The ram’s head in the second case excels in the beauty of its workmanship anything to be found elsewhere in the museums of Europe or Egypt. It is of the finest gold, but its value does not depend upon the precious material: the ancient engraver knew how to model it with a bold and free hand, and he has managed to invest it with as much dignity as if he had been carving his subject in heroic size out of a block of granite or limestone. It is not an example of pure industrial art, but of an art for which a designation is lacking. Other examples, although more carefully executed and of more costly materials, do not approach it in value: such, for instance, are the earrings of Ramses XII. at Gîzeh, which are made up of an ostentatious combination of disks, filigree-work, chains, beads, and hanging figures of the urseus.

To get an idea of the character of the plate on the royal sideboards, we must have recourse to the sculptures in the temples, or to the paintings on the tombs: the engraved gold or silver centrepieces, dishes, bowls, cups, and amphoras, if valued by weight only, were too precious to escape the avarice of the impoverished generations which followed the era of Theban prosperity. In the fabrication of these we can trace foreign influences, but not to the extent of a predominance over native art: even if the subject to be dealt with by the artist happened to be a Phoenician god or an Asiatic prisoner, he was not content with slavishly copying his model; he translated it and interpreted it, so as to give it an Egyptian character.

The household furniture was in keeping with these precious objects. Beds and armchairs in valuable woods, inlaid with ivory, carved, gilt, painted in subdued and bright colours, upholstered with mattresses and cushions of many-hued Asiatic stuffs, or of home-made materials, fashioned after Chaldæan patterns, were in use among the well-to-do, while people of moderate means had to be content with old-fashioned furniture of the ancient regime.

The Theban dwelling-house was indeed more sumptuously furnished than the earliest Memphite, but we find the same general arrangements in both, which provided, in addition to quarters for the masters, a similar number of rooms intended for the slaves, for granaries, storehouses, and stables. While the outward decoration of life was subject to change, the inward element remained unaltered. Costume was a more complex matter than in former times: the dresses and lower garments were more gauffered, had more embroidery and stripes; the wigs were larger and longer, and rose up in capricious arrangements of curls and plaits.

The use of the chariot had now become a matter of daily custom, and the number of domestics, already formidable, was increased by fresh additions in the shape of coachmen, grooms, and saises, who ran before their master to clear a way for the horses through the crowded streets of the city.*

As material, existence became more complex, intellectual life partook of the same movement, and, without deviating much from the lines prescribed for it by the learned and the scribes of the Memphite age, literature had become in the mean time larger, more complicated, more exacting, and more difficult to grapple with and to master. It had its classical authors, whose writings were committed to memory and taught in the schools. These were truly masterpieces, for if some felt that they understood and enjoyed them, others found them almost beyond their comprehension, and complained bitterly of their obscurity. The later writers followed them pretty closely, in taking pains, on the one hand to express fresh ideas in the forms consecrated by approved and ancient usage, or when they failed to find adequate vehicles to convey new thoughts, resorting in their lack of imagination to the foreigner for the requisite expressions. The necessity of knowing at least superficially, something of the dialect and writings of Asia compelled the Egyptian scribes to study to some degree the literature of Phonecia and of Chaldæa.

From these sources they had borrowed certain formulae and incantation, medical recipes, and devout legends, in which the deities of Assyria and especially Astartê played the chief part. They appropriated in this manner a certain number of words and phrases with which they were accustomed to interlard their discourses and writings. They thought it polite to call a door no longer by the word ro, but the term tira, and to accompany themselves no longer with the harp bordt, but with the same instrument under its new name kinnôr, and to make the salâm in saluting the sovereign in place of crying before him, aaû. They were thorough-going Semiticisers; but one is less offended by their affectation when one considers that the number of captives in the country, and the intermarriages with Canaanite women, had familiarised a portion of the community from childhood with the sounds and ideas of the languages from which the scribes were accustomed to borrow unblushingly. This artifice, if it served to infuse an appearance of originality into their writings, had no influence upon their method of composition. Their poetical ideal remained what it had been in the time of their ancestors, but seeing that we are now unable to determine the characteristic cadence of sentences or the mental attitude which marked each generation of literary men, it is often difficult for us to find out the qualities in their writings which gave them popularity. A complete library of one of the learned in the Ramesside period must have contained a strange mixture of works, embracing, in addition to books of devotion, which were indispensable to those who were solicitous about their souls,* collections of hymns, romances, war and love songs, moral and philosophical treatises, letters, and legal documents.

