Part 13

The first was found in the Salt collection, purchased by Champollion at Leghorn in 1825, which forms the basis of the Louvre collection.[77] It is a young woman in a long clinging dress trimmed with a band of embroidery in white thread running from top to bottom. She wears a gold necklace of three rows and gold bracelets. On her head is a wig, the hair of which hangs down to the rise of the breast; the wig is kept in place by a large gilded band simulating a crown of leaves arranged points downwards. The right arm hangs down beside the body, and the hand held an object, probably in metal, which has disappeared; the left arm is folded across the chest, and the hand clasps the stem of a lotus, the bud pointing between the breasts. The body is supple and well-formed, the breast young, straight, slight, the face broad, and smiling with something of softness and vulgarity. The artist was unable to avoid heaviness in the arrangement of the coiffure, but he has modelled the body with an elegant and chaste delicacy; the dress follows the form without revealing it indiscreetly, and the gesture with which the young woman presses the flower against her is natural. The statuette is painted dark red, except the eyes and the embroidery, which are white, and the wig, which is black: the bracelets, the necklace, and the bandeau are of a yellow gold identical with the small book exhibited in the glass case marked Z in the “Salle civile.”[78]

Two inscriptions engraved on the pedestal, and then painted yellow, inform us of the name of the woman, and of that of the individual who dedicated the statue. One on the front runs thus:

(A) ADORATION TO PHTAH SOKAR-OSIRI,[79] GREAT GOD, PRINCE OF ETERNITY, TO WHOM ARE GIVEN ALL KINDS OF GOOD THINGS AND PURE THINGS, TO THE DOUBLE OF THE PERFECT LADY NAÎ OF THE TRUE PERFECT VOICE.

The other is engraved on the right side, and runs:

(B) IT IS HER BROTHER WHO MAKES HER NAME TO LIVE, THE SERVANT PHTAH-MAÎ.

From other monuments we know more than one Egyptian of the name Phtah-Maî, and more than one lady Naî: but none of them has any claim to be identified with our two personages. Phtah-Maî is not a noble: he filled a very humble post, that of a page attached to a noble, or a subordinate employé of a temple or of a court of justice. But the charm of the monument he devoted to the memory of his sister is only the more remarkable.

The personage in the middle is a priest, standing, wearing the short wig with little locks of hair in rows one above the other. The bust is bare, and his only garment is a long skirt falling half way down the leg, spread out in front into a sort of pleated apron. In his two hands he bears a sacred insignia consisting of a ram’s head surmounted by the solar disk, and forming an ægis, the whole set into a staff of fairly large dimensions: the attitude is one of repose. The third figure, on the contrary, is full of movement and activity. It is an officer in semi-military costume of the time of Amenôphis III or of his successors: a small wig, a clinging smock with sleeves, a short loin-cloth tightly girded over the hips and scarcely descending to the middle of the thigh, decorated in front with a small piece of stuff standing out, pleated lengthwise. These two statuettes are painted dark red with the exception of the wig, which is black, of the cornea of the eyes, which is white, and the insignia of the priest, which is yellow. The old pedestal has disappeared, and with it the name. Like the limestone and wooden statues of large dimensions, these formed part of the funerary equipment: they were the supports of souls in miniature, and served as a body for the double of the model and _kept alive the name_ of a person who had been loved or well known. There are a large number of them in the museums, and nearly all are of the same epoch. Neither the Ancient nor the Middle Empire made them--Saïte art preferred hard stone: the wooden statuettes that I have so far seen are of the second Theban period, and belong to the XVIIIth, XIXth, and XXth Dynasties.

