9. Art
Architecture”Old Kingdom, Middle Kingdom, Empire and Sate sculpture”Bas-reliefโ€”Painting”Minor arts”Music”The artists
The greatest element in this civilization was its art. Here, almost at the threshold of history, we find an art powerful and mature, superior to that of any modern nation, and equaled only by that of Greece. At first the luxury of isolation and peace, and then, under Thutmose III and Rameses II, the spoils of oppression and war, gave to Egypt the opportunity and the means for massive architecture, masculine statuary, and a hundred minor arts that so early touched perfection. The whole theory of progress hesitates before Egyptian art.
Architecture* was the noblest of the ancient arts, because it combined in imposing form mass and duration, beauty and use. It began humbly in the adornment of tombs and the external decoration of homes. Dwellings were mostly of mud, with here and there some pretty woodwork (a Japanese lattice, a well-carved portal), and a roof strengthened with the tough and pliable trunks of the palm. Around the house, normally, was a wall enclosing a court; from the court steps led to the roof; from this the tenants passed down into the rooms. The well-to-do had private gardens, carefully landscaped; the cities provided public gardens for the poor, and hardly a home but had its ornament of flowers. Inside the house the walls were hung with colored mattings, and the floors, if the master could afford it, were covered with rugs. People sat on these rugs rather than on chairs; the Egyptians of the Old Kingdom squatted for their meals at tables six inches high, in the fashion of the Japanese; and ate with their fingers, like Shakespeare. Under the Empire, when slaves were cheap, the upper classes sat on high cushioned chairs, and had their servants hand them course after course.190
Stone for building was too costly for homes; it was a luxury reserved for priests and kings. Even the nobles, ambitious though they were, left the greatest wealth and the best building materials to the temples; in consequence the palaces that overlooked almost every mile of the river in the days of Amenhotep III crumbled into oblivion, while the abodes of the gods and the tombs of the dead remained. By the Twelfth Dynasty the pyramid had ceased to be the fashionable form of sepulture. Khnumhotep (ca. 2180 B.C.) chose at Beni-Hasan the quieter form of a colonnade built into the mountainside; and this theme, once established, played a thousand variations among the hills on the western slope of the Nile. From the time of the Pyramids to the Temple of Hathor at Denderahโ€”i.e., for some three thousand yearsโ€”there rose out of the sands of Egypt such a succession of architectural achievements as no civilization has ever surpassed.
At Karnak and Luxor a riot of columns raised by Thutmose I and III, Amenhotep III, Seti I, Rameses II and other monarchs from the Twelfth to the Twenty-second Dynasty; at Medinet-Habu (ca. 1300 B.C.) a vast but less distinguished edifice, on whose columns an Arab village rested for centuries; at Abydos the Temple of Seti I, dark and sombre in its massive ruins; at Elephantine the little Temple of Khnum (ca. 1400 B.C.), โ€positively Greek in its precision and eleganceโ€;191 at Der-el-Bahri the stately colonnades of Queen Hatshepsut; near it the Ramesseum, another forest of colossal columns and statues reared by the architects and slaves of Rameses II; at Philรฆ the lovely Temple of Isis (ca. 240 B.C.) desolate and abandoned now that the damming of the Nile at Assuan has submerged the bases of its perfect columnsโ€”these are sample fragments of the many monuments that still adorn the valley of the Nile, and attest even in their ruins the strength and courage of the race that reared them. Here, perhaps, is an excess of pillars, a crowding of columns against the tyranny of the sun, a Far-Eastern aversion to symmetry, a lack of unity, a barbaric-modern adoration of size. But here, too, are grandeur, sublimity, majesty and power; here are the arch and the vault,192 used sparingly because not needed, but ready to pass on their principles to Greece and Rome and modern Europe; here are decorative designs never surpassed;193 here are papyriform columns, lotiform columns, โ€proto-Doricโ€ columns,194 Caryatid columns,195 Hathor capitals, palm capitals, clerestories, and magnificent architraves full of the strength and stability that are the very soul of architectureโ€s powerful appeal.* The Egyptians were the greatest builders in history.