It would have been similar in character to the literary-possessions of an Egyptian of the Memphite period,* but the language in which it was written would not have been so stiff and dry, but would have flowed more easily, and been more sustained and better balanced.

The great odes to the deities which we find in the Theban papyri are better fitted, perhaps, than the profane compositions of the period, to give us an idea of the advance which Egyptian genius had made in the width and richness of its modes of expression, while still maintaining almost the same dead-level of idea which had characterised it from the outset. Among these, one dedicated to Harmakhis, the sovereign sun, is no longer restricted to a bare enumeration of the acts and virtues of the “Disk,” but ventures to treat of his daily course and his final triumphs in terms which might have been used in describing the victorious campaigns or the apotheosis of a Pharaoh. It begins with his awakening, at the moment when he has torn himself away from the embraces of night. Standing upright in the cabin of the divine bark, “the fair boat of millions of years,” with the coils of the serpent Mihni around him, he glides in silence on the eternal current of the celestial waters, guided and protected by those battalions of secondary deities with whose odd forms the monuments have made us familiar. “Heaven is in delight, the earth is in joy, gods and men are making festival, to render glory to Phrâ-Harmakhis, when they see him arise in his bark, having overturned his enemies in his own time!” They accompany him from hour to hour, they fight the good fight with him against Apopi, they shout aloud as he inflicts each fresh wound upon the monster: they do not even abandon him when the west has swallowed him up in its darkness.* Some parts of the hymn remind us, in the definiteness of the imagery and in the abundance of detail, of a portion of the poem of Pentaûîrît, or one of those inscriptions of Ramses III. wherein he celebrates the defeat of hordes of Asiatics or Libyans.

The Egyptians took a delight in listening to stories. They preferred tales which dealt with the marvellous and excited their imagination, introducing speaking animals, gods in disguise, ghosts and magic. One of them tells of a king who was distressed because he had no heir, and had no sooner obtained the favour he desired from the gods, than the Seven Hathors, the mistresses of Fate, destroyed his happiness by predicting that the child would meet with his death by a serpent, a dog, or a crocodile. Efforts were made to provide against such a fatality by shutting him up in a tower; but no sooner had he grown to man’s estate, than he procured himself a dog, went off to wander through the world, and married the daughter of the Prince of Naharaim. His fate meets him first under the form of a serpent, which is killed by his wife; he is next assailed by a crocodile, and the dog kills the crocodile, but as the oracles must be fulfilled, the brute turns and despatches his master without further consideration. Another story describes two brothers, Anûpû and Bitiû, who live happily together on their farm till the wife of the elder falls in love with the younger, and on his repulsing her advances, she accuses him to her husband of having offered her violence. The virtue of the younger brother would not have availed him much, had not his animals warned him of danger, and had not Phrâ-Harmakhis surrounded him at the critical moment with a stream teeming with crocodiles. He mutilates himself to prove his innocence, and announces that henceforth he will lead a mysterious existence far from mankind; he will retire to the Valley of the Acacia, place his heart on the topmost flower of the tree, and no one will be able with impunity to steal it from him. The gods, however, who frequent this earth take pity on his loneliness, and create for him a wife of such beauty that the Nile falls in love with her, and steals a lock of her hair, which is carried by its waters down into Egypt. Pharaoh finds the lock, and, intoxicated by its scent, commands his people to go in quest of the owner. Having discovered the lady, Pharaoh marries her, and ascertaining from her who she is, he sends men to cut down the Acacia, but no sooner has the flower touched the earth, than Bitiû droops and dies. The elder brother is made immediately acquainted with the fact by means of various prodigies. The wine poured out to him becomes troubled, his beer leaves a deposit. He seizes his shoes and staff and sets out to find the heart.

