Part 3

I shall be sincerely sorry if he fails in that particular, but even so, I should feel it right to declare that he has come honourably out of an enterprise in which he had no predecessors. The few plates that I inserted a quarter of a century ago in the _Monuments de l’Art Antique_, and the notices contained in the parts of the _Musée Egyptien_ that have already appeared, afforded both experts and amateurs a foretaste of the surprises that Egypt has in store in the matter of art; they have been too few, and have related to subjects too scattered in point of time, to produce a body of doctrine. But here, on the contrary, nearly two hundred pieces are available, classified according to the order of the Dynasties, and for the most part unpublished, or better reproduced than in the past. Each will be accompanied by an analysis in which the researches previously connected with it will be set forth and discussed; for the first time Egyptologists and the general public will have the artistic and critical apparatus required for judging the value of the principal pieces of Egyptian statuary before their eyes and in their hands. Those who know the amount of the literature existing on Egyptology, and how scattered it is, can easily imagine the patience and bibliographical _flair_ that Bissing must have needed for gathering from libraries the information so generously scattered on every page of his notices. But that was only the least part of his task; the appreciation of the objects themselves demanded of him an ever alert attention and a continuous tension of mind which would promptly have exhausted a man less devoted to the minutiæ of artistic observation. In other branches of the science, the materials have for the most part been so often and so repeatedly kneaded that nearly always half of the work has been already done; here, nothing of that sort exists, and in many cases Bissing has dealt with objects that he was the first to know, and of which no previous study had been attempted. That he is sometimes weary, and that here and there his opinions may be controverted, he willingly confesses. But what surprises me is how very rarely it is necessary to upset them, even partially.

I hope then that we shall not have to wait too long for the completion of this admirable work. May I venture to add that after the present edition, which is an _édition de luxe_, a popular edition would be welcome? Egyptologists like myself are condemned to pay such large sums for our books that the price of these “Denkmäler” does not alarm us, but the fact has greater importance for others. A reproduction in a smaller _format_, and less expensive, would greatly help to spread the knowledge of Egyptian art among classes of readers whom the book in its present form will not reach.

II

SOME PORTRAITS OF MYCERINUS[11]

It has long been a debatable question if the Egyptian statues of kings and private individuals can be regarded as faithful portraits or as merely approximate to their originals. No one has ever denied that their authors desired to make them as like as possible, but we hesitate to believe that they succeeded in doing so. The air of uniformity lent them by the repeated employment of the same expressions and the same postures encouraged the notion that, judging themselves incapable of exactly transcribing the details of bodily form or physiognomy proper to each individual, the sculptors decided that such details were not necessary for the kind of service to which the statues were destined: they considered that the task entrusted to them was sufficiently fulfilled if the soul or the _double_ for which these statues provided an imperishable body recognized in them enough of the perishable body to enable them to attach themselves to it without hurt in the course of their posthumous existence. The study of the monuments has dissipated those doubts. Any one who has carefully handled one of the Saïte heads, the skull and face of which present such clearly individual characteristics, must acknowledge that so many details noted with such felicitous care indicate an absolute intention of transmitting the exact appearance of the model to posterity. And if, proceeding forward, we reach the second Theban period, we shall soon, thanks to the chances which have delivered to us the well-preserved corpses of about fifty princes and princesses, recognize the success with which the royal studios perpetuated in stone the effigies of their contemporaries. The profile of Setouî I photographed in his coffin would coincide line for line with that of his bas-reliefs of Karnak or Abydos were it not for the thinness resulting from embalmment. Let us go back eight or ten centuries and see how the master sculptors of the first Theban period treated their Pharaohs. The statues of Amenemhaît III and of Sanouosrît have so personal a note that we should be wrong to imagine they could be anything but a sincere, almost a brutal likeness. The two Chephrên of the Cairo Museum were not long ago alone in suggesting to us the conviction that the Memphian times yielded nothing in this matter of resemblance to ages farther removed from us; the recent discovery of ten statues of Mycerinus prevents any further doubt.