Some would add that they were also the greatest sculptors. Here at the outset is the Sphinx, conveying by its symbolism the leonine quality of some masterful Pharaohโ€”perhaps Khafre-Chephren; it has not only size, as some have thought, but character. The cannon-shot of the Mamelukes have broken the nose and shorn the beard, but nevertheless those gigantic features portray with impressive skill the force and dignity, the calm and sceptical maturity, of a natural king. Across those motionless features a subtle smile has hovered for five thousand years, as if already the unknown artist or monarch had understood all that men would ever understand about men. It is a Mona Lisa in stone.
There is nothing finer in the history of sculpture than the diorite statue of Khafre in the Cairo Museum; as ancient to Praxiteles as Praxiteles to us, it nevertheless comes down across fifty centuries almost unhurt by timeโ€s rough usages; cut in the most intractable of stones, it passes on to us completely the strength and authority, the wilfulness and courage, the sensitivity and intelligence of the (artist or the) King. Near it, and even older, Pharaoh Zoser sits pouting in limestone; farther on, the guide with lighted match reveals the transparency of an alabaster Menkaure.
Quite as perfect in artistry as these portraits of royalty are the figures of the Sheik-el-Beled and the Scribe. The Scribe has come down to us in many forms, all of uncertain antiquity; the most illustrious is the squatting Scribe of the Louvre.* The Sheik is no sheik but only an overseer of labor, armed with the staff of authority, and stepping forward as if in supervision or command. His name, apparently, was Kaapiru; but the Arab workmen who rescued him from his tomb at Sakkara were struck with his resemblance to the Sheik-el-Beled (i.e., Mayor-of-the-Village) under whom they lived; and this title which their good humor gave him is now inseparable from his fame. He is carved only in mortal wood, but time has not seriously reduced his portly figure or his chubby legs; his waistline has all the amplitude of the comfortable bourgeois in every civilization; his rotund face beams with the content of a man who knows his place and glories in it. The bald head and carelessly loosened robe display the realism of an art already old enough to rebel against idealization; but here, too, is a fine simplicity, a complete humanity, expressed without bitterness, and with the ease and grace of a practised and confident hand. โ€If,โ€ says Maspero, โ€some exhibition of the worldโ€s masterpieces were to be inaugurated, I should choose this work to uphold the honor of Egyptian artโ€196โ€”or would that honor rest more securely on the head of Khafre?
These are the chefs-dโ€ล“uvres of Old Kingdom statuary. But lesser masterpieces abound: the seated portraits of Rahotep and his wife Nofrit, the powerful figure of Ranofer the priest, the copper statues of King Phiops and his son, a falcon-head in gold, the humorous figures of the Beer-Brewer and the Dwarf Knemhotepโ€”all but one in the Cairo Museum, all without exception instinct with character. It is true that the earlier pieces are coarse and crude; that by a strange convention, running throughout Egyptian art, figures are shown with the body and eyes facing forward, but the hands and feet in profile;* that not much attention was given to the body, which was left in most cases stereotyped and unrealโ€”all female bodies young, all royal bodies strong; and that individualization, though masterly, was generally reserved for the head. But with all the stiffness and sameness that priestly conventions and control forced upon statuary, paintings and reliefs, these works were fully redeemed by the power and depth of the conception, the vigor and precision of the execution, the character, line and finish of the product. Never was sculpture more alive: the Sheik exudes authority, the woman grinding grain gives every sense and muscle to her work, the Scribe is on the very verge of writing. And the thousand little puppets placed in the tombs to carry on essential industries for the dead were moulded with a like vivacity, so that we can almost believe, with the pious Egyptian, that the deceased could not be unhappy while these ministrants were there.
Not for many centuries did Egyptian sculpture equal again the achievements of the early dynasties. Because most of the statuary was made for the temples or the tombs, the priests determined to a great degree what forms the artist should follow; and the natural conservatism of religion crept into art, slowly stifling sculpture into a conventional, stylistic degeneration. Under the powerful monarchs of the Twelfth Dynasty the secular spirit reasserted itself, and art recaptured something of its old vigor and more than its old skill. A head of Amenemhet III in black diorite197 suggests at once the recovery of character and the recovery of art; here is the quiet hardness of an able king, carved with the competence of a master. A colossal statue of Senusret III is crowned with a head and face equal in conception and execution to any portrait in the history of sculpture; and the ruined torso of Senusret I, in the Cairo Museum, ranks with the torso of Hercules in the Louvre. Animal figures abound in the Egyptian sculpture of every age, and are