Chapter IV: Part 4

It is a long time since I undertook to distinguish, under the apparent uniformity with which Egypt is reproached, the varieties of composition and conception that may serve for the recognition of schools, and, in the work of the schools, for that of particular studios. I have not found it difficult to show how the Memphian manner differs from the Theban, nor what distinguishes both from that which flourished at Hermopolis, Tanis, Saïs; but for the lack of sufficiently numerous documents, I had not succeeded in marking out the development of one same school through a long series of centuries. The find at Karnak gave me the materials I lacked, and since M. Legrain has been exploiting it, I have not ceased to search in it for information on that point. I have obtained much there, sometimes, it is true, of varying value, and I have still much to learn both about the most ancient periods and about certain moments of transition in more recent periods. I believe, however, the results already obtained are sufficiently important and significant to compel us to remodel the history of Egyptian art. I have not ventured to do that here, but, short as the present essay is, it may clearly be seen to what results it has led me. I have confirmed the fact that the characteristics of Theban art were those I thought I recognized at the beginning of my studies: I then rapidly noted the stages that the art passed through from the moment that Thebes awoke to political life almost to that when it ceased to exist as a great city.

XI

THE COW OF DEIR-EL-BAHARÎ[52]

At two o’clock in the afternoon of February 12, 1906, while Naville was finishing his lunch, a workman came running up to tell him that the top of a vault was beginning to emerge from the earth. For several days certain indications had led him to think that a discovery was at hand: he went to the spot and at once saw in the mound of sand that dominated the back porticoes of the temple of Montouhotpou a spectacle that filled him with joy. The vault was almost half dug out; under it, in the shade, an admirable cow extended her neck, and seemed to look about her curiously. A few hours’ work sufficed to set her completely free. She was intact, but a little figure leaning against her breast had had its face crushed in distant ages, and the violence of the blows had caused a crack in the head and shoulders that compromised its solidity. The chamber that sheltered the cow was built in a hollow of the rock with slabs of sculptured and painted sandstone. The semicircular ceiling did not present the usual regular vault with converging keystones and surfaces; it was composed of a double row of bent blocks cut in quarters of a circle and buttressed one against the other at their upper end. It was painted dark blue with yellow five-pointed stars scattered over it to represent the sky. The three vertical partitions were decorated with religious scenes: on the one at the back Thoutmôsis III worships Amonrâ, lord of Thebes, and on the two sides he makes an offering to Hathor, who is no other than the very cow shut into the vault.

(From the right-hand side of the group.)]

Three-quarters view.]

She was still half buried when some ten inquisitive persons turned their kodaks on her, thus despoiling Naville, and disputing among themselves the pleasure of being the first to photograph her. In the evening nothing else was talked of in the Louxor hotels, and the tourists did not fail to make up parties to go and admire her the next day. The fellahs, on their side, related the most marvellous tales. She had breathed noisily just at the moment that the light of day touched her, and had shivered in all her limbs. She had directed such a look on the workman who had perceived her that he broke his leg with an awkward blow of his axe. She was not, as she seemed to be, of stone, but of fine gold, disguised by Pharaoh’s magicians in order to keep off treasure-seekers: a few formulas repeated at a fixed hour with the prescribed fumigations and rites, a little dynamite, and after the explosion the fragments would be transformed into ingots of metal. And as if the sorcerers were not sufficient, dealers in antiquities prowled about in the vicinity. Doubtless she was too heavy for them to think of carrying her off whole, but would they have found it very difficult to detach the head and decamp with it during the night, in spite of the vigilance of our guards or with their complicity? Unscrupulous amateurs are never far to seek, ready to pay heavily for a stolen object, provided they believe it to have an artistic or archæological value, and the certainty of gaining hundreds of pounds in case of success largely compensates the honest brokers of Louxor for the petty annoyance of disbursing a few pence by way of fine or of undergoing a week’s imprisonment if they are caught in the act. I should have preferred to leave the monument in its ancient place, but it would have been tempting fortune, and the only means of saving it was to send it to Cairo. I entrusted the matter to M. Baraize, one of our engineers, and he carried it out extremely well: in less than three weeks he had dismantled the blocks, packed up the cow, and transported the cases by train across the Theban plain. The chapel is now rebuilt in a good position at the end of one of the rooms of the Cairo Museum, but the goddess is not hidden in darkness as at Deîr-el-Baharî. She stands at the entrance, her body in the full light, the hinder parts a little under the vault: she comes forth from her house and shows herself freely to visitors, from the snout to the end of the tail.[53]

Cairo Museum.]

