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G. MASPERO




New Yor]{ University Library
Institute of Fine Arts




Graduate
Fine Arts



i r • ►^ A «



The Stephen Chan Library of Fine Art;



gift of

Joyce von Bothmer



from the library of

Bernard V. Bothmer

(1912 - 1993)

In His Memory



m-u^i



Institute of Fine Arts. New \ork University



ART IN EGYPT



ARS UNA: SPECIES MILLE

GENERAL HISTORY OF ART



ART IN ANCIENT ROME

By Euge'nie Strong

ART IN GREAT BRITAIN AND IRE-
LAND

By Sir Walter Armstrong

ART IN SPAIN AND PORTUGAL
By Marcel Dieulafoy

ART IN FRANCE

By Louis Hourticq

ART IN EGYPT

By Sir Gaston Maspero

ART IN NORTHERN ITALY

By Commendatore Corrado Ricci

ART IN FLANDERS

By Max Rooses



NEW YORK UNIVERSITY

CeUEEE OF FINE m

LIBRARY




BUST OF THE PRINCESS NEFERET

(Museum, Cairo)



ARS UNA: SPECIES MILLE
GENERAL HISTORY OF ART



ART IN EGYPT



BV



G. MASPERO



MEMBER OV THE INSTITUTE
DIRECTOR GENERAL OF THE SERVICE OF ANTIQUITIES OF EGYPT



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NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

MCMXXX



Graduate
Fine Arts



7'Ats volume is published simtilfaneously in
America by CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, New
York; in England by WiLLiAM tiElNEMANN,
London; also in French by HacHETTE ET Cie.,
Paris; in German by JULlUS HOFFMANN,
Stuttgart; in Italian by //% D'Arti GrAFICHE, Bergamo ; in Spanish by the

LiBRERLA. Gutenberg de Jose Ruiz, Madrid.



Printed by Tlie Scril>iicr I'ress
New York. U. S. A.












33



PREFACE

The art of Egypt, like all the rest of its civilisation, is the pro-
duct of the African soil. If it occasionally took ideas or methods
of expression from the peoples with which it was brought into
contact by the Pharaohs, its levies were not important enough
in the first instance to exercise a durable influence upon its
constitution. In a few years, it had so completely assimilated
the substance of these as to leave us hardly sensible that any
alien influences had interfered, even momentarily, with its ho-
mogeneity. It was only towards the end, when the race whose
mind it had so admirably materialised and translated began to
bow beneath the weight of over fifty centuries of existence, that
it too declined, lacking strength to defend its superannuated
traditions successfully against the new conceptions of beauty set
before it by younger races.

I have dealt briefly with the period of its infancy, thinking
the reader would forgive me, if I devoted as little as possible
of the limited space at my disposal to dubious origins. Besides,
unlike some of my confreres, I cannot accept as art the rude
images by which every new-born people seeks to reproduce the
objects or the beings it sees around it, and the ideas they evoke.
I have therefore dealt with it as almost adult, when it had left



1G7083



PREFACE

its awkward age behind it. I have indicated the religious and
social principles by which it was governed at the time of the
Thinite dynasties, and I have then tried to determine the suc-
cessive stages of its development during the following periods.
It has been very erroneously supposed that it presented a per-
fect uniformity from beginning to end, and that its character was
identical in all the different regions of the land, save for certain
differences of handling which were the results of degrees of skill
in its artists. I have shown how, while drawing everywhere
upon a common fund of general ideas, it had so far varied their
manifestations in different districts, as to give birth to indepen-
dent schools, the activity of which augmented or relaxed accord-
ing to the varying fortunes of the cities which were their homes:
the Thinite School, the Memphite School, the Hermopolitan
School, the Tanite School, the secondary schools of the Said or
the Delta. The list is as yet imperfectly established, and I have
not been able to make it complete in architecture, for lack of
a sufficient number of provincial documents, but it is fairly
satisfactory as regards painting and sculpture. Not only is it
possible to determine their principal characteristics, but there
are some among them, the Theban School, for instance, whose
fortunes may be easily followed from the rise of the Eleventh
Dynasty to the rule of the Caesars. Its relics are to be counted
by thousands, and each day is marked by discoveries which
enable us to fill in the lacunae of our science in this connection,
and to give additional precision to what we already know.

