Chapter 5

EGYPTIAN ARCHITECTURE.

BOOKS RECOMMENDED: Champollion, _Monuments de l’Egypte et de la Nubie_. Choisy, _L’art de bâtir chez les Egyptiens_. Flinders-Petrie, _History of Egypt; Ten Years Digging in Egypt, 1881-91_. Jomard, _Description de l’Egypte, Antiquités_. Lepsius, _Denkmäler aus Aegypten und Aethiopien_. Mariette, _Monuments of Upper Egypt_. Maspero, _Egyptian Archæology_. Perrot and Chipiez, _History of Art in Ancient Egypt_. Prisse d’Avennes, _Histoire de l’art égyptien_. Reber, _History of Ancient Art_. Rossellini, _Monumenti del Egitto_. Wilkinson, _Manners and Customs of Ancient Egyptians_.

+LAND AND PEOPLE.+ As long ago as 5000 B.C., the Egyptians were a people already highly civilized, and skilled in the arts of peace and war. The narrow valley of the Nile, fertilized by the periodic overflow of the river, was flanked by rocky heights, nearly vertical in many places, which afforded abundance of excellent building stone, while they both isolated the Egyptians and protected them from foreign aggression. At the Delta, however, the valley widened out, with the falling away of these heights, into broad lowlands, from which there was access to the outer world.

The art history of Egypt may be divided into five periods as follows:

I. THE ANCIENT EMPIRE (cir. 4500?-3000 B.C.), comprising the first ten dynasties, with Memphis as the capital.

II. THE FIRST THEBAN MONARCHY or MIDDLE EMPIRE (3000-2100 B.C.) comprising the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth dynasties reigning at Thebes.

The Hyksos invasion, or incursion of the Shepherd Kings, interrupted the current of Egyptian art history for a period of unknown length, probably not less than four or five centuries.

III. THE SECOND THEBAN MONARCHY (1700?-1000 B.C.), comprising the eighteenth to twentieth dynasties inclusive, was the great period of Egyptian history; the age of conquests and of vast edifices.

IV. THE DECADENCE or SAITIC PERIOD (1000-324 B.C.), comprising the dynasties twenty-one to thirty (Saitic, Bubastid, Ethiopic, etc.), reigning at Sais, Tanis, and Bubastis, and the Persian conquest; a period almost barren of important monuments.

(Periods III. and IV. constitute together the period of the NEW EMPIRE, if we omit the Persian dominion.)

V. THE REVIVAL (from 324 B.C. to cir. 330 A.D.) comprises the Ptolemaic or Macedonian and Roman dominations.

+THE ANCIENT EMPIRE: THE PYRAMIDS.+ The great works of this period are almost exclusively sepulchral, and include the most ancient buildings of which we have any remains. While there is little of strictly architectural art, the overwhelming size and majesty of the Pyramids, and the audacity and skill shown in their construction, entitle them to the first place in any sketch of this period. They number over a hundred, scattered in six groups, from Abu-Roash in the north to Meidoum in the south, and are of various shapes and sizes. They are all royal tombs and belong to the first twelve dynasties; each contains a sepulchral chamber, and each at one time possessed a small chapel adjacent to it, but this has, in almost every case, perished.

Three pyramids surpass all the rest by their prodigious size; these are at Ghizeh and belong to the fourth dynasty. They are known by the names of their builders; the oldest and greatest being that of +Cheops+, or Khufu;[1] the second, that of +Chephren+, or Khafra; and the third, that of +Mycerinus+, or Menkhara. Other smaller ones stand at the feet of these giants.

[Footnote 1: The Egyptian names known to antiquity are given here first in the more familiar classic form, and then in the Egyptian form.]

The base of the “Great Pyramid” measures 764 feet on a side; its height is 482 feet, and its volume must have originally been nearly three and one-half million cubic yards (Fig. 1). It is constructed of limestone upon a plateau of rock levelled to receive it, and was finished externally, like its two neighbors, with a coating of polished stone, supposed by some to have been disposed in bands of different colored granites, but of which it was long ago despoiled. It contained three principal chambers and an elaborate system of inclined passages, all executed in finely cut granite and limestone. The sarcophagus was in the uppermost chamber, above which the superincumbent weight was relieved by open spaces and a species of rudimentary arch of Λ-shape (Fig. 2). The other two pyramids differ from that of Cheops in the details of their arrangement and in size, not in the principle of their construction. Chephren is 454 feet high, with a base 717 feet square. Mycerinus, which still retains its casing of pink granite, is but 218 feet in height, with a base 253 feet on a side.