II

Our wonder is at first aroused by the mixture she presents of conventional mysticism with realism. The front view shows only the head surrounded by accessories, the significance of which is only appreciated by those who are learned in religious matters. At the top of the composition, between the tall horns in form of a lyre, the usual head-dress of goddess-mothers, is the solar disk flanked by upstanding feathers and stamped with an inflated uræus. This scaffolding of emblems without thickness and almost without consistence would run the risk of being broken by the slightest blow if it was not supported, and so it rests on two tufts of aquatic plants, the stalks of which, rising from a socket near the hoofs, spring up right and left of the legs; flowers alternating with buds bend over the back of the neck and form a fan-shaped support behind the disk and feathers. Under the snout, and as if framed by the vegetation, is the statuette of a man standing, his back to the cow’s chest. As I said, the face is mutilated, the flesh black; he stretches out his hands, palms downward, in front of him with a gesture of submission, as if avowing himself the humble servant of Hathor: by the uræus of the crown and the stiff petticoat spread in a triangle in front of the thighs, we guess him to be a Pharaoh. He is found again in a less punctilious attitude under the right flank of the statue. He is kneeling, naked, and his flesh is red; he presses the teat between his hands, and drinks greedily of the sacred milk. If we may believe the cartouche engraved between the lotuses, the two figures, the black and the red, are one and the same sovereign, Amenôthes II of the XVIIIth Dynasty, and perhaps that is the case. But it was Thoutmôsis III who built the chapel, and it is he that the artists have represented twice over, praying in front of the cow and sucking the udder. It would be strange if, after erecting the sanctuary, he should have omitted to provide it with his goddess. It is more probable that the cow was commissioned by him, and shut up there by his order, but without dedication or cartouche: he considered doubtless that the neighbouring bas-reliefs would constitute sufficient title-deeds. Later, Amenôthes II, wishing to associate himself with his father’s act of piety, and noticing an empty space behind the coiffure, inscribed his name there.

Such a complexity of figures and attributes does not tend to make the appreciation of the work easy for us, and we have also to add the prescriptions of the ritual to the conventions of the craft from which Egyptian artists were never free, at least when stone was their material: the belly, tail, legs, all the lower parts of the group, are enclosed in a stone partition which spoils the effect even while it preserves them from the chances of breakage. And yet, despite defects that shock a sculptor of our time, one glance suffices to reveal the extraordinary beauty of the work. The head differs from that of our European cows, but it is a question of race, and whoever has seen the Soudanese cow of the present day will easily distinguish its features in the Hathor of Deîr-el-Baharî: the fullness of the brow, the subtle modelling of the temples and cheeks, the gentle widening out of the snout, the suppleness of the nostrils, and the smallness of the mouth. Such accuracy of detail will delight the naturalist, but it might be feared that it would harm the artistic value of the whole. That is not the case at all, and if at a distance the physiognomy seems to have only an expression of gentleness and meditative somnolence, as soon as we go near it assumes an air of intelligent attention. The eye seems to grow larger and to follow the visitor who arrives, the snout to contract and palpitate, as if to scent out. The sculptor, instead of following the tradition and polishing the stone as highly as possible, has respected the fine furrows of the chisel, and the light playing on them gives at moments the illusion of a shudder running over the skin. The body is of equally accurate composition, the chest narrow, shoulders thin, spine long and saddle-backed, leg long and slender, the thigh sinewy, the haunches prominent, the udder only slightly developed. The hinder part is worked with an incredible fidelity. Contrary to custom, the coat is red-brown, darker on the back, lighter, of a tawny shade that becomes white, on the belly; it is speckled with black spots, like flowers with four petals, which we should consider artificial, if there were not animals of Soudanese origin in the Egyptian herds of to-day that show similar markings. By those spots they recognize among the heifers of the year the one in which Hathor has deigned to become incarnated, and which must be worshipped as long as she remains on earth.

III

She was, above all, the divinity of the dead. The buildings scattered about that corner of the necropolis were not exclusively consecrated to the gods of the living; they were the chapels attached to royal tombs, some of which, like that of Montouhotpou, were contiguous to the tomb, while others, like that of Queen Hachopsouîtou, for example, were relegated to the other side of the mountain, in the Bibân-el-Molouk. The sovereigns were sometimes praying and bringing offerings to the gods, sometimes associated with them and taking part in their sacrifices. Hathor, ruler of the West and lady of the heaven, had become by a concourse of ideas, the reasons of which can be understood, the mistress of souls and _doubles_: she played thus a part of great importance in places where the worship of her vassals was celebrated. Walk through the halls of the large terraced temple and you will find her repeatedly with the figure and posture assumed by her in the oratory discovered by Naville: she is the foster-mother whose milk Thoutmôsis and Hachopsouîtou are greedily imbibing. The suckling of the sovereign was not a mere metaphor of language, realized and transcribed on stone, but a material act borrowed from the customs of Egyptian law, and the final formality of the ceremonies of the adoption. The woman who had no son to perpetuate her memory, and desired to have one, after reading the preliminary passages, had to offer one of her breasts, in all probability the right, to the youth or man she had chosen; he would press the teat between his lips for a few seconds, and by this pretence of feeding would become to her as a son. Among half civilized peoples where this custom prevails, it is not required that the woman has been or is still married: only, the young girl who acquires a child by this method covers her breast with a thin stuff before going through the ceremony. If, then, Thoutmôsis III, or by usurpation Amenôthes II, was represented kneeling under the right teat of the Hathor, he wished thereby to prove that she was his divine mother, and the complacent manner in which she yields him her milk sufficiently shows that she admitted the legitimacy of his claim.