Some of them, if not all, were used for purposes that seem strange to us. Several had little rolls of papyrus fastened to their pedestal or their body, ordinary letters that the writers sent to one another; one possessed by the Leyden Museum is an adjuration addressed _to the perfect soul of the lady Ankhari_ by her still living husband:[80] “What fault have I committed against thee that I should be reduced to the miserable condition in which I find myself? What have I done to justify this attack on me, if no fault has been committed against thee? From the time I became thy husband until this day, what have I done against thee that I should conceal? What shall I do when I have to bear witness to my conduct in regard to thee, and shall appear with thee before the tribunal of the dead, addressing myself to the cycle of the infernal gods, and thou wilt be judged after this writing, which is in words uttering my complaint in regard to what thou hast done. What wilt thou do?” The general tone of the piece is, as is clear, one of complaint and accusation. The husband laments about “the miserable condition to which he is reduced,” three years after he has become a widower; then he relates the incidents of his conjugal life in order to show the ingratitude he has received for his trouble and care. “When thou becamest my wife, I was young, I was with thee, I did not desert thee, I caused no grief to thy heart. Now so I acted when I was young; when I was promoted to high dignities by Pharaoh, I did not desert thee; I said: ‘Let them be mutual between us!’ and as everybody who came saw me with thee, thou didst not receive those whom thou didst not know, for I acted according to thy will. Now, here it is, thou hast not satisfied my heart and I shall plead with thee, and the true will be distinguished from the false.” He dwells on and reminds her of his kindnesses: “I have never been found acting brutally to thee like a peasant who enters other people’s houses.” When she died, during an eight months’ absence occasioned by his service with Pharaoh, “I did what was seeming for thee: I lamented thee greatly with my people opposite my dwelling, I gave stuffs and swathings for thy burial, and for that purpose had many linen cloths woven, and I omitted no good offering I could make thee.”[81] The poor man does not state clearly the nature of the troubles from which he suffered. Perhaps he imagined that his wife tormented him in the form of a spectre; perhaps, what after all comes to the same thing in the belief of an Egyptian, he was attacked by diseases and overwhelmed with infirmities that he attributed to the malignity of the dead woman. We are reminded of the strange actions that the Icelanders of the Middle Ages practised against ghosts. The administration set on foot the whole cortège of officials and the whole of its legal code to bring the accusation, judge and condemn the dead who persisted in haunting the house in which they had lived. The records of the causes are extant and testify to the gravity that presided over this strange procedure. The Leyden papyrus certainly relates to an affair of the kind. A husband, addressing his wife’s soul, summons her to suspend persecutions that are in no way justified, under pain of answering for her conduct before the infernal jury. If she did not heed this preliminary advice, the matter would be brought later before the tribunal of the gods of the west and pleaded: the papyrus would serve as a piece of convincing evidence, and then “the true would be distinguished from the false.”

There was one difficulty to be overcome: how was the summons to be sent to her? The Egyptians were never embarrassed when it was a question of communicating with the other world. The husband read the letter in the tomb, then fastened it to a figure of the woman. Thus she could not fail to receive the adjuration as she received the funerary banquet, or the effect of the prayers that assured her happiness beyond the tomb. The preoccupations of art held only a subordinate place in statues like those of the lady Naî and her two companions: the religious idea was predominant, and it was religion which gave the monument its meaning.

XIX

A FRAGMENT OF A THEBAN STATUETTE[82]

The excavations undertaken by Mr. Mond on the eastern slope of the hills of Cheîkh-Abd-el-Gournah, in one of the richest of the Theban cemeteries of the XVIIIth and XIXth Dynasties, have already given several valuable monuments to the “Service des Antiquités”; and nothing surpasses or even equals the fragment illustrated here. The statuette to which it belongs was broken in the middle. The hips and legs have disappeared, as well as the right arm, and the plinth against which the back leaned; Mr. Mond eagerly sought the missing pieces among the residue of his find, but in vain; they were not forthcoming, and were doubtless either destroyed in ancient times, or carried off by some amateur during the nineteenth century. The fragment that remains to us measures nearly a foot in length and about 4½ inches across the shoulders; there is nothing in the lines by which one can determine whether the person it represents was seated or standing. I am inclined to think that, according to the custom of the time, the attitude resembled that of the little lady Touî in the Louvre,[83] standing, the feet nearly on the same level, the right arm hanging down, the head erect, with the wig of ceremony, and the dress of great holidays.

The material employed by the sculptor is limestone of the kind the inscriptions describe as the _fine white stone of Tourah_, but thick beds of it extend along the sides of the valley of Egypt from the environs of Cairo to the defiles of Gebeleîn. It abounds in the Theban plain, and although it is too split and cracked in every sense to be of any use for building purposes, it is admirably suited for designs of restricted dimensions, such as those of our statuette. It was most probably carved in the stone of Cheîkh-Abd-el-Gournah itself, perhaps in one of the blocks extracted at the time of hollowing out the tomb for which it was destined. It forms an excellent substance, supple and firm at the same time, and subserves with an inimitable docility the boldest and the most delicate strokes of the chisel; the grain of marble, crystalline and almost metallic, makes the sensation on the eye of a rigid envelope in which the subject is, as it were, imprisoned, while limestone, softer and richer, better reproduces the elasticity of the surface of flesh and the free play of the muscles under the skin. Our statuette had been illuminated in accordance with custom, but it bears only imperceptible traces of painting and has the natural colour of old limestone, a tone between cream and yellowed ivory, which recalls the paleness of Egyptian women. The detail of the clothing and ornaments which was due to the brush has vanished, and is only indicated on the border of the mantle by faint tooling. It has thus lost its archæological value, but has gained an aspect of refinement wanting in works where the colour has been preserved intact.