I have put a good deal of my own into this little volume,
and much that I owe to others. We may set aside those who
wrote when Egypt was a sealed book to the modern world.
Although Champollion had from the outset very sound ideas
on the nature of Egyptian art, and thoroughly appreciated its
fine qualities, the admirable Emmanuel de Rouge was the
first to define its characteristics scientifically and to sketch its
history, in his Notice of 1854 on the monuments of the Louvre
(Oeuvres diverses, vol. Ill, p. 36 — 40) and in his report of 1854

vi



PREFACE

(Ibid. vol. II, p. 213 — 246). Mariettc, when in 1864 he compiled
his Catalogue of the Boulak Museum, pointed out many traits
which his master had not noted, but the rest of the school, ab-
sorbed in deciphering texts, did not follow on the path thus opened,
and for many years only amateurs and classical archaeologists
made their way along it: Charles Blanc (Voyage dans la Haute
Egypte, 8vo, Paris, 1870, and Grammaire des Arts du Dessin, 6th
ed., Paris, 1886), Comte du Barry de Mervel (Etudes sur l' Architec-
ture Egyptienne, 8vo, Paris, 1873), Soldi (La Sculpture Egyptienne,
8vo, Paris, 1876), Marchandon de la Faye (Histoire de I'Art Egyptien
d'apres les Monuments, 4to, Paris, 1878), Perrot-Chipiez (Histoire
de I'Art dans VAntiquite, I' Egypte, 8vo, Paris, 1880), Goodyear
(Grammar of the Lotus, 4 to, New York, 1891), Liibke-Semrau
(Die Kunst des Altertums, 14 th ed., 8vo, Esslingen, 1908), Springer-
Michael is (Handbuch der Kunstgeschichte, 9th. ed., 8vo, vol. I,
Leipzig, 1911), Sybel (Weltgeschichte der Kunst im Altertum,
2nd ed., 8vo, Marburg, 1903), Woermann (Geschichte der Kunst
aller Zeiten und Volker, 8vo, vol. I, Leipzig, 1904). Finally, how-
ever, the Egyptologists took the field, Maspero in Rayet's
Monuments de I'Art antique, fol. vol. I, 1879 — 1883, and Arche-
ologie Egyptienne, 8vo, Paris, 1887, Flinders Petrie in Egyptian
Decorative Art, 8vo, London, 1895, Georges Foucart in Histoire
de I'ordre lotiforme, 8vo, Paris, 1897. Naville insisted on the
part played by utilitarian considerations in the formation of
sculptural and architectural types (L' Art Egyptien, 8vo, Paris, 1907),
while Bissing condensed the results of his prolonged studies in
a manual (Einfiihrung in die Geschichte der Agyptischen Kunst
von den dltesten Zeiten bis auf die Romer, 8vo, Berlin, 1908).
In the interval Steindorff had prepared for the curious who visit
the Nile each year a substantial resume of our knowledge on
the subject (Baedeker's Handbook, Egypt and the Sudan, Leip-
zig, 1908) and Spiegelberg, reviving a theory propounded by
Rouge and Mariette , sought to demonstrate the existence of a
popular art less rigid than the official art (Geschichte der Agyp-
tischen Kunst, 8vo, Leipzig, 1903). As a fact, there was never