But these are only half the ideas expressed by the group, and it remains for us to determine the meaning of the flowering lotuses which stand at the right and left. As sovereign of the West and of the lands in which the dead sojourned, she assumed different forms according to the provinces. In the North the people imagined her under the aspect of one of those fine sycamores which grow in the midst of the sand on the borders of the Libyan Desert, rendered green and thick by the hidden waters sent them by the infiltrations of the Nile. The mysterious path which leads to the shores of the West brings the _doubles_ to her feet; as soon as they are arrived, the divine soul, lodged in the trunk, thrust out the half or the whole of her body, and offered them a vase full of pure water and a tray filled with loaves. If they accepted her gifts--and they could scarcely refuse them--they confessed at once that they were her vassals; they were no longer authorized to return to the living, but the regions of the world beyond the tomb would open to them. In the nomes of the Saîd where she was imagined to be a cow, she haunted a fertile marsh situated on the slopes of the Libyan mountains; whenever a _double_ came to its edge she stretched forth her head from among the herbage to meet him, and claimed his homage, and when he had paid it, she allowed him to enter the realms of the funereal gods. The 186th Chapter[54] of the “Book of the Dead,” a very favourite one with devout persons under the second Theban Empire, initiates us into this myth, and the vignette that precedes it shows us the scene as the Egyptians conceived it: the red or yellow slopes of the mountain, the tufts of aquatic plants, the cow conferring with the defunct. The Pharaoh who commissioned our group--or rather the sculptor who executed it--combined the idea common to all with the royal concept of the adoption by the goddess, and he expressed the result therefrom as completely as the processes of his art permitted. He reduced the marsh to two slender clusters of lotus, and marked the two chief points of the adoption by means of two little royal figures and their attributes. The first, as we have seen, wears the costume of the Pharaohs and has black flesh; standing upright under the animal’s snout, it faces the spectator. Amenôthes II has just arrived in front of the cow and addressed to her the prayer in which he conjures her to aid him in his journey in search of the everlasting cities; his colour indicates that he is still the slave of death, but the goddess has already enrolled him among her adherents, and presents him to the universe as her well-beloved son. That formality over, he slips through the verdure, kneels down, and crushing the teat in his hand, greedily puts his lips to it. That is the final rite of the adoption, and also the pledge of his return to normal existence. Scarcely has he swallowed the first mouthfuls of milk than life enters his veins; the artist has represented him naked as a new-born infant, and painted his flesh red, the colour of the living.

IV

The two forms of Hathor welcoming the dead are not each confined to the province in which it was born. They gradually spread over the whole country, not without experiencing diverse fortunes. Hathor in the tree was reserved for papyri, stelæ, and bas-reliefs. The first idea was scarcely suitable for statuary, and the cleverest sculptor would have been embarrassed to derive a large tree from the stone, a goddess lost in the branches, a person in prayer before the tree and before the goddess. But it lent itself to painting, and some of the vignettes in which it is expressed in the excellent copies of the “Book of the Dead” or on the walls of the Theban hypogeums, show us the admirable way in which the designers of the new empire used it. Nothing could be more varied or skilful than the relations they establish between the woman and the sycamore on the one hand and the dead person on the other. He is sometimes accompanied by his soul, a big hawk with human head and arms, which mimics his slightest gestures: while the _double_ receives the elixir of youth in his clasped hands, the soul turns a runnel aside for his own benefit, and greedily drinks from it. Colour adds its charm to the composition, and the replicas of the subject to be seen at Cheîkh Abd-el-Gournah in the hypogeums of the XVIIIth and XIXth Dynasties would obtain a place of honour in our museums, if it was permitted to detach them and mount them in separate panels.

Hathor in the marshes was entirely suited to the ordinary conditions of sculpture, and if in some places serious difficulties were presented, I have indicated how the Theban masters overcame them. She provided a fairly frequent theme for the studios, and the Cairo Museum possesses three examples. They are smaller than the Deîr-el-Baharî group, and do not unite the two concepts of the adoration and the adoption. Consequently the lotus is wanting and the dedicatory figure at the cow’s udder. They are the affair of simple private persons who had no right to proclaim themselves children of the goddess. If they had attempted to touch the breast of Hathor they would have usurped one of the privileges of royalty; they appear then only once in each group, standing or crouching in front of the chest. In one, which is in grey schist and measures nearly four and a half feet long, the donor has lost his head and neck, and he lifts up a table of offerings with both hands in front of him; the cow also is decapitated.[55] No trace of inscription is to be seen on the pedestal, but the composition is that of the first Saïte period. The piece, although not the most mediocre that could be found, lacks originality; it is the work of a skilful journeyman who had no personal inspiration, and only knew how to apply the formulas of the school conscientiously. The second group is in yellowish limestone. It measures not quite three feet in length and has suffered more than the preceding one.[56] Not only has the animal’s head been destroyed, but its tail and one of its hind legs have vanished. The man is mutilated to the point that only one of his feet remains to prove to us that he was kneeling. He bore a table of offerings. An inscription engraved on the edge of the pedestal informs us that he was called Petesomtous, and the name, together with the style, takes us back to the Saïte period, perhaps to the period of the Persian domination. The composition is, besides, sufficiently rough, and it would not deserve any attention if the interest of the subject did not compensate for its insignificance as a work of art.

