Part 7
At the beginning of the century Egypt was a land of untouched and inexplicable mystery; the hieroglyphics were wondered at, and puzzled over, without any idea of how they were to be read, whether as symbols or as letters. The history was entirely derived from the confused accounts of Greek authors, the lists remaining of Manetho’s history, written about 260 B. C., and the allusions in the Bible. The attempt to make everything fit to the ideas of the Greeks, and to make everything refer to the Biblical history, greatly retarded the understanding of the monuments, and is scarcely overcome yet. The first great step forward was when an inscription was found at Rosetta, in 1799, written in two methods, the monumental hieroglyphic and the popular demotic, along with a Greek version. By 1802 some groups of each writing had been translated. Young identified more signs, and Gell, by 1822, could successfully apportion three-quarters of the signs to the Greek words. The next step was to apply the modern Coptic language, descended from the ancient Egyptian, to the reading of the words. Gell had been doing so, but it needed a student of Coptic—Champollion—to carry this out thoroughly, as he did in 1821–32. Since then advance in reading has been only a matter of detail, not requiring any new principles.
The knowledge of the art began with the admiration for the debased work of Roman times, the principal interest at the beginning of the century. Then the excavations among the Rameside monuments at Thebes, about 1820–30, took attention back to the age of 1500–1000 B. C. The work of Lepsius, and later of Mariette, from 1840–80, opened men’s eyes to the splendid work of the early dynasties, about 4000–3000 B. C. And lastly the excavations of 1893–99 have fascinated scholars by a view of the rise of the civilization and the prehistoric period before 5000 B. C.
Throughout the greater part of the century the archæology of Egypt lay untouched; all attention was given to the language; and even Gardner Wilkinson’s fine view of the civilization (1837) depended largely on Greek authors, and had no perspective of history in tracing changes and development. It is only in the last ten or fifteen years that any exact knowledge has been acquired about the rise and progress of the various arts of life; this study now enables us to date the sculpture, metal work, pottery, and other art products as exactly as we can those of the Middle Ages.
The view that we now have of the rise and decay of this great civilization and its connection with other lands is more complete and far-reaching than that of any other country. In the early undated age, before the monarchy which began about 4800 B. C., a flourishing civilization was spread over upper Egypt. Towns were built of brick, as in later times; clothing was made of woven linen and of leather; pottery was most skilfully formed, without the potter’s wheel, hand-made, yet of exquisite regularity and beauty of outline, while the variety of form is perhaps greater than in any other land; stone vases were made entirely by hand, without a lathe, as perfect in form as the pottery, and of the hardest rocks, as diorite and granite; wood was carved for furniture; the art of colored glazing was common, and was even applied to glazing over large carvings in rock crystal; ornaments and beads were wrought of various stones and precious metals; ivory combs with carved figures adorned the hair; ivory spoons were used at the table; finely formed weapons and tools of copper served where strength was needful, while more useful were flint knives and lances which were wrought with a miraculous finish that has never been reached by any other people; and games were played with dainty pieces made of hard stone and of ivory. But all this tasteful skill of 6000–5000 B. C. had its negative side; in the artistic copying of nature the mechanical skill of these people carried them a very little way; their figures and heads of men and animals are strangely crude. And they had no system of writing, although marks were commonly used. They always buried the body doubled up, and often preserved the head and hands separately. Commerce was already active, and large rowing-galleys carried the wares of different countries around the Mediterranean. These people were the same as the modern Kabyle, of Algeria, and akin to the South European races, but with some negro admixture. Our whole knowledge of this age has only been gained within the last five years.
At about 5000 B. C. there poured into Egypt a very different people, probably from the Red Sea. Having far more artistic taste, a commoner use of metals, a system of writing already begun, and a more organized government, these fresh people started a new civilization in Egypt; adopting readily the art and skill of the earlier race, they formed by their union the peculiar culture known as Egyptian, a type which lasted for four thousand years. The same foundation of a type is seen in the bodily structure; the early historical people had wider heads and more slender noses than the prehistoric, but from 4000 B. C. down to Roman times the form shows no change.
From this union of two able races came one of the finest peoples ever seen, the Egyptians of the old kingdom, 4500—3500 B. C. Full of grand conceptions, active, able, highly mechanical, and yet splendid artists, they have left behind them the greatest masses of building, the most accurate workmanship and exquisite sculptures in the grand pyramids and tombs of their cemeteries. They perfected the art of organizing combined labor on the immense public works. In all these respects no later age or country has advanced beyond this early ability. The moral character and ideas are preserved to us in the writings of these people; and we there read of the ability, reserve, steadfastness, and kindliness which we see reflected in the lifelike portraiture of that age.
