Egyptian Art: Studies

At two o’clock in the afternoon of February 12, 1906, while Naville was finishing his lunch, a workman came running up to tell him that the top of a vault was beginning to emerge from the earth. For several days certain indications had led him to think that a discovery was at hand: he went to the spot and at once saw in the mound of sand that dominated the back porticoes of the temple of Montouhotpou a spectacle that filled him with joy. The vault was almost half dug out; under it, in the shade, an admirable cow extended her neck, and seemed to look about her curiously. A few hours’ work sufficed to set her completely free. She was intact, but a little figure leaning against her breast had had its face crushed in distant ages, and the violence of the blows had caused a crack in the head and shoulders that compromised its solidity. The chamber that sheltered the cow was built in a hollow of the rock with slabs of sculptured and painted sandstone. The semicircular ceiling did not present the usual regular vault with converging keystones and surfaces; it was composed of a double row of bent blocks cut in quarters of a circle and buttressed one against the other at their upper end. It was painted dark blue with yellow five-pointed stars scattered over it to represent the sky. The three vertical partitions were decorated with religious scenes: on the one at the back Thoutmôsis III worships Amonrâ, lord of Thebes, and on the two sides he makes an offering to Hathor, who is no other than the very cow shut into the vault.

She was still half buried when some ten inquisitive persons turned their kodaks on her, thus despoiling Naville, and disputing among themselves the pleasure of being the first to photograph her. In the evening nothing else was talked of in the Louxor hotels, and the tourists did not fail to make up parties to go and admire her the next day. The fellahs, on their side, related the most marvellous tales. She had breathed noisily just at the moment that the light of day touched her, and had shivered in all her limbs. She had directed such a look on the workman who had perceived her that he broke his leg with an awkward blow of his axe. She was not, as she seemed to be, of stone, but of fine gold, disguised by Pharaoh’s magicians in order to keep off treasure-seekers: a few formulas repeated at a fixed hour with the prescribed fumigations and rites, a little dynamite, and after the explosion the fragments would be transformed into ingots of metal. And as if the sorcerers were not sufficient, dealers in antiquities prowled about in the vicinity. Doubtless she was too heavy for them to think of carrying her off whole, but would they have found it very difficult to detach the head and decamp with it during the night, in spite of the vigilance of our guards or with their complicity? Unscrupulous amateurs are never far to seek, ready to pay heavily for a stolen object, provided they believe it to have an artistic or archæological value, and the certainty of gaining hundreds of pounds in case of success largely compensates the honest brokers of Louxor for the petty annoyance of disbursing a few pence by way of fine or of undergoing a week’s imprisonment if they are caught in the act. I should have preferred to leave the monument in its ancient place, but it would have been tempting fortune, and the only means of saving it was to send it to Cairo. I entrusted the matter to M. Baraize, one of our engineers, and he carried it out extremely well: in less than three weeks he had dismantled the blocks, packed up the cow, and transported the cases by train across the Theban plain. The chapel is now rebuilt in a good position at the end of one of the rooms of the Cairo Museum, but the goddess is not hidden in darkness as at Deîr-el-Baharî. She stands at the entrance, her body in the full light, the hinder parts a little under the vault: she comes forth from her house and shows herself freely to visitors, from the snout to the end of the tail.53

II

Our wonder is at first aroused by the mixture she presents of conventional mysticism with realism. The front view shows only the head surrounded by accessories, the significance of which is only appreciated by those who are learned in religious matters. At the top of the composition, between the tall horns in form of a lyre, the usual head-dress of goddess-mothers, is the solar disk flanked by upstanding feathers and stamped with an inflated uræus. This scaffolding of emblems without thickness and almost without consistence would run the risk of being broken by the slightest blow if it was not supported, and so it rests on two tufts of aquatic plants, the stalks of which, rising from a socket near the hoofs, spring up right and left of the legs; flowers alternating with buds bend over the back of the neck and form a fan-shaped support behind the disk and feathers. Under the snout, and as if framed by the vegetation, is the statuette of a man standing, his back to the cow’s chest. As I said, the face is mutilated, the flesh black; he stretches out his hands, palms downward, in front of him with a gesture of submission, as if avowing himself the humble servant of Hathor: by the uræus of the crown and the stiff petticoat spread in a triangle in front of the thighs, we guess him to be a Pharaoh. He is found again in a less punctilious attitude under the right flank of the statue. He is kneeling, naked, and his flesh is red; he presses the teat between his hands, and drinks greedily of the sacred milk. If we may believe the cartouche engraved between the lotuses, the two figures, the black and the red, are one and the same sovereign, Amenôthes II of the XVIIIth Dynasty, and perhaps that is the case. But it was Thoutmôsis III who built the chapel, and it is he that the artists have represented twice over, praying in front of the cow and sucking the udder. It would be strange if, after erecting the sanctuary, he should have omitted to provide it with his goddess. It is more probable that the cow was commissioned by him, and shut up there by his order, but without dedication or cartouche: he considered doubtless that the neighbouring bas-reliefs would constitute sufficient title-deeds. Later, Amenôthes II, wishing to associate himself with his father’s act of piety, and noticing an empty space behind the coiffure, inscribed his name there.

