A History of Art in Ancient Egypt

A history of art in ancient Egypt.

Vol. I.

by Georges Perrot and Charles Chipiez.

PREFACE.

M. Perrot's name as a cla.s.sical scholar and archaeologist, and M.

Chipiez's as a penetrating critic of architecture, stand so high that any work from their pens is sure of a warm welcome from all students of the material remains of antiquity. These volumes are the first instalment of an undertaking which has for its aim the history and critical a.n.a.lysis of that great organic growth which, beginning with the Pharaohs and ending with the Roman Emperors, forms what is called Antique Art. The reception accorded to this instalment in its original form is sufficient proof that the eulogium prefixed to the German translation by an eminent living Egyptologist, Professor Georg Ebers, is well deserved; "The first section," he says, "of this work, is broad and comprehensive in conception, and delicate in execution; it treats Egyptian art in a fas.h.i.+on which has never previously been approached." In clothing it in a language which will, I hope, enable it to reach a still wider public, my one endeavour has been that it should lose as little as possible, either in substance or form.

A certain amount of repet.i.tion is inevitable in a work of this kind when issued, as this was, in parts, and in one place[1] I have ventured to omit matter which had already been given at some length, but with that exception I have followed M. Perrot's words as closely as the difference of idiom would allow. Another kind of repet.i.tion, with which, perhaps, some readers may be inclined to quarrel, forced itself upon the author as the lesser of two evils. He was compelled either to sacrifice detail and precision in attempting to carry on at once the history of all the Egyptian arts and of their connection with the national religion and civilization, or to go back upon his footsteps now and again in tracing each art successively from its birth to its decay. The latter alternative was chosen as the only one consistent with the final aim of his work.

[1] Page 92, Vol. I.

Stated in a few words, that aim is to trace the course of the great plastic evolution which culminated in the age of Pericles and came to an end in that of Marcus Aurelius. That evolution forms a complete organic whole, with a birthday, a deathday, and an unbroken chain of cause and effect uniting the two. To objectors who may say that the art of India, of China, of j.a.pan, should have been included in the scheme, it may be answered: this is the life, not of two, or three, but of one. M. Perrot has been careful, therefore, to discriminate between those characteristics of Egyptian art which may be referred either to the national beliefs and modes of thought, or to undeveloped material conditions, such as the want or superst.i.tious disuse of iron, and those which, being determined by the very nature of the problems which art has to solve, formed a starting point for the arts of all later civilizations. By means of well-chosen examples he shows that the art of the Egyptians went through the same process of development as those of other and later nationalities, and that the real distinguis.h.i.+ng characteristic of the sculptures and paintings of the Nile Valley was a continual tendency to simplification and generalization, arising partly from the habit of mind and hand created by the hieroglyphic writing, partly from the stubborn nature of the chief materials employed.

To this characteristic he might, perhaps, have added another, which is sufficiently remarkable in an art which had at least three thousand years of vitality, namely, its freedom from individual expression. The realism of the Egyptians was a broad realism. There is in it no sign of that research into detail which distinguishes most imitative art and is to be found even in that of their immediate successors; and yet, during all those long centuries of alternate renascence and decay, we find no vestige of an attempt to raise art above imitation.

No suspicion of its expressive power seems to have dawned on the Egyptian mind, which, so far as the plastic arts were concerned, never produced anything that in the language of modern criticism could be called a creation. In this particular Egypt is more closely allied to those nations of the far east whose art does not come within the scope of M. Perrot's inquiry, than to the great civilizations which formed its own posterity.

Before the late troubles intervened to draw attention of a different kind to the Nile Valley, the finding of a pit full of royal mummies and sepulchral objects in the western mountain at Thebes had occurred to give a fresh stimulus to the interest in Egyptian history, and to encourage those who were doing their best to lead England to take her proper share in the work of exploration. A short account of this discovery, which took place after M. Perrot's book was complete, and of some of the numerous art objects with which it has enriched the Boulak Museum, will be found in an Appendix to the second volume.