After a partial decay about 3000 B. C. this civilization blossomed out again nobly in the twelfth dynasty about 2600 B. C.; though the works of this age hardly reach the high level of the earlier times, yet they are finer than anything that followed them. At this period more contact with other countries is seen; both Syria and the Mediterranean were known, though imperfectly.
To this succeeded another decadence, sealed by the disaster of the foreign invasion of the Hyksos. But this was thrown off by the rise of a third age of brilliance—the eighteenth dynasty, 1500 B. C.—which, though inferior to early times in its highest work, yet shines by the widespread of art and luxury throughout the upper classes. Magnificence became fashionable, and the lower classes contented themselves with most barefaced imitations of costly wares. Foreign islands came closely in contact with Egypt. The ships of the Syrian coast and Cyprus continually traded to and fro, exchanging silver, copper, and precious stones for the gold of Egypt. Greece also traded its fine pottery of the Mycenæan age for the showy necklaces of gold and the rings and amulets with names of Pharaohs. Egypt then dominated the shores of the western Mediterranean, the plains of the Euphrates, and the fertile Soudan. But this power and wealth led to disaster. Like Rome, later on, she could not resist the temptation to live on plunder; heavy tribute of corn was exacted, large numbers were employed in unproductive labor, and national disaster was the natural consequence. Egypt never recovered the dominion or the splendor that were hers in this age. Of this period some slight notions are given us from literary remains in the Bible and Greek authors; but archæology is, so far, our only practical guide, as in the earlier ages. The great temples and monuments of the eighteenth-twentieth dynasties (1600–1100 B. C.) bear hundreds of historical inscriptions, the tombs are covered with scenes of private life, the burials and the ruins of towns furnish us with all the objects of daily use. This age is one of the fullest and richest in all history, and hardly any other is better known even in Greece or Italy. Yet all this has been brought to light in the century, and the knowledge of the foreign relations of Egypt is entirely the result of the last fifteen years.
The final thousand years of the civilization of Egypt is checkered with many changes; sometimes independent, as in the ages of Shishak of Necho, and of the Ptolemies; at other times a prey to Ethiopians, Persians, Greeks, or Romans. Its arts and crafts show a constant decay, and there was but little left to resist the influence of Greek taste and design, which ran a debased course in the country. There was, however, a spread of manufactures and of cheap luxuries into lower and lower classes; and the wealth of the country accumulated under the beneficent rule of the earlier Ptolemies (300–200 B. C.).
The principal discoveries about these later ages have been in the papyri, which have been largely found during the last twenty years. The details of the government and life of the country in the Ptolemaic (305–30 B. C.) and Roman (30 B. C.–640 A. D.) periods have been cleared up; and many prizes of classical literature have also been recovered. The archæology of the Middle Ages in Egypt has also been studied. Many of the Arabic buildings have been recently cleaned and put in good condition, and the splendid collection of manuscripts in Cairo has opened a view of the beautiful art of the thirteenth-fifteenth centuries so closely akin to what was done in Europe at the same time.
Egypt is, then, before all other lands, the country of archæology. A continuous history of seven thousand years, with abundant remains of every period to illustrate it, and a rich prehistoric age before that, give completeness to the study and the fullest value to archæological research.
MESOPOTAMIA
The valley of the Euphrates might well rival that of the Nile if it were scientifically explored, but unhappily all the excavation has been done solely with a view to inscription and sculpture, and no proper record has been made, nor have any towns been examined, the only work being in palaces and temples.
The earliest study on the ground was by Rich (1818–20), who gathered some few sculptures and formed an idea of Assyrian art. The French Consul, Botta, excavated Khorsabad (founded 700 B. C.) in 1834–35, and Layard excavated Nimrud in 1845–47; these were both Assyrian sites. The older Babylonian civilization was touched at Erech by Loftus, in 1849–52; and this age has attracted the most important excavations made since, at Tello by Sarzec (1876–81), and at Nippur by Peters and Haynes, of Philadelphia, during the last few years.
The cuneiform characters were absolutely unexplained until Grotefend, in 1800, resolved several of them by taking inscriptions which he presumed might contain names of Persian kings and comparing them alongside of the known names; thus—without a single fixed point to start from—he tried a series of hypotheses until he found one which fitted the facts. Bournouf (in 1836) and Lassen (1836–44) rectified and completed the alphabet. But the cuneiform signs were used to write many diverse languages, as the Roman alphabet is used at present; and the short Persian alphabet was only a fraction of the great syllabary of six hundred signs used for Assyrian. Rawlinson had independently made out the Persian alphabet, using the Zend and Sanskrit for the language. He next, from the trilingual Behistun inscription in Persian, Assyrian, and Vannic, resolved the long Assyrian syllabary, using Hebrew for the language. Since then other more obscure languages written in cuneiform have been worked with more or less success; the most important is the Turanian language, used by the earlier inhabitants of Babylonia before the Semitic invasion; this is recorded by many syllabaries and dictionaries, and translations compiled by the literary Semitic kings.