After a search of seven years he discovers it, and reviving it in a vase of water, he puts it into the mouth of the corpse, which at once returns to life. Bitiû, from this moment, seeks only to be revenged. He changes himself into the bull Apis, and, on being led to court, he reproaches the queen with the crime she has committed against him. The queen causes his throat to be cut; two drops of his blood fall in front of the gate of the palace, and produce in the night two splendid “Persea” trees, which renew the accusation in a loud voice. The queen has them cut down, but a chip from one of them flies into her mouth, and ere long she gives birth to a child who is none other than a reincarnation of Bitiû. When the child succeeds to the Pharaoh, he assembles his council, reveals himself to them, and punishes with death her who was first his wife and subsequently his mother. The hero moves throughout the tale without exhibiting any surprise at the strange incidents in which he takes part, and, as a matter of fact, they did not seriously outrage the probabilities of contemporary life. In every town sorcerers could be found who knew how to transform themselves into animals or raise the dead to life: we have seen how the accomplices of Pentaûîrît had recourse to spells in order to gain admission to the royal palace when they desired to rid themselves of Ramses III. The most extravagant romances differed from real life merely in collecting within a dozen pages more miracles than were customarily supposed to take place in the same number of years; it was merely the multiplicity of events, and not the events themselves, that gave to the narrative its romantic and improbable character. The rank of the heroes alone raised the tale out of the region of ordinary life; they are always the sons of kings, Syrian princes, or Pharaohs; sometimes we come across a vague and undefined Pharaoh, who figures under the title of Pîrûîâûi or Prûîti, but more often it is a well-known and illustrious Pharaoh who is mentioned by name. It is related how, one day, Kheops, suffering from ennui within his palace, assembled his sons in the hope of learning from them something which he did not already know. They described to him one after another the prodigies performed by celebrated magicians under Kanibri and Snofrûi; and at length Mykerinos assured him that there was a certain Didi, living then not far from Meîdum, who was capable of repeating all the marvels done by former wizards. Most of the Egyptian sovereigns were, in the same way, subjects of more or less wonderful legends—Sesostris, Amenôthes III., Thûfcmosis III., Amenemhâît I., Khîti, Sahûrî, Usirkaf, and Kakiû. These stories were put into literary shape by the learned, recited by public story-tellers, and received by the people as authentic history; they finally filtered into the writings of the chroniclers, who, in introducing them into the annals, filled up with their extraordinary details the lacunæ of authentic tradition. Sometimes the narrative assumed a briefer form, and became an apologue. In one of them the members of the body were supposed to have combined against the head, and disputed its supremacy before a jury; the parties all pleaded their cause in turn, and judgment was given in due form.*

Animals also had their place in this universal comedy. The passions or the weaknesses of humanity were attributed to them, and the narrator makes the lion, rat, or jackal to utter sentiments from which he draws some short practical moral. La Fontaine had predecessors on the banks of the Nile of whose existence he little dreamed.

As La Fontaine found an illustrator in Granville, so, too, in Egypt the draughtsman brought his reed to the aid of the fabulist, and by his cleverly executed sketches gave greater point to the sarcasm of story than mere words could have conveyed. Where the author had briefly mentioned that the jackal and the cat had cunningly forced their services on the animals whom they wished to devour at their leisure, the artist would depict the jackal and the cat equipped as peasants, with wallets on their backs, and sticks over their shoulders, marching behind a troup of gazelles or a flock of fat geese: it was easy to foretell the fate of their unfortunate charges. Elsewhere it is an ox who brings up before his master a cat who has cheated him, and his proverbial stupidity would incline us to think that he will end by being punished himself for the misdeeds of which he had accused the other. Puss’s sly and artful expression, the ass-headed and important-looking judge, with the wand and costume of a high and mighty dignitary, give pungency to the story, and recall the daily scenes at the judgment-seat of the lord of Thebes. In another place we see a donkey, a lion, a crocodile, and a monkey giving an instrumental and vocal concert.