Among the other pyramids there is considerable variety both of type and material. At Sakkarah is one 190 feet high, constructed in six unequal steps on a slightly oblong base measuring nearly 400 × 357 feet. It was attributed by Mariette to Ouenephes, of the first dynasty, though now more generally ascribed to Senefrou of the third. At Abu-Seir and Meidoum are other stepped pyramids; at Dashour is one having a broken slope, the lower part steeper than the upper. Several at Meroë with unusually steep slopes belong to the Ethiopian dynasties of the Decadence. A number of pyramids are built of brick.

+TOMBS.+ The Ancient Empire has also left us a great number of tombs of the type known as _Mastabas_. These are oblong rectangular structures of stone or brick with slightly inclined sides and flat ceilings. They uniformly face the east, and are internally divided into three parts; the chamber or chapel, the _serdab_, and the well. In the first of these, next the entrance, were placed the offerings made to the _Ka_ or “double,” for whom also scenes of festivity or worship were carved and painted on its walls to minister to his happiness in his incorporeal life. The serdabs, or secret inner chambers, of which there were several in each mastaba, contained statues of the defunct, by which the existence and identity of the Ka were preserved. Finally came the well, leading to the mummy chamber, deep underground, which contained the sarcophagus. The sarcophagi, both of this and later ages, are good examples of the minor architecture of Egypt; many of them are panelled in imitation of wooden construction and richly decorated with color, symbols, and hieroglyphs.

+OTHER MONUMENTS.+ Two other monuments of the Ancient Empire also claim attention: the +Sphinx+ and the adjacent so-called “+Sphinx temple+” at Ghizeh. The first of these, a huge sculpture carved from the rock, represents Harmachis in the form of a human-headed lion. It is ordinarily partly buried in the sand; is 70 feet long by 66 feet high, and forms one of the most striking monuments of Egyptian art. Close to it lie the nearly buried ruins of the temple once supposed to be that of the Sphinx, but now proved by Petrie to have been erected in connection with the second pyramid. The plan and present aspect of this venerable edifice are shown in Figs. 3 and 4. The hall was roofed with stone lintels carried on sixteen square monolithic piers of alabaster. The whole was buried in a rectangular mass of masonry and revetted internally with alabaster, but was wholly destitute internally as well as externally of decoration or even of mouldings. With the exception of scanty remains of a few of the pyramid-temples or chapels, and the temple discovered by Petrie in Meidoum, it is the only survival from the temple architecture of that early age.

+THE MIDDLE EMPIRE: TOMBS.+ The monuments of this period, as of the preceding, are almost wholly sepulchral. We now encounter two types of tombs. One, structural and pyramidal, is represented by many examples at Abydos, the most venerated of all the burial grounds of Egypt (Fig. 5). All of these are built of brick, and are of moderate size and little artistic interest. The second type is that of tombs cut in the vertical cliffs of the west bank of the Nile Valley. The entrance to these faces eastward as required by tradition; the remoter end of the excavation pointing toward the land of the Sun of Night. But such tunnels only become works of architecture when, in addition to the customary mural paintings, they receive a decorative treatment in the design of their structural forms. Such a treatment appears in several tombs at Beni-Hassan, in which columns are reserved in cutting away the rock, both in the chapel-chambers and in the vestibules or porches which precede them. These columns are polygonal in some cases, clustered in others. The former type, with eight, sixteen, or thirty-two sides (in these last the _arrises_ or edges are emphasized by a slight concavity in each face, like embryonic fluting), have a square abacus, suggesting the Greek Doric order, and giving rise to the name _proto-Doric_ (Fig. 6). Columns of this type are also found at Karnak, Kalabshé, Amada, and Abydos. A reminiscence of primitive wood construction is seen in the dentils over the plain architrave of the entrance, which in other respects recalls the triple entrances to certain mastabas of the Old Empire. These dentils are imitations of the ends of rafters, and to some archæologists suggest a wooden origin for the whole system of columnar design. But these rock-cut shafts and heavy architraves in no respect resemble wooden prototypes, but point rather to an imitation cut in the rock of a well-developed, pre-existing system of stone construction, some of whose details, however, were undoubtedly derived from early methods of building in wood. The vault was below the chapel and reached by a separate entrance. The serdab was replaced by a niche in which was the figure of the defunct carved from the native rock. Some of the tombs employed in the chapel-chamber columns of quatrefoil section with capitals like clustered buds (Fig. 7), and this type became in the next period one of the most characteristic forms of Egyptian architecture.