Such a complexity of figures and attributes does not tend to make the appreciation of the work easy for us, and we have also to add the prescriptions of the ritual to the conventions of the craft from which Egyptian artists were never free, at least when stone was their material: the belly, tail, legs, all the lower parts of the group, are enclosed in a stone partition which spoils the effect even while it preserves them from the chances of breakage. And yet, despite defects that shock a sculptor of our time, one glance suffices to reveal the extraordinary beauty of the work. The head differs from that of our European cows, but it is a question of race, and whoever has seen the Soudanese cow of the present day will easily distinguish its features in the Hathor of Deîr-el-Baharî: the fullness of the brow, the subtle modelling of the temples and cheeks, the gentle widening out of the snout, the suppleness of the nostrils, and the smallness of the mouth. Such accuracy of detail will delight the naturalist, but it might be feared that it would harm the artistic value of the whole. That is not the case at all, and if at a distance the physiognomy seems to have only an expression of gentleness and meditative somnolence, as soon as we go near it assumes an air of intelligent attention. The eye seems to grow larger and to follow the visitor who arrives, the snout to contract and palpitate, as if to scent out. The sculptor, instead of following the tradition and polishing the stone as highly as possible, has respected the fine furrows of the chisel, and the light playing on them gives at moments the illusion of a shudder running over the skin. The body is of equally accurate composition, the chest narrow, shoulders thin, spine long and saddle-backed, leg long and slender, the thigh sinewy, the haunches prominent, the udder only slightly developed. The hinder part is worked with an incredible fidelity. Contrary to custom, the coat is red-brown, darker on the back, lighter, of a tawny shade that becomes white, on the belly; it is speckled with black spots, like flowers with four petals, which we should consider artificial, if there were not animals of Soudanese origin in the Egyptian herds of to-day that show similar markings. By those spots they recognize among the heifers of the year the one in which Hathor has deigned to become incarnated, and which must be worshipped as long as she remains on earth.

III

She was, above all, the divinity of the dead. The buildings scattered about that corner of the necropolis were not exclusively consecrated to the gods of the living; they were the chapels attached to royal tombs, some of which, like that of Montouhotpou, were contiguous to the tomb, while others, like that of Queen Hachopsouîtou, for example, were relegated to the other side of the mountain, in the Bibân-el-Molouk. The sovereigns were sometimes praying and bringing offerings to the gods, sometimes associated with them and taking part in their sacrifices. Hathor, ruler of the West and lady of the heaven, had become by a concourse of ideas, the reasons of which can be understood, the mistress of souls and doubles: she played thus a part of great importance in places where the worship of her vassals was celebrated. Walk through the halls of the large terraced temple and you will find her repeatedly with the figure and posture assumed by her in the oratory discovered by Naville: she is the foster-mother whose milk Thoutmôsis and Hachopsouîtou are greedily imbibing. The suckling of the sovereign was not a mere metaphor of language, realized and transcribed on stone, but a material act borrowed from the customs of Egyptian law, and the final formality of the ceremonies of the adoption. The woman who had no son to perpetuate her memory, and desired to have one, after reading the preliminary passages, had to offer one of her breasts, in all probability the right, to the youth or man she had chosen; he would press the teat between his lips for a few seconds, and by this pretence of feeding would become to her as a son. Among half civilized peoples where this custom prevails, it is not required that the woman has been or is still married: only, the young girl who acquires a child by this method covers her breast with a thin stuff before going through the ceremony. If, then, Thoutmôsis III, or by usurpation Amenôthes II, was represented kneeling under the right teat of the Hathor, he wished thereby to prove that she was his divine mother, and the complacent manner in which she yields him her milk sufficiently shows that she admitted the legitimacy of his claim.