PREFACE

any distinction between the two, but the same artists were allow-
ed more or less liberty according to the nature of the subjects
they treated and the social condition of those they portrayed.
I have tried as far as possible to reproduce and to appreciate
only things I have myself seen and handled, and the good for-
tune which made me twice the director of the Service of Anti-
quities has greatly facilitated my task. I should, however, be
guilty of ingratitude no less than of injustice if I did not acknow-
ledge my debt to those collections of engravings and photographs
in black and white and in colours, in which so many of us, and
I myself among them, have been able to study monuments to
which personal access was denied us. The architectural drawings
of the French Commission have lost little of their value, and it
would be difficult to over-estimate the works of Cailliaud, Gau,
Champollion, and Rosellini. Lepsius' Denkmdler has been of
greater service to archaeologists and philologists than to art-
historians. Weidenbach, who executed the plates for this with the
help of his pupils, conceived the unhappy idea of rendering bas-
reliefs and paintings by a series of stereotyped designs which he
copied and recopied with slight modifications throughout the
work. We can hardly be surprised therefore if critics, finding
the same persons treated in the same manner from the Memphite
period to that of the Roman domination, accused Egyptian art
of monotony. Prisse d'Avennes, though his drawing has more
warmth and flexibility, was also guilty of conventionalising his
models excessively in his Histoire de I'Art Egyptien. We may
turn from these approximations to the more trustworthy facsim-
iles of Champollion and Rosellini when we wish to form an
opinion of monuments now mutilated or destroyed; for the others,
we may consult Maximc Ducamp's Voyages en Egypte (fol.,
Paris, 1852), the photographs Banville tock in concert with
Emmanuel de Rouge (fol., Paris, 1868), Bcchard's L' Egypte et la
Nubie (fol., Paris, 1887). the albums of Mariettc (A/hum du
Musee de Boulaq, fol., Cairo, 1872), Borchardt (Kunstwcrke aus
dem Agyptischen Museum zu Cairo, fol., Cairo, 1908), Capart

viii



PREFACE

(L'Arf Egi/ptien, 4 to, Brussels, 1909) and above all the incom-
parable atlas which Bissing is completini;^ for the firm of Briick-
mann (Denkmciler agyptisc/wr Skiilptiir, fol., Munich, 1906 — 1911).
The Cairo Museum , in the volumes of its Catalogue General
(4to, Cairo, 1900 — 1911) has reproduced all the objects of its
collections which are of interest to artist or historian, and that
of Berlin has given us a valuable selection of its treasures
(Agyptische iind Vorderasiatische Alterti'imer aiis den Koniglichen
Miiseen zii Berlin, fol., Berlin, 1897), but the riches of the British
Museum, the Louvre, Turin, and Leyden have hardly been ex-
ploited as yet, and how many marvels Egypt herself displays to
tourists and even to scholars who pass them by indifferently!

Nevertheless, Egyptian Art is no longer the exclusive domain
of a privileged few. Artists — painters, sculptors, architects —
blind at first to its merits, have come of late years to perceive
and feel them keenly; the admiration it inspires increases with
closer study. Men of letters and the general public are still
disconcerted by the strangeness of some of its conventions, and
a certain time will no doubt have to pass before they appreciate
it at its true value. May this little book, in which I have follow-
ed its fortunes as clearly and completely as lay in my power,
help those who misjudge it, to understand, if not to love it!



CONTENTS

PART I

PAGE

THE BEGINNINGS OF ART IN EGYPT

CHAPTER I

THINITE ART 1

CHAPTER II

MEMPHITE ART 26

PART II

THEBAN ART

CHAPTER I

THE HRST THEBAN AGE FROM THE ELEVENTH TO THE SEVENTEENTH

DYNASTY 95

CHAPTER II

THE SECOND THEBAN AGE FROM THE EIGHTEENTH TO THE TWENTY-
FIRST DYNASTY 124

PART III

THE SAiTE AGE AND THE END

OF EGYPTIAN ART

INDEX 305



XI




FIG. I.— SHUNET-KZ-ZEBIB, ABYDOS. TYPE OF THINITK FORTRESS.

PARTI
THE BEGINNINGS OF ART IN EGYPT



CHAPTER I

THINITE ART

Primitive Art in Egypt before Menes — Thinite Art and its Remains: Architecture. Fortresses,
Palaces. Temples, Tombs — In it we may trace the Principles and Forms which, de-
veloping in the course of centuries, gave to Egyptian Art its characteristic aspect —
Memphite Art was developed by contact with it.