Three-quarters view.]

The third was celebrated from the moment of its discovery. It is in green schist, slightly over three feet in length, and under it in height. It was found by Mariette at Saqqarah, fifty years ago, in the tomb of a certain Psammetichus, a contemporary of the first Nectanebo.[57] It was accompanied by two fine statues of Osiris and Isis,[58] which are the glory of the Cairo Museum, and we owe them for a certainty to the same artist. The posture of the cow is the same as that of Deîr-el-Baharî; like her, the head-dress is formed of the solar disk with the uræus surmounted by two long feathers, but a _monaît_ fastened round the neck by its chain lies flat on the spine. Psammetichus stands under the head, his back to the chest, his hands hanging down over the apron, with the same gesture of submission as that of Amenôthes II. Besides his name and protocol, the inscriptions contain a prayer for his happiness, addressed to the benevolent Hathor. The hardness of the material has prevented the sculptor from completely freeing the fragile parts: the cow’s legs and belly are sunk in the stone, as are the back and feet of the man; the head-dress is supported by a semi-cone set in the back of the neck, and the ears are reinforced by a pad which doubles their thickness. The sculptor, embarrassed by the necessity of preserving masses of superfluous material, had the ingenious idea of treating the lower limbs as a bas-relief. He has designed them on each side of the panel that supports the belly, so that Hathor has two chest profiles and a double supply of legs. He has so cleverly arranged this superabundance of legs that it is not noticeable at a first glance, and some effort of thought is required to make sure that it exists. But despite these eccentricities the work is of rare perfection. Never has such hard stone been manipulated with greater suppleness; the outlines have a harshness that all the virtuosity of the execution has not been able to prevent, but the modelling of the bodies and the faces, both of the animal and of the man, is of unparalleled delicacy, and the whole breathes serenity mingled with melancholy. It is, as a piece of animal sculpture, the best that has come down to us in Saïte art.

V

Nevertheless, it loses when compared with the schist group of the time of Amenôthes II. The mythological element is less predominant, and the head gains by not being framed by two tufts of aquatic plants: but if the religious convention is less encumbering, the artistic convention and the conventions of the studio come out in a much more apparent fashion. The Saqqarah group belongs to the Memphian school, and, as with nearly all the products of that school, the form has something artificial and impersonal. Hathor is a symbolic cow, the half-abstract type of Egyptian cows, a type that in the eyes of the Memphians realized the ideal of the earthly or sacred cow: she has the elegance, but also the softness and the rather insipid meekness, which distinguishes the human figures. The Hathor of Naville, on the contrary, belongs to the Theban school, and possesses the characteristics that I have described above.[59] The royal studio whence it came was governed by the theological laws, and was forbidden to modify in any way the types that, in the course of ages, had been determined on for revealing the concepts of popular tradition or learned dogma, but it tried to keep their expression as near to life as the rites authorized. The artist who produced the Memphian Hathor chose a pattern from his cartoons, and translated it into stone without troubling to correct the banal purity by imitating a beast of the sacred herd. The sculptor to whom we owe the Theban Hathor, on the contrary, while preserving the ritual arrangement of the parts and the accumulation of the symbols, has placed them on a real cow, on the cow, perhaps, that for the moment incarnated the goddess in the neighbouring temple of Queen Hachopsouîtou. Imagine her without the emblematic surroundings he was compelled to give her--the heavy head-dress, the lotus tufts, the two statuettes of the Pharaoh--and you will have the good motherly creature who goes peaceably to pasture, and, as she goes, observes everything with her eye, inquisitive and dreamy at the same time. Neither Greece nor Rome has left us anything that can be compared with it; we must go to the great sculptors of animals of our own day to find an equally realistic piece of work.

From the right-hand side of the group.]

XII

THE STATUETTE OF AMENÔPHIS IV

(_The Louvre_)

The statuette originally formed part of a group. The lower part has been fairly skilfully restored in modern times: the upper comes from the Salt collection,[60] and, like most of the objects of that collection, was found at Thebes. It represents Amenôphis IV of the XVIIIth Dynasty, the first in date of the Pharaohs we are accustomed to name the heretic kings.

