Part 11

One of the very few instances known to me in which vegetable forms are employed in ornamentation by the natives of British New Guinea occurs along the Fly River (Figs. 4, 8). These natives are fond of decorating their drums with leaves, hence it may happen that, on the principle of expectancy, leaves become mentally associated with drum decoration, and in consequence often carved upon drums, and thence, by the constraint of the feeling of expectancy transferred to pipes and other objects; the casual decoration becomes an engraved ornament. On the other hand, the Fly River appears to have been a culture route (pp. 28, 70), and the employment of plant motives (if the majority of these devices are really such) may be partly due to influence from Malaysia. Dr. M. Uhle[63] points out that “The influences of the plant ornamentation of the East Indian Archipelago are also found in Western New Guinea. Although essentially peculiar to the western portion of the East Indian Archipelago it is not wanting in isolated cases in the eastern. Plant ornamentations in perforated carving are known from Halmahera which form a precise parallel with the carvings from Geelvink Bay. Further, the plant ornamentation occurs in Geelvink Bay also in isolated four-petalled flowers, as in Celebes, Halmahera, Timor, and Borneo. [Plant garlands are found on objects from the neighbourhood of Geelvink and Humboldt Bays.] A complete tendril with four-rayed leaves [or flowers] occurs as a pattern on a pottery-beater from Humboldt Bay.[64] Trustworthy examples from further east in North New Guinea are either absent or are as yet unrecorded. The influence of the western plant ornament is also felt in South-west New Guinea in the district between Kamrao and Etna Bays. The formation of a cruciform pattern through the arrangement of four Nassa shells, which occurs not only in Geelvink Bay but also in South-west New Guinea at Wamuka River, appears to be due to the influence of a plant pattern, the frequent four-petalled flower.”

[63] “Holz- und Bambus-Geräthe aus Nord West Neu Guinea,” _Dresden Ethnograph. Mus._, 1886.

[64] P. Mantegazza, “Studii antrop. ed etnogr. sulla Nuova Guinea,” _Arch. per l’Antrop. e la Etnol._, vii., 1877, Pl. X., No. 914.

In the central district of British New Guinea plant forms appear to be again met with (Fig. 21). I say “appear,” as unless there is direct information from natives it is always risky to hazard a guess as to the meaning of a particular design. The reason for these designs is at present quite obscure, but there can be no doubt that there is a reason for them, and a good one too.

Where plants are represented by savage peoples we shall probably find that as a rule their employment is primarily due to other causes than the selection of beautiful forms and graceful curves for their own sakes. A very good example of this is found among the magic patterns on the combs of the Negritos of Malacca, and I would refer the reader to the section on Sympathetic Magic (p. 235), where this is dealt with at considerable length. It may be that this four-rayed flower which is credited with magical properties is the same which, as Dr. Uhle has pointed out, is so widely spread in the decorative art of the Malay Archipelago and Northern New Guinea.

Few plants have penetrated into the psychical life of man to the same extent as the lotus. The food-plants, which afford sustenance to his body, rarely, as such, enter the portals of art. Even those used in fermentation do not necessarily fare much better. The chief exception is the vine, which from its graceful habit of growth and its decorative leaves and clusters of grapes readily lends itself to artistic treatment, but in this case it was probably on account of the “wine that maketh glad the heart of man,” rather than the beauty of the vine, that this creeper became a favourite motive in decorative art. Having once effected an entrance by appealing to the lower senses, the vine retained its position by gratifying the higher. This chapter in the history of art has, however, yet to be written.

Neither mere utility nor intrinsic beauty appear to be a necessary qualification for the establishing of plant-life in decorative art. It is only, so to speak, when plants are provided with a soul, when an inner meaning is read into them, that they become immortalised.

The best example of this is found in the history of the lotus in decorative art. Religion introduced it, symbolism established it, and habit or expectancy retained it.

