statue of nearly the same height as himself, and yet had hands and calves like those of a woman, that looked of slight strength and incapable of continuous effort. The knotty and twisted excrescences to be seen on the arms, back, or chest of our athletes were rarely found in Egyptians of ancient race, at least in youth. The ancient sculptor rightly noted that physiological trait of his people. He had a young man before him: so he evolved from the limestone a young Egyptian body in which the play of the muscles is hidden beneath the skin, and is only betrayed by a number of touches manipulated with knowledge and discretion. If, like his colleague who sculptured the Louvre scribe, he had had to portray a person of ripe age, he would not have exerted himself to bring out the flabbiness of the flesh and the heaviness of its folds, to execute all the pleasant work of the chisel which so well reproduces the depredations of age in a rich sedentary man of fifty. In short, he worked differently because he had a different subject.

There is no sort of inscription on either statue to inform us of the name and characteristics of its original, who must have been a person of some importance: a large tomb invariably meant a considerable fortune, or a high post in the administrative hierarchy which compensated for mediocrity of fortune. It might also be that Pharaoh, desiring to reward services rendered him by some one in his _entourage_, granted him a statue, a stele, an entire tomb built by the royal architects at the expense of the Treasury.[34] It is certain that our anonymous scribe held high rank in his lifetime, but to what Dynasty did he belong? He so closely resembles the scribe of the Louvre that he was evidently his contemporary: he must then have lived at the end of the Vth Dynasty, and we reach a similar result if we compare him with the other statues preserved at Gizeh. It is of the style of the statues of Ti and of Rânofir, especially of the last two. One of them, which formerly was No. 975 in the Boulaq Museum, is full of dignified feeling.[35] Rânofir is standing, his two arms pressed against his body, one leg in advance, in the attitude of a prince who is looking at his vassals march past him. Whoever has seen him cannot fail to observe how much he resembles our new scribe. Firstly, the head-dress is the same; they both have the head framed, so to speak, in a bell-mouthed wig. The hairs or fibres of which it is made were gummed, as is the case to-day with the hair of certain African tribes. The hair is carefully smoothed on the forehead and the top of the head, and being parted on the cranium, hangs down and forms a kind of dark case round the face which accentuates the ruddy tint of the flesh. The modelling of the torso, the muscling of the arms, are treated in the same way in both statues, and the dignified expression which characterizes the physiognomy of Rânofir relieves the somewhat commonplace features of the new scribe. Those are all facts that are not to be noted in other portraits of our personages. The seated statue that I first described possesses the general aspect of the individual, and undoubtedly represents him; but the technique and feeling differ, since it is necessarily that of a different sculptor. It is the same with Rânofir. The statue of him numbered 1049 in the Boulaq Museum lacks the high dignity we admire in No. 975. It is so heavy, so expressionless, that it almost seems to be another Egyptian. The difference in the workmanship proves that two artists were commissioned to execute statues of the same man. The identity of workmanship, on the other hand, compels us to recognize the same hand in the statue No. 975 of Rânofir and in that of our new scribe: the two works proceeded almost at the same time from one studio.

Cairo Museum.]

It would be interesting to find out if, among the statues in the museums, there are others that may be related to these and have a common origin. I do not so far know any, but I ought to add to what I have said the indication of a special sign by which they can be distinguished. The Egyptians were accustomed to paint their statues and bas-reliefs, and the colours in which they clothed them were more varied, and more subject to change, than is generally recognized. We are used to see only a red-brown tone for the flesh, and they certainly employed it very often; they did not, however, employ that tone only, and men’s faces are occasionally coloured in a very different way. The colouring of statue No. 975 and of the new scribe differs from the usual manner. That of statue No. 975 has grown paler since Rânofir left his tomb and became exposed to the light, but that of the Gizeh scribe is still fresh, and resembles as faithfully as possible the yellow complexion bordering on red of the modern fellah. The greater number of archæologists who occupy themselves with Egyptian art neglect facts of this kind. During my stay in Egypt I have endeavoured to bring them out, and it is in co-ordinating them systematically that I have been able to verify the existence, either at Memphis itself or in the ancient village of Saqqarah, of two principal studios of sculptors and painters to which customers of the later periods of the Vth Dynasty entrusted the task of decorating the tombs and carving the funerary statues.