Part 15

The progress of the clearing away revealed the existence of a series of intact tombs at the south of the pyramid. The last of those that had been opened belonged to a very high personage named Zannehibou, in his lifetime commandant of the king’s boats. The mummy, a block of shining bitumen, was at once recognised as a very rich one. At the height of the face it had a large gold mask which fitted on the front part of the head like the _cartonnage_ case usual with mummies of the second Saïte Period. It had a broad necklace round its neck of beads of gold and of green felspar or of lapis lazuli mounted with gold thread, and fastened to it were numerous amulets, also of gold. Below the necklace, on the chest, an image of the goddess Nouît, in gold, spread its wings. A network of gold and felspar hung down to the hip, and from the image of the Nouît to the ankles might be read, on a long band of gold-leaf, the usual inscriptions in relief: the name of the dead man, his filiation, with short formulas of prayer. Two gold figures of Isis and Nephthys were sewn on the chest, two leaves of gold cut as sandals were fitted to the soles of the feet; a silver plaque with a line engraving of a mystic eye for the incision whence the entrails had been extracted, gold cases for the twenty fingers and toes, completed this magnificent decoration. Everything that with the lower classes of the same period would have been in cardboard, or gilded paste, or enamelled clay, was pure gold and fine stones with Zannehibou. The find, estimated by weight alone, would be valuable, but what gave it inestimable worth was the delicate and artistic workmanship of the greater number of the objects. A few of them, like the sandals and the finger-cases, are only worth the raw metal; the rest are the work of veritable artists. The inscriptions of the legs, the winged Nouît, the Isis and the Nephthys, the mask, are stamped, and although the mask and the two goddesses were miserably crushed by the lid when the sarcophagus was closed, the mould of hard stone which was used to fix them was so delicately cut that the best-preserved pieces, the winged Nouît, for instance, may be quoted as the highest degree of perfection that could be attained by that process. The amulet in shape of a necklace is only a leaf cut with the chisel, on which a chapter of the “Book of the Dead” is engraved with the graving needle. The vulture amulet is a small, thin plaque, on one side of which the stamped figure of a vulture with spread wings has been stuck, while on the other the chapter of the “Book of the Dead” has been engraved, as with the necklace. It is all of good workmanship, but in the amulets hanging on the real necklace of the mummy the goldsmith has surpassed himself.

They are extraordinarily small, and in order to show the detail I have had the illustrations made twice the actual size, a proceeding that weakens the contours and the modelling. To realize their beauty it is necessary to have held them in the hand. The palm-tree, which has lost some leaves, is a unique object, more curious than elegant, but the mystic boat which is beside it, unique also so far, is a prodigy of delicate chiselling. It is the boat of the god Sokaris, a boat of most archaic construction, and which was already used for the accomplishment of the sacred rites under the Thinite Dynasty. The belly is broad and round, the stern rather heavy, but the bows very light and much decorated. It rests on a sort of side-ladder of beams and ropes, which is itself built on to a sledge: it was pulled along in the public ceremonies by means of a rope put through a hole made in the curved front of the sledge. The decoration and the equipage are most curious. On the bow is a gazelle’s head with straight horns turned to the interior, and along the prow a row of divergent plates of thin metal, the use of which is not very clear: it is as if the carcase of the gazelle was opened and showed the ribs fixed on the spine. At the back, to terminate the poop, there is a ram’s head with curved horns. In the middle, on an oblong rectangular pedestal, a hawk proudly perches; behind him are the four oar-rudders, two on each side; in front of him six little hawks ascend in procession, two by two, towards the gazelle’s head, led by a Nile fish placed edgeways on its ventral fin. For the moment I will not attempt to explain the meaning of these emblems, but what we can never grow tired of admiring is the cleverness with which the craftsman has grouped these widely differing elements into an harmonious whole, and especially the extraordinary skill with which he worked his metal. His gazelle’s head, a mere fraction of an inch in size, is of as proud a bearing as if it were of natural size: everything is exact, intelligent; the curve of the forehead, the flattening of the snout, the expression of the face, even to the natural pout of the creature. Each of the six hawks preserves its individual physiognomy, and the fish itself, reduced in size as it is, has the exact shape of the big Nile perch, and not that of any sort of fish.