The young woman who has thus left us her portrait lived under the XIXth Dynasty, at a time when fashion imposed enormous head-dresses and scanty clothing on its votaries. An almost transparent linen covers the left shoulder, then crosses the chest and is knotted under the right armpit, concealing the rest of the costume; the left hand is freed from it and clasps a lotus stem, the flower reaching to the hollow between the breasts. The bust has not yet attained its plenitude, but the breasts are well shaped and well separated, but so slight that they scarcely make any impression on the linen; the lines of the arm, shoulder, and neck indicate thinness. The artist has well understood the characteristics of the dawn of womanhood, and the discreet fashion in which he permits us to guess the slender grace beneath the garment is that of a master craftsman, but it is in the head and face that he shows the full measure of his talent. The head is fitted into a wig of complicated structure which yields nothing in size to the majestic peruke of Louis XIV. A double ribbon running from the forehead to the back of the neck divides the hair into two equal masses, which are themselves divided into volutes of little waved locks, each formed of two thin tresses, twisted together at the extremity. The whole forms a stiff heavy fabric which, unskilfully interpreted, would make the piece ugly, no matter how successful in the other parts. Our sculptor has made no change in the general arrangement--his model would not have permitted it--but he has adjusted the parts with such happy ingenuity that the monster wig, instead of overpowering the face, acts as a frame to it and sets it off.

It is of the purest Egyptian type, not the heavy, brutal type which predominates in the Memphian age and among the fellahs to-day, but an elegant refined type of which numerous examples are provided by statuettes of all periods. The forehead appears to be rather low, but we cannot be sure if it was so by nature, or if it is the wig which conceals its height. The eyes are long, almond-shaped, slanting towards the temple, widely opened. The eyelids are drawn clearly, almost sharply, and meet at an acute angle both at the inner corner and at the outer commissure. The globe of the eye is rather prominent, the pupil was added with the brush, and a sort of greyish tone vaguely marks the place. The eyebrows are a flattened bow, thin and regular. The nose is attached to the superciliary arcade by a fairly accentuated curve; it is straight, thin, rounded at the end, with delicate nostrils. The lower part of the face is thick-set, and of so firm a cut that with age--if age ever came--it would have become hard. The lips are full, thick, edged the whole length, split in the middle: they are pressed together as if to keep back a smile. The whole face changes in character and almost in century, according to the angle from which it is looked at. Seen from the front it is round and full, with neither superabundance nor softness of flesh: it is the little middle-class girl of Thebes, pretty, but common in form and expression. Seen from the side between the hanging pieces of the wig, as if between two long ringlets falling on the shoulders, it assumes a malicious, roguish expression not ordinarily usual in Egyptian women: it might be one of our contemporaries who from caprice or coquetry had put on the ancient coiffure.

Who was she in her lifetime, and what was her name? The fragment which represents her was found at the bottom of a funerary pit, in the court-yard of the tomb of Menna, and Menna flourished under the XIXth Dynasty. Was she one of his wives, or daughters, or sisters? The inscription which might have told us is heaven knows where, and it will be a great piece of good fortune if it is ever found.

XX

THE LADY TOUÎ OF THE LOUVRE AND EGYPTIAN INDUSTRIAL SCULPTURE IN WOOD[84]

The little lady Touî, who entered the Louvre last year, was in her lifetime a singer in the service of Amon. The title gives rise to doubt and scarcely permits us to determine to what class of society she belonged. The singers in the service of Amon were of all ranks, some married, others free. They were all bound to serve the god; they shook before him the sistrum that kept off spirits, or wielded the magic whip, the _monaît_, with which they beat the air to keep off with heavy blows the evil beings who floated invisible in it. The most humble were of easy morals, and the series of licentious vignettes in the Turin Museum leaves no room for doubt regarding the kind of life they led. They were the servants of the temple; they placed their bodies at the free disposal of their master Amon, and whoever addressed them in his name would not meet with refusal. In the Græco-Roman period the high-priest chose a young girl of rare beauty from among the richest and noblest families of Thebes and solemnly dedicated her. She became the chief singer, and shared the life of her companions of lower origin as long as youth lasted; when she was past the age of child-bearing she retired, and an honourable marriage allowed her to end her days amid the respect of all. The lady Touî’s position seems to have been less curious. The wives of priests or those of citizens affiliated to the different brotherhoods of Amon formed associations of _singers_ who appeared in the temples on days of festival or at the hours fixed for certain ceremonies: they only accepted the duty of playing the sistrum or of plying the whip, leaving to the others the rest of the function. Touî doubtless had a husband and children somewhere in Thebes. In an Egyptian tale[85] the heroine, Tboubouî, daughter of a priest of Bastît, replies to the lover who is importuning her: “I am pure, I am no wanton.” Touî might say the same to us if, trusting to her title, we confused her with the common _singing-girls_, who yielded their bodies to all.