The general view of the civilization which has been obtained by these labors of the century shows it to have been more important to the world than any other. Cuneiform was the literary script of the world for at least six thousand years, the only medium of writing from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean. The Babylonian culture was almost certainly the source of the oldest present civilization—that of China. And the arts were developed probably even earlier than in Egypt. The first inhabitants were called Sumirian (or river folk) in distinction from the Accadian (or highland) people, who came from Elam down into the Euphrates valley, bringing with them the use of writing. Their earliest writing was of figure symbols (like the Egyptian and Hittite); but as in the valley clay tablets were the only material for writing, the figures became gradually transformed into groups of straight lines and spots impressed on the clay; hence the signs were formalized into what we call cuneiform. The Semitic invaders were using cuneiform characters by about 3000 B. C.
The early civilization was intensely religious, the main buildings being the temples, which were placed on enormous piles of brick-work. The sculpture was at a high level in the time of Naram-Sinn, about 3750 B. C.; and yet below his ruins at Nippur there are no less than thirty-five feet depth of earlier ruins, which must extend back to 6000 or 7000 B. C. In early times stone implements were used alongside of copper and bronze, as we find in Egypt 4000 B. C. Pottery was well made, and also reliefs in terra-cotta. Personal ornaments of engraved gems and gold-work were common.
The main landmarks in the later time of this civilization are the Elamite invasion of Kudur-nan-khundi (2280 B. C.) which upset the Semitic rulers, and the Assyrian invasion of Tiglath-Adar (1270 B. C.), after which interest centres in the Assyrian kingdom and its development of the Mesopotamian culture which it borrowed. The main buildings of the Assyrian kings were their enormous palaces, the mass of which was of unbaked bricks, faced with alabaster slabs; such were the works of Assurnazir-pal (Nimrud, 880 B. C.), Sargon (Khorsabad, 710 B. C.), Sennacherib and Assurbani-pal (Kouyunjik, 700 B. C.). The later, Assyrian, form of the civilization was to the earlier Chaldean much what Rome was to Greece, a rather clumsy borrower, who laboriously preserved the literature and art. Some of the Assyrian sculpture of animals is, however, perhaps unsurpassed for vivid action. The systematic libraries, containing copies of all the older literature for general study, were most creditable, though the Assyrian himself composed nothing better than chronicles. Nearly all that we possess of Babylonian religion, and much of the history, is in the copies scrupulously made from the ancient tablets by the Assyrian scribes, who noted every defect in the original with critical fidelity.
The Mesopotamian civilization has left its mark on the modern world. Its religion greatly influenced Hebrew, and thence Christian, thought, the psalms, for instance, being a Babylonian form of piety. Its science fixed the signs of the zodiac, the months of the year, the days of the week, and the division of the circle in degrees, all of which are now universal. And its art, carried by the Phœnicians, was copied by the Greeks and Etruscans, and thus passed on into modern design.
SYRIA
The knowledge of Palestine was but slight, and of northern Syria nothing to speak of, a century ago. Travellers with some scientific ability, such as Robinson (1838 and 1852), De Saulcy (1853), and Van de Velde (1854), greatly extended our view and led up to the splendid survey by the Palestine Exploration Fund (1866 and on), which exhausted the surface study of the land. The more archæological work of excavation was begun at Jerusalem (1867–70), and resumed (1892–99) at Lachish, Jerusalem, etc. The topographical results are all important, and leave nothing to be done until excavation can be freely applied; and the small amount of digging yet done has fixed the varieties of pottery back to 2000 B. C. and given some early architecture. But the ruins of Syria, and indeed of Turkey in general, are practically yet untouched. The discovery (1868) of the inscription of Mesha, King of Moab (896 B. C.), opened a new prospect of research which cannot yet be entered upon. In the north of Syria nothing has been done except the German work at Singerli, from which came an Aramean inscription of about 740 B. C. And in the south a large number of early inscriptions of the Arabian dynasties, reaching back some centuries B. C., have been copied; but there, also, excavation is impossible.