_The Lotus and its Wanderings._

As many mistakes have arisen from the confusion of the Egyptian lotus with the rose water-lily it is necessary to clearly distinguish between them.

The White lotus (_Nymphæa lotus_) and the Blue lotus (_N. cœrulea_), which is only a colour variety of the former, have a disc-like leaf, cleft nearly to its centre, which floats on the surface of the water. The calyx has only four coarse sepals which are dark green in colour, and which entirely encase the bud until it begins to open. As it expands the delicate white or sapphire blue petals offer a marked contrast to the sepals. From four points of view of the open flower a central and two lateral sepals will be evident, often when the flower begins to fade the sepals bend downwards, but the petals do not expand to a greater extent than is shown in the accompanying figure (Fig. 70), in which will also be seen the characteristic seed-capsule with its rosette-like apex.

The rose water-lily, or water-bean (_Nelumbium speciosum_), according to Professor Goodyear,[65] is not represented in Egyptian pattern ornament. Its leaves (Fig. 71), standing erect out of the water, are bell-shaped and not slit. The calyx has numerous, over-lapping, scale-like sepals. The flower opens widely and the broad petals disappear from view by the expansion of the blossom. The seed-pod resembles the spout of a watering-pot. Sir J. G. Wilkinson says,[66] “The Nelumbium, common in India, grows no longer in Egypt, and the care taken in planting it formerly seems to show it was not indigenous in Egypt.”

[65] W. H. Goodyear, _The Grammar of the Lotus_, 1891.

[66] J. G. Wilkinson, _The Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians_, ii. (3rd edition), p. 407.

In every book dealing with Ancient Egypt numerous figures of the lotus will be noticed either in scenes illustrating the cult of some divinity and as sacred symbols, or in later times employed merely for decorative effect. The same remark applies, though to a less extent, to the art of Chaldea, Assyria, Persia, India, Phœnicia, and several of the Mediterranean countries.

Why should this motive be so widely spread? The most obvious answer has already been suggested. Religion introduced the lotus to art. We have already noticed the earthly original, now allusion must be briefly made to its symbolism; then its original home must be sought; and finally, some of its wanderings traced, and a few of its variations and transformations noted.

It appears that in Ancient Egypt the lotus was symbolic of the sun; a text at Denderah says, “The Sun, which was from the beginning, rises like a hawk from the midst of its lotus bud. When the doors of its leaves open in sapphire-coloured brilliancy, it has divided the night from the day.”[67] At Denderah a king makes an offering of the lotus to the Sun-god, Horus, with the words, “I offer thee the flower which was in the beginning, the glorious lily of the Great Water.”[68]

[67] Brugsch, _Religion und Mythologie der Alten Ægypter_, i. p. 103; cf. Goodyear, p. 6.

[68] Brugsch, _Religion_, etc., i. p. 121; _loc. cit._, p. 6.

Fig. 72 is a detail taken from a plate in the second volume of the magnificent atlas by Prisse d’Avennes;[69] it is part of the offerings on an altar before Osiris, who is crowned with the solar disc. Osiris is the sun in the Lower World—_i.e._, during the night, and the father of Horus. Horus is sometimes depicted seated on a lotus.

[69] _Histoire de l’Art Egyptien d’après les Monuments_, 1878.

The various animals which were symbolic of the sun or associated with sun-divinities are also placed in direct connection with the lotus, as if to emphasise its solar significance; for example—

The solar-bull is well recognised in Egyptian mythology, the Bull-god Apis being an incarnation of Osiris, and an offspring of the Sun-god, Ptah of Memphis. Similarly also for Assyria, Merodach, “the Bull of Light,” was originally a Sun-god; his Syrian equivalent was Baal. The Phœnician Moon-goddess, Astarte, had the bull as her symbol, and the bull of Europa was its counterpart. The Taurus of the Chaldean Zodiac commenced the year.

The lion was another sun-animal both in Egypt and in Chaldea and Assyria.