A lion and a gazelle play a game of chess. A cat of fashion, with a flower in her hair, has a disagreement with a goose: they have come to blows, and the excitable puss, who fears she will come off worst in the struggle, falls backwards in a fright. The draughtsmen having once found vent for their satire, stopped at nothing, and even royalty itself did not escape their attacks. While the writers of the day made fun of the military calling, both in prose and verse, the caricaturists parodied the combats and triumphal scenes of the Ramses or Thutmosis of the day depicted on the walls of the pylons. The Pharaoh of all the rats, perched upon a chariot drawn by dogs, bravely charges an army of cats; standing in the heroic attitude of a conqueror, he pierces them with his darts, while his horses tread the fallen underfoot; his legions meanwhile in advance of him attack a fort defended by tomcats, with the same ardour that the Egyptian battalions would display in assaulting a Syrian stronghold.

This treatment of ethics did not prevent the Egyptian writers from giving way to their natural inclinations, and composing large volumes on this subject after the manner of Kaqîmni or Phtahhotpû. One of their books, in which the aged Ani inscribes his Instructions to his son, Khonshotpû, is compiled in the form of a dialogue, and contains the usual commonplaces upon virtue, temperance, piety, the respect due to parents from children, or to the great ones of this world from their inferiors. The language in which it is written is ingenious, picturesque, and at times eloquent; the work explains much that is obscure in Egyptian life, and upon which the monuments have thrown no light. “Beware of the woman who goes out surreptitiously in her town, do not follow her or any like her, do not expose thyself to the experience of what it costs a man to face an Ocean of which the bounds are unknown.* The wife whose husband is far from home sends thee letters, and invites thee to come to her daily when she has no witnesses; if she succeeds in entangling thee in her net, it is a crime which is punishable by death as soon as it is known, even if no wicked act has taken place, for men will commit every sort of crime when under this temptation alone.”

“Be not quarrelsome in breweries, for fear that thou mayest be denounced forthwith for words which have proceeded from thy mouth, and of having spoken that of which thou art no longer conscious. Thou fallest, thy members helpless, and no one holds out a hand to thee, but thy boon-companions around thee say: ‘Away with the drunkard!’ Thou art wanted for some business, and thou art found rolling on the ground like an infant.” In speaking of what a man owes to his mother, Ani waxes eloquent: “When she bore thee as all have to bear, she had in thee a heavy burden without being able to call on thee to share it. When thou wert born, after thy months were fulfilled, she placed herself under a yoke in earnest, her breast was in thy mouth for three years; in spite of the increasing dirtiness of thy habits, her heart felt no disgust, and she never said: ‘What is that I do here?’ When thou didst go to school to be instructed in writing, she followed thee every day with bread and beer from thy house. Now thou art a full-grown man, thou hast taken a wife, thou hast provided thyself with a house; bear always in mind the pains of thy birth and the care for thy education that thy mother lavished on thee, that her anger may not rise up against thee, and that she lift not her hands to God, for he will hear her complaint!” The whole of the book does not rise to this level, but we find in it several maxims which appear to be popular proverbs, as for instance: “He who hates idleness will come without being called;” “A good walker comes to his journey’s end without needing to hasten;” or, “The ox which goes at the head of the flock and leads the others to pasture is but an animal like his fellows.” Towards the end, the son Khonshotpû, weary of such a lengthy exhortation to wisdom, interrupts his father roughly: “Do not everlastingly speak of thy merits, I have heard enough of thy deeds;” whereupon Ani resignedly restrains himself from further speech, and a final parable gives us the motive of his resignation: “This is the likeness of the man who knows the strength of his arm. The nursling who is in the arms of his mother cares only for being suckled; but no sooner has he found his mouth than he cries: ‘Give me bread!’”

It is, perhaps, difficult for us to imagine an Egyptian in love repeating madrigals to his mistress,* for we cannot easily realise that the hard and blackened bodies we see in our museums have once been men and women loving and beloved in their own day.