My acknowledgments for generous a.s.sistance are due to Dr. Birch, Mr.

Reginald Stuart Poole, and Miss A. B. Edwards.

W. A.

INTRODUCTION.

I.

The successful interpretation of the ancient writings of Egypt, Chaldaea, and Persia, which has distinguished our times, makes it necessary that the history of antiquity should be rewritten. Doc.u.ments that for thousands of years lay hidden beneath the soil, and inscriptions which, like those of Egypt and Persia, long offered themselves to the gaze of man merely to excite his impotent curiosity, have now been deciphered and made to render up their secrets for the guidance of the historian. By the help of those strings of hieroglyphs and of cuneiform characters, ill.u.s.trated by paintings and sculptured reliefs, we are enabled to separate the truth from the falsehood, the chaff from the wheat, in the narratives of the Greek writers who busied themselves with those nations of Africa and Asia which preceded their own in the ways of civilization. Day by day, as new monuments have been discovered and more certain methods of reading their inscriptions elaborated, we have added to the knowledge left us by Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus, to our acquaintance with those empires on the Euphrates and the Nile which were already in old age when the Greeks were yet struggling to emerge from their primitive barbarism.

Even in the cases of Greece and Rome, whose histories are supplied in their main lines by their cla.s.sic writers, the study of hitherto neglected writings discloses many new and curious details. The energetic search for ancient inscriptions, and the scrupulous and ingenious interpretation of their meaning, which we have witnessed and are witnessing, have revealed to us many interesting facts of which no trace is to be found in Thucydides or Xenophon, in Livy or Tacitus; enabling us to enrich with more than one feature the picture of private and public life which they have handed down to us. In the effort to embrace the life of ancient times as a whole, many attempts have been made to fix the exact place in it occupied by art, but those attempts have never been absolutely successful, because the comprehension of works of art, of _plastic_ creations in the widest significance of that word, demands an amount of special knowledge which the great majority of historians are without; art has a method and language of its own, which obliges those who wish to learn it thoroughly to cultivate their taste by frequenting the princ.i.p.al museums of Europe, by visiting distant regions at the cost of considerable trouble and expense, by perpetual reference to the great collections of engravings, photographs, and other reproductions which considerations of s.p.a.ce and cost prevent the _savant_ from possessing at home. More than one learned author has never visited Italy or Greece, or has found no time to examine their museums, each of which contains but a small portion of the acc.u.mulated remains of antique art. Some connoisseurs do not even live in a capital, but dwell far from those public libraries, which often contain valuable collections, and sometimes--when they are not packed away in cellars or at the binder's--allow them to be studied by the curious.[2] The study of art, difficult enough in itself, is thus rendered still more arduous by the obstacles which are thrown in its way. The difficulty of obtaining materials for self-improvement in this direction affords the true explanation of the absence, in modern histories of antiquity, of those laborious researches which have led to such great results since Winckelmann founded the science of archaeology as we know it. To take the case of Greece, many learned writers have in our time attempted to retrace its complete history--England, Germany, and France have each contributed works which, by various merits, have conquered the favour of Europe. But of all these works the only one which betrays any deep study of Greek art, and treats it with taste and competence, is that of M. Ernest Curtius; as for Mr. Grote, he has neither a theoretic knowledge of art, nor a feeling for it. Here and there, indeed, where he cannot avoid it, he alludes to the question, but in the fewest and driest phrases possible. And yet Greece, without its architects, its sculptors, and its painters, without in fact its pa.s.sion for beautiful form, a pa.s.sion as warm and prolific as its love for poetry, is hardly Greece at all.

[2] Our national library at the British Museum is, perhaps, the only one which does not deserve this reproach.--ED.