In making only a cursory examination we are struck by the ways in which it differs from the royal statuettes that have come down to us. The Pharaohs are usually seated with the head erect, the bust firm, in a posture of stiff dignity which did not lack grandeur. Here the royal stiffness has almost wholly disappeared. The head leans slightly forward, the bust sinks down, it seems as if the body, powerless to hold itself up, is going to slip off the seat; the abandon of the posture is in entire harmony with the character of the person. The back is slightly rounded, the hips are larger than are suitable for a man, the belly and chest inflated; the breasts are round like those of a woman, the puffed-out torso is wrinkled in folds of fat, the face is weak and good-natured. In all that, the artist has set aside the æsthetic rules usual in Egypt. If it were not for the awkward angle formed by the arm that holds the sceptre and the whip, and the bad execution of the hand that rests on the left thigh, his work might be quoted as an excellent specimen of what a conscientious sculptor could do at the best moments of Theban art between Thoutmôsis III and Setouî I.

The Louvre.]

I do not believe that in the long series of Pharaohs there is a prince who has been so badly treated by contemporary scholars as he has been, and about whom they have allowed greater rein to their imagination. At first, the roundness of his body and the exaggeration of his breast caused him to be taken for a woman: for a long time Champollion characterized him as a queen, and was only convinced of his error with difficulty. Later, Mariette thought he recognized in him the exterior signs of a eunuch. Contemporary monuments assign him a wife and children, and we can find a way of reconciling this embarrassing posterity with the new theory. It suffices to suppose that, after having been married and become the father of four daughters, he went to war with one of those African tribes that have preserved to this day the custom of castrating their prisoners: having fallen into their hands, he would have left them as we see him. Some Egyptologists have accused him of being an idiot, the more moderate only regard him as a fanatic. Born of a foreign mother, the white Taîa, brought up by her to worship Canaanitish deities, he had scarcely ascended the throne before he wished officially to replace the worship of Amon by that of the solar disk, whose Egyptian name, Aton, perhaps reminded him of the Syrian name Adoni or Adonaï. This story is well imagined, but to me it seems more than doubtful. Two proofs have been advanced concerning the foreign origin of Taîa: the pink colour of her cheeks and the curious form of the names used in her family. The flesh of Egyptian women was always painted pale yellow: if Taîa is pink, it is because she was fairer than they, and consequently of exotic birth. The argument was specious, but it is not permissible to repeat it to-day. For it has been discovered that in the time of Amenôphis II and Amenôphis III the artists for some years employed pink tones for the flesh of their personages, both men and women, and the confirmation of that fact takes away any value from the reasoning deduced from Taîa’s colour. Taîa has pink flesh in the monuments because the fashion of the day required that she should so have it, and not because she possessed the fair complexion of the northerner. As to the names of the members of her family, Iouaa, Touaa, they do not seem to me to be Asiatic. Doubtless they are not constructed in the Theban manner, but they are found, and many like them, in the tombs of the Ancient Empire. Far from proving a Canaanitish or Libyan extraction, they take us back to the oldest periods of the history of Egypt and denote a Memphian or Heliopolitan origin.

If, as everything indicates, Taîa is not a foreigner, we no longer have any cause to seek beyond Egypt for the motives that made Amenôphis IV decide to proscribe the worship of Amon. In fact, the religion of Aton that he professed is indigenous in its formulas and ceremonies. Aton is the solar disk, the shining globe lighted every morning in the east in order to be extinguished every evening in the west; for some theologians it was the visible body in which Râ, the solar god _par excellence_, was the soul; for others the actual god, and not the shining manifestation of the god. The Theban priesthood had adopted the first theory, which better harmonized with its monotheistic tendencies, and it had developed it to the utmost: it had fused together all the forms of the divinity, and only recognized in it the aspects, the diverse conditions of one and the same being who was the soul of the Sun, Amonrâ. The schools of Memphis and Heliopolis, older than those of Thebes, had remained more closely attached to the ancient polytheism, and interpreted its doctrines in a more material sense. A fact that, so far, no one has ever brought forward, proves incontestably that the worship rendered by Amenôphis IV to Aton was connected with that of the sun as practised at Heliopolis: the high priest of Aton, the supreme head of the royal religion, bore the same official name and the same titles as that of Râ at Heliopolis.

If, however, the monuments tell us that the worship of Aton was a form of the most ancient worship of Râ, they do not so far assist us to determine the points of detail in which it differed. The solar disk of Amenôphis IV, the supreme god Aton, is recognized by the rays terminating in hands that he darts on the earth: the hands brandish the anserated cross, and bring life to everything that exists. I am not sure that Amenôphis IV invented this imagery: I like to think that in that, as in everything, he was bound to follow tradition. The prayers that accompany the figure of the god, the ceremonies celebrated in his name, are all Egyptian; they present that character of seriousness and sometimes of licence to be observed at Denderah, and in all the places where the sombre myth of dead Osiris does not rule. The bas-reliefs that have preserved its physiognomy for us might serve as an illustration for the picture drawn by Herodotus of the great festival of Bubastis.