The statuette that represents her may deservedly rank as one of the best works which have recently emerged from Theban soil. She stands upright in the hieratical attitude of repose, one foot in advance, the head fixed, the right arm hanging by her side, the left arm across the chest, holding the sacred whip, the _monaît_, folded up. She wears the ceremonial costume, a long robe with sleeves, narrow, crossed in front, edged with a heavy, stiff fringe, a broad necklace round the neck; on her head the immense wig fashionable among the Thebans in the eleventh and tenth centuries B.C., numerous little tresses gathered together at the ends into two or three, and finished off with tassels or little curls. The effect was fairly ugly: it lent heaviness to the top of the figure, diminished the size of the face, cramped the neck, concealed the fall of the shoulders and the rise of the breasts, broke the equilibrium of the body. But the anonymous artist who made the portrait of the lady Touî has derived an almost fortunate advantage from this deplorable head-dress: he has treated it as a sort of background which sets off the face, neck, and chest. The lateral tufts of hair frame the features without making them too heavy, and the close-fitting coif at the top is placed on the skull without appearing to crush it. The slender, healthy forms of the body are rendered in remarkable fashion, and the modelling of the belly and legs shows itself under the clinging stuff with a precision that is in no way brutal. In looking at it we certainly recognize more than one defect: the figure lacks suppleness and the face expression; the wood is cut harshly and with an almost puerile detail. The whole, however, pleases by some indescribable simple and chaste charm: the Louvre was perfectly right to acquire it, even if more money was expended than is usual on Egyptian objects of such small size.

Its use is easy to determine; it is a miniature _statue of the double_ shut up in the tombs of the Memphian period. A statue was not within the reach of everybody: only the rich could procure one, and people of moderate means were obliged to content themselves with little figures of less cost. The population of priests, _servants_, _singing-girls_, heads of the works who lived round the sanctuary of Amon or in the temples of the necropolis, had many pretensions to luxury with slender resources: their tombs are filled with objects which pretend to be what they are not, and veritably deceive the eye, destined to give the dead the illusion of opulence; massive wooden vases painted to represent alabaster or granite vases, rings and jewels in glass or enamel that appear to be gold rings and jewels, furniture in common wood, varnished, speckled, veined, to simulate furniture in rare woods. The lady Touî belonged to that half-needy class, and had to substitute statuettes of carved and polished wood for limestone or sandstone statues. All the museums in Europe have similar ones, and through Champollion, the Louvre possessed the lady Naî,[86] who sustains comparison very well with her new comrade. Egyptian sculptors had acquired veritable mastery in this subordinate form of sculpture, and there are pieces of singular charm among those that have reached us. Take, for instance, the little girl and the woman I have chosen almost at hazard in one of the cases of the Turin Museum. The little girl is standing, one foot in advance, the arms hanging down, naked according to the custom of Egyptian children, with a necklace, and a belt which loosely surrounds the loins, short plaited hair with a tress falling over the ears. The material is less precious than with the lady Touî, and the work less thorough, but has the slim delicacy of a little Egyptian girl of eight or ten years old ever been better expressed? It is an exact portrait, in costume and figure, of the little Nubian girls of the Cataract before the age of puberty obliges them to wear clothes; it is their thin chest, slender hips, clearly cut, delicate thigh, their bearing, hesitating and bold at the same time, the roguish expression of their features.

The other statuette represents a well-developed woman standing on a round pedestal without a scrap of clothing or veil, but very proud of her head-dress, and especially of her big earrings. She touches the right one with her hand and makes it stand out a little in order to show it, or to assure herself that the jewel is very becoming; the head is big, the shoulders thin, the chest narrow, and the sculptor was embarrassed to render the movement of the arms; but the eyes are so wide open, the smile so contented, the expression of the whole so intelligent, that we can easily excuse that defect.