Similar qualities are to be seen in the neighbouring pieces, in the ram’s head, the ordinary hawk, the hawk with a human head, and that with a ram’s head, and in the vulture. The seated Isis who nurses her child on her lap and the crouching Neîth have their usual characteristics of resignation and gentleness, and at the same time the simplicity of line that lends so dignified an air to the smallest Egyptian figures. It has all been chiselled out of the ingot itself, and the detail cut with so minute a point that we ask where the artisan could have obtained it.

Tiny lions addorsed or couchant, tiny mystic eyes, tiny monkeys worshipping the emblem of Osiris, tiny vultures, and tiny hawks extending their wings, each piece claims careful examination, and would by itself alone bring joy to the heart of a collector. The masterpiece of the series is, however, the _soul_, the hawk with a human head, enamelled body and wings, of which both back and front views are here reproduced. The back follows the usual manner, small rods of bent gold, curved, soldered on to a gold plaque and encrusted with thin plates of felspar to simulate feathers; but on the other side, the body, wings, and claws are modelled with the new purpose of reproducing the natural form of the bird. The little human head is a marvel of somewhat weak gracefulness: the eyes are well open, the mouth is smiling, the nostrils actually palpitate, the ear is cut out and is hollowed broad and high as is customary, and there is nothing, even to the wrinkles of the neck and the roundness of a double chin, that does not clearly stand out under the reflection of the gold. Here again, it is all chiselled by a master-hand, with a sureness I have only found in the hawk with a ram’s head in the Louvre,[90] with which this _soul of Gizeh_ may be compared.

The circumstances of the discovery would not have informed us of the date, if the style of the jewels had not done so. It is Saïte art with its lightness, suppleness, somewhat arch charm, its almost too high relief. A tendency is felt in the direction of the exaggerated roundness of the Ptolemies, and, in fact, a note furnished by M. Chassinat permits us to fix the time at which Zannehibou lived. He belonged to the family of a certain Psammetichus, whose tomb is near his, which an inscription in the Louvre found by Mariette in the Serapeum places at the beginning of the fifth century, during the last years of the reign of Darius I. If, as is likely, he was the grandson of that Psammetichus, he died at the end of the fourth century, just when the Saïte kings were resuming their superiority over the Persians, at most, a hundred years before the Macedonian conquest. The goldsmiths who fashioned his ornaments had probably seen Greek jewels, and had perhaps already felt Hellenic influence: in that way the almost Ptolemaic characteristics of the collection are explained. We know that Saïte jewels are very rare; the Louvre alone possesses any that are out of the ordinary run: the two necklace fastenings in form of a ship bought by M. G. Bénédite a few years ago. The mummy of Zannehibou has filled up the lacuna in the Gizeh series, and thanks to it, we now know that the goldsmith’s art yielded in nothing to the other arts at the time of the last Egyptian renaissance. Let us add that these jewels, although found on a mummy and made for it, are not, as is too often the case, jewels of the dead, pleasing in colour and design, but too weakly mounted to stand the wear and tear if worn by a living person. Like the jewels of Ramses II in the Louvre,[91] like those of Queen Ahhotpou at Gizeh, they are real jewels, identical at all points, except perhaps in the choice of subjects, with the jewels worn every day.

Such is the find that made a happy termination to our Saqqarah campaign. All the pieces were covered with bitumen, and it is no slight merit to M. Barsanti that he should have discovered them and separated them one after the other. Several pits, equally untouched, await us at the same spot under fifteen or eighteen yards of sand, and I have a good hope that next year’s excavations may have as glad surprises for us as those of this year.