THE most ancient tombs, those of the prehistoric period, have
so far yielded nothing which indicates any extraordinary
development of the artistic sense among the early Egyptians. The
objects found in them bear witness to a taste for personal adorn-
ment, and for decorated arms and utensils, equal, but by no means
superior to that of most semi-civilised nations. They consist of
coloured pottery, either glazed or unglazed, plain, or covered
with incised or painted ornament, furniture of wood or stone,
jewelry of variegated pebbles, of shells, rough or carved, of bone,
ivory, glassy pastes, and precious metals; finally, figures of men
and animals, some designed for personal use, such as receptacles
for cosmetics, others reserved for funerary rites. The persons
and things represented on vases are not grouped methodically
in superposed rows, but are scattered irregularly over the sur-
face at the will of the designer, here a house, there an animal,



NEW YORK UNIVERSITY

nUECE IE HIE UTS

LIBRARY



ART IN EGYPT



a palm-tree, a boat, a few fish. They reveal facility in seizing
living forms, and a natural skill in translating attitudes and

movement by drawing and
modelling. But there is
nothing to compare with
the sculptures and paint-
ings that contemporaries
of the Reindeer Period
were executing in the
regions now known as



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y\r,. 2. — THE ABVnOS BRACELETS.
(Museum, Cairo.) (Phot. E. Brugsch.)




France and Spain.

Nevertheless, when we
pass from these produc-
tions to which no exact
date can be assigned, to
those of the historic dynas-
ties, we are confronted
by thousands of objects and buildings , the execution of which
secures a high place for the Egyptians among the nations of
the East in the realm of art. Where we had found only the
rude essays of laborious apprentices, and the rudiments of a
craftsmanship as yet uncertain of itself, we come suddenly,
and almost without transition, to the works of masters, and
to a highly accomplished technique. Must we conclude that

between the two stages,
alien races from without
had dominated the na-
tives, bringing them a con-
ception of beauty and a
power of realising it which
they had lacked hereto-
fore? It seems improbable
that a sudden efflorescence
of art should have followed
on a foreign invasion; but
if there are no extant
monuments by which we
may gauge the natural
evolution of the Egyptian
genius, we are compelled
to recognise among the
artisans of the Thinite age, the inspiration and even the processes
of preceding generations. Their jewelry had preserved the earlier

2



f



3. — IVOKY IKKT OE A HED AND A STOOL.
(Museum, Cairo.) (P/iol. /'. Brugsch.)



THINITE ART

tradition, and their happiest effects were inspired by it. I may
cite the four bracelets discovered by Petrie in the necropoHs of
Abydos (Fig. 2), with tiieir alternating plates of graven gold and




FIG. 4. — FIGIRINKS OF ANIMALS, MONKKY, MON. IXXiS.
(Museum, Cairo.) (Phot E Brugsch.)

of turquoise or light blue glass, their beads or pendants of carved
amethyst, and the chased floral ornament, the delicacy of which
might be envied by our modern goldsmiths. The same might
be said of furniture and domestic utensils, feet of bedsteads or
stools in wood and in ivory (Fig. 3), figurines of lions, monkeys,
and dogs (Fig. 4), stone
or crystal fish, statuettes
of prisoners orslaves, bone
tablets on which the prin-
cipal episodes of royal
sepulture were traced with
the style (Fig. 5), cylinders
bearing hieroglyphic le-
gends or divine emblems,
club-heads, etc. In all
these we recognise the
early ideas and conventions,
with this difference, that
what was the result of pure
instinct in the beginning
has become that of deliber-
ate intention. Craftsmen
or artists, the experience ffg. s.-thr tablf.t of aha.

of an unknown number of (Museum, Cairo.) (Phot. E Brugsch )




generations had taught

them gradually to bring out the principal lines of their models,
to fix their contours, to simplify their reliefs, to co-ordinate their

3 B 2



ART IN EGYPT




FIG. 6.— GROOVED FACADE OF THIMTE

TOMBS AND FORTRESSES.