Having said that, it may be asked what motives impelled Amenôphis IV to deny the gods of his fore-fathers and to embrace a Heliopolitan religion. It should be noted at once that his father, Amenôphis III, had already set the example of a special affection for solar worships other than that of Amon: we may then believe that Amenôphis IV as a child was brought up in particular devotion for Râ, and that later, a natural result of his early education, he was desirous of imposing his favourite deity on his subjects. But I do not think that religious faith was the sole, or even the principal reason of his cruel persecution of the priests and partisans of Amon; politics probably were chiefly responsible. Amon was, above all, the patron of Thebes: he had made the greatness of the Theban Dynasties, and they, in their turn, had exalted him above all his compeers. The conquests in Syria and Ethiopia had not been without benefit for Egypt in general, but they had been specially advantageous to Amon; the greater part of the booty had passed into his coffers, his priests filled the public offices, and his chief prophet was the highest personage of the empire after the reigning sovereign. Had there been under Thoutmôsis IV an attempt similar to that which delivered the last Ramessides to the pontiffs of Amon and which raised Hrihor to the throne? I do not know; but I believe the desire to counterbalance their power weighed heavily in the favour shown by Amenôphis III to other divinities, and that a definite wish to overturn not only Amon, but especially his clergy, induced Amenôphis IV to thrust Aton into the first rank. He did not recoil from any means that would lead to success. As the destiny of Amon was indissolubly bound up with that of Thebes, so long as Thebes was the capital, Amon and his priests would keep the supremacy. Amenôphis IV, after changing his name, which was a profession of faith in the excellence of Amon, for that of Khounaton, “splendour of Aton,” founded a new capital which he called the city of Aton; he installed there a new priesthood which he richly endowed, and then erased the name of Amon from all the monuments throughout Egypt and even at Thebes. But the worship of Amon had its roots too deeply implanted in the land, and his priests were too powerful, for the king to prevail against them. When he was dead, his successors gave up the struggle: Aton returned into obscurity, his city was deserted, and the name of the king, proscribed by sacerdotal hatred, vanished with the buildings on which it had been engraved.

His attempt was not without influence on art. The necropolis of El-Amarna has told us the names of two of the sculptors who helped to adorn the city during its brief existence. Their works are distinguished from earlier ones by a greater freedom of composition, and particularly by greater realism in the reproduction of the persons. The Amenôphis IV of the Louvre does honour to their talent; it is the more valuable since their works, treated with great ferocity by the Theban reaction, have become very rare. We have a certain number of bas-reliefs more or less mutilated, but very few statues; that of the Louvre is, so far, a unique work of its kind.

XIII

FOUR CANOPIC HEADS FOUND IN THE VALLEY OF THE KINGS AT THEBES[61]

Among the principal objects discovered by Theodore Davis in 1907 in the Valley of the Kings, in the secret chamber where the heretic Pharaoh Khouniatonou was buried with an equipment partly consisting of objects that had belonged to his mother, Tîyi, there are four alabaster Canopic jars of a rare perfection even for that period of perfect execution. The body of the jar is a little longer than is usual, slender at the base, bulging out at the top, with a polish at once unobtrusive and pleasing to the eye. An inscription had been engraved on it, and so far as may be judged by the place it occupied, was the ordinary dedication to the deities protecting the entrails; but it has been effaced, then the place smoothed over, and tinted with the colour of the surrounding part. The touching up is accomplished with so much skill that we can only here and there, beneath the transparence of the glazing, guess at a few marks of the old writing. The four lids are in the form of a human head, a very refined head framed in the short wig with close rows of little flat locks of hair: a golden uræus, now vanished, stood on the forehead. As the face is beardless, and the whole of the equipment except the coffin bears the name of Tîyi, the Canopic jars have been attributed to the queen. I do not share that opinion; I maintain that they belonged to the Pharaoh, and that we should see his authentic portrait in them.

Alabaster Canopic head found at Thebes.]

Alabaster Canopic head found at Thebes.]

No one who has seen the four heads side by side will doubt that they represent one and the same person. The insignificant differences to be noticed between them are caused by unimportant technical details, or by breakages in the stone, or by the action of damp, or the different way in which time has treated the materials of which the eyes were formed. The eyebrows consist of a fillet of blue enamel encrusted on the edge of the arch, and the eye, properly so-called, is also designated by a blue fillet, which includes a cornea in white limestone, relieved with red at the corners, and an iris of black stone. In some, the eyebrow is gone. In others the iris has fallen, leaving blind one or both the eyes, or, the whole having been displaced, the eye has been brought forward as if the person was suffering from the beginning of an exophthalmic goître. Very different expressions of countenance are the result, but under them all the same face is quickly recognized: a longish oval, rather thin at the bottom, a somewhat narrow forehead, a straight nose, thin where it joins the face and turned up at the end almost like Roxelana’s, delicate wide-opened nostrils, the sides thin and nervous, a short upper lip, a small but full mouth, a bony chin, pointed and heavy, joined to the neck by a rather harsh line. None of the heads have been entirely respected by time, and one of them has lost its nose, but by good luck, rare in archæology, the best in composition is also that which has suffered least: if the enamel of the eyelids is wanting, the eyes are intact and the epidermis without scratches. I do not think that there exists in the Egyptian sculpture of that period a more energetic or living physiognomy: the mouth is closed as if to retain the words that desire to escape, the nostrils are inflated and palpitate, the eyes look keenly and frankly into those of the visitor. With age, the alabaster has taken on the dull complexion of the great Egyptian ladies, always protected by the veil, which the sun can never burn. So that it is not surprising that many should have felt in looking at them that they were heads of a woman, and, knowing the circumstances of the discovery, imagined that they saw the most celebrated woman there had then been in the Egyptian Empire, the queen-dowager Tîyi.