Much disappointment is thus prepared for those who, without the leisure to enter deeply into detail, wish to picture to themselves the various aspects of the ancient world. They are told of revolutions, of wars and conquests, of the succession of princes; the mechanism of political and civil inst.i.tutions is explained to them; "literature,"

we are told, "is the expression of social life," and so the history of literature is written for us. All this is true enough, but there is another truth which seems to be always forgotten, that the art of a people is quite as clear an indication of their sentiments, tastes, and ideas, as their literature. But on this subject most historians say little, contenting themselves with the brief mention of certain works and proper names, and with the summary statement

To this question our neighbours may reply that the _Geschichte der bildenden Kunst_ of Carl Schnaase[3] does all that we ask. But that work has one great disadvantage for those who are not Germans. Its great bulk will almost certainly prevent its ever finding a translator, while it makes it very tedious reading to a foreigner. It must, besides, be very difficult, not to say impossible, for a single writer to treat with equal competence the arts of Asia, of Greece, and of Rome, of the Middle Ages and of modern times. As one might have expected, all the parts of such an extensive whole are by no means of equal value, and the chapters which treat of antique art are the least satisfactory. Of the eight volumes of which the work consists, two are devoted to ancient times, and, by general acknowledgment, they are not the two best. They were revised, indeed, for the second edition, by two colleagues whom Herr Schnaase called in to his a.s.sistance; oriental art by Carl von Lutzow, and that of Greece and Rome by Carl Friedrichs. But the chapters in which a.s.syria, Chaldaea, Persia, Phnicia, and Egypt are discussed are quite inadequate. No single question is exhaustively treated. Instead of well-considered personal views, we have vague guesses and explanations which do nothing to solve the many problems which perplex archaeologists. The ill.u.s.trations are not numerous enough to be useful, and, in most cases, they do not seem to have been taken from the objects themselves. Those which relate to architecture, especially, have been borrowed from other well known works, and furnish therefore no new elements for appreciation or discussion. Finally, the order adopted by the author is not easily understood. For reasons which have decided us to follow the same course, and which we will explain farther on, he takes no account of the extreme east, of China and j.a.pan; but then, why begin with India, which had no relations with the peoples on the sh.o.r.es of the Mediterranean until a very late date, and, so far as art was concerned, rather came under their influence than brought them under its own?

[3] _Geschichte der bildenden Kunst_, 2nd ed., corrected and augmented, with wood engravings in the text, 8 vols. 8vo.

1865-1873. The first edition consisted of 7 vols., and appeared between 1843 and 1864.

The fact is that Schnaase follows a geographical order, which is very confusing in its results. To give but one example of its absurdity, he speaks of the Phnicians before he has said a word of Egypt; now, we all know that the art of Tyre and Sidon was but a late reflection from that of Egypt; the workshops of those two famous ports were mere factories of cheap Egyptian art objects for exportation.

Again, the first part of Herr Schnaase's work is already seventeen years old, and how many important discoveries have taken place since 1865? Those of Cesnola and Schliemann, for instance, have revealed numberless points of contact and transmission between one phase of antique art and another, which were never thought of twenty years ago.

The book therefore is not "down to date." With all the improvements which a new edition might introduce, that part of it which deals with antiquity can never be anything but an abridgment with the faults inherent in that kind of work. It could never have the amplitude of treatment or the originality which made Winckelmann's _History of Art_ and Ottfried Muller's _Manual of Artistic Archaeology_ so successful in their day.[4]

[4] Germany had long felt the want which Schnaase attempted to satisfy. As early as 1841 Franz Kugler published his _Handbuch der Kunstgeschichte_, which embraces the whole history of art from the earliest times down to our own day. The book was successful; the fourth edition, revised and corrected by Wilhelm Lubke (2 vols. 8vo. 1861, Stuttgart), lies before us, but to give an idea of its inadequacy as a history of ancient art, it is enough to say that the whole of the antique period, both in Greece and Asia, occupies no more than 206 pages of the first volume. The few ill.u.s.trations are not very good in quality, and their source is never indicated; the draughtsman has taken little care to reproduce with fidelity the style of the originals or to call attention to their peculiarities; finally, the arrangements adopted betray the defects of a severely scientific method. The author commences with Celtic monuments (dolmens and menhirs), and then pa.s.ses to the structures of Oceania and America; before commencing upon Egypt he takes us to Mexico and Yucatan. Lubke, whilst still occupied with the work of Kugler, wished to supply for the use of students and artists a book of a more elementary character; he therefore published in 1860 an 8vo volume which he called _Grundriss der Kunstgeschichte_; the antique here occupies 208 pages out of 720. His plan seems to us to be open to the same objection as that of Kugler; he follows a geographical instead of an historical arrangement; he begins with the extreme east; he puts the a.s.syrians and the Persians before Egypt, and India before a.s.syria. His ill.u.s.trations are sometimes better than those of Kugler, but many of the cuts are common to both works.