(After Garstang;.)



movements and their postures. They took pleasure in slow and
tranquil gestures; if the nature of their subjects, religious

processions, hunting and
battle - scenes , assaults
on cities, the pursuit of
enemies, forced them to
express violent or rapid
action, they did their utmost
to minimise its hard ab-
ruptness. It will be readily
supposed without much
insistence on the point,
that an art so well regulated
implies a long period of
preliminary effort and ex-
periment. In spite of ex-
ternal divergences , the
elements are those chosen
and employed by the ancestors of its practitioners from the
beginning; but the workman had handled them so often and for
so long that by dint of practice he had at last reduced them to
a system, and had replaced the direct observation of nature by the

constant use of decorative schemes
or of formulae accepted in the
workshop.

The impression made by the
industrial arts is confirmed by the
rarer survivals of the higher arts,
architecture, sculpture, and paint-
ing. Very little has come down
to us of the military and civil or
indeed of the religious archi-
tecture; we have the ruins of a
fortress at Hieraconpolis, in Aby-
dos (cf. Fig. 1) and in one or
two small townshijjs of the Said,
while in some of the ritual tablets
and the hier()glyj)hic writings we
find incidental renderings of se-
veral very ancient temples (cf.
Fig. 8). The fortresses, or rather
castles in which the kings and nobles lived, are vast parallelograms
of sun-dried brick, the walls of which are sometimes perfectly

4




7 IM.W <)}■• TtIK lORTRKSS G K
).M-1-,I.-AIIMAW (After (Juibtll )



THINITE ART

smooth and unadorned from one angle to the other, sometimes
divided into panels, the beds of which are alternately horizontal




FIG. 8. — VARIOUS TYPES OF ARCHAIC ( HAPKI.S AND TlMl'MiS.



and concave, and sometimes finally present a series of vertical
prismatic grooves (Fig. 6). The principal doorway is generally
relegated to the end of one of the lateral walls, and is set in a
block of masonry solid enought to defy sap and ram (Fig. 7).
Private persons inhabited buildings of beaten earth or dried brick
similar to those of the modern fellahin, and like these, generally
of a single storey. The temple was an isolated cell, of variable
dimensions, but always of
small extent, raised upon
an artificial mound at the
endof arectangular enclosure
bounded by a low wall or
rows of piles; two posts
were set up in front of the
entrance, and the emblem of
the god crowned the roof, or
was raised on a pole in the
middle of the enclosure
(Fig. 8). The cella consisted
at first of four wooden
uprights, connected by wicker-
work plastered with mud;
the doorway was closed by a
wooden panel or a hanging
mat. In some cases, the
roof was flat, with or without

a cornice; but in general, it described a peculiar curve from
front to back, the form of which persisted after the little build-

5



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fi

i



FIG g.— WOODEN NAOS.
(Museum Turin ) (Phot Lanzone.)



ART IN EGYPT




mM:m



ing of slight materials had become a naos of wood (Fig. 9) or
of stone covered with inscriptions and hieroglyphic scenes (Fig. 10).
To this cell other cabins were soon added for the accommodation
of auxiliary gods, priests, and offerings, and the whole, symmetrically
arranged in an enclosure, constituted a divine palace, analogous
to the royal dwelling. At a later stage the gods, dissatisfied
with so poor a dwelling, demanded thicker walls made of bricks,

and stone for thresholds,
lintels , architraves , and
the bases of columns ; then
limestone or sandstone
was substituted for brick,
with granite to surround
the bays, and the perish-
able huts of an earlier
age became houses of
eternity, without, however,
changing the main lines
of the primitive plan.
The fragments which we
possess of the temple
dedicated to the gods of
Hieraconpolis prove that
the transformation was
already far advanced under
the Third Dynasty. They
formed part of a doorway
of pink granite, the exterior
faces of which were decor-
ated with royal legends
(Fig. 11), and with bas-
reliefs which were effaced during one of the reconstructions of
the building; the patterns made by the hammer-strokes enable us
to divine that these reliefs represented the sovereign adoring the
divinity with the ritual familiar to us on the monuments of the
Theban era.