Among birds the hawk and the eagle were sun symbols, especially the former, and it is sometimes depicted standing on a lotus. The solar-goose is also important in its association with the lotus. (Fig. 129, G.)

In early Cyprian pottery we find lotus derivatives grouped with the solar cross and other symbols of the sun. (Fig. 129, F.)

The association of the lotus with the sun probably led to its other symbolic relations, and these latter have rather drawn attention away from what is here regarded as the more primitive symbol.

The lotus was a well recognised symbol of life, resurrection, and immortality. It was largely employed in funeral rites in Egypt, and is constantly associated with mummies, and also symbolised the resurrection, but this latter idea was associated in the Egyptian mind with reproductive power, and hence the relation of this also to the lotus. Professor Maspero says:[70] “The assimilation and occasional complete identity of the Supreme God with the sun being once admitted, the assimilation and complete identity of the secondary divine beings with Ra (the sun) were a matter of course. Amon, Osiris, Horus, Ptah, were regarded sometimes as the living soul of Ra, sometimes as Ra himself.” From this would result a mingling and extension of symbolism; but upon these troubled waters the lotus calmly rides supreme. Its association with the sun, its connection with reproductive energy, its descent into the grave, and its symbolism of a resurrection have given to the lotus that immortality which it symbolised.

[70] Maspero, _Histoire ancienne des Peuples de l’Orient_, p. 31, cf. Goodyear, p. 11.

Although lotus designs are profusely scattered up and down in Egyptian art there is no reason for believing that the Egyptians regarded it as a national emblem, but it was a universally recognised symbol. At the beginning of the year it sprouted from its slimy bed and floated beautiful and pure on the surface of the waters. At sunrise the buds opened and studded the water with white or cerulean asters, which closed when night fell. Every autumn it died its annual death only as prelude to the vernal resurrection.

The intensely religious mind of the Ancient Egyptians was permeated with the problems of death and elevated by the prospect of immortality. Resurrection and future bliss were articles of firm faith, not merely a pious hope. What wonder then, with this religious saturation of immortality, that the flower which symbolised the resurrection should be depicted in such profusion in their tombs and elsewhere!

If the reader will take the trouble to compare lotus representations in books on Egyptology it will be beyond dispute that it is the white or blue lotus (Nymphæa), and not the rose water-lily (Nelumbium), which is so ubiquitously delineated.

A slightly conventionalised lotus with two of its leaves (Fig. 73) is drawn on a vase contemporaneous with the pyramids, from the Necropolis of Memphis (Fourth and Fifth Dynasties, 3998-3503 B.C.).

The same lotus flower (Fig. 72) appears some two thousand years later in a representation of an offering to Osiris from the Necropolis of Thebes belonging to the Twentieth Dynasty. Indeed, it was painted and carved so frequently for thousands of years that it would be impossible to describe its variations and applications. I must, however, permit myself to allude to one or two examples which are interesting from other points of view. In Plate VIII., Fig. 12, we see single lotus flowers employed in an isolated manner in a border pattern, and alternating with these is another device. The separation of the elements of a border pattern is by no means universal in Egyptian decorative art; for example, the scroll pattern (Fig. 74) from the Necropolis of Thebes is a good example of a pattern which gives an idea of flow, but even here there is a lack of continuity in the spiral band which creates a feeling of dissatisfaction when one attempts to trace out the construction of the design. It is evident that in such patterns the spiral is quite a secondary motive, and it thus has not been worked out logically; the lotus flowers and the rosettes are the essential elements of the pattern.

With the last figure we may compare the scroll detail (Fig. 75) from a Melian vase, the lotus flower being represented by four black marks, and the scroll has acquired that development which is so characteristic of Ægean art.

Various causes may lead to the evolution of a recognised scheme of decoration of certain objects, but when a new class of objects is to be decorated the artist has a chance to exhibit his originality; even so this is about the last thing which decorative artists do manifest. The constraint of custom appears to exert an influence too potent to be readily snapped, and so the Egyptian decorator, being further tied by religious sentiment, ornamented even extensive areas, such as the ceilings of tombs, with lotus designs, the main elements of which had been elaborated elsewhere.