Under the t.i.tle _Geschichte der Plastik_, Overbeck and Lubke have each written a comprehensive history of sculpture. [The word "comprehensive" must here be understood in a strictly limited sense.--ED.] The word _Plastik_ in the language of German critics has this special and restricted meaning--it comprises sculpture only. The work of Overbeck, far superior to that of Lubke, deserves the success which has attended it; the third edition, which contains the results of the searches at Olympia and at Pergamus, is now in course of publication.

Winckelmann's _History of Art among the Ancients_, originally published in 1764, is one of those rare books which mark an epoch in the history of the human intellect. The German writer was the first to formulate the idea, now familiar enough to cultivated intelligences, that art springs up, flourishes, and decays, with the society to which it belongs; in a word, that it is possible to write its history.[5]

This great _savant_, whose memory Germany holds in honour as the father of cla.s.sic archaeology, was not content with stating a principle: he followed it through to its consequences; he began by tracing the outlines of the science which he founded, and he never rested till he had filled them in. However, now that a century has pa.s.sed away since it appeared, his great work, which even yet is never opened without a sentiment of respect, marks a date beyond which modern curiosity has long penetrated. Winckelmann's knowledge of Egyptian art was confined to the _pasticcios_ of the Roman epoch, and to the figures which pa.s.sed from the villa of Hadrian to the museum of Cardinal Albani. Chaldaea and a.s.syria, Persia and Phnicia, had no existence for him; even Greece as a whole was not known to him. Her painted vases were still hidden in Etruscan and Campanian cemeteries; the few which had found their way to the light had not yet succeeded in drawing the attention of men who were preoccupied over more imposing manifestations of the Greek genius. Nearly all Winckelmann's attention was given to the works of the sculptors, upon which most of his comprehensive judgments were founded; and yet, even in regard to them, he was not well-informed. His opportunities of personal inspection were confined to the figures, mostly of unknown origin, which filled the Italian galleries. The great majority of these formed part of the crowd of copies which issued from the workshops of Greece, for some three centuries or more, to embellish the temples, the basilicas, and the public baths, the villas and the palaces of the masters of the world. In the very few instances in which they were either originals or copies executed with sufficient care to be fair representations of the original, they never dated from an earlier epoch than that of Praxiteles, Scopas, and Lysippus. Phidias and Alcamenes, Paeonius and Polycletus, the great masters of the fifth century, were only known to the historian by the descriptions and allusions of the ancient authors.

[5] Winckelmann's History of Ancient Art should be read in connection with his Remarks upon the History of Art, which is a kind of supplement to it, and takes the place of that new edition of which the author's premature and tragic death deprived the world. It is an answer to the objections which made themselves heard on every side; the preface to _Monumenti inediti_ (Rome, 1867, 2 vols. in folio, with 208 plates) should also be read. The method of Winckelmann is there most clearly explained. Finally, the student of the life and labours of Winckelmann may consult with profit the interesting work of Carl Iusti, _Winckelmann, sein Leben, seine Werke, und seine Zeitgenossen_, which will give him a clear idea of the state of archaeology at the time when the German _savant_ intervened to place it upon a higher footing.