Most of them have not left Egypt. The first that came to us was acquired by purchase in 1888, with four statuettes of Naousirrîya, of Mankahorou, of Chephrên, and perhaps of Cheops. According to the information collected at the time by Grébaut, they were found together, two or three weeks before, by fellahs of Mît-Rahineh under the ruins of a little brick building situated at the east of what was formerly the sacred lake of the temple of Phtah at Memphis. That was certainly not their original place; they had probably each adorned first the funerary chapel annexed to the pyramid of its sovereign: their transference to the town and their reunion in the place where they were discovered are not earlier than the reign of the last Saïtes or the first Ptolemies. It was then, in fact, that hatred of foreign domination having exalted the love of all that was peculiarly Egyptian in the eyes of the people, reverence for the glorious Pharaohs of former ages revived: their priesthoods were reorganized, and they again received the worship to which centuries of neglect had disaccustomed them. None of our figures are life-size, and the Mycerinus in diorite, which is not one of the smallest, is scarcely 21⅛ inches in height. It is enthroned on a cubical block with the impassibility that the Chephrên has made familiar to us; the bust is stiff, the arms rest on the thighs, he looks straight before him, his face expressionless, as was imposed on Pharaoh by etiquette, while the crowd of courtiers and vassals filed past at his feet: if his name, engraved on the sides of his seat to the right and left of his legs, had not told who he was, we should have guessed it from his bearing. The composition, although not the best imaginable, is good: but the head makes a poor effect in relation to the torso, a defect always at first ascribed to the heedlessness of the sculptor. But it is to be noted that the face somewhat recalled that of two of the other Pharaohs, a fact to be explained by the relationship, the second, Chephrên, being the father of Mycerinus, and the third, probably Cheops, his grandfather. That is a reason for presuming that they are portraits, but are they authentic portraits? Several Berlin Egyptologists whose natural ingenuity encouraged them to revise Mariette’s criticisms on art, thought to discern in certain details of the costume and ornamentation a proof that if they were not figures of pure imagination, they were at least copies of ancient originals freely executed under one of the Saïte Dynasties, and their theory, although opposed by experts who had a longer experience, disconcerted the majority. It was soon upset by facts, but, as often happens, the consequences deduced from it survived by force of habit. Many of us feared for some years after to be asserting too much, to declare openly that our Mycerinus was what we had entitled him on the faith of his inscription, the real Mycerinus.

We did not do so until 1908, when Reisner and his Americans, excavating at Gizeh round about the third pyramid, brought to light monuments that with the best will in the world no one could assign to any other epoch than that of Mycerinus. It seems that the fame of piety which popular story ascribed to him was not wholly unmerited, at least as far as his own divinity is concerned, for with the elements of a voluminous funerary equipment in all kinds of stones, the workmen brought out of the ruins of the chapel, fragments of a multitude of statues in alabaster, schist, limestone, and rare breccia. Among them were some unfinished or scarcely shaped out, for the sovereign having died while they were being fashioned, the works, according to Oriental custom, had been immediately interrupted and the workshops abandoned in confusion.

The statues which were already finished and set up in their places were overturned at some unknown period, perhaps when Saladin dismantled the pyramids to build the new ramparts and citadel of Cairo, and the fragments were so ill-treated that an enormous number of them have disappeared. Out of a hundred baskets of debris collected by the Americans, they found at most, besides five or six intact heads, enough to put together, almost completely, two alabaster statues. The best of the heads is in the Cairo Museum, and it has sufficient resemblance to our statuette for us to have no hesitation in recognizing Mycerinus, even if the place whence it comes did not help us to guess it. The statue that the find brought us is seated, but the block on which it is sculptured is not perpendicular to its base, so that it leans slightly backward. On the other hand, the two arms being cut between the armpit and the hip, the accident makes it appear at first glance as if the bust is too narrow for its height. But, and this is the important point, the head is small, so small that the head-dress, in spite of its size, is not sufficient to correct the bad effect of this disproportion between its smallness and the amplitude of the shoulders. The fault is not to be ascribed to the artist’s ignorance and lack of skill, as is probably done. He was not, it must be admitted, a man of talent, but he knew his business, and proved it by the general quality of his work. The harmony between the trunk and the leg, the muscles of the chest, the texture of the costume, the modelling of the knee and calf, conform to the æsthetics of the time; the foot and ankle are particularized with the virtuosity of a craftsman skilled in all the subtleties of his calling. So, now, returning to the statuette of Mît-Rahineh, the technique of which shows it to proceed not from a different school but from a different studio, we shall find a difficulty in imagining that two sculptors would each have fallen into so great an error, if they had not seen it themselves in their model. Since their statues are microcephalous, Mycerinus must have been microcephalous almost to deformity.