In Fig. 76 we have a ceiling design in which the lotus is very apparent both in flower and bud; the rosettes, like spiders’ webs, may possibly represent the leaves of the lotus (Fig. 70), and we have the same interlocking but discontinuous spirals that occur in Fig. 74.

A different treatment of the same motive is seen in Fig. 77, but here only the lotus flowers and the interlocking scrolls are employed. Below each flower is a fan-like portion apparently tied on to the former; this may have some significance or it may be merely a convenient method of finishing off the flower.

In these old Egyptian designs the rosette is often associated with the lotus and lotus derivatives, as in Fig. 74; and it may happen, as in Fig. 78, that the former is the most prominent motive. The lotus is here represented solely by the black triangles which occupy the angles of the quadrangular spaces which contain the rosettes; at all events there is good evidence to support this view.

The angularisation of the last pattern gives us Fig. 79, which many people would imagine to be Greek, although, as a matter of fact, it is ancient Egyptian. The rosettes and the angled scrolls alone persist. We cannot speak with certainty as to the reason for the modification of the scrolls, but it is probable that it resulted from an attempt to copy such a painted design as Fig. 78 in textiles, and the pattern metamorphosed by the new conditions was painted on the tomb ceilings along with its more flowing progenitor. For further examples of analogous transference of designs from one technique to another, and their consequent transformation, the reader is referred to p. 112.

Professor Flinders Petrie has stated that the scroll or spiral was one of the greatest factors in the early development of ornament, and only second to the lotus in the part it played in the decorative ideas of the ancient world. What it symbolised, if symbolise anything it did, we know not. Some affect to see in it a representation of the wanderings of the soul, but why, as Professor Petrie suggests, some souls should come to the end of their wanderings in a spiral and others in an oval is not explained. Its oldest use was on the scarabs, where it was clearly used first as “filling-in” ornament. We can first trace it about 3,500 B.C. At first in loose unconnected “C” and “S” links, and afterwards in every variety of combination, continuous as well as unconnected, the scroll line winds its way for ages through the records of Egyptian decoration. Yet there is a clear margin of 1000 years at least between any Egyptian date of its use and its appearance in the art of other ancient countries. From the fact that it is generally coloured yellow in Egyptian designs, Professor Petrie infers that gold was used in these forms to enclose gems, cloisonné and coloured stones; indeed Schliemann found such work in his explorations at Mycenæ.

Mr. Arthur Evans remarks:[71]—“On the twelfth dynasty [about between 2778 and 2565 B.C.] scarabs the returning spiral motive, as is well known to Egyptologists, was developed to an extraordinary degree. These purely spiral types, like the twelfth dynasty motives, were also copied by the native Cretan engravers. From Crete, where we find these Aegean forms in actual juxtaposition with their Egyptian prototypes, we can trace them to the early cemeteries of Amorgos, and here and in other Aegean islands like Melos can see them taking before our eyes more elaborate developments. Reinforced a thousand years later by renewed intimacy of contact between the Aegean peoples and the Egypt of Amenophis III., the same system was to regain a fresh vitality as the principal motive of the Mycenæan goldsmith’s work. But though this later influence reacted on Mycenæan art [about 1500 B.C.], as can be seen by the Orchomenos ceiling, the root of its spiral decoration is to be found in the earlier ‘Aegean’ system engrafted long before, in the days of the twelfth dynasty.

[71] A. J. Evans, “Primitive Pictographs and a Prae-Phœnician Script, from Crete and the Peloponnese,” _Journ. Hellenic Studies_, xiv., 1894, p. 328.