The main new light from Syria has been on the Hittite power. Burckhardt, in 1812, had noticed a new kind of hieroglyph at Hamath. After several ineffective copies, Wright made casts of the stones in 1872. Several other such inscriptions have been found, and from these and the Egyptian and Assyrian references to the Hittites we now realize that they were a northern people, with a great capital on the Euphrates, at Karkhemish, and ruling over nearly all Syria and Asia Minor. Little has yet been fixed about the writing; a few signs are read and some have passed into the Cypriote alphabet. A striking proof of the spread of Babylonian culture is seen in the tablets found in Egypt at Tel-el-Amarna in 1887, which show that all the correspondence between Egypt and Syria in the fifteenth century B. C. was carried on in cuneiform. These hundreds of letters give a vivid picture of life in Syria at that early date.
GREECE
The revival of interest in Greek civilization was at first purely literary, and remained so during two or three centuries. But during the last century various travellers and residents abroad made collections which awoke an interest in the art; and though most of these collectors were content with merely showy sculpture, greatly restored and falsified for the market, yet some—such as Hamilton—took a real archæological interest in the unearthing and collecting of ancient art. The condition of study at the end of the eighteenth century was that many private men of wealth had bought large quantities of sculpture which was but little understood, and looked on more from a decorative than a scientific point of view, while there were the beginnings of a serious appreciation of it which had been just laid down by Winckelmann.
The nineteenth century opened with a grand work of publishing the principal treasures of classical art in England, which was finally issued in 1809 by Payne, Knight, and Townley; this marks the highest point of the dilettante collecting spirit, which was soon eclipsed by truer knowledge. Hitherto the best sculpture had hardly been known but at second hand through Roman copies; a closer acquaintance began with the travels of Dodwell, Gell, and Leake, all in the first decade of the century. The free opening of the British Museum, in 1805, and the accumulation there of all the best collections within the first quarter of the century, also served to educate a public taste. The first struggle of scientific and artistic knowledge against the dilettante spirit was over the Elgin marbles; by 1816 they were accepted as the masterpieces which all later criticism has proved them to be. The Æginetan and Phigaleian sculptures, brought to Munich and London, helped also to show the nobility of early Greek art; so that the last two generations have had a canon of taste to rely upon, the value of which cannot be overestimated.
Following on this noble foundation, other collectors worked in Greece and Asia Minor, and the British Museum profited by the labors of Burgon, Fellows, and Woodhouse between 1840 and 1860. The diplomatically supported work of Newton on the Mausoleum (1857–58), and Wood at Ephesus (1863–75), filled out our knowledge of the middle period of Greek art (350 B. C.). Comparatively little has been done since then by England, but the activity of the Germans at Olympia has given us the only original masterpiece that is known—the Hermes of Praxiteles (350 B. C.), and their work at Pergamon revealed the great altar belonging to the later age (180 B. C.). The excavations at Athens (in 1886) have produced the impressive statues dedicated to Athene about 520 B. C., which reveal the noble rise of Attic sculpture. But attention during the last quarter-century has been largely fixed upon the earlier ages. The discoveries of Schliemann at Hissarlik (Troy, 1870–82), Mycenæ (1876), Orchomenos (1880–81), and Tiryns (1884), opened a new world of thought and research. Though at first bitterly attacked, it is now agreed that these discoveries show us the civilization of Greece between 2000 and 1000 B. C. Lastly, during ten years past Egypt has provided the solid chronology for prehistoric Greece by discoveries of trade between the two countries.
We can now very briefly estimate the present position of our knowledge as gained during the century. Setting aside the early foreign pottery found in Egypt, which belongs probably to Greece or Italy at 5000 and 3000 B. C., we first touch a civilized city in the lowest town of Troy, where metal was scarcely yet in use, which is certainly before 2000 and probably about 3000 B. C. in date. Succeeding that is the finely built second Troy, rich in gold vases and ornaments, which—though mistaken by Schliemann for the Homeric Troy—must yet be long before that, probably before 2000 B. C. After the burning of that come three other rebuildings before we reach the town of the age of Mycenæ, about 1500 B. C. Of this, which was in Greece the climax of the prehistoric civilization, there are the splendid treasures found at Mycenæ, the magnificent domed tombs, the abundance of fine jewelry and metal-work, of beautiful pottery and glazed ornament. To this age belong the great palaces of Mycenæ, Tiryns, Athens, and other hill fortresses, of which hardly more than the plans can now be traced. And it is this civilization which traded eagerly with Egypt, exchanging the valued manufactures of each country. This period was at its full bloom from 1500–1200 B. C., and began to decay by 1100 B. C., this dating being given by the contact with Egypt.