The search among the beds of fragments of stone was continued. A few weeks before it was finished, at the end of May, 1908, it produced four groups in schist, the testimony of which fully confirmed that of the alabaster statues. The disposition is the same, with very slight divergences, which do not sensibly modify the aspect of the pieces. Three persons stand side by side against a slab 17 to 23 inches high. Mycerinus is in the middle, his left foot advanced, the waist-cloth fluted on the loins, and on his forehead the white cap of the kingdom of Upper Egypt. He always has a goddess on his right, a Hathor moulded in the sleeveless smock open on the chest, and on her hair the short wig and the _coufieh_. On the top of this head-dress she wears her two cow’s horns and the solar disk. In one of the groups she is walking, her arms hanging down and her hands laid flat on her thighs; in the second, she embraces him with her left arm and presses against him; in the third she holds his right hand in her left. The last of the figures is sometimes a woman, sometimes a man: the man, who is shorter by a third than his companions, walks forward swinging his arms; the two women are at rest, and one of them puts her right arm round the king’s waist, in symmetry with the Hathor on the left. They are geographical entities, nomes, and the standards on their heads tell us their names: the two women personify the nomes of Sistrum and the Dog, the man that of Oxyrrhinchus. The fragments of schist under which they were buried assuredly belong to other groups now destroyed, but how many of them were there in the beginning? The decorative theme of which they formed part is one of which the intention is grasped at the first glance, but if we needed a commentary to explain it, the brief legends at the base would provide the material. They inform us, in fact, that our Hathor is the lady of the Canton of the Sycomore, and that the nome of the Dog, that of the Sistrum, that of Oxyrrhinchus, bring the sovereign all the good things of their territory. Mycerinus, in his quality of king of the Saîd and of the delta, had a right to tribute during his life, and to offerings after his death from the whole country, and on the other hand, Hathor, lady of the Sycomore, is the patron of dead Osirians in the Memphian province where the palaces and tombs of the Pharaohs are. It was natural then that she should serve as the introducer of the delegates of the nomes when they came to pay their tribute to the common master. With rich private individuals, the operation was symbolized on the walls of the funerary chapels by long processions of men or women in bas-relief, each of whom incarnated one of the domains charged with the upkeep of the tomb. Here it was expressed in even a more concrete fashion by two series of groups in rondo-bosso, which were probably developed on the walls in one of the court-yards of the temple of the pyramid. The four which have escaped destruction belonged to the series of the Saîd, as is proved by their names and the head-dress of the sovereign, but those of the delta could not have been omitted without causing regrettable privations to the _double_ in his life beyond the tomb; there were then about forty in all, as many as there were nomes in the whole of Egypt.