“In the wake of early commerce the same spiraliform motives were to spread still further afield to the Danubian basin, and thence in turn by the valley of the Elbe to the Amber Coast of the North Sea, there to supply the Scandinavian Bronze Age population with their leading decorative designs. Adopted by the Celtic tribes in the Central European area, they took at a somewhat later date a westerly turn, reached Britain with the invading Belgae, and finally survived in Irish Art.”[72]

[72] Cf. also G. Coffey, “The Origins of Prehistoric Ornament in Ireland,” _Journ. Roy. Soc. Ant. Ireland_, 1894, 1895.

Among the most frequent of the decorative designs employed by the Assyrians are the knop (or bud) and flower pattern and the rosette, and usually these are found in combination. For the former design I shall employ the Greek term “Anthemion.”

“That flower,” write MM. Perrot and Chipiez,[73] “has been recognised as the Egyptian lotus, but Layard believes its type to have been furnished, perhaps, by a scarlet tulip which is very common towards the beginning of spring in Mesopotamia.[74] We ourselves believe rather in the imitation of a motive from the stuffs, the jewels, the furniture, and the pottery that Mesopotamia drew from Egypt at a very early date through the intermediary of the Phœnicians. The Phœnicians themselves appropriated the same motive and introduced it with their own manufactures, not only into Mesopotamia but into every country washed by the Mediterranean. Our conjecture is to some extent confirmed by an observation of Sir H. Layard’s. This lotus flower is only to be found, he says, in the most recent of Assyrian monuments, in those, namely, that date from the eighth and seventh centuries B.C., centuries during which the Assyrian kings more than once invaded Phœnicia and occupied Egypt.[75] In the more ancient bas-reliefs, flowers with a very different aspect—copied in all probability direct from nature—are alone to be found.

[73] G. Perrot and C. Chipiez, _A History of Art in Chaldæa and Assyria_, 1884, i. p. 303.

[74] A. H. Layard, _Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon_, i. p. 184, note.

[75] _Nineveh and its Remains_, ii. p. 212, note.

“The lotus flower is to be found, moreover, in monuments much older than those of the Sargonids, but that does not in any way disprove the hypothesis of a direct plagiarism. The commercial relations between the valleys of the Nile and the Euphrates date from a much more remote epoch, and about the commencement of the eighteenth dynasty the Egyptians seem to have occupied in force the basin of the Khabour, the principal affluent of the Euphrates. Layard found many traces of their passage over and sojourn in that district, among them a series of scarabs, many of which bore the superscription of Thothmes III. [1481-1449 B.C.]. So that the points of contact were numerous enough, and the mutual intercourse sufficiently intimate and prolonged, to account for the assimilation by Mesopotamian artists of a motive taken from the flora of Egypt, and to be seen on almost every object imported from the Nile Valley. This imitation appears all the more probable as in the paintings of Theban tombs, dating from a much more remote period than the oldest Ninevite remains, the pattern with its alternate bud and flower is complete (Plate VIII., Fig. 12).

“The Assyrians borrowed their motive from Egypt, but they gave it more than Egyptian perfection. They gave it the definite shapes that even Greece did not disdain to copy. In the Egyptian frieze the cones and flowers are disjointed; their isolation is unsatisfactory both to the eye and the reason. In the Assyrian pattern they are attached to a continuous undulating stem, whose sinuous lines add greatly to the elegance of the composition.”

While admitting that the lotus motive overran Assyrian art, there is reason to believe that it did so only because there was an antecedent style upon which it could be engrafted. The pattern shown in Fig. 10, Plate VIII., is an example of an Assyrian anthemion engraved on an ivory panel in the British Museum, and of purely Assyrian workmanship. It is worth while attempting to trace this back as far as possible. In Fig. 4, Plate VIII., we have a pattern painted in red, blue, white, and yellow upon plaster, discovered by Sir Henry Layard in Nebuchadnezzar’s palace in Nineveh. In this there is a serial repetition of a disc, or sphere, which is pendant; all the pendants are connected by a single cord, which appears as if it were drawn into loops by their weight.