But these are only half the ideas expressed by the group, and it remains for us to determine the meaning of the flowering lotuses which stand at the right and left. As sovereign of the West and of the lands in which the dead sojourned, she assumed different forms according to the provinces. In the North the people imagined her under the aspect of one of those fine sycamores which grow in the midst of the sand on the borders of the Libyan Desert, rendered green and thick by the hidden waters sent them by the infiltrations of the Nile. The mysterious path which leads to the shores of the West brings the doubles to her feet; as soon as they are arrived, the divine soul, lodged in the trunk, thrust out the half or the whole of her body, and offered them a vase full of pure water and a tray filled with loaves. If they accepted her gifts—and they could scarcely refuse them—they confessed at once that they were her vassals; they were no longer authorized to return to the living, but the regions of the world beyond the tomb would open to them. In the nomes of the Saîd where she was imagined to be a cow, she haunted a fertile marsh situated on the slopes of the Libyan mountains; whenever a double came to its edge she stretched forth her head from among the herbage to meet him, and claimed his homage, and when he had paid it, she allowed him to enter the realms of the funereal gods. The 186th Chapter54 of the “Book of the Dead,” a very favourite one with devout persons under the second Theban Empire, initiates us into this myth, and the vignette that precedes it shows us the scene as the Egyptians conceived it: the red or yellow slopes of the mountain, the tufts of aquatic plants, the cow conferring with the defunct. The Pharaoh who commissioned our group—or rather the sculptor who executed it—combined the idea common to all with the royal concept of the adoption by the goddess, and he expressed the result therefrom as completely as the processes of his art permitted. He reduced the marsh to two slender clusters of lotus, and marked the two chief points of the adoption by means of two little royal figures and their attributes. The first, as we have seen, wears the costume of the Pharaohs and has black flesh; standing upright under the animal’s snout, it faces the spectator. Amenôthes II has just arrived in front of the cow and addressed to her the prayer in which he conjures her to aid him in his journey in search of the everlasting cities; his colour indicates that he is still the slave of death, but the goddess has already enrolled him among her adherents, and presents him to the universe as her well-beloved son. That formality over, he slips through the verdure, kneels down, and crushing the teat in his hand, greedily puts his lips to it. That is the final rite of the adoption, and also the pledge of his return to normal existence. Scarcely has he swallowed the first mouthfuls of milk than life enters his veins; the artist has represented him naked as a new-born infant, and painted his flesh red, the colour of the living.

IV

The two forms of Hathor welcoming the dead are not each confined to the province in which it was born. They gradually spread over the whole country, not without experiencing diverse fortunes. Hathor in the tree was reserved for papyri, stelæ, and bas-reliefs. The first idea was scarcely suitable for statuary, and the cleverest sculptor would have been embarrassed to derive a large tree from the stone, a goddess lost in the branches, a person in prayer before the tree and before the goddess. But it lent itself to painting, and some of the vignettes in which it is expressed in the excellent copies of the “Book of the Dead” or on the walls of the Theban hypogeums, show us the admirable way in which the designers of the new empire used it. Nothing could be more varied or skilful than the relations they establish between the woman and the sycamore on the one hand and the dead person on the other. He is sometimes accompanied by his soul, a big hawk with human head and arms, which mimics his slightest gestures: while the double receives the elixir of youth in his clasped hands, the soul turns a runnel aside for his own benefit, and greedily drinks from it. Colour adds its charm to the composition, and the replicas of the subject to be seen at Cheîkh Abd-el-Gournah in the hypogeums of the XVIIIth and XIXth Dynasties would obtain a place of honour in our museums, if it was permitted to detach them and mount them in separate panels.

Hathor in the marshes was entirely suited to the ordinary conditions of sculpture, and if in some places serious difficulties were presented, I have indicated how the Theban masters overcame them. She provided a fairly frequent theme for the studios, and the Cairo Museum possesses three examples. They are smaller than the Deîr-el-Baharî group, and do not unite the two concepts of the adoration and the adoption. Consequently the lotus is wanting and the dedicatory figure at the cow’s udder. They are the affair of simple private persons who had no right to proclaim themselves children of the goddess. If they had attempted to touch the breast of Hathor they would have usurped one of the privileges of royalty; they appear then only once in each group, standing or crouching in front of the chest. In one, which is in grey schist and measures nearly four and a half feet long, the donor has lost his head and neck, and he lifts up a table of offerings with both hands in front of him; the cow also is decapitated.55 No trace of inscription is to be seen on the pedestal, but the composition is that of the first Saïte period. The piece, although not the most mediocre that could be found, lacks originality; it is the work of a skilful journeyman who had no personal inspiration, and only knew how to apply the formulas of the school conscientiously. The second group is in yellowish limestone. It measures not quite three feet in length and has suffered more than the preceding one.56 Not only has the animal’s head been destroyed, but its tail and one of its hind legs have vanished. The man is mutilated to the point that only one of his feet remains to prove to us that he was kneeling. He bore a table of offerings. An inscription engraved on the edge of the pedestal informs us that he was called Petesomtous, and the name, together with the style, takes us back to the Saïte period, perhaps to the period of the Persian domination. The composition is, besides, sufficiently rough, and it would not deserve any attention if the interest of the subject did not compensate for its insignificance as a work of art.