The excellence of those that have survived fills us with regret for those that are lost. At the instant they emerged from the earth, they preserved something of their primitive colouring, but contact with the air and light speedily deprived them of it, and only traces remain on the chest, at the neck, wrists, waist, places protected by the customary ornaments of people of high rank. The gold-leaf with which the necklaces and bracelets were decorated was stolen in times of antiquity, but the thicker layers of paint on which they were placed preserve their contours fairly exactly. It would be easy for us to restore to the whole the aspect it had when fresh and new--a light yellow complexion for the women, and red-brown for the men, black hair, blue or white head-dresses, white crowns, and garments relieved by the tawny brilliance of the jewels. In pieces where everything is so minutely calculated for reality, it is scarcely probable that anything is the effect of chance or of lack of skill; if then the sovereign’s head is too small it is because it was so in reality. In fact, the lack of proportion with the rest of the body is less perceptible here than in the isolated statues, and it is not perceptible at the first glance: but it is soon recognized when the sovereign is compared with his two companions. Not only are their heads larger and more massive than his, but it would seem that the sculptor desired to accentuate the inequality between them by a trick of his craft: he has perceptibly narrowed their shoulders, and the contrast between the small head that surmounts the vast shoulders of Mycerinus with the two large heads that weight the narrow shoulders of the acolytes, emphasizes the deformity that the placing together of three figures on the same level had almost concealed. Study of the schists leads to the same conclusion as that formed of the alabasters. It is the real Mycerinus that contemporaries have bound themselves to transmit to posterity, and they have spared no details which were naturally calculated to make us better acquainted with him. We have only to analyse their works to see him stand before us in his habit as he lived. He was tall, robust, slender, with long legs, powerful shoulders surmounted by a small face, an athlete with the head almost of a child. In addition, projecting eyes, big ears, a short nose, the tip turned up, a sensual mouth with full lips, a chin receding under the artificial beard; the expression of the face is benevolent, even weak. In vain has the sculptor stiffened the backbone and the neck, thrown out the chest, stretched the biceps, clenched the fist, and immobilized the features into a hieratic gravity: he has not succeeded in inculcating the sovereign majesty that makes our Chephrên the ideal Pharaoh, the equal of the gods. He has the sanctimonious appearance of a private individual of good family, but his general bearing is below his condition. We could easily point to a dozen statues, his neighbours in the Cairo Museum, that of Rânafir, for instance, which have a more exalted appearance and a prouder mien.

And the new schist group that Reisner discovered during the winter of 1909 has not made any change in our opinion necessary. This time Mycerinus is represented with his wife; the lower portions of the two figures had not received the final polish when death intervened, but those of the upper part were finished and are admirable. Mycerinus wears the head-dress of the ordinary _claft_, which squarely frames the face, and his features are those with which we have become familiar in the statues described above; eyes starting from his head, a fixed expression, turned up nose, a large, loose mouth, the lower lip protruding, the physiognomy of a man of the middle class straining to appear dignified. The queen does not appear much more noble, but in looking at her we are disposed to think that she had more intelligence and vivacity. We should not say that she was exactly smiling, but a smile has just passed over her face, and traces of it remain on her lips and in her eyes. She has beautiful round cheeks, a little turned-up nose, a full chin, full lips cleft from top to bottom by a strongly marked furrow: a determined expression shows itself between her narrow, heavy eyelids. She resembles her husband, a fact that is not surprising, since unions between brothers and sisters were not only tolerated but commanded by custom; there is thus every chance that the couple were born of the same father and mother; she has only a greater appearance of strength than he has. Custom exacted that, when a husband and wife were associated in a group, they should not be placed side by side on a level of absolute equality, but that the woman should be given a posture or merely a gesture implying a state of more or less affectionate dependence on the husband; she crouched at his feet, her chest against his knees, or her arm was round his waist or his neck, as if she had no trust except in his protection. Here the queen’s gesture is in conformity with convention, but the manner of its execution contradicts the intention of submission: she leans less against the Pharaoh than she draws him close to her, and looks as if she is protecting him at least as much as he is protecting her. She is his equal in height, and even if she is more slender than he is, as is proper to her sex, her shoulders are as robust. Does it mean that the sculptor has attributed to her the massive shoulders of a man? Not at all: but following the example of his colleagues in the triads, he has cheated a little in order to dissimulate the defect of his model. As doubtless he would not have liked to show a deformed Pharaoh, and as he might not alter features which, after all, were those of a god, he has made the deformity less visible by taking away from the shoulders what was wanted in order to establish a sort of apparent equilibrium between the parts, and so we are brought back by a fresh detour to the point to which the examination of the alabasters and triads had led us. Let us once more conclude that the effigies of the Memphian Pharaohs and their subjects were real portraits of the personages they claimed to reproduce.