The feeling which they entertained one for another had none of the reticence or delicacy of our love: they went straight to the point, and the language in which, they expressed themselves is sometimes too coarse for our taste. The manners and customs of daily life among the Egyptians tended to blunt in them the feelings of modesty and refinement to which our civilization has accustomed us. Their children went about without clothes, or, at any rate, wore none until the age of puberty. Owing to the climate, both men and women left the upper part of the body more or less uncovered, or wore fabrics of a transparent nature. In the towns, the servants who moved about their masters or his guests had merely a narrow loin-cloth tied round their hips; while in the country, the peasants dispensed with even this covering, and the women tucked up their garments when at work so as to move more freely. The religious teaching and the ceremonies connected with their worship drew the attention of the faithful to the unveiled human form of their gods, and the hieroglyphs themselves contained pictures which shock our sense of propriety. Hence it came about that the young girl who was demanded in marriage had no idea, like the maiden of to-day, of the vague delights of an ideal union. The physical side was impressed upon her mind, and she was well aware of the full meaning of her consent. Her lover, separated from her by her disapproving parents, thus expresses the grief which overwhelms him: “I desire to lie down in my chamber,—for I am sick on thy account,—and the neighbours come to visit me.—Ah! if my sister but came with them,—she would show the physicians what ailed me,—for she knows my sickness!” Even while he thus complains, he sees her in his imagination, and his spirit visits the places she frequents: “The villa of my sister,—(a pool is before the house),—the door opens suddenly,—and my sister passes out in wrath.—Ah! why am I not the porter,—that she might give me her orders!—I should at least hear her voice, even were she angry,—and I, like a little boy, full of fear before her!” Meantime the young girl sighs in vain for “her brother, the beloved of her heart,” and all that charmed her before has now ceased to please her. “I went to prepare my snare, my cage and the covert for my trap—for all the birds of Puânît alight upon Egypt, redolent with perfume;—he who flies foremost of the flock is attracted by my worm, bringing odours from Puânît,—its claws full of incense.—But my heart is with thee, and desires that we should trap them together,—I with thee, alone, and that thou shouldest be able to hear the sad cry of my perfumed bird,—there near to me, close to me, I will make ready my trap,—O my beautiful friend, thou who goest to the field of the well-beloved!” The latter, however, is slow to appear, the day passes away, the evening comes on: “The cry of the goose resounds—which is caught by the worm-bait,—but thy love removes me far from the bird, and I am unable to deliver myself from it; I will carry off my net, and what shall I say to my mother,—when I shall have returned to her?—Every day I come back laden with spoil,—but to-day I have not been able to set my trap,—for thy love makes me its prisoner!” “The goose flies away, alights,—it has greeted the barns with its cry;—the flock of birds increases on the river, but I leave them alone and think only of thy love,—for my heart is bound to thy heart—and I cannot tear myself away from thy beauty.” Her mother probably gave her a scolding, but she hardly minds it, and in the retirement of her chamber never wearies of thinking of her brother, and of passionately crying for him: “O my beautiful friend! I yearn to be with thee as thy wife—and that thou shouldest go whither thou wishest with thine arm upon my arm,—for then I will repeat to my heart, which is in thy breast, my supplications.—If my great brother does not come to-night,—I am as those who lie in the tomb—for thou, art thou not health and life,—he who transfers the joys of thy health to my heart which seeks thee?” The hours pass away and he does not come, and already “the voice of the turtle-dove speaks,—it says: ‘Behold, the dawn is here, alas! what is to become of me?’ Thou, thou art the bird, thou callest me,—and I find my brother in his chamber,—and my heart is rejoiced to see him!—I will never go away again, my hand will remain in thy hand,—and when I wander forth, I will go with thee into the most beautiful places,—happy in that he makes me the foremost of women—and that he does not break my heart.” We should like to quote the whole of it, but the text is mutilated, and we are unable to fill in the blanks. It is, nevertheless, one of those products of the Egyptian mind which it would have been easy for us to appreciate from beginning to end, without effort and almost without explanation. The passion in it finds expression in such sincere and simple language as to render rhetorical ornament needless, and one can trace in it, therefore, nothing of the artificial colouring which would limit it to a particular place or time. It translates a universal sentiment into the common language of humanity, and the hieroglyphic groups need only to be put into the corresponding words of any modern tongue to bring home to the reader their full force and intensity. We might compare it with those popular songs which are now being collected in our provinces before the peasantry have forgotten them altogether: the artlessness of some of the expressions, the boldness of the imagery, the awkwardness and somewhat abrupt character of some of the passages, communicate to both that wild charm which we miss in the most perfect specimens of our modern love-poets.

END OF VOL. V.