+TEMPLES.+ Of the temples of this period only two have left any remains of importance. Both belong to the twelfth dynasty (cir. 2200 B.C.). Of one of these many badly shattered fragments have been found in the ruins of Bubastis; these show the clustered type of lotus-bud column mentioned above. The other, of which a few columns have been identified among the ruins of the Great Temple at Karnak, constituted the oldest part of that vast agglomeration of religious edifices, and employed columns of the so-called proto-Doric type. From these remains it appears that structural stone columns as well as those cut in the rock were used at this early period (2200 B.C.). Indeed, it is probable that the whole architectural system of the New Empire was based on models developed in the age we are considering; that the use of multiplied columns of various types and the building of temples of complex plan adorned with colossal statues, obelisks, and painted reliefs, were perfectly understood and practised in this period. But the works it produced have perished, having been most probably demolished to make way for the more sumptuous edifices of later times.

+THE NEW EMPIRE.+ This was the grand age of Egyptian architecture and history. An extraordinary series of mighty men ruled the empire during a long period following the expulsion of the Hyksos usurpers. The names of Thothmes, Amenophis, Hatasu, Seti, and Rameses made glorious the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties. Foreign conquests in Ethiopia, Syria, and Assyria enlarged the territory and increased the splendor of the empire. The majority of the most impressive ruins of Egypt belong to this period, and it was in these buildings that the characteristic elements of Egyptian architecture were brought to perfection and carried out on the grandest scale.

+TOMBS OF THE NEW EMPIRE.+ Some of these are structural, others excavated; both types displaying considerable variety in arrangement and detail. The rock-cut tombs of Bab-el-Molouk, among which are twenty-five royal sepulchres, are striking both by the simplicity of their openings and the depth and complexity of their shafts, tunnels, and chambers. From the pipe-like length of their tunnels they have since the time of Herodotus been known by the name _syrinx_. Every precaution was taken to lead astray and baffle the intending violator of their sanctity. They penetrated hundreds of feet into the rock; their chambers, often formed with columns and vault-like roofs, were resplendent with colored reliefs and ornament destined to solace and sustain the shadowy Ka until the soul itself, the Ba, should arrive before the tribunal of Osiris, the Sun of Night. Most impressively do these brilliant pictures,[2] intended to be forever shut away from human eyes, attest the sincerity of the Egyptian belief and the conscientiousness of the art which it inspired.

[Footnote 2: See Van Dyke’s _History of Painting_, Figure 1.]

While the tomb of the private citizen was complete in itself, containing the Ka-statues and often the chapel, as well as the mummy, the royal tomb demanded something more elaborate in scale and arrangement. In some cases external structures of temple-form took the place of the underground chapel and serdab. The royal effigy, many times repeated in painting and sculpture throughout this temple-like edifice, and flanking its gateways with colossal seated figures, made buried Ka-statues unnecessary. Of these sepulchral temples three are of the first magnitude. They are that of +Queen Hatasu+ (XVIIIth dynasty) at Deir-el-Bahari; that of +Rameses II.+ (XIXth dynasty), the +Ramesseum+, near by to the southwest; and that of +Rameses III.+ (XXth dynasty) at Medinet Abou still further to the southwest. Like the tombs, these were all on the west side of the Nile; so also was the sepulchral temple of Amenophis III. (XVIIIth dynasty), the +Amenopheum+, of which hardly a trace remains except the two seated colossi which, rising from the Theban plain, have astonished travellers from the times of Pausanias and Strabo down to our own. These mutilated figures, one of which has been known ever since classic times as the “vocal Memnon,” are 56 feet high, and once flanked the entrance to the forecourt of the temple of Amenophis. The plan of the Ramesseum, with its sanctuary, hypostyle hall, and forecourts, its pylons and obelisks, is shown in Figure 8, and may be compared with those of other temples given on pp. 17 and 18. That of Medinet Abou resembles it closely. The Ramesseum occupies a rectangle of 590 × 182 feet; the temple of Medinet Abou measures 500 × 160 feet, not counting the extreme width of the entrance pylons. The temple of Hatasu at Deir-el-Bahari is partly excavated and partly structural, a model which is also followed on a smaller scale in several lesser tombs. Such an edifice is called a _hemispeos_.