Alabaster Canopic head found at Thebes.]

Strictly speaking, that is quite possible, for on the one hand the head-dress and necklace into which the neck fits are common to both sexes, and on the other, the features, more accentuated than is usual with a woman, are not so to the point of only fitting a man; directly, however, they are compared with those of the portraits of Tîyi, we are bound to confess that the resemblance is slight. Two types of these have come down to us. In the first, which is by far the most frequent, her face was remodelled and symbolized in the studios of Thebes in accordance with the customary formula for queens. The colossal group of Medinet Habou, recently transported to the Cairo Museum, offers, perhaps, the best example. There, following the regulations, Tîyi is furnished with a round, regular face, almond-shaped eyes, good cheeks, straight nose, smiling mouth, and normal chin: there is something about her which prevents us from confusing her with the other princesses of her era, but she has preserved none of the peculiarities that compose her actual physiognomy. That is no longer the case with the most individual of the specimens of the second type, the soapstone head that Petrie discovered at Sinaï, which is now in the Cairo Museum. The right wing of the wig is wanting, and the nose has been crushed by an unfortunate blow on the left nostril, without, however, losing anything of its essential form; a cartouche engraved on the front of the head-dress tells us the name, and at the first glance the portrait gives the impression of a good likeness. It is not flattering. If we are to believe it, Tîyi presented the racial characteristics of the Berbers or of the women of the Egyptian desert: small eyes puckered at the temples, a nose with a broad tip and contemptuous nostrils, a heavy, sulky mouth with turned-down corners, the lower lip dragged back by a receding chin like that of a semi-negress: the receding chin alone forbids us to identify her with the original of our Canopic jars. They have certainly a family likeness, and it could not be otherwise, for if I am right it is a question of mother and son, but variations are to be noted in the son which remove him from the type so clearly revealed in Petrie’s statuette. That type, on the contrary, is preserved intact in the admirable head in painted wood which has passed into the collection of Herr Simon of Berlin. We might even say that it is exaggerated, and that the eyes are more oblique, the cheek-bones more prominent, the nose more aggressive, the smiling muscles more sharply evident, the mouth and chin closer to that of a negress. I believe it to be one of Tîyi’s granddaughters who became queen after the fall of the Heretic Dynasty: her head-dress, which was originally that of a private person, was afterwards modified to receive the insignia of royalty. Was she married to Harmhâbi, to Ramses, or to Setouî I? The deviation between the group to which she belongs and that of the Canopic jars is sufficiently great to force us to give up the idea that they represent one person. In addition, our Canopic sculptures possess only one uræus on the forehead, as is customary with kings, while the others have the double uræus which then begins to be the etiquette with queens. That rule has exceptions, and therefore I shall not deduce too strict conclusions from it: but the absence of the second uræus is not less a somewhat strong presumption in favour of the opinion that our Canopic heads are those of a man and not of a woman.

Cairo Museum.]

Alabaster Canopic head found at Thebes.]

If, however, they are portraits of a man, the circumstances of their discovery compel us to declare that he must be the king Khouniatonou; but how are we to be convinced of this when we remember the grotesque silhouette that the sculptors of El-Amarna have given him? To believe them, he would have been physically a sort of degenerate, tall, weakly, with hips and chest like a woman’s, a neck without consistency, an absurd head, a flat, almost non-existent forehead, an enormous nose, an ugly mouth, a massive chin.[62] He seems to have liked these caricatures, and his friends, imitating him from a desire to flatter him, altered more or less the shape of their own bodies in order that they might resemble that of his. Documents of different origins prove, however, that he was not, or had not always been, the queer figure that is attributed to him. The Louvre alone possesses two such witnesses. The first, which came to the Museum in its early days, is a charming statuette in yellow soapstone. The king is seated, but he has lost the bottom of the legs, which a modern restorer has skilfully replaced. He wears the _coufeh_ with hanging ends, the bust is bare; in his right hand he holds the hooked staff and the sacred whip emblems of royalty; the left hand is indolently stretched over the thigh. The body is young, the muscling supple and thick, and although he sinks down a little, he has not the squat attitude we know so well. The face and neck are somewhat slender, and contain the characteristics that, exaggerated later, lent themselves almost naturally to caricature. It is, in fact, the effigy of the young king sculptured at Thebes at the time when he was only Amenôphis IV, but when he demanded that he should be represented as he was, or as he saw himself, without reference to the conventional type of the Pharaoh. In the second piece, a statue of which only the head and shoulders remain, he is some years older. He is armed for war, and his neck, too slender, has bent under the weight of the helmet, as if thenceforth incapable of supporting it. It is the profile of the bas-reliefs of El-Amarna with the rounded spine and the particular curve that projects the head forward; the forehead, nose and mouth only differ from those of the statuette in that they are thinner. A plaster mask in the Cairo Museum which Petrie considers to have been moulded on the corpse immediately after the sovereign’s death, but which is undoubtedly a studio model, testifies to a condition of physiological degeneracy that did not before exist. It presents the emaciated features of the bas-reliefs and their bony texture, it is true, but without their extreme exaggerations. When it was question of a statue, the sculptor forbade himself the liberties that his colleagues, commissioned to decorate the tombs, allowed themselves with the master: he represented him just as he was at the moment, and the physiognomy was sufficiently original for him to be certain of always deriving from it a work that would force the attention of the spectators.