XXIV

A BRONZE EGYPTIAN CAT BELONGING TO M. BARRÈRE[92]

This fine bronze cat was purchased at Cairo in 1884 by M. Barrère, then agent and consul-general of France in Egypt. It belongs to the innumerable family of cats which suddenly came forth from the ruins of Tell Bastah in 1878, and were, in a few years, scattered over the whole world. It measures 1 foot 4⅛ inches in height, and if not the largest found at that time, it is at least bigger than the average. But its size is not its chief merit: the Egyptians, who were the first to tame the cat, studied it so closely that they expressed its characteristics with extraordinary excellence. M. Barrère’s cat is firmly seated on her hind-quarters, looking straight in front of her, in the satisfied attitude of an animal which has done its duty and has nothing to reproach itself with. The wooden pedestal to which it was attached is wanting, but the metal tenon which fastened it is still in its place, and the body is in a perfect state of preservation. It was moulded in one piece round a core of sand that has disappeared, then touched up with the burin and the file, and then polished; it has not suffered from its long sojourn in the earth, and we can judge its qualities or its defects as clearly as if it had been made yesterday. It is a fine piece, of very sure design and careful execution. The artist was not afraid to multiply the details, and he has simplified the surfaces; but the force of the line, the robust and vigorous character of the execution, make his work a piece of the first rank. It is wonderful to note the intelligent skill with which he has expressed the characteristics and physiognomy of the race. The haunch is broad and round, the back supple, the neck slender, the head delicate, the ear straight; it is the Egyptian cat in all its elegance, as we can still see it among the fellahs, for crossing with foreign species has not altered it.

She is Bastît, a goddess of good family, the worship of whom flourished especially in the east of the delta, and she is very often drawn or named on the monuments, although they do not tell us enough of her myths or her origin. She was allied or related to the Sun, and was now said to be his sister or wife, now his daughter. She sometimes filled a beneficent and gracious rôle, protecting men against contagious diseases or evil spirits, keeping them off by the music of her sistrum: she had also her hours of treacherous perversity, during which she played with her victim as with a mouse, before finishing him off with a blow of her claws. She dwelt by preference in the city that bore her name, Poubastît, the Bubastis of classical writers. Her temple, at which Cheops and Chephrên had worked while they were building their pyramids, was rebuilt by the Pharaohs of the XXIInd Dynasty, enlarged by those of the XXVIth; when Herodotus visited it in the middle of the fifth century B.C., he considered it one of the most remarkable he had seen in the parts of Egypt through which he had travelled. It stood in the centre of the city, at the end of the market-place. It was bordered by two canals, each 100 feet wide and shaded by trees; they flowed without joining, one on the right, the other on the left of the building, almost making it an artificial island. Travellers before entering it looked over the enclosure, even into the exterior court-yards, for Bubastis had undergone the fate of many of the large cities of Egypt; in the course of ages the ground became raised in such a way that the foundations of recent houses were on a higher level than those of the temple. A big wall, decorated with pictures like the outer wall of the temple of Edfou, enclosed the temenos. The fêtes of Bastît attracted pilgrims from all parts of Egypt, as at the present day those of Sidi Ahmed el-Bedaouî draw people to the modern fair of Tantah. The people of each village crowded into large boats to get there, men and women pell-mell, with the fixed intention of enjoying themselves on the journey, a thing they never failed to do. They accompanied the slow progress of navigation with endless songs, love songs rather than sacred hymns, and there were always to be found among them flute players and castanet players to support or keep time to the voices. Whenever they passed by a town, they approached the bank as near as they could without landing, and then, while the orchestra redoubled its noise, the passengers threw volleys of insults and coarse remarks at the women standing on the bank; they retorted, and when they had exhausted words, they pulled up their petticoats and behaved indecently by way of reply. Herodotus was told that 700,000 persons, equal numbers of men and women, not reckoning little children, went thus every year to Bubastis. Entry into the temple did not calm them, far from it. They sacrificed a great number of victims with a sincere and joyous piety; then they drank deeply from morning to evening, and from evening to morning, as long as the festival lasted: more wine was consumed in a few days than in all the rest of the year put together.