In such a case as this the clearest and most precise of verbal descriptions is of less value than any fragment of marble upon which the hand of the artist is still to be traced. Who would then have guessed that the following generation would have the opportunity of studying those splendid groups of decorative sculpture whose close relation to the architecture of certain famous temples has taught us so much? Who in those days dreamt of looking at, still less of drawing, the statues in the pediments and sculptured friezes of the Parthenon, of the Thesaeum, of the temples at aegina, at Phigalia, or at Olympia? Now if Winckelmann was ignorant of these, the real monuments of cla.s.sic perfection, it follows that he was hardly competent to recognise and define true archaism or to distinguish the works of sculpture which bore the marks of the deliberate, eclectic, and over-polished taste of the critical epochs. He made the same mistake in speaking of architecture. It was always, or nearly always, by the edifices of Rome and Italy, by their arrangement and decoration, that he pretended to explain and judge the architecture of Greece.

But Winckelmann rendered a great service to art by founding a method of study which was soon applied by Zoega[6] and by Ennio Quirino Visconti,[7] to the description of the works which filled public and private galleries, or were being continually discovered by excavation.

These two _savants_ cla.s.sified a vast quant.i.ty of facts; thanks to their incessant labours, the lines of the master's rough sketch were accented and corrected at more than one point; the divisions which he had introduced into his picture were marked with greater precision; the groups which he had begun to form were rendered more coherent and compact; their features became more precise, more distinct, and more expressive. This progress was continuous, but after the great wars of the Revolution and the Empire its march became much more rapid, and the long peace which saw the growth of so rich a harvest of talent, was also marked by a great increase in the energy with which all kinds of historical studies were prosecuted.

[6] Zoega busied himself greatly with Egypt, and in inaugurating the study of Coptic prepared the way for Champollion. But the work which gave him a place among the chief scholars of Winckelmann is unfinished; the _Ba.s.sirilievi antichi di Roma_ (Rome, 2 vols. 4to. 1808) only contains the monuments in the Villa Albani, engraved by Piroli, with the help of the celebrated Piranesi. A volume containing most of his essays was given to the world by Welcker in 1817 (_Abhandlungen herausgegeben und mit Zusatzen begleitet_, 8vo. Gottingen), who also published his life and a volume of his correspondence (Zoega, _Sammlung seiner Briefe und Beurtheilung seiner Werke_, 2 vols. 8vo. Stuttgart, 1819).

[7] _Il Museo Pio-Clementino_, Visconti, vol. i. 1782; by Enn.

Quir. Visconti, vols. ii. to vii. Rome, 1784-1807. _Museum Worsleyanum_, 2 vols. folio. London, 1794. _Monumenti Gabini della Villa Pinciana_, Visconti, 8vo. 1797. _Description des Antiques du Musee Royal_, begun by Visconti and continued by the Comte de Clarac. 12mo. Paris, 1820. For the collection of the materials and the execution of the plates in the _Iconographie Grecque et Romain_, Visconti took advantage of his opportunities as director of the _Musee Napoleon_, into which the art treasures of all Europe, except England, were collected at the beginning of this century.

But the widest, as well as the most sudden, enlargement of the horizon was due to a rapid succession of discoveries, some the result of persevering searches and lucky excavations, others rendered possible by feats of induction which almost amounted to genius. It seemed as though a curtain were drawn up, and, behind the rich and brilliant scenery of Graeco-Roman civilization, the real ancient world, the world of the East, the father of religions and of useful inventions, of the alphabet and of the plastic arts, were suddenly revealed to us. The great work which was compiled by the _savants_ who accompanied Bonaparte to Egypt first introduced the antiquities of that country to us, and not long afterwards Champollion discovered the key to the hieroglyphics, and thus enabled us to a.s.sign to the monuments of the country at least a relative date.

A little later Layard and Botta freed Nineveh from the ruins of its own buildings, and again let in the light upon ancient a.s.syria. But yesterday we knew nothing beyond the names of its kings, and yet it sprang again to the day, its monuments in marvellous preservation, its history pictured by thousands of figures in relief and narrated by their accompanying inscriptions. These did not long keep their secrets to themselves, and their interpretation enables us to cla.s.sify chronologically the works of architecture and sculpture which have been discovered.