Like the temples, the tombs of the Thinite age retained the
principal features of those of the earlier period at Abydos, at
Nakadah, at Hieraconpolis, and in all places where they have
been discovered hitherto. The most famous, that of Nakadah
(Fig. 12), did not belong, as might have been supposed, to the
Menes who founded the Egyptian Empire, nor to some other
Menes almost contemporary with him; it guarded the mummy of

6




rifJ. 10. — SIDK OK NAOS OK SAKT-EL-HENNEH.
(Museum, Cairo.) (Phot. L. Brugsch.)



THINITE ART



some nameless lord, who ruled a portion of the Theban plain.
Imagine a rectangle some 176 feet long by 88 wide, running
diagonally from north to south. It is
composed entirely of unfired bricks
cemented and plastered with clay,
without either limewash or painting.
The exterior surfaces were originally
decorated with the usual vertical grooves,
and the plan of the interior included
a large hall, separated from the enclosing
wall by a narrow passage, and divided
into five compartments ranged in a
line on the main axis. The corpse was
laid in the central compartment, and
his household goods were arranged partly
on the ground around him, partly in the
four other chambers. When these were
full, they were walled up, and the
adjoining passage was parcelled into
cells for the reception of surplus provi-
sions, after which the entrance was
blocked, and the external decorations
were masked by a facing of bricks,
whitewashed over. The tombs of the
Thinite Pharaohs excavated by Ame-
lineau to the west of Abydos, and by

Garstang at Rekaknah and at Bet-Khallaf (Figs. 13, 14) were
not all exactly similar in arrangement; one was shaped somewhat
like a shuttle, wider in the
middle than at the two
extremities; another was
floored and panelled with
wood, and their outer
surfaces showed neither
projections nor recesses.
None the less are they of
the same type as that of
Nakadah, and if we con-
sider them as a whole,
we are struck by their
general resemblance to the

fortresses of Abydos and Hieraconpolis. Like these, they have
in some cases walls with prismatic niches; they have their store-

7




FIG. IT. — nOOR-JAMR OF THE

TKMFI.K OF KOM-EL-AHMAR.
(Museum, Cairo.) (Phot.L.Brugsch.




â– PLAN OF THE TOMB AT NAKADAH.
(After De Morgan.)



ART IN EGYPT

rooms and their lodging reserved for the chief; their doors are
hidden away at the least accessible point, and they were blocked
up after the deposition of the corpse, just as those of the




FIG. 13. — ROYAL TOMB AT BKT-K HAl.l.A F. (Phot Garstang.)



fortresses were barricaded in the hour of danger (Fig. 14).
Thus the same intention governed the construction of each.
Just as the fortress was the residence of the living lord or
sovereign, the castle in which he held his court in peace, and
in which he awaited behind barricaded doors the attacks of his
enemies in war, so the tomb was looked upon as the castle
of the dead lord or sovereign, in which he intrenched himself
for all eternity, safe from the outrages of men and of years. If
we remember that the temple was also a palace, the palace of
the god. we shall be driven to admit that identity of terms here

denotes identity of con-



ception, and that the
manner of life of the lord
or the Pharaoh before and
after interment, was ident-
ical with that of the gods.
Origmally, the monumen-
tal tomb had been the
privilege of those powerful
enough to procure it, chiefs
of clans, princes of Nomes,
great officers of the crown,
and kings; later, with the
growth of wealth in the
nation, the privilege was
extended, and was conferred, under the conditions we shall
presently note, on those of the people whose fortunes or the

8




VU,. l.|. IM.AN «»!• THK lOMI? (Aflti Garslan^.)



THINITE ART



favour of the master cncouras^ed to aspire to the luxury of an
independent future hfe.

The internal walls are generally speaking bare, but the priests
or the relatives of the defunct stored up in the vault or in the