The third was celebrated from the moment of its discovery. It is in green schist, slightly over three feet in length, and under it in height. It was found by Mariette at Saqqarah, fifty years ago, in the tomb of a certain Psammetichus, a contemporary of the first Nectanebo.57 It was accompanied by two fine statues of Osiris and Isis,58 which are the glory of the Cairo Museum, and we owe them for a certainty to the same artist. The posture of the cow is the same as that of Deîr-el-Baharî; like her, the head-dress is formed of the solar disk with the uræus surmounted by two long feathers, but a monaît fastened round the neck by its chain lies flat on the spine. Psammetichus stands under the head, his back to the chest, his hands hanging down over the apron, with the same gesture of submission as that of Amenôthes II. Besides his name and protocol, the inscriptions contain a prayer for his happiness, addressed to the benevolent Hathor. The hardness of the material has prevented the sculptor from completely freeing the fragile parts: the cow’s legs and belly are sunk in the stone, as are the back and feet of the man; the head-dress is supported by a semi-cone set in the back of the neck, and the ears are reinforced by a pad which doubles their thickness. The sculptor, embarrassed by the necessity of preserving masses of superfluous material, had the ingenious idea of treating the lower limbs as a bas-relief. He has designed them on each side of the panel that supports the belly, so that Hathor has two chest profiles and a double supply of legs. He has so cleverly arranged this superabundance of legs that it is not noticeable at a first glance, and some effort of thought is required to make sure that it exists. But despite these eccentricities the work is of rare perfection. Never has such hard stone been manipulated with greater suppleness; the outlines have a harshness that all the virtuosity of the execution has not been able to prevent, but the modelling of the bodies and the faces, both of the animal and of the man, is of unparalleled delicacy, and the whole breathes serenity mingled with melancholy. It is, as a piece of animal sculpture, the best that has come down to us in Saïte art.

V

Nevertheless, it loses when compared with the schist group of the time of Amenôthes II. The mythological element is less predominant, and the head gains by not being framed by two tufts of aquatic plants: but if the religious convention is less encumbering, the artistic convention and the conventions of the studio come out in a much more apparent fashion. The Saqqarah group belongs to the Memphian school, and, as with nearly all the products of that school, the form has something artificial and impersonal. Hathor is a symbolic cow, the half-abstract type of Egyptian cows, a type that in the eyes of the Memphians realized the ideal of the earthly or sacred cow: she has the elegance, but also the softness and the rather insipid meekness, which distinguishes the human figures. The Hathor of Naville, on the contrary, belongs to the Theban school, and possesses the characteristics that I have described above.59 The royal studio whence it came was governed by the theological laws, and was forbidden to modify in any way the types that, in the course of ages, had been determined on for revealing the concepts of popular tradition or learned dogma, but it tried to keep their expression as near to life as the rites authorized. The artist who produced the Memphian Hathor chose a pattern from his cartoons, and translated it into stone without troubling to correct the banal purity by imitating a beast of the sacred herd. The sculptor to whom we owe the Theban Hathor, on the contrary, while preserving the ritual arrangement of the parts and the accumulation of the symbols, has placed them on a real cow, on the cow, perhaps, that for the moment incarnated the goddess in the neighbouring temple of Queen Hachopsouîtou. Imagine her without the emblematic surroundings he was compelled to give her—the heavy head-dress, the lotus tufts, the two statuettes of the Pharaoh—and you will have the good motherly creature who goes peaceably to pasture, and, as she goes, observes everything with her eye, inquisitive and dreamy at the same time. Neither Greece nor Rome has left us anything that can be compared with it; we must go to the great sculptors of animals of our own day to find an equally realistic piece of work.