The greater number of the pilgrims, before returning home, left a souvenir of their visit at the feet of Bastît. It was a votive stele with a fine inscription, and a picture showing the donor worshipping his goddess; or a statuette in blue or green pottery, or if they were wealthy, in bronze, silver, or sometimes gold: the goddess would be standing, seated, crouching with a woman’s body and a cat’s head, a sistrum or an ægis in her hand. During the Greek period the figures were in bronze or in painted and gilded wood surmounted by a cat’s head in bronze. Many were life-size and modelled with elaborate art; they had eyes of enamel, a gilded necklace round the neck, earrings, and amulets on the forehead. It sometimes happened that when a cat he particularly venerated died in his house, the pilgrim embalmed it according to the rites: he took the mummy with him, and, arrived at Bubastis, shut it up in one of the figures he offered. These various objects, at first placed anywhere in the temple, would quickly have filled it, if some remedy had not been found. They were piled up provisionally at the end of one of the secondary chambers, then thrown outside, and there encountered diverse fortunes. I do not think I am calumniating the Egyptian priests in saying that it must have been a great grief to them to part with so many precious gifts without trying to derive some honest profit from them. The gold and silver figures did not endure; they quickly went into the melting-pot, and few emerge from the ruins, but the bronze and copper were so abundant that there would have been little to gain in melting down the cats. So they sorted out the heap of bronzes, and while they kept some, the finest, doubtless, or those that bore inscriptions, they sold the rest to new generations of pilgrims, who, in their turn, offered them in due form. However frequently this was done, the influx was considerable, and they were forced to rid themselves quickly of the pieces that had at first been kept in reserve. They shut them up in cellars, or in pits dug expressly for them, veritable _favissæ_ similar to those of classical times;[93] they accumulated by thousands, large and small, in wood and in bronze, some intact and fresh as when just made, others already out of shape, rotten, oxidized and of no value. The places of concealment were soon forgotten, and the stuff in them reposed there beyond the reach of men until the day when the chances of excavation brought it to light.

One of them restored M. Barrère’s cat. It is not possible to determine the period at which it was buried: the persons who found it were seekers of nitreous manure, or dealers in antiquities who took good care not to divulge the circumstances and the site of their discovery. But judging from the roundness of certain forms and the aspect of the bronze, we recognize the style of the second Saïte Period, and the piece is to be attributed either to the Nectanebos, or the first Ptolemies, in a general way to the fourth century B.C. or the beginning of the third century B.C. It was the time when the worship of Bastît and her subordinate forms, Pakhît, Maît, was most popular, the period when, near Speos-Artemidos, the most extensive cemetery of cats in Egypt was established. The execution is pure Egyptian, and in no way betrays any Greek influence.

XXV

A FIND OF CATS IN EGYPT[94]

It was announced in the English newspapers, and the French followed suit, that a ship had recently reached London and disembarked 180,000 mummies of Egyptian cats. For a long time manufacturers of different nationalities have been accustomed to seek out the burying grounds of animals throughout Egypt, and to export the bones to Europe, where they are used as manure. A few years ago a necropolis full of monkeys was sent to Germany to manure beet-root fields. It seems that the cats of this year were discovered near Beni-Hassan; they were piled up at hazard in a sort of cavern, into which a fellah in search of antiquities was the first to penetrate. In fact, at some distance to the south of the hypogeums of Beni-Hassan, in the place called by geographers Speos-Artemidos, is a chapel hollowed out in the rock, and consecrated by the kings of the XVIIIth and XIXth Dynasties to a local goddess, a woman’s body with a cat’s or lion’s head, called Pakhît. The depôt recently exploited was found there, and the cats which reposed in it must have lived in the vicinity, under the protection of their cousin, the goddess. Cemeteries of the same kind existed wherever a divinity of a feline type was worshipped, lion, tiger, or cat. The most celebrated was at Bubastis, in the delta, where the seekers of antiquities cleared away the rubbish about thirty-seven years ago.[95] The mummies of cats were buried there in _favissæ_, deep pits, some merely wrapped in swathings, others enclosed in little coffins reproducing the image of the animal. Some of these coffins are entirely of wood covered with white stucco, gilded, painted in bright colours; some are in bronze, others have the body in wood and the head in bronze, with gold rings in their ears and encrustations of gold on the forehead and in the eyes. Statuettes of cats of different sizes, portraits of the goddess Bastît with a cat’s head, or of the god Nofirtoumou, are mingled with the mummies. Thence come the thousands of bronze cats, big and little, with which all the antiquaries of Europe and Cairo were so abundantly provided from 1876 to 1888. The important cat illustrated here, and who lives now in one of the glass cases in the “Salle divine” of the Louvre, is a perfect type of the species, long, slender in the back, broad in the hind-quarters, with a delicate, well-set head, rings in the ears, a necklace round the neck, and a little scarab on the top of the head; the artist who modelled it has rendered excellently and truthfully the supple bearing and the bold physiognomy of his original.