Cairo Museum.]

Cairo Museum.]

Painted wood. Berlin, collection of M. James Simon.]

Painted wood. Berlin, collection of M. James Simon.]

And now let us compare each of these pieces with our Canopic heads. The profile of Khouniatonou helmeted is not as strong as theirs, due perhaps to the contusions undergone by the surface of the stone during a long sojourn in a damp soil where saltpetre was abundant, but each of the elements may be superposed and adjusted, forehead, nose, eyes, mouth, chin, in an absolutely satisfying manner: it merely seems that the artist of the Canopic heads saw his model in better health than that of the statue. The resemblance, although less complete, with the statuette of yellow soapstone is still apparent. No unprejudiced observer with the series in front of him can come to any other conclusion than that we have in it portraits of one and the same man. Leaving out the slight differences due to the chisel, there is no more deviation between the group of statues and the best of our heads than there is between that and the three found with it. There is divergence in one point only: in the two statues the head bends and leans forward more or less; in the Canopic jars it is erect without weakness. A moment’s reflection will show that it could not be otherwise. However greatly we are moved by the beauty of the work, we must not forget that our four heads belong, not to art pure and simple, but to industrial art, and that their purpose imposed special rules on the master who chiselled them. They were prosaic lids for the receptacles in which the entrails of the Pharaoh were placed, and it was necessary that the median axis of the vase properly so-called should coincide exactly with that of the lid. There was a question of equilibrium to be managed between the two constituent elements of the Canopic jar; the sculptor must straighten the neck of his model, and consequently correct the impression of lassitude given by the statues, by an appearance of vigour. If we examine the portraits of Khouniatonou and his successors in company of a physician, certain anatomical details that at the first glance we did not trouble about--the depression of the temples, the obliquity of the eyes, the contraction of the sides of the nostrils, the pinching of the mouth, the attenuation of the neck--assume an etiological value that the archæologist was far from suspecting. Dr. Baÿ, studying the faces of Khouniatonou, Touatânkhamânou, and Harmhâbi with me, diagnosed symptoms of consumption more or less advanced. If Khouniatonou died of the disease when thirty years old, we need not be greatly surprised.

The Louvre.]

I do not insist upon this kind of research, in which I am not competent, and I leave it to the reader to decide if I have or have not proved the identity of the person represented by our four heads to be that of Khouniatonou, the heresiarch. One of them at least is a masterpiece, and the others possess qualities that assure them a high place in the estimation of connoisseurs, but to which of the great Egyptian schools ought we to attribute them? We may hesitate between two: the Theban, to which most of the artists who filled the royal laboratories then belonged, and the Hermopolitan, in the province of which was El-Amarna, the favourite residence of the sovereign. It was certainly the latter school that worked at the hypogeums and sculptured the pictures. We find in them its defects: harsh, rough composition, a tendency to caricature the human form and to multiply comic episodes; but also its good qualities: suppleness, movement, life, freedom of execution. The few figures in alto-relievo that have escaped destruction, those, for instance, that accompany two of the large front stelæ, are of the same style as the bas-reliefs, but we do not find in them any of the characteristics that we have noted as proper to the monuments of the Louvre or to our Canopic jars. Just as the others show an unfinished, worn aspect, these are carefully finished in the least details: it is the perfect chiselling and high polish of the Theban masters and their strong, dignified way of posing the figure and expressing the physiognomy of the model. Whoever has seen the statues of Thoutmôsis III, Amenôthes II, the so-called Taîa, and Touatânkhamânou in the Cairo Museum will not doubt for a moment that our four heads are from the hands of persons belonging to the same school: they belong to the Theban school, and more particularly, I think, to that portion of the Theban school which, a few years later, decorated the temple of Gournah, the Memnonium of Abydos, and the hypogeum of Setouî I.

Fragment of a stone statue. The Louvre.]

XIV

A HEAD OF THE PHARAOH HARMHABI

(_Boulaq Museum_)