The information thus obtained was supplemented by careful exploration of the ruins in Babylonia, lower Chaldaea, and Susiana. These had been less tenderly treated by time and by man than the remains of Nineveh.

The imposing ruins of the palace at Persepolis and of the tombs of the kings, had been known for nearly two centuries, but only by the inadequate descriptions and feeble drawings of early travellers.

Ker-Porter, Texier, and Flandrin provided us with more accurate and comprehensive descriptions, and, thanks to their careful copies of the writings upon the walls of those buildings, and upon the inscribed stones of Persia and Media, Eugene Burnouf succeeded in reconstructing the alphabet of Darius and Xerxes.

Thus, to the toils of artists and learned men, who examined the country from the mountains of Armenia to the low and marshy plains of Susiana, and from the deserts which border the Euphrates to the rocks of Media and Persia, and to the philologists who deciphered the texts and cla.s.sified the monumental fragments which had travelled so far from the scene of their creation, we owe our power to describe, upon a sound basis and from authentic materials, the great civilisation which was developed in Western Asia, in the basin of the Persian Gulf. There were still many details which escaped us, but, through the shadows which every day helped to dissipate, the essential outlines and the leading ma.s.ses began to be clearly distinguished, and the local distinctions which, in such a vast extent of country and so long a succession of empires, were caused by differences of race, of time, and of physical conditions, began to be appreciated. But, in spite of all these differences, the choice of expressive means and their employment, from Babylon to Nineveh, and from Nineveh to Susa and Persepolis, presented so many points of striking similarity as to prove that the various peoples represented by those famous capitals all sprang from the same original stock. The elements of writing and of the arts are in each case identical. The alphabets were all formed upon the same cuneiform principle, notwithstanding the variety in the languages which they served. In the plastic arts, although the plans of their buildings vary in obedience to the requirements of different materials, their sculpture always betrays the same way of looking at living forms, the same conventions and the same motives. Every work fas.h.i.+oned by the hand of man which has been discovered within the boundaries given above, displays community of style and unity of origin and tradition.

The result of these searches and discoveries was to show clearly that this ancient civilisation had sprung from two original sources, the one in the valley of the Nile, the other in Chaldaea. The latter was the less ancient of the two, and was considerably nearer our own time than the epoch which witnessed the commencement of the long series of Egyptian dynasties by the reign of Menes. These two civilizations met and intermingled through the agency of the Phnicians, and any active and prolific interchange of ideas and products began, traces of which are still to be found both in Egypt and a.s.syria.

It still remained doubtful, and the doubt has but lately been removed, how the influence of these two great centres of cultivation was extended to the still barbarous tribes, the ancestors of the Greeks and Romans, who inhabited the northern and eastern sh.o.r.es of the Mediterranean.

It is only within the last twenty years, since the mission of M.

Renan, that Phnicia has become well-known to us. Several English and French travellers, Hamilton, Fellows, Texier, among others, had already, in the first half of the century, described the curious monuments of Lydia, Phrygia, Cappadocia, and of the still more picturesque Lycia, whose spoils now enrich the British Museum; people vaguely conjectured that through those countries had progressed, stage by stage, from the east to the west, the forms and inventions of a system of civilization which had been elaborated in the distant Chaldaea. But it was not till 1861 that an expedition, inspired by the desire to clear up this very question, succeeded in demonstrating the _role_ actually played by the peoples inhabiting the plateau of Asia Minor. As for Cyprus, it was but yesterday that the explorations of Lang and Cesnola revealed it to us, with its art half Egyptian and half a.s.syrian, and its cuneiform alphabet pressed into the service of a Greek dialect. These discoveries have put us on the alert. Not a year pa.s.ses without some lucky "find," such as that of the Palaestrina treasure, in the immediate neighbourhood of Rome, or that made by Salzmann at Rhodes. These pieces of good fortune allow the archaeologist to supply, one by one, the missing links of the chain which attaches the arts of Greece and Italy to the earlier civilizations of Egypt and a.s.syria.