The cats represented on the monuments, or the mummies of which are found in Egypt, were not of the same race as our domestic cat. Scholars have studied them and are unanimous--Virchow, too, recently--in recognizing them as the _Felis maniculata_ and the _Felis chaus_. Egypt had tamed a few individual ones, but had not domesticated the whole species. They are sometimes to be seen on the bas-reliefs solemnly seated near their masters. It is commonly asserted that they were used for hunting birds in the marshes, and Wilkinson quotes in support a fairly large number of mural paintings where they stalk through the reeds, routing out little birds. I confess that this interpretation does not seem to me to be correct. Where others claim to recognize animals ready for the chase and acting on behalf of man, I only see animals, tame or not, on marauding bent and scouring the bushes for their own purposes; just as our domesticated cat chases the sparrows in our gardens and destroys the nests in our parks without any advantage to his master. Egyptian artists, very acute observers of what was going on around them, reproduced their cats’ expeditions, as they noted other picturesque details of the life of nature.

If we examined the 180,000 cats--neither more nor less--we should probably come upon a fairly large proportion of ichneumons. In Egypt the ichneumon and the cat were always associated; wherever there are mummies of cats it may be safely assumed that mummies of ichneumons are not far off. Cats or ichneumons, I hope the whole of them will not be used to manure the ground, but that some fine specimens may be chosen for the museums of antiquities and of natural history: in sparing a few hundreds, agriculture will not lose much, and science will gain considerably. The origin of our tom-cat has long been under discussion; some refer it to Egypt, others to Europe. It would be a pity not to profit by such an invasion of Egyptian cats, and to try to obtain a definite solution of the question.

FOOTNOTES

[1] From the _Journal des Savants_, 1908, pp. 1–17.

[2] F.W. von Bissing, “Denkmäler Ægyptischer Skulptur.” Text, 4to; portfolio of plates, fol.; Bruckmann, Munich, 1906–8.

[3] It may also be asked if the stele of the King-Serpent is an original or a restoration of the time of Setouî I.

[4] Bissing, II. _Plate with the name of King Athotis_, note 6.

[5] I even noted the existence of one of these tails in wood in the Marseilles Museum (_Catalogue_, p. 92, No. 279).

[6] _Musée Egyptien_, vol. ii., Pl. IX-X and pp. 25–30.

[7] Ibid., vol. ii., Pl. XV, pp. 41–45.

[8] Maspero, _Guide to the Cairo Museum_, 1906, pp. 156–7, No. 550.

[9] _Revue de l’Art Ancien et Moderne_, 1906, vol. x., pp. 241–52, 337–48; cf. Chap. X. of the present volume.

[10] _Musée Egyptien_, vol. ii., pp. 90–2.

[11] From the _Revue de l’Art ancien et moderne_, 1912, vol. xxxi., pp. 241–54.

[12] It is mentioned for the first time in Emmanuel de Rougé’s _Catalogue_, 1855, under No. 6; it is placed on the mantelpiece